“Quid ridēs? Mūtātō nōmine dē tē fābula narrātur.”
“Why are you laughing? With the name changed, the story is told about you!”
It is easy to feel suffocated by history. It is easy to feel that we are simply unwitting agents destined only to experience history, and never to make it.
Yet, history itself shows this to be untrue. History is made by human beings who, conscious of their conditions and their place on the stage of world history, grasp in their hands their material conditions and wield them as their weapon. Indeed, history is not simply a noun — it is also a verb. It is something we can do, not simply something we must merely live through.
But how does one make history? How does one take charge of their agency? In 2025, as imperialist war ravages the global south, as the new gestapo targets immigrants, as the working class becomes ever poorer, ever more disenfranchised, and as modern fascism begins to rear its ugly head, such a question becomes a matter of life and death. Indeed, such dire circumstances beg the age-old question: “What is to be done?”
In 1902, Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin posed this very question. At the time there existed within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party an ideological trend deemed Economism. These Economists felt that revolutionaries should focus not on the overthrow of autocracy, or any other sociopolitical issue, but should focus exclusively on trade union struggles.
Lenin, seeing this trend as restricting the work of revolutionaries and holding back the ability of the people to liberate themselves from Tsarism, embarked on a long-form polemic in which he laid out his critique of the Economist trend, and proposed his own “skeleton plan” for revolutionary change.
Today there exists, in our current circumstances, a myriad of seemingly unrelated issues: ICE, genocide in Palestine, queer liberation, black liberation, the struggle for reproductive rights, workers’ rights — the list goes on. Time and time again, the average person, beginning to gain embryonic consciousness of their circumstances, finds themselves engaged in one or more of the aforementioned struggles. They may even dedicate significant amounts of their time to these struggles, but after signing every petition, filling their representatives’ mailboxes with voicemails and picketing everyday, nothing seems to change.
Why? Our activist has done everything they know how to do; they have been disciplined, educated and steadfast in their work, but the world does not seem to change. They have not managed to grasp control over history. What is going wrong?
When Lenin stood against the Economists’ narrow view of the revolutionary movement, he did so with the knowledge that there could not be a far-reaching change in the circumstances of those workers engaged in trade union struggles without real political change. To put it simply, the workers needed power.
For Lenin, however, it was not just the workers who needed power — it was all of the, as he put it, “toiling and exploited masses.” This included not just the working class, but the peasantry, the oppressed nationalities within the Russian Empire and all who found themselves oppressed by the rule of the Tsar and his cronies. It was only with a far-reaching and unrestricted orientation towards all revolutionary struggles which found themselves at odds with the existence of autocracy that the revolutionaries could achieve victory.
As Lenin wrote: “The [socialist’s] ideal should not be a trade union secretary, but a tribune of the people, able to react to every manifestation of tyranny and oppression, no matter where it takes place, no matter what stratum or class of people it affects.”
It is high time that activists and organizers see the forest for the trees. We must understand that none of our demands will ever be met if we do not unite our struggles and fight for one demand, the very demand which unites us all: the demand for power. Only when power is in the hands of the oppressed, only when it is taken from the hands of the oppressors will we know true liberation.
A continuation of this article, “On power: What’s in a demand?” will be published March 10 in The Mass Media.