Karl Marx

A Brief Biographical Sketch With an Exposition of Marxism

This article on Karl Marx, which now appears in a separate printing, was
written in 1913 (as far as I can remember) for the Granat Encyclopaedia . A fairly detailed bibliography of literature on Marx,
mostly foreign, was appended to the article. This has been omitted in the
present edition. The editor of the Encyclopaedia, for their part, have, for
censorship reasons, deleted the end of the article on Marx, namely, the
section dealing with his revolutionary tactics. Unfortunately, I am unable
to reproduce that end, because the draft has remained among my papers
somewhere in Krakow or in Switzerland. I only remember that in the
concluding part of the article I quoted, among other things, the passage
from Marx’s letter to Engels of April 16, 1856, in which he
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, who have now sunk to utter betrayal of socialism
and to desertion to the bourgeoisie, have failed to understand since 1905.

N. Lenin

Moscow, May 14, 1918

| Published in 1918 in the pamphlet: N. Lenin, Karl Marx, Priobi Publishers, Moscow Published according to the manuscript |