The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution (April Theses)¶
Core Argument¶
Here, in the April Theses, Lenin delivers a strategic break from the entire edifice of Second International Marxism and the compromising logic of revolutionary defencism. The core argument is that the February Revolution has created a unique, unstable dual power—the Soviets alongside the bourgeois Provisional Government—and that the proletariat must refuse all support for the latter. The war remains imperialist on Russia’s part so long as capitalist power holds; a genuinely democratic peace is impossible without the overthrow of capital. Lenin therefore demands a complete rupture: no support for the Provisional Government, whose promises of renouncing annexations are exposed as fraudulent, and a patient, persistent campaign to win the masses away from their “unreasoning trust” in the bourgeoisie.
The theses advance a concrete programme for the transition. Power must pass entirely to the Soviets of Workers’ Deputies, the only possible form of revolutionary government. The standing army, police, and bureaucracy are to be abolished, replaced by the arming of the whole people and by officials who are elective, recallable, and paid no more than a competent worker’s wage. All landed estates are to be confiscated, all land nationalised and placed under local peasant Soviets, with model farms run on large estates for the public account. Banks are to be amalgamated into a single national bank under Soviet control. Lenin is emphatic that this is not the immediate introduction of socialism, but the establishment of workers’ control over production and distribution.
The polemical thrust is directed at two fronts. First, against the “social-chauvinists”—Plekhanov, Goldenberg, and the Menshevik defencists—who, Lenin charges, are socialists in word and chauvinists in deed, and who dishonestly misrepresent his call for patient explanation as a “banner of civil war.” Second, against the vacillating ‘Centre’ of international Social-Democracy—Kautsky, Longuet, Chkheidze, Turati, MacDonald—who oscillate between chauvinism and genuine internationalism. Lenin insists on a complete break: the Party must rename itself Communist, discard its outmoded minimum programme, and take the initiative in creating a revolutionary International against both the social-chauvinists and the Centre. The theoretical grounding is explicitly Marxist, recalling the experience of the Paris Commune and Marx’s and Engels’s writings of 1871–1875 on the kind of state the proletariat requires—a “commune state,” not a parliamentary republic. The theses are thus a declaration of war on the entire political and theoretical inheritance of the Second International, demanding that the Russian proletariat lead the way toward a new, revolutionary International.