Lenin’s famous pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (WITBD) was published in 1902. Although called a pamphlet, it is a lengthy one; my 1973 Beijing edition runs to 236 pages, excluding notes. It belongs to its time; that is, the fractious period between the foundation of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1898 and its second conference in 1903 when the party split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. WITBD is not an easy read, being polemical, repetitive, and full of references to texts. This short outline aims to use a judicious selection of quotations from Lenin himself to make his key ideas accessible to new adherents to socialist politics.
WITBD was seminal to the foundation of the Russian Bolsheviks and to the subsequent international revolutionary socialist movement, including our own International Socialist Organisation. The international context for Lenin’s writing of WITBD was one of backsliding from the Marxist politics of the socialist parties that were allied in the Socialist International. The largest and most prestigious of these parties was the German Social Democratic Party. One of its intellectual leaders was Eduard Bernstein, who, in 1899, wrote Evolutionary Socialism, in which he repudiated the need for revolution and advocated gradual reform through parliamentarism. In the United Kingdom the reformist trend was represented by Fabianism.
In Russia, revisionism took the form of the doctrine of Economism. Economism was a trend within Russian social democracy that limited itself to following workers’ “spontaneous” trade union struggles. The essential background to these views was an upsurge of strikes in the latter 1890s. The corollary of Economism was to drop political education and agitation, notably the struggle against Tsarism. Lenin wrote:
Social-Democracy leads the struggle of the working class not only for better terms for the sale of labour power, but also for the abolition of the social system which compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich. Social-Democracy represents the working class not in the latter’s relation to only a given group of employers, but in its relation to all classes of modern society, to the state as an organized political force. Hence, it follows that Social-Democrats not only must not confine themselves entirely to the economic struggle; they must not even allow the organization of economic exposures [popular leaflets on work conditions]to become the dominant part of their activities.
Lenin argued that the Economists ceded ground to bourgeois politics.
… all worship of the spontaneity of the mass movement and any degrading of Social-Democratic politics to trade-unionist politics means precisely preparing the ground for converting the working-class movement into an instrument of bourgeois democracy. The spontaneous working-class movement by itself is able to create (and inevitably creates) only trade unionism, and working-class trade-unionist politics are precisely working-class bourgeois politics.
Lenin complained that the Economist trend was having an effect on Social-Democratic organisation.
Let us take the type of Social-Democratic study circle that has become most widespread in the past few years and examine its work. It has “contacts with the workers” and rests content with this, issuing leaflets in which abuses in the factories, the government’s partiality towards the capitalists, and the tyranny of the police are strongly condemned. At workers’ meetings the discussions never, or rarely ever, go beyond the limits of these subjects. Extremely rare are the lectures and discussions held on the history of the revolutionary movement, on questions of the government’s home and foreign policy, on questions of the economic evolution of Russia and of Europe, on the position of the various classes in modern society, etc. As to systematically acquiring and extending contact with other classes of society, no one even dreams of that. In fact, the ideal leader, as the majority of the members of such circles picture him, is something far more in the nature of a trade union secretary than a socialist political leader. … In a word, every trade union secretary conducts and helps to conduct “the economic struggle against the employers and the government”. It cannot be too strongly maintained that this is still not Social-Democracy, that the Social-Democrat’s ideal should not be the trade union secretary, but the tribune of the people, who is able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it appears, no matter what stratum or class of the people it affects; who is able to generalise all these manifestations and produce a single picture of police violence and capitalist exploitation; who is able to take advantage of every event, however small, in order to set forth before all his socialist convictions and his democratic demands, in order to clarify for all and everyone the world-historic significance of the struggle for the emancipation of the proletariat.
Lenin challenged the Economists’ stages view that trade-union struggles first led to political struggles second.
Is it true that, in general, the economic struggle “is the most widely applicable means” of drawing the masses into the political struggle? It is absolutely untrue. All and sundry manifestations of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, and not only such as are connected with the economic struggle, are not one whit less “widely applicable as a means of “drawing in” the masses. The Zemsky Nachalniks [rural officials appointed from the landed nobility], the flogging of peasants, the corruption of the officials, the police treatment of the “common people” in the cities, the fight against the famine-stricken and the suppression of the popular striving towards enlightenment and knowledge, the extortion of taxes, the persecution of the religious sects, the humiliating treatment of the soldiers and the treatment of the students and the liberal intelligentsia as if they were soldiers – do all these and a thousand other similar manifestations of tyranny, though not directly connected to the “economic “ struggle, represent, in general, less “widely applicable” means and occasions for political agitation and for drawing the masses into political struggle?
The reader will by now have an understanding of the main thrust of WITBD. This heritage work informs how the International Socialist Organisation organises itself. Our publications – magazine and website – take up a plethora of political subjects. At our regular meetings, held on university campuses, a range of political issues are discussed, and not primarily trade union affairs or even exclusively concerns confined to the working class. In this way, by holding frequent educational meetings on issues as varied as trans rights, Palestine, elections, and many others, the ISO is training up its membership for becoming “tribunes of the people.”
