How Lenin Studied Marx (1933)

The text is sourced N. K. Krupskaya, On Education: Selected Articles and Speeches (FLPH, Moscow 1957).

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Russia was an industrially backward country and for that reason her labour movement began to develop only in the 1890s — at the time when in a number of other countries the working class, armed with the experience of the 1848 Revolution and of the Paris Commune of 1871, was already waging a bitter revolutionary struggle. Marx and Engels, the great revolutionary leaders of the international labour movement, were steeled in the crucible of the revolutionary struggle. Marxism illuminated the path of social development, revealed the inevitability of the disintegration of capitalism and its replacement by communism. It showed the path along which new social forms would develop, the path of the class struggle, the path of the socialist revolution; it explained the role of the proletariat in this struggle and pointed to its inevitable victory.

Our labour movement developed under the banner of Marxism — it did not grope its way, it did not advance bindly. The coal was clear and so was the path.

Lenin did a great deal to illuminate with Marxism the path to be taken by the Russian proletariat in its struggle. It is fifty years since Marx died, but Marxism continues to guide our Party in all its activity. Leninism is merely further development of Marxism, its extension.

The keen interest shown in how Lenin studied Marx is therefore quite understandable.

Lenin knew Mars perfectly. When he came to Petersburg in 1893, he surprised us Marxists by how well he knew Marx’s and Engels’s works.

When the first Marxist circles were organized in the 1890s their members studied mainly the first volume of Capital, which could be obtained, although with great diffculty. As for the other works of Marx, things were altogether bad. Most of the members of our circle had not even read the Manifesto of the Communist Party. I myself read it (in German) only in 1898, when I was in exile.

Marx and Engels were strictly banned. In A Characterization of Economic Romanticism, which he wrote for Novoye Slovo [New Word] in 1897, Lenin resorted to allegories so as to avoid using the words “Marx” and “Marxism.” To do otherwise would have gotten the journal into trouble.

Vladimir Ilyich knew all of Marx’s and Engels’s works and always tried to get them in German and French. Anna Ilyinichna ^[1] recalls that Vladimir Ilyich and his sister Olga read The Poverty of Philosophy in French. But he had to read most of Marx’s and Engels’s works in German, and translated the most interesting and important passages into Russian. In his first big work, Who The “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, published illegally in 1894, he quotes the Manifesto of the Communist Party, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, The Poverty of Philosophy, The German Ideology, Marx’s letter to Ruge in 1843, Engels’s Anti-Dühring and The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.

Most of the Marxists in those days did not know Marx’s works. The “Friends of the People” explained a whole series of questions in a new way and proved extremelv popular.

In Lenin’s next work — The Economic Content of Narodism and How It Is Criticized in Mr. Struve’s Book — we find quotations from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, The Civil War in France, Critique of the Gotha Programme and the second and third volumes of Capital.

His years in emigration enabled Lenin to read and study all of Marx’s and Engels’s works.

Lenin’s biography of Marx, written in 1914 for the Granat Encyclopedical Dictionary, is a perfect illustration of how well he knew Marx’s works. That is also revealed by the innumerable excerpts he made when reading Marx. The Lenin Institute has many copy-books with his extracts from Marx.

Vladimir Ilyich used them in his works, re-read and annotated them. He not only knew Marx, but thoroughly understoud him. Speaking at the Third All-Russian Congress of the Young Communist League in 1920, Vladimir Ilyich said it was necessary to have “the ability to acquire the sum of human knowledge, and to acquire it in such a way that communism shall not be something learned by rote, but something that you yourselves have thought over, that it shall embody the conclusions which are inevitable from the standpoint of modern education.” ^[2]

Lenin studied not only what Marx had written, but also everything written about Marx and Marxism by his enemies in the bourgeois camp, and elucidated the fundamentals of Marxism in his polemics with them.

In his first big work, Who The “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats (in reply to the anti-Marxist articles in Russkoye Bogatstvo [Russian Wealth]) Lenin counterposes Marx’s standpoint to that of the Narodniks (Mikhailovsky, Krivenko and Yuzhakov).

In the article The Economic Content of Narodism and How It Is Criticized in Mr. Struve’s Book, he pointed out that Struve’s standpoint was diametrically different from that of Marx.

Lenin analyzed the agrarian issue in The Agrarian Question and the “Critics of Marx”, in which he counterposed Marx’s standpoint to the petty-bourgeois view held by German Social-Democrats (David, Hertz) and Russian critics (Chernov, Bulgakov).

“De choc des opinions jaillit la verite,” says a French proverb. ^[3] Ilyich liked to quote it. When it came to the main questions of labour movement, he constantly brought to light and contrasted class points of view on the subject.

Lenin did that in a most characteristic manner. This is reflected, for instance, by volume XIX of his works, which contains his excerpts, extracts and abstracts on the agrarian issue prior to 1917.

He would go carefully through the allegations of the “critics,” select and write out the most vivid and typical passages, and then compare them with Marx’s views. In his detailed analysis of the various critiques he tried to expose their class essence by underlining the most important and urgent problems.

Lenin very frequently deliberately sharpened a question. It was not a matter of tone, he held. One could speak sharply and rudely so long as one spoke to the point. In his preface to F. A. Sorge’s letters he quotes Mehring and adds that “Mehring was right when he said (Der Sorgesche Briefwechsel) that Marx and Engels had not much of an idea of ‘good manners’: ‘If they did not think long over every blow they dealt, neither did they whimper over every blow they received.’” Sharpness was a characteristic of Lenin’s, he learned it from Marx. “Marx relates,” he wrote, “that he and Engels constantly fought the ‘miserable’ way in which the Sozial-Democrat was conducted and often expressed their opinions sharply (wobei’s oft scharf hergeht).” ^[4] Ilyich was not afraid of sharpness, but he demanded that the retorts should be to the point.

There was one word that Lenin liked very much — “quibbling.” When arguments were not to the point, when speakers resorted to exaggeration and to petty fault-finding, he would say: “That is mere quibbling.”

He was opposed even more sharply to polemics that aimed less at thrashing out some question than at settling some petty factional grudge. That, incidentally, was a favourite method of the Mensheviks. Concealing themselves behind quotations from Marx and Engels taken out of their context, out of the circumstances in which they were written, they served factional aims entirely. In his preface to Sorge’s letters Lenin wrote:

“To think that these recommendations of Marx and Engels to the British and American workers’ movement can be simply and directly applied to Russian conditions is to use Marxism not in order to comprehend its method, not in order to study the concrete historical peculiarities of the labour movement in definite countries, but in order to settle petty factional, intellectualist grudges.” ^[5]

Here we come to the question of how Lenin studied Marx. That may be seen partly from the above-mentioned quote: it is necessary to comprehend Marx’s method, to learn from him how to study the peculiarities of the labour movement in certain countries. This is what Lenin did. For him Marxism was not a dogma but a guide to action. He once used the following expression: “Who wants to consult with Marx?” A very characteristic expression, that. He himself constantly “consulted with Marx.” He re-read Marx again and again in the most difficult, crucial moments of the Revolution. Sometimes when you went into his office, everyone would be worried. But Ilyich would sit engrossed in Marx, and it would be hard indeed to tear him away from the book. He did not turn to Marx to calm his nerves or reinforce his confidence in the strength of the working class or his faith in final victory — he had enough confidence here. He turned to Marx to “consult” him, to seek answers to the urgent problems facing the labour movement. In his article “F. Mehring on the Second Duma” Lenin wrote:

“The argumentation of such people is based on a poor selection of quotations. They take the general position on the support of the big bourgeoisie against the reactionary petty-bourgeoisie and without criticism adapt it to the Russian Cadets and the Russian Revolution. Mehring gives these people a good lesson. Anyone who wants to consult with Marx [My italics — N. K.] on the tasks of the proletariat and the bourgeois revolution must take the reasoning of Marx which apply precisely to the epoch of the German bourgeois revolution. It is not for nothing that our Mensheviks so fearfully avoid this reasoning. In this reasoning we see the fullest and clearest expression of the merciless struggle against the conciliatory bourgeoisie which was carried on by the Russian ‘Bolsheviks’ in the Russian revolution.” ^[6]

Lenin’s method was to take Marx’s works dealing with similar situtions, carefully analyze them, compare them with the present situation, and bring out the simlarities and differences. The best example of how Lenin did that is his application of this method in the 1905-07 Revolution.

In his pamphlet What Is To Be Done? (1902) Lenin wrote:

“History now puts before us an immediate task which is the most revolutionary of all the immediate tasks of the proletariat of any other country. The carrying out of this task the destruction of the most powerful support not only for European but also (we may now say) Asiatic reaction would make the Russian proletariat the vanguard of the international revolutionary proletariat.” ^[7]

We know that the revolutionary struggle of 1905 enhanced the international role of the Russian working class and that the overthrow of tsarism in 1917 put the Russian proletariat in the vanguard of the international revolutionarv proletariat. But that happened 15 years after What Is To Be Done? was written. The rise of the revolutionary wave, following the massacre of the workers in Palace Square on January 9, 1905, raised the question of where the Party should lead the masses, and what tactics it should adopt. And here Lenin again “consulted” Marx. He thoroughly studied Marx’s works on the French and German bourgeois-democratic revolutions of 1848: The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 and the third volume of Marx’s and Engels’s Literary Heritage (touching on the German revolution), published by F. Mehring.

In June and July 1905 Ilyich wrote the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, in which he counterposed the tactics of the Bolsheviks, who urged the working masses to wage a resolute irreconcilable struggle against autocracy and to rise in arms if need be, to the tactics of the Mensheviks, who pursued a policy of conciliation with the liberal bourgeoisie. It was necessary to put an end to tsarism, Lenin said in the pamphlet.

“The conference [of the new Iskra-ists — N. K.] also forgot that as long as the power remains in the hands of the Tsar, any decisions of any representatives remain empty talk and just as pitiful as the ‘decisions’ of the Frankfurt parliament which are famous in the history of the German Revolution of 1848. For this very reason Marx, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, mercilessly poured sarcasm on the liberal Frankfurt ‘liberators’ because they spoke excellent words, adopted all kinds of democratic ‘decisions,’ ‘established’ all kinds of freedom, but in reality left the power in the hands of the Monarchy, and did not organise the armed struggle against the troops of the monarchy. And while the Frankfurt liberators chattered, the monarchy bided its time, strengthened its military forces, and counter-revolution, relying on real force, overthrew the democrats with all their beautiful decisions.” ^[8]

And Vladimir Ilyich posed the question: would the bourgeoisie undermine the Russian revolution by concluding a deal with tsarism, or would we, to quote Marx, settle accounts with tsarism “in the plebeian way”?

“When the revolution decisively conquers, we shall settle with Tsarism in a Jacobine, or if you will, in a plebeian, manner. ‘The whole of French terrorism,’ wrote Marx in the famous Neue Rheinische Zeitung in 1848, ‘was nothing else but the plebeian manner of settling with the enemies of the bourgeoisie with absolutism, feudalism, respectability.’ (See Marx’s Literary Heritage, published by Mehring.) Did those people who frightened the Social-Democratic Russian workers with the bogey of ‘Jacobinism’ in the epoch of the democratic revolution ever think of the meaning of these words of Marx?” ^[9]

The Mensheviks claimed that their tactics was to “remain a party of extreme revolutionary opposition” and that this did not exclude partial, episodic conquest of power and establishment of revolutionary communes in certain towns. “What does the term ‘revolutionary communes’ mean?” Lenin asked, and replied:

“Confusion of revolutionary thought leads them [the new Iskra-ists — N. K.], as very often happens, to revolutionary phrasemongering. Yes, the use of the words ‘revolutionary commune’ in a resolution passed by representatives of Social-Democracy is revolutionary phrase-mongering and nothing else. Marx more than once condemned such phrase-mongering, when ‘fascinating’ terms of the bygone past were used to hide the tasks of the future. In such cases a fascinating term that has played its part in history becomes futile and pernicious tinsel, a child’s rattle. We must give the workers and the whole people a clear and unambiguous explanation as to why we want a provisional revolutionary government to be set up; and exactly what changes we shall accomplish, if we exercise decisive influence on the government, on the very morrow of the victory of the popular insurrection which has already commenced. These are the questions that confront political leaders.” ^[10]

And further:

“These vulgarizers of Marxism have never pondered over what Marx said about the need of substituting the criticism of weapons for the weapons of criticism. Taking the name of Marx in vain, they, in actual fact, draw up resolutions on tactics wholly in the spirit of the Frankfurt bourgeois windbags, who freely criticized absolutism and rendered democratic consciousness more profound, but failed to understand that the time of revolution is the time of action, of action both from above and from below.” ^[11]

“Revolutions are the locomotives of history,” Marx said. Lenin quoted this saying of Marx’s in assessing the role of the fermenting revolution.

Further analyzing Karl Marx’s theses in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Lenin ascertained the meaning of the revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. But he drew an analogy between our bourgeois-democratic revolution and the German bourgeois-democratic revolution of 1848. He wrote:

“Thus, it was only in April 1849, after the revolutionary newspaper had been appearing for almost a year (the Neue Rheinische Zeitung began publication on June 1, 1848), that Marx and Engels declared in favour of a special workers’ organization! Until then they were merely running an ‘organ of democracy’ unconnected by any organizational ties with an independent workers’ party.

This fact, monstrous and improbable as it may appear from our present-day standpoint, clearly shows us what an enormous difference there is between the German Social-Democratic Party of those davs and the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party of today. This fact shows how much less the proletarian features of the movement, the proletarian current within it, were in evidence in the German democratic revolution (because of the backwardness of Germany in 1848 both economically and politically — its disunity as a state).” ^[12]

Of particular interest are the articles Vladimir Ilyich wrote in 1907 — articles on Marx’s correspondence and activity. These are “Preface to the Russian Translation of the Letters of K. Marx to L. Kugelman”, “F. Mehring on the Second Duma”, and “Preface to the Russian Translation of ‘Letters by J. F. Becker, J. Dietzgen, F. Engels, K. Marx and Others to F. A. Sorge and Others’.”

These articles present a perfect piclure of Lenin’s method of studying Marx. The last is of exceptional interest. It was written at the time when, following his differences with Bogdanov, Lenin again seriously took up philosophy, when the questions of dialectical materialism attracted his attention with particular force.

Studying simultaneously what Marx said concerning questions analogical to those that arose in Russia following the defeat of the revolution, and questions of dialectical and historical materialism, Lenin learned from Marx how to apply the method of dialectical materialism to the study of historical development. In his “Preface to F. A. Sorge’s Letters” he wrote:

“It is highly instructive to compare what Marx and Engels said of the British, American and German labour movements. The comparison acquires all the greater importance when we remember that Germany on the one hand, and England and America on the other, represent different stages of capitalist development and different forms of domination of the bourgeoisie as a class over the entire political life of these countries. From the scientific standpoint, what we observe here is a sample of materialist dialectics, of the ability to bring out and stress the various points and various sides of the question in application to the specific peculiarities of different political and economic conditions. From the standpoint of the practical policy and tactics al the workers’ party, what we see here is a sample of the way in which the creators of the Communist Manifesto defined the tasks of the fighting proletariat in accordance with the different stages of the national labour movement in different countries.” ^[13]

The 1905 Revolution set forth a series of new urgent questions, and in solving them Lenin studied Marx’s works all the more profoundly. It was in the flames of the revolution that the Leninist (the genuinely Marxist) method of studying Marx was steeled.

It was this method of studying Marx that helped Lenin to fight against distortion of Marxism, against attempts to emasculate its revolutionary essence. We know that Lenin’s book The State and Revolution played a tremendous role in organizing the October Revolution and Soviet government. This book is based wholly on the profound study of Marx’s teaching on the state. Let me cite the first page of Lenin’s The State and Revolution:

“What is now happening to Marx’s teaching has, in the course of history, happened repeatedly to the teachings of revolutionary thinkers and leaders of oppressed classes struggling for emancipation. During the lifetime of great revolutionaries, the oppressing classes constantly hounded them, received their teachings with the most savage malice, the most furious hatred and the most unscrupulous campaigns of lies and slander. After their death, attempts are made to convert them into harmless icons, to canonize them, so to say, and to surround their names with a certain halo for the ‘consolation’ of the oppressed classes and with the object of duping the latter, while at the same time emasculating the essence of the revolutionary teaching, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it. At the present time, the bourgeoisie and the opportunists within the working-class movement concur in this ‘doctoring’ of Marxism. They omit, obliterate and distort the revolutionary side of this teaching, its revolutionary soul. They push to the foreground and extol what is or seems acceptable to the bourgeoisie. All the social-chauvinists are now ‘Marxists’ (don’t laugh!). And more and more frequently, German bourgeois scholars, but yesterday specialists in the annihilation of Marxism, are speaking of the ‘national-German’ Marx, who, they aver, educated the workers’ unions which are so splendidly organized for the purpose of conducting a predatory war!

In such circumstances, in view of the unprecedentedly widespread distortion of Marxism, our prime task is to re-establish what Marx really taught on the subject of the state.” ^[14]

Comrade Stalin wrote, in The Foundations of Leninism:

“Only in the subsequent period, the period of direct action by the proletariat, the period of proletarian revolution, when the question of overthrowing the bourgeoisie became a question of immediate action; when the question of the reserves of the proletariat (strategy) became one of the most burning questions; when all forms of struggle and of organization, parliamentary and extraparliamentary (tactics), had fully manifested themselves and became well defined — only in this period could an integral strategy and elaborated tactics for the struggle of the proletariat be drawn up. It was precisely in that period that Lenin brought out into the light of day the brilliant ideas of Marx and Engels on tactics and strategy that had been immured by the opportunists of the Second International. But Lenin did not confine himself to restoring certain tactical propositions of Marx and Engels. He developed them further and supplemented them with new ideas and propositions, combining them all into a system of rules and guiding principles for the leadership of the class struggle of the proletariat.” ^[15]

Marx and Engels wrote that their “teaching is not a dogma but a guide to action.” Lenin repeatedly reiterated that. His method of studying Marx’s and Engels’s works, revolutionary practice, the entire atmosphere of the era of proletarian revolutions helped Lenin to turn Marx’s revolutionary theory into a genuine guide to action.

I should like to dwell on one question of decisive importance. We recently marked the fifteenth anniversary of Soviet power. And in this connection we recalled how the conquest of power in October 1917 was organized. It was not spontaneous. It had been thoroughly planned by Lenin, who was guided by Marx’s directions on the organization of uprisings.

The October Revolution, which put dictatorship into the hands of the proletariat, radically changed the conditions of the struggle. But it is precisely because Lenin was guided not by the letter of Marx’s and Engels’s theses, but by their revolutionary spirit, that he was able to apply Marxism to socialist construction in the era of proletarian dictatorship.

I shall only dwell on a few points. Thorough research work is necessary here: to see what Lenin took from Marx, how he took it, when and in connection with what tasks of the revolutionary movement. I have not touched upon such extremely important issues as the national question, imperialism, etc. This job is facilitated by the publication of a full collection of Lenin’s works. The study of Lenin’s method of working on Marx in all the phases of the revolutionary struggle, from the first to the last, will help us better to understand not only Marx, but Lenin himself, his method of studying Marx and his method of applying Marx’s teachings in practice.

There is one more side of Lenin’s study of Marx which must be mentioned owing to its great significance. Lenin did not only study what Marx and Engels wrote as well as what Marx’s “critics” wrote about him, he also studied the way which led Marx to his various views, and the works and books which stimulated Marx’s thoughts and drove them in a definite direction. He studied, so to speak, the sources of Marxist philosophy, what and how precisely Marx took from this or that writer.

Lenin closely studied the method of dialectical materialism. In his article “On the Significance of Militant Materialism” (1922) Lenin wrote that it was necessary for the contributors to Under the Banner of Marxism ^[16] to arrange for the systematic study of Hegelian dialectics from a materialist standpoint. He held that without a solid philosophical background it was impossible to hold out in the struggle against the onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the restoration of the bourgeois world outlook. From his own experience he wrote of how to organize the study of Hegelian dialectics. Here is the paragraph in question:

“It must be realized that unless it stands on a solid philosophical ground no natural science and no materialism can hold its own in the struggle against the onslaught of bourgeois ideas and the restoration of the bourgeois world outlook. In order to hold their own in this struggle and carry it to a victorious finish, the natural scientist must be a modern materialist, a conscious adherent of the materialism which is represented by Marx, i.e., they must be a dialectical materialist. In order to attain this aim, the contributors to Under the Banner of Marxism must arrange for the systematic study of Hegelian dialectics from a materialist standpoint, i.e.., the dialectics which Marx applied practically in his Capital and in his historical and political works. […] Taking as our basis Marx’s method of applying the Hegelian dialectics materialistically conceived, we can and should elaborate this dialectics from all aspects, print in the magazine excerpts from Hegel’s principal works, interpret them materialistically and comment on them with the help of examples of the way Marx applied dialectics, as well as of examples of dialectics in the sphere of economic and political relations, which recent history, especially modern imperialist war and revolution, is providing in unusual abundance. In my opinion, the group of editors and contributors to Under the Banner of Marxism should be a kind of ‘Society of Materialist Friends of Hegelian Dialectics.’ Modern matural scientists (if they know how to seek, and if we learn to help them) will find in the Hegelian dialectics materialistically interpreted a series of answers to the philosophical problems which are being raised by the revolution in natural science and which make the intellectual admirers of bourgeois fashion ‘stumble’ into reaction.” ^[17]

The IX and XII volumes of Lenin’s works have now been published, and they reveal the whole process of Lenin’s thinking when he analyzed Hegel’s basic works, show how he applied the method of dialectical materialism in studying Hegel, how closely he linked this study with the study of Marx, with the ability to make Marxism a guide to action in the most diverse conditions.

But it was not only Hegel that Lenin studied. He read, for instance, Marx’s letter to Engels of February 1, 1858, in which he sharply criticized Lassalle’s book The Philosophy of Heraclitus the Obscure of Ephesus (Vol. II) and said it was an “amateurish” bit of work. Lenin gives, to begin with, a brief formulation of Marx’s criticism: “Lassalle simply repeats Hegel, he describes him, ruminates millions of times on certain sayings of Heraclitus, embellishing his work with a surfeit of Most learned Gellertian ballast.” ^[18] Nevertheless, Lenin studied this work of Lassalle’s, made an abstract of it, wrote out excerpts, put down his remarks and came to the following conclusion: “Marx’s criticism is on the whole correct. It isn’t worthwhile to read Lassalle’s book.” But the work over this book gave Lenin himself a deeper understanding of Marx: he understood why this book of Lassalle displeased Marx to such an extent.

To conclude, I should like to point to one last aspect of Lenin’s work on Marx — his popularization of Marxism. The popularizer himself learns a great deal when he approaches his work “seriously” and sets himself the task of summing up the essence of some theory in the simplest and most comprehensible form.

Lenin always took this work most seriously. In a letter he wrote from exile to Plekhanov and Axelrod he said there was nothing he wanted so much as to learn to write for workers.

He wanted to make Marxism understandable to the working masses. Working in the Marxist circles in the 1890s, he tried above all to explain the first volume of Capital, illustrating it with examples from the lives of his listeners. In 1911, training leaders for the rising revolutionary movement at the party school in Longjumeau (near Paris), Lenin read workers lectures on political economy, doing his best to explain the fundamentals of Marxism in the simplest possible way. In his Pravda articles Ilyich tried to popularize various aspects of Marxism. A fine example of popularization is what Lenin said in 1921, during the debates on the trade unions, of the way to study various things and developments from a dialectical standpoint. Lenin said:

“To know the subject thoroughly, one must take hold of and study all its sides, all the connections and its proper place in the given situation. We shall never fully attain this, but the demand of many-sidedness will make us steer clear of errors and inertia. This comes first. Secondly, dialectical logic demands that the subject be taken in its development, in its ‘self-motion’ (as Hegel says) and its changes. Thirdly, human practice must concentrate on full ‘definition’ of the subject, as a criterion of truth, as well as a practical indicator of the connection of the subject with what man needs. Fourthly, dialectical logic teaches us that ‘There is no abstract truth, that truth is always concrete,’ as the late Plekhanov, who was a follower of Hegel, liked to say.” ^[19]

These few lines are the essence of what Lenin achieved after many years of work on questions of philosophy, always applying the method of dialectical materialism, always “consulting” Marx. These lines show in a concise way all that is essential to guide one in the study of developments.

The way Lenin studied Marx shows us how we must study Lenin. His teachings are inseparably linked with those of Marx — they are Marxism in action, Marxism in the era of imperialism and proletarian revolutions.