-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- what the hell is that book all about? i was trying to read it this weekend and it was a chore. is there a cliffnotes for this thing? shag
^^^^^^^
CB: Without revolutionary theory there is no revolutionary movement ( practice, action , activity). What is to be done , practice.
Lenin criticized Economism, trade unionism pure and simple is a Menshevik error leaving politics to the liberals and excluding workers from politics. Politics is not left to the petit bourgeois intellectuals. Workers are involved in politics as well as economic-trade union struggle.
Freedom of Criticism is criticized, as yeah , we have to have debate, theoretical analysis, thought, but philosophers have interpreted the world in a number of ways, but the thing is to change it through what is to be done .
Student study circles merging with workers struggles.
Democratic centralism, which is common sense. You can't get anything done ( as in what is to be done) without uniting around majority decisions. You debate and vote and then the majority unite around the majority decision. Action what is to be _done_.
Concrete analysis of the concrete situation - Leninism.
Bolshevism means "majorityism" in Russian. Majority rule in democracy. Democracy is a novel concept in Czarist Russion, unlike the US which had it for over a hundred years in 1905.
Bolshevism is a oolitical party of a New Type in 1905. It was fresh.
League for the Emancipation of Labor.
" What is to be done ?" was the title of a popular novel by a Russian materialist artist at that time. Forgot his name.
Nikolay Chernyshevsky
>From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Nikolay Chernyshevsky Born July 12, 1828(1828-07-12) Saratov, Russia Died October 17, 1889 (aged 61) Russia Influenced Svetozar Marković Nikolay Gavrilovich Chernyshevsky (Russian: Никола́й Гаври́лович Черныше́вский) (July 12, 1828 – October 17, 1889) was a Russian revolutionary democrat, materialist philosopher, critic, and socialist (seen by some as a utopian socialist). He was the leader of the revolutionary democratic movement of the 1860s, and was an influence on Vladimir Lenin and Emma Goldman and Serbian political writer and socialist Svetozar Marković.
Contents [hide] 1 Biography 2 Influence 3 Works about Chernyshevsky 4 Works 5 References 6 External links
[edit] Biography
The son of a priest, Chernyshevsky was born in Saratov in 1828, and
stayed there till 1846. After graduating from Saint Petersburg
University in 1850, he taught literature at a gymnasium in Saratov.
>From 1853 to 1862, he lived in Saint Petersburg, and became the chief
editor of Sovremennik ("Contemporary"), in which he published his main
literary reviews and his essays on philosophy.
In 1862, he was arrested and confined in the Fortress of St. Peter and Paul, where he wrote his famous novel What Is to Be Done? The novel was an inspiration to many later Russian revolutionaries, who sought to emulate the novel's hero, who was wholly dedicated to the revolution, ascetic in his habits and ruthlessly disciplined, to the point of sleeping on a bed of nails and eating only meat in order to build strength for the Revolution. Among those who took inspiration from the character was Lenin, who wrote a work of political theory of the same name, and who was ascetic in his personal life (lifting weights, having little time for love, and so on). In 1862, Chernyshevsky was sentenced to civil execution (mock execution), followed by penal servitude (1864-72), and by exile to Vilyuisk, Siberia (1872-83). He died at the age of 61.
[edit] Influence Chernyshevsky was a founder of Narodism, Russian populism, and agitated for the revolutionary overthrow of the autocracy and the creation of a socialist society based on the old peasant commune.
Chernyshevsky's ideas were heavily influenced by Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky, and Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach. He saw class struggle as the means of society's forward movement and advocated for the interests of the working people. In his view, the masses were the chief maker of history. He is reputed to have used the phrase "the worse the better", to indicate that the worse the social conditions became for the poor, the more inclined they would be to launch a revolution.
According to Professor Emeritus of Slavic and Comparative Literature at Stanford, Joseph Frank, "Chernyshevsky's novel What Is to Be Done?, far more than Marx's Capital, supplied the emotional dynamic that eventually went to make the Russian Revolution".[1]
[edit] Works about Chernyshevsky Vladimir Nabokov's The Gift has the protagonist, Fyodor Godunov-Cherdyntsev, study Chernyshevsky and write the critical biography The Life of Chernychevski which represents Chapter Four of the novel. The publication of this work causes a literary scandal.[2] Paperno, Irina, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988. [edit] Works Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality Essays on the Gogol Period in Russian Literature