Lenin's What is to be Done? (A Summary)
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End Song:
• L'Internationale but it's lofi hip hop
Sources:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/leni...
Summary:
Lenin’s What Is To Be Done? is a polemic against opportunism, spontaneity, and amateurism in the Russian Social-Democratic movement at the dawn of the twentieth century. He argues that the fashionable call for “freedom of criticism” masked Bernsteinian revisionism, which sought to degrade socialism into reformist class collaboration, and insists instead that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.” Against the Economists, who elevated spontaneity and narrowed politics to trade-union struggles, Lenin maintains that socialist consciousness does not arise organically but must be brought into the workers’ movement by revolutionary Social-Democrats. Left to itself, the working class achieves only trade-union consciousness, while genuine Social-Democracy must train workers to respond to every form of oppression across society, transforming them into tribunes of the people. To overcome the movement’s chronic amateurism and fragmentation, Lenin calls for a professional, centralised organisation of full-time revolutionaries, distinct from but guiding broader workers’ organisations, and coordinated through an all-Russia political newspaper that would unify local struggles, sharpen political exposures, and prepare systematically for revolution. In conclusion, he periodises Russian Social-Democracy into three stages—from theoretical infancy, to mass emergence, to the current period of disunity and opportunism—and declares that to advance, the movement must put an end to the “third period” by uniting theory, organisation, and practice in a disciplined party capable of leading the proletariat beyond trade-unionism toward socialist revolution.