What the Friends of the People Are (1894)
“One of the favourite hobby-horses of the subjective philosopher is the idea of the conflict between determinism & morality, between historical necessity & the significance of the individual. He has filled reams of paper on the subject & has uttered an infinite amount of sentimental, philistine nonsense in order to settle this conflict in favour of morality & the role of the individual. The idea of determinism, which postulates that human acts are necessitated & rejects the absurd tale about free will, in no way destroys man’s reason or consciousness, or appraisal of his actions. Quite the contrary, only the deterministic view makes a strict & correct appraisal possible instead of attributing everything you please to free will. Similarly, the idea of historical necessity does not in the least undermine the role of the individual in history: all history is made up of the actions of individuals, who are undoubtedly active figures. The real question that arises in appraising the social activity of an individual is: what conditions ensure the success of his actions, what guarantee is there that these actions will not remain an isolated act lost in a welter of contrary acts?”
The Economic Content of Narodism, 1895
“Freedom is the appreciation of necessity, far from assuming fatalism, determinism in fact provides a basis for reasonable action”
What is to be done? (1902)
Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905)
The Attitude Towards Bourgeois Parties, 1907
“They [the Mensheviks] forgot that anybody who tackles partial problems without having previously settled general problems, will inevitably and at every step “come up against” those general problems without himself realising it. To come up against them blindly in every individual case means to doom one’s politics to the worst vacillation and lack of principle.”
Materialism & Empirio-Criticism (1908)
Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916)
April Theses (1917)
The Impending Catastrophe & How to Combat it (1917)
“For socialism is merely the next step forward from state-capitalist monopoly. Or, in other words, socialism is merely state-capitalist monopoly which is made to serve the interests of the whole people and has to that extent ceased to be capitalist monopoly.”
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)
Better Fewer, But Better
“Ideas become a power when they grip the people” Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 26
“The splitting of a single whole & the cognition of its contradictory parts…is the essence of dialectics” Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 38
“The state capitalism, which is one of the principal aspects of the New Economic Policy, is, under Soviet power, a form of capitalism that is deliberately permitted and restricted by the working class. Our state capitalism differs essentially from the state capitalism in countries that have bourgeois governments in that the state with us is represented not by the bourgeoisie, but by the proletariat, who has succeeded in winning the full confidence of the peasantry.” Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 42 (1922)