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

306V. I. LENINthey promised. All bourgeois politicians in all bourgeoisrevolutions “fed” the people and fooled the workers withpromises.Ours is a bourgeois revolution, therefore, the workers mustsupport the bourgeoisie, say the Potresovs, Gvozdyovsand Chkheidzes, as Plekhanov said yesterday.Ours is a bourgeois revolution, we Marxists say,therefore the workers must open the eyes of the people to thedeception practised by the bourgeois politicians, teach themto put no faith in words, to depend entirely on their ownstrength, their own organisation, their own unity, and theirown weapons.The government of the Octobrists and Cadets, of theGuchkovs and Milyukovs, cannot, even if it sincerely wantedto (only infants can think that Guchkov and Lvov are sincere),cannot give the people either peace, bread, or freedom.It cannot give peace because it is a war government, agovernment for the continuation of the imperialist slaughter,a government of plunder, out to plunder Armenia, Galiciaand Turkey, annex (Constantinople, reconquer Poland, Courland,Lithuania, etc. It is a government bound hand andfoot by Anglo-French imperialist capital. Russian capitalis merely a branch of the world-wide “firm” which manipulateshundreds of billions of rubles and is called “Englandand France”.It cannot give bread because it is a bourgeois government.At best, it can give the people “brilliantly organised famine”,as Germany has done. But the people will not accept famine.They will learn, and probably very soon, that there is breadand that it can be obtained, but only by methods that donot respect the sanctity of capital and landownership.It cannot give freedom because it is a landlord and capitalistgovernment which fears the people and has alreadybegun to strike a bargain with the Romanov dynasty.The tactical problems of our immediate attitude towardsthis government will be dealt with in another article. Init, we shall explain the peculiarity of the present situation,which is a transition from the first stage of the revolutionto the second, and why the slogan, the “task of the day”, atthis moment must be: Workers, you have performed miraclesof proletarian heroism, the heroism of the people, in the