What Is To Be Done?

What Is To Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (Russian: Что делать?, tr. Chto delat'?), is a political pamphlet written by the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin in 1901 and published in 1902. Its title is inspired by the novel of the same name by the 19th century Russian revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky.

In What Is to Be Done?, Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously become political simply by fighting economic battles with employers over wages, working hours and the like. To convert the working class to Marxism, Lenin insists that Marxists should form a political party, or "vanguard", of dedicated revolutionaries to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The pamphlet precipitated in part the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) between Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

In 1904 Leon Trotsky published his reply Our Political Tasks, asserting that Lenin's approach will inevitably lead to a bloody takeover of the party by a dictator akin to the Reign of Terror in the French Revolution.

Lenin first confronted the so-called "Economist" trend in Russian Social Democracy, who followed the line of Eduard Bernstein. He explained that Bernstein's positions were opportunist, a point expressed by the French socialist Alexandre Millerand, as in taking a post in a bourgeois government. Against the Economists' demand for "freedom of criticism", Lenin advanced the position that the orthodox Marxists had the same right to criticize in return. He stressed that in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, revolutionary Social Democrats would need to pay particular attention to theoretical questions, recalling Friedrich Engels' position that there were three forms of Social Democratic struggle: political, economic, and theoretical.

...
Wikipedia