Vladimir Lenin - The State and Revolution (1917)

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Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in the ancient Greek republics: freedom for the slave-owners.

Vladimir Lenin
So long as the state exists there is no freedom. When there is freedom, there will be no state.

Vladimir Lenin
Although the Russian bourgeois revolution of 1905-07 displayed no such brilliant successes as at time fell to the Portuguese and Turkish revolutions, it was undoubtedly a "real people's" revolution, since the mass of the people, their majority, the very lowest social groups, crushed by oppression and exploitation, rose independently and stamped on the entire course of the revolution the imprint of their own demands, their attempt to build in their own way a new society in place of the old society that was being destroyed.

Vladimir Lenin
It is more pleasant and useful to go through the 'experience of the revolution' than to write about it.

Vladimir Lenin
The suppression of the bourgeois state by the proletarian state is impossible without a violent revolution.

Vladimir Lenin
We are not utopians, we do not indulge in "dreams" of dispensing at once with all administration, with all subordination; these anarchist dreams... serve only to postpone the socialist revolution until human nature has changed. No, we want the socialist revolution with human nature as it is now, with human nature that cannot dispense with subordination, control and "managers."... The united workers themselves... will hire their own technicians, managers and bookkeepers, and pay them all, as, indeed, every state official, ordinary workmen's wages.

Vladimir Lenin
For the state to wither away completely, complete communism is necessary.

Vladimir Lenin
The functionaries of our political organizations and trade unions are corrupted — or rather tend to be corrupted — by the conditions of capitalism and betray a tendency to become bureaucrats, i. e., privileged persons divorced from the people and standing above the people.

Vladimir Lenin
... the oppressed are allowed once every few years to decide which particular representatives of the oppressing class shall represent and repress them in parliament!

Vladimir Lenin
We set ourselves the ultimate aim of abolishing the state, i. e., all organized and systematic violence, all use of violence against people in general. We do not expect the advent of a system of society in which the principle of subordination of the minority to the majority will not be observed.
In striving for socialism, however, we are convinced that it will develop into communism and, therefore, that the need for violence against people in general, for the subordination of one man to another, and of one section of the population to another, will vanish altogether since people will become accustomed to observing the elementary conditions of social life without violence and without subordination.

Vladimir Lenin
The working class must break up, smash the "ready-made state machinery," and not confine itself merely to laying hold of it.

Vladimir Lenin
The majority of the so-called great powers have long been exploiting and enslaving a whole series of small and weak peoples. And the imperialist war is nothing other than a war for the division and redivision of this kind of booty.

Vladimir Lenin