Ricardo:
>That's just what Marx hoped for, but the fact is that workers have
>shown little inclination to "create themselves" into Marxists.
>That's why Lenin wrote What is to be done?
>
This is silly. Lenin wrote this in order to help construct a socialist
party in Russia based on the German model. He and Plekhanov struggled with
the Economist tendency which resisted a national organization. There is
nothing really new in this article, as scholars such as Neil Harding have
pointed out. All of the ideas are imported from Western Europe and adapted
to Russian conditions.
For example, Lenin's concept of a vanguard represented orthodox social
democratic thought.. George Plekhanov, eighteen years before the
publication of "What is to be Done?" stated that "the socialist
intelligentsia...must become the leader of the working class in the
impending emancipation movement, explain to it its political and economic
interests and also the interdependence of those interests and must prepare
them to play an independent role in the social life of Russia." In 1898,
Pavel Axelrod wrote that "the proletariat, according to the consciousness
of the Social Democrats, does not possess a ready-made, historically
elaborated social ideal," and "it goes without saying that these
conditions, without the energetic participation of the Social Democrats,
may cause our proletariat to remain in its condition as a listless and
somnolent force in respect of its political development." The Austrian
Hainfeld program of the Social Democrats said that "Socialist consciousness
is something that is brought into the proletarian class struggle from the
outside, not something that organically develops out of the class
struggle." Kautsky, the world's leading Marxist during this period, stated
that "socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out
of the other; each arises under different conditions. Modern socialist
consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge."
Lenin was responsible for many positive innovations in Marxist thought such
as his understanding of the national question, but "What is To Be Done"
contains no new ideas.
Louis Proyect
