Abstract
In the late nineteenth century, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) pioneered a new type of party that combined innovative techniques of mass mobilization (the “permanent campaign,” the “alternative culture,” and extensive party press) with a well-defined revolutionary aim. Russian Social Democrats admired this model, but they realized they lacked an essential precondition: the political freedom that was necessary to carry out mass mobilization of a national scale. They themselves were forced to innovate while adapting the SPD model to inhospitable Russian conditions. Lenin’s What is To be Done? is less of a theoretical breakthrough than a summary of methods already found by empirical trial and error, coupled with Lenin’s own practical suggestions toward achieving the next step, namely, a national party with a functioning central leadership. The influence of the SPD continued long after 1905 and can be seen in the post-revolutionary ‘propaganda state’ that applied the permanent campaign without limit or rival.
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- 1.
Robert C. Tucker, ed., The Marx - Engels Reader (New York: Norton, 1978), 518 (Inaugural Address of the First International) (in English in the original).
- 2.
Engels , “The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party,” Marx and Engels , Collected Works, 20: pp. 77–78.
- 3.
John Rae , Contemporary Socialism (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1884), pp. 127–129.
- 4.
As cited in Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered (Haymarket Press, 2006), pp. 53–61.
- 5.
K.M. Takhtarev , Rabochee dvizhenie v Peterburge, 1893–1901 gg. (Leningrad: Priboi, 1924), p. 24.
- 6.
As cited in Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, p. 59.
- 7.
Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism can be found at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/index.htm.
- 8.
Marc Angenot, “Place au prolétariat conscient et organisé!” (Montréal : CIADEST, 1992).
- 9.
All Kautsky quotations in this essay are from Karl Kautsky , Das Erfurter Programm (Dietz Verlag: 1967), originally published 1892.
- 10.
Robert Hunter , Socialists at Work (Macmillan Company: New York, 1908).
- 11.
Vernon Lidtke , The Alternative Culture : Socialist Labor in Imperial Germany (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
- 12.
Hunter , Socialists at Work, pp. 213–214.
- 13.
Hunter, Socialists at Work.
- 14.
Lenin, V.I., Polnoe sobranie sochineniia (PSS), 5th ed. (Moscow: Gos. Izd-vo polit. lit-ry, 1958–1964), 33: 104 (State and Revolution).
- 15.
Lenin, PSS, 4: 189 (1899).
- 16.
Lenin, PSS, 7: 197–198 (from “To the Rural Poor ”).
- 17.
Lars T. Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, Chapter Two.
- 18.
Lenin PSS, 4: 219.
- 19.
Georgii Plekhanov, Sochineniia (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1923–1927), 12: 489, pp. 167–168.
- 20.
Takhtarev , Rabochee dvizhenie, pp. 179–181.
- 21.
Lenin, PSS, 7: 133.
- 22.
Lenin, PSS, 7: 139–140.
- 23.
Lenin PSS, 22: 199 (unpublished article of November 1912); “radical change in the entire political system” is a euphemism for “revolution” that was used to get past the censor.
- 24.
Martov , Proletarskaia bor’ba v Rossii, (St. Petersburg, 1904), 80.
- 25.
The Credo text as published by Lenin, PSS, 4: 167–168.
- 26.
This is the point Lenin was making with his celebrated epigram from What Is To Be Done? : “give us an organization of revolutionaries—and we will turn Russia around!” (Lih, Lenin Rediscovered, pp. 428–432).
- 27.
Lenin PSS, 6: 132, 121, 40, 97.
- 28.
This seminal text can be read in Richard B. Day and Daniel Gaido, eds., Witnesses to Permanent Revolution (Brill, 2009), along with commentaries by Lenin and Trotsky (the young Stalin also wrote one).
- 29.
Lars T. Lih, “‘A New Era of War and Revolution’: Lenin, Kautsky , Hegel and the Outbreak of World War I ,” in Cataclysm 1914: The First World War and the Making of Modern World Politics, ed. Alexander Anievas (Leiden: Brill, 2014).
- 30.
Bukharin and Preobrazhensky, Azbuka kommunizma (ABC of Communism) (Moscow: Gosizdat, 1919), paragraph 49.
- 31.
Riddell, Founding the Communist International : proceedings and documents of the First Congress , March 1919 (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1987), pp. 152–153.
- 32.
Lenin, PSS, 35: 47–48.
- 33.
Bukharin ’s Program of the Communists ( Bolsheviks ) (1918) is available online under the title Programme of the World Revolution: http://www.marxists.org/archive/bukharin/works/1918/worldrev/index.html.
- 34.
Bukharin , Program of the Communists.
- 35.
Draper, The “Dictatorship of the Proletariat” from Marx to Lenin (Monthly Review Press, New York: 1987), p. 142.
- 36.
John Riddell, ed., Workers of the World and Oppressed Peoples, Unite! Proceedings and Documents of the Second Congress, 1920 (Pathfinder Press, 1991), 1: 153.
- 37.
See Peter Kenez, The Birth of the Propaganda State: Soviet Methods of Mass Mobilization, 1917–1929 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).
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Lih, L.T. (2018). The Impact of the SPD Model on Lenin and Bolshevism. In: Rockmore, T., Levine, N. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Leninist Political Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51650-3_14
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