Vladimir Lenin's quotes

“Some own land, factories and capital and live on the unpaid labour of the workers; these form an insignificant minority. Others, namely, the vast mass of the population, own no means of production and live only by selling their labour-power; these are proletarians.

…The bourgeoisie and the proletariat enjoy equal political rights. But they are not equal in class status: one class, the capitalists, own the means of production and live on the unpaid labour of the workers. The other class, the wage-workers, the proletariat, own no means of production and live by selling their labour-power in the market.

The abolition of classes means placing all citizens on an equal footing with regard to the means of production belonging to society as a whole. It means giving all citizens equal opportunities of working on the publicly-owned means of production, on the publicly-owned land, at the publicly-owned factories, and so forth” (V.I. Lenin / “A Liberal Professor on Equality” / 1914).

“In a society based on private property and the enslavement of millions of propertyless toilers by a handful of rich people, the government cannot be anything but the loyal friend and ally of the exploiters and the most reliable guardian of their power. And in order to be a reliable guardian, it is not enough to possess guns, bayonets, and whips in our times: it is necessary to convince the exploited that the government stands above classes, that it does not serve the interests of the aristocracy and the bourgeiosie, but those of justice” (V.I. Lenin / “A Valuable Admission” / 1901).

“The whole point is that a bourgeois state which is exercising the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie through a democratic republic cannot confess to the people that it is serving the bourgeoisie; it cannot tell the truth, and has to play the hypocrite.

But the state of the Paris Commune type, the Soviet state, openly and frankly tells the people the truth and declares that it is the dictatorship of the proletariat and the poor peasants; and by this truth it wins over scores and scores of millions of new citizens who are kept down in any democratic republic, but who are drawn by the Soviets into political life, into democracy, into the administration of the state” (V.I. Lenin / “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky” / 1918).

“Look at the capitalists: They try to inflame national strife among the “common people”, while they themselves manage their business affairs remarkably well — Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Jews, and Germans together in one and the same corporation. Against the workers the capitalists of all nations and religions are united, but they strive to divide and weaken the workers by national strife!” (V.I. Lenin / “The Nationalisation of Jewish Schools” / 1913).

“In any case the hired worker will be an object of exploitation. Successful struggle against exploitation requires that the proletariat be free of nationalism, and be absolutely neutral, so to speak, in the fight for supremacy that is going on among the bourgeoisie of the various nations. If the proletariat of any one nation gives the slightest support to the privileges of its “own” national bourgeoisie, that will inevitably rouse distrust among the proletariat of another nation; it will weaken the international class solidarity of the workers and divide them, to the delight of the bourgeoisie” (V.I. Lenin / “About the Right of Nations to Self-Determination” / 1914).

“Picture to yourselves a slave-owner who owns 100 slaves warring against a slave-owner who owns 200 slaves for a more “just” distribution of slaves. Clearly, the application of the term “defensive” war, or war “for the defence of the fatherland” in such a case would be historically false, and in practice would be sheer deception of the common people, of philistines, of ignorant people, by the astute slave-owners. Precisely in this way are the present-day imperialist bourgeoisie deceiving the peoples by means of “national” ideology and the term defence of the fatherland in the present war between slave-owners for fortifying and strengthening slavery” (V.I. Lenin / “Socialism and War” / 1915).

“The whole Provisional Government is a government of the capitalist class. It is a matter of class, not of persons. To attack Milyukov personally, to demand, directly or indirectly, his dismissal, is a silly comedy, for no change of personalities can change anything so long as the classes in power are unchanged” (V.I. Lenin / “Icons Versus Cannons, Phrases Versus Capital” / 1917).