Lenin Collected Works:
Volume 14

Preface by Progress Publishers

Volume 14 contains V. I. Lenin's extremely important philosophical work Materialism and Empirio-criticism, written in 1908 and published in 1909, which was the theoretical preparation for the Bolshevik Party.

In this work Lenin gave an all-round criticism of the anti-Marxist views of the Russian Machists and their foreign philosophical teachers. At the same time Lenin's work was a defence of the theoretical basis of Marxism —dialectical and historical materialism—and a materialist generalisation of all that was valuable and essential in the achievements of science, and especially natural science, during the period from the death of Engels to the appearance of Lenin's book Materialism and Empiric-criticism.

This work has become a model of irreconcilable, party struggle against the enemies of dialectical and historical materialism.

The volume includes also Lenin's “Ten Questions to a Lecturer”, written in the spring of 1908, which furnished the basis for the public dissociation of the Bolshevik group from the philosophical views of the Machist Bogdanov and his supporters, who had joined the Bolsheviks in 1905.

Lenin's work Materialism and Empiric-criticism is printed in the present volume in accordance with the first edition of the book (1909) collated with the second edition (1920). In preparing the text account has been taken of the instructions given by Lenin in letters to relatives during the preparation of the book for the press in 1908-09 and in correcting the proofs of the first edition.