Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 26 - From Marx to Mao

120V. I. LENINed by the landowners, for decades have been robbed anddowntrodden by the capitalists and the tsar’s officials. Heunderstands all this “theoretically”, he only pays lip-serviceto this, he is simply terrified by the “exceptionally complicatedsituation”.After the July days, thanks to the extremely solicitousattention with which the Kerensky government honouredme, I was obliged to go underground. Of course, it was theworkers who sheltered people like us. In a small workingclasshouse in a remote working-class suburb of Petrograd,dinner is being served. The hostess puts bread on the table.The host says: “Look what fine bread. ‘They’ dare not giveus bad bread now. And we had almost given up even thinkingthat we’d ever get good bread in Petrograd again.”I was amazed at this class appraisal of the July days.My thoughts had been revolving around the political significanceof those events, weighing the role they played in thegeneral course of events, analysing the situation that causedthis zigzag in history and the situation it would create,and how we ought to change our slogans and alter our Partyapparatus to adapt it to the changed situation. As forbread, I, who had not known want, did not give it a thought.I took bread for granted, as a by-product of the writer’swork, as it were. The mind approaches the foundation ofeverything, the class struggle for bread, through political analysisthat follows an extremely complicated and deviouspath.This member of the oppressed class, however, eventhough one of the well-paid and quite intelligent workers,takes the bull by the horns with that astonishing simplicityand straightforwardness, with that firm determination andamazing clarity of outlook from which we intellectuals areas remote as the stars in the sky. The whole world is dividedinto two camps: “us”, the working people, and “them”,the exploiters. Not a shadow of embarrassment over whathad taken place; it was just one of the battles in the longstruggle between labour and capital. When you fell trees,chips fly.“What a painful thing is this ‘exceptionally complicatedsituation’ created by the revolution,” that’s how the bourgeoisintellectual thinks and feels.