What Is To Be Done?¶
Core Argument¶
In the chapter "What Is To Be Done?", the core argument is a defence of Lenin’s organisational conceptions against the distortions of Economism, while simultaneously subjecting one of Lenin’s most famous formulations to a rigorous Marxist critique. The chapter opens by depicting the fragmentation of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party at the turn of the century, with a proliferation of small groups in Petersburg alone — the ‘Group for the Self-Emancipation of the Working Class’, ‘Workers’ Banner’, ‘Social Democrat’, and others — many infected by Economism. These groups, the text argues, affected a ‘pure proletarian’ image but in reality pandered to the prejudices of the most backward layers, revealing a deep-seated intellectual snobbery and contempt for workers, analogous to the Narodniks’ failed ‘going to the people’.
The chapter then turns to Lenin’s writings on organisation, particularly Where to Begin, which sets out the newspaper as a collective organiser: not merely a propagandist and agitator, but the scaffolding for a permanent, disciplined, all-Russian network of local agents. The central theoretical intervention, however, is a sustained polemic against the famous passage in What Is To Be Done? where Lenin, borrowing from Kautsky, asserts that the working class, left to itself, can develop only trade union consciousness, and that socialist consciousness must be brought to it from without by bourgeois intellectuals. The chapter argues that this formulation is a one-sided and erroneous exaggeration, a polemical overcorrection against the Economists’ worship of spontaneity. It marshals historical evidence to refute the claim: the Chartist movement, which Lenin himself called the first mass revolutionary workers’ party, had already gone far beyond trade union consciousness a decade before the Communist Manifesto, embracing general strikes and armed insurrection. The Paris Commune of 1871, where workers took power without a Marxist party at their head, and the spontaneous creation of soviets in the 1905 Russian Revolution, are cited as further proof that the proletariat can and does generate socialist consciousness from its own experience. The Spanish Revolution of 1936, where Catalan workers smashed the fascist army without Marxist leadership, and France 1968, are adduced as modern confirmations.
The chapter does not, however, abandon the necessity of the subjective factor. It insists that the revolutionary party and leadership are indispensable, but argues that the process of class consciousness and the building of the party are two parallel lines that may not intersect for long periods. The party’s role is not to ‘teach the workers to suck eggs’ but to make conscious the unconscious will of the working class to transform society. The text notes that Lenin himself later admitted the formulation was a polemical exaggeration, citing his speech at the Second Congress of the RSDLP and Trotsky’s biography of Stalin. The chapter’s polemical target is therefore twofold: the Economists’ adaptation to backwardness, and the mechanical repetition of Lenin’s error by later Marxists who fail to grasp its context. The essential legacy of What Is To Be Done? is its insistence on training worker cadres with a clear grasp of Marxist theory, combating the petty bourgeois prejudice that workers cannot understand theory, and establishing the dialectical interrelation between agitation, propaganda, and the need to raise consciousness from immediate struggles to a full understanding of the working class’s historical role.