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

408V. I. LENINto carrying out in practice the work of removing the capitalists.The great change from working under compulsion toworking for oneself, to labour planned and organised on agigantic, national (and to a certain extent international,world) scale, also requires—in addition to “military” measuresfor the suppression of the exploiters’ resistance—tremendousorganisational, organising effort on the part of the proletariatand the poor peasants. The organisational task isinterwoven to form a single whole with the task of ruthlesslysuppressing by military methods yesterday’s slave-owners(capitalists) and their packs of lackeys—the bourgeoisintellectual gentlemen. Yesterday’s slave-owners and their“intellectual” stooges say and think, “We have always beenorganisers and chiefs. We have commanded, and we want tocontinue doing so. We shall refuse to obey the ‘commonpeople’, the workers and peasants. We shall not submit tothem. We shall convert knowledge into a weapon for thedefence of the privileges of the money-bags and of the ruleof capital over the people.”That is what the bourgeoisie and the bourgeois intellectualssay, think, and do. From the point of view of selfinteresttheir behaviour is comprehensible. The hangers-onand spongers on the feudal landowners, the priests, thescribes, the bureaucrats as Gogol depicted them, and the “intellectuals”who hated Belinsky, 151 also found it “hard”to part with serfdom. But the cause of the exploiters and oftheir “intellectual” menials is hopeless. The workers andpeasants are beginning to break down their resistance—unfortunately, not yet firmly, resolutely and ruthlesslyenough—and break down they will.“They” think that the “common people”, the “common”workers and poor peasants, will be unable to cope with thegreat, truly heroic, in the world-historic sense of the word,organisational tasks which the socialist revolution has imposedupon the working people. The intellectuals who areaccustomed to serving the capitalists and the capitaliststate say in order to console themselves: “You cannot dowithout us.” But their insolent assumption has no truth init; educated men are already making their appearance onthe side of the people, on the side of the working people,