What Is To Be Done? (Lenin, 1935)/Conclusion

by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

CONCLUSION

The history of Russian Social-Democracy can he divided into three distinct periods:

The first period covers about ten years, approximately the years 1884 to 1894. This was the period when the theory and the programme of Social-Democracy germinated and took root. The number of adherents to the new tendency in Russia could be counted in units. Social-Democracy existed without a labour movement; it was, as it were, in its period of gestation.

The second period covers three or four years—1894–1898. In this period Social-Democracy appeared in the world as a social movement, as the rising of the masses of the people, as a political party. This is the period of its infancy and adolescence. Social-Democratic ideas spread among the intelligentsia like an epidemic and they became entirely absorbed in the fight against Populism, in going among the workers, and the latter, in their turn, were entirely absorbed in fomenting strikes. The movement made enormous strides. The majority of the leaders were very young people who had by no means reached the "age of thirty-five," which to N. Mikhailovsky appears to he a sort of natural borderline. Owing to their youth, they proved to he untrained for practical work and they left the scene with astonishing rapidity. But in the majority of cases the scope of their work was extremely wide. Many of them began their revolutionary thinking as Narodovolists. Nearly all of them in their early youth enthusiastically worshipped the terrorist heroes. It was a great wrench to abandon the captivating impressions of these heroic traditions and it was accompanied by the breaking off of personal relationships with people who were determined to remain loyal to Narodnaya Volya and for whom the young Social-Democrats had profound respect. The struggle compelled them to educate themselves, to read the illegal literature of all tendencies and to study closely the questions of legal Populism. Trained in this struggle, Social-Democrats went into the labour movement without "for a moment" forgetting the theories of Marxism which illumined their path or the task of overthrowing the autocracy. The formation of the party in the spring of 1898 was the most striking and at the same time the last act of the Social-Democrats in this period.

The third period, as we have seen, began in 1897 and definitely replaced the second period in 1898 (1898–?). This was the period of confusion, disintegration, and vacillation. In the period of adolescence the youth's voice breaks. The voice of Russian Social-Democracy in this period began to break, began to strike a false note—on the one hand, in the productions of Messrs. Struve and Prokopovich, Bulgakov and Berdyaev, on the other hand in the productions of V. I-na and R. M., B. Krichevsky and Martynov. But it was only the leaders who wandered from the path; the movement itself continued to grow and advanced by enormous strides. The proletarian struggle spread to new strata of the workers over the whole of Russia and at the same time indirectly stimulated the revival of the democratic spirit among the students and among other strata of the population. The consciousness of the leaders, however, shrank be£ore the breadth and power of the spontaneous rising; among Social-Democrats, a different streak predominated—a streak of party workers who had been trained almost exclusively on "legal" Marxian literature, and the more the spontaneity of the masses called for consciousness, the more they lacked consciousness. The leaders not only lagged behind in regard to theory ("freedom of criticism") and practice ("primitiveness") but even tried to justify their backwardness by all sorts of high-flown arguments. Social-Democracy was degraded to the level of trade unionism in legal literature by the Brentanoists and in illegal literature by the Khvostists. The programme of the Credo began to be put into operation, especially when the "primitiveness" of the Social-Democrats caused a revival of non-Social-Democratic revolutionary tendencies.

And if the reader reproaches me for having dealt in excessive detail with Rabocheye Dyelo, I will say to him in reply: Rabocheye Dyelo acquired "historical" significance because it most strikingly reflected the "spirit" of this third period.^[1] It was not the consistent R. M. but the weathercock Krichevskys and Martynovs who could properly express the confusion and vacillation, and the readiness to make concessions to "criticism," to Economism and to terrorism. It is not the lofty contempt for practical work displayed by the worshippers of the "absolute" that is characteristic of this period, but the combination of pettifogging practice and utter disregard for theory. It was not so much the downright rejection of "grand phrases" that the heroes of this period engaged in as in their vulgarisation: Scientific Socialism ceased to be a complete revolutionary theory and became a petty-bourgeois idea "freely" diluted with the contents of every new German textbook that appeared; the slogan "class struggle" did not impel them forward to wider and more strenuous activity but served as a soothing syrup, because (sic!) the "economic struggle is inseparably linked up with the political struggle"; the idea of a party did not serve as a call for the creation of a militant organisation of revolutionists, but was used to justify some sort of a "revolutionary bureaucracy" and infantile playing at "democracy."

When this third period will come to an end and the fourth period will commence, we do not know (at all events it is already heralded by many symptoms). Just now we are passing from the sphere of history into the sphere of the present and partly into the sphere of the future. But we firmly believe that the fourth period will see the consolidation of militant Marxism, that Russian Social-Democracy will emerge from the crisis in the full strength of manhood, that a "new guard" will arise, that instead of the present rear-guard of opportunists, we will have a genuine vanguard of the most revolutionary class.

In the sense of calling for such a "new guard" and summing up as it were all that has been expounded above, my reply to the question: "What is to be done?" can be put briefly: Liquidate the Third Period.

1. I could also reply in the German proverb: Den Sack schägt man, den Esel meint man. It was not Rabocheye Dyelo alone that was carried away by the fashion of "criticism" but also the masses of practical workers and theoreticians; they became confused over the question of spontaneity and slipped from the Social-Democratic to the trade-union conception of our political and organisational tasks.