Winning the Vast Majority Through Proletarian State Power

(Quote of the Week)

Polemicizing against the Social Democrats of the Second International, who preached that socialism could be introduced through winning a majority in bourgeois parliaments, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin stressed that the proletariat would win the support of the vast majority of working people through smashing the bourgeois state and replacing it with a workers state that expropriates capitalist property. This teaching is of special relevance today in the U.S., Europe and throughout the capitalist world, where masses of the population are being ground down by the ongoing economic crisis.

How can state power in the hands of the proletariat become the instrument of its class struggle for influence over the non-proletarian working people, of the struggle to draw them to its side, to win them over, to wrest them from the bourgeoisie?

First, the proletariat achieves this not by putting into operation the old apparatus of state power, but by smashing it to pieces, levelling it with the ground (in spite of the howls of frightened philistines and the threats of saboteurs), and building a new state apparatus....

Secondly, the proletariat can, and must, at once, or at all events very quickly, win from the bourgeoisie and from petty-bourgeois democrats “their” masses, i.e., the masses which follow them—win them by satisfying their most urgent economic needs in a revolutionary way by expropriating the landowners and the bourgeoisie.

The bourgeoisie cannot do that, no matter how “mighty” its state power may be.

The proletariat can do that on the very next day after it has won state power, because for this it has both an apparatus (the Soviets) and economic means (the expropriation of the landowners and the bourgeoisie)....

The traitors, blockheads and pedants of the Second International could never understand such dialectics; the proletariat cannot achieve victory if it does not win the majority of the population to its side. But to limit that winning to polling a majority of votes in an election under the rule of the bourgeoisie, or to make it the condition for it, is crass stupidity, or else sheer deception of the workers. In order to win the majority of the population to its side the proletariat must, in the first place, overthrow the bourgeoisie and seize state power; secondly, it must introduce Soviet power and completely smash the old state apparatus, whereby it immediately undermines the rule, prestige and influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the non-proletarian working people. Thirdly, it must entirely destroy the influence of the bourgeoisie and petty-bourgeois compromisers over the majority of the non-proletarian masses by satisfying their economic needs in a revolutionary way at the expense of the exploiters.

—V.I. Lenin, “The Constituent Assembly Elections and the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” December 1919, Collected Works, Vol. 30