What Is To Be Done
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What Is To Be Done
''What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement'' is a political pamphlet written by Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin (credited as N. Lenin) in 1901 and published in 1902. Lenin said that the article represented "a skeleton plan to be developed in greater detail in a pamphlet now in preparation for print." Its title is taken from the 1863 novel of the same name by the Russian revolutionary Nikolai Chernyshevsky. In ''What Is to Be Done?'', Lenin argues that the working class will not spontaneously become political simply by fighting economic battles with employers over wages, working hours, and the like. To educate the working class on Marxism, Lenin insists that Marxists should form a political party, or vanguard, of dedicated revolutionaries in order to spread Marxist political ideas among the workers. The pamphlet, in part, precipitated the split of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party between Lenin's Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. Main points Lenin ...
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Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. ( 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,. was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism. Born to an upper-middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire's Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye in Siberia for three years, where he married ...
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Economism
Economism, sometimes spelled economicism, is a term referring to the distraction of working class political activism from a global political project to purely economic demands. The concept encompasses rewarding workers in socialism with money incentives, rather than incentivizing workers through revolutionary politics. The term is originally associated with Vladimir Lenin's critique of trade unionism. In Marxist analysis The term economism was used by Lenin in his critique of the trade union movement, in reference to how working class demands for a more global political project can become supplanted by purely economic demands. Economistic demands include higher wages, shorter working hours, secure employment, health care, and other benefits. In his criticism of economism, Lenin's view was that the political figure of the worker could not necessarily be inferred from the worker's social position. Under capitalism, the worker's labor power is commodified and sold in exchange for ...
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Marxists Internet Archive
Marxists Internet Archive (also known as MIA or Marxists.org) is a non-profit online encyclopedia that hosts a multilingual library (created in 1990) of the works of communist, anarchist, and socialist writers, such as Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Rosa Luxemburg, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Kropotkin and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, as well as that of writers of related ideologies, and even unrelated ones (for instance, Sun Tzu). The collection is maintained by volunteers, and is based on a collection of documents that were distributed by email and newsgroups, later collected into a single gopher site in 1993. It contains over 180,000 documents from over 850 authors in 80 languages. History Origins The archive was created in 1990 by a person — known only by his Internet tag, Zodiac — who started archiving Marxist texts by transcribing the works of Marx and Engels into E-text, starting with the ''Communist Manifesto''. In 1993 ...
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Political Consciousness
Following the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Marx outlined the workings of a political consciousness. The politics of consciousness Consciousness typically refers to the idea of a being who is self-aware. It is a distinction often reserved for human beings. This remains the original and most common usage of the term. For Marx, consciousness describes a person's political sense of self. That is, consciousness describes a person's awareness of politics. For Marx, an authentic consciousness was linked to understanding one's true position in History. While Hegel placed God behind the workings of consciousness in people, Marx saw the political economy as the engine of mind. In the 20th century, many social movements and intellectuals have developed this use of consciousness. False consciousness In Marx's view, consciousness was always political, for it was always the outcome of politic-economic circumstances. What one thinks of life, power, and self, for Marx, is ...
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International Committee Of The Fourth International
The International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI) is the name of two Trotskyist internationals; one with sections named Socialist Equality Party which publishes the World Socialist Web Site, and another linked to the Workers Revolutionary Party in the UK. Foundation The International Committee originated as a public faction of the Fourth International. It was formed in 1953 by a number of national sections of the FI that disagreed with the course of the International Secretariat of the Fourth International led at that time by Michel Pablo (Raptis) and Ernest Mandel (Germain). The Committee was co-ordinated by the American section, the Socialist Workers Party, and included the British section led by Gerry Healy and Pierre Lambert's Internationalist Communist Party (PCI) in France. Trotskyist groups in various other countries, notably in Switzerland, China, Canada and Nahuel Moreno's group in Argentina, also joined. The grouping's founding statement was an open le ...
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World Socialist Web Site
The World Socialist Web Site (WSWS) is the website of the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI). It describes itself as an "online newspaper of the international Trotskyist movement". The WSWS publishes articles and analysis of news and events from around the world, updated daily. The site also includes coverage of the history of working-class political and organized labor movements. About The WSWS was established on February 14, 1998. The site was redesigned on October 22, 2008, and then again on October 1, 2020. The WSWS supports and helps campaign for the Socialist Equality Parties in elections. The site has no advertisements, except for material from Mehring Books, the ICFI's publishing arm. Instead, it sustains itself through the donations of readers and supporters. David North serves as Chairman of the site's International Editorial Board. Content The WSWS publishes articles on politics, finance and economics, culture, police violence, racis ...
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Bourgeoisie
The bourgeoisie ( , ) is a social class, equivalent to the middle or upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with, the proletariat by their affluence, and their great cultural and financial capital. They are sometimes divided into a petty (), middle (), large (), upper (), and ancient () bourgeoisie and collectively designated as "the bourgeoisie". The bourgeoisie in its original sense is intimately linked to the existence of cities, recognized as such by their urban charters (e.g., municipal charters, town privileges, German town law), so there was no bourgeoisie apart from the citizenry of the cities. Rural peasants came under a different legal system. In Marxist philosophy, the bourgeoisie is the social class that came to own the means of production during modern industrialization and whose societal concerns are the value of property and the preservation of capital to ensure the perpetuation of their economic supremacy in society. ...
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Orthodox Marxists
Orthodox Marxism is the body of Marxist thought that emerged after the death of Karl Marx (1818–1883) and which became the official philosophy of the majority of the Socialism, socialist movement as represented in the Second International until the First World War in 1914. Orthodox Marxism aims to simplify, codify and systematize Marxist method and theory by clarifying the perceived ambiguities and contradictions of classical Marxism. The philosophy of orthodox Marxism argues that material development (advances in technology in the productive forces) is the primary agent of change in the structure of society. Orthodox Marxists believe that certain social systems (e.g. feudalism, capitalism and so on) become contradictory as productive forces develop, resulting in social revolutions in response to those mounting contradictions. This revolutionary change is the vehicle for fundamental society-wide changes, and ultimately leads to the emergence of new economic systems. In the te ...
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Bourgeois
The bourgeoisie ( , ) is a social class, equivalent to the middle or upper middle class. They are distinguished from, and traditionally contrasted with, the proletariat by their affluence, and their great cultural and financial capital. They are sometimes divided into a petty (), middle (), large (), upper (), and ancient () bourgeoisie and collectively designated as "the bourgeoisie". The bourgeoisie in its original sense is intimately linked to the existence of cities, recognized as such by their urban charters (e.g., municipal charters, town privileges, German town law), so there was no bourgeoisie apart from the citizenry of the cities. Rural peasants came under a different legal system. In Marxist philosophy, the bourgeoisie is the social class that came to own the means of production during modern industrialization and whose societal concerns are the value of property and the preservation of capital to ensure the perpetuation of their economic supremacy in society. ...
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Alexandre Millerand
Alexandre Millerand (; – ) was a French politician. He was Prime Minister of France from 20 January to 23 September 1920 and President of France from 23 September 1920 to 11 June 1924. His participation in Waldeck-Rousseau's cabinet at the start of the 20th century, alongside the Marquis de Galliffet, who had directed the repression of the 1871 Paris Commune, sparked a debate in the French Section of the Workers' International (SFIO) and in the Second International about the participation of socialists in bourgeois governments. Biography Early life and religion Millerand was brought up in Paris, to Jean-François Millerand and Amélie-Mélanie Cahen of Alsatian Jewish origin, while his paternal family originated from Franche-Comté. Millerand was baptized in 1860, while his mother converted to Catholicism. However, Millerand later became an agnostic, even going as far as to participate in a civil marriage ceremony. He temporized later on letting his children being baptize ...
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Socialism
Socialism is a left-wing economic philosophy and movement encompassing a range of economic systems characterized by the dominance of social ownership of the means of production as opposed to private ownership. As a term, it describes the economic, political and social theories and movements associated with the implementation of such systems. Social ownership can be state/public, community, collective, cooperative, or employee. While no single definition encapsulates the many types of socialism, social ownership is the one common element. Different types of socialism vary based on the role of markets and planning in resource allocation, on the structure of management in organizations, and from below or from above approaches, with some socialists favouring a party, state, or technocratic-driven approach. Socialists disagree on whether government, particularly existing government, is the correct vehicle for change. Socialist systems are divided into non-market and market f ...
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