BY V.I. LENIN

In the opening years of this century, communists within the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party debated how to build the kind of proletarian party needed to lead the working class to take power. This struggle led to a split in 1903 in the party between the Bolsheviks (from the Russian word for majority) and reformist Mensheviks, or minority. V.I. Lenin's pamphlet, What is to be Done?, was published in 1902 as part of the polemics between these wings of the party.

The different political views within the R.S.D.L.P were reflected in various publications, some of which Lenin refers to in the excerpt below. The paper Iskra (The Spark), was the first all-Russian illegal Marxist newspaper founded by Lenin in 1900. It played a decisive part in the establishment of the revolutionary Marxist party of the working class.

Rabochaya Mysl (Workers Thought) was the newspaper of the Economists, a Russian variant of syndicalism and an opportunist trend in Russian Social-Democracy at the turn of the century. The Economists limited the tasks of the working-class movement to the economic struggle for bettering the conditions and wages of the working class, maintaining that the political struggle should be left to the liberal bourgeoisie. The Economists opposed the concept of a centralized revolutionary party built around one program and with one leadership, favoring instead a loose-knit federation of local groups.

Everyone knows that the economic struggle of the Russian workers underwent widespread development and consolidation simultaneously with the production of "literature" exposing economic (factory and occupational) conditions. The "leaflets" were devoted mainly to the exposure of the factory system, and very soon a veritable passion for exposures was roused among the workers. As soon as the workers realised that the Social-Democratic study circles desired to, and could, supply them with a new kind of leaflet that told the whole truth about their miserable existence, about their unbearably hard toil, and their lack of rights, they began to send in, actually flood us with, correspondence from the factories and workshops....

The overwhelming majority of Russian Social-Democrats have of late been almost entirely absorbed by this work of organising the exposure of factory conditions. Suffice it to recall Rabochaya Mysl to see the extent to which they have been absorbed by it - so much so, indeed, that they have lost sight of the fact that this, taken by itself, is in essence still not Social-Democratic work, but merely trade-union work.

As a matter of fact, the exposures merely dealt with the relations between the workers in a given trade and their employers, and all they achieved was that the sellers of labour-power learned to sell their "commodity" on better terms and to fight the purchasers over a purely commercial deal.

These exposures could have served (if properly utilised by an organisation of revolutionaries) as a beginning and a component part of Social-Democratic activity; but they could also have led (and, given a worshipful attitude towards spontaneity, were bound to lead) to a "purely trade-union" struggle and to a non- Social-Democratic working-class movement.

Social-Democracy leads the struggle of the working class, not only for better terms for the sale of labour- power, but for the abolition of the social system that compels the propertyless to sell themselves to the rich.

Social-Democracy represents the working class, not in its relation to a given group of employers alone, but in its relation to all classes of modern society and to the state as an organised political force.

Hence, it follows that not only must Social-Democrats not confine themselves exclusively to the economic struggle, but that they must not allow the organisation of economic exposures to become the predominant part of their activities. We must take up actively the political education of the working class and the development of its political consciousness....

Working-class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class is affected - unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a Social-Democratic point of view and no other. The consciousness of the working masses cannot be genuine class-consciousness, unless the workers learn, from concrete, and above all from topical, political facts and events to observe every other social class in all the manifestations of its intellectual, ethical, and political life; unless they learn to apply in practice the materialist analysis and the materialist estimate of all aspects of the life and activity of all classes, strata, and groups of the population.

Those who concentrate the attention, observation, and consciousness of the working class exclusively, or even mainly, upon itself alone are not Social-Democrats; for the self-knowledge of the working class is indissolubly bound up, not solely with a fully clear theoretical understanding or rather, not so much with the theoretical, as with the practical, understanding - of the relationships between all the various classes of modern society, acquired through the experience of political life.

For this reason the conception of the economic struggle as the most widely applicable means of drawing the masses into the political movement, which our Economists preach, is so extremely harmful and reactionary in its practical significance.... But this "clear picture" cannot be obtained from any book. It can be obtained only from living examples and from exposures that follow close upon what is going on about us at a given moment; upon what is being discussed, in whispers perhaps, by each one in his own way; upon what finds expression in such and such events, in such and such statistics, in such and such court sentences, etc., etc. These comprehensive political exposures are an essential and fundamental condition for training the masses in revolutionary activity....

A word in passing about "calls to action." The only newspaper which prior to the spring events called upon the workers to intervene actively in a matter that certainly did not promise any palpable results whatever for the workers, i.e., the drafting of the students into the army, was Iskra.

Immediately after the publication of the order of January 11, on "drafting the 183 students into the army," Iskra published an article on the matter (in its February issue, No. 2), and, before any demonstration was begun, forthwith called upon "the workers to go to the aid of the students," called upon the "people" openingly to take up the government's arrogant challenge.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home