“We must not depict socialism as if socialists will bring it to us on a plate all nicely dressed. That will never happen. Not a single problem of the class struggle has ever been solved in history except by violence. When violence is exercised by the working people, by the mass of exploited against the exploiters — then we are for it!”

— Vladimir Lenin

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

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Vladimir Lenin336

Russian politician, led the October Revolution 1870–1924

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“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 (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

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

“On the ground of the class struggle we are invincible; if we leave it we are lost, because we are no longer socialists. The strength and power of socialism rests in the fact that we are leading a class struggle; that the laboring class is exploited and oppressed by the capitalist class, and that within capitalist society effectual reforms, which will put an end to class government and class exploitation, are impossible.”

Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826–1900) German socialist politician

No Compromise – No Political Trading (1899)

“When we understand that privileged people derive material benefits from the exploitation of oppressed people, and that this means we benefit from the violence used to keep them down, we cannot sincerely condemn them for violently rebelling against the structural violence that privileges us.”

Peter Gelderloos (1982) American anarchist

Peter Gelderloos, How Nonviolence Protects the State http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/peter-gelderloos-how-nonviolence-protects-the-state (Cambridge, MA: South End Press, 2007), 37.

“Violence is not the monopoly of the exploiters and as such the exploited can use it too and, moreover, ought to use it when the moment arrives.”

Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–1967) Argentine Marxist revolutionary

Method of Guerrilla Warfare (1963)

“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 (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

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

“We have never preached violence, except the violence of love, which left Christ nailed to a cross, the violence that we must each do to ourselves to overcome our selfishness and such cruel inequalities among us. The violence we preach is not the violence of the sword, the violence of hatred. It is the violence of love, of brotherhood, the violence that wills to beat weapons into sickles for work.”

Óscar Romero (1917–1980) Fourth Archbishop of San Salvador

Oscar A. Romero, The Violence of Love http://data.plough.com/ebooks/ViolenceOfLove.pdf (1977).

“But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.”

Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929–1968) American clergyman, activist, and leader in the American Civil Rights Movement

1950s, Three Ways of Meeting Oppression (1958)
Source: A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches
Context: A second way that oppressed people sometimes deal with oppression is to resort to physical violence and corroding hatred. Violence often brings about momentary results. Nations have frequently won their independence in battle. But in spite of temporary victories, violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem; it merely creates new and more complicated ones.

“Perhaps there has been, at some point in history, some great power whose elevation was exempt from the violent exploitation of other human bodies. If there has been, I have yet to discover it. But this banality of violence can never excuse America, because … America believes itself exceptional, the greatest and noblest nation ever to exist.”

Ta-Nehisi Coates book Between the World and Me

Source: Between the World and Me (2015), p. 8.

“The proletariat needs state power, a centralized organisation of force, an organisation of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population - the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians - in the work of organising a socialist economy.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

1.1, The Lenin Anthology
The State and Revolution (1917)

“The proletariat needs state power, the centralized organization of force, the organization of violence, for the purpose of crushing the resistance of the exploiters and for the purpose of leading the great mass of the population - the peasantry, the petty bourgeoisie, the semi-proletarians - in the work of organizing a socialist economy.”

Vladimir Lenin (1870–1924) Russian politician, led the October Revolution

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

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