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    What Is To Be Done?
    What Is To Be Done?
    What Is To Be Done?
    Ebook312 pages5 hours

    What Is To Be Done?

    By V. I. Lenin

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    “The pamphlet... outlined a broad plan of organisation in which everyone would find a place for himself, become a cog in the revolutionary machine, a cog, which, no matter how small, was vital to the working of the machine. The pamphlet urged the necessity of intensive and tireless efforts to build the foundation that had to be built if the Party was to exist in deeds and not in words...” (Nadezhda Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin.)

    First published in early 1902, What Is to Be Done? remains a classic of Marxism on the building of the revolutionary party, which sets out the party’s role as the organiser and director of the revolution. The pamphlet was written as part of a conflict with the opportunism of the Economists, who emphasised ‘bread and butter issues’ rather than theory.

    Lenin uses the book to explain the necessity of creating a centralised group of professional and dedicated revolutionary cadres before the “times of explosion and outbursts.” The history of the past 100 years has proven Lenin right: time and again, the masses have been ready to struggle, but let down by their leadership.

    Today, many working-class people are beginning to reject the status quo and are looking to socialist ideas as an alternative. It is the duty of Marxists to build an organisation capable of offering a way forward, and What is to Be Done? represents an excellent guide as to how to do this.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWellred
    Release dateOct 1, 2020
    ISBN9781005899493
    What Is To Be Done?
    Author

    V. I. Lenin

    V.I. Lenin (1870-1924) was a pivotal figure in twentieth century radical politics. He was a theoretician and the leader of the Russian Bolshevik Party. He wrote widely, authoring books such as Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Pluto, 1996). His selected writings were collected in the volume Revolution, Democracy, Socialism (Pluto, 2008).

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      What Is To Be Done? - V. I. Lenin

      Preface

      According to the author’s original plan, the present pamphlet was to have been devoted to a detailed development of the ideas expressed in the article ‘Where to Begin?’ (Iskra, No. 4, May 1901.) We must first apologise to the reader for the delay in fulfilling the promise made in that article (and repeated in response to many private inquiries and letters). One of the reasons for this delay was the attempt, undertaken in June of the past year (1901), to unite all the Social-Democratic organisations abroad. It was natural to wait for the results of this attempt, for, had the effort proved successful, it would perhaps have been necessary to expound Iskra’s conceptions of organisation from a somewhat different approach; in any case, such a success promised to put an end very quickly to the existence of the two trends in the Russian Social-Democratic movement. As the reader knows, the attempt failed, and, as we propose to show, was bound to fail after the new swing, of Rabocheye Dyelo, in its issue No. 10, towards Economism. It was found to be absolutely essential to begin a determined struggle against this trend, diffuse and ill-defined, but for that reason the more persistent, the more capable of reasserting itself in diverse forms. Accordingly, the original plan of the pamphlet was altered and considerably enlarged.

      Its main theme was to have been the three questions raised in the article ‘Where to Begin?’ – the character and main content of our political agitation; our organisational tasks; and the plan for building, simultaneously and from various sides, a militant, all-Russia organisation. These questions have long engaged the mind of the author, who tried to raise them in Rabochaya Gazeta[1] during one of the unsuccessful attempts to revive that paper (see Chapter 5). But the original plan to confine the pamphlet to an analysis of only these three questions and to set forth our views as far as possible in a positive form, without, or almost without, entering into polemics, proved wholly impracticable, for two reasons. On the one hand, Economism proved to be much more tenacious than we had supposed (we employ the term Economism in the broad sense, as explained in Iskra, No. 12, December 1901, in the article entitled ‘A Talk with Defenders of Economism’, which was a synopsis, so to speak, of the present pamphlet). It became clear beyond doubt that the differences regarding the solution of the three questions mentioned were explainable to a far greater degree by the basic antithesis between the two trends in the Russian Social-Democratic movement than by differences over details. On the other hand, the perplexity of the Economists over the practical application of our views in Iskra clearly revealed that we often speak literally in different tongues and therefore cannot arrive at an understanding without beginning ab ovo, and that an attempt must be made, in the simplest possible style, illustrated by numerous and concrete examples, systematically to ‘clarify’ all our basic points of difference with all the Economists. I resolved to make such an attempt at ‘clarification’, fully realising that it would greatly increase the size of the pamphlet and delay its publication; I saw no other way of meeting my pledge I had made in the article ‘Where to Begin?’. Thus, to the apologies for the delay, I must add others for the serious literary shortcomings of the pamphlet. I had to work in great haste, with frequent interruptions by a variety of other

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