Lenin Showed the Way to End Wall Street’s Grip on Power
The workers must take power into their own hands, abolish private property
Today we commemorate the memory of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin on the 101st anniversary of his untimely death. These days his name is not so well known among the US American workers, but there was a time when he was more beloved by millions of workers and farmers in this country than any other man in history. Lenin was the revolutionary leader who developed the teachings of the founders of the scientific socialist principles, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.
Lenin showed the workers of Russia and the rest of the world how to use these teachings and the best experience of the workers, under the conditions of today and a century ago, to free themselves from the slavery of rule by a few rich capitalists. Basing his philosophy on the teachings of Marx and Engels, Lenin demonstrated that miserable insecurity haunts the lives of all workers under our present order of rule by the rich. He showed how the political and economic system of capitalism, the system of private property and private profit, breeds poverty for the toilers, the majority of people, while granting luxury and ease for a handful of billionaires.
Lenin further showed how capitalism inevitably gives rise to poverty at a time when “too much” of the goods and necessities humans need are produced. His teachings expose how the present order of things leads to the massing of exorbitant wealth in the hands of a parasitic few, while those of us whose hands and minds have produced this wealth are condemned to a life of tenuous employment, physical and mental insecurity, precarious living standards, and general misery.
Above all, though, Lenin showed how the working class can END this state of capitalist enslavement, end the dictatorship of capital, whether it was disguised by “democracy” or evoked in overt fascism. He proved how the workers could destroy the rule of the rich and replace it with the rule of the workers – of Us – with the aid of all toilers. To achieve this, Lenin emphasized that the workers must create a new form of government, a Soviet one; a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” wherein workers’ councils, elected by the workers in the factories, mines, mills, railroads, offices and farms decided how resources, sustenance, and surplus would be allocated.
This would mean the greatest democracy for all who labor. It would be rule by an actual majority instead of the farcical example of democracy we see today where a minuscule group of extremely wealthy leeches decide everything from the cost of food and utilities, to whether you can receive life saving health treatments, to how long you may stay home with your newborn before you must return to work. It was with these ideas, this vision, this unyielding belief that it was not only possible, but inevitable, that Lenin guided the Russian workers and farmers to revolutionary victory over feudal czarism and capitalist exploitation in 1917.
The US billionaires, industrialists, tech monopolists, landlords, bankers, mortgage holders, and their latest Mouthpiece in Chief, Donald Trump, ALL fear the influence Marx and Lenin’s teachings could have on the American workers. Why else would they constantly harp on every minor inconvenience to befall their charmed lives as a clandestine communist plot to destroy “America”? These vampires know that in Lenin’s teachings, the American worker begins to see through the fraud behind “making America great” and “law and order” and all the other nonsense that only protects the pockets of the wealthy. That working people might realize capitalist control is neither necessary nor permanent is the monopolists’ greatest fear. But neither Wall Street nor their venal journalists, podcasts, politicians, and TV news readers will be able to hold back an oppressed and impoverished working class who finally recognizes itself as a class – as Lenin taught workers in Russia.
Lenin educated the workers in how to struggle for their day-to-day interests, for better working conditions, higher wages, more leisure time, better education and infrastructure. But Lenin taught most of all that these desires and more must eventually stop being asked for and finally be taken by force.
Only by building a communist party of the most class-conscious workers can we build what we deserve.