Bourgeois civilisation has borne all its luxuriant fruits

Bourgeois civilisation has borne all its luxuriant fruits. America has taken first place among the free and educated countries in the level of development of the productive forces of united human labour, in the use of machinery and of all the wonders of modern technology. At the same time America has become one of the foremost countries in the depth of the abyss between a handful of brazen billionaires, choking in filth and luxury, on the one hand, and the millions of working people who live for ever on the verge of destitution, on the other. The American people, who gave the world a model of revolutionary war against feudal slavery, have found themselves in the modern, capitalist wage slavery of a clique of billionaires, and have found themselves playing the part of a hired hangman who, to please the rich rabble, strangled the Philippines in 1898 on the pretext of “liberating” them, and in 1918 is strangling the Russian Socialist Republic on the pretext of “defending” it from the Germans.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, “A Letter to American Workers”, 20 August 1918