What Is To Be Done?
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A library version of What Is To Be Done? is available. |
What Is To Be Done?[a] is a work by Vladimir Lenin[b] published in March 1902. The work was written at the end of 1901 and early in 1902. In "Where To Begin", published in Iskra, No. 4 (May 1901), Lenin said that the article represented "a skeleton plan to be developed in greater detail in a pamphlet now in preparation for print".
The text's central focus is the ideological formation of the proletariat. In What Is To Be Done?, Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously become political simply by fighting economic battles with capitalists over wages, working hours, and the like. To educate the working class on Marxism, Lenin insists that Marxists should form a political party, or vanguard, of dedicated revolutionaries in order to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The pamphlet, in part, precipitated the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party between Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
