14 Vladimir Lenin Quotes on Economics

Vladimir Lenin quotes on economics

2. What we prize most is peace and an opportunity to devote all our efforts to restoring our economy.

16. The worker is becoming impoverished absolutely, i.e., he is actually becoming poorer than before; he is compelled to live worse, to eat worse, to suffer hunger more, and to live in basements and attics.

29. Socialism, by organising production without class oppression, by ensuring the well-being of all members of the state, gives full play to the 'sympathies' of the population, thereby promoting and greatly accelerating the drawing together and fusion of the nations.

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

36. The bourgeoisie are today evading taxation by bribery and through their connections; we must close all loopholes.

37. The 'democratisation' of the ownership of shares, from which the bourgeois sophists and opportunist so-called 'Social-Democrats' expect (or say that they expect) the 'democratisation of capital', the strengthening of the role and significance of small scale production, etc., is, in fact, one of the ways of increasing the power of the financial oligarchy.

43. Modern militarism is the result of capitalism. In both its forms it is the 'vital expression' of capitalism-as a military force used by the capitalist states in their external conflicts and as a weapon in the hands of the ruling classes for suppressing every kind of movement, economic and political, of the proletariat.

44. Trade unions and strikes cannot help in times of crisis when there is no demand for this 'commodity', they cannot change the conditions which, convert labour-power into a commodity and which doom the masses of working people to dire need and unemployment. To change these conditions, a revolutionary struggle against the whole existing social and political system is necessary; the industrial crisis will convince very many workers of the justice of this statement.

48. Present-day society is wholly based on the exploitation of the vast masses of the working class by a tiny minority of the population, the class of the landowners and that of the capitalists. It is a slave society, since the 'free' workers, who all their life work for the capitalists, are 'entitled' only to such means of subsistence as are essential for the maintenance of slaves who produce profit, for the safeguarding and perpetuation of capitalist slavery.

57. There are at present 300,000 bourgeois in the Crimea. These are a source of future profiteering, espionage and every kind of aid to the capitalists. However, we are not afraid of them. We say that we shall take and distribute them, make them submit, and assimilate them.

58. Political institutions are a superstructure resting on an economic foundation. The Three Sources and Three Constituent Parts of Marxism (1913)

60. The war is relentless: it puts the alternative in a ruthless relief: either to perish, or to catch up with the advanced countries and outdistance them, too, in economic matters. The Impending Catastrophe and How to Fight It (1917)

61. Let us...take the most concrete example of state capitalism...It is Germany. Here we have the 'last word' in modern, large-scale capitalist engineering and planned organization, subordinated to Junker-bourgeois imperialism. Cross out the words in italics and [substitute] a Soviet state, that is, a proletarian state, and you will have the sum total of the conditions necessary for socialism.

71. To hoard surpluses of grain and other food products at a time when the people in Petrograd, in Moscow, and in dozens of non-agricultural uyezds are not only suffering from a shortage of bread, but are cruelly starving, is an enormous crime deserving the most ruthless punishment.