sets Lenin’s What Is to Be Done? in the context of the struggle to build a socialist organization in Russia.
Socialist Worker, September 29, 2008 | Issue 681
IN DECEMBER 1895, Vladimir Lenin, then a young Russian Social Democrat, was arrested in St. Petersburg and spent the next four years in Siberian exile. He had been the leader of a local social democratic circle for two years.
Socialist Worker writers introduce ten of the most important writings by leading thinkers in the revolutionary socialist tradition.
In exile, he spent part of the time working on a massive work analyzing the nature of Russian capitalism. On the practical side, he hatched a plan to produce a national newspaper that could unite around it the scattered, isolated groupings of Russian revolutionaries throughout the empire into a single all-Russian Social Democratic Party.
An attempt to form a national party had been made at the first national Russian Social Democratic conference in 1898, but it was small and unrepresentative, and most of its participants were arrested immediately after the conference took place.
It did, however, produce a manifesto that encapsulated the orthodox view of the majority of Russian Marxists at the time, including Lenin: “The further east one goes in Europe, the meaner, more cowardly and politically weak the bourgeoisie becomes, and the greater are the cultural and political tasks that fall to the proletariat.”
Lenin’s plans bore fruit; the periodical Iskra (the Spark)–which gathered as editors both the most prominent young leaders, such as Lenin and Julius Martov, but also the founders of Russian Marxism, such as George Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod–was able over a period of three years, from 1900 to 1903, to win over the majority of Russian committees to Lenin’s proposal for the all-Russian party.
- Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Communist Manifesto
- Frederick Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific
- Frederick Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State
- Karl Marx, The Civil War in France
- Rosa Luxemburg, The Mass Strike
- Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution
- Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution
- Vladimir Lenin, What Is to Be Done
- Vladimir Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism
- Leon Trotsky, Permanent Revolution
Lenin outlined his plan in a number of articles in Iskra. The first step, he said, was an all-Russian political newspaper. “Without it,” he wrote, “we cannot conduct that systematic, all-round propaganda and agitation, consistent in principle, which is the chief and permanent task of Social Democracy in general and, in particular, the pressing task of the moment, when interest in politics and in questions of socialism has been aroused among the broadest strata of the population.”
This passage gives a hint of the urgency of Lenin’s call; he believed that the working-class movement was advancing by leaps and bounds, and that the socialists, with their purely local, agitational work, usually centered around lending assistance to workers’ economic struggles, were lagging behind these developments. The working class, he wrote, “has demonstrated its readiness, not only to listen to and support the summons to political struggle, but boldly to engage in battle.”
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THE TASKS of the Iskraists, therefore, were not purely organizational or technical. Lenin and his cohorts were waging a political fight against other trends in the movement–namely, the trend known as “economism,” centered around a newspaper called Rabochaya Mysl (Workers Thought), but also the eclectic trend around the newspaper Rabochaya Dyelo (Workers Dawn), which seemed unable to take a firm stand on anything.
In Lenin’s opinion, the economists made a virtue of the socialist movements’ weaknesses, arguing that the task of socialists was merely to support workers’ economic struggles. The elitist assumption was that workers weren’t ready for political agitation.
The economists, argued Lenin, were the Russian variant of the German “revisionists,” led by Eduard Bernstein, who famously wrote that the movement was everything and the final goal nothing. In Russia, Lenin argued, the economists were attempting “to narrow the theory of Marxism, to convert the revolutionary workers’ party into a reformist party.”
Lenin’s beef with the Dyelo group was that it downplayed the danger of economism, alternatively criticizing and flirting with their ideas. The Dyeloists also were uncritical of terrorism, and though it is rarely acknowledged by Lenin’s critics over the years, Iskra spent some time engaging in a polemic in favor of the methods of mass struggle and against individual terror, on the grounds that this tactic “disorganizes the forces, not of the government, but of the revolution.”
For Lenin, the main imbalance was between the rapid growth of class struggle–strikes, even general strikes, and May Day demonstrations–while the organization of socialists that could provide a national leadership and unite the disparate struggles into a common front against the autocracy was lacking. Worse, there were political trends in the movement that saw this as a perfectly fine state of affairs.
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Tags: exile, Iskra, Russian capitalism, Russian Marxists, socialist consciousness, socialist movement, Vladimir Lenin, What Is To Be Done?, working class struggle
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