Of all the short texts in the Marxist library, this is the one most likely to have taught you your Marxism — and most likely to have taught it to you as a catechism. 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 in the seventh edition, Volume 28, 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. The edition in your hands is Volume 21 of the Collected Works, issued by Progress Publishers in Moscow in 1964, translated from the Russian and edited by Julius Katzer.
The article carries a short 1918 Preface that tells you at once what kind of text this is and what was done to it. The tsarist censor, Lenin explains, "for censorship reasons, deleted the end of the article on Marx, namely, the section dealing with his revolutionary tactics." The most political part — the part on what Marxists should actually do — was the part the autocracy would not print, and Lenin, writing the preface from the middle of a revolution he now led, could only partly reconstruct it from memory. He used the occasion to strike at the Mensheviks, who had, he wrote, "sunk to utter betrayal of socialism and to desertion to the bourgeoisie." Keep that preface in mind: it is the sound of a living argument going on around a text that would later be frozen solid.
What the article does supremely well is map. In a few thousand words Lenin lays out the whole of Marx's thought as a single connected structure: philosophical materialism, then dialectics, then the materialist conception of history, then the class struggle; then value and surplus value; then socialism; then tactics. The famous opening of the doctrinal section is the seed of everything: "Marxism is the system of Marx's views and teachings," continuing and consummating "the three main ideological currents of the nineteenth century, as represented by the three most advanced countries of mankind: classical German philosophy, classical English political economy, and French socialism combined with French revolutionary doctrines in general." As a piece of exposition this is unmatched — lucid, proportionate, and honest about difficulty. And, crucially, Lenin's bibliography, which fills the last pages of this edition, is the work of a real scholar, not a propagandist: he sends the reader to Marx's critics by name — Böhm-Bawerk, Bernstein, Sombart, the "marginal utility" economists, the anarchists and the Narodniks — because he expects the doctrine to survive the encounter. That open, arguing quality is the truest thing in the book.
It has a weakness, and the weakness is bound up with the strength. This is an encyclopaedia article, and its virtue is that it makes Marxism teachable by dividing it into parts. But a living, self-correcting body of thought presented as a numbered "system" is one short step from a body of thought presented as a closed one. The very sentence "Marxism is the system of Marx's views and teachings" — right and useful for a reference work — could be lifted out and made to mean that Marxism is finished, a fixed doctrine to be learned rather than a method to be used. The neatness that makes the article a superb door into Marx also makes it easy to nail shut. And the piece we have is missing precisely the part that would have guarded against this — the concluding section on revolutionary tactics that the censor cut and that Lenin could only sketch again from memory. What survives of it, restored in this edition, is the antidote to the schematism: Marx, Lenin writes, "enthusiastically hailed the revolutionary initiative of the masses, who were 'storming heaven'" in the Paris Commune of 1871, even though he had warned against the rising and even in its defeat; and Marx "sharply condemned" the empty "revolutionary phrases" of the ultra-lefts while, "no less sharply," attacking the opportunism that shrank from illegal struggle. Marxism, in the part the censor removed, is not a system at all but a discipline of judgement.
Was the state that canonised this article faithful to it? Here is the sharpest irony in the whole programme of these introductions, because no single text did more to make the catechism, and no single text argues harder against it. The tripartite structure Lenin sketched here — three sources, three component parts, which he had laid out under exactly that title in a companion article of 1913 — was lifted wholesale into "Marxism-Leninism" as taught in every Soviet school and Party study circle: dialectical and historical materialism reduced to a set of numbered theses, recited and examined. The article a working revolutionary wrote to open a living method to encyclopaedia readers became the master template for a dead orthodoxy. What the apparatus kept was the skeleton — the three parts, the clean divisions. What it amputated was everything that made Lenin's version alive: the open bibliography that argued with its enemies became a closed canon that anathematised them; the flexible, self-critical tactics — condemning phrase-mongering and opportunism in the same breath — vanished into a doctrine that could bless whichever line the leadership currently held. From 1956 the same custodians who reprinted Lenin's scorn for the Mensheviks' "desertion to the bourgeoisie" made "the peaceful, parliamentary road to socialism" and "peaceful coexistence" their own general line — the very tailing after respectability that the restored tactics section was written against.
And the reification reached the author as much as the text. The man who signed a modest encyclopaedia entry and wrote "as far as I can remember" in its preface was embalmed against his widow's wishes, welded to Stalin as half of a doctrinal couple, and turned into the co-proprietor of an "-ism." "Karl Marx" is the document in which you can watch this happen, because the distance between the article and its use is so wide and so measurable. Lenin systematised Marx in order to hand readers a method; the bureaucracy systematised Lenin in order to withdraw the method from readers and keep it for itself. The frozen article became the measure of exactly how far the state had travelled from the revolutionary who wrote it.
So read this small classic for what it is, and refuse the reading pressed on it for seventy years. It is not a set of theses to be memorised; it is one of the clearest short accounts ever written of how Marx's philosophy, economics and politics fit together — offered, as its bibliography and its tactics prove, as an invitation to think and to argue, not to obey. The revolutionary tradition that survived Stalinism, from Trotsky to Ernest Mandel, kept this Lenin alive: the one who engaged Böhm-Bawerk and Bernstein by name rather than banning them, who prized the Commune's audacity over the safety of an occupied position, who treated Marxism as a guide to action that has to be re-earned in every new situation. Read against the catechism that flew its structure while betraying its spirit, "Karl Marx" remains the best door into Marx there is — provided you walk through it, as Lenin did, arguing.