Lenin CW-Vol. 23.pdf - From Marx to Mao

LETTERS FROM AFAR299history, and, on the other, of engendering world-wide crisesof unparalleled intensity—economic, political, national andinternational. Apart from an extraordinary acceleration ofworld history, it was also necessary that history make particularlyabrupt turns, in order that at one such turn the filthyand blood-stained cart of the Romanov monarchy should beoverturned at one stroke.This all-powerful “stage manager”, this mighty acceleratorwas the imperialist world war.That it is a world war is now indisputable, for the UnitedStates and China are already half-involved today, and willbe fully involved tomorrow.That it is an imperialist war on both sides is now likewiseindisputable. Only the capitalists and their hangers-on, thesocial-patriots and social-chauvinists, or—if instead of generalcritical definitions we use political names familiar inRussia—only the Guchkovs and Lvovs, Milyukovs and Shingaryovson the one hand, and only the Gvozdyovs, Potresovs,Chkhenkelis, Kerenskys and Chkheidzes on the other, candeny or gloss over this fact. Both the German and the Anglo-French bourgeoisie are waging the war for the plunderof foreign countries and the strangling of small nations, forfinancial world supremacy and the division and redivisionof colonies, and in order to save the tottering capitalistregime by misleading and dividing the workers of the variouscountries.The imperialist war was bound, with objective inevitability,immensely to accelerate and intensify to an unprecedenteddegree the class struggle of the proletariat against thebourgeoisie; it was bound to turn into a civil war betweenthe hostile classes.This transformation has been started by the February-March Revolution of 1917, the first stage of which has beenmarked, firstly, by a joint blow at tsarism struck by twoforces: one, the whole of bourgeois and landlord Russia,with all her unconscious hangers-on and all her consciousleaders, the British and French ambassadors and capitalists,and the other, the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, which hasbegun to win over the soldiers’ and peasants’ deputies. 128These three political camps, these three fundamental politicalforces—(1) the tsarist monarchy, the head of the feudal