Published on April 22, 2024, by Il Grido del Popolo©️
On the 154th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Lenin, a revolutionary, statesman, and theorist, we present a selection of less well-known quotations that demonstrate the enduring relevance of the proletarian struggle against war, exploitation, and humiliation.
“A newspaper is not only a collective propagandist and a collective agitator, it is also a collective organiser.” – Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, “The Plan For an All-Russia Political Newspaper” (1901)
“When the masses are digesting a new and exceptionally rich experience of direct revolutionary struggle, the theoretical struggle for a revolutionary outlook, i.e., for revolutionary Marxism, becomes the watchword of the day.” – Lenin, Two Letters (1908)
“All official and liberal science defends wage-slavery, whereas Marxism has declared relentless war on that slavery.” – Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)
“Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.” – Lenin, The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism (1913)
“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 (where it is anchored by the class interests of the ruling classes).” – Lenin, Summary of Dialectics (1914)
“The working class cannot play its world-revolutionary role unless it wages a ruthless struggle against this renegacy, spinelessness, subservience to opportunism and unexampled vulgarization of the theories of Marxism.” – Lenin, Socialism and War (1915)
“The war of 1914-18 was imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital.” – Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1914)
“It is, of course, much easier to shout, abuse, and howl than to attempt to relate, to explain.” – Lenin, April Theses (1917)
“A party is the vanguard of a class, and its duty is to lead the masses and not merely to reflect the average political level of the masses.” – Lenin, Speech On The Agrarian Question November 14 (1917)
“Bolshevism went through fifteen years of practical history (1903-17) unequalled anywhere in the world in its wealth of experience. During those fifteen years, no other country knew anything even approximating to that revolutionary experience, that rapid and varied succession of different forms of the movement—legal and illegal, peaceful and stormy, underground and open, local circles and mass movements, and parliamentary and terrorist forms.” – Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)
“Without an alliance with non-Communists in the most diverse spheres of activity there can be no question of any successful communist construction.” – Lenin, The Significance of Militant Materialism (1922)
“Capital is an international force. To vanquish it, an international workers’ alliance, an international workers’ brotherhood, is needed. We are opposed to national enmity and discord, to national exclusiveness. We are internationalists.” – Lenin, Letter to the Workers and Peasants of the Ukraine (1919)
