Karl Marx: A Brief Biographical Sketch with an Exposition of Marxism

Of all the short texts in the Marxist library, this is the one most likely to have taught you your Marxism.

Lenin wrote it in the second half of 1914, at Poronin on the Galician border and then in Berne, in the weeks when the First World War broke out and the Second International collapsed into support for its own governments. It was not a manifesto but a commission: an entry on "Karl Marx" for the Granat Encyclopaedic Dictionary, the most widely used reference work in Russia, which appeared in 1915 over the signature "V. Ilyin". The task Lenin set himself was to compress the whole of Marxism - the philosophy, the economics, the socialism, the tactics, and the life that held them together - into the space of an encyclopaedia article.

He did it so well that the piece has been reprinted, translated and set for study ever since, and it remains one of the clearest short accounts ever written of how Marx's philosophy, economics and politics fit together.

The volume carries a short Preface Lenin added in 1918, which tells you at once what kind of text this is and what was done to it. The tsarist censor, he explains, "for censorship reasons, deleted the end of the article on Marx, namely, the section dealing with his revolutionary tactics". The most political part - what Marxists should actually do - was the part the autocracy would not print, and Lenin, writing now from the middle of a revolution he led, could only partly reconstruct it from memory.

The bibliography he attached is worth noticing too: he engages Boehm-Bawerk and Bernstein by name rather than banning them, which tells you how he meant the article to be used.

Collected Works, Volume 21. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.