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

HOW TO ORGANISE COMPETITION?409and are helping to break the resistance of the servants ofcapital. There are a great many talented organisers amongthe peasants and the working class, and they are only justbeginning to become aware of themselves, to awaken, tostretch out towards great, vital, creative work, to tacklewith their own forces the task of building socialist society.One of the most important tasks today, if not the mostimportant, is to develop this independent initiative of theworkers, and of all the working and exploited people generally,develop it as widely as possible in creative organisationalwork. At all costs we must break the old, absurd,savage, despicable and disgusting prejudice that only theso-called “upper classes”, only the rich, and those who havegone through the school of the rich, are capable of administeringthe state and directing the organisational developmentof socialist society.This is a prejudice fostered by rotten routine, by petrifiedviews, slavish habits, and still more by the sordid selfishnessof the capitalists, in whose interest it is to administerwhile plundering and to plunder while administering. Theworkers will not forget for a moment that they need thepower of knowledge. The extraordinary striving after knowledgewhich the workers reveal, particularly now, showsthat mistaken ideas about this do not and cannot existamong the proletariat. But every rank-and-file worker andpeasant who can read and write, who can judge people andhas practical experience, is capable of organisational work.Among the “common people”, of whom the bourgeois intellectualsspeak with such haughtiness and contempt, there aremany such men and women. This sort of talent among theworking class and the peasants is a rich and still untappedsource.The workers and peasants are still “timid”, they havenot yet become accustomed to the idea that they are now theruling class; they are not yet resolute enough. The revolutioncould not at one stroke instil these qualities into millionsand millions of people who all their lives had been compelledby want and hunger to work under the threat of thestick. But the Revolution of October 1917 is strong, viableand invincible because it awakens these qualities, breaks downthe old impediments, removes the worn-out shackles, and