Lenin began work on the book The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky at the beginning of October 1918, immediately after he had read Kautsky’s The Dictatorship of the Proletariat, which distorted and vulgarised the Marxist theory of the proletarian revolution and slandered the Soviet state. Lenin attached great importance to exposure of Kautsky’s opportunist views on the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.
Written: October—November, 1918.
First Published: 1918 in pamphlet form by Kommunist Publishers, Moscow. Published according to the pamphlet checked with the manuscript.
Source: Lenin’s Collected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, Volume 28, 1974, pages 227-325
Translated (and edited): Jim Riordan
Transcription/HTML Markup: David Walters & Robert Cymbala
Online Version: V. I. Lenin Internet Archive, 2002
Second proofreading: Steve Iverson, 2014
Marxist.com version: HTML reworked and further edited, November 2019