What, however, is the domination of the capitalist class over the entire mass of working folk based on? It is based on the fact that all the factories, mills, mines, machines, and instruments of labour are in the hands of the capitalists, are their private property; on the fact that they possess enormous quantities of land (of all the land in European Russia, more than one-third belongs to landed proprietors, who do not number half a million). The workers possess no instruments of labour or materials, and so they have to sell their labour-power to the capitalists, who only pay the workers what is necessary for their keep, and place all the surplus produced by labour in their pockets; thus they pay for only part of the working time they use, and appropriate the rest. The entire increase in wealth resulting from the combined labour of the masses of workers or from improvements in production goes to the capitalist class, while the workers, who toil from generation to generation, remain propertyless proletarians. That is why there is only one way of ending the exploitation of labour by capital, and that is to abolish the private ownership of the instruments of labour, to hand over all the factories, mills, mines, and also all the big estates, etc., to the whole of society and to conduct socialist production in common, directed by the workers themselves. The articles produced by labour in common will then go to benefit the working people themselves, while the surplus they produce over and above their keep will serve to satisfy the needs of the workers themselves, to secure the full development of all their capabilities and equal rights to enjoy all the achievements of science and art. That is why the programme states that the struggle between the working class and the capitalists can end only in this way. To achieve that, however, it is necessary that political power, i.e., the power to govern the state, should pass from the hands of a government which is under the influence of the capitalists and landowners, or from the hands of a government directly made up of elected representatives of the capitalists, into the hands of the working class.

Such is the ultimate aim of the struggle of the working class, such is the condition for its complete emancipation.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Draft and Explanation of a Programme for the Social-Democratic Party

#Lenin

@Communism

'Brothers of the Slavs! - All to fight against a common enemy - Fascism!' (Russian #poster by V. Inozemtsev/ Vladivostok lithograph No. 1. Soviet Union, 1941).

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"increasing physical resistance"

Posted by Sofia

@Communists

'To protect the power of the workers and peasants, we need a powerful Red Army' (Russian #poster by Eduard Artsrunyan/ Izdatel'stvo Plakat, Moscow. Soviet Union, 1977).

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'Mannerheim - He is concerned about the distant spine of the Urals, but his own spine was bent and broken' (Russian #postcard by Vladimir Gal'ba/ Iskusstvo, Moscow. As part of the series 'Fascist guard dogs'. Soviet Union, 1943).

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"Lenin and Children. Winter" ("Ленин и дети. Зима") - #Painting by Ivan Tarasovich Klets (Иван Тарасович Клец), 1980.

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A world where our grandchildren have to go to a museum to see what a gun looked like
Vijay Prashad

In the aftermath of the war, Virginia Woolf wrote in her novel Mrs. Dalloway of a former soldier who, overcome by fear, uttered, ‘The world wavered and quivered and threatened to burst into flames’.This sentiment not only holds true of this former soldier’s post-traumatic stress disorder:it is how nearly everyone feels, besieged by fears of a world engulfed in flames and being unable to do anything to prevent it.

Those words resonate today,as NATO’s provocations in Ukraine put the possibility of nuclear winter on the table and the US and Israel commit genocide against the Palestinian people as the world watches in horror.Remembering these words today makes one wonder:can we awake from this century-long nightmare,rub our eyes, and realise that life can go on without war? Such a wonder comes from a fit of hope, not from any real evidence.We are tired of carnage and death.We want a permanent end to war

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"Fraternal greetings to all peoples fighting for the victory of democracy and socialism!", soviet poster, 1949

"University students", painting by Valentin Volkov, 1947