What Is to Be Done?

What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement (1902) is a political pamphlet written by the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin. Lenin contends that the working class will not become politically aware simply by struggling with employers over wages, hours and working conditions. He maintains that Marxists should form a political party of committed revolutionaries to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers.

The pamphlet was partly responsible for the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party into Lenin’s Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Claiming that socialist theory was the product of the “revolutionary socialist intellectuals”, Lenin states that the working class was able to develop only a “trade-union consciousness”. He points out that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of modern scientific socialism, belonged to this bourgeois intelligentsia.