What was the purpose of Lenin's What is to be done?

[kaiser2011]

I've been browsing the forum for a while but i just registered. Looks like a great community. :)

Can anyone answer my question in few sentences? I want to see how others interpret it.

[Tommy4ever]

Well, I'm not sure what you mean by 'purpose' but I'll give a go at answering your question.

It was written to literally answer the question ''what is to be done?'', this is Lenin clearing stating his idea of how to bring about the revolution - from his point of view in 1902.

[caramelpence]

WITBD was written not as an abstract theoretical treatise but as an intervention in a definite political and argumentative context. The context was one where, shortly after the first congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party or RSDLP in 1898, which had witnessed the arrest of all the delegates and the effective smashing of the nascent party, there emerged a trend within Russian Social Democracy that Lenin branded "economism". Lenin's aim in WITBD was essentially to pose arguments against this economist trend in order to guide the resuscitation of the party. In doing so, he saw himself as affirming an essentially orthodox concept of the role of the party, rather than a brand new concept. The economist trend was centered around the papers Rabochaya Mysl and Rabochee Delo, and its adherents argued that Social Democrats should focus on the struggle for gradual improvements in the material conditions of the working class, in that they believed that the winning of economic reforms and gains would enable the working class to gain a revolutionary consciousness of its own accord. The thrust of Lenin's own argument and that of the entire Iskra group, Iskra being a paper founded explicitly in order to oppose economism, was that the class struggle is a political struggle by definition, and that the role of revolutionaries was to lead the main body of the working class in political struggle, which meant asserting leadership over the democratic movement in Russia at that time, rather than concentrating on economic struggles alone. This is of course a simplified characterization of the positions and debates on both sides. If you want to see Lenin's own appreciation of the influence of context on his writing of WITBD then you should check out Lenin's subsequent article Preface to the Collection 'Twelve Years' (1907) and for a detailed understanding of WITBD I would definitely recommend the work of Neil Harding. Unfortunately, WITBD is one of the most misunderstood and mischaracterized text in the history of Marxist thought.