Lenin’s What is to be Done? famously opens up with a quote from Lassalle to Marx from 24 June, 1852. This is no accident and serves to set the serious tone for the rest of the book.

Party struggles lend a party strength and vitality; the greatest proof of a party’s weakness is its diffuseness and the blurring of clear demarcations; a party becomes stronger by purging itself…

Philistines bristle at the suggestion of a ‘purge’ strengthening the party, especially in the light of the experience of Stalinism. The word ‘purge’ has a completely different connotation today than in 1852 or 1902. The idea is that a genuinely homogeneous party is much stronger than a heterogeneous one cannot be denied. Over a period of time, the party can attract all kinds of accidental elements with alien ideas that can play a very negative role. The party is not a playground for such types. It was far better to split politically with those who were moving in the opposite direction.

As Marx explained, the revolutionary party is a living organism, which evolves at each stage of its development. The transformation from a small circle to a larger grouping leads to different methods, as does the transformation to a mass party. There is a tendency for some who played a role in one period to be left behind in a new period in the organisation’s development. This can give rise to frictions and even splits at a certain stage. Splits can be viewed as unfortunate, but they are sometimes inevitable and even necessary. Just as a human being sheds or ‘purges’ dead cells to allow new cells to grow in their place, a similar process takes place within the party.

Lenin explains that the early years of the Russian movement were inevitably dominated by small circles of Marxists. These circles played a progressive role. But they eventually became a barrier to the further development of the party.

And the transition to a democratically organised workers’ party, proclaimed by the Bolsheviks in Novaya Zhizn in November 1905, i.e., as soon as the conditions appeared for legal activity – this transition was virtually an irrevocable break with the old circle ways that had outlived their day. (LCW, vol. 13, p. 105.)

As the whole history of Bolshevism shows, political differences and arguments over strategy and tactics can become very heated. Lenin’s Bolshevik Party was known as the school of hard knocks. They had many polemics. Lenin noted this feature in 1907:

The pamphlets What is to be Done? and One Step Forward, Two Steps Back published in this collection present to the reader a heated, at times bitter and destructive, controversy within the circles abroad. Undoubtedly, this struggle has many unattractive features.

Nevertheless, out of such clashes, there emerged a new political clarity, which provided the Party with greater cohesion and confidence.

Throughout his lifetime, Lenin was firm in his defence of revolutionary principles and defence of Marxism. When What is to be Done? was published the struggle against the Russian Economists was reaching its conclusion. In the preface to the book, Lenin states that they would make no progress in Russia “until we have completely put an end to this [Economist] period”. The book was used to settle the scores with this opportunist tendency.

Lenin also explained that the struggle against Marxism was developed by the bourgeois intelligentsia in the universities and transferred to the reformists and opportunists in the Labour movement, where it became their stock-in-trade. That remains the case today.

To this day, the worst ideological garbage is produced in the universities. The cadres of the revolutionary party therefore needed to be theoretically equipped to answer the arguments of its political enemies, above all in the so-called places of learning. Lenin uses the whole of the first section of What is to be Done? to explain that the Economist trend was part of the opportunist trend in the international movement, on a par with the revisionists led by Eduard Bernstein in Germany and Millerand in France. Lenin saw his struggle against Economism in Russia as part of this international struggle.