"What can be done?" was at first, a novel with Enlightened-socialist ideas by Nikolai Tschernishevski, published in 1863 (sometimes attributed to Alexander Herzen, due to it being mistaken with "Who is to blame?", a novel which appeared in 1847); then, in March 1902, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin published in Stuttgart, under the same title "What can be done?", the theory of the party organized around the theory of the "democratic centralism"; which was turned into a guiding principle of the communist state (not just of the party), and was introduced by Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev, in the Soviet Constitution of 1977.
It is interesting to note that before providing the definition of the term, ("Democratic Centralism = a basic principle specific to the organization and the operation of communist and labor parties, which supports the combination between centralism and democracy, and centralized leadership with the participation of the members of the collective"), the Explicative Dictionary of the Romanian Language of 1998 mentions that the terms is "obsolete".
Well, Tuesday"s meeting of Paris, between German chancellor Angela Merkel and French president Nicolas Sarkozy, makes it necessary to urgently revise that dictionary, because the European Union will be reorganized based on the principle of democratic centralism, which means that the term is now being used again.
And the fact that it will be used at such a vast scale, all over Europe, would make even the brilliant Lenin green with envy, overshadowing any joy he might feel if he were alive today that the questions that Russian socialists were asking -"Who is to blame?", and "What can be done?" - now both express the concerns of those who are trying to find a solution to the world crisis.
A true economic European government - that is what the joint French-German proposal sounds like, after the meetin
