What Is To Be Done?
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- This article is about Lenin's pamphlet. For other uses, see What Is To Be Done? (disambiguation).
What Is to Be Done? (Russian: Что делать?) was a political pamphlet, written by Vladimir Lenin at the end of 1901 and early 1902. The title is inspired by the novel of Nikolai Chernyshevsky with the same name. The piece called for the formation of a revolutionary vanguardist party that would direct the efforts of the working class. Lenin thought that, left to their own devices, workers would be merely satisfied with "trade unionism," and that only a revolutionary party could direct a "scientific" socialist revolution. The piece partly precipitated the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks became Lenin's revolutionary party, while the Mensheviks preferred to take a more moderate path to liberal government that would eventually lead to socialist revolution.
However it has recently been argued in a book on the pamphlet by Lars Lih that it has been widely misinterpreted, based partly on mistranslations of key terms used by Lenin.
[edit] External links
- What Is To Be Done?, by V.I. Lenin
- Lenin's Collected Works
- review of Lih's book from Socialist Democracy (Ireland)
[edit] References
Malia, Martin The Soviet Tragedy: A History of Socialism in Russia, 1917-1991. New York: The Free Press, 1994.
Lih, Lars Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? in Context
