Listen to the words of Vladimir Lenin and ask yourself, “Is this not happening in America today? Are these not the tactics of the so-called Democratic Party?”
The ballot box is the purview of the unintelligent masses. True political power lies in the Courts and if not there, then the streets.
To belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.
Our schoolteacher should be raised to a standard he has never achieved, and cannot achieve, in bourgeois society. This is a truism and requires no proof.
The most important thing is to know how to awaken in the still undeveloped masses an intelligent attitude towards religious questions and an intelligent criticism of religions.
But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on.
It is not difficult to be a revolutionary when revolution has already broken out and is in spate, when all people are joining the revolution just because they are carried away, because it is the vogue, and sometimes even from careerist motives.
We must display determination, endurance, firmness and unanimity. We must stop at nothing. Everybody and everything must be used to save the rule of the workers and peasants, to save communism.
Human child birth is an act which transforms the woman into an almost lifeless, bloodstained heap of flesh, tortured, tormented and driven frantic by pain.
It is the duty of the revolution to put an end to compromise, and to put an end to compromise means taking the path of socialist revolution.
It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain.
Abolition of the police, the army and the bureaucracy. The salaries of all officials, all of whom are elective and displaceable at any time, not to exceed the average wage of a competent worker.
Our Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks themselves share, and instill into the minds of the people, the false notion that universal suffrage “in the present-day state” is really capable of revealing the will of the majority of the working people and of securing its realization.
We Social-Democrats always stand for democracy, not “in the name of capitalism, ” but in the name of clearing the path for our movement, which clearing is impossible without the development of capitalism.
Socialists must explain to the masses that they have no other road of salvation except the revolutionary overthrow of “their” governments, and that advantage must be taken of these governments’ embarrassments in the present war precisely for this purpose.
Convert the imperialist war into civil war.
We fully regard civil wars, i.e., wars waged by the oppressed class against the oppressing class, slaves against slave-owners, serfs against land-owners, and wage-workers against the bourgeoisie, as legitimate, progressive and necessary.
War cannot be abolished unless classes are abolished and Socialism is created.
Human knowledge is not (or does not follow) a straight line, but a curve, which endlessly approximates a series of circles, a spiral. Any fragment, segment, section of this curve can be transformed (transformed one-sidedly) into an independent, complete, straight line, which then (if one does not see the wood for the trees) leads into the quagmire, into clerical obscurantism.
Capital, created by the labor of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed.
All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.
The art of any propagandist and agitator consists in his ability to find the best means of influencing any given audience, by presenting a definite truth, in such a way as to make it most convincing, most easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.
Social-Democracy, however, wants, on the contrary, to develop the class struggle of the proletariat to the point where the latter will take the leading part in the popular Russian revolution, i.e., will lead this revolution to a the democratic-dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.
Are we to build the Party on the basis of that already formed and welded core of Social-Democrats which brought about the Party Congress, for instance, and which should enlarge and multiply Party organizations of all kinds; or are we to content ourselves with the soothing phrase that all who help are Party members?
This struggle must be organized, according to “all the rules of the art”, by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity. The fact that the masses are spontaneously being drawn into the movement does not make the organization of this struggle less necessary. On the contrary, it makes it more necessary.
The progressive historical role of capitalism may be summed up in two brief propositions: increase in the productive forces of social labour, and the socialisation of that labour. But both these facts manifest themselves in extremely diverse processes in different branches of the national economy.
