What Is to Be Done?

The booklet's central focus is the ideological formation of the proletariat. Lenin argues that the working class will not become politically advanced simply by fighting economic battles against employers over wages, hours, and the like. To imbue the working class with Marxist principles, he recommends a cadre of dedicated revolutionaries form a vanguard political party that can teach Marxism to workers.

The legacy of What Is to Be Done? has been much debated. The ideas put forth in the pamphlet regarding the composition and organization of a successful revolutionary party were said to have precipitated the 1903 split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) into the Bolshevik ("majority") faction and Menshevik ("minority") faction. Some, including Lenin, claimed that readers of What Is to Be Done? misrepresented its contents to further their own agendas.

Main points

Lenin first confronts the so-called economist trend in Russian social democracy that followed the line of the German Marxist Eduard Bernstein. Lenin labels Bernstein's position opportunistic, a point proven (in Lenin's estimation) when French socialist Alexandre Millerand accepted a cabinet post in his country's bourgeois government. In response to the economists' demand for freedom of criticism, Lenin asserts that orthodox Marxists must have the same right to criticize. He emphasizes that in fighting the bourgeoisie, Russian revolutionaries should pay particular attention to theoretical questions, recalling Friedrich Engels' statement that in the struggle for social democracy, the theoretical form of struggle was as important as the political and economic.

Lenin explains that workers will not automatically develop class consciousness as a result of economic conflicts with their employers or through actions like spontaneous strikes and demonstrations. Instead, professional revolutionaries need to form a political party to advocate Marxist ideas and persuade workers to join the movement for change. He writes that political understanding requires understanding the entirety of society, not just what happens in the workplace:

Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without; that is, only from outside the economic struggle, from outside the sphere of relations between workers and employers. The sphere from which alone it is possible to obtain this knowledge is the sphere of relationships (of all classes and strata) to the state and the government, the sphere of the interrelations between all classes.

Reflecting on the wave of strikes in late 19th century Russia, Lenin observes that "the history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own efforts, is able to develop only trade union consciousness"; that is, the conviction that it must combine into unions, petition the government for pro-labor legislation, etc. However, socialist theory in Russia, and elsewhere in Europe, was the product of the "educated representatives of the propertied classes", the intellectuals or "revolutionary socialist intelligentsia". Lenin states that Marx and Engels themselves, the founders of modern scientific socialism, belonged to this bourgeois intelligentsia.