Lenin Collected Works:
Volume 14
Preface by Progress Publishers
Volume 14 contains V. I. Lenin's extremely important
philosophical work Materialism and Empirio-criticism,
written in 1908 and published in 1909, which was the theoretical
preparation for the Bolshevik Party.
In this work Lenin gave an all-round criticism of the anti-Marxist
views of the Russian Machists and their foreign philosophical
teachers. At the same time Lenin's work was a defence of the
theoretical basis of Marxism —dialectical and historical
materialism—and a materialist generalisation of all that was
valuable and essential in the achievements of science, and
especially natural science, during the period from the death of
Engels to the appearance of Lenin's book Materialism and
Empiric-criticism.
This work has become a model of irreconcilable, party struggle
against the enemies of dialectical and historical materialism.
The volume includes also Lenin's “Ten Questions to a
Lecturer”, written in the spring of 1908, which furnished the
basis for the public dissociation of the Bolshevik group from the
philosophical views of the Machist Bogdanov and his supporters, who
had joined the Bolsheviks in 1905.
Lenin's work Materialism and Empiric-criticism is printed
in the present volume in accordance with the first edition of the
book (1909) collated with the second edition (1920). In preparing
the text account has been taken of the instructions given by Lenin
in letters to relatives during the preparation of the book for the
press in 1908-09 and in correcting the proofs of the first edition.
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