Collected Works of V. I. Lenin - Vol. 13 - From Marx to Mao

120V. I. LENINtrained, and organised preceded those actions of hundredsof thousands of workers which dealt a mortal blow to theold autocracy in Russia. The sustained and imperceptiblework of guiding all the manifestations of the proletarianclass struggle, the work of building a strong and seasonedparty preceded the outbreak of the truly mass struggle andprovided the conditions necessary for turning that outbreakinto a revolution. And now the proletariat, as the people’sfighting vanguard, must strengthen its organisation, scrapeoff all the green mould of intellectualist opportunism,and gather its forces for a similar sustained and stubborneffort. The tasks which history and the objective positionof the broad masses have posed before the Russian revolutionhave not been solved. Elements of a new, nationalpolitical crisis have not been eliminated, but, on the contrary,have grown deeper and wider. The advent of thiscrisis will place the proletariat once more at the head ofthe movement of the whole people. The workers’ Social-Democratic Party should be prepared for this role. And thesoil, fertilised by the events of 1905 and subsequent years,will yield a harvest tenfold richer. If a party of severalthousand class-conscious advanced members of the workingclass could rally a million proletarians behind it at the endof 1905, then today, when our Party has tens of thousandsof Social-Democrats tried and tested in the revolution, whohave become still more closely linked with the mass of theworkers during the struggle itself, it will rally tens of millionsbehind it and crush the enemy.Both the socialist and the democratic tasks of the workingclassmovement in Russia have been focused much moresharply and brought to the fore more urgently under theimpact of revolutionary events. The struggle against thebourgeoisie is rising to a higher stage. The capitalists areuniting in national associations, are leaguing themselvesmore closely with the government, and are resorting moreoften to extreme methods of economic struggle, includingmass lock-outs, in order to “curb” the proletariat. Butonly moribund classes are afraid of persecutions. The morerapidly the capitalists achieve successes the more rapidlydoes the proletariat grow in numbers and unity. The economicdevelopment of both Russia and the whole world is a