Why the battle of ideas is central

16th in a series of articles around the 100th anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin). This article continues an analysis of Ulyanov’s famous 1902 pamphlet What Is To Be Done?, depicted by both Stalinists and mainstream academics as a blueprint for bureaucratism, but in truth far from that. Ulyanov started the pamphlet with a call to stand firm against right-wing drifts in the Russian and world socialist movements at that time — “Economism”, Bernsteinism, Millerandism.

By Sean Matgamna

Ulyanov contrasts the neglect of theoretical questions by the champions of “freedom of criticism” with the attitude and the work of the publishers of Iskra and Zarya, which “demands ‘vigilant attention to the theoretical aspect of the revolutionary movement of the proletariat’, and calls for ‘ruthless criticism of the Bernsteinian and other anti-revolutionary tendencies’ in our movement. The issues of Zarya to date show how this programme has been carried out”. (Four issues of Zarya, a theoretical journal, were published in 1901-2 alongside the fortnightly-in-aspiration newspaper Iskra by a team, working in exile, including Ulyanov).

Marxists had to be able to deal from a working-class point of view with all the questions thrown by society, whether they related directly to the economics of working-class life or not. [1]

“High-sounding phrases against the ossification of thought, etc.”, wrote Ulyanov, “conceal unconcern and helplessness with regard to the development of theoretical thought. The case of the Russian Social-Democrats manifestly illustrates the general European phenomenon (long ago noted also by the German Marxists) that the much vaunted ‘freedom of criticism’ does not imply substitution of one theory for another, but freedom from all integral and pondered theory; it implies eclecticism and lack of principle. Those who have the slightest acquaintance with the actual state of our movement cannot but see that the wide spread of Marxism [in Russia in the 1890s] was accompanied by a certain lowering of the theoretical level. Quite a number of people with very little, and even a total lack of theoretical training joined the movement because of its practical significance and its practical successes...”

The ‘Economist’-leaning paper Rabocheye Dyelo had quoted Marx’s statement:

“A single step of the real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.”

Ulyanov:“To repeat these words in a period of theoretical disorder is like wishing mourners at a funeral many happy returns of the day. Moreover, these words of Marx are taken from his letter on the [German Marxists’ 1875] Gotha Programme, in which he sharply condemns eclecticism in the formulation of principles. If you must unite, Marx wrote to the party leaders, then enter into agreements to satisfy the practical aims of the movement, but do not allow any bargaining over principles, do not make theoretical ‘concessions’. This was Marx’s idea, and yet there are people among us who seek in his name to belittle the significance of theory!”

Revolutionary theory

Ulyanov now repeats the words written by George Plekhanov in the early 1880s at the start of the Russian movement:

“Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. This idea cannot be insisted upon too strongly at a time when the fashionable preaching of opportunism goes hand in hand with an infatuation for the narrowest forms of practical activity”.

Ulyanov adds: “For Russian Social-Democrats the importance of theory is enhanced by three other circumstances, which are often forgotten:

“First, by the fact that our Party is only in process of formation, its features are only just becoming defined, and it has as yet far from settled accounts with the other [Populist] trends of revolutionary thought that threaten to divert the movement from the correct path. On the contrary, precisely the very recent past was marked by a revival of non-Social-Democratic [non-Marxist] revolutionary trends…” The Social-Revolutionary Party, the populist heir to the Narodniks whose high point of activity was the 1870s and 1880s, was formed in 1902.

“Under these circumstances, what at first sight appears to be an ‘unimportant’ error may lead to most deplorable consequences, and only short-sighted people can consider factional disputes and a strict differentiation between shades of opinion inopportune or superfluous. The fate of Russian Social-Democracy for very many years to come may depend on the strengthening of one or the other ‘shade’.”

There is no such thing as a national Social-Democratic [Marxist] movement, says Ulyanov.

“The Social-Democratic movement is in its very essence an international movement. This means, not only that we must combat national chauvinism, but that an incipient movement in a young country can be successful only if it makes use of the experiences of other countries. In order to make use of these experiences it is not enough merely to be acquainted with them, or simply to copy out the latest resolutions. What is required is the ability to treat these experiences critically and to test them independently...”

Specifically: Russia, so Ulyanov and all Russian Marxists believe, faces a bourgeois-democratic revolution against Tsarism — something like the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. The question of what role the working class and the Russian Marxist movement will play in that revolution will dominate Russian Marxism up to 1917. Groupings, factions, and parties will group and regroup around different conceptions of the Russian revolution and the role of Marxists in it. Lenin will argue that the Marxists should put themselves at the head of a great national workers’ and peasant revolution. This will led by the workers and peasants and directed not only against the Tsar and the landlords but also in part also against the big bourgeoisie. It can only achieve bourgeois democratic transformation of Russia, but it can make that transformation profound and radical, with wide rights for the workers.

“The national tasks of Russian Social-Democracy are such as have never confronted any other socialist party in the world. We shall have occasion further on to deal with the political and organisational duties which the task of emancipating the whole people from the yoke of [Tsarist] autocracy imposes upon us. At this point, we wish to state only that the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory...”

Ulyanov will later on in the book discuss the views of those who argue that ideas, “ideology”, can not shape and reshape the workers’ movement produced by a particular environment. Here, quoting Friedrich Engels, he outlines the key Marxist idea that the class struggle also takes place on the level of ideas. This view about “three fronts of the class struggle” is central to Marxism. There is nothing capricious, or “just Russian”, about it.

Germany

“Let us quote what Engels said in 1874 concerning the significance of theory in the Social-Democratic movement. Engels recognises, not two forms of the great struggle of Social Democracy (political and economic), as is the fashion among us, but three, placing the theoretical struggle on a par with the first two. His recommendations to the German working-class movement, which had become strong, practically and politically, are… instructive from the standpoint of present-day problems and controversies:

“The German workers have two important advantages over those of the rest of Europe. First, they belong to the most theoretical people of Europe; and they have retained that sense of theory which the so-called ‘educated’ classes of Germany have almost completely lost. Without German philosophy, which preceded it, particularly that of Hegel, German scientific socialism — the only scientific socialism that has ever existed — would never have come into being.

“Without a sense of theory among the workers, this scientific socialism would never have entered their flesh and blood as much as is the case.

“What an immeasurable advantage this is may be seen, on the one hand, from the indifference towards all theory, which is one of the main reasons why the English working-class movement crawls along so slowly in spite of the splendid organisation of the individual unions; on the other hand, from the mischief and confusion wrought by Proudhonism [proto-anarchism], in its original form, among the French and Belgians, and, in the form further caricatured by Bakunin, among the Spaniards and Italians.

“The second advantage is that, chronologically speaking, the Germans were about the last [of the big European nations] to come into the workers’ movement. Just as German theoretical socialism will never forget that it rests on the shoulders of Saint-Simon, Fourier, and Owen — three men who, in spite of all their fantastic notions and all their utopianism, have their place among the most eminent thinkers of all times, and whose genius anticipated innumerable things, the correctness of which is now being scientifically proved by us — so the practical workers’ movement in Germany ought never to forget that it has developed on the shoulders of the English and French movements, that it was able simply to utilise their dearly bought experience, and could now avoid their mistakes, which in their time were mostly unavoidable.

“Without the precedent of the English trade unions and French workers’ political struggles, without the gigantic impulse given especially by the Paris Commune [of 1871], where would we be now?

“It must be said to the credit of the German workers that they have exploited the advantages of their situation with rare understanding. For the first time since a workers’ movement has existed, the struggle is being conducted pursuant to its three sides — the theoretical, the political, and the practical-economic (resistance to the capitalists) — in harmony and in its interconnections, and in a systematic way.

“It is precisely in this, as it were, concentric attack, that the strength and invincibility of the German movement lies.

“Due to this advantageous situation, on the one hand, and to the insular peculiarities of the English and the forcible suppression [after 1871] of the French movement, on the other, the German workers have for the moment been placed in the vanguard of the proletarian struggle. How long events will allow them to occupy this post of honour cannot be foretold. But let us hope that as long as they occupy it, they will fill it fittingly.

“This demands redoubled efforts in every field of struggle and agitation. In particular, it will be the duty of the leaders to gain an ever clearer insight into all theoretical questions, to free themselves more and more from the influence of traditional phrases inherited from the old world outlook, and constantly to keep in mind that socialism, since it has become a science, demands that it be pursued as a science, i.e., that it be studied.

“The task will be to spread with increased zeal among the masses of the workers the ever more clarified understanding thus acquired, to knit together ever more firmly the organisation both of the party and of the trade unions…”

Ulyanov has learned from the German workers’ movement — he wrote What Is To Be Done? in Munich — but he quotes Engels expressing clearly the idea that having the workers of any nation seen as “at the head” of the movement is undesirable. The German workers’ movement was in fact “at the head”, and its turning chauvinist in 1914, its complicity in Germany invading Belgium and France, was central to the collapse of the Socialist International then.

Engels:“If the German workers progress in this way, they will not be marching exactly at the head of the movement — it is not at all in the interest of this movement that the workers of any particular country should march at its head — but they will occupy an honourable place in the battle line; and they will stand armed for battle when either unexpectedly grave trials or momentous events demand of them increased courage, increased determination and energy.”

And so, writes Ulyanov, it proved. “Within a few years the German workers were subjected to unexpectedly grave trials in the form of the Exceptional Law Against the Socialists [a law which made their party illegal, from 1878 to 1890]. And they met those trials armed for battle and succeeded in emerging from them victorious.

“The Russian proletariat will have to undergo trials immeasurably graver; it will have to fight a monster compared with which an anti-socialist law in a constitutional country seems but a dwarf.

“History has now confronted us with an immediate task which is the most revolutionary of all the immediate tasks confronting the proletariat of any country. The fulfilment of this task, the destruction of the most powerful bulwark, not only of European, but (it may now be said) of Asiatic reaction, would make the Russian proletariat the vanguard of the international revolutionary proletariat.

“And we have the right to count upon acquiring this honourable title, already earned by our predecessors , the revolutionaries [agrarian socialists and political ‘terrorists’] of the seventies, if we succeed in inspiring our movement, which is a thousand times broader and deeper, with the same devoted determination and vigour”.

Spontaneity

Ulyanov takes up one of the central questions of Marxist politics — the relationship between Marxism, and Marxists, and the “spontaneous” working class movement — to explain why he thinks Russian revolutionaries must strive so hard to be determined, vigorous, studious, and theoretically clear. He does not upbraid workers for being unaware; he urges revolutionaries to increased energy in educating themselves and enabling themselves to educate to workers anxious to hear. [2}

On one level Marxism is nothing but the theoretical summing up of the experience of the working class. The experience of the first mass working class movement, Chartism in Britain in the 1830s and 40s, played a great part in shaping the Marxism which Marx and Engels created in the 1840s and afterwards. But it was not the only element in it. James Connolly, in an obituary of Keir Hardie in 1915, asserted that Hardie’s life was “a living proof of the truth of the idea that labour could furnish in its own ranks all that was needed to achieve its own emancipation”. But in fact Marxism also grew out of the highest learning of the bourgeoisie — German philosophy and English political economy. It grew out of the work of “utopian socialists” such as Robert Owen.

The utopian socialists responded to the horrors which industrial capitalism inflicted on the proletariat by creating imaginary alternative social systems and then trying to build them from scratch as socialist colonies in some wilderness or other (in Texas, for example).

Marx and Engels brought many elements together to create a new outlook on the world.

Though this outlook subsumed the social experience of the proletariat and what could be learned from its attempt to build a labour movement, and though it expressed the historic interests of the working class, the fact that Marxism also embodied the highest learning of bourgeois society necessarily meant that it began divorced from the living working class. For the learning on which Marxism was erected was, in general, not the possession of capitalism’s exploited wage-slaves. {3]

Even when they accepted the socialist conclusions that Marx and Engels had established out of their learning, workers could not “spontaneously” arrive at Marxism for themselves. By definition, it had to come to them from “outside”, brought by representatives of the educated classes, in the first instance, Marx and Engels, or by workers who had made or gained special scope to educate themselves.

If not at Marxism, what exactly does the working class “spontaneously” arrive at when it tries to generalise its experience and elaborate its own distinct outlook? Ulyanov’s answer was that the working class arrives spontaneously only at trade union consciousness.

The proletariat also threw up men like Wilhelm Weitling and Pierre Joseph Proudhon, who created their own variants of utopian socialism, or — Proudhon — an outlook that corresponded to the interests of the petty bourgeois, the small producer, rather than those of the proletariat. With both of these famous socialists Marx clashed bitterly, counterposing his own ideas to theirs.

It is with this complex network of interlinked questions that Ulyanov deals in the section of What Is To Be Done entitled: “The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the [Marxist] Social-Democrats.”

He invokes the spirit of the great revolutionary populist movement of the past, the lone fighters who had killed the Tsar in 1881 and died on the scaffold, in jails and in bleak exile: the new, working class movement must recreate the splendid dedication and ardent revolutionary spirit of the old movement, but on a higher level.

“Our movement, much wider and deeper than the movement of the seventies, must be inspired with the same devoted determination and energy that inspired the movement of that time… No one, we think, has up to now doubted that the strength of the modern movement lies in the awakening of the masses (principally, the industrial proletariat);… its weakness [in contrast to the seventies] lies in the lack of consciousness and initiative among the revolutionary leaders.

“[The ‘Economist’-leaning paper] Rabochye Dyelo… in its polemic with Iskra and Zarya… tried to ascribe [its] ‘general disagreements’ [with Iskra] to a more profound cause — to the ‘different appraisals of the relative importance of the spontaneous and consciously “methodical” element’ [in the development of labour movements]. Rabochye Dyelo’s indictment reads: a ‘belittling of the significance of the objective, or the spontaneous, element of development’… [This thesis] illuminate[s] the quintessence of the present-day theoretical and political differences that exist among Russian Social-Democrats...

“We [have] pointed out how universally absorbed the educated youth of Russia was in the theories of Marxism in the middle of the nineties [when for a while thinly disguised Marxist books could be published legally because they presented the evolution of capitalism as opening new possibilities]. In the same period the strikes that followed the famous St. Petersburg industrial war of 1896 assumed a similar general character. Their spread over the whole of Russia clearly showed the depth of the newly awakening popular movement, and if we are to speak of the ‘spontaneous element’ then, of course, it is this strike movement which, first and foremost, must be regarded as spontaneous. But there is spontaneity and spontaneity.

Strikes

“Strikes occurred in Russia in the 1860s and 70s (and even in the first half of the nineteenth century), and they were accompanied by the ‘spontaneous’ destruction of machinery, etc. Compared with these ‘revolts’, the strikes of the 90s might even be described as ‘conscious’, to such an extent do they mark the progress which the working-class movement made in that period. This shows that the ‘spontaneous element’, in essence, represents nothing more nor less than consciousness in an embryonic form.

“Even the primitive revolts expressed the awakening of consciousness to a certain extent. The workers were losing their age-long faith in the permanence of the system which oppressed them and began... I shall not say to understand, but to sense the necessity for collective resistance, definitely abandoning their slavish submission to the authorities. But this was, nevertheless, more in the nature of outbursts of desperation and vengeance than of struggle.

“The strikes of the nineties revealed far greater flashes of consciousness; definite demands were advanced, the strike was carefully timed, known cases and instances in other places were discussed, etc.

“The revolts were simply the resistance of the oppressed, whereas the systematic strikes represented the class struggle in embryo, but only in embryo.

“Taken by themselves, these strikes were simply trade union struggles, not yet Social Democratic [class-conscious socialist] struggles. They marked the awakening antagonisms between workers and employers; but the workers, were not, and could not be, conscious of the irreconcilable antagonism of their interests to the whole of the modern political and social system [our emphasis], i.e., theirs was not yet Social-Democratic consciousness.

“In this sense, the strikes of the nineties, despite the enormous progress they represented as compared with the ‘revolts’, remained a purely spontaneous movement.

“We have said that there could not have been Social-Democratic [Marxist] consciousness among the workers. This consciousness could only be brought to them from without. The history of all countries shows that the working class, exclusively by its own effort, is able to develop only trade union consciousness, i.e., the conviction that it is necessary to combine in unions, fight the employers, and strive to compel the government to pass necessary labour legislation, etc.

“Trade unionism does not exclude “politics” altogether, as some imagine. Trade unions have always conducted political (but not Social-Democratic) agitation and struggle...

“The theory of [Marxist] socialism, however, grew out of the philosophic, historical, and economic theories elaborated by educated representatives of the propertied classes, by intellectuals. By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia.

“In the very same way, in Russia, the theoretical doctrine of Social-Democracy [Marxism] arose altogether independently of the spontaneous growth of the working-class movement; it arose as a natural and inevitable outcome of the development of thought among the revolutionary socialist intelligentsia.

“In the time of which we are speaking, the middle [eighteen] nineties, [Marxism] not only represented the completely formulated programme of the Emancipation of Labour group [of Plekhanov, Axelrod, Zasulich and others] but had already won over to its side the majority of the revolutionary youth in Russia.

“Hence, we had both the spontaneous awakening of the working masses, their awakening to conscious life and conscious struggle, and a revolutionary youth, armed with Social-Democratic theory and straining towards the workers. In this connection it is particularly important to state the oft-forgotten (and comparatively little-known) fact that, although the early Social-Democrats of that period zealously carried on economic agitation (being guided in this activity by the truly useful indications contained in the pamphlet [of Kremer and Martov] On Agitation, then still in manuscript), they did not regard this as their sole task.

“On the contrary, from the very beginning they set for Russian Social-Democracy the most far-reaching historical tasks, in general, and the task of overthrowing the [Tsarist] autocracy, in particular…

“A part (perhaps even a majority) of the Social-Democrats, active in the period of 1895-98, justly considered it possible even then, at the very beginning of the ‘spontaneous’ movement, to come forward with a most extensive programme and a militant tactical line. Lack of training of the majority of the revolutionaries, an entirely natural phenomenon, could not have roused any particular fears.

“Since the tasks were properly defined, since the energy existed for repeated attempts to fulfil them, temporary failures represented only part misfortune. Revolutionary experience and organisational skill are things that can be acquired, provided the desire is there to acquire them, provided the shortcomings are recognised, which in revolutionary activity is more than half-way towards removing them.

“But what was only part misfortune became full misfortune when this consciousness began to grow dim… when there appeared people — and even Social-Democratic organs — that were prepared to regard shortcomings as virtues, that even tried to invent a theoretical basis for their slavish cringing before spontaneity. It is time to draw conclusions from this trend, the content of which is incorrectly and too narrowly characterised as Economism...

Leaders

“The founding of [the newspaper] Rabochaya Mysl [in 1897] brought Economism to the light of day... [The] leading article [of the first issue of Rabochaya Mysl brings out in bold relief the entire spirit of Rabochaya Mysl and Economism generally...”

The article said: “The virility of the working-class movement is due to the fact that the workers themselves are at last taking their fate into their own hands, and out of the hands of the leaders”.

Ulyanov:“Actually, the leaders (i.e. the Social-Democrats, the organisers of the League of Struggle) were, one might say, torn out of the hands of the workers by the police; yet it is made to appear that the workers were fighting against the leaders and liberated themselves from their yoke!” He means the leaders of the St Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class — himself, Martov, Potresov, and others — who, like many revolutionaries then, were arrested (in 1895 and 1896) after only some months of activity.

“Instead of sounding the call to go forward towards the consolidation of the revolutionary organisation and the expansion of political activity, the call was issued [by Rabochaya Mysl] for a retreat to the purely trade union struggle. They announced that ‘the economic basis of the movement is eclipsed by the effort never to forget the political ideal’, and that the watchword for the working-class movement was ‘Struggle for economic conditions’ (!) or, better still, ‘The workers for the workers’.”

That is, the reduction of Marxist work to exclusive concentration on direct and immediate economic questions that affected workers. What had been a big step forward earlier in the 1890s, with the Marxists expanding from secret discussion circles to leafleting which reached workers on “economic” issues, was made exclusive and became one-sided and false.

“It was declared that strike funds ‘are more valuable to the movement than a hundred other organisations’... etc. Catchwords like ‘We must concentrate, not on the “cream” of the workers, but on the “average”, mass worker’; ‘Politics always obediently follows economics’, etc., etc., became the fashion, exercising an irresistible influence upon the masses of the youth who were attracted to the movement but who, in the majority of cases, were acquainted only with such fragments of Marxism as were expounded in legally appearing publications.

“Political consciousness was completely overwhelmed by spontaneity — the spontaneity of the ‘Social-Democrats’…” The Marxist socialists became illegal trade unionists.

“Phrases like these have always been a favourite weapon of the West-European bourgeois, who, in their hatred for socialism, strove… to transplant English trade-unionism to their native soil and to preach to the workers that by engaging in the purely trade union struggle they would be fighting for themselves and for their children, and not for some future generations with some future socialism. And now [some Russian Social-Democrats] have set about repeating these bourgeois phrases.”

Consciousness

“The overwhelming of political consciousness by spontaneity, to which we referred above, also took place spontaneously. This may sound like a pun, but, alas, it is the bitter truth. It did not take place as a result of an open struggle between two diametrically opposed points of view, in which one triumphed over the other; it occurred because of the fact that an increasing number of ‘old’ revolutionaries were ‘torn away’ by the gendarmes and... increasing numbers of ‘young’... Social Democrats appeared on the scene...

“Secondly, in the very first literary expression of Economism we observe the exceedingly curious phenomenon — highly characteristic for an understanding of all the differences prevailing among present day Social Democrats — that the adherents of the ‘labour movement pure and simple’, worshippers of the closest ‘organic’ contacts (Rabochye Dyelo’s term) with the proletarian struggle, opponents of any non-worker intelligentsia (even a socialist intelligentsia), are compelled, in order to defend their positions, to resort to the arguments of the bourgeois ‘pure trade-unionists’...

“All worship of the spontaneity of the working class movement, all belittling of the role of ‘the conscious element’, of the role of Social-Democracy, means, quite independently of whether he who belittles that role desires it or not, a strengthening of the influence of bourgeois ideology upon the workers. All those who talk about ‘overrating the importance of ideology’, about exaggerating the role of the conscious element, etc., imagine that the labour movement pure and simple can elaborate, and will elaborate, an independent ideology for itself, if only the workers ‘wrest their fate from the hands of the leaders’. But this is a profound mistake”. It ignores the fact that workers live amidst a constant downpour of bourgeois ideologies. Those will prevail unless the Marxists are energetic and sharp enough with alternatives.

Ulyanov quotes Karl Kautsky, then the main theoretician of German Social Democracy, on a new draft programme of the Austrian Social-Democratic Party.

“Many of our revisionist critics believe that Marx asserted that economic development and the class struggle create, not only the conditions for socialist production, but also, and directly, the consciousness [KK’s emphasis] of its necessity. Judging by the draft, one might assume that this... view... was shared by the committee that drafted the Austrian programme”.

Kautsky quotes: “The more capitalist development increases the numbers of the proletariat, the more the proletariat is compelled and becomes fit to fight against capitalism. The proletariat becomes conscious of the possibility and of the necessity for socialism. In this connection socialist consciousness appears to be a necessary and direct result of the proletarian class struggle”.

Not so, writes Kautsky. “Of course, socialism, as a doctrine, has its roots in modern economic relationships just as the class struggle of the proletariat has, and, like the latter, emerges from the struggle against the capitalist-created poverty and misery of the masses. But socialism and the class struggle arise side by side and not one out of the other; each arises under different conditions.

“Modern socialist consciousness can arise only on the basis of profound scientific knowledge. Indeed, modern economic science is as much a condition for socialist production as, say, modern technology, and the proletariat can create neither the one nor the other, no matter how much it may desire to do so; both arise out of the modern social process. The vehicle of science is not the proletariat, but the bourgeois intelligentsia [KK’s italics]: it was in the minds of individual members of this stratum that modern socialism originated, and it was they who communicated it to the more intellectually developed proletarians who, in their turn, introduce it into the proletarian class struggle where conditions allow that to be done. Thus, socialist consciousness is something introduced into the proletarian class struggle from without and not something that arose within it spontaneously. Accordingly, the old Hainfeld programme quite rightly stated that the task of Social-Democracy is to imbue the proletariat (literally: saturate the proletariat) with the consciousness of its position and the consciousness of its task. There would be no need for this if consciousness arose of itself from the class struggle. The new draft copied this proposition from the old programme, and attached it to the proposition mentioned above. But this completely broke the line of thought...”

Socialist theoreticians

Of course, Ulyanov adds, this does not mean that the workers have no part in creating such an ideology. “They take part, however, not as workers, but as socialist theoreticians, as Proudhons and Weitlings; in other words, they take part only when they are able, and to the extent that they are able, more or less, to acquire the knowledge of their age and develop that knowledge.

“In order that workers may succeed in this more often, every effort must be made to raise the level of the consciousness of the workers in general; it is necessary that the workers do not confine themselves to the artificially restricted limits of ‘literature for workers’ but that they learn to an increasing degree to master general literature.

“It would be even truer to say ‘are not confined’, instead of ‘do not confine themselves’, because the workers themselves wish to read and do read all that is written for the intelligentsia, and only a few (bad) intellectuals believe that it is enough ‘for workers’ to be told a few things about factory conditions and to have repeated to them over and over again what has long been known”.

[1] For an example from recent times: Northern Ireland, which was and is very complicated, with an all-Ireland minority, the Protestant Unionists, becoming a majority in an artificially-delineated Six Counties state with an artificial Catholic-nationalist minority a bigger proportion of the Six Counties population than all the Protestants were in all Ireland. The pretence — that’s all it could be — that Protestants and Catholics in the Six Counties would unite around trade-union questions, and that was enough to answer the “constitutional question”, flew in the face of all history and was an evasion. Though ultra-leftism is the last thing one thinks of when Militant, forerunner of the Socialist Party and Socialist Appeal, is considered, they were “ultra-left” on Northern Ireland with their “workers’ trade-union unity is the answer” line when the Catholic revolt was on.

[2] Lars Lih’s big book Lenin Rediscovered stresses that the Russian word translated into English versions of What Is To Be Done? as “spontaneous” means something more like “elemental”, constrained by lack of developed awareness, than unconstrained.

[3] Socialism in a vague and incoherent sense could be created by some workers instinctively, but socialism meaning Marxist socialism could not. That is the sense in which “socialism”, meaning Marxist socialism, has to be brought in from “outside” the working-class movement. Joseph Dietzgen, a German artisan and a member of the German Social Democracy, worked out a variant of what history has called Marxism, but that was a freak, rather than typical or representative.