What Is to Be Done?

Written by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, this political pamphlet is a foundational text of revolutionary Marxism. It was composed during a period of intense factional debate within the Russian Social-Democratic movement, the broad socialist movement that sought to organize the working class against the tsarist autocracy. Lenin, then a leading figure among the revolutionary wing of this movement, wrote the pamphlet to settle ideological disputes with a tendency he calls "Economism," an orientation within Russian Social-Democracy that prioritized workers' immediate economic demands over revolutionary political struggle and party-building. The work also served as a manifesto for Iskra ("The Spark"), the underground newspaper Lenin co-edited, which he envisioned as the organizational backbone of a future revolutionary party.

In the Preface, Lenin explains that the pamphlet was originally meant to develop ideas from his earlier article "Where to Begin?", published in Iskra in May 1901, which outlined three core questions: the character of political agitation, organizational tasks, and a plan for building a militant all-Russia organization. A failed attempt in June 1901 to unite Social-Democratic organizations abroad delayed the project. When Rabocheye Dyelo ("Workers' Cause"), the organ of the Union of Russian Social-Democrats Abroad, swung back toward Economism in its 10th issue, Lenin decided a broader and more polemical treatment was necessary.

Chapter One, "Dogmatism and 'Freedom of Criticism,'" attacks the slogan of "freedom of criticism" as a cover for smuggling opportunism into the revolutionary movement. Lenin identifies two trends within international Social-Democracy: a revolutionary trend and a revisionist one. The revisionist trend, led by the German theorist Eduard Bernstein, sought to transform Social-Democracy from a party of revolution into a party of gradual reform, denying the necessity of socialist revolution, the class struggle, and the dictatorship of the proletariat (the concept that the working class must seize and hold state power). In France, the socialist Alexandre Millerand demonstrated this revisionism in practice by joining a bourgeois government cabinet. Lenin argues that "freedom of criticism" in this context means freedom to introduce bourgeois ideas into socialism.

Lenin then examines how this international revisionism manifested in Russia. During a brief period of "legal Marxism" in the 1890s, Marxist ideas spread through censored publications because the tsarist government initially failed to recognize their revolutionary potential. This created a temporary alliance between genuine revolutionaries and bourgeois democrats, but when the latter turned toward Bernstein's revisionist current, the alliance ruptured. Underground Social-Democrats, meanwhile, drifted toward Economism. Lenin traces the connection between legal criticism and illegal Economism, citing the Credo, a document that openly proposed workers confine themselves to economic struggle while the intelligentsia merge with liberals for political work. The chapter closes with an extended discussion of Friedrich Engels, the major socialist theorist, and his 1874 preface to The Peasant War in Germany, in which Engels insisted that socialism, having become a science, must be studied as a science, and placed the theoretical struggle on equal footing with the political and economic struggles.

Chapter Two, "The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social-Democrats," contains Lenin's most controversial argument. He distinguishes between levels of spontaneity in the working-class movement, from the desperate revolts of earlier decades to the more organized strikes of the 1890s. Yet even the latter, he argues, represented only trade-union consciousness in embryonic form. Lenin asserts that the working class, by its own efforts alone, can develop only trade-union consciousness: The conviction that workers must form unions, fight employers, and press the government for labor legislation. Socialist theory, he contends, arose from the philosophical and economic work of educated intellectuals and must be brought to the working class from outside the economic struggle. He supports this claim with a lengthy quotation from Karl Kautsky, the leading theoretician of German Social-Democracy, who argued that socialist consciousness is introduced into the class struggle from without.

Lenin examines the first literary expression of Economism in the newspaper Rabochaya Mysl ("Workers' Thought"), whose inaugural editorial in 1897 proclaimed that workers should focus on economic conditions. He attacks Rabocheye Dyelo's claim that planned tactics contradict Marxism, calling this a slander that belittles the initiative of conscious revolutionaries. Drawing on examples from German Social-Democratic history, he shows that the movement always advanced through competing tactical plans, not through passive adaptation to spontaneous developments.

Chapter Three, "Trade-Unionist Politics and Social-Democratic Politics," argues that the Economists reduce Social-Democratic activity to the level of trade-union politics. Lenin refutes the claim, advanced by Alexander Martynov, a writer for Rabocheye Dyelo, that the economic struggle is the most widely applicable means of drawing masses into political struggle. He contends that any manifestation of tyranny, whether persecution of religious sects, flogging of peasants, or suppression of cultural activities, serves equally well. Lenin draws a central distinction: The Social-Democrat's ideal should not be the trade-union secretary but the tribune of the people, one who reacts to every manifestation of tyranny and generalizes all such cases into a comprehensive picture of exploitation. He also argues that Economism and terrorism share a common root, since both bow to spontaneity rather than developing conscious political leadership.

Chapter Four, "The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organisation of the Revolutionaries," is the organizational heart of the pamphlet. Lenin describes the typical Social-Democratic study circle of the period: Students establish contacts with workers and gradually expand propaganda, only to be swept up in police raids because their leaders were already known from their student days. He draws a sharp distinction between two types of organization. Workers' organizations should be broad and as public as conditions allow. The organization of revolutionaries, by contrast, must consist of people who make revolutionary activity their profession, must efface all distinctions between workers and intellectuals, and must operate under strict secrecy. He criticizes the elaborate rules of the St. Petersburg League of Struggle, a local Social-Democratic organization whose layered structure of factory circles and election systems only made police raids easier. He proposes instead a small, compact core of experienced revolutionaries.

Lenin addresses the charge that his model is undemocratic, arguing that "broad democracy" is meaningless under autocratic conditions where neither full publicity nor genuine elections are possible. The only serious principles are strictest secrecy, careful selection of members, and professional revolutionary training. He insists that worker-revolutionaries must be raised to the level of professionals and maintained by the party, rather than left working 11 and a half hours a day in factories.

Chapter Five, "The 'Plan' for an All-Russia Political Newspaper," defends the proposal that a regularly published all-Russia newspaper can serve as the organizational backbone of the revolutionary movement. Lenin argues against objections from both Rabocheye Dyelo and L. Nadezhdin of Svoboda ("Freedom"), a rival revolutionary group, who contended that strong local organizations must be built first. Lenin insists the relationship runs the other way: There is no means of training strong political organizations except through an all-Russia newspaper. He compares the newspaper to scaffolding erected around a building under construction, temporary but indispensable. Lenin envisions a weekly newspaper distributed in tens of thousands of copies that would "fan every spark of the class struggle and of popular indignation into a general conflagration" (200). Around this effort, a trained corps of revolutionary fighters would form, providing the flexibility to respond to both periods of calm and moments of uprising.

In the Conclusion, Lenin divides Russian Social-Democracy into three periods: the rise of theory (1884–1894), the emergence of Social-Democracy as a mass movement (1894–1898), and a crisis period of disunity and vacillation beginning in 1898. In this third period, Economism took hold and Social-Democracy was degraded to trade unionism. Lenin expresses confidence that a fourth period will bring the consolidation of militant Marxism, and he answers the title's question with a summary reply: "Put an End to the Third Period." An appendix recounts the failed unity negotiations between Iskra and Rabocheye Dyelo, concluding that the rupture was caused not by organizational disputes but by the opportunists' determination to preserve their freedom to vacillate on questions of principle.