VI Lenin
We do not regard Marx’s theory as something completed and inviolable; on the country, we are convinced that it has only laid the foundation stone of the science which socialists must develop in all directions if they wish to keep pace with life.
(1899: Our Programme)
If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration?
(1901: What Is To Be Done? Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’)
In the beginning we had to teach the workers the ABC, both in the literal and in the figurative senses. Now the standard of political literacy has risen so gigantically that we can and should concentrate all our efforts on the more direct Social-Democratic objectives aimed at giving an organised direction to the revolutionary stream.
(1905: New Tasks and New Forces)
That today, when the wave has ebbed, there remain and will remain only real Marxists, does not frighten us but rejoices us.
(1908: Two Letters)
1) Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it.
2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be no such difference. The only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known. And philosophical inventions of specific boundaries between the one and the other, inventions to the effect that the thing-in-itself is “beyond” phenomena (Kant), or that we can and must fence ourselves off by some philosophical partition from the problem of a world which in one part or another is still unknown but which exists outside us (Hume) — all this is the sheerest nonsense, Schrulle, crotchet, invention.
3) In the theory of knowledge, as in every other branch of science, we must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.
(1908: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism)
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.
(1913: The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism)
Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed.
(1913: The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism)
Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated, development (inflation, distension) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge, into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature, apotheosised.
(1914: Summary of Dialectics)
Working class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected – unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic point of view and no other. The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life…
(1902: What Is To Be Done?)
(1899: Our Programme)
If democracy, in essence, means the abolition of class domination, then why should not a socialist minister charm the whole bourgeois world by orations on class collaboration?
(1901: What Is To Be Done? Dogmatism and ‘Freedom of Criticism’)
In the beginning we had to teach the workers the ABC, both in the literal and in the figurative senses. Now the standard of political literacy has risen so gigantically that we can and should concentrate all our efforts on the more direct Social-Democratic objectives aimed at giving an organised direction to the revolutionary stream.
(1905: New Tasks and New Forces)
That today, when the wave has ebbed, there remain and will remain only real Marxists, does not frighten us but rejoices us.
(1908: Two Letters)
1) Things exist independently of our consciousness, independently of our perceptions, outside of us, for it is beyond doubt that alizarin existed in coal tar yesterday and it is equally beyond doubt that yesterday we knew nothing of the existence of this alizarin and received no sensations from it.
2) There is definitely no difference in principle between the phenomenon and the thing-in-itself, and there can be no such difference. The only difference is between what is known and what is not yet known. And philosophical inventions of specific boundaries between the one and the other, inventions to the effect that the thing-in-itself is “beyond” phenomena (Kant), or that we can and must fence ourselves off by some philosophical partition from the problem of a world which in one part or another is still unknown but which exists outside us (Hume) — all this is the sheerest nonsense, Schrulle, crotchet, invention.
3) In the theory of knowledge, as in every other branch of science, we must think dialectically, that is, we must not regard our knowledge as ready-made and unalterable, but must determine how knowledge emerges from ignorance, how incomplete, inexact knowledge becomes more complete and more exact.
(1908: Materialism and Empirio-Criticism)
Where the bourgeois economists saw a relation between things (the exchange of one commodity for another) Marx revealed a relation between people.
(1913: The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism)
Capital, created by the labour of the worker, crushes the worker, ruining small proprietors and creating an army of unemployed.
(1913: The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism)
Philosophical idealism is only nonsense from the standpoint of crude, simple, metaphysical materialism. From the standpoint of dialectical materialism, on the other hand, philosophical idealism is a one-sided, exaggerated, development (inflation, distension) of one of the features, aspects, facets of knowledge, into an absolute, divorced from matter, from nature, apotheosised.
(1914: Summary of Dialectics)
Working class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected – unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic point of view and no other. The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life…
(1902: What Is To Be Done?)