The crisis of World Capitalism -Ways and Means of Accomplishing the Socialist Revolution
Past experience teaches us that the ruling classes never voluntarily renounce their power, their numerous privileges or private ownership of the means of production, which enables them to exploit the working people. For that reason the socialist revolution is necessarily linked up with revolutionary violence, with the forcible overthrow of the capitalist system.
However, there are different kinds of violence. One is linked up with the use of weapons, with civil war, with foreign intervention. Another is, so to speak, of a peaceful nature: expropriation or restriction of private ownership, deprivation or restriction of the political rights of the exploiting classes, the drawing of these classes into labour by compulsion, and so on. This second kind of violence (peaceful violence) is inevitable in a socialist revolution, for the triumph of socialism is inconceivable 97without violence, without compulsion (economic and political). As regards armed force, the problem of whether to apply it cannot be settled without analysing the specific conditions, the alignment of class forces in the country concerned, and the international situation.
Aiming to discredit the lofty ideals of scientific communism and breed distrust for it, its opponents maintain that everywhere and under all conditions the triumph of socialism is linked up with armed force, with war. Yet scientific communism proceeds from the thesis that wars are not necessary for the victory of socialism. Socialism triumphs by virtue of the operation of objective laws of social development, which are studied and applied by the foremost class of modern times—the working class and its Marxist party. These laws operate inexorably, and by virtue of their operation socialism will ultimately triumph throughout the world just as it has triumphed in the Soviet Union and other socialist countries.
Scientific communism has always been and remains firmly opposed to all theories about “exporting revolution”, about “pushing” the revolution by armed force. Denouncing the “Left” adventurists, who call for a “ revolutionary war" against world imperialism, Lenin declared that perhaps the authors of these calls “believe that the interests of the world revolution require that it should be given a push, and that such a push can be given only by war, never by peace, which might give the people the impression that imperialism was being ’legitimised’? Such a ’theory’ would be completely at variance with Marxism, for Marxism has always been opposed to ’pushing’ revolutions, which develop with the growing acuteness of the class antagonisms that engender revolutions”. [97•*
The proletariat is the most humane class of our times. It seeks to preserve and multiply the achievements of human culture, raise the level of the productive forces, and protect people, working people, who are the principal wealth of our planet. For that reason it wants to seize power by peaceful means, to accomplish a peaceful transition from capitalism to socialism. More than a century ago, in reply to the question whether it was possible to 98abolish private ownership by peaceful means Engels replied: “One would desire that this should be so, and Communists would be the last to object to it.” A peaceful transition safeguards huge material values and the lives of great numbers of people and, Lenin wrote, it “would have been the least painful" and the “easiest and most advantageous course for the people".
However, the choice of the road to socialism depends not on the desire of individuals or classes but primarily on the objective alignment of class forces in the country concerned. If the forces of the working class, of the working people predominate overwhelmingly over the forces of the bourgeoisie, and the latter, realising that resistance is useless, prefer to save their heads by conceding power to the proletariat, a peaceful transition to socialism is possible.
Historical experience, however, shows that the bourgeoisie, like any other class doomed by history, is unable to evaluate the balance of forces soberly. With the desperation of the doomed, it is doing everything in its power to preserve or recover its lost supremacy, to prolong its existence. Its principal means are weapons, which it always brings into play when its rule is menaced, when the oppressed threaten its supremacy and its privileges. The Paris Commune was drowned in torrents of blood. The Russian landowners and capitalists did not reconcile themselves to the victory of the working people in October 1917. They started a civil war and called in the assistance of the capitalists of foreign countries, who attempted to restore capitalist rule in Russia by sword and fire. But, led by its Party, the working class together with other working masses repulsed the attack of the bourgeoisie and upheld proletarian rule.
Experience has shown that it is an indispensable condition for the triumph of the socialist revolution that the working class masters the methods of armed struggle. It is quite another matter whether there will be a need to use weapons against the bourgeoisie. At a time when the bourgeoisie held undivided sway over the whole world, when it knew its strength and could unite to fight the oppressed who rose in revolt, weapons were, essentially, 99the proletariat’s only means of winning power. It was not fortuitous that Lenin did not rule out, in principle, the possibility of the proletariat winning power by peaceful means but considered this possibility unlikely and extremely rare.
Lenin noted that there are different forms of parliamentarianism. Some people use parliaments to preach reforms to suit the bourgeoisie, to curry favour with their governments, others—to remain revolutionaries to the end. Lenin always emphasised that the parliament should be used not for reformist aims, i.e., to champion reforms that would please the bourgeoisie and yet be powerless to alleviate the lot of the people, but for propaganda purposes and the organisation of socialist reforms. The achievement of socialism with the utilisation of the parliament signifies basic revolutionary reforms supported by a nation-wide class struggle. Naturally, the opportunity for attaining this objective becomes all the greater when the strength of the working class and its allies becomes increasingly tangible and it has an ever bigger arsenal of means of struggle. It would be naive to expect that the working class can take and hold power only by winning parliamentary elections. Only when the victory in parliament is backed up by a real class force prepared to defend this victory, by armed strength if necessary, will there be a guarantee that the results of the vote are not trampled by the bourgeoisie, that they will be preserved, consolidated and developed with the purpose of carrying out socialist reforms in all spheres of social life.
The possibility of the socialist revolution triumphing by peaceful means should not be absolutised, its recognition should not be taken to mean that the proletariat has rejected armed force as a means of seizing political power. It should not be forgotten that the bourgeoisie is still supreme in a large part of the world, and that it has weapons which it can use and frequently does use against the proletariat, against the working people. For that reason the working class must be vigilant and prepared to utilise the most diverse forms of struggle, non-peaceful and peaceful. In order to accomplish the socialist revolution victoriously, the working class must master all forms of struggle, skilfully apply forms that satisfy the concrete situation and be prepared quickly and abruptly to go over from one form of struggle to another.
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Notes
[97•*] Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 27, pp. 71–72.
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