Class Consciousness for the Apocalypse

Time is urgent.  We are literally drowning in pandemics, class warfare, and climate change.  "Eat the rich" is more popular now than ever, but it's not enough.

Published in 1902, Lenin's What is to Be Done? demanded action in a time that was similarly hopeless.  Russia was industrializing, while Czarist pogroms ravaged the minorities of a dying empire.  Lenin's gift was his unrelenting criticism of every idea under the sun.  You could say that his rhetorical talents represent the best parts of the Marxist tradition.

At the time, there was a belief among ssocialists that all one had to do to raise class consciousness was to add a 'political character' to the economic struggle.  Do what is possible now by agitating for economic reforms that would improve the conditions for workers and labor unions.  Lenin found this strategy disturbing:

Working class consciousness cannot be genuine political consciousness unless the workers are trained to respond to all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse, no matter what class affected - unless they are trained, moreover, to respond from a social-democratic point of view and no other.

As Mike Davis recently said on The Dig, Jacobin Magazine's podcast platform, 'The "Left' has never been less internationalist.  I've said it time and time again, but the left's lack of solidarity with the Syrian people, as they were being slaughtered by high-flying death machines, was not just a strategic mistake - it was a moral one.  Class consciousness shouldn't be nationally oriented.  Agitate against American imperialism, but also recognize that the United States is not an exceptional country.  Imperialism exists in many forms, times, and places.

Lenin went even further to argue that this fallacy - 'economism' - was reactionary:

In order to become a social democrat, the worker must have a clear picture in his mind of the economic nature and the social and political features of the landlord and the priest, the high state official and the peasant, the student and the vagabond; he must know their strong and weak points; he must grasp the meaning of catchwords and all manner of sophisms by which each class and each stratum camouflages its selfish strivings and its real 'inner workings'; he must understand what interests are reflected by certain institutions and certain laws and how they are reflected.

Why do so many socialists continue to treat workers as children?  Without a clear class analysis of problems as they arise, working-class people will never be able to lose their chains, let alone understand their material strength.