Reading Lenin: The Vanguard

The idea

Read chapter two of What Is To Be Done? at the Marxists Internet Archive. Source read: https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/ii.htm. Lenin argues that socialist consciousness cannot arise from the workers' own struggle. "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." Socialist theory, he says, "would have to be brought to them from without", by intellectuals. Three consequences follow, and the anchor's summary rests on them. First, a party of professional revolutionaries must lead, not follow, the workers. Second, worship of spontaneity strengthens bourgeois ideology, so the party must instruct. Third, since consciousness comes from outside the class, a peasant country can be led past the capitalist stage Marx thought necessary. Read it as the seed of one-party rule: whoever holds the consciousness holds the right to lead.