What is to be Done How Lenin built a battle organisation

Marxist Theory · 2026-05-13

Core Argument

The article argues that Lenin's What is to be Done? remains the indispensable handbook for building a revolutionary party capable of overthrowing capitalism, precisely because it correctly identifies the relationship between spontaneity and consciousness, and the organisational conclusions that flow from this analysis. The central thesis is that the working class, left to its own devices, develops only the rudiments of trade-union consciousness; revolutionary socialist consciousness must be brought to the workers by a disciplined vanguard party armed with Marxist theory. This is not an argument about the workers being stupid — it is an argument about the structural limitations of economic struggle alone. The Economists' error, which the article insists is reproduced today by reformists, sectarians and careerists alike, was to worship spontaneity and reduce the party's role to that of a trade union secretary. Against this, Lenin counterposed the party as a centralised organisation of professional revolutionaries — people who devote their whole lives, not just their spare evenings, to the revolution — capable of acting as "tribunes of the people" and raising the workers' sights from the individual boss to the entire class and state apparatus.

Theoretical Grounding

The analysis draws on the classical Marxist distinction between the economic struggle (trade union consciousness) and the political struggle (revolutionary consciousness), a distinction Lenin inherited from Marx and Engels but sharpened in the specific conditions of tsarist Russia. The article grounds itself in the Leninist theory of the party as developed in What is to be Done?, but it is careful to note the limitations of Lenin's own formulation — the claim that workers can develop "exclusively by their own effort" only trade union consciousness is acknowledged as a "sharply simplified" and "blunt formula" that Lenin borrowed from Kautsky and never repeated. The article situates this debate within the broader Marxist tradition by connecting Economism to the international opportunist trend exemplified by Eduard Bernstein's revisionism, which Rosa Luxemburg answered in Reform or Revolution. The theoretical lineage is therefore: Marx and Engels on the need for the party to raise consciousness; Kautsky's (problematic) formulation on spontaneity; Lenin's correction and development; Luxemburg's polemic against Bernstein; and the contemporary application of these categories to the present conjuncture. Democratic centralism is presented not as a Leninist invention but as the organisational form of the entire Marxist movement before Stalin's bureaucratic distortion.

Conjunctural Relevance

The article connects the argument to the present moment through a series of sharp contemporary illustrations. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's 2018 Vanity Fair interview is cited as a perfect example of workerist demagogy — flaunting working-class credentials to sneer at theory while channelling workers into the arms of the Democratic Party, supporting Biden's ban on the railway workers' strike, and backing military aid to Israel after 7 October. Momentum and Podemos are analysed as contemporary examples of the "broad, grassroots movement" model that, in practice, produced bureaucratic cliques, digital pseudo-democracy, and eventual capitulation — Momentum leading the Corbyn movement to rout, Podemos becoming junior partners in a right-wing social-democratic government. The Socialist Party in Britain is criticised for repeatedly attempting to proclaim "broad" workers' parties that end up watering down their revolutionary profile. The article argues that the objective conditions for reformism have evaporated: capitalism lurches from crisis to crisis, and the carcasses of Syriza, Corbyn and Sanders demonstrate that reformism today ends in "betrayal and utter capitulation before the ruling class." The article concludes by situating the current work of the Revolutionary Communist International — the launching or relaunching of communist newspapers in Britain, Canada, Germany, El Salvador, Portugal, Sweden, Switzerland, and Hungary — as a direct continuation of the Iskra method.

Where the Argument Continues

The article explicitly announces its own sequel: next week's analysis of Lenin's One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904), in which Lenin gave his "first, meticulous assessment" of the Bolshevik-Menshevik split that emerged at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903. The article also directs readers to Rob Sewell and Alan Woods' biography In Defence of Lenin, specifically chapter 5, for a fuller analysis of this period. The broader corpus of In Defence of Marxism and the Revolutionary Communist International is implicitly invoked throughout: the launching of national newspapers is presented as the contemporary equivalent of the Iskra project, and the call to "move forward to found a Revolutionary Communist International" frames the entire argument as preparation for that founding congress. The article leaves open the question of how the Leninist party model applies in countries where mass workers' organisations already exist and are dominated by reformist bureaucracies — a question that Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder addresses, and which the RCI's ongoing work presumably continues to develop.

Connections

• Lenin, What is to be Done? — the primary text under analysis
• Lenin, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back — the sequel text promised for next week
• Lenin, Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder — the later development of the party theory in conditions of mass workers' organisations
• Rosa Luxemburg, Reform or Revolution — the answer to Bernstein's revisionism, cited in the article
• Rob Sewell and Alan Woods, In Defence of Lenin — the biography recommended for fuller historical context
• Karl Kautsky — the source of the problematic formulation on spontaneity that Lenin borrowed
• The experience of Momentum, Podemos, Syriza, and the Sanders movement — contemporary negative examples of the "broad" model
• The Revolutionary Communist International's ongoing newspaper project — the contemporary positive application of the Iskra method

Key Quotes

1. "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity."

2. "You, gentlemen, who are so much concerned about the 'average worker', as a matter of fact, rather insult the workers by your desire to talk down to them when discussing working-class politics and working-class organisation. Talk about serious things in a serious manner; leave pedagogics to the pedagogues, and not to politicians and organisers!"

3. "The role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory."

4. "The rural superintendents and the flogging of peasants, the corruption of the officials and 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 and the persecution of the religious sects, the humiliating treatment of soldiers and the barrack methods in the treatment of the students and liberal intellectuals — do all these and a thousand other similar manifestations of tyranny, though not directly connected with the 'economic' struggle, represent, in general, less 'widely applicable' means and occasions for political agitation and for drawing the masses into the political struggle?"

5. "The publication of an all-Russia political newspaper must be the main line by which we may unswervingly develop, deepen, and expand the organisation (viz., the revolutionary organisation that is ever ready to support every protest and every outbreak)."

6. "It is a slander against the working class to say that they are not interested in theory or incapable of understanding it. If simply and skillfully explained in a lively way, if Marxists write good agitation and good propaganda on the diversest subjects, workers, starting with the advanced layer, will certainly be able to understand it. The power of Marxist theory is that it is true, and life teaches these same truths to workers on a daily basis."