No pamphlet of the twentieth century has been made to carry a heavier load of later meaning than this one. What Is To Be Done? was written at the end of 1901 and the beginning of 1902 by a thirty-one-year-old exile who signed himself N. Lenin, and it was meant to settle a quarrel inside a small, illegal, and quarrelsome movement. Half a century on, the Soviet state that traced its lineage to that movement had turned the pamphlet into scripture: the founding charter, as the official phrase would have it, of "the party of a new type." The distance between the occasion and the use is the whole story of this book, and it is worth keeping in view from the first page.
The occasion first. By 1901 Russian Social-Democracy was a scatter of local study circles (kruzhki), each producing its own leaflets, most of them absorbed in the day-to-day economic grievances of the factory. Lenin, writing from abroad for the new paper Iskra (The Spark), set out to break the hold of what he called Economism — the tendency to confine the workers' movement to wage demands and trade-union bargaining and to let socialist politics look after itself. Against it he argued three things that still read with force. First, that theory is not a luxury: "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement," and a movement that despises theory hands its members over to whatever ideas are already in the air, which in a class society are the ruling class's ideas. Second, that politics cannot be improvised from the shop floor alone but must reach into "the sphere of relationships of all classes and strata to the state." Third, that in the conditions of the tsarist police state an amateur, decentralised movement would simply be arrested piecemeal, and that survival required a core of trained, full-time organisers — "professional revolutionaries" — bound together by a single all-Russia paper, which he compared to "the scaffolding erected round a building under construction."
Read whole, and in its own setting, the pamphlet is far stranger and more attractive than its reputation. It is not a cold manual of conspiracy. Its most famous title is itself an homage — Lenin borrowed it from Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel, the book that had formed a generation of Russian radicals, his own dead brother among them. At the centre of the argument sits an unexpected defence of imagination, quoted from the critic Pisarev: "We should dream!" Lenin wrote, and added that "of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement." The closing image is not of a machine but of comrades "marching in a compact group along a precipitous and difficult path, firmly holding each other by the hand." This is a document of a besieged and hopeful minority, not of a state. Its polemical heat — the mockery of "freedom of criticism" as, in practice, "freedom to convert Social-Democracy into a democratic party of reform" — is the heat of an argument its author expected to lose as often as win.
That is precisely what the Soviet apparatus that produced the present edition could not afford to let the reader feel. This translation, by Joe Fineberg and George Hanna, comes from Volume 5 of Lenin's Collected Works, issued by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow in 1961 — the house that two years later would be renamed Progress Publishers. It is a careful, readable text, set from the 1902 edition and checked against the one Lenin revised in 1907. But the framing around it does quiet and consequential work. The editorial notes ("— Ed.") that thread the volume are, for the most part, cross-references and identifications; where they touch the pamphlet's status they tend to seal it. The most telling move is an omission. The volume reproduces the minor footnotes Lenin added in 1907, and an editorial note even records that he then abridged the text "with slight abridgements." What it does not reproduce is the 1907 preface itself — the place where Lenin, looking back, warned that "the basic mistake made by those who now criticise What Is To Be Done? is to treat the pamphlet apart from its connection with the concrete historical situation of a definite, and now long past, period." The one passage in which the author most sharply dated his own book, and told his readers not to make a timeless doctrine of it, is precisely the passage the timeless-doctrine edition leaves out.
The apparatus needed the omission because the single most quoted sentence in the book is also its most vulnerable. "There could not have been Social-Democratic consciousness among the workers," Lenin wrote; "it would have to be brought to them from without." Class political consciousness, he insisted, "can be brought to the workers only from without." Two things about this formula deserve to be said plainly, and the edition helps with neither. The first is that it was not Lenin's invention. The long passage he quotes in support is from Karl Kautsky, the acknowledged authority of German and international Social-Democracy, who had written that socialist consciousness is "something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without" — von Aussen Hineingetragenes — and not something that grows within it on its own. What later readers took for a uniquely Leninist heresy was, in 1902, orthodox Second-International Marxism; Lenin was leaning on the movement's central teacher, not defying him. The second thing is that the formula is genuinely dangerous, and the danger is not imaginary. If consciousness must be carried to the class from outside it, by an intelligentsia that possesses the science the workers cannot generate, then the door stands open to a politics in which the party knows the class's interests better than the class does — and may, in the end, act in its name against it.
This is where an honest account has to hold two truths at once. Lenin's insistence that the labour movement does not become socialist automatically, that it can be captured by liberalism or narrowed to trade-union horizons, was and remains correct; the twentieth century is a long confirmation of it. But the "from without" formula, pressed as a general theory rather than a polemical exaggeration of the moment, points toward substitution — the party for the class. It was Lenin's own comrades who saw this first and said so at once. In 1904 the young Trotsky, then his opponent, warned in Our Political Tasks that the logic could run downhill: the party organisation substitutes itself for the working class, then the leadership for the organisation, and finally a single man for the leadership. Rosa Luxemburg pressed the same objection from Germany. Lenin, to his credit, did not treat the pamphlet as a graven tablet; by 1907 he was telling readers it had "bent the stick" too far in one direction and should not be read as a statement of principle. The tragedy is that the state built in his name reached for the stick exactly where he had bent it, and broke it off.
For the later use is where this text earned its introduction. Stripped of its date and its opponents — all of them, as the pamphlet's own dogged polemics against Rabocheye Dyelo (Workers' Cause) and the rest now testify, long dead — What Is To Be Done? was refashioned into the founding proof of a doctrine Lenin never held: that the party is the sole legitimate bearer of the class's consciousness, that its discipline is beyond question, and that dissent within it is by nature a leak of "bourgeois ideas." The line "Give us an organisation of revolutionaries, and we will overturn Russia" — which Lenin offered as a deliberate variation on Archimedes' boast about a lever and a place to stand — was read back as sober constitutional principle. Democratic centralism, a rule for keeping an underground both united and alive, hardened into the bureaucratic centralism of a ruling machine, and then into the 1921 ban on factions, and then into a single party that forbade to its own members the "freedom of criticism" whose abuse by others Lenin had mocked. The Short Course of 1939 read 1902 backward through Stalin's needs, and the Collected Works that carried this pamphlet were an instrument of that reading. A book written to keep revolutionary theory and open argument alive against the current, inside a persecuted minority, became the license for a state that abolished both.
None of that is Lenin's confession, and the reader should resist the mirror-image Cold-War habit of treating the pamphlet as the seed from which the labour camps grew by simple logic. It was neither. It was a brilliant, overstated, situational intervention by a serious revolutionary who said, four years later, that it should not be read as anything else. The service this edition can still perform — against its own framing — is to let the pamphlet be read as it was written: dated, embattled, and arguing. Restore the 1907 preface in your mind as you read, remember that the "from without" was Kautsky's before it was Lenin's, and the book becomes what it always was — not the charter of a monolith, but the record of an argument about how a movement keeps its head in bad conditions. That argument is still worth having, which is more than can be said for the use to which the argument was put.