Isabel’s Reviews > Lenin and the Revolutionary Party > Status Update

“A revolution takes place only when there is no other way out. And the insurrection, which rises above a revolution like a peak in the mountain chain of events, can no more be evoked by will than the revolution as a whole.” -Trotsky

“Our is a bourgeois revolution, therefore, the workers must support the bourgeoisie, say the [Mensheviks].

Ours is a bourgeois revolution, we Marxists say, therefore the workers must open the eyes of the people to the deception practiced by the bourgeois politicians… to depend entirely on their own strength, their own organization, their own unity, and their own weapons.” -Lenin

As Trotsky later commented, “the will to struggle is not stored up in advance, and is not dictated from above – it has in every occasion to be independently renewed and tempered.”

“Only what is taken by force / Will live, will be holy, / Will be taken forever.” -Evgeny Tarasov

“[Marxism] made clear the real task of a revolutionary socialist party: not to draw up plans for refashioning society, not to preach to the capitalists and their hangers on about improving the lot of workers, not to hatch conspiracies, but to organize the class struggle of the proletariat and to lead this struggle, the ultimate aim of which is the conquest of political power by the proletariat…”