The Threefold Logic of Lenin's Ideological and Political Education Thought in What Is to Be Done?

At the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century in Russia, capitalist expansion coexisted with the rapid growth of the proletariat. However, the worker movement was trapped in spontaneity and reformist illusions due to ideologies such as economism, reformism, and populism, leaving revolutionary parties facing ideological dispersion and organizational splits. Lenin's 1902 publication What Is to Be Done? began with intra-party criticism and systematically argued for the leading significance of “theoretical struggle,” proposing the “inoculation theory” to solve the historical problem that the working class could not spontaneously develop socialist consciousness. By constructing institutional carriers such as organizations of professional revolutionaries and all-Russian political newspapers, Lenin established the position of ideological and political education as the pivot of party building and traced the theoretical resources of Marx, Engels, Chernyshevsky, Kautsky, and Plekhanov to lay its academic foundation. This reveals the inevitable logic of ideological and political education in shaping class consciousness, achieving centralization and unity, and fulfilling the tasks of the Russian revolution. Facing the new era, returning to the paradigm of ideological and political education in What Is to Be Done? can not only provide theoretical sources and practical insights for contemporary Chinese ideological and political education but also help reshape the proletariat's subjectivity and revolutionary strategy in the context of global capitalist transformations, promoting the cause of human liberation along the path of Chinese-style modernization.