Professional Revolutionaries
직업혁명가
An organisational concept Lenin advanced in What Is to Be Done? (1902): people who make revolutionary activity their profession and are professionally trained in the art of combating the political police. Lenin argued that under the autocracy, alongside broad and open workers' organisations, a small, secret and stable organisation of such revolutionaries, in which distinctions between workers and intellectuals were effaced, must secure the movement's continuity. It became the starting point of the Bolshevik conception of the vanguard party and was criticised as "ultra-centralism" by Luxemburg, the young Trotsky and others.
In depth
The argument of What Is to Be Done?
Lenin introduced the concept in chapter IV of What Is to Be Done?, written between autumn 1901 and February 1902, in criticising the "handicraft" methods of the Economists. He distinguished the organisation of workers from the organisation of revolutionaries. The workers' organisation must first of all be a trade-union organisation, as broad and as public as possible. The organisation of revolutionaries, by contrast, "must consist first and foremost of people who make revolutionary activity their profession", and in view of this common characteristic all distinctions between workers and intellectuals, not to speak of distinctions of trade and profession, must be effaced. Such an organisation must not be very extensive and must be as secret as possible.
Lenin summed it up in five propositions: no revolutionary movement can endure without a stable organisation of leaders maintaining continuity; the broader the mass drawn spontaneously into the struggle, the more urgent the need for such an organisation; it must consist chiefly of people professionally engaged in revolutionary activity; in an autocratic state, the more its membership is confined to people professionally trained in the art of combating the political police, the harder it will be to unearth; and the greater will be the number of people from the working class and other classes able to join the movement and work in it. Recalling his own days as an amateur, he wrote: "Give us an organisation of revolutionaries, and we will overturn Russia!"
Spontaneity, consciousness and the vanguard party
The organisational argument is tied to the book's other theses. Lenin held that by their spontaneous struggle alone workers reach only trade-union consciousness, and that Social-Democratic consciousness has to be brought from outside the economic struggle. A national political newspaper and an organisation of professional revolutionaries were therefore to raise the spontaneous movement to political struggle. The idea led to the dispute between Lenin and Martov over party membership at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903 and the split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and later underlay the Leninist conception of the vanguard party.
Criticism and assessment
In "Organisational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy" (1904) Rosa Luxemburg criticised the "ultra-centralism" Lenin advocated as driven not by a creative spirit but by "the sterile spirit of the night-watchman", aiming to control party activity rather than to fertilise it. The mistakes a truly revolutionary workers' movement makes, she wrote, are historically far more fruitful than the infallibility of the very best central committee. The same year Trotsky, in Our Political Tasks, set a party that "thinks for" the proletariat and "substitutes itself politically for it" against one that politically educates and mobilises the proletariat, and placed Lenin's method in the first camp.
Lenin himself confined the scheme to the conditions of autocratic Russia: What Is to Be Done? distinguished countries with political liberty from absolutist Russia. Whether the concept is a permanent principle of Bolshevism or a tactic adapted to illegality is still debated.