Collected Works, Volume 1 by V. I. Lenin

Author:V. I. Lenin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Verso Books

Appendix III

When I speak of a narrow understanding of Marxism, I have the Marxists themselves in mind. One cannot help remarking in this connection that Marxism is most atrociously narrowed and garbled when our liberals and radicals undertake to expound it in the pages of the legal press. What an exposition it is! Just think how this revolutionary doctrine has to be mutilated to fit it into the Procrustean bed of Russian censorship! Yet our publicists light-heartedly perform that operation! Marxism, as they expound it, is practically reduced to the doctrine of how individual property, based on the labour of the proprietor, undergoes its dialectical development under the capitalist system, how it turns into its negation and is then socialised. And with a serious mien, they assume that the whole content of Marxism lies in this “scheme,” ignoring all the specific features of its sociological method, the doctrine of the class struggle, and the direct purpose of the inquiry, namely, to disclose all the forms of antagonism and exploitation in order to help the proletariat abolish them. It is not surprising that the result is something so pale and narrow that our radicals proceed to mourn over the poor Russian Marxists. We should think so! Russian absolutism and Russian reaction would not be absolutism and reaction if it were possible, while they exist, to give a full, accurate and complete exposition of Marxism, setting forth its conclusions without reservation! And if our liberals and radicals knew Marxism properly (if only from German literature), they would be ashamed thus to distort it in the pages of the censored press. If a theory may not be expounded—keep silent, or make the reservation that you are giving a far from complete exposition of it, that you are omitting its most essential features; but why expound only fragments of it and then howl about its being narrow?

That, indeed, is the only explanation of the absurdity, possible only in Russia, that people are regarded as Marxists who have no idea of the class struggle, of the antagonism necessarily inherent in capitalist society, and of the development of this antagonism; people who have no notion of the revolutionary role of the proletariat; even people who come out with purely bourgeois projects, provided they contain such catchwords as “money economy,” its “necessity,” and similar expressions, which require all the intellectual profundity of a Mr. Mikhailovsky to be regarded as specifically Marxist.

Marx, on the other hand, considered the whole value of his theory to lie in the fact that it is “in its essence critical* and revolutionary.”103 And this latter quality is indeed completely and unconditionally inherent in Marxism, for this theory directly sets itself the task of disclosing all the forms of antagonism and exploitation in modern society, tracing their evolution, demonstrating their transitory character, the inevitability of their transformation into a different form, and thus serving the proletariat as a means of ending all exploitation as quickly and easily as possible. The irresistible attraction of this

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