Start with the ultimate question in politics.

What is to be Done?

May one (can one?) question the question itself? Question the primacy of this one question that circumscribes – limits, defines, paradoxically deifies – theory? Puts theory to the ultimate test of effectivity. Can one seriously contest the word is between the query ‘what’ and the phrase ‘to be done’, question the surety in the be-ing of the act? As Simon Critchley (1999a, 2) reminds us, “… the copula in predicative propositions – S is P – is one of the principal targets of deconstruction”.

But remember, questioning does not mean a forgetting, not a total abandonment of the matter at hand. One engages as one interrogates.

What is to be done? How to engage with the problem, responsibly? The history of the more than hundred years that separate us from Lenin's raising of that question is not innocent enough for an easy response.

Before embarking on the seemingly fashionable gesture of deconstructing the query, before the ‘petty’ squabbles about words that irritate the propriety of the ‘responsible’ theorizer, let us move on to another sentence known well for its direct condemnation of ‘armchair theorists’ and an almost unequivocal call to action:

Let us remember the way Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (1985, 346) has dealt with the word ‘change’.