Plekhanov’s behaviour had been insulting to such a degree that one could not help suspecting him of harbouring ‘unclean’ thoughts about us (i.e., that he regarded us as careerists). He trampled us underfoot, etc. I fully supported these charges. My ‘infatuation’ with Plekhanov disappeared as if by magic, and I felt offended and embittered to an unbelievable degree. Never, never in my life, had I regarded any other man with such sincere respect and veneration, never had I stood before any man so ‘humbly’ and never before had I been so brutally ‘kicked’. That’s what it was, we had actually been kicked. We had been scared like little children, scared by the grown-ups threatening to leave us to ourselves, and when we funked (the shame of it!) we were brushed aside with an incredible unceremoniousness. We now realised very clearly that Plekhanov had simply laid a trap for us that morning when he declined to act as a co-editor; it had been a deliberate chess move, a snare for guileless ‘pigeons’ … And since a man with whom we desired to co-operate closely and establish most intimate relations, resorted to chess moves in dealing with comrades, there could be no doubt that this man was bad, yes, bad, inspired by petty motives of personal vanity and conceit – an insincere man. This discovery – and it was indeed a discovery – struck us like a thunderbolt; for up to that moment both of us had stood in admiration of Plekhanov, and, as we do with a loved one, we had forgiven him everything; we had closed our eyes to all his shortcomings; we had tried hard to persuade ourselves that those shortcomings were really non-existent, that they were petty things that bothered only people who had no proper regard for principles. Yet we ourselves had been taught practically that those ‘petty’ shortcomings were capable of repelling the most devoted friends, that no appreciation of his theoretical correctness could make us forget his repelling traits. Our indignation knew no bounds. Our ideal had been destroyed; gloatingly we trampled it underfoot like a dethroned god. There was no end to the charges we hurled against him. It cannot go on like this, we decided. We do not wish, we will not, we cannot work together with him under such conditions. Good-bye, magazine!
Young comrades ‘court’ an elder comrade out of the great love they bear for him – and suddenly he injects into this love an atmosphere of intrigue, compelling them to feel, not as younger brothers, but as fools to be led by the nose, as pawns to be moved about at will, and, still worse, as clumsy Streber who must be thoroughly frightened and quashed! An enamoured youth receives from the object of his love a bitter lesson – to regard all persons ‘without sentiment’, to keep a stone in one’s sling. Many more words of an equally bitter nature did we utter that night. The suddenness of the disaster naturally caused us to magnify it, but, in the main, the bitter words we uttered were true. Blinded by our love, we had actually behaved like slaves, and it is humiliating to be a slave. Our sense of having been wronged was magnified a hundredfold by the fact that ‘he’ himself had opened our eyes to our humiliation.
Even as all this was going on in the tiny confines of Switzerland, back at home some of the opponents of Plekhanov were putting forward ideas that were leading to an effective rapprochement with the autocracy. These included syndicalism, a blind worship of existing class consciousness and an inability to think ahead. The economistic currents of these ‘legal Marxists’ were all mired in presentism, arguing, ‘What exists may not be permanent but we have to accompany it till there is a change. Then we will accompany that change.’
The lodestar for most Social Democrats was the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). It was seen by European socialists, including Lenin, as a model party. But he insisted that it could afford luxuries, such as an embedded and well-defined revisionist minority in its ranks, because conditions in Germany were the opposite of those in Russia. Since 1890 the group had been able to operate legally. It had a clear-cut Marxist programme, a highly developed press, well-established methods for resolving disputes and leaders with real authority. The contrast was obvious. The German model, almost perfect for democratic countries, could not be reproduced in tsarist Russia.
This was the context in which Lenin’s first major political work was written and published in 1902. He titled it What Is to Be Done? as a homage to the old radical Populist. Reading the text can be disconcerting, since it is a series of polemics aimed at groups long extinct. But it is equally disconcerting to those who open its pages hoping to find prescriptions for building a conspiratorial underground party. It is not a Marxist version of Nechaev’s Catechism. And a reader might even be shocked to find a defence of ‘dreaming’ in the middle of the text where Lenin is sharply critical of those who can’t think beyond the concrete conditions of factory life. Suddenly the familiar figure of Pisarev makes an appearance, and Lenin quotes from his essay ‘Blunders of Immature Thought’:
‘There are rifts and rifts,’ wrote Pisarev of the rift between dreams and reality. ‘My dream may run ahead of the natural march of events or may fly off at a tangent in a direction in which no natural march of events will ever proceed. In the first case my dream will not cause any harm; it may even support and augment the energy of the working men … There is nothing in such dreams that would distort or paralyse labour-power. On the contrary, if man were completely deprived of the ability to dream in this way, if he could not from time to time run ahead and mentally conceive, in an entire and completed picture, the product to which his hands are only just beginning to lend shape, then I cannot at all imagine what stimulus there would be to induce man to undertake and complete extensive and strenuous work in the spheres of art, science, and practical endeavour … The rift between dreams and reality causes no harm if only the person dreaming believes seriously in his dream, if he attentively observes life, compares his observations with his castles in the air, and if, generally speaking, he works conscientiously for the achievement of his fantasies. If there is some connection between dreams and life then all is well.’ Of this kind of dreaming there is unfortunately too little in our movement.
As early as 1907, Lenin made it clear that the prescriptions outlined were neither universally applicable nor would they be needed forever in Russia:
Concerning the essential content of the pamphlet it is necessary to draw the attention of the modern reader to the following. The basic mistake made by those who now criticise What Is to Be Done? is to treat the pamphlet apart from its connection with the concrete historical situation of a definite, and now long past, period in the development of our Party.
This was true. Neither Marx nor Lenin ever generalised from specifically local experiences. What they did understand, better than most of their peers, was that the foundations of bourgeois society were not immovable and, for Lenin, this understanding was crucial in declaring the twentieth century to be an epoch of wars and revolutions.
The universal importance of What Is to Be Done? did not lie in its detailed rebuttals of other political currents, but in its stress on the primacy of politics and the necessity of a revolutionary party with a vigorous set of publications, as well as its careful delineation of the relationship between theory and practice that the young Lukács would later (1924) describe as encompassing the ‘actuality of the revolution’.
Where would the theory come from? Here there were no doubts whatsoever. Marxist and socialist theories did not emerge spontaneously but from the intellectual labour of many, and ‘out of the philosophical, historical and economic theories that were worked out by the educated representatives of the propertied classes – the intelligentsia. The founders of modern socialism, Marx and Engels, belong by social status to the bourgeois intelligentsia.’ And, as mentioned earlier, the same applied to the anarcho-Populist currents that dominated the nineteenth century: Kropotkin, Bakunin, Tolstoy.
Trade union activity was the spontaneous consciousness of the newly industrialised workers but, on its own, was insufficient and often ended up being dominated by its capitalist opponent. It would not come to socialism spontaneously. Politics and parties were essential:
Those who refrain from concerning themselves in this way … in reality leave the liberals in command, place in their hands the political education of the workers, and concede the hegemony in the political struggle to elements which,
