April 22, 2020, is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Il’ich Lenin, one of the greatest revolutionaries who ever lived. He dedicated his life to the exploited and oppressed of the world: workers, peasants, women, and those especially exploited by colonialism and racism. He dedicated his life to the destruction of capitalism and the establishment of an egalitarian world without racism and sexism. As capitalism ravages the world with wars and now a ruthless pandemic let us all make a contribution to the fight for communism.
In Czarist Russia Lenin helped organize a communist party (Bolsheviks) with deep ties to the working class dedicated to armed revolution against the capitalists. During World War I the world’s imperialist powers sacrificed the lives of millions of workers as they fought to redivide and control the world. Lenin called for the workers of the world to stop fighting each other and turn their guns on their capitalist masters. Turn this imperialist war into a war for worker’s power was Lenin’s call. In 1917, led by Lenin and the Bolshevik Party (later the Russian Communist Party), the workers of Russia seized state power, thus founding the first workers’ state. The Russian Revolution was the most momentous event of the 20th century. It established socialism, not communism, and socialism maintained too many features of capitalism. But it showed that millions of workers could take power and run all of society, beating back huge elements of racism and sexism.
Lenin the revolutionary
leader and intellectual
Lenin led Soviet Russia during its first five years through the most brutal difficulties of civil war, famine, and a typhus epidemic. The Russian capitalists organized three separate armies to destroy the Russian revolution. They were aided by 13 capitalist nations that invaded Russia to “strangle Bolshevism in its cradle” (Winston Churchill). The capitalists were defeated and the first worker’s state survived.
Under Lenin’s leadership the Soviet Union formed the Communist International (Comintern). The Comintern trained and organized revolutionaries from the world’s colonies to fight for both national independence and then for socialism. National independence succeeded; there are no more traditional “colonies” ruled directly by imperialist countries. But national independence did not lead to communism. Nationalism is a capitalist ideology. Only internationalism serves the working class.
In his book What Is To Be Done? (1902), Lenin proposed the idea of a revolutionary party, composed both of professional revolutionaries and a broad network of local Party organizations and members – devoted to revolution, not to reforming capitalism. The struggle for such a party led to the formation of the Bolshevik Party. The Progressive Labor Party was founded on Lenin’s principles. Today we are expanding on those principles to build an international party of tens of millions fighting directly for communism.
Lenin also promoted the need to establish a nation-wide newspaper to conduct propaganda and agitation for socialism. This paper was Iskra, (Spark) and later Pravda, (Truth). PLP’s newspaper CHALLENGE is based on Lenin’s concept.
Honor Lenin fight for
communist revolution
Most socialists in the Second International were in trade unions. Lenin understood that trade unions fought for reforms under capitalism, and would never be revolutionary organizations. However, under the leadership of a revolutionary communist party, strikes could not only improve conditions for workers, but would be “schools for communism.” These struggles would demonstrate how capitalism cannot be reformed to serve the interests of workers, but must be overthrown.
Lenin argued that a revolutionary communist party must be mainly clandestine, because making revolution is always illegal. Its legal activities, important while permitted by the ruling class, can never be the “be all and end all.”
In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) Lenin advanced our understanding of imperialism. It is a world system in which major capitalist countries, in service to their multi-national banks and corporations, compete to control the natural resources, markets and labor of other countries. The competition between imperialist countries – the U.S., the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Spain, Italy, Austria-Hungary, Turkey, and Japan – led to both the First and Second World Wars, which killed tens of millions of workers.
In The State and Revolution (1917) Lenin describes the role of the state (government) in society. The government of a nation serves its capitalist class. Some nations have a democratic façade to hide what is a capitalist dictatorship. Communism will mean worker’s power, a dictatorship of the proletariat over the capitalists.
The world’s workers owe Lenin an immense debt for his tireless efforts to promote communist revolution. Let’s acknowledge that debt is by working to rebuild the international communist movement today, as capitalism is destroying worker’s lives and moving to world war between the imperialist powers.
Our Party, the PLP, believes in fighting for revolution, while also immersing ourselves in the workers’ reform struggles. Here is what Lenin wrote about “reform and revolution” in 1916. These ideas are still our guideposts today!
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Lenin on Reform and Revolution
It would be absolutely wrong to believe that immediate struggle for socialist revolution implies that we can, or should, abandon the fight for reforms.... We should support … every real economic and political improvement in the position of the masses.
The difference between us and the reformists … is not that we oppose reforms while they favour them ... They confine themselves to reforms and as a result stoop…to the role of “hospital orderly for capitalism”.
We tell the workers: Make it your prime duty systematically to spread the idea of immediate socialist revolution, prepare for this revolution and radically reconstruct every aspect of party activity.
The conditions of bourgeois democracy very often compel us to take a certain stand on a multitude of small and petty reforms. But we must be able, or learn, to take such a position on these reforms … that…five minutes of every half-hour speech are devoted to reforms and twenty-five minutes to the coming revolution.
“Principles Involved in the War Issue,” December, 1916: V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, 4th English Edition, and Volume 23. Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1964.