A fight had already been waged for some time for ideological clarity with disputes between Marxism and Populism, the latter of which espoused not class struggle but individual terrorism; and then with the advocates of Legal Marxism, which had abandoned the revolutionary essence of Marxism.
The dispute taken up in Lenin’s book was with the opportunism of the Economists, which had become prominent. It was through these ideological battles that Russian Marxism took shape.
It should be clear from Lenin’s writings that the development of the revolutionary party is a complex process that goes through different stages and takes shape over a number of years and even decades. Its birth pangs can be painful and it is subject to continuous crystallisation, regroupings and even splits before emerging as a mass force. What is to be Done? was part of this crystallisation.
It can be said that Lenin’s work has particular importance for today, given, on the centenary of the Russian Revolution, the attacks on Lenin and Leninism as well as the political backsliding of present-day various sectarian groups. Having burnt their fingers on their ultra-leftism, these groups then abandoned all hope and dashed in an opportunist direction.
This is a particular characteristic of the Socialist Workers Party, a supposedly Leninist organisation, which over the years established popular front organisations, such as the Anti-Nazi League, Respect, the Stop the War Coalition and Stand Up to Racism, where there was no mention of a socialist programme for fear of alienating their liberal supporters. The SWP’s ‘anti-imperialist’ opportunism pushed them into bed with all kinds of elements, including their scandalous support of black reaction in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood. Likewise, the Socialist Party of England and Wales wanted to become more popular by changing its name from ‘Militant Labour’ to the more politically bland ‘Socialist’ Party.
These organisations, as soon as they get close to the working class, begin to adapt their propaganda to the reformist milieu within the labour movement, while at the same time elevating crude ‘activism’ to a panacea. All they offer is the thin political gruel of their ‘mass’ newspapers, which become increasingly reformist in character. In times of austerity, the SP, while calling for no cuts, offers sound advice to local authorities on how to tweak and balance their budgets, as if there can be a solution on a capitalist basis. In this way, they have become a mirror image of yesterday’s Economists by deliberately lowering the level of “the working-class movement and the class struggle to narrow trade unionism and to a ‘realistic’ struggle for petty, gradual reforms”, to use Lenin’s words.
For the Russian Economists, the workers were supposedly only interested in economic or ‘bread and butter’ issues. Such an approach can be summed up as ‘workerism’, an attempt to lower the political level as a short-cut to the masses. This, however, was not a proletarian tendency, despite its demagogy, but the snobbishness of intellectuals who imagined that the way to win workers is to pander to their so-called prejudices. However, such attempts to curry favour with the masses are never successful.
Lenin wrote this book in late 1901 and early 1902 to answer the “burning questions of our movement” about organisation and at the same time criticising the party’s right wing. At this time, the Russian Marxists were grouped around their newspaper Iskra, which had waged a struggle to build the party based on sound theoretical principles.
Without doubt, Lenin’s book constitutes an important contribution to theory and explains the vital role of the revolutionary party as the organiser and director of the proletarian revolution. In fact, Lenin’s life work was unique in understanding the essential role of the party. His genius allowed him to see far more clearly than anyone else in the movement concerning the importance of the party.
For Lenin, the centralised party was essential in order to lead the masses to victory in the revolution. Lenin understood that such a party could not be improvised, “since it is too late to form the organisation in times of explosion and outbursts”. Instead it needed to be consciously built before such events occurred, starting with the assembling of a cadre of “professional revolutionaries”.