David Riazanov's KARL MARX and FREDERICK ENGELS An Introduction to Their Lives and Work

When Monthly Review Press reprinted this classic work in 1973, Paul M. Sweezy wrote the reasons for doing so in a brief foreword:

"Back in the 1930s when I was planning a course on the economics of socialism at Harvard, I found that there was a dearth of suitable material in English on all aspects of the subject, but especially on Marx and Marxism. In combing the relevant shelves of the University library, I came upon a considerable number of titles which were new to me. Many of these of course turned out to be useless, but several contributed importantly to my own education and a few fitted nicely into the need for course reading material. One which qualified under both these headings and which I found to be of absorbing interest was David Riazanov's Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels which had been written in the mid-1920s as a series of lectures for Soviet working-class audiences and had recently been translated into English by Joshua Kunitz and published by International Publishers.

 "I assigned the book in its entirety as an introduction to Marxism as long as I gave the course. The results were good: the students liked it and learned from it not only the main facts about the lives and works of the founders of Marxism, but also, by way of example, something of the Marxist approach to the study and writing of history.

 "Later on during the 1960s when there was a revival of interest in Marxism among students and others, a growing need was felt for reliable works of introduction and explanation. Given my own past experience, I naturally responded to requests for assistance from students and teachers by recommending, among other works, Riazanov's Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. But by that time the book had long been out of print and could usually be found only in the larger libraries (some of which, as has a way of happening with useful books, had lost their copies in the intervening years). We at Monthly Review Press therefore decided to request permission to reprint the book, and this has now been granted. I hope that students and teachers in the 1970s will share my enthusiasm for a work which exemplifies in an outstanding way the art of popularizing without falsifying or vulgarizing."

  His sentiments are shared. So here's a digital edition, permanently archived on the net, thus never off the library shelf. Download or print out your own copy.

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