What is to be done- How Lenin's political theory is as applicable today as it was in 1902
68I just finished reading a biography of Lenin today, and I was fascinated by what a complex person that he was. For example, he was born into a middle class family in 1870 and was the son of a schoolteacher, (his mother), and a government education official, (his father), of some importance because the family could claim to be amongst the lower rungs of the nobility due to the work of his father in the education bureaucracy of the Imperial Russian Government.
Lenin came from a remarkably diverse ancestry, which included Russian, German, Swedish, central Asian, (mongolian), and Jewish. The Jewish portion has carried some debate or controversy, ( Due to antisemitism, I suspect). From what I have read, I see no reason that the jewish portion should not be included, but that maybe from the viewpoint of how such things such as ethnicity and culture are viewed today.
The main points of the "What is to be done" pamphlet are as valid today as they were in 1902 when they were first published. They are-
Lenin argues that workers will not spontaneously become Marxists just by fighting battles over wages with their employers. Lenin argues that Marxists need to form a political party to publicise Marxist ideas and persuade workers to become Marxists.
Lenin argues that to understand politics you must understand all of society, not just workers and their economic struggles with their employers. To become political and to become Marxists, workers need to learn about all of society, not just their own corner of it:
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.[2]
Writing about the wave of strikes in late nineteenth century Russia, Lenin states 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, combining into unions, etc. Socialist theory, however, in Russia, as elsewhere in Europe, was the product of the "educated representatives of the propertied clases", the intellectuals or "revolutionary socialist intellectuals". Lenin states that the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves, belonged to this bourgeois intelligentsia.[3] (from wikipedia article "what is to be done").
In this country, (the US), we have always been taught that the ideas of Karl Marx, Lenin, and other socialist thinkers and politicians were evil and as such, had no place in the social makeup of this nation, and, by extension, anyone who had any sort of socialist or marxist leanings was some how less american then the red, white and blue flag waving, capitalist portions of the civil population of the United States. It is an unfortunate trait of our human makeup to smear and otherwise villify that which we don't understand or agree with, but as far as one being less american or patriotic because they identify with the writings of Marx or Lenin more then they do the opinions of someone with a more captialist viewpoint I would argue that nothing could be farther from the truth.
Ask yourself just who is shipping thousands of jobs overseas, and who is letting big business have free reign to run the economy of this nation, and by extension, the economies of the rest of the world into the ground? I would be willing to wager that it is not the socialists of this nation.
Educate yourselves because knowledge is power.
