What Is to Be Done?

What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement[lower-alpha 1] is a political pamphlet written by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (credited as N. Lenin) in 1901 and published in 1902, a development of a "skeleton plan" laid out in an article first published in early 1901.[1][2] Its title is taken from the 1863 novel of the same name by the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky.

This article is about Lenin's pamphlet. For the Chernyshevsky novel, see What Is to Be Done? (novel). For other uses, see What Is to Be Done? (disambiguation).

What is to be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement
Original cover
AuthorVladimir Lenin (as N. Lenin)
Original titleЧто дѣлать? Наболѣвшіе вопросы нашего движенія
LanguageRussian
Published1902

The text's central focus is the ideological formation of the proletariat.[3]: 30  In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously become political simply by fighting economic battles with employers over wages, working hours, and the like. To educate the working class on Marxism, Lenin insists that Marxists should form a political party, or vanguard, of dedicated revolutionaries in order to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The pamphlet, in part, precipitated the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party between Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.[4]

Main points
1953 stamp marking the 50th anniversary of What Is to Be Done?

Lenin first confronts the so-called economist trend in Russian social democracy that followed the line of Eduard Bernstein.[3]: 30  He explains that Bernstein's positions were opportunist, a point expressed by the French socialist Alexandre Millerand as in taking a post in a bourgeois government. Against the economists' demand for freedom of criticism, Lenin advances the position that the orthodox Marxists had the same right to criticize in return. He stresses that in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, revolutionary social democrats would need to pay particular attention to theoretical questions, recalling Friedrich Engels' position that there were three forms of social democratic struggle, namely political, economic and theoretical.[5]

Lenin hypothesizes that workers will not spontaneously develop class consciousness due to economic conflicts with their employers or through spontaneous actions like strikes or demonstrations.[3]: 30  Instead, revolutionaries need to form a political party to publicize Marxist ideas and persuade workers to join.[3]: 30  Lenin argues that understanding politics requires understanding all of society, not just workers and their economic struggles with their employers.

Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without; that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships (of all classes and strata) to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes.[6]

Reflecting on the wave of strikes in late 19th century Russia, Lenin writes that "the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade-union consciousness"; that is, combining into trade unions and so on. However, socialist theory in Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, was the product of the "educated representatives of the propertied classes", the intellectuals or "revolutionary socialist intellectuals". Lenin states that Karl Marx and Engels themselves, the very founders of modern scientific socialism, belonged to this bourgeois intelligentsia.[7]

Notes
  1. Pre-reformed Russian: Что дѣлать? Наболѣвшіе вопросы нашего движенія; Russian: Что делать? Наболевшие вопросы нашего движения, romanized: Chto delat? Nabolevshie voprosy nashego dvizheniya

References
  1. Le Blanc, Paul. 2008. Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings of Lenin. London: Pluto Press. pp. 9, 128.
  2. Lenin, Vladimir (1901). "What Is To Be Done?". Lenin's Selected Works. Marxists Internet Archive. Retrieved 11 February 2018.
  3. Ministry of Education and Training (Vietnam) (2023). Curriculum of the Basic Principles of Marxism-Leninism. Vol. 1. Translated by Nguyen, Luna. Banyan House Publishing. p. 30. ISBN 9798987931608.
  4. Malia, Martin (1994). The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917–1991. New York: Free Press. ISBN 978-0-02-919795-0.
  5. North, David (6 September 2005). "The Origins of Bolshevism and What Is To Be Done?". World Socialist Web Site. International Committee of the Fourth International. Archived from the original on 6 June 2013. Retrieved 3 June 2013.
  6. Lenin, Vladimir (1901). "What Is to Be Done?". Lenin Internet Archive at Marxists Internet Archive.
  7. Le Blanc, Paul (2008). Revolution, Democracy, Socialism: Selected Writings of Lenin. London: Pluto Pres. pp. 31, 137–138.

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Further reading
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