Page:Solomon Abramovich Lozovsky - Lenin, The Great Strategist of the Class War - tr. Alexander Bittleman (1924).pdf/32



S a foremost strategian Lenin understood how to direct the attention of the masses to itself, how to concentrate the fighting energies of the masses, directing them to some central point. He knew the secret of formulating slogans in a simple and universally understood manner. He also knew as no body else did how to organize the masses lead them into struggle, always in accordance with the fundamental principle of strategy which is, that the offensive is the best defensive. Lenin never permitted the initiative to slip out of his hands. He knew that the moment the enemy seizes the initiative our battle is lost. He was always striving towards determining results, even if they were small. He pursued our class enemies to the point of their complete destruction. He knew neither sentimentalism nor vacillation, which was the result, not of his "blood-thirstiness" as our class enemies would have us believe, but of his deep understanding of the mechanism of the social struggle.

When the class struggle reaches a sharpened stage, indecision is much more costly to the working class than the utmost relentlessness towards the enemy. In moments of decision the least failure to adopt energetic measures results in the working class paying with thousands of lives. Such indecision enables the enemy to collect its forces and to assume the offensive. In the whole of Lenin's activities the following passes like a red thread: Initiative, determination, ruthlessness, the pursuit of the enemy until he is destroyed, quick action and the concentration of the proletarian forces at the weakest spot of the enemy's front.

At the same time Lenin understood how to diagnose the weaks spots in the armor of his own class. He would fight and exclude from the midst of the proletariat many elements and whole social groups that were steering against the course of the proletarian movement. He had a very fine sense of perception for all the quiet processes that are going on within the masses, he sensed very quickly all the subterranean forces within the proletariat, and he always understood how to differentiate between the sound and unsound tendencies within the working class. We must not forget that the working class finds itself within the capitalist order of society, and that as a result of this, capitalism is exerting a great influence over the proletarian masses. Reformism, for instance, is the ideology of the bourgeoisie transplanted on working class soil. Lenin was in posses-