The Tasks of the Proletariat in the Present Revolution

This is Lenin’s report on the tasks of the revolutionary proletariat, also known as the “April Theses”, which was published on April 17-18, 1917, and published in Pravda issue No.26, on April 20, 1917. The Chinese translation is included in Vol. 29 of the second revised edition of Complete Works of Lenin.

In February 1917 (Russian calendar), the second bourgeois revolution broke out in Russia. The tsarist autocratic government was overthrown. Then came the “dual power” of the Soviets, namely, the bourgeois provisional government headed by the constitutional party which controlled all organs of political power, and Petrograd engineers who relied on the support of armed workers and soldiers. Due to the lack of political experience among the masses of workers and peasants, the leadership of the Soviet Union was stolen by Menshevik and the social revolutionaries who followed the provisional bourgeois government. The Soviet Union thus became a supplementary and affiliated regime to the provisional bourgeois government. During this period of historical transformation, the Bolshevik Party had very different views on the characteristics of the current situation and the direction of the revolution. A clear policy to arm the whole Party was urgently needed. In April 1916, Lenin returned to Petrograd from his exile in Zurich, Switzerland, and worked out the first draft of “April Theses” overnight.

Immediately after the text was ready, this famous draft was discussed in the Bolsheviks’ meeting and a meeting of both Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Lenin clearly proposed the route, principles and strategies for the transition from bourgeois democratic revolution to socialist revolution. In politics, Lenin argued that: (1) The Russian bourgeois democratic revolution was basically completed, and currently it was a transition from the first to the second stage of the revolution, that is, to the stage of the socialist revolution. Due to the lack of consciousness and organization of the proletariat in the first stage of Russia, the political power fell into the hands of the bourgeoisie. In the second stage, the political power should be transferred to the hands of the proletariat and poor peasants. It was not a parliamentary republic, but the Soviet Congresses system created by the Russian revolutionary masses. (2) To seize power peacefully and take the road of peaceful revolutionary development. The strategy is to “give no support to the provisional government” and “return all political power to the Soviet Union” to end the coexistence of the two powers. On the economic front, Lenin proposed a series of economic measures for Russia’s transition to socialism: (A) Workers on behalf of the Soviet Union supervise the production and distribution of all social products; (B) To merge all the banks nationwide into one national bank under the supervision of Soviet labor deputies; (C) Confiscate and nationalize all the land of the landlords and hand it over to the peasants.

Lenin also put forward the important task of immediately convening the Bolshevik Party Congress, revising the party programme, renaming the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party as the Communist Party, and establishing a new revolutionary International so as to draw a clear line with the Social-Democratic parties of various countries that betrayed socialism.

“April Theses” has laid down the specific route for the Bolshevik Party so as to shift the bourgeois democratic revolution into a socialist revolution, laid an important ideological and theoretical foundation for the victory of the October Revolution and the establishment of the first socialist state, and developed Lenin’s “theory of socialist movement achieving victory first in one country or several countries”.