Written:
Unknown
First Published: Unknown
Source: Great Soviet
Encyclopedia
Translated: Unknown
Transcription/Markup:
Steve Palmer
Proofread:Unknown
Copyleft: Internet
Archive(marxists.org) 20014. Permission
is
granted to copy and/or distribute this document under the terms of
the Creative Commons License.
An
article written by V. I. Lenin in
1914 for the Granat Encyclopedia. Lenin worked on
the article in Poronin
(Galicia) in the spring and in Bern (Switzerland) in the fall. It was
completed
in November 1914. In a letter to the editors of Granat Publishing House
dated
Nov. 4 (17), 1914, Lenin wrote: “I have sent you today by registered
post the
article on Marx and Marxism for the dictionary. It is not for me to
judge how
far I have succeeded in solving the difficult problem of squeezing the
exposition into a framework of about 75, 000 letters and spaces. I will
observe
that I had to compress the literature very intensively …, and I had to
select
the essence of various tendencies (of course, with the majority for
Marx). It
was difficult to make up my mind to renounce many quotations from Marx
…
Readers of the dictionary should have available all the most important
statements
by Marx, otherwise the purpose of the dictionary would not be achieved.
That is
how it seemed to me” (Poln. sobr. sock, 5th ed.,
vol. 49, p. 31).
After
a brief biographical sketch of
the main stages of the life and work of K. Marx as a scholar and
revolutionary,
Lenin expounded Marx’ doctrine, which was a continuation and completion
of
classical German philosophy, classical English political economy, and
French
socialism (ibid., p. 50). In particular, he noted
the remarkable
consistency and integrity of Marx’ views, “whose totality constitutes
modern
materialism and modern scientific socialism, as the theory and program
of the
working-class movement in all the civilized countries of the world” (ibid.,
pp. 50–51). Thus, Lenin considered it necessary “to present a brief
outline of
his world-conception in general, prior to giving an exposition of the
principal
content of Marxism, namely, Marx’ economic doctrine” (ibid.,
p. 51).
Lenin
demonstrates that Marx’
philosophical materialism not only is opposed to the various forms of
idealism,
but also differs fundamentally from pre-Marxist materialism, which was
for the
most part mechanistic, which did not consistently adhere to the ideas
of
development, and which did not comprehend the significance of the
practical
revolutionary activity of people. Marx and Engels perceived Hegelian
dialectics
as “the most comprehensive and profound doctrine of development, and
the
richest in content” (ibid., p. 53), and they
consistently extended
materialism to the sphere of social phenomena. This made it possible to
search
out the roots of social phenomena in the degree of development of
material
production and to investigate, with the precision of the natural
sciences, the
social conditions of life of various classes of society and the process
of
emergence, development, and decline of social and economic structures.
Further
on, Lenin gives an account of the most important features of the theory
of
classes and class struggle, and he reveals the place of this theory in
the general
system of Marx’ views.
Noting
that “Marx’ economic doctrine
is the most profound, comprehensive, and detailed confirmation and
application
of his theory” (ibid., p. 60), Lenin characterized
in detail the
analysis of the productive relations of bourgeois society which Marx
laid out
in Das Kapital and singled out the most important
features of this
doctrine: the analysis of the commodity and of money, and the theories
of
surplus value, accumulation of capital and crises of overproduction,
social
reproduction, and ground rent. Having examined the main features of
Marx’
economic doctrine, Lenin concluded that “Marx deduces the inevitability
of the
transformation of capitalist into socialist society wholly and
exclusively from
the economic law of the development of contemporary society” (ibid.,
p.
73).
A
separate section of Lenin’s
article is devoted to Marx’ views on the theory of class struggle. Marx
exposed
as one of the many shortcomings of old-style materialism its inability
to
understand the conditions and significance of revolutionary activity.
Throughout his life, along with working out scientific theory, Marx
devoted
great attention to questions of tactics in the class struggle of the
proletariat. “Marx justly considered that, without this
aspect, materialism
is incomplete, one-sided, and lifeless” (ibid., p.
77). The
consideration of the objectively inevitable dialectics of human
history, the
program and tactics of economic struggle and of the trade-union
movement, the
tactics of political struggle for the proletariat, the correlation of
the legal
and illegal forms of that struggle, the support of the revolutionary
initiatives of the masses—these, according to Lenin, are the basic
questions of
proletarian tactics worked out by Marx.
Lenin’s
article concludes with a
special section that gives an extensive bibliography on Marx and
Marxism.
Describing Marx’ work, as well as the literature about him and about
Marxism,
Lenin noted the need to study the works of F. Engels in order to
evaluate Marx’
views correctly. “It is impossible to understand Marxism,” he wrote,
“and to
propound it fully without taking into account all
the works of Engels” (ibid.,
p. 93).
V.
S. VYGODSKII