The proletariat needs state power, a centralised organisation of force, an organisation of violence, both to crush the resistance of the exploiters and to lead the enormous mass of the population—the peasants, the petty bourgeoisie, and semi-proletarians—in the work of organising a socialist economy.
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"We must learn to approach the masses with the greatest patience and caution, to overcome the prejudices of the masses and replace them with conscious class consciousness."
"The party is the mind, honor, and conscience of our epoch."
"The state is a special organisation of force; it is an organisation of violence for the suppression of some class."
"There is no 'democracy' in the abstract, there is only class democracy."
"The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his."
Russian revolutionary who led the October 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and founded the Soviet state; What Is to Be Done? (1902) shaped 20th-century revolutionary practice. Closely associated with Leon Trotsky (his Red Army organizer and 1917 partner) and Karl Marx (the source Lenin claimed (and adapted)). For an intellectual contrast, see Karl Popper, Austrian-British philosopher — Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) systematically attacked Marx-and-Lenin 'historical inevitability' as the philosophical structure that produces totalitarianism — Lenin's vanguard-party doctrine is Popper's primary 20th-century target.
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