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The Working Class and Revolution

V. I. Lenin


1. The democratic and the socialist revolution.

2. The bourgeois nature of the democratic revolution. ("Bourgeois and socialist revolution.")

3. The tasks of Social-Democracy as an independent class party of the proletariat.

4. The role of the peasantry in the democratic revolution.

5. Insurrection and the revolutionary army.

6. The revolutionary government. Its tasks.

7. The revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry.

1. α) The aims of the working class.
     β) Social-Democracy. Our programme.
     γ) The maximum and
     δ) the minimum programme. {A description of it (compare 6 points*)}
     ε) The democratic and the socialist revolution.

2. The bourgeois and the socialist revolution. Why is the democratic revolution bourgeois in nature?
     α) Commodity and capitalist production.
     β) The economic essence.
     γ) The Constitutional-Democratic Party, its programme, and its class essence. A class party. Zemstvo congresses. Unions of intellectuals. The legal press.
     ε) Bourgeois advice to the proletariat: the trade union struggle, etc.

3. Conclusions from the above. An independent class party. Organisation—trade union and Party, agitational, and military. Marxism: "a doctrine".

4. The peasantry's special interests. Remnants of serf-ownership. Why is the role of the peasantry in the democratic revolution of particular importance? The "general redistribution" and its significance. The peasants are the workers' natural allies. The peasantry's petty-bourgeois nature.

5. The uprising. Moral and material force. Arming of the people. Military organisation (military problems, etc.). The revolutionary army. (Example: Nizhni-Novgorod and Ekaterinoslav) ((bombs, arms)).

6. The revolutionary government, the organ of uprising. The significance of a revolutionary government and revolutionary power. Participation in a revolutionary government. The programme of a revolutionary government: 6 points. Get Europe moving.

7. What is dictatorship? Dictatorship of a class and dictatorship of an individual. Democratic dictatorship. Classes.


Notes

[*] See p. 183 of this volume.—Ed.

PA-note
Citation from the article, The Boycott of the Bulygin Duma, and Insurrection.
... It would be hard to imagine a better time for widespread agitation for an uprising and in order to conduct that agitation full clarity regarding the programme of a provisional revolutionary government is also necessary. This programme should consist of the six points which we have indicated previously (see Proletary, No.7, "The Revolutionary Army and the Revolutionary Government"):

         1) convocation of a popular constituent assembly;
         2) arming of the people;
         3) political freedom—the immediate repeal of all laws that contradict it;
         4) complete cultural and political freedom for all oppressed and disfranchised nationalities—the Russian people cannot win liberty for themselves without fighting for the liberty of the other nationalities;
         5) an eight-hour working day;
         6) the establishment of peasant committees for the support and implementation of all democratic reforms, among them agrarian reforms, up to and including the confiscation of the landlords' land.


Written: Written in August 1905
Published: First published in 1926 in Lenin Miscellany V. Published according to the manuscript.
Source: Lenin Collected Works, Progress Publishers, 1972, Moscow, Volume 9, pages 207-208.
Translated: The Late Abraham Fineberg and Julius Katzer


eSource: Marxists.org - Marxists Internet Archive
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