What is to Be Done: Revolutionary Theory, or a Fashion Accessory for Hasan Piker?
Edward Liger Smith
Abstract
This article examines the political strategy advanced by the popular online commentator Hasan Piker through the theoretical framework developed by Vladimir Lenin in What Is to Be Done? It argues that Piker’s advocacy of working within the Democratic Party and prioritizing reformist politics closely parallels the economism, Bernsteinian revisionism, and “tailism” that Lenin subjected to sustained criticism in his classic text. By situating Piker’s positions within the historical debates of the Russian socialist movement, the article contends that his conception of socialist organization substitutes adaptation to existing political consciousness for the construction of an independent revolutionary vanguard. Drawing on close textual analysis of Lenin alongside Piker’s public statements and political interventions, the essay maintains that appeals to Leninist language cannot obscure a strategic orientation fundamentally at odds with Lenin’s conception of revolutionary leadership, class independence, and political organization. The article concludes that contemporary socialist movements seeking to advance revolutionary politics must reject reformist accommodation within bourgeois parties and instead prioritize the development of an independent communist organization capable of cultivating revolutionary consciousness and leading a struggle for systemic transformation.
Keywords
Lenin, Hasan Piker, Reformism, Vanguard Party, Democratic Party
