What Is to Be Done?

What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement 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. Its title is taken from the 1863 novel of the same name by the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky. The text's central focus is the ideological formation of the proletariat. 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. Lenin first confronts the so-called economist trend in Russian social democracy that followed the line of Eduard Bernstein. 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. 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. Instead, revolutionaries need to form a political party to publicize Marxist ideas and persuade workers to join.

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Related concepts (7)

Vanguardism

Vanguardism, in the context of Leninist revolutionary struggle, relates to a strategy whereby the most class-conscious and politically "advanced" sections of the proletariat or working class, described as the revolutionary vanguard, form organizations to advance the objectives of communism. They take actions to draw larger sections of the working class toward revolutionary politics and to serve as manifestations of proletarian political power opposed to the bourgeoisie.

Democratic centralism

Democratic centralism is the organisational principle of having political decisions reached by voting processes which are binding upon all members of a political party. It is mainly associated with Leninism, wherein the party's political vanguard of revolutionaries practice democratic centralism to select leaders and officers, determine policy, and execute it. Democratic centralism has primarily been associated with Marxist–Leninist and Trotskyist parties, but has also occasionally been practised by other democratic socialist and social democratic parties.

Revolutionary socialism

Revolutionary socialism is a political philosophy, doctrine, and tradition within socialism that stresses the idea that a social revolution is necessary to bring about structural changes in society. More specifically, it is the view that revolution is a necessary precondition for transitioning from a capitalist to a socialist mode of production. Revolution is not necessarily defined as a violent insurrection; it is defined as a seizure of political power by mass movements of the working class so that the state is directly controlled or abolished by the working class as opposed to the capitalist class and its interests.