Royal Road to Science — Reading All 50 Volumes of the Marx Engels Collected Works (MECW)
This is an introduction for one person’s attempt to write something about each of the 50 volumes of the Marx Engels Collected Works (MECW.) It is also a summary of the actual published “Introduction” to those 50 volumes as well.
What if you don’t know what the MECW is? Molte benedizioni! Or if you are quite familiar but want a refresher of what it covers (and not to be confused with the “MEGA”) I suggest first you go here
Then if you want to take a highly illegal peek into any of the volumes, they remain (mostly) digitally available at http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/cw/index.html , even as Marxists.org was threatened with legal action that led to them being removed from that massive archive. I will continually link to “History is a Weapon” throughout this project if possible.
So what are you about to read, if I can prevent you from closing your browser prematurely?
First, I will briefly tell you who the hell I am. Then I will talk about my reading order and why I will read the 50 volumes in a slightly different order than the published numbers (short version is this to be somewhat more chronological — nothing so Althusserian as a particular discussion on “how” to read Marx and Engels “correctly.”) This introductory Medium post will also cover the brief “General Introduction” to the 50 volumes (published in Volume One of my physical International Publishers editions and available online here: http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/cw/volume01/intro.html .) Then I will stop before the preface to Volume One, which will be handled with the subsequent text of Volume One itself in a future post.
So who am I? Just some dude in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. I am 40 [edit 41] years old, went to college for a year and have no formal training in history, economics, philosophy, or much of anything else we are going to encounter here. I have as a union organizer for the last 20 years, mostly as a staffer, but also as a rank and filer in a grocery store, warehouse, distribution center, and on a towboat. I am active in our local DSA chapter and in some tenant organizing. Though I like reading “Theory”, I have spent very little time in formal reading groups either. I don’t say these things as some sort of humble brag about being an autodidact (Eco notes how they are losers), but simply because as a practical matter I am likely to mostly go through this reading and writing alone.
So you (if anyone other than my wife reads this) may be wondering: why do I think I would have useful observations about the MECW? I may not! But it just seemed pretty ridiculous to spend perhaps the next several years reading these tens of thousands of pages of writing by two authors and then for it to just…end. And as implied, I am skeptical I could get together a reading group to keep an Endnotes style marathon reading+discussion group going for several years. So this is an attempt to:
- Deal with the deeply felt need to show productivity and take notes,
2. Provide people who will not read the MECW but share some political sympathies some interesting and/or helpful insights into the writing of Marx and Engels
3. Inspire others to read the MECW and talk to me about as well.
I will likely make note of every pun Marx writes as well, though so far it seems the German puns don’t translate so neatly.
Leftists love to do different versions of the “what’s your line?” game. I don’t know exactly how to describe mine, except I’ve called myself a communist since some point in high school. I can however list some influences on my political thinking outside of Marx and Engels: Lenin, Luxemburg, Tronti, CLR James, Federici, and what I think of as the sort of heterodox Marxist thinkers of the US rust belt, like Noel Ignatiev/Sojurner Truth Organization/Race Traitor, Martin Glaberman, James and Grace Lee Boggs. The interchange between Turin and Detroit is especially interesting to me (the social factory, workers inquiry, etc.) Though it’s not my tendency and some of this may …contradictory and he was largely being an opportunist, I think Mao wrote two great essays too. Overall, I am at least somewhat sympathetic to the trendy “base building” concept presently and are starting to explore the “New German Reading of Marx” to the extent I can as a non-German reader.
So, for a while I had thought it would be fun and useful to own and read the MECW but never felt motivated to pull the trigger. Standing aside thousands of people taking to the streets of Pittsburgh to protest that Black Lives Matter during a pandemic simply motivated me to go back to Marx.
My reading of Marx and Engels before has been too piecemeal: basically the political works (The Eighteenth Brumaire as my favorite), Grundrisse, Capital (a few times with a few different “aides”, commentaries, or suggested “ways” to read Marx from Heinrich to Harry Cleaver to Althusser and Balibar to David Harvey), a few Soviet printed collections of specific topics (e.g. On Ireland and the Irish Question), a few of Engels’ more sociological works, and way too many examples of “let me go to to Marxists.org and read this specific essay or letter people are referencing.” But that leaves gaps even in major published works, never mind some of the letters and notebooks and miscellany* I am currently reading (*wow the young Marx was truly “head over heels” for Jenny and wrote some real humdinger poems.) And now I should that I have never read a “complete” biography of Marx (Heinrich’s remaining volumes could take many years?), so I may observe things about his life that others past Marx 101 already knew.
So I emailed International Publishers, asked if there would be a discount if I bought the entire collection all at once. They almost immediately replied (on a weekend) that yes, there would be an 20% discount to the order and a pretty good deal on media shipping. Within a week or so, 49 volumes showed up on my porch in giant boxes postmarked from New Jersey along with a Homeland Security agent who [redacted].
The dust covers were all different glorious colors of creamy faded and fresh, not remotely matching. The actual printing spanned decades. I grabbed a random Engels edition, opened to a random page to take a sniff, and out fell some sort of map of battle formations. What have I gotten myself into?
For now I plan on 50 additional Medium entries for the 50 volumes but that is only an estimate, as it may ultimately be preferable to create multiple entries for major works within a volume.
My plan for reading is to reorder the 50 volumes more chronologically to deal with the fact that 38–50 (all letters) were published separately than the original 37 volumes. So for example, I will read volumes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 38, 11, 39, 12, 40, and so on. Otherwise I would be reading letters from 1839 directly after essays from 1878, which would be very disorienting. Especially if this takes two seven years, which is my rough estimate for something like 30,000-40,000 pages taking a back seat to children, work, hobbies, and reading some novels to break up the MECW.
So now for the General Introduction, from 1975 (for reference, Volume 50 wasn’t finished until 2004. Apparently some changes happened in the world in that time.) Here is the link again: http://hiaw.org/defcon6/works/cw/volume01/intro.html
And BOOM! It starts with big statements to get the partisan’s blood flowing: “KARL MARX and FREDERICK ENGELS were the authors of an integrated body of philosophical, economic and social-political views, the ideology of communism, which in our time has spread more widely and exercised a greater influence on the course of world history than any other.”
“Theirs was a unique collaboration in theoretical work and in revolutionary leadership. While the leading role in it certainly belongs to Marx, the partnership was so close, many important writings having been undertaken under their joint authorship and the greater part of the work of each from the beginning of their friendship in 1844 to Marx’s death in 1883 having been discussed with the other, that their works must of necessity be collected together.”
…
“The sum total of achievement of Marx and Engels was truly immense.”
The mark of the official international Communist movement is stamped onto the General Introduction as well, starting with Lenin: “The further development of Marxism on a world scale from the close of the nineteenth century is inseparably bound up with the personality, ideas and work of V. I. Lenin”…“Without revolutionary theory,” Lenin said, “there can be no revolutionary movement.”…”Marxism organically absorbs the new features that were introduced by Lenin and represents in the modern epoch the integrated international doctrine of Marx, Engels and Lenin, constituting the foundation of the international communist movement.”
Efficiently and neatly, three worlds are summarized by what was essentially the “line” in a socialist high water mark of the 1970’s: “In the years that have followed, the working people of socialist countries have faced and continue to face immense problems of socialist planning and administration, of overcoming objective difficulties of development and, in a number of cases, errors, of resolving new contradictions and of organising creative labour to strengthen the socialist system and move towards the goal of communism. Marxism-Leninism has been and continues to be the basis of all the achievement of socialist countries. The same is true of the working-class movement in the capitalist countries, where a struggle is spreading for profound economic and social-political changes, for true democracy, for a transition to the road to socialism; one of the vital conditions of victory in this struggle is to eliminate the consequences of opportunism and division in the working-class movement. In the countries that have freed themselves from colonialism and are developing on new lines, leading forces of the national liberation movements are turning more and more to the guidance of this teaching in the struggle to eliminate the results of colonial slavery, neo-colonialism and racialism, and to achieve economic and cultural renaissance.”
The General Introduction then goes through the history of publication in German and eventually in English of these works. Then into the conceptual organization of the works: “The whole edition will comprise fifty volumes, organised into three main groups: (1) philosophical, historical, political, economic and other works; (2) Marx’s Capital, with his preliminary versions and works directly connected with it, particularly the Economic Manuscripts of 1857–1858 better known under the editorial heading Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen konomie; (3) the letters, beginning from August 1844. According to the preliminary plan of the edition, the first group will run from volumes 1 to 28, the second from 29 to 37, and the third from 38 to 50.
“The first three volumes will have certain specific structural features. Before the beginning of their close friendship and co-operation in August 1844, Marx and Engels each developed independently as thinker, writer and revolutionary, and in these volumes their works and letters will be published separately. The first volume will contain works and letters of the young Marx up to March 1843, and the second works and letters of Engels over approximately the same period. The third volume will be divided on the same principle, giving works and letters of Marx and Engels from the spring of 1843 up to August 1844 in two separate sections. In the subsequent volumes the literary legacy of the founders of Marxism, an important feature of whose creative work from August 1844 onwards was constant collaboration, will be published together.”
So who planned all this?
“This complete edition of the works of Marx and Engels is the product of agreement and collaboration of British, American and Soviet scholars, translators and editors. It is published by Lawrence & Wishart Ltd., London, International Publishers Co. Inc., New York, in consultation respectively with the Executive Committee of the Communist Party of Great Britain and the National Committee of the Communist Party of the United States of America, and by Progress Publishers and the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Moscow.
“The entire work of preparation and publication is supervised by editorial commissions appointed by the publishers in Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. Together they form a team responsible for the edition as a whole.
“Considerable help is being afforded, too, by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, in Berlin.
…
“The general principles governing its preparation and publication were first agreed at a general conference of representatives of the three publishers in Moscow at the beginning of December 1969, and subsequently elaborated further by the agreement of the three editorial commissions. Those who took part personally in the elaboration of these principles are listed alphabetically below:
GREAT BRITAIN: Jack Cohen, Maurice Cornforth, Maurice Dobb, E. J. Hobsbawm (!), James Klugmann, Margaret Mynatt.
USA: James S. Allen, Philip S. Foner (also a ! for me?), the late Howard Selsam, Dirk J. Struik, William W. Weinstone.
USSR: for Progress Publishers — N. P. Karmanova, V. N. Pavlov, M. K. Shcheglova, T. Y. Solovyova; for the Institute of Marxism-Leninism — P. N. Fedoseyev, L. I. Golman, A. I. Malysh, A. G. Yegorov, V. Y. Zevin.”
One thing that may be interesting to do at the end of the entire collection is to write an essay revisiting the various prefaces and end notes put together by what could be called the “worldview Marxists” of the Soviet Union and it’s “line” as for how they influenced the particular presentation of Marx and Engels within.
Anyway, I hope you’re ready to go! I read that about a month ago and it had me fired up.
I’ve finished Volume One so thoughts coming on that should be coming relatively soon, especially “Debates on the Law on the Thefts of Wood.”
