Book: What Is to Be Done?

Context and Aim
Written in 1902 amid Tsarist repression and factional disputes inside the Russian Social-Democratic movement, What Is to Be Done? confronts how a socialist party should be built and how it should relate to the spontaneous struggles of workers. Lenin frames the central issue as overcoming localism, amateurism, and narrow trade-unionism to forge a disciplined, nationwide political force capable of fighting the autocracy and achieving socialist aims. He intervenes against the current of “Economism,” a trend that prioritized immediate economic demands and underestimated political leadership and theory.

Spontaneity and Consciousness
A defining argument is the distinction between spontaneous worker unrest and socialist consciousness. Factory strikes and economic grievances, left to themselves, tend to produce trade-union consciousness, struggles for better wages and conditions, rather than a political program to overturn the state. Citing Karl Kautsky, Lenin contends that socialist theory arises from scientific analysis and must be introduced to the working-class movement by trained revolutionaries who can connect everyday grievances to a comprehensive political strategy. He condemns “tailism,” the habit of passively following the spontaneous movement, and insists that leadership must elevate and generalize scattered experiences into class-wide political awareness.

Organization and Discipline
The book outlines a model of a centralized party of professional revolutionaries. Under autocracy, fragmented local circles are easily repressed; only a trained cadre, working semi-clandestinely with a strict division of labor, can maintain continuity and initiative. Lenin argues for rigorous selection, specialized skills, and coordination across the empire, anticipating what later became known as democratic centralism: broad debate internally, unity in action externally. This does not mean exclusion of workers; rather, it means preparing worker-leaders through systematic education and organization, while resisting the romanticization of loose, amateur activism that leaves movements vulnerable to police and confusion.

Political Agitation and the Press
A national political newspaper, envisioned in Iskra (“The Spark”), is presented as both an educator and an organizer. For Lenin, the paper is a scaffolding that links local cells, standardizes tactics, spreads analysis, and trains agitators. He urges agitation that goes beyond factory issues to expose every abuse of the autocratic state, censorship, police brutality, peasant oppression, national and religious discrimination, so the proletariat becomes the tribune of all the oppressed. By unifying diverse grievances under a political banner, the party can transform discontent into a sustained mass movement rather than episodic unrest.

Scope, Allies, and Theory
Lenin rejects reliance on liberal allies who seek constitutional concessions without challenging class domination, and he opposes the individual terrorism of the Socialist-Revolutionaries as a substitute for mass politics. Central is the claim that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”: strategy must be grounded in Marxist analysis, a program, and tactics that adapt to changing conditions while keeping the aim of seizing political power in view. The party must lead the proletariat in a political struggle for hegemony, link economic battles to state-wide political demands, and forge unity across regions and industries.

Impact
What Is to Be Done? sharply demarcated revolutionary social democracy from Economism and helped prepare the conditions for the 1903 split between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Its insistence on professional organization, ideological clarity, and a national press became hallmarks of Bolshevik practice. Often caricatured as elitist, the text argues that disciplined leadership is a condition for mass empowerment under repression, not a substitute for it. The book endures as a touchstone on party-building, political education, and the relationship between spontaneity and strategy in revolutionary movements.