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17.4 Lenin and Russian Socialism: Lenin, What Is to Be Done?, 1902

By the late nineteenth century, most West European socialist parties were operating in a more or less democratic environment in which they could organize legally, contest elections, and serve in parliament. Some of them, following Eduard Bernstein, had largely abandoned any thoughts of revolution in favor of a peaceful and democratic path to socialism. For others, this amounted to a betrayal of the Marxist vision. This was particularly the case for Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, then a prominent figure in the small Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, established in 1898. Lenin was particularly hostile to what he called “economism” or “trade-unionism,” which focused on immediate reforms such as higher wages, shorter hours, and better working conditions. He was operating in a still-autocratic Russian state, where neither political parties nor trade unions were legal and where no national parliament or elections allowed for the expression of popular grievances.

In a famous pamphlet titled What Is to Be Done? (1902), Lenin addressed many of these issues, well before he became the leader of the world’s first successful socialist revolution in 1917.

What were Lenin’s objections to economism?
What kind of party organization did he favor?
Why did Lenin believe that workers were unlikely to come to a revolutionary consciousness on their own? What was necessary to move them in that direction?
Was Lenin more faithful to the views of Marx himself than the revisionists and economists were?
In what ways did Lenin’s views reflect the specific conditions of Russia?

LENIN

What Is to Be Done?

1902

The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., it may itself realize the necessity for combining in unions, for fighting against the employers, and for striving to compel the government to pass necessary labor legislation, etc. The theory of socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories that were elaborated by the educated representatives of the propertied classes, the intellectuals…. [I]n Russia … it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of ideas among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.

It is only natural that a Social Democrat, who conceives the political struggle as being identical with the “economic struggle against the employers and the government,” should conceive of an “organization of revolutionaries” as being more or less identical with an “organization of workers.” …

[O]n questions of organization and politics, the Economists are forever lapsing from Social Democracy into trade unionism. The political struggle carried on by the Social Democrats is far more extensive and complex than the economic struggle the workers carry on against the employers and the government. Similarly … the organization of a revolutionary Social Democratic Party must inevitably differ from the organizations of the workers designed for the latter struggle. A workers’ organization … must be as wide as possible; and … it must be as public as conditions will allow…. On the other hand, the organizations of revolutionaries must consist first and foremost of people whose profession is that of a revolutionary…. Such an organization must of necessity be not too extensive and as secret as possible….

I assert:

that no movement can be durable without a stable organization of leaders to maintain continuity;
that the more widely the masses are spontaneously drawn into the struggle and form the basis of the movement and participate in it, the more necessary is it to have such an organization….
that the organization must consist chiefly of persons engaged in revolutionary activities as a profession;
that in a country with an autocratic government, the more we restrict the membership of this organization to persons who are engaged in revolutionary activities as a profession and who have been professionally trained in the art of combating the political police, the more difficult will it be to catch the organization….

The centralization of the more secret functions in an organization of revolutionaries will not diminish, but rather increase the extent and the quality of the activity of a large number of other organizations intended for wide membership…. [I]n order to “serve” the mass movement we must have people who will devote themselves exclusively to Social Democratic activities, and that such people must train themselves patiently and steadfastly to be professional revolutionaries….

Let no active worker take offense at these frank remarks, for as far as insufficient training is concerned, I apply them first and foremost to myself. I used to work in a circle that set itself great and all-embracing tasks; and every member of that circle suffered to the point of torture from the realization that we were proving ourselves to be amateurs at a moment in history when we might have been able to say, paraphrasing a well-known epigram: “Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we shall overturn the whole of Russia!”

Source: V. I. Lenin, What Is to Be Done? (Pamphlet, 1902; Marxists Internet Archive, 1999), https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm.