What Is You Be Done?

Karya Lenin "What Is To Be Done?"

What Is To Be Done? Ialah karya Lenin yang diterbitkan akhir tahun 1901 dan awal tahun 1902. Pada artikelLenin yang berjudul, “Where Too Begin” yang diterbitkan oleh Iskra Bulan Mei 1901, Ia menyatakan “a skeleton plan to be developed in greater detail in a pamphlet now in preparation for print”. Lenin memulai menulis sebenarnya pada musim gugur 1901. Dalam pengantar, “Preface to the Pamphlet Documents of the ‘Unity’ Conference” yang ditulis bulan November 1901, Lenin menyatakan bahwa buku tersebut dalam tahap persiapan. Pada bulan Desember Lenin menulis Ikhtisar “What Is To Be Done?” dirangkum dalam sebuah artikel yang berjudul “A Talk with Defenders of Economism”.

Isi dari buku itu ialah :

1.Dogmatism And “Freedom of Criticism”

a)a) What Does “Freedom of Criticism” Mean?

b)b) The New Advocates of “Freedom of Criticism”

c)c) Criticism in Russia

d)Engels On the Importance of the Theoretical Struggle

2.The Spontaneity of the Masses and the Consciousness of the Social-Democrats

a)The Beginning of the Spontaneous Upsurge
b)The Begin Spontaneity. Rabochaya Mysl
c)The Self-Emancipation Groupand Rabocheye Dyelo

3.Trade-Unionist Politics And Social-Democratic Politics

a)Political Agitation And Its Restriction By the Economists
b)How Martynov Rendered Plekhanov More Profound
c)Political Exposures And “Training In Revolutionary Activity”
d)What Is There In Common Between Economism and Terrorism?
e)The Working Class As Vanguard Fighter For Democracy
f)Once More “Slanderers”, Once More “Mystifiers”

4.The Primitiveness of the Economists and the Organization of the Revolutionaries

a)WHAT IS PRIMITIVENESS?
b)Primitiveness and Economism
c)Organisation of Workers and Organisation of Revolutionaries
d)The Scope of Organisational Work
e)“Conspiratorial” Organisation and “Democratism”
f)Local and All-Russia Work

5.The “Plan” For an All-Russia Political Newspaper

a)Who Was Offended By the Article “Where To Begin”
b)Can A Newspaper Be A Collective Organiser?
c)What Type of Organisation Do We Require?

Bab pertama dari buku ini merupakan pembelaan dari tren Marxist revolusioner dalam gerakan kelas pekerja. Ini menunjukkan bahwa Bernsteinians menggunakan selogan “Freedom of Criticism” untuk topeng yang diusulkan mereka semua pada semua prinsip dasar marxisme. Seperti halnya Bernsteinians mengajurkan “class cooperation” dan menolak ide proletar dan kediktatorannya. Lenin berpandangan bahwa pengembangan kreatif terhadap Marxisme diperkaya dengan perjuangan kaum ploretar yang sebenarnya itu tidak sama dengan upaya kaum revisionis untuk menumbangkan dasar-dasar dan prinsif Marxisme. “Freedom of Criticism” ditulis Lenin yang berarti “freedom for an opportunist trend in social –Democracy” yang mengubah social –Democracy kepada menjadi democratic party of reform. Dimana kebebasan untuk memperkenalkan ide-ide borjuis dan elemennya ke dalam sosialisme. Sebagaimana :

“Social-Democracy must change from a party of social revolution into a democratic party of social reforms. Bernstein has surrounded this political demand with a whole battery of well-attuned “new” arguments and reasonings. Denied was the possibility of putting socialism on a scientific basis and of demonstrating its necessity and inevitability from the point of view of the materialist conception of history. Denied was the fact of growing impoverishment, the process of proletarisation, and the intensification of capitalist contradictions; the very concept, “ultimate aim”, was declared to be unsound, and the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat was completely rejected. Denied was the antithesis in principle between liberalism and socialism. Denied was the theory of the class struggle, on the alleged grounds that it could not be applied to a strictly democratic society governed according to the will of the majority, etc”

Paham Ekonomi Russia merupakan sebuah varian dari paham oportunis internasional. Dengan pengaminan spontanitas gerakan kelas pekerja, menekankan pada semua aspek ekonomi dari perjuangan kelas kaum proletar dan menganjurkan pendekatan reformis untuk perjuangan politik, yang memerankan kesadaran sosialis dan partai gerakan buruh yang dilihat secara objektif. Semua itu dijadikan kendaraan kaum borjuis pada kaum proletar. Hal ini dikarenakan mereka mencoba melucuti kelas pekerja baik secara ideologis maupun organisatoris dalam melawan otokrasi dan borjuasi. Paham ekonomi tersebut hingga pada akhirnya menjadi pangkal hambatan menuju kekuasaan yang terpusat oleh partai Marxist revolusioner. Sebagaimana :

“The chief distinguishing feature of Russia in regard to the point we are examining is that the very beginning of the spontaneous working-class movement, on the one hand, and of the turn of progressive public opinion towards Marxism, on the other, was marked by the combination of manifestly heterogeneous elements under a common flag to fight the common enemy (the obsolete social and political world outlook). We refer to the heyday of “legal Marxism”. Speaking generally, this was an altogether curious phenomenon that no one in the eighties or the beginning of the nineties would have believed possible. In a country ruled by an autocracy, with a completely enslaved press, in a period of desperate political reaction in which even the tiniest outgrowth of political discontent and protest is persecuted, the theory of revolutionary Marxism suddenly forces its way into the censored literature and, though expounded in Aesopian language, is understood by all the “interested”. The government had accustomed itself to regarding only the theory of the (revolutionary) Narodnaya Volya as dangerous, without, as is usual, observing its internal evolution, and rejoicing at any criticism levelled against it. Quite a considerable time elapsed (by our Russian standards) before the government realised what had happened and the unwieldy army of censors and gendarmes discovered the new enemy and flung itself upon him. Meanwhile, Marxist books were published one after another, Marxist journals and newspapers were founded, nearly everyone became a Marxist, Marxists were flattered, Marxists were courted, and the book publishers rejoiced at the extraordinary, ready sale of Marxist literature. It was quite natural, therefore, that among the Marxian neophytes who were caught up in this atmosphere, there should be more than one”

Setelah membuka kedok ideologi ekonomi oportunis, Lenin mendukung dan menekankan pentingnya teori revolusioner dan partai Marxis sebagai kekuatan utama dalam perjuangan kelas atau gerakan buruh. Lenin menunjukkan hubungan yang dihilangkan pada semua aspek perjuangan kelas kaum proletar, politik, ekonomi, dan ideologi. Lalu menekankan kekuatan khusus signifikasi teoritis (yaitu ideologi) partai pekerja.

Bab kedua berkaitan dengan hubungan spontanitas dan kesadaran dalam gerakan kelas pekerja. Para ekonom menyatakan bahwa “Social –Democracy” tidak perlu menanamkan kesadaran sosialis pada kelas pekerja. Mereka mengira bahwa semua itu merupakan gangguan bagi gerakan buruh di luar kesadaran sosialis dengan upayanya sendiri. Di sini Lenin menunjukkan bahwa “the socialist doctrine is worked out by the ideologists of the working class and is carried over by the working-class party into the class struggle of the proletariat—a struggle that grows spontaneously out of the soil of capitalist relations”.

Lenin menunjukkan bahwa sejarah dunia beritakan mengenai trade-unionist hanya bisa dilakukan sendiri oleh usaha kelas pekerja. Ideologi sosialis dimasukkan kedalam gerakan buruh dalam perjuangan yang kompleks, terus menerus, dan enggan terhadap ideologi borjuis. Dalam kata-kata Lenin the only choice is—either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course. Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology.Oleh karena itu meremehkan ideologi sosialis dengan cara apapun untuk penyimpangan ialah untuk memperkuat ideologi borjuis. Pada awal abad ke 20 Patai Marxis Russia dihadapkan pada tugas yang ditunjjukan Lenin bahwa harus adanya pengaturan gerakan kelas pekerja dalam perjuangan politik melawan kapistalisme dan mempersenjatai dengan ide ide sosialisme ilmiah.

“Since there can be no talk of an independent ideology formulated by the working masses themselves in the process of their movement, e only choice is — either bourgeois or socialist ideology. There is no middle course (for mankind has not created a “third” ideology, and, moreover, in a society torn by class antagonisms there can never be a non-class or an above-class ideology). Hence, to belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology, to its development along the lines of the Credo programme; for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism, is Nur-Gewerkschaftlerei, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy. The sentence employed by the authors of the Economist letter published in Iskra, No. 12, that the efforts of the most inspired ideologists fail to divert the working-class movement from the path that is determined by the interaction of the material elements and the material environment is therefore tantamount to renouncing socialism. If these authors were capable of fearlessly, consistently, and thoroughly considering what they say, as everyone who enters the arena of literary and public activity should be, there would be nothing left for them but to “fold their useless arms over their empty breasts” and surrender the field of action to the Struves and Prokopoviches, who are dragging the working-class movement “along the line of least resistance”, i.e., along the line of bourgeois trade-unionism, or to the Zubatovs, who are dragging it along the line of clerical and gendarme “ideology”.

Pada bab ketika Lenin menjelaskan hubungan ekonomi dan politik dari perjuangan kelas kaum ploretar. Lenin mengkritik ekonomi serikat perdagangan dan melihat para reformis politik yang didukung kebijakan Partai Marxis revolusioner. Di sini juga lenin menunjukkan bahwa membatasi perjuangan politik untuk perjuangan reformasi untuk mengutuk perbudakan upah kelas pekerja. Maka dengan itu satu-satunya cara ploretariat radikal dalam peningkatan posisi ekonomi adalah dengan menggulingkan kekuasaan kaum penghisap dan berjuang untuk kekuatan kelas pekerja. Selain daripada itu bahwa kepentingan mendasar ekonomi ploretariat dapat dipenuhi dengan revolusi politik yang menggantikkan kediktatoran kaum borjuis dengan kediktatoran proletariat. Sebagai berikut :

But everyone agrees with this!” the impatient reader will exclaim, and the new instructions adopted by the last conference of the Union Abroad for the Editorial Board of Rabocheye Dyelo definitely say: “All events of social and political life that affect the proletariat either directly as a special class or as the vanguard of all the revolutionary forces in the struggle for freedom should serve as subjects for political propaganda and agitation”. Yes, these are very true and very good words, and we would be fully satisfied if Rabocheye Dyelo understood them and if it refrained from saying in the next breath things that contradict them. For it is not enough to call ourselves the “vanguard”, the advanced contingent; we must act in such a way that all the other contingents recognise and are obliged to admit that we are marching in the vanguard. And we ask the reader: Are the representatives of the other “contingents” such fools as to take our word for it when we say that we are the “vanguard”? just picture to yourselves the following: a Social-Democrat comes to the “contingent” of Russian educated radicals, or liberal constitutionalists, and says, We are the vanguard; “the task confronting us now is, as far as possible, to lend the economic struggle itself a political character”. The radical, or constitutionalist, if he is at all intelligent (and there are many intelligent men among Russian radicals and constitutionalists), would only smile at such a speech and would say (to himself, of course, for in the majority of cases he is an experienced diplomat): “Your ’vanguard’ must be made up of simpletons. They do not even understand that it is our task, the task of the progressive representatives of bourgeois democracy to lend the workers’ economic struggle itself a political character. Why, we too, like the West-European bourgeois, want to draw the workers into politics, but only into trade-unionist, not into Social-Democratic politics. Trade-unionist politics of the working class is precisely bourgeois politics of the working class, and this ‘vanguard’s’ formulation of its task is the formulation of trade-unionist politics! Let them call themselves Social-Democrats to their heart’s content, I am not a child to get excited over a label. But they must not fall under the influence of those pernicious orthodox doctrinaires, let them allow ’freedom of criticism’ to those who unconsciously are driving Social-Democracy into trade-unionist channels.”

Pada bab ke empat dan kelima dari karyanya, Lenin membuktikan rencanana dalam membangun sebuah partai marxis dalam penjelasan artikelnya yan berjudul “Where to Begin?”. Kelompok sosial demokrasi dan komite Russia merupakan kekuatan terbesar dan tidak terorganisir. Mereka tidak mampu memimpin dalam upaya pelaksanaan tujuan-tujuan kaum politik kaum proletar. Hal yang dibutuhkan di sana ialah organisasi tungal. Lenin membahas hal ini ketika ia menulis bahwa “the spontaneous struggle of the proletariat will not become its genuine ’class struggle’ until this struggle is led by a strong organization of revolutionaries”.

Lenin menyatakan bahwa dalam membangun partai harus dimulai dengan surat kabar politik nasional Russia untuk menyebarluaskan pandangan “revolutionary Social Democracy”. Jaringan diselenggarakan surat kabar dari agen dan koresponden sebagai kerangka dalam pembangunannya. Menurut Lenin partai itu terdiri dari a narrow circle of leading party workers dan a broad network of party organizations.