Karl Marx

Contents

1. Preface 1 min 4

   Lenin explains that the article was written for the Granat encyclopaedia, whose editors cut its closing section on Marx’s revolutionary tactics for reasons of censorship. He cannot restore it, having left the draft in Cracow or Switzerland, but recalls quoting Marx’s 1856 remark that a German proletarian revolution would need the support of a second Peasant War, a point he says the Mensheviks have never grasped.

2. Karl Marx 12 min 18

   A compact biography: Marx’s family and studies, the Young Hegelians and Feuerbach, the Rheinische Zeitung, marriage and the move to Paris, the partnership with Engels from 1844, the Communist League and the Manifesto, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848–49, exile and poverty in London, Capital, the First International and the Paris Commune, and his last years and death in 1883.

3. The Teaching of Marx 25 min 18

   Lenin presents Marxism as the heir of German philosophy, English economics and French socialism. He sets out Marx and Engels’s materialism (matter primary, thought its reflection), their dialectics as the richest doctrine of development, the materialist conception of history summarised in the 1859 preface, and the theory of class struggle as the key to history, closing with Marx’s economics as its fullest confirmation.

4. Marx’s Economic Doctrine 32 min 20

   A summary of Capital: the commodity, use-value and value, abstract socially necessary labour, the forms of value and money; the transformation of money into capital, labour-power and surplus value, constant and variable capital, absolute and relative surplus value; accumulation, the reserve army, crises and primitive accumulation; the reproduction schemes, prices of production and the falling rate of profit; and the theory of rent, ending with Marx’s verdict on peasant property under capitalism.

5. Socialism 9 min 13

   Marx derives socialism from capitalism’s own economic law of motion: the socialisation of labour, seen in large-scale industry, trusts and finance capital, and a proletariat trained by capitalism that must win political power and expropriate the expropriators. Lenin sketches what follows: higher productivity, a new union of town and country, a new family and education prepared by factory labour, nations as a product of the bourgeois epoch, and the state, an organ of class rule even in the democratic republic, dying out with classes. Small peasants are to be won by example, not expropriated.

6. Tactics of the Class Struggle of the Proletariat 13 min 15

   Marx gave lifelong attention to proletarian tactics, which must rest on an objective account of all classes and treat history dialectically, using quiet periods to prepare for days that concentrate twenty years. Lenin traces Marx’s guidance on the economic struggle, from The Poverty of Philosophy to the warnings about the bourgeois corruption of English workers, and on politics: support for agrarian revolution in Poland and extreme democracy in Germany in 1848, war on playing at revolution after 1850, criticism of Lassalle and Liebknecht, enthusiasm for the Commune, and attacks on both Most and the opportunists under the Anti-Socialist Law.

7. Bibliography 36 min 10

   Lenin’s annotated bibliography, written for the Granat encyclopedia in 1914: Marx’s works in chronological order, from the 1841 dissertation to Capital and the posthumous publications, with their Russian translations, many of them from the revolutionary years 1905–06; then the literature on Marx and Marxism, grouped as Marxist, bourgeois and revisionist, on his biography, philosophy, economics, the marginalist critique, the revisionism debate, the accumulation controversy, the older Russian and Narodnik writers, and the anarchist critics. He insists that Marxism cannot be understood without all the works of Engels.