Poor choice. Would not recommend. Almost all the references are going over my head, and I really don't feel like chasing them down. Maybe I'll pick it back up after studying the 1905 revolution or if I really get into German social democrat history or whatever. I'll finish it I guess, but I expect to retain nothing and learn very little.

  • thethirdgracchi [he/him, they/them]
    ·
    4 years ago

    Glad to hear it! And yeah that's even the academic consensus in some circles. Lars Lih in Lenin Rediscovered: What Is To Be Done? In Context, argues as much (more or less), and spends the rest of the book attempting to contextualize the content of What Is To Be Done within the larger sphere of debate in the Bolshevik/Menshevik world. It's not worth reading or studying without that context, and there's no much you're going to get from it outside of academic curiosities. In fact, much of what Lenin states in the book were just standard democratic socialist (the word had a different context at the time, lol) assumptions widely held by communists across Europe. For actual strategies and innovations of Lenin that pushed him beyond those, you need to look elsewhere at his later works.