Vladimir Lenin on
KARL MARX
PREFACE
Moscow, May 14, 1918
This article on Karl Marx, which now appears in a separate printing, was written
in 1913 (as far as I can remember) for the Granat Encyclopaedia. A fairly
detailed bibliography of literature on Marx, mostly foreign, was appended to the
article. This has been omitted in the present edition. The editor of the
Encyclopaedia, for their part, have, for censorship reasons, deleted the end of
the article on Marx, namely, the section dealing with his revolutionary tactics.
Unfortunately, I am unable to reproduce that end, because the draft has remained
among my papers somewhere in Krakow or in Switzerland. I only remember that in
the concluding part of the article I quoted, among other things, the passage
from Marx's letter to Engels of April 16, 1856, in which he wrote:
"The whole thing in Germany will depend on the possibility of backing the
proletarian revolution by some second edition of the Peasant War. Then the
affair will be splendid."
That is what our Mensheviks[1] , who have now sunk to utter betrayal of
socialism and to desertion to the bourgeoisie, have failed to understand since
1905.
N. Lenin
Footnotes
[1] Mensheviks -- An opportunist trend in the Russian Social-Democratic
movement.
They became know as Mensheviks at the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903.
During the elections to the Party central bodies, the revolutionary
Social-Democrats, led by Lenin, won the majority (bolshinstvo) while the
opportunists found themselves in the minority (menshinstvo); hence the names
Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.
During the 1905-07 revolution, the Mensheviks opposed the hegemony of the
working class in the revolution and its alliance with the peasantry and demanded
agreement with the liberal bourgeoisie, which, they maintained, should lead the
revolution. In the years of reaction which followed the defeat of the 1905
revolution, most of the Mensheviks became liquidators: they demanded the
liquidation of the revolutionary illegal party of the working class. After the
victory of the February bourgeois-democratic revolution in 1917, the Mensheviks
accepted posts in the bourgeois Provisional Government, supported its
imperialist policy and opposed the socialist revolution being prepared by the
Bolsheviks.
After the October Revolution, the Mensheviks became an openly
counter-revolutionary party organizing and participating in conspiracies and
revolts against Soviet power.
Karl Marx
Marx, Karl, was born on May 5, 1818 (New Style), in the city of Trier (Rhenish
Prussia). His father was a lawyer, a Jew, who in 1824 adopted Protestantism. The
family was well-to-do, cultured, but not revolutionary. After graduating from a
Gymnasium in Trier, Marx entered the university, first at Bonn and later in
Berlin, where he read law, majoring in history and philosophy. He concluded his
university course in 1841, submitting a doctoral thesis on the philosophy of
Epicurus. At the time Marx was a Hegelian idealist in his views. In Berlin, he
belonged to the circle of "Left Hegelians" [1] (Bruno Bauer and others) who
sought to draw atheistic and revolutionary conclusion from Hegel's philosophy.
After graduating, Marx moved to Bonn, hoping to become a professor. However, the
reactionary policy of the government, which deprived Ludwig Feuerbach of his
chair in 1832, refused to allow him to return to the university in 1836, and in
1841 forbade young Professor Bruno Bauer to lecture at Bonn, made Marx abandon
the idea of an academic career. Left Hegelian views were making rapid headway in
Germany at the time. Feuerbach began to criticize theology, particularly after
1836, and turn to materialism, which in 1841 gained ascendancy in his philosophy
(The Essence of Christianity).
The year 1843 saw the appearance of his Principles of the Philosophy of the
Future. "One must oneself have experienced the liberating effect" of these
books, Engels subsequently wrote of these works of Feuerbach. "We [i.e., the
Left Hegelians, including Marx] all became at once Feuerbachians." [2] At that
time, some radical bourgeois in the Rhineland, who were in touch with the Left
Hegelians, founded, in Cologne, an opposition paper called Rheinische Zeitung
[3] (The first issue appeared on January 1, 1842). Marx and Bruno Bauer were
invited to be the chief contributors, and in October 1842 Marx became
editor-in-chief and moved from Bonn to Cologne.
The newspaper's revolutionary-democratic trend became more and more pronounced
under Marx's editorship, and the government first imposed double and triple
censorship on the paper, and then on January 1 1843 decided to suppress it. Marx
had to resign the editorship before that date, but his resignation did not save
the paper, which suspended publication in March 1843. Of the major articles Marx
contributed to Rheinische Zeitung, Engels notes, in addition to those indicated
below (see Bibliography [4] ), an article on the condition of peasant
winegrowers in the Moselle Valley. [5] Marx's journalistic activities convinced
him that he was insufficiently acquainted with political economy, and he
zealously set out to study it.
In 1843, Marx married, at Kreuznach, a childhood friend he had become engaged to
while still a student. His wife came of a reactionary family of the Prussian
nobility, her elder brother being Prussia's Minister of the Interior during a
most reactionary period -- 1850-58. In the autumn of 1843, Marx went to Paris in
order to publish a radical journal abroad, together with Arnold Ruge
(1802-1880); Left Hegelian; in prison in 1825-30; a political exile following
1848, and a Bismarckian after 1866-70). Only one issue of this journal,
Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, appeared [6] . publication was discontinued
owing to the difficulty of secretly distributing it in Germany, and to
disagreement with Ruge. Marx's articles in this journal showed that he was
already a revolutionary who advocated "merciless criticism of everything
existing", and in particular the "criticism by weapon", [7] and appealed to the
masses and to the proletariat.
In September 1844, Frederick Engels came to Paris for a few days, and from that
time on became Marx's closest friend. They both took a most active part in the
then seething life of the revolutionary groups in Paris (of particular
importance at the time was Proudhon's [8] doctrine), which Marx pulled to pieces
in his Poverty of Philosophy, 1847); waging a vigorous struggle against the
various doctrines of petty-bourgeois socialism, they worked out the theory and
tactics of revolutionary proletarian socialism, or communism (Marxism). See
Marx's works of this period, 1844-48 in the Bibliography. At the insistent
request of the Prussian government, Marx was banished from Paris in 1845, as a
dangerous revolutionary. He went to Brussels. In the spring of 1847 Marx and
Engels joined a secret propaganda society called the Communist League[9] ; they
took a prominent part in the League's Second Congress (London, November 1847),
at whose request they drew up the celebrated Communist Manifesto, which appeared
in February 1848. With the clarity and brilliance of genius, this work outlines
a new world-conception, consistent with materialism, which also embrace the
realm of social life; dialectics, as the most comprehensive and profound
doctrine of development; the theory of the class struggle and of the
world-historic revolutionary role of the proletariat -- the creator of a new,
communist society.
On the outbreak of the Revolution of February 1848, [10] Marx was banished from
Belgium. He returned to Paris, whence, after the March Revolution, [11] he went
to Cologne, Germany, where Neue Rheinische Zeitung [12] was published from June
1 1848 to May 19 1849, with Marx as editor-in-chief. The new theory was
splendidly confirmed by the course of the revolutionary events of 1848-49, just
as it has been subsequently confirmed by all proletarian and democratic
movements in all countries of the world. The victorious counter-revolution first
instigated court proceedings against Marx (he was acquitted on February 9 1849),
and then banished him from Germany (May 16 1849). First Marx went to Paris, was
again banished after the demonstration of June 13 1849 [13] and then went to
London, where he lived until his death.
His life as a political exile was a very hard one, as the correspondence between
Marx and Engels (published in 1913) clearly reveals. Poverty weighed heavily on
Marx and his family; had it not been for Engels' constant and selfless financial
aid, Marx would not only have been unable to complete Capital but would have
inevitably have been crushed by want. Moreover, the prevailing doctrines and
trends of petty-bourgeois socialism, and of non-proletarian socialism in
general, forced Marx to wage a continuous and merciless struggle and sometime to
repel the most savage and monstrous personal attacks (Herr Vogt [14]). Marx, who
stood aloof from circles of political exiles, developed his materialist theory
in a number of historical works (see Bibliography), devoting himself mainly to a
study of political economy. Marx revolutionized science (see "The Marxist
Doctrine", below) in his Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy(1859)
and Capital (Vol. I, 1867).
The ...
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Go to the beginning of the document
Go to previous page
Go to next page
Go to the end of document
