What Is To Be Done?

Summary

‘What Is to Be Done?’ (1902) is a political tract written by the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. Lenin argues that the working class will not become politically aware simply by challenging employers about wages, hours and working conditions. He contends that Marxists should form a political party of committed revolutionaries to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The tract was partly responsible for the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party into Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Claiming that the working class was only able to develop a “trade-union consciousness", he states that socialist theory was the product of the "revolutionary socialist intellectuals". He points out that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of scientific socialism, belonged to this bourgeois intelligentsia.