What is to Be Done?

Dissent is the Art of Orchestrating Butterfly Effects

What is to be done?

That was the question poised by Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin in his 1902 political pamphlet, entitled “Что делать?” in Russian. What is to be Done runs 137 pages long; today we’d call it a book, complain that it’s too long, and ask for the TLDR, but the men of the early 20th century had better-fed minds that could distinguish a short work from a long one.

In his pamphlet, Lenin argued that a disciplined revolutionary party based on sound theory was necessary to lead the proletariat towards socialist revolution:

We shall have occasion further on to deal with the political and organizational duties which the task of emancipating the whole people from the yoke of autocracy imposes upon us. At this point, we wish to state only that the role of vanguard fighter can be fulfilled only by a party that is guided by the most advanced theory…

Engels recognizes, not two forms of the great struggle of Social Democracy (political and economic), as is the fashion among us, but three, placing the theoretical struggle on a par with the first two.

The man with the goatee goes on to lambast the existing “social democratic” organizations of his day for being fragmented, amateurish, and incapable of the great task ahead.

According to What is to be Done, three things were necessary for a revolution:

1. An advanced theory of revolution must have been formulated by a revolutionary political party;

2. The revolutionary political party must have created vanguard fighters guided by this advanced theory; and

3. The social and economic conditions of late-stage capitalism must deteriorated to the point that the working class is ready to led by the vanguard fighters.

Lenin developed the first and built the second, and when the third came along he was the Man with the Plan. The pamphlet became famous because Lenin was proven right. His work shaped the ideology and organizational principles of the Bolshevik movement, which later lead the October Revolution and established Soviet rule.

But when Vladimir Lenin wrote What is to be Done in 1902, was he anyone that mattered?

No, he was not. His father was a deceased schoolteacher. His brother was an executed criminal. He himself was a felon — but not a cool, dangerous, inspiring one, no.

23-year-old Vladimir was part of a crowd handing out pamphlets in a protest in St. Petersburg in 1896. He was arrested by the tsarist government for sedition, kept in jail for a year, then sentenced without trial. The government deemed him to be of such little consequence or threat that, unlike his brother who was executed, Lenin was just given three year’s exile in Siberia. After completing his exile, he moved to Munich, where in 1901 he raised funds from private donors to create Spark, a newspaper devoted to socialist causes. He adopted a pseudonym based on an obscure geographical reference and joined an underground political party, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), but it was fractious and divided on ideological issues. It was at this point that he published his pamphlet, calling for organizational unity to create a vanguard.

Let’s re-imagine the 20th century left-wing revolutionary Vladimir Lenin as a 21st century American right-wing dissident.

In our re-imagining, 23-year-old Chadimir was among the crowd that entered the Capitol Building on January 6th 2021. He was arrested for insurrection and kept in jail for 12 months before being sentenced to three years in a federal correctional facility in North Dakota. When his sentence was over, he re-located to Moscow, where he ran a successful GoFundMe campaign to launch Spark.com on the Substack platform. He adopted a pseudonym based on an obscure pop culture reference and joined an underground Telegram group, but it was fractious and divided on ideological issues. It was at this point that he published a series of long-form essays calling for organizational unity to create the vanguard.

Chadimir recently posted this on his Instagram:

Imagine stumbling on a link to Chadimir’s blog on Unz.com. Would you think, “Ah, clearly, this is one of the world-historical figures of our day, a man who will re-shape the course of human history!”? Or would you think “just another glowie, grifter, or LARPer!”?

It’s a rhetorical question. I already know the answer.

I mean, I haven’t ever written a 137-page pamphlet calling for a revolutionary vanguard to strike down the tsar… But I did recently make a post in a Telegram group stating that I thought maybe the dissident right on Substack should work on a coherent ideology and plan of action. And it went about as you’d expect - I was told that anyone without resources recommending such a course of action was engaging in mental masturbation or LARPing while anyone with resources was already co-opted.

Now, that criticism isn’t wrong. The resources of the right really have been co-opted and misdirected, and anyone thinking they can make a difference really is engaging in mental masturbation.

But so what? Masturbation might be a sin against nature, but mental masturbation is a prerequisite for achievement.

Every rock star began as a long-haired freak in a garage with a dream of a record deal and groupies. Every best-selling author began as a would-be writer being told that no one buys books. Every successful entrepreneur began by faking it until he made it. Every revolutionary began as a nobody. None of them had the odds on their side. Victory wasn’t assured; it wasn’t even plausible; it was so unlikely as to seem impossible! It was all a LARP… until it wasn’t.¹

The reason so many successful actors, musicians, and politicians are narcissists is that in order to become a highly successful actor, musician, or politician, you have to take long shots against long odds. Often the only people who take long shots against long odds are the people who are self-deluded enough to think they’re better than all the others who tried and failed.

People like Lenin.

Lenin was a self-deluded nobody. He was a loser. He had accomplished virtually nothing with his life except a stint in the gulag. He was nowhere near as influential as the well-established figures who currently are prominent among the dissident right. He wasn’t even… Nick Fuentes.

But Lenin he changed the world. Sure, he changed it for the worse — but he changed it. And so could we.²

It’s often said that politics is the art of the possible. But that’s not true. Conventional politics might be just the art of the possible, but dissident politics is the art of the impossible. It’s the art of orchestrating butterfly effects until they cause a hurricane.

Today, we have the butterflies, but they’re an improvisational jazz band, and not an orchestra. Maybe we need a… monarch butterfly…. to show us where to fly.

Contemplate the punishment I have just inflicted on the Tree of Woe.

1. I am being hyperbolic to make a point. Please don’t respond in the comments to mention Hollywood nepotism or whatever. I will smack anyone who does with a copy of Aristotle’s Rhetoric. A hardcover copy, mind you.

2. The ambiguity is intentional. Enjoy.