First Published: Workers Viewpoint, Vol. 5, No. 17, May 19, 1980.
Transcription, Editing and Markup: Paul Saba
Copyright: This work is in the Public Domain under the Creative Commons Common Deed. You can freely copy, distribute and display this work; as well as make derivative and commercial works. Please credit the Encyclopedia of Anti-Revisionism On-Line as your source, include the url to this work, and note any of the transcribers, editors & proofreaders above.
LENIN wrote this in 1900 shortly after the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party was formed. Russia was in the midst of a grave economic crisis which lasted from 1900-1903. Large numbers of workers were out of work, and their livelihoods were worsening daily. Under the influence of Marxism, the labor movement rose steadily and a strike wave spread all over the country. Encouraged by the workers’ struggle, the peasants fought the landlords. The students also rose up, motivated by the worker-peasant revolutionary movement. The Russian workers did not only fight for shorter hours and higher wages, they were demanding: “down with the autocracy”, “democracy” and “freedom”. The proletariat was already turning from the economic struggle to political struggle, aimed straight at the overthrow of czarist rule.
But within the Party, the “Economists” wanted to limit the workers’ movement to a purely economic struggle, fighting against individual factory owners and not the czarist government as a whole to thoroughly eliminate the exploitative system. They violently opposed the fundamental task of the Russian Social-Democrats (Communists) to inject socialist consciousness into the workers’ movement, straitjacketing the working class and strangling the communists. Lenin launched a relentless struggle against these opportunists. “Urgent Tasks” was one of the first articles in a series he wrote in Iskra. a newspaper which he founded and edited. These culminated in What Is To Be Done? which sealed the verdict on economism and established the authority on how to build the Party of a new type, not only in Russia in the l900’s. but for all communist parties in the era of imperialism.
Eighty years after Lenin wrote “Urgent Tasks”, the lessons and principles it contained are even more applicable. Imperialism has decayed further, especially in the U.S. The depth of the I980’s crisis is unprecedented. The Communist Workers Party, at its Founding Congress in October 1979 foresaw this and developed our framework for looking at developments in the next five years. This line states that due to the heightened contradictions among the bourgeoisie themselves, the US ruling class has at most 5 years to try to get a coalition together which can agree on policies that may temporarily get them out of the crisis. In that short period, the US imperialists must prepare for world war by imposing fascism at home, by attacking the working people and their leadership, the CWP. This line defines the framework for the Party’s tasks–in the next few years ahead, the Party must prepare to the point of no return for the seizure of state power and establish the dictatorship of the proletariat. The Party of the US proletariat must be built up to such strengths that we can directly contend for power and smash the bourgeoisie dead in their tracks.
Subsequent events since the Party’s Founding have born out the correctness of this line. The sudden leap downward in the American people’s standard of living, and the most inflammable political situation ever since World War II have marked the significance of the 1980’s. We must foresee the untold suffering and the inevitable struggles, momentous struggles ahead which will make the battles of the 1960’s look like a picnic. This will affect everyone’s life and inflict casualties on everyone’s family and deeply scar the hearts and minds of every American alive. It will also be a struggle for our final emancipation. It can be the last fight to end all wars, class exploitation and national oppression, to eliminate all classes and all oppressive exploitative ideology and practices which flow from class society. So the more intensely we fight and prepare now in the next few years, the less casualties there will be in the coming decade.
This line has to be explained to the majority of American people. Our Communist framework must be integrated with the struggles of the masses at all times, not just in forums, or study sessions or after we get involved in immediate issues. This propaganda task is the most important issue of all and has to be in the forefront of all our work. Only by carrying out uncompromising communist propaganda will there be momentum to the Party’s advanced line to imbue strategic class confidence to the proletariat, so it will turn from a class in itself to a class for itself.
* * *
Social-Democracy is the combination of the working-class movement and socialism. Its task is not to serve the working-class movement passively at each of its separate stages, but to represent the interests of the movement as a whole, to point out to this movement its ultimate aim and its political tasks, and to safeguard its political and ideological independence. Isolated from Social-Democracy, the working-class movement becomes petty and inevitably becomes bourgeois. In waging only the economic struggle, the working class loses its political independence; it becomes the tail of other parties and betrays the great principle: ’The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.’ in every country there has been a period in which the working class movement existed apart from socialism, each going its own way; and in every country this isolation has weakened both socialism and the working-class movement. Only the fusion of socialism with the working class movement has in all countries created a durable basis for both. But in every country this combination of socialism and the working class movement was evolved historically, in unique ways, in accordance with the prevailing conditions of time and place. In Russia, the necessity for combining socialism and the working-class movement was in theory long ago proclaimed, but it is only now being carried into practice. It is a very difficult process and there is, therefore, nothing surprising in the fact that it is accompanied by vacillations and doubts...
Our principal and fundamental task is to facilitate the political development and the political organization of the working class. Those who put this task into the background, who refuse to subordinate to it all the special tasks and particular methods of struggle, are following a false path and causing serious harm to the movement. And it is being pushed into the background, firstly, by those who call upon revolutionaries to employ only the forces of isolated conspiratorial circles cut off from the working class movement in the struggle against the government. It is being pushed into the background, secondly, by those who restrict the content and scone of political propaganda, agitation and organization; who think it fit and proper to treat the workers to “politics” only at exceptional moments in their lives, only on festive occasions; who too solicitously substitute demands for partial concessions from the autocracy for the political struggle against the autocracy; and who do not go to sufficient lengths to ensure that these demands for partial concessions are raised to the status of a systematic, implacable struggle of a revolutionary, working-class party against the autocracy. . .
We, of course, wholly endorse this appeal, but we will not fail to add: organize, but not only in mutual benefit societies, strike funds, and workers’ circles; organize also in a political party; organize for the determined struggle against the autocratic government and against the whole of capitalist society. Without such organization the proletariat will never rise to the class-conscious struggle; without such organization the working class movement is doomed to impotency. . . The struggle which has developed so widely during the past five or six years has revealed the great potential revolutionary power of the working class; it has shown that the most ruthless government persecution does not diminish, but on the contrary increases the. number of workers who strive towards socialism, towards political consciousness, and towards the political struggle... (Lenin, “The Urgent Tasks of Our Movement” Collected Works, Vol. 4)