Page:Lenin - What Is To Be Done - tr. Joe Fineberg (1929).pdf/9



What Is To Be Done? is one of Lenin's outstanding revolutionary writings. It has long been a classic in its field. The first generation of Russian Bolsheviks, which includes many of the present Soviet leaders, have been brought up on this brilliant exposition of the policies and tactics of the revolutionary Socialist movement. Its uniqueness in Russian Marxist literature is due to the way it treats the rôle of the Party in the revolutionary struggle a subject to which slight attention was paid up to that time. The subtitle, "Burning Questions of Our Movement," which Lenin gave to this brochure, indicates how deeply he felt the need of calling attention to the problem of organisation.

What were these "burning questions" which Lenin, soon after his return from Siberian exile, posed and to which he gave answers, first in articles in the Iskra ("The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement," December, 1900; "Where To Begin," May, 1901) and finally developed in What Is To Be Done?, published in March, 1902?

Ideologically, Marxism had won a decisive victory over Populism which exercised hegemony among advanced Russian society and revolutionary intelligentsia during the seventies and eighties. In his early writings Lenin himself carried on sharp polemics against Populist and other utopian perversions of Socialism, thereby greatly contributing to the Marxist literary campaign designed to check their influence on the nascent revolutionary workers' movement.

The Marxist movement at that time suffered, however, from two basic weaknesses. The first was the tendency prevalent in a section of the movement and characterised as Economism, which maintained that the economic struggles of the workers for the improvement of their immediate working and living conditions should be the chief preoccupation of the labor movement. The struggle against tsarism, the Economists proposed to leave to the liberal bourgeoisie to whom they ascribed a monopoly in that field. Lenin and other revolutionary Socialists could not but consider such a policy as a travesty on Marxism, as a complete break with the nature and aims of the revolutionary labor movement, the very essence of which, they held,