What Is To Be Done? (Lenin, 1935)/Foreword
EDITOR'S FOREWORD
What Is To Be Done? is one of Lenin's outstanding revolutionary writings. It has long been a classic in its field. The first generation of Russian Bolsheviks, which includes many of the present Soviet leaders, have been brought up on this brilliant exposition of the policies and tactics of the revolutionary Socialist movement. Its uniqueness in Russian Marxist literature is due to the way it treats the rôle of the Party in the revolutionary struggle a subject to which slight attention was paid up to that time. The subtitle, "Burning Questions of Our Movement," which Lenin gave to this brochure, indicates how deeply he felt the need of calling attention to the problem of organisation.
What were these "burning questions" which Lenin, soon after his return from Siberian exile, posed and to which he gave answers, first in articles in the Iskra ("The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement," December, 1900; "Where To Begin," May, 1901)[1] and finally developed in What Is To Be Done?, published in March, 1902?
Ideologically, Marxism had won a decisive victory over Populism which exercised hegemony among advanced Russian society and revolutionary intelligentsia during the seventies and eighties. In his early writings Lenin himself carried on sharp polemics against Populist and other utopian perversions of Socialism, thereby greatly contributing to the Marxist literary campaign designed to check their influence on the nascent revolutionary workers' movement.
The Marxist movement at that time suffered, however, from two basic weaknesses. The first was the tendency prevalent in a section of the movement and characterised as Economism, which maintained that the economic struggles of the workers for the improvement of their immediate working and living conditions should be the chief preoccupation of the labor movement. The struggle against tsarism, the Economists proposed to leave to the liberal bourgeoisie to whom they ascribed a monopoly in that field. Lenin and other revolutionary Socialists could not but consider such a policy as a travesty on Marxism, as a complete break with the nature and aims of the revolutionary labor movement, the very essence of which, they held, was the struggle for power. Lenin goes hammer and tongs after all those who attempt to separate the struggle against the tsarist government from that against the capitalists, and brands the pure and simple trade unionism of the Economists as thoroughly reactionary and inimical to the interests of the workers.
The second weakness which Lenin vigorously attacks in this study is the question of organisation. He raises this problem to the political importance it deserves and makes an impassioned appeal to scrap the existing form of organisation and build a theoretically sound party, revolutionary in purpose and national in scope. Although formally organised into a party a few years before (1898), the Marxist movement consisted of little more than small circles, each carrying on a more or less independent existence and engaging in sporadic and planless activities. This loose aggregation of revolutionists, carrying on their work in primitive, handicraft fashion, and depending on the spontaneity of the masses, could not, according to Lenin, become the organiser and leader of the revolutionary struggles which were rapidly developing and which were involving larger and larger masses of workers. Only a centralised party, working according to a carefully prepared plan, with each member assigned a specific task for which he is to be held accountable, could successfully lead the Russian workingclass in the struggle against capitalist exploitation and tsarist rule.
"If we have a strongly organised party, a single strike may grow into a political demonstration, into a political victory over the government," Lenin wrote sometime before he began to work on What Is To Be Done? Obviously, the party as he conceived it, had to consist of members "who shall devote to the revolution not only their spare evenings, but the whole of their lives."
Written thirty years ago, What Is To Be Done? still retains its freshness because of the revolutionary enthusiasm which permeates its pages and the great lessons it has today for the workers in capitalist countries who would build their revolutionary parties after the pattern fashioned by Lenin during the formative period of the Bolshevik Party.
December, 1931.
- ↑ V. I. Lenin, The Iskra Period, Book I, pp. 53–58; 109–116.