What Is to Be Done?

By: Vladimir Lenin

Narrated by: Adam Douglas

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.

Public Domain (P)2020 Museum Audiobooks

a blueprint for a revolution

written 7 years before the Russian revolution in 1917. an amazing outline of, like he says, what is to be done.

incredibly salient, even today

An analytical work on what to do if you're at odds with the state. Great book.

Great To Read the Unfiltered Works of the World’s Monsters

The narration was great! I love reading the unfiltered works of the word’s monsters to try to get insight in how to prevent similar movements from successfully emerging again. In What Is To Be Done, Lenin argues for need of the professional revolutionary because the masses are not competent to lead a revolution. This results in the “successful” revolution being dominated by professional revolutionaries. When they succeed, as in the USSR and China, these professional revolutionaries go on to run their countries’ with their prime motivation being retain power at all costs. They denominate, terrorize, and even kill the masses to keep them under control. The professional revolutionaries, including Lenin, are not heroes. The Europeans who brought social democracy through the parliamentary process, which Lenin in later works claimed would fail, were much more successful in improving their societies for the masses than were the revolutionary mobsters such as Lenin, Stalin, and Mao.

Revolutions 101

Concise and articulate information that gives great guidance on the pitfalls of radical movements. The way Lenin makes the case for a movement based on political and economic pains shows how ahead of his time Lenin was. He died too soon.

4/5 meow meow beans

This book was more superficial than i wanted it to be. 3rd part is where the listening really gets good, but shoot! i did not retain this argument well.