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

474V. I. LENINthe time, who have been sleeping with an old, shabby littlebook carefully stowed away under the pillow, the unwantedbook that serves them as a guide and manual in implantingofficial socialism. But the minds of tens of millions of thosewho are doing things create something infinitely loftierthan the greatest genius can foresee. Genuine, revolutionarysocialism did not break away today but at the beginning ofthe war. This significant break, this rift in socialist theory,has come about in every country and every state. And it issplendid that socialism has split!We can counter the accusation that we are fighting against“socialists” by saying merely that in the epoch of parliamentarismthese supporters of the latter no longer have anythingin common with socialism but have become decayed, obsoleteand backward, and have ended by deserting to the bourgeoisie.“Socialists” who shouted about “defending thecountry” during a war resulting from the imperialist urge ofinternational robbers are not socialists but hangers-on ofthe bourgeoisie, their dish-lickers.Those who talk so much about the dictatorship of democracymerely utter meaningless, absurd phrases which indicateneither economic knowledge nor political understanding.One of the objectors said here that the Paris Commune canbe proud of the fact that during the Paris workers’ uprisingthere was no violence or arbitrary action on their part; butit is beyond doubt that the Commune fell only because itdid not make proper use of armed force at the right moment,although it won undying fame in history, for it was thefirst to put the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat intopractice.Commenting briefly on the struggle against the bourgeoisie,landowners and capitalists, the speaker declared firmlyand resolutely, amidst a burst of applause: “Say what youmay, the bourgeoisie will in the end be forced by the willof the revolutionary people either to capitulate, or toperish.”Drawing a parallel between anarchism and Bolshevikviews, Comrade Lenin said that at that time, in the periodof a radical break-up of the bourgeois system, the conceptof anarchism was finally assuming concrete features. But