Karl Marx/Frederick Engels — Collected’ Works. Volume I — ‘Karl Marx 1835-1843. Cloth- bound, 806 pp., illustrated, 1975. Books, 487 Adelaide St. W., Toronto, Price $7.50.

Reviewed by R. S. KENNY

. MAY seem strange when we _~ Consider the towering fame of Karl Marx and Frederick En- 8els that until the year of 1975 /2O volume of a Collected Works /Of these men in the English lan- /8uage was on the table before aS The body of Karl Marx was id in Highgate Cemetery in London in 1883; the ashes of En- /8els were scattered ‘on the Waters off Eastbourne in 1895. The English-speaking world has | ad to wait nearly one hundred ‘Years for the corpus of their Works to be available.

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We must recall the extra- Heeary circumstances of their jlves and the fortunes of their Writings, After their deaths, ‘Most of their literary remains Were in the hands of what was Considered the mighty German /20cial Democratic Party. In any ternational gathering of social- Sts no one came to firm conclu-

‘Slons until the German comrades _

wad spoken. Yet during this Period ng edition of the collected jrorks ‘was attempted. In Eng- 8nd an edition of Capital did not 4Ppear until twenty years -after € publication of Das Kapital.

| interestingly enough an edi- ‘p= Was published \in Tsarist /“Ussia only five years after its ‘Publication in Germany. The Permission to publish Capital in asia in 1872 must be one of in. Most anomalous acts of ot censorship. The censors Ss Msidered the work as “strictly entific,” “difficult and hardly '“°mprehensible,” “few would and it and still fewer would qyierstand it.” They did require t. € Temoval of the frontispiece, Care of Marx; the work it- btn Bey considered irrelevant

Ussian reality. ag Promise of a collected | S took on substance on the tig of the October Revolu- Sand Despite the years of stress “stat anguish, the new socialist byoted founded an institute de- “able to assembling -all avail- moy, records of the socialist | Worke ne and in particular, the LE i of Karl Marx, Frederick Hines S and V. I. Lenin. Today no Epect in the world, in this res- ibe Tivals the resources of the ism-te, of the Institute of Marx- reso, ninism in Moscow. These . Urces are indispensable in 3 Preparation of any edition of i Collected works of Karl bcluae and Frederick Engels, in- Ing the edition in the Eng-

lish language.

bin co Marxists and many others 1975 e English-speaking world,

isto 1S an important date in the ary a of publishing. In Janu- lfirst Ot this year ‘appeared the of fifty volumes that will

‘Canadian Distributor: Progress -

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house all the known writings of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. In former times those of us who

-are at home only in the English

language, had to remain con- tent mainly with the fundamen- tal works of the founders of scientific socialism. The fasci- nating correspondence was limi- ted to a few books such as a selected volume and the collec- tion of letters of Engels and Paul and Laura Lafargue, Marx’s daughter. In the Collected Works there will be no less than thirteen volumes of correspon- dence.

There will be a wealth of arti- cles, many not previously avail- able in our language, some print- ed for the first time in any lan- guage. There have been many new discoveries of their writings and these will be incorporated in the new Collected Works. We are assured that the accuracy of the texts and their complete- ness will make this the great

standard edition. A scholarly ap-

paratus accompanying each vol-

ume will make this edition a |

mine of information for every serious student of Marxism.

This enterprise is an interna- tional endeavor with three pub- lishing houses involved in the

project: in the United States of |

America, International Publish- ers cf New York; in Great Britain,

Lawrence & Wishart of London;

in the Soviet Union, Progress Publishers. The actual printing has been delegated to the press- es of the Soviet Union. Each volume will consist of 700-1000 pages. They are finely illustrated

and are bound in rich, red cloth, gold-stamped. :

The editorial. commission in Great Britain contains the names of the distinguished Marxists, Jack Cohen, Maurice Cornforth, Maurice Dobb, E. J. Hobsbaum, James ~ Klugmann and Margaret Mynatt. In the United States, James S. Allen, Philip S. Foner, the late Howard Selsam, Dirk J. Struik and Wil- liam W. Weinstone. Together with the Soviet commission, these three commissions are sharing in the production of these volumes. ~

The edition is designed to satisfy the highest academic

standards. All previous transla- tions into English are being carefully. checked to assure that they convey into our language he exact meaning of the origi- nal. ‘

The commissions have inherit- ed a.rich legacy. In the past; efforts have been made to pro- duce editions of the works of Marx and Engels, both in- Ger- man.and in Russian. In 1927 the Institute of Marxism-Leninism began the publication in the ori- ginal language of the collected works, but this did not extend beyond twelve volumes. Two more editions, much extended, were published in the Russian language, the first between 1928 and 1947, the second was begun in 1955. In the German Demo- cratic Republic a notable edition was begun in 1956 (Werke). It is published in forty-four books, two of them being supplement- ary volumes. Thus much ground- work. has been done,

In the General Introduction to

’ the Collected Works the editors

set out their objective: “The task is to. take into account and use to the fullest advantage the

best traditions established in ~

this field in Great Britain, the USA, the USSR, the German Democratic Republic, and other countries, as well as the results achieved by world science in in- vestigating the literary legacy of Marx and Engels and the history of Marxism. Thus this edition will provide for the first time to the English-speaking world a practically complete, organized and, annotated collection of the

works of the founders and first teachers of the international communist movement.”

It is estimated that it will take ten years to complete this vast enterprise. When the entire fifty volumes are placed in their bookcase we cannot but be awe- struck by the sheer industry of these two men. How did these

“men of the nineteenth century,

‘in the midst of their busy politi- cal lives, ever manage to drive their quills and pens with such unflagging energy? And what an immense array of special knowl- edge is revealed in the titles of the works that will occupy these volumes.

The first volume is devoted to the writings of the young Marx who was born in 1818. The sec- ond volume will contain the early writings of Engels. The period of Marx’s early life ex- tends from 1835 to 1843; the ma- terial consists of articles, pam- phlets, letters and poems. It con- tains Marx’s doctoral thesis, Dif- ference between the Democri- tean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature,

We are so inclined to think of Marx as he appeared in his later photographs that we are apt to forget that he was once a young man. A young man of a special type. We love to think (fondly) that all young men who later

_ became eminent were terrible as

students. For us a very comfort- ing doctrine. But in the Reports on ‘the student work (included in this volume) his teachers uni- formly describe the young Marx as ‘diligent’; some prefer the term ‘exceedingly diligent’.

Like many young men of sen- sibility the youthful Marx sur- rendered to the urge to write poetry, some of. it in the roman- tic mood characteristic -of the age. As to an evaluation of his poetry, I am not, with my limited knowledge of the original Ger- man, prepared to acknowledge either its merits or its limita- tions.

From the period of his earliest writings Marx indicates his strong social concern. He did not begin as a socialist; the very word ‘socialism’ had just entered man’s consciousness and. man’s vocabulary. The first volume marks the beginnings of a tran- sition; in the words of Lenin, “Marx’s transition from idealism to materialism and from revolu- tionary democracy to commun- ism.” The volume extends to 1843. Five years later Marx and Engels were to write The Mani- festo of the Communist Party, the foundation-stone of the in- ternational communist move- ment.

For Marxists in the English- speaking world, and a host of others who have gained invalu- able insights from their writings, the appearance of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Fred- erick Engels will be the out- standing publishing event of our century.

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—FRIDAY, JANUARY 24, 1975—Page 7