Page:Vladimir Ilyich Lenin - On Organization (1926).pdf/40

as a whole, and strives at all the turning points of this path to champion, not individual groups, not individual trades, but the interests of the working class as a whole. The Communist Party is the organizational-political lever by the aid of which the most progressive section of the working class directs the mass of the proletariat and semi-proletariat along the right path."

This is a condensed expression of the principles of the teachings of Lenin on the Party. In his speech at the Second Congress of the Communist International Lenin said:

"A political Party can combine only a minority of the class, in the same way as the really class conscious workers throughout the whole of capitalist society represent only a minority of all the workers. For that reason we are compelled to admit that only a class conscious minority can guide the vast masses of the workers and get them to follow it . . . . If the minority is really class conscious, if it succeeds in getting the masses to follow it, if it is able to reply to every question that comes up on the order of the day, then it is in essence a Party . . . . If the minority is not able to lead the masses, link itself closely up with them, then it is not a Party and is good for nothing even if it calls itself a Party.”

Thus the Communist Party combines only a minority of the working class. Until the capture of power by the proletariat, and a long time after that. it cannot embrace the majority of the working