What Is To Be Done?

Contents

1. Preface 6 min 5

   Dated February 1902. The pamphlet was meant to expand Lenin's article "Where to Begin" (Iskra No. 4, May 1901) on three questions: the content of political agitation, the tasks of organisation, and a plan for building a militant all-Russian organisation. The failed attempt at unity with the émigré "League" in 1901, and Rabocheye Dyelo's turn back towards "Economism", forced him to begin further back, with "freedom of criticism" and the relation between the party and the spontaneous mass movement, and to argue the whole case from first principles.

2. I Dogmatism and “Freedom of Criticism” 50 min 34

   "Freedom of criticism", the slogan of Bernstein's revisionists and now of Rabocheye Dyelo, means in practice freedom to turn Social-Democracy into a party of reforms; Millerand's entry into a French cabinet shows where it leads. Lenin traces the Russian version: the brief alliance with the "legal Marxists" against Populism, their drift into Bernsteinism, and the parallel rise of Economism among practical workers, summed up in the Credo. Against eclecticism he sets the theoretical struggle: "Without a revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement", backed by a long passage from Engels on the German workers' three-sided struggle.

3. II The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Class-Consciousness of Social-Democracy 56 min 46

   The strikes of the 1890s showed consciousness "in an embryonic form", but by itself the working class develops only trade-union consciousness; socialist theory was worked out by the educated, Marx and Engels included, and must be brought to the workers "from without", as Lenin argues with a long quotation from Kautsky. Since the only choice is bourgeois or socialist ideology, "bowing to spontaneity" means the spread of bourgeois ideology. Lenin follows the first Rabochaya Mysl, the "Self-Emancipation" group and Rabocheye Dyelo's theory of "tactics as a process", which he names "khvostism": tailing behind the movement.

4. III Trade-Union Politics and Social-Democratic Politics 1 h 47 min 36

   Factory exposures roused the workers, but they remain trade-union work. Martynov's call "to give the economic struggle itself a political character" means only fighting for reforms, while political consciousness has to come from outside the relation between worker and employer, from exposing the autocracy's treatment of every class. The Social-Democrat's model should be "a tribune of the people", not a trade-union secretary. Economism and the new terrorism share one root, subservience to spontaneity, and a party that wants to be the vanguard must lead all the opposition, liberals and students included, through political exposures in an all-Russian paper.

5. IV The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organisation of Revolutionists 2 h 13 min 39

   The movement's weakness is "primitive methods" (kustarnichestvo): short-lived local circles of amateurs that the police round up after a few months. Lenin argues for a small, stable, centralised organisation of "professional revolutionists" trained to outwit the political police, surrounded by broad, loose workers' organisations. Workers too must be trained as professional revolutionaries. He answers the charge of "Narodovolism" by recalling Zemlya i Volya's organisation of the 1870s, and the charge of being undemocratic by arguing that full publicity and election are impossible under the autocracy, where "comradely confidence" must take their place. Local papers should give way to a single all-Russian one.

6. V The “Plan” for an All-Russian Political Newspaper 1 h 1 min 24

   Lenin defends the plan of "Where to Begin" against Rabocheye Dyelo's charge of trying to dictate to the committees, and against Nadezhdin, who called it armchair work. A regular all-Russian newspaper would be "a collective organiser", like the scaffolding around a building under construction: distributing and writing for it would create a network of agents linking the local circles, train leaders, and prepare the party for both calm and upheaval, up to "the national armed insurrection". The chapter includes the passage on the right to dream, with a long quotation from Pisarev.

7. Conclusion 7 min 4

   Lenin divides the history of Russian Social-Democracy into three periods: its gestation as a theory (1884–94), its rapid growth as a movement of the young intelligentsia and the strikes (1894–98), and a third period of confusion and vacillation, beginning in 1897–98, of which Rabocheye Dyelo is the typical product. He hopes a fourth will bring the consolidation of "militant Marxism", and answers his title in three words: "Liquidate the Third Period."

8. Appendix: The Attempt to Unite Iskra with Rabocheye Dyelo 17 min 8

   An account of Iskra's dealings with the "League of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad" and its organ: the split in the League in 1900, the June 1901 conference and its resolutions against opportunism, the League's new turn in Rabocheye Dyelo No. 10, and the "Unity" Congress in Zurich in October 1901, where the League's amendments ended the attempt and the two sides broke for good.

9. Correction to What Is To Be Done? 2 min 1

   A short correction printed in Iskra No. 18 (April 1902): the "Group of Initiators" who mediated between Iskra and the League left the League later than the pamphlet said, after the League had refused a conference, which casts doubt on the League's stated reason for turning their offer down.