“What is to be done?” That’s the question posed in a 1902 pamphlet by Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as “Lenin,” as the young revolutionary began to flesh out his weaponization of Karl Marx’s principles of communism.
It wasn’t enough, argued Lenin in typically turgid prose, to expect Russia’s nearly non-existent industrialized working class—the proletariat—to come to international Socialism on its own.
Instead, he believed, the radical “Populists” who advocated the communization of the peasantry as a necessary first step were in fact advocating a form of capitalism—and that couldn’t be allowed to happen. True Socialism, said Lenin, could only be found in Marxism, and for that a strong Communist Party was needed to guide the Russian people to the correct conclusions. And so he provided one.
Two decades later, Lenin was the absolute master of the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Against all odds, a true communist society had come into being without ever having passed through a capitalist phase.
The horror that resulted would last until Christmas Day, 1991, when the USSR collapsed of its own “internal contradictions” and in the face of implacable opposition and a clear objective from Ronald Reagan. “We win, they lose,” he said.
Today, as the rising tide of socialism washes over most of the so-called “blue” states and has begun to lap at the steps of the Capitol, it’s wise for us to revisit the lessons of Leninism and to repeat his question. What, indeed, is to be done?
Bury Trump
For too long, conservatives have been on the back foot, constantly reacting to the Left’s ongoing provocations and, mostly fruitlessly, attempting either to resist them or roll them back. From gay marriage to transsexuals in the military—both long thought not only unthinkable but, in the case of the latter, unbelievable—has been but the work of a few years. During the same period, not a single major conservative policy has been enacted, in part because the Republican Party is engaged in defense, when it should be on offense.
