Karl Marx
Preface
Section summary
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.
The article on Karl Marx now appearing as a separate offprint was written by me in 1913 (as far as I remember) for the Granat Encyclopaedia. At the end of the article there was attached a fairly detailed list of literature about Marx, mainly foreign. This has been omitted in the present edition. Then the editors of the encyclopaedia, for their part, on grounds of censorship, cut out the end of the article on Marx, which set out his revolutionary tactics. Unfortunately I am unable to reproduce that end here, for the draft has remained somewhere among my papers in Cracow or in Switzerland. I remember only that in that end of the article I quoted, among other things, the passage from Marx’s letter to Engels of 16 April 1856, in which Marx 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 have failed to understand since 1905, sliding down now to complete betrayal of socialism, to going over to the side of the bourgeoisie.