What Is To Be Done?

BURNING QUESTIONS of our MOVEMENT

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The history of Russian Social-Democracy can be distinctly
divided into three periods:

The first period embraces about ten years, approximately from
1884 to 1894. This was the period of the rise and consolidation of
the theory and programme of Social-Democracy. The adherents of the
new trend in Russia were very few in number. Social-Democracy
existed without a working-class movement, and as a political party
it was at the embryonic stage of development.

The second period embraces three or four years—1894-98, In
this period Social-Democracy appeared on the scene as a social
movement, as the upsurge of the masses of the people, as a
political party. This is the period of its childhood and
adolescence. The intelligentsia was fired with a vast and general
zeal for struggle against Narodism and for going among the
workers; the workers displayed a general enthusiasm for strike
action. The movement made enormous strides. The majority of the
leaders were young people who had not reached “the age of
thirty-five” which to Mr. N. Mikhailovsky appeared to be a sort of
natural border-line. Owing to their youth, they proved to be
untrained for practical work and they left the scene with
astonishing rapidity. But in the majority of cases the scope of
their activity was very wide. Many of them had begun their
revolutionary thinking as adherents of Narodnaya Volya. Nearly all
had in their early youth enthusiastically worshipped the terrorist
heroes. It required a struggle to abandon the captivating
impressions of those heroic traditions, and the struggle was
accompanied by the breaking off of personal relations with people
who were determined to remain loyal to the Narodnaya Volya and for
whom the young Social-Democrats had profound respect. The struggle
compelled the youthful leaders to educate themselves to read
illegal literature of every trend, and to study closely the
questions of legal Narodism. Trained in this struggle, Social-Democrats went into the working-class movement without “for
a moment” forgetting either the theory of Marxism, which brightly
illumined their path, or the task of overthrowing the autocracy. The formation of the Party in the spring of 1898 was
the most striking and at the same time the last act of the
Social-Democrats of this period.

The third period, as we have seen, was prepared in 1897 and it
definitely cut off the second period in 1898 (1898-?). This was a
period of disunity, dissolution, and vacillation. During
adolescence a youth’s voice breaks. And so, in this period, the
voice of Russian Social-Democracy began to break, to strike a
false note — on the one hand, in the writings of Messrs. Struve
and Prokopovich, of Bulgakov and Berdyaev, and on the other, in
those of V. l-n and R. M., of B. Krichevsky and Martynov. But it
was only the leaders who wandered about separately and drew back;
the movement itself continued to grow, and it advanced with
enormous strides. The proletarian struggle spread to new strata of
the workers and extended to the whole of Russia, at the same time
indirectly stimulating the revival of the democratic spirit among
the students and among other sections of the population. The
political consciousness of the leaders, however, capitulated
before the breadth and power of the spontaneous upsurge; among the
Social-Democrats, another type had become dominant — the type of
functionaries, trained almost exclusively on “legal Marxist”
literature, which proved to be all the more inadequate the more
the spontaneity of the masses demanded political consciousness on
the part of the leaders. The leaders not only lagged behind in
regard to theory (“freedom of criticism”) and practice (“primitiveness”), but they sought to justify their backwardness
by all manner of high-flown arguments. Social-Democracy was
degraded to the level of trade-unionism by the Brentano adherents
in legal literature, and by the tail-enders in illegal literature. The Credo programme began to be put into
operation, especially when the “primitive methods” of the
Social-Democrats caused a revival of revolutionary non-Social-Democratic
tendencies.

If the reader should feel critical that I have dealt at too
great length with a certain Rabocheye Dyelo , I can say
only that Rabocheye Dyelo acquired “historical” significance because it most notably reflected the
“spirit” of this third period. [1]

It was not the consistent R. M., but the weathercock Krichevskys and Martynovs who were able properly
to express the disunity and vacillation, the readiness to make
concessions to “criticism” to “Economism”, and to terrorism. Not the lofty contempt for practical work displayed by some
worshipper of the “absolute” is characteristic of this period,
but the combination of pettifogging practice and utter disregard for
theory. It was not so much in the direct rejection of “grandiose
phrases” that the heroes of this period engaged as in their
vulgarisation. Scientific socialism ceased to be an integral
revolutionary theory and became a hodgepodge “freely” diluted with
the content of every new German textbook that appeared; the slogan
“class struggle” did not impel to broader and more energetic
activity but served as a balm, since “the economic struggle is
inseparably linked with the political struggle”; the idea of a
party did not serve as a call for the creation of a militant
organisation of revolutionaries, but was used to justify some sort
of “revolutionary bureaucracy” and infantile playing at
“democratic” forms.

When the third period will come to an end and the fourth (now
heralded by many portents) will begin we do not know. We are
passing from the sphere of history to the sphere of the present
and, partly, of the future. But we firmly believe that the fourth
period will lead to the consolidation of militant Marxism, that
Russian Social-Democracy will emerge from the crisis in the full
flower of manhood, that the opportunist rearguard will be “replaced” by the genuine vanguard of the most
revolutionary class.

In the sense of calling for such a “replacement” and by way of
summing up what has been expounded above, we may meet the
question, What is to be done? with the brief reply:

Put an End to the Third Period.