Vladimir Lenin: Class (page 2)

Vladimir Lenin was Russian politician, led the October Revolution. Explore interesting quotes on class.
Vladimir Lenin: 672   quotes 145   likes

“About three million must be regarded as middle peasants, while barely two million consist of kulaks, rich peasants, grain profiteers… Ruthless war on the kulaks! Death to them! … [Class struggle entails] ruthless suppression of the kulaks, those bloodsuckers, vampires, plunderers of the people and profiteers, who batten on famine.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Comrade Workers, Forward To The Last, Decisive Fight! Collected Works, Vol. 28, pages 53-7.
Attributions

Death , War , People

“Does not the whole history of socialism, particularly of French socialism, which is so rich in revolutionary striving, show us that when the working people themselves take power in their hands the ruling classes resort to unheard-of crimes and shootings if it is a matter of protecting their money-bags.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Report on the Activities of the Council of People’s Commissars" (24 January 1918); Collected Works, Vol. 26, pp. 459-61.
1910s

Money , People , History

“The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be a trade union secretary. but a tribune of the people, able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it takes place, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; he must be able to group all these manifestations into a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; he must be able to take advantage of every petty event in order to explain his socialistic convictions and his Social-Democratic demands to all, in order to explain to all and every the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Three, Section E, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)

People , World

“The exploiting classes need political rule in order to maintain exploitation, i. e., in the selfish interests of an insignificant minority and against the interests of the vast majority of the people. The exploited classes need political rule in order completely to abolish all exploitation, i. e., in the interests of the vast majority of the people, and against the interests of the insignificant minority consisting of the modern slave-owners - the landlords and the capitalists.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

2.1, "The Eve of The Revolution", Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
The State and Revolution (1917)

People , Selfishness

“When we say "the state," the state is We, it is we, it is the proletariat, it is the advanced guard of the working class.”

Vladimir Lenin

Speech (27 May 1922).
1920s

“Treat the Jews (express it politely: Jewish petty bourgeoisie) and urban inhabitants in the Ukraine with an iron rod, transferring them to the front, not letting them into the government agencies (except in an insignificant percentage, in particularly exceptional circumstances, under class control).”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996), p. 77.
Attributions

“Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence… The class struggle did not accidentally assume its latest form, the form in which the exploited class takes all the means of power in its own hands in order to completely destroy its class enemy, the bourgeoisie…”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Report on the Activities of the Council of People’s Commissars, Collected Works, Vol. 26, pages 459-61.
Attributions

History , Problem

“The Congress decisively rejects terrorism, i. e., the system of individual political assassinations, as being a method of political struggle which is most inexpedient at the present time, diverting the best forces from the urgent and imperatively necessary work of organisation and agitation, destroying contact between the revolutionaries and the masses of the revolutionary classes of the population, and spreading both among the revolutionaries themselves and the population in general utterly distorted ideas of the aims and methods of struggle against the autocracy.”

Vladimir Lenin

http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1903/2ndcong/5.htm
Second Congress of the RSDLP: Drafts of Minor Resolutions
July–August
1903
Collected Works
6
yes
Lenin
Vladimir Ilich
Marxists.
1900s

Idea , Decision , Time

“We must '"go among all classes of the people" as theoreticians, as propagandists, as agitators and as organizers.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Three, Section E, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)

People

“The passing of state power from one class to another is the first, the principal, the basic sign of a revolution, both in the strictly scientific and in the practical political meaning of that term.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 42–54.
Collected Works

“It is I think, almost universally realized at present that the Bolsheviks could not have retained power for two and a half month, let alone two and a half years, without the most rigorous and truly iron discipline in our Party, or without the fullest unreserved support from the entire mass of the working class, that is, from all thinking, honest, devoted and influential elements in it, capable of leading the backward strata or carrying the latter along with them.”

Vladimir Lenin book "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

Source: "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920), CH. 2 An Essential Condition of the Bolsheviks' Success

Support , Thinking , Universe

“Class consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only outside of the economic struggle, outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the phere of relationships between all the various classes and strata and the state and the government-the sphere of the interrelations between all the various classes.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Three, Section D, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)

Knowledge

“From the vulgar bourgeois standpoint the terms dictatorship and democracy are mutually exclusive. Failing to understand the theory of class struggle, and accustomed to seeing in the political arena the petty squabbling of the various bourgeois circles and coteries, the bourgeois conceives dictatorship to mean the annulment of all the liberties and guarantees of democracy, tyranny of every kind, and every sort of abuse of power in the personal interests of a dictator.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 31.
Collected Works

Democracy , Understanding , Personality

“When we are reproached with having established a dictatorship of one party and, as you have heard, a united socialist front is proposed, we say, "Yes, it is a dictatorship of one party! This is what we stand for and we shall not shift from that position because it is the party that has won, in the course of decades, the position of vanguard of the entire factory and industrial proletariat. This party had won that position even before the revolution of 1905. It is the party that was at the head of the workers in 1905 and which since then — even at the time of the reaction after 1905 when the working-class movement was rehabilitated with such difficulty under the Stolypin Duma — merged with the working class and it alone could lead that class to a profound, fundamental change in the old society.”

Vladimir Lenin

“Speech to the First All-Russia Congress of Workers in Education and Socialist Culture” (30 July 1919) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/aug/05.htm Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 535.
1910s

Change , Time

“We, the Great-Russian proletarians, who defend no privileges whatever, do not defend this privilege either. We are fighting on the ground of a definite state; we unite the workers of all nations living in this state; we cannot vouch for any particular path of national development, for we are marching to our class goal along all possible paths.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Right of Nations to Self-Determination", (1904), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

Fight

“To become a power the class-conscious workers must win the majority to their side. As long as no violence is used against the people there is no other road to power. We are not Blancists, we do not stand for the seizure of power by a minority.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 38–41.
Collected Works

People

“Classes still remain, and will remain everywhere for years after the proletariat's conquest of power.”

Vladimir Lenin book "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

CH 5, "Left Wing Communism in Germany. The Leaders, the Party, the Class, the Mass"
"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

“Modern militarism is the result of capitalism. In both its forms it is the “vital expression” of capitalism — as a military force used by the capitalist states in their external conflicts and as a weapon in the hands of the ruling classes for suppressing every kind of movement, economic and political, of the proletariat.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 15, pp. 191–201.
Collected Works

“To belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology; for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.”

Vladimir Lenin

What is to be Done? (1902)

Way , Democracy

“The state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability class antagonisms. The state arises when, where and to the extent that class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.”

Vladimir Lenin

1.1, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
(1917)