Lenin’s Message to the American Public:
Abridged excerpt from ‘To An American Journalist’s Questions’ 20th of July 1919.
Q. What else would you care to bring to the notice of American public opinion?
A. More than anything else I should like to state the following to the American public:
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.
Capitalism 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 which group of plunderers is to obtain the spoils of imperialism, power over the colonies, financial “spheres of influence” or “mandates to rule”, etc.
The collapse of capitalism is inevitable.
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.