The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism
Три источника и три составных части марксизма
Lenin’s short article for the thirtieth anniversary of Marx’s death (March 1913), presenting Marxism as the legitimate successor of the best of nineteenth-century thought: German classical philosophy, English political economy and French socialism, which it transformed into dialectical materialism, the theory of surplus value and the doctrine of the class struggle.
- Edition
- Translated for the Compendium from the Russian text of the Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 5th ed., vol. 23 (Moscow, 1973), which follows the first publication in Prosveshchenie No. 3 (March 1913).
- Source
- Russian Wikisource
Start reading 14 min audiobook
Quiz
Test your reading. The short quiz draws 5 questions at random from 10; score 80% for a silver medal. The full quiz asks all 10; a perfect score earns gold.
Contents
- Introduction 2 min 4
Bourgeois science hates Marxism because no social science can be impartial in a class society. Yet Marxism is no sect: Marx answered questions already raised by the best thought of mankind, and his teaching is the legitimate successor of German philosophy, English political economy and French socialism. “The teaching of Marx is all-powerful because it is true.”
- I I 4 min 6
The philosophy of Marxism is materialism, the only consistent philosophy, which Marx enriched with Hegel’s dialectics and extended from nature to society as historical materialism: social ideas and political institutions reflect the economic system and rest on it as a superstructure.
- II II 4 min 6
Building on Smith and Ricardo, Marx founded the labour theory of value rigorously, showed relations between people behind relations between things, and made surplus value the cornerstone of his economics. Capital ruins small producers, concentrates production, creates monopolies and crises, and in doing so builds the united power of labour.
- III III 4 min 4
Utopian socialism condemned capitalism but could not explain it or find the force to replace it. The revolutions of Europe revealed the class struggle as the driving force of history, and Marx drew the conclusion: the proletariat must learn to see class interests behind every phrase and organise itself to sweep away the old order.