The liberals cannot advocate a struggle, because they are afraid of it. They respond to the intensification of reaction by whining about a constitution, thus corrupting people’s minds, and by intensified opportunism.

Comrade workers! May Day is coming, the day when the workers of all lands celebrate Their awakening to a class- conscious life, their solidarity in the struggle against all coercion and oppression of man by man, the struggle to free the toiling millions from hunger, poverty, and humiliation.

What made the May Day celebrations…an event of outstanding importance? The large-scale participation of the workers in the strike, the huge mass meetings in the streets, the unfurling of red flags, the presentation of demands put forth…and the revolutionary character of these demands

Everyone knows that bourgeois politicians always come forward with all sorts of slogans, programmes, and platforms to deceive the people. Bourgeois politicians always, especially before elections, call themselves liberals, progressives, democrats and even “radical socialists”

When a liberal is abused, he says: Thank God they didn't beat me. When he is beaten, he thanks God they didn't kill him. When he is killed, he will thank God that his immortal soul has been delivered from its mortal clay.

When thieves fall out, honest men come by their own, to some extent. When bourgeois newspapermen quarrel they reveal to the public the venality of the “big dailies” and the tricks they are up to.

The standpoint of life, of practice, should be first and fundamental in the theory of knowledge. And it inevitably leads to materialism, brushing aside the endless fabrications of professorial scholasticism.

Unity is a great thing and a great slogan. But what the workers’ cause needs is the unity of Marxists, not unity between Marxists, and opponents and distorters of Marxism.

But when people who have radically severed relations with the very foundations of Marxism in philosophy begin to dodge, confuse matters, hedge and assure us that they “too” are Marxists in philosophy, that they are “almost” in agreement with Marx, and have only slightly “supplemented” him—

It is a real cock-and-bull story.

(Stormy applause) Comrades, I must naturally begin by thanking you for two things: firstly, for the congratula-tions addressed to me today, and secondly, even more for having spared me congratulatory speeches (Applause.)

The more strongly the working-class movement develops the more frantic are the attempts by the bourgeoisie and the feudalists to suppress it or break it up.

The interests of the bourgeoisie demand the embellishment of capitalism and the concealment of the gulf that divides the classes. The interests of the proletariat demand the exposure of capitalism and of the exploitation of wage-labour

The capitalists and landowners want, at all costs, to keep the workers of different nations apart while the powers that be live splendidly together as shareholders in profitable concerns involving millions

The Economist, a journal that speaks for the British millionaires, is pursuing a very instructive line in relation to the war. Representatives of advanced capital in the oldest and richest capitalist country, are shedding tears over the war and incessantly voicing a wish for peace…

The workers realised from the very start that in order to fight for peace, bread, and freedom, the labouring classes, the workers, soldiers and peasants, must organise, close their ranks, unite independently of the capitalists and against the capitalists.

Is there a grain of Marxism in proclaiming the conduct of the capitalists “madness”, when, caught in the vise of…imperialist capital, they cannot act otherwise? www.marxists.org/archive/leni...

To believe that the capitalist class will “mend its ways”, will cease to be a capitalist class, will give up its profits, is a fatuous hope, an idle dream, and in effect a deception of the people.

We believe that even a hundred regicides can never produce so stimulating and educational an effect as this participation of tens of thousands of working people in meetings where their vital interests and the links between politics and these interests are discussed,

More audacity, comrades! More confidence in the strength of the revolutionary classes, especially the proletariat, enriched as they now are by new experience; more independent initiative! All the signs indicate that we are on the eve of a great struggle.

The petty-bourgeois viewpoint differs from the bourgeois one in that the petty bourgeois “renounces” annexations, “condemns” imperialism, “demands” from the bourgeoisie that it cease to be imperialistic while keeping within the framework of world-imperialist relations and the capitalist system…

The only choice is — either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology).

His Liberal Highness would have known this had he possessed at least an elementary knowledge of the “fundamental principles of Marxism”, of which he speaks with such boundless aplomb and with equally boundless ignorance.

Monopolies, oligarchy, the striving for domination and not for freedom, the exploitation of an increasing number of small or weak nations by a handful of the richest or most powerful nations—all these have given birth to those distinctive characteristics of imperialism

But the bourgeoisie is more afraid of the movement of the masses than of reaction. Hence the striking, incredible weakness of the liberals in politics, their absolute impotence.

In a society of wage slavery, every merchant and every proprietor plays a game of chance, saying as it were: “I shall either be ruined or make a profit and ruin others.” Every year hundreds of capitalists go bankrupt and millions of peasants, handicraftsmen and artisans are ruined.

Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle.

If the liberals still renounce the “theory” of the class struggle, call it a mistake, etc., in face of these instructive facts, it only goes to show that the liberal conscience is not clear.

The little yellow-beaked birds who have just broken from the egg of bourgeois ideas are always frightfully clever. We shall have to let that go.

The incomes of the landlords doubled. Wages barely kept pace with the price of food products, but the landlords’ incomes rose five times as high as the price of food products. The landowners and well-to-do peasant proprietors are growing steadily richer.

It is ridiculous to speak of “law” when the landowners both make the laws and in practice apply or annul them. There is, therefore, a class that itself creates the “law” and itself annuls it. Liberal speeches about “law” and “reforms”, therefore, are empty chatter.

Who “earned” this property? Those who did not work, the shareholders, and first and foremost the millionaire magnates who hold most of the shares. The work was done by hundreds of employees... These employees remained employees. They do not receive anything more than their salaries.

It is time to prepare for the forthcoming May Day celebrations, and one of the most important preparation measures must consist in learning what the Social-Democratic movement in Russia has already achieved,

In either case our line is one: to hammer out the democratic forces by merciless criticism of all vacillations, by uncompromising struggle against the democrats joining the liberals, who have proved their counter revolutionariness.

There is nothing more convenient for our liberals than that…general haziness—“oppositionism”, “progressism”. What is hidden behind those words, what sort of oppositional activity was displayed….which class he served, are things they prefer not to discuss. These things are distasteful to liberals.

If the present war rouses among the reactionary Christian socialists, among the whimpering petty bourgeoisie, only horror and fright, only aversion to all use of arms, to bloodshed, death, etc., then we must say: Capitalist society is and has always been horror without end.

The proletariat is becoming enlightened and educated by waging its class struggle; it is ridding itself of the prejudices of bourgeois society; it is rallying its ranks ever more closely and is learning to gauge the measure of its successes; it is steeling its forces and is growing irresistibly.

Capitalism cannot develop except in a whole series of contradictions, and the indication of these contradictions merely explains to us the historically transitory nature of capitalism, explains the conditions and causes of its tendency to go forward to a higher form.

A slight revival of industry, a relative improvement in trade and a slight revival of bourgeois liberalism, and the opportunist begins to shout: Don’t frighten the bourgeoisie away, don’t fight shy of it, drop your “phrase-mongering” about social revolution!

The contradictions in Tolstoy’s works…are indeed glaring. On the one hand, we have the great artist, the genius who has not only drawn incomparable pictures of Russian life but has made first-class contributions to world literature. On the other hand we have the landlord obsessed with Christ.

In conclusion it will perhaps be worth while replying to a question which has probably occurred already to more than one reader. Did it pay to argue so long with such gentlemen? Was it worth while replying seriously to this stream of liberal and censor-protected filth…?

Only by getting down to business themselves will the workers—in time, after stubborn work and persistent effort—be able to help towards a better understanding of their own movement and thus ensure bigger successes for that movement.

The work of political agitation is never wasted.

If people who regard themselves as liberal and progressive scholars are capable of tolerating such heroes of buffoonery…if these heroes are granted scientific degrees…then that only shows the ‘law’ of the bourgeois era: the more shamelessly you mock science to demolish Marx the greater is your merit

Civilisation, freedom and wealth under capitalism call to mind the rich glutton who is rotting alive but will not let what is young live on. But the young is growing and will emerge supreme in spite of all.

Both economic and political agitation are equally necessary to develop the class-consciousness of the proletariat; both economic and political agitation are equally necessary for guiding the class struggle of the Russian workers, because every class struggle is a political struggle.

That is a muddle, a disgusting muddle, Mr. “Muddleheaded Counsellor”!

Socialism is not a ready-made system that will be mankind’s benefactor. Socialism is the class struggle of the present-day proletariat as it advances from one objective today to another objective tomorrow for the sake of its basic objective, to which it is coming nearer every day.

“We” are great masters at upsetting and refuting Marx; “we”, the civilised merchants and professors of political economy, have refuted him completely!... And at the same time we steal little bits and pieces from him and boast to the whole world of our “progressiveness”....

For centuries England has enslaved Ireland, condemned the Irish peasants to unparalleled misery and gradual extinction from starvation, driven them off the land and compelled hundreds of thousands and even millions of them to leave their native country and emigrate to America.