The text What Is To Be Done? captures the essential tension between the conservative and cooperative social democrats and the more radical, militantly hard-line Marxists. Lenin, largely responsible for spearheading the Russian Revolution in 1917, was squarely in the latter camp.
This text challenges the social democratic position and their claims of a "freedom of criticism" of the dogmas of Marxist ideology. For Lenin, this was deeply problematic, and he excoriated the social democrats for their denial of several points: a) the scientific basis of the inevitability of a materialist conception of history, b) the deep divisions between socialism and liberalism, and c) the inevitability of the theory of class struggle and the necessity for revolutionary action.
Much of what the social democrats believed existed within a framework of reform and the "evolution" of capitalism toward a more just and equitable system. Marx and his revolutionary descendants, Lenin foremost among them, felt that there was no place for compromise with the capitalists and that the only way forward was through revolutionary action. We also see the expression of this idea in the primary source, as Lenin openly mocks the "French socialists" for being co-opted into the capitalist system. In the last lines of the first section on the "freedom of criticism," Lenin asks that these so-called critics to not drag those committed to the purity of revolutionary struggle down into the "marsh" with them.
At the time of the publication of this text, Lenin was a member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, which was closely committed to Marxists revolutionary principles. In the last section of the text, Lenin highlights the importance of what he calls "theoretical struggle." He quotes a piece written in the 1870s by Engels directed at the German worker, emphasizing the importance of remaining theoretically vigilant in the face of co-optation by the forces of capitalism and liberal democracy. Part of this theoretical vigilance again involved the necessity to see Marxism in scientific terms—and to see the class struggle as a kind of historical inevitability destined to eventually end in communist revolution and the triumph of the proletariat. He ends by saying that the Russian proletariat faces a monumental struggle against a deeply entrenched and conservative government. Nonetheless, he believes that they would triumph.
Soon after publishing this text, Lenin's Bolshevik wing of the socialist movement separated from the Mensheviks over differences that on the surface appeared minor but which reflected deep divisions about Marx's ideas of historical materialism. What Is To Be Done? reflects Lenin's devoted and fanatical position on these ideas.
https://www.marxists.org/
Saturday, April 30, 2016
Summarize what Lenin believed and hoped to gain using the following primary source. https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/i.htm
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