Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - Lessons of the Revolution (1918).djvu/50

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Appendix.

I.

A country may be spoken of in terms of either is political or economic-industrial form. In the political sense countries are: Autocracies (where politically privileged classes still exist; though now there are no more absolute monarchies, and the autocracies still extant may be called semi-democracies); and Democracies (where no personal or class privileges exist, and the individual enjoys perfect freedom of movement). In the economic sense all nations are capitalistic; that is all necessities of life are produced and distributed on the basis of a politically legalized principle of private ownership in land, national resources, and factories. This system of national economics is such that the great accumulation of wealth produced by nothing but labor remains as if by magic in the hands of a Few.

II.

All revolutions known until now, though always started by, and in the interest of, hungry stomachs, have always remained in the end merely political. Autocracies were reduced to semi-autocracies, (as in Germany, Italy, Austria), or to de-