Rob Sewell
Lenin’s book What is to be Done? is a Marxist classic on the building of the revolutionary party. It is also the text most criticised by reformists and academics alike for supposedly planting the seeds of totalitarian dictatorship.
An example of the vitriol poured on Lenin is the following by the historian Anthony Read in his book The World on Fire (London, 2008, pp. 5-6.):
Bolshevism was founded on a lie, setting a precedent that was to be followed for the next ninety years. Lenin had no time for democracy, no confidence in the masses and no scruples about the use of violence. He wanted a small, tightly organised and strictly disciplined party of hard-line professional revolutionaries, who would do exactly as they were told.
This open hatred should not surprise us. But nothing could be further from the truth. While Marx is thrown a few compliments about his analysis of capitalist crisis by bourgeois commentators, Lenin has no such redemption. He is relentlessly attacked and slandered by an unholy alliance. The reason for this is that Lenin built a party that was able to carry out the socialist revolution and gave an example to the workers of the world of how, concretely, capitalism could be overthrown.
Ever since, the bourgeois have attempted to bury the real essence of Lenin’s work and promote the idea that Stalinism and Leninism are essentially the same thing. This idea enjoys the joint approval of liberals, democrats, reformists, idealists, pragmatists, and anarchists alike.
Regardless of these unfounded slanders, What is to be Done? has an important place in Marxist literature, and is a major landmark in the history of Russian Marxism that needs to be studied seriously by those who want to change society.
The reason why this work has not been given sufficient attention may be due to the fact that the book contains an exaggeration, where the author bent the stick too far in stating that the working class left to itself can only arrive at a trade union consciousness.
This is clearly not the case. History has shown many times, starting with the Chartists, that the working class in struggle can indeed arrive at a socialist consciousness. In fact, as the book shows, Lenin had borrowed this idea from Karl Kautsky, the then leader of the German Social-Democracy and the Second International.
The fact is that after this single reference, Lenin never again repeated this mistaken formulation and even within the pages of the work admits that this is “sharply simplified” and a “blunt formula”, which he used to attack the opportunistic deviation of the Russian Economists, a right-wing trend within the movement at that time that in effect denied the role of the revolutionary party.
Despite this one exaggeration, Lenin’s What is to be Done? contains a wealth of knowledge on the importance of the revolutionary party, which today deserves much greater study. In fact, Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife and co-worker, urged its study “by everyone who wants to be a Leninist in deeds and not words.” (Reminiscences of Lenin, p. 66.)
The book was published in early 1902 to great acclaim within the Marxist circles of Russia. “What is to be Done? was a great success”, explained Krupskaya. “It supplied the answers to a number of vital and pressing questions. Everyone keenly felt the need for an underground organisation working according to a plan.”
The pamphlet was an ardent appeal for organisation. It outlined a broad plan of organisation in which everyone would find a place for himself, become a cog in the revolutionary machine, a cog, which, no matter how small, was vital to the working of the machine. (Ibid, pp. 76.)
Lenin’s work was an important contribution in this early period of the Russian revolutionary movement. It should be read in conjunction with his other articles of the same period, in particular ‘Where to Begin?’, which is complementary to What is to be Done?
In fact, ‘Where to Begin?’ opens with the statement:
In recent years the question of ‘what is to be done’ has confronted Russian Social-Democracy with particular instance. It is not a question of what path we must choose (as was the case in the late eighties and early nineties), but of what practical steps we must take upon the known path and how they shall be taken. It is a system and a plan of practical work. (LCW, vol. 5, p. 17.)
Lenin’s later work was simply a development of these basic ideas.