The
Classics, New Century, Part 7a
What Is To Be Done?
The downloadable linked document below is made up of
extracts from Lenin’s “What Is To Be Done?”
In this book Lenin was concerned to oppose what he called
“economism”, which is also called “syndicalism” and in South Africa in the past
and still up to now, called “workerism”.
Lenin was concerned to show, following the publication of Eduard
Bernstein’s gradualist, reformist “Evolutionary Socialism”
of 1899 and Rosa Luxemburg’s “Reform or Revolution?”
published in 1900, that a revolutionary transformation of society was not
possible without a revolutionary political party of the working class.
In a Preface to the book, Lenin explained that
various internal political matters within the Russian Social-Democratic and
Labour Party (RSDLP) had caused him to hold the book back; if the outcome of
these inner-party struggles had been different, than the book would have been
written differently, he wrote.
In Chapter 1, it is clear that the initial
thrust of Lenin’s polemic is directed against Eduard Bernstein, just as Rosa
Luxemburg’s was, in 1900.
Trade union organisation of the working class was never
going to be sufficient for revolution. Lenin showed that the worker’s vanguard political
party, the communist party, remains a “must-have”.
What Is To Be Done? is the book where Lenin most clearly
differentiated the reformist mass organisations from the vanguard
political party of the working class, the communist party (the downloadable
file contains the passages that are most directly relevant to this point).
What Is To Be Done? is for this reason regarded as the
generative blueprint for the Communist Parties as we know them, and of the form
that they took after the October, 1917 revolution in Russia and in particular
following the formation of the Comintern in 1919.
The
blueprint is most precisely seen in Part C, “Organisation of Workers and
Organisation of Revolutionaries”, which is included in the linked document.
Lenin concludes: “…our
task is not to champion the degrading of the revolutionary to the level of an
amateur, but to raise the
amateurs to the level of revolutionaries.”
Next in this part, we will look at Lenin’s report of the
Second Congress of the RSDLP.
Please download and read the text via the following
link:
What Is To
Be Done?, Parts B and C, Lenin, 1902 (8369 words)
Further
reading:
Leninism or Marxism?,
Rosa Luxemburg, 1904 (7279
words)
Lenin’s Reply to Rosa
Luxemburg, 1904 (4632 words)
Reform or
Revolution?, Rosa Luxemburg, 1900 (10250 words)
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