The Liberating Promise of Socialism

(Quote of the Week)

In July 1919, less than two years after the victorious proletarian revolution in Russia, Bolshevik leader V.I. Lenin granted an interview to a U.S. news agency with the agreement that his answers would be published unaltered in over 100 newspapers. In one of his responses excerpted below, Lenin explained that capitalism had outgrown its historically progressive role and become a fetter on the development of society, as starkly shown by the carnage of interimperialist World War I. In contrast, the fledgling Soviet workers state was a beacon of hope for the toiling masses worldwide. The news agency suppressed this answer as “unadulterated Bolshevist propaganda,” but Max Eastman’s left radical magazine The Liberator published it in October 1919.

Compared to feudalism, capitalism was an historical advance along the road of “liberty,” “equality,” “democracy” and “civilisation.” Nevertheless capitalism was, and remains, a system of wage-slavery, of the enslavement of millions of working people, workers and peasants, by an insignificant minority of modern slave-owners, landowners and capitalists. Bourgeois democracy, as compared to feudalism, has changed the form of this economic slavery, has created a brilliant screen for it but has not, and could not, change its essence. Capitalism and bourgeois democracy are wage-slavery.

The gigantic progress of technology in general, and of means of transport in particular, and the tremendous growth of capital and banks have resulted in capitalism becoming mature and overmature. It has outlived itself. It has become the most reactionary hindrance to human progress. It has become reduced to the absolute power of a handful of millionaires and multimillionaires who send whole nations into a bloodbath to decide whether the German or the Anglo-French group of plunderers is to obtain the spoils of imperialism, power over the colonies, financial “spheres of influence” or “mandates to rule,” etc.

During the war of 1914-18 tens of millions of people were killed or mutilated for that reason and for that reason alone....

The capitalists, the bourgeoisie, can at “best” put off the victory of socialism in one country or another at the cost of slaughtering further hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants. But they cannot save capitalism. The Soviet Republic has come to take the place of capitalism, the Republic which gives power to the working people and only to the working people, which entrusts the proletariat with the guidance of their liberation, which abolishes private property in land, factories and other means of production, because this private property is the source of the exploitation of the many by the few, the source of mass poverty, the source of predatory wars between nations, wars that enrich only the capitalists.

The victory of the world Soviet republic is certain.

—V.I. Lenin, “Answers to an American Journalist’s Questions” (July 1919)