What Is To Be Done

The communists I have met at the university were often dogmatic and narrow-minded. I read a book on the bloody purges committed by the NPA against its own cadres suspected of being military agents and they blithely dismiss it as propaganda. They rally against what they label as commercialization of the university even if the sale or rental of idle assets would help fund salary increases for professors, and improvement of facilities. They would rather ask for more money from government, probably to be funded by more taxes from the poor people they claim to defend.

Reading Lenin's What Is To Be Done, which is a polemic against party members who seek reform rather than revolution, I begin to understand where the dogmatism is coming from. Lenin values ideological purity and sees it as critical to the formation of a vanguard party that will raise the level of consciousness of the masses. History momentarily validated his strategy when he took power in 1917, but finally consigned communism to its proverbial dustbin when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989.

It is no accident that an exclusive approach to politics ultimately failed. Radicals, by exalting a particular set of revealed truths, alienate the majority that are more receptive to reason and debate. They are thus left at the margins, watching history unfold rather than making it.