was the struggle for power. Lenin goes hammer and tongs after all those who attempt to separate the struggle against the tsarist government from that against the capitalists, and brands the pure and simple trade unionism of the Economists as thoroughly reactionary and inimical to the interests of the workers.
The second weakness which Lenin vigorously attacks in this study is the question of organisation. He raises this problem to the political importance it deserves and makes an impassioned appeal to scrap the existing form of organisation and build a theoretically sound party, revolutionary in purpose and national in scope. Although formally organised into a party a few years before (1898), the Marxist movement consisted of little more than small circles, each carrying on a more or less independent existence and engaging in sporadic and planless activities. This loose aggregation of revolutionists, carrying on their work in primitive, handicraft fashion, and depending on the spontaneity of the masses, could not, according to Lenin, become the organiser and leader of the revolutionary struggles which were rapidly developing and which were involving larger and larger masses of workers. Only a centralised party, working according to a carefully prepared plan, with each member assigned a specific task for which he is to be held accountable, could successfully lead the Russian workingclass in the struggle against capitalist exploitation and tsarist rule.
"If we have a strongly organised party, a single strike may grow into a political demonstration, into a political victory over the government," Lenin wrote sometime before he began to work on What Is To Be Done? Obviously, the party as he conceived it, had to consist of members "who shall devote to the revolution not only their spare evenings, but the whole of their lives."
Written thirty years ago, What Is To Be Done? still retains its freshness because of the revolutionary enthusiasm which permeates its pages and the great lessons it has today for the workers in capitalist countries who would build their revolutionary parties after the pattern fashioned by Lenin during the formative period of the Bolshevik Party.
December, 1931.
