The first volume contains four works (New Economic Developments In Peasant Life, On the So-Called Market Question, What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of It in Mr. Struve's Book) written by V. I. Lenin in 1893-1894, at the outset of his revolutionary activity, during the first years of the struggle to establish a workers' revolutionary party in Russia.
In these works, which are directed against the Narodniks and “legal Marxists," Lenin gives a Marxist analysis of Russia's social and economic system at the close of the nineteenth century, and formulates a number of programme principles and tasks for the revolutionary struggle of the Russian proletariat.
The paper, On the So-Called Market Question, is included in the fourth edition of V. I. Lenin's Collected Works: it did not appear in earlier editions. Lenin wrote the paper in the autumn of 1893. The manuscript was believed to be lost beyond recall and was discovered only in 1937, when' it was published for the first time.
Lenin's work What the “Friends of the People” Are is published in the present edition according to a new copy of the hectographed edition of 1894 which came into the possession of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism only in 1936, and was not taken account of in previous editions of the Works of V. I. Lenin. The copy mentioned contains numerous editorial corrections apparently introduced by Lenin when preparing to have the book published abroad. All these corrections have been introduced into the present edition. This edition, therefore, contains the exact text of What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats.
