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

FEAR OF COLLAPSE OF THE OLD AND FIGHT FOR THE NEW401class struggle at its highest pitch when it turns into civilwar, the only war that is legitimate, just and sacred—not inthe clerical but in the human sense—the sacred war of theoppressed to overthrow the oppressors and liberate theworking people from all oppression. Actually all these tyrannised,shocked and scared bourgeois, petty bourgeois and“those in the service of the bourgeoisie” are frequently guided,without realising it, by that old, absurd, sentimental andvulgar intellectualist idea of “introducing socialism”, whichthey have acquired from hearsay and scraps of socialisttheory, repeating the distortions of this theory produced byignoramuses and half-scholars, and attributing to us Marxiststhe idea, and even the plan, to “introduce” socialism.To us Marxists these notions, to say nothing of the plans,are alien. We have always known, said and emphasisedthat socialism cannot be “introduced”, that it takes shapein the course of the most intense, the most acute classstruggle—which reaches heights of frenzy and desperationand civil war; we have always said that a long period of“birth-pangs” lies between capitalism and socialism; thatviolence is always the midwife of the old society; that aspecial state (that is, a special system of organised coercionof a definite class) corresponds to the transitional periodbetween the bourgeois and the socialist society, namely, thedictatorship of the proletariat. What dictatorship impliesand means is a state of simmering war, a state of militarymeasures of struggle against the enemies of the proletarianpower. The Commune was a dictatorship of the proletariat,and Marx and Engels reproached it for what they consideredto be one of the causes of its downfall, namely, that the Communehad not used its armed force with sufficient vigour tosuppress the resistance of the exploiters. 150These intellectualist howls about the suppression of capitalistresistance are actually nothing but an echo of the old“conciliation”, to put it in a “genteel” manner. Putting itwith proletarian bluntness, this means: continued kowtowingto the money-bags is what lies behind the howls againstthe present working-class coercion now being applied(unfortunately, with insufficient pressure or vigour) againstthe bourgeoisie, the saboteurs and counter-revolutionaries.The kind Peshekhonov, one of the conciliating ministers,