Marx/Engels Collected Works (also known as MECW) is the largest existing collection of English translations of many of the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Its 50 volumes contain publications by Marx and Engels released during their lifetimes, many unpublished manuscripts of Marx's economic writings, and extensive correspondence. The Collected Works, for the most part compiled by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU, was issued from 1975 to 2004 by Progress Publishers (1931, Moscow) in collaboration with Lawrence and Wishart (1936, London) and International Publishers (1924, New York City).
Part of a series on |
Marxism |
---|
Although about a third of Marx and Engels' works were originally written in English and partly published in the British or American press, [1] the vast majority of their literary legacy was not collected, translated (where necessary) and made available in an extensive English edition for decades after their death.
In the Soviet Union, comprehensive collections of the works of Marx and Engels were already compiled in the 1920s and 1930s (an aborted complete edition, MEGA1 , as well as a first Russian edition in 28 volumes, Sochineniya1). But only following the publication of new editions in Russian and German in the 1950s and 1960s (Sochineniya2 and Marx-Engels-Werke with 39 basic volumes and a few more supplementary ones later on), an English edition begun being prepared by Soviet editors with the help of the publishing houses of the Communist Parties in Great Britain and the USA and translators from these countries. [2]
After general editing principles had been agreed upon by the representatives of all three sides (Institute of Marxism-Leninism and Progress Publishers, Moscow, the Central Committees of the CPs in Great Britain and the US and their publishers Lawrence and Wishart, London, and International Publishers, New York) at a conference in Moscow in December 1969, [3] the first volume of the new edition was published in 1975.
More than forty volumes were published before the fall of the USSR; the few remaining ones were completed and issued by 2004 (V. 50).
Especially large parts of both authors' early writings, many of their newspaper articles (e.g. from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung 1848-49) and most of their letters as well as a lot of Marx's economic manuscripts were published in English for the first time in the Collected Works. [4] In total, the 50 volumes comprise 1,968 works and other documents (of which 805 were published in English for the first time) and 3,957 letters (of which 2,283 had never been published in English before). [5]
The Collected Works consists of writings by Marx between 1835 and his death in 1883, and by Engels between 1838 and his death in 1895. Early volumes (V. 1-2) include juvenilia, such as correspondence between Marx and his father, Marx's poetry, and letters from Engels to his sister. The edition also contains several major, well-known works by Marx and Engels, such as The Condition of the Working Class in England (V. 4), The Communist Manifesto (V. 6), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (V. 11), and Anti-Dühring (V. 25).
The collection is divided into three parts. Volumes 1-27 collect the political, philosophical, historical and journalistic writings of the authors, in chronological order. Volumes 28-37 specifically collect Marx's writings on political economy, including a large amount of draft material and manuscripts which culminated in the three volumes of Capital (V. 35-37). Finally, volumes 38-50 collect the letters and personal correspondence of the authors. [6]
Although most of MECW's volumes include material written by Marx and Engels (whether separately or as co-authors), a large minority of volumes are devoted to material written by only one author. Red check marks indicate the author's presence in a volume, while black X marks indicate that the author's work is absent. Although the volumes typically contain large varieties of material, only major selected items are listed below, for illustration.
Volume | Marx | Engels | Period | Pub. Date | Major Contents |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 1835-1843 | 1975 | Early writings of Marx, including doctoral dissertation The Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature [7] | ||
2 | 1838-1842 | 1975 | Early writings of Engels [8] | ||
3 | 1843-1844 | 1975 | Early writings of both, including the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 , Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right [9] | ||
4 | 1844-1845 | 1975 | The Holy Family , The Condition of the Working Class in England [10] | ||
5 | 1845-1847 | 1976 | The German Ideology , Theses on Feuerbach [11] | ||
6 | 1845-1848 | 1976 | The Communist Manifesto , The Poverty of Philosophy , Principles of Communism [12] | ||
7 | 1848 | 1977 | Articles for Neue Rheinische Zeitung [13] [14] [15] | ||
8 | 1848-1849 | 1977 | |||
9 | 1849 | 1977 | |||
10 | 1849-1851 | 1978 | The Class Struggles in France 1848–1850 , The Peasant War in Germany [16] | ||
11 | 1851-1853 | 1979 | The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon , Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany [17] | ||
12 | 1853-1854 | 1979 | Newspaper articles concerning global politics and other writings, including The Civil War in the United States [18] [19] [20] [21] [22] [23] [24] [25] | ||
13 | 1854-1855 | 1980 | |||
14 | 1855-1856 | 1980 | |||
15 | 1856-1858 | 1986 | |||
16 | 1858-1860 | 1980 | |||
17 | 1859-1860 | 1981 | |||
18 | 1857-1862 | 1982 | |||
19 | 1861-1864 | 1984 | |||
20 | 1864-1868 | 1985 | Articles and writings concerning the First International, Value, Price and Profit (V. 20) [26] [27] [28] [29] | ||
21 | 1867-1870 | 1985 | |||
22 | 1870-1871 | 1986 | |||
23 | 1871-1874 | 1988 | |||
24 | 1874-1883 | 1989 | Critique of the Gotha Program , Socialism: Utopian and Scientific [30] | ||
25 | — | 1987 | Anti-Dühring , Dialectics of Nature [31] | ||
26 | 1882-1889 | 1990 | Origin of the Family , Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy [32] | ||
27 | 1890-1895 | 1990 | Late political writings of Engels [33] | ||
28 | 1857-1861 | 1986 | Grundrisse , A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy [34] [35] | ||
29 | 1857-1861 | 1987 | |||
30 | 1861-1863 | 1988 | Economic Manuscripts of 1861–1863, which includes Theories of Surplus Value [36] [37] [38] [39] [40] | ||
31 | 1861-1863 | 1989 | |||
32 | 1861-1863 | 1989 | |||
33 | 1861-1863 | 1991 | |||
34 | 1861-1864 | 1994 | |||
35 | — | 1996 | Capital, Volume I [41] | ||
36 | — | 1997 | Capital, Volume II [42] | ||
37 | — | 1998 | Capital, Volume III [43] | ||
38 | 1844-1851 | 1982 | Letters [44] [45] [46] [47] [48] [49] [50] [51] [52] [53] [54] [55] [56] | ||
39 | 1852-1855 | 1983 | |||
40 | 1856-1859 | 1983 | |||
41 | 1860-1864 | 1985 | |||
42 | 1864-1868 | 1987 | |||
43 | 1868-1870 | 1988 | |||
44 | 1870-1873 | 1989 | |||
45 | 1874-1879 | 1991 | |||
46 | 1880-1883 | 1992 | |||
47 | 1883-1886 | 1995 | |||
48 | 1887-1890 | 2001 | |||
49 | 1890-1892 | 2001 | |||
50 | 1892-1895 | 2004 |
Although the Collected Works is the most comprehensive English translation of Marx and Engels' work, it is not their complete work. An ongoing project to publish the pair's complete works in their original language ( Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe ) is expected to require 114 volumes. [57] However, as MEGA differs from MECW particularly in content in that it presents numerous excerpts and notes in its fourth section, publishes the letters to Marx and Engels from third persons, and prints various editions of the same works (e.g. Capital ), the overwhelming majority of the published writings, manuscripts, and letters of Marx and Engels are in any case included in MECW. [58]
Karl Heinrich Marx was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and the four-volume Das Kapital (1867–1883). Marx's political and philosophical thought had enormous influence on subsequent intellectual, economic, and political history. His name has been used as an adjective, a noun, and a school of social theory.
Friedrich Engels, sometimes anglicised as Frederick Engels, was a German philosopher, critic of political economy, historian, political theorist and revolutionary socialist. He was also a businessman, journalist and political activist, whose father was an owner of large textile factories in Salford and Barmen, Prussia.
Ernest Charles Jones was an English poet, novelist and Chartist. Dorothy Thompson points out that Jones was born into the landed gentry, became a barrister, and left a large documentary record. "He is the best-remembered of the Chartist leaders, among the pioneers of the modern Labour movement, and a friend of both Marx and Engels."
The Neue Rheinische Zeitung: Organ der Demokratie was a German daily newspaper, published by Karl Marx in Cologne between 1 June 1848 and 19 May 1849. It is recognised by historians as one of the most important dailies of the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany. The paper was regarded by its editors and readers as the successor of an earlier Cologne newspaper, the Rheinische Zeitung, also edited for a time by Karl Marx, which had been suppressed by state censorship over five years earlier.
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific is a short book first published in 1880 by German-born socialist Friedrich Engels. The work was primarily extracted from a longer polemic work published in 1878, Anti-Dühring. It first appeared in the French language.
Progress Publishers was a Moscow-based Soviet publisher founded in 1931.
David Riazanov, born David Borisovich Goldendakh, was a Russian revolutionary, historian, bibliographer and archivist. Riazanov founded the Marx–Engels Institute and edited the first large-scale effort to publish the collected works of these two founders of the modern socialist movement. Riazanov was a prominent victim of the Great Terror of the late 1930s.
"The Civil War in France" was a pamphlet written by Karl Marx, as an official statement of the General Council of the International on the character and significance of the struggle of the Communards in the Paris Commune.
"Wage Labour and Capital" was an 1847 lecture by the critic of political economy and philosopher Karl Marx, first published as articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in April 1849. It is widely considered the precursor to Marx’s influential treatise Das Kapital. It is commonly paired with Marx's 1865 speech Value, Price and Profit. In 1883, a Russian translation was published as a book and included an excerpt from Capital volume 1 in the appendix, chapter 23 on Historical Tendency of Capitalist Accumulation. In 1885, a pamphlet version was first published as an English translation. An 1885 pamphlet based on the newspaper articles was published in Hottingen-Zürich without Marx's knowledge and with a brief introduction by Engels. The German edition was revised by Friedrich Engels in 1891 and published by Vorwärts after the Anti-Socialist Laws had lapsed the previous year. In 1893, an updated English translation from the 1891 German edition was published in London.
Lawrence & Wishart is a British publishing company formerly associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain. It was formed in 1936, through the merger of Martin Lawrence, the Communist Party's press, and Wishart Ltd, a family-owned Left-wing and anti-fascist publisher founded by Ernest Wishart, father of the painter Michael Wishart.
Collected works may refer to:
Karl Marx wrote a number of notebooks on the history of technology which so far remain unpublished in English. Their whereabouts were for a long time unknown but in the past they were read and discussed by Marxist researchers.
Theories of Surplus Value is a draft manuscript written by Karl Marx between January 1862 and July 1863. It is mainly concerned with the Western European theorizing about Mehrwert from about 1750, critically examining the ideas of British, French and German political economists about wealth creation and the profitability of industries. At issue are the source, forms and determinants of the magnitude of surplus-value and Marx tries to explain how after failing to solve basic contradictions in its labour theories of value the classical school of political economy eventually broke up, leaving only "vulgar political economy" which no longer tried to provide a consistent, integral theory of capitalism, but instead offered only an eclectic amalgam of theories which seemed pragmatically useful or which justified the rationality of the market economy.
The correct place of Karl Marx's early writings within his system as a whole has been a matter of great controversy. Some believe there is a break in Marx's development that divides his thought into two periods: the "Young Marx" is said to be a thinker who deals with the problem of alienation, while the "Mature Marx" is said to aspire to a scientific socialism.
The Poverty of Philosophy is a book by Karl Marx published in Paris and Brussels in 1847, where he lived in exile from 1843 until 1849. It was originally written in French as a critique of the economic and philosophical arguments of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon set forth in his 1846 book The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty.
The German Ideology is a set of manuscripts originally written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels did not find a publisher, but the work was later retrieved and published for the first time in 1932 by David Riazanov through the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow. The first part of the book is an exposition of Marx's "materialist conception of history", though recent research for the new Marx Engels Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) indicates that much of the 'system' in this part was created afterwards by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow in the 1930s, from the set of manuscripts written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Much of the rest of the book consists of many satirical polemics against Bruno Bauer, other Young Hegelians, and Max Stirner's The Ego and Its Own (1844).
Die Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) is the largest collection of the writing of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in any language. It is an ongoing project intended to produce a critical edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels that reproduces the extant writings of both authors in books of high-quality paper and library binding.
Das Kapital, also known as Capital: A Critique of Political Economy or sometimes simply Capital, is a foundational theoretical text in materialist philosophy, critique of political economy and politics by Karl Marx. Marx aimed to reveal the economic patterns underpinning the capitalist mode of production in contrast to classical political economists such as Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo and John Stuart Mill. While Marx did not live to publish the planned second, third and fourth parts, the second and third volumes were completed from his notes and published after his death by his colleague Friedrich Engels; the fourth volume was completed and published after Engels's death by Marxist philosoper Karl Kautsky. Das Kapital is the most cited book published before 1950 in the social sciences.
The Karl Marx Library is a topically-organized series of original translations and biographical commentaries edited by historian and Karl Marx scholar Saul K. Padover (1905-1981) and published by academic publisher McGraw-Hill Books. Originally projected as a 13 volume series at the time of its launch in 1971, ultimately only 7 volumes found print prior to Padover's death, supplemented by a biography and an unnumbered volume of selected correspondence.
The Marx–Engels–Lenin Institute, established in Moscow in 1919 as the Marx–Engels Institute, was a Soviet library and archive attached to the Communist Academy. The institute was later attached to the governing Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and served as a research center and publishing house for officially published works of Marxist thought.