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Рязанов Д. Б. Новые данные о литературном наследстве К. Маркса и Ф. Энгельса : (сообщение тов. Рязанова, сделанное в Соц. академии 20/XI-23 г.) // Вестник Социалистической академии. – 1923. – Кн. 6 (октябрь-декабрь). – С. 351–376.
Before discussing the new insights that are opening up to us in the literary legacy of Marx and Engels, I shall say a few words about the position and state in which this literary legacy found itself until recently. The literary legacy of Marx and Engels came to light following Engels’s death. Engels managed to make the most ill-advised arrangement imaginable in this matter. Had he left no instructions at all, it is highly likely that the legacy would have been preserved. Of all his posthumous wishes, only one was carried out, and with great difficulty: instead of burying him, he was cremated after all, and his ashes were scattered somewhere in the North Sea. This was the only request which, following a debate in the party press, was fulfilled.
Under different circumstances, people would have brought fresh flowers to his grave for a year or two, then forgotten about it, and that would have been the end of the matter. But since nothing needed to be done for Engels himself, certain obligations remained regarding his estate. Yet it was precisely this estate that was handled the worst of all. Almost the entire vast library of Marx and Engels was lost. It had been bequeathed to the German Social Democratic Party, just as a significant portion of his estate and the entire legacy of manuscripts left by Engels had been bequeathed to the same party. Since German law did not permit Engels to bequeath everything directly to the German party, he was forced to appoint two trustees – Bernstein and Bebel – who, from 1896 onwards, therefore regarded themselves as the owners of this legacy, as private owners entitled to dispose of this property. But even here a serious oversight was made: they did not take the trouble to ascertain whether the entire estate had been bequeathed to them, or whether someone had managed to conceal part of it. In reality, however, something completely unexpected for Engels happened: a part of his literary estate – a rather substantial one – had, by some chance, ended up in Berlin along with the Marx and Engels library. I remember very well that as far back as 1900 I came across this library, lying unsorted in several rooms in Berlin.
When showing me what remained of Engels’s military library, the late Karl Pfankuch spoke of these books with great scepticism and even with the disdain that practitioners often feel towards theorists, dismissing them as superfluous ballast. Indeed, nothing remains of the military library now except for a few random books. The vast majority of the remaining books, as they did not know what to do with them, were handed over to a workers’ library in Berlin, without taking the trouble to check whether the books bore any traces of Engels’ and Marx’s intellectual work in the form of marginal notes. Thus, more than a thousand books belonging to them vanished from the sight of scholarly researchers until more favourable times, along with all of Marx and Engels’s annotations. Some of the manuscripts and notebooks which they deemed it possible to send to Berlin were dispatched, but Bernstein ensured that the manuscripts and, as far as possible, the letters did not leave London.
I shall now turn to that part of Marx and Engels’ literary legacy which found its way to Berlin. A vast portion, the fate of which remained unknown, stayed in London; yet, somehow, when I visited the Lafargues at Draveil (108 boulevard Henri-Barbusse) in 1911, I found, quite unexpectedly, a very large portion of Engels’ and Marx’s papers in their possession. How they came to be there is difficult to explain. It is likely that some of them were sent there after Eleanor Marx’s death. It is possible that the papers belonging to Marx were given to his daughters. Thus, the Marx and Engels archive was divided into three parts: one part ended up in Draveil, another remained in London with Bernstein, and the third was handed over to the Party archive. The part that was in the archive soon became accessible to anyone wishing to consult it.
The first person who, by virtue of his duties, had to familiarise himself with the literary legacy of Marx and Engels was Mehring, who in 1898 was commissioned by the Party to publish the literary legacy of Marx and Engels. To a certain extent, we were all raised and educated on the three-volume literary legacy of Marx and Engels published by Mehring. [1] I have always regarded these three volumes as a work that exhausted everything that could be offered in this field, the author of which, in any case, had carefully examined everything he could get his hands on. Mehring received this commission from the Central Committee of the German Social Democratic Party, of which Bebel was a member. And Bebel, in such cases, was remarkably courteous and willing to accommodate all manner of scholars ... He later proved to be very courteous towards a young comrade who was a complete stranger to him – that is, towards me. Towards Mehring, I must say, he was no less courteous. And yet, for some reason, the literary legacy that Mehring compiled between 1898 and 1902 reveals significant gaps. Thus, one question arises for all readers of these three volumes.
We have all read the preface to Marx’s Critique of Political Economy; we have all read about the two thick volumes – in octavo – in which Marx and Engels criticised German ideology, that is to say, the whole of post-Hegelian philosophy and ‘true socialism’ in all its manifestations. Each of us was left wondering: where have these two large volumes gone? We sought the answer in Mehring. In the Literary Legacy you will find a short chapter devoted to this ‘German Ideology’, but from it you will learn, quite unexpectedly, that the Literary Legacy is intended to publish only the works by Marx and Engels that were actually printed, and not those that remained in manuscript form, and that this is why he does not publish the manuscript. Mehring forgot that in the first volume he had published Marx’s doctoral thesis, which also existed only in manuscript form. This is followed by a strange statement that The German Ideology is, in general, of no interest, especially since Marx and Engels, in essence, wrote it for their own clarification. And yet, in that very same second volume, you will find a short section entitled The Leipzig Cathedral. It turns out that Mehring had in his possession a short manuscript of The Leipzig Cathedral, dedicated to Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. What exactly it represents, or what part of a larger whole it forms, Mehring does not know, even though he held this manuscript in his own hands. I shall explain this secret to you. It has only now become clear to me, following a recent trip to Berlin. The fact is that Mehring did indeed try very hard to obtain The German Ideology. He understood perfectly well that, even if he had decided not to publish it, there was no way of understanding the entire transitional period between The Holy Family – in which Marx criticised Bruno Bauer – and The Poverty of Philosophy without it. Only by unpacking these two volumes can one bridge the gap that exists between the two phases of Marx and Engels’ literary output. Mehring tried to obtain this manuscript; he asked Bernstein and even sought the help of Laura Lafargue; these efforts date from the time when Bernstein had already become a theorist of revisionism, when Laura Lafargue regarded him as a renegade. And Bernstein evaded the request, though not entirely. To get rid of Mehring, he gave him a short manuscript on Bruno Bauer. This is the very manuscript on the Leipzig Cathedral. On the basis of this section, Mehring came to the conclusion that The German Ideology really had little to offer.
Ultimately, he should simply have stated: I am not being given the opportunity to publish the literary legacy of Marx and Engels properly, and readers must take this into account. But it turns out that Mehring, too, had deceived Bernstein. Whilst I was now working with Bernstein, gathering together the various fragments of The German Ideology, I was unable to obtain one manuscript: the second part on Bruno Bauer. In response to my persistent enquiries, Bernstein told me that he seemed to have given it to Mehring in 1900, but had not received it back. I enquired with Eduard Fuchs, Mehring’s current literary executor. No trace of it. In the end, this missing part turned out to be the manuscript of The Leipzig Cathedral. I confess. Before the war, I had not taken a particular interest in this manuscript, but I had drawn Gustav Mayer’s attention to it, suggesting that he publish it. At the time, I was working on the later period in the lives of Marx and Engels. Now, having obtained the manuscript, I examined it carefully. It turned out that on the last page, in Engels’s own hand, was written: II. Bruno Bauer, 1845–46. This was the section of The German Ideology which Bernstein had given to Mehring in 1900 and which Mehring had decided to hand over to the archives.
In the preface to Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, Engels writes that, whilst preparing to write an essay on Feuerbach, he decided to take a look at this old manuscript, and notes: ‘The section on Feuerbach is unfinished.’ The manuscript showed him just how inadequate their economic knowledge had been at the time. You know how all our anti-Marxists have exploited these statements by Engels. But he does not say what exactly is contained in this manuscript. In 1918, Mehring published a major biography of Marx. There, too, you will find a chapter on The German Ideology. It goes even further in denying the significance of The German Ideology than his remarks in The Literary Legacy. It is almost a denial of the significance of this work even for the biography of Marx and Engels, and even for characterising the intellectual development of Marx and Engels. That was in 1918.
The following year, Gustav Mayer published a biography of Engels. [2] It must be said that Mayer deserves credit for uncovering certain facts concerning Engels’s life up to the age of 42. But Gustav Mayer is a bourgeois writer; he has only recently become a Social Democrat – or, more precisely, a German National Social Democrat; he is a man who is fundamentally incapable of understanding Marxism as a philosophical and revolutionary doctrine. He may still be able to understand Engels as a good, patriotic German. And yet, in his book, we find a most interesting chapter. It runs, roughly, from page 240 to 261. It must be said that these pages constitute the most interesting part, the most interesting section of this book. They present something entirely new. I happened to come across a copy of this book that had belonged to Kautsky, and from his notes I could see that these matters were entirely new to him as well. I was curious to know how Gustav Mayer had obtained this information about The German Ideology. In the notes, he states that Bernstein was kind enough to provide him with some of the Engels manuscripts in his possession. Gustav Mayer is a journalist, a veteran newspaper correspondent, and has retained the habits of a journalist and newspaper correspondent to this day. A journalist’s first duty is to conceal from all colleagues the source from which he obtains his information. Even when writing a scholarly work, he does not specify in detail which manuscripts he has used. You will search in vain in the notes for precise indications such as: ‘I made use of such-and-such, such-and-such and such-and-such sections of The German Ideology, Manuscript No. 1. And such-and-such quotations are taken from such-and-such a manuscript, in such-and-such a library, on such-and-such a page.’ Not a word is said about this, yet it is nevertheless evident that he had several manuscripts at his disposal.
There are comrades present in this hall who have probably also taken note of these striking passages in Mayer’s book. This discovery has compelled me to postpone the publication of the relevant volume of Marx’s works until I have finally managed to ascertain what has become of The German Ideology – whether it has indeed vanished without trace. The result of the trip I undertook to Berlin for this purpose is that I have finally, with great difficulty, managed to bring the entire The German Ideology to light. Here, in fact, I have a photograph of this manuscript. Sixty years after the proletarian revolution, I hope to tell you how much effort I expended, with the help of Louise Kautsky, to obtain one manuscript after another from Bernstein over the course of four weeks. I drew on all the printed sources known to me. Firstly, I wanted to get hold of Saint Max. I remembered that part of The German Ideology had been published, and I thought the easiest way to obtain it from him would be to ask for what had already been published. Having achieved this, I pointed out to Bernstein that in such-and-such a book he had stated that there was another part and that he would publish it. He did not recall this. I then showed him the relevant passage and also obtained the second part of this manuscript.
It turned out that the published section of ‘Saint Max’ constituted no more than ⅔ of the actual manuscript. A closer examination of the manuscript immediately yielded unexpected results. It turned out that it had suffered less from the ‘gnawing criticism of mice’ than Bernstein had thought when he published ‘Saint Max’. The mice had eaten far less than Bernstein had assumed. Thus, regarding the chapter on ‘humane liberalism’ in ‘Saint Max’, Bernstein writes: ‘Since only three pages have survived – all the rest, pages 41–42, were eaten by mice – I prefer not to publish this chapter at all.’ But, having leafed through the manuscript carefully, I found everything that was supposedly eaten by the mice intact, without any traces of damage whatsoever. But this is only one part of The German Ideology, albeit the most significant. According to my rough calculations, this section, devoted to Stirner, takes up no fewer pages than The One and His Property.
I should mention in passing that, whilst Marx was working on The Holy Family, Bruno Bauer was the most popular exponent of the most radical strand of philosophical thought. But even whilst The Holy Family was being printed, Stirner’s book (The Ego and Its Own, 1844) was published. It swept aside Bruno Bauer and his ilk in one fell swoop. During 1845, Stirner became the dominant figure in intellectual discourse, and to the German intelligentsia he proved to be incomparably more radical than Bruno Bauer. Marx and Engels launched a fierce attack on Stirner precisely in order to demonstrate, through him, the utter groundlessness of the extreme liberal bourgeois worldview. This explains the disproportionately large amount of space they devoted to Max Stirner in their work. But in The German Ideology, Marx and Engels did not limit themselves to Stirner alone. It is also devoted to Bruno Bauer and Feuerbach. The former–precisely because Engels and Marx had already dealt with him in The Holy Family is given comparatively little space, although far more than Bernstein seemed to think; he had a very poor understanding of the manuscript and appended the section devoted to Bauer to the chapters in which Marx and Engels criticise Feuerbach. The final chapters constitute the section of the manuscript which Engels, in the preface to his Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, describes as unfinished. It is from this section that Mayer took the striking passages I have mentioned. Unfortunately, he failed to present them properly.
It turns out that in this unfinished section, Marx and Engels – who, in their dealings with Stirner and Bruno Bauer, behave like angry teachers harshly chastising their pupils – treat Feuerbach as an opponent whom they regard with deep respect, whose person they do not attack. With regard to him, they deem it necessary right from the outset to contrast their materialist viewpoint with the idealist one. A critique of Feuerbach’s concept of ‘man’ is presented. This passage is quoted in Mayer’s account. Our starting point, our initial position, is not something abstract, but real individuals and their actions, the conditions they found ready-made, and the conditions as they are transformed by human activity. Anyone who wishes to study human history must set themselves the task first of all of studying this human organism, of studying man himself, and then the environment in which he acts, studying the geological, geographical, climatic and other conditions surrounding him. All this is set out magnificently, concretely and vividly precisely in the chapter on Feuerbach. I shall endeavour to have it published as soon as possible, even before it appears as a separate book. [3]
This indication alone suffices to show the immense significance of the manuscript of The German Ideology for resolving a whole range of questions. I have already pointed to one such question. For us, the period from ‘real humanism’ to revolutionary communism remained without connecting links; two stages in the development of Marx and Engels remained unexplained. But it was not only in the personal development of Marx and Engels, but also in the development of German ideology as a whole, that this entire transition from Hegel, through Feuerbach, to Marx and Engels remained completely incomprehensible and unexplored. It also remained unclear why Marx and Engels had, as it were, abandoned philosophy from that point onwards. In this manuscript, we find indications that Marx and Engels had already, at that time, formed a view of philosophy known to us from the formulation later given by Engels. All that remains of philosophy is dialectics and formal logic; everything else passes into the realm of the relevant sciences. But the manuscript also contains a large section devoted to the German ‘true socialists’. Until now, we have had at our disposal only a brief, rather scathing characterisation given in the Communist Manifesto. Now we have a detailed critique of all the writings of the ‘true socialists’.
You can now see what immense significance this manuscript holds, both for the biographies of Marx and Engels and for the history of German ideology, for the history of German social, political and economic thought in the nineteenth century, and for the history of nineteenth-century thought in general. For all of us, and especially for our young comrades who are becoming Marxists, it is very important to trace, through the manuscript by Marx and Engels, that extremely arduous path – now overgrown with detours and byways that are no longer necessary for us – along which Marx and Engels, via Hegel, via Feuerbach, via English political economy, and via the unfolding class struggle of the proletariat, arrived at dialectical materialism.
But it is not only the manuscript of The German Ideology that is now in our possession. I have managed to find – not in Bernstein’s collection, but in the archive of the German Social Democrats – other manuscripts by Marx dating from the period before 1848. Although I worked quite regularly in this archive before the war, and was the first to organise the papers by Marx that had accumulated there, I did not have the opportunity to study them, as I was occupied with work on the history of the International; moreover, I assumed that Mehring had made use of everything relating to the period prior to 1848. Furthermore, I thought that only Marx’s notebooks had been sent along with the library. I had looked through them at the time and made a few notes for myself, but I was left with the impression that these were simply Marx’s notebooks. I knew that these notebooks contained his notes, but I was only looking for what I needed for my work. Now I have looked through the notebooks particularly carefully and came across one large manuscript. It begins on page 5. At first, it seemed that these were merely excerpts. Marx quotes a paragraph from some book and makes comments on it. It occurred to me that this might be preparatory work in the field of a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. It turned out that this assumption was correct. The manuscript – which I shall publish shortly – contains, paragraph by paragraph, a critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, from pages 261–262 approximately to page 311. This manuscript runs to about a hundred pages.
Amongst those same notebooks, I chanced upon another one. The fact that I had spent a great deal of time over the last two years studying the Communist Manifesto now drew my attention to one of these manuscripts. Upon examining it, I saw the date: ‘November 47’. On closer inspection, I realised that it was a rough outline of a chapter from the Communist Manifesto, listing the main sections in which the whole of socialist literature is criticised. I was delighted, thinking that perhaps in this notebook I might find the draft of those pages which we have in the Communist Manifesto. But my hopes were not fulfilled. It turned out to be merely a short version of a single passage from the Communist Manifesto; however, in this notebook I did find something resembling notes for a new series of lectures on wage labour and capital. This work still requires deciphering. Alongside this, in the same notebooks I found a fragment relating to Marx’s studies of Greek philosophy, and another economic manuscript modelled on Marx’s writings. As you can see, apart from The German Ideology, there are few new manuscripts from the period prior to 1847. Of greatest significance are the manuscript containing a brief critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, and the manuscript on wages. [4]
We shall now turn to the period following the revolution. Marx devoted himself entirely to the study of political economy. From Engels’s preface to Volume 2 of Capital, we have a general idea of the state of the economic manuscripts left by Marx, on which Engels and, later, Kautsky worked. Engels writes that Marx left behind 23 large notebooks, totalling 1,472 pages. These notebooks were written between August 1861 and June 1863. He adds that the first five notebooks (220 pages) and notebooks 19–23 (pages 1,159–1,472) constitute the first draft of the first volume of Capital. He decided not to use them for the time being. Pages 973 to 1158 in notebooks 16, 17 and 18 deal with the following issues: ‘capital, profit, rate of profit, commercial capital, money capital’ – all of which are discussed in the third volume. Pages 223–972 of notebooks 6–15 constitute a history of the theories of surplus value, precisely what Marx intended to investigate in Volume 4 of Capital. As early as the 1880s, when he began working on Marx’s literary legacy, Engels spoke of this fourth volume. He subsequently discussed this with Kautsky. Seven hundred and fifty pages of Marx’s manuscript yielded the four volumes familiar to you all as Theories of Surplus Value [5], whilst a fifth more remained unpublished. Thus, in these 23 notebooks alone, which contain the draft of Volume 1 of Capital and the initial draft of part of Volume 3 of Capital, we have approximately six unpublished volumes equivalent in size to Theories of Surplus Value.
In the same preface to the second volume of Capital, Engels reports that he found a manuscript written by Marx in 1864–65, which, he surmises, constitutes the third volume of Capital. He then goes on to list the material he used in compiling the second volume of Capital. Engels had eight of Marx’s manuscripts at his disposal. I must say that Marx’s eighth manuscript – one of the most interesting, as is evident from the second volume of Capital – has disappeared, and, despite all my efforts, I have been unable to find it. Of the manuscripts representing various drafts of the second volume of Capital, Engels used two in their entirety. Admittedly, these two manuscripts are so extensive that they account for more than half the volume of the second volume of Capital. The first manuscript, comprising 150 pages, and the third manuscript were not used at all; the fourth manuscript was used only to a limited extent. Thus, even within this group of manuscripts relating to Volume 3 – apart from Volume 3 itself – I found a number of manuscripts representing a new draft of certain chapters of Volume 1 of Capital.
We now come to an interesting question.
Every Russian Marxist who has studied Volume 2 of Capital has always wondered whether it might be possible to obtain Volume 2 of Capital as Marx left it, in its unedited form, with Engels’s commentary alongside it. Many of us had the impression that Engels was, perhaps, somewhat subjective. Well, a closer examination of the contents of these manuscripts has reinforced this view in my mind. And even more so with regard to Volume 3 of Capital. When Engels published Volume 2 of Capital, he expected to publish Volume 3 within a few months. He thought he had found a manuscript that was quite ready. In reality, however, it took him nine years to publish the third volume of Capital. There were so many gaps in the manuscript that Engels had to flesh out certain sections himself. He spent several years working on one section and eventually abandoned it because he realised it would come to nothing. It can be said with certainty that the third volume of Capital represents, rather, a brilliant variation on a theme outlined and developed by Marx, but nevertheless a variation by Engels.
But Engels went through several more manuscripts. Whether he had forgotten about them is hard to say, but amongst Marx’s notebooks I have now found a further eight containing economic writings. In one of these notebooks, I came across an interesting note by Marx in which he lists the contents of all these notebooks. The manuscript was written in the mid-1850s. It is, in fact, the first draft of a work by Marx for which he had not yet devised a title and which turned out to be the first draft of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.
You can see what these notebooks contain from the following indication. In one of them, Kautsky found the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Thus, the following task emerges for us in publishing Marx’s economic legacy. First, we must publish the first draft of the A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, which dates from the mid-1850s. The second major task is the publication of all 23 of Marx’s notebooks, as they have been preserved. Next comes the first volume of Capital with all its variants and all its drafts; the second volume of Capital, as left by Marx and as revised by Engels; the third volume of Capital, as left by Marx and as revised by Engels; the fourth volume is omitted. Under this plan, it is omitted entirely.
I have already mentioned that even in the notebooks, which apparently contain only extracts, there are independent comments by Marx. Experts on the second volume of Capital can judge for themselves what sort of material is to be found there from the fact that sections 89–92 of that volume were taken by Engels not from the manuscript but from one such notebook.
The considerable work involved in photographing the manuscripts held by Bernstein and Marx’s principal economic manuscripts has not yet allowed me to photograph all of Marx’s notebooks. But this work will need to be done. Simply because these notebooks are of great interest for the history of Marx’s intellectual development, and are of interest for characterising his methods of work and study.
I shall now turn to the third group of manuscripts. At the beginning of 1870, Engels moved to London. From his correspondence with Marx, we can see that Engels retained his long-standing interest in the chemistry of dyes – this is probably due to his background in the textile trade – as well as in chemistry, physics and the natural sciences in general, which he had studied whilst at secondary school. In Manchester, with the help of his friend Carl Schorlemmer, a well-known chemist, he continued to study the natural sciences alongside other disciplines. After moving to London, he devoted himself even more intensively to the natural sciences. Some of you will probably recall his letter of May 1873, in which he informs Marx–who had gone to Manchester–of the conclusions he had reached, and asks his friend to convey to him the views of his Manchester acquaintances. We can see, therefore, that Engels had already been conducting thorough research in the field of natural science several years before his polemic with Eugen Dühring. In the preface to Anti-Dühring, he expresses the hope that he will be able to continue his studies. In a letter to Marx dated November 1882, we find an interesting reference. In connection with a new discovery in the field of electricity, which, in his view, confirmed his theory, he wrote to Marx that he wished to finish his work on dialectics in nature as soon as possible. What became of this work, and to what extent it was completed, remains unknown.
Neither Kautsky nor Mehring ever mentioned this work to me; it is not referred to in any article on Engels, and even Bernstein makes no mention of it in his notes on the correspondence. Imagine, then, my surprise when Bernstein, quite by chance, whilst sorting through the manuscripts he had in his possession–a process which lasted about a month–brought me a large manuscript by Engels on Dialectics in Nature. From the title on the cover, it was clear that the manuscript consisted of six parts, in which the laws of the motion of matter, electricity and magnetism, etc., were explored. Unfortunately, Part 4 – Natural Science in the World of Ghosts – had disappeared. My persistent requests to track it down proved fruitless for a long time. I was already preparing to leave for Russia without this part, but, almost on the eve of my departure, it was finally found. But it was not just this manuscript. This group also includes several other manuscripts bearing the following titles: Nature and Natural Science, Mathematics and Natural Science, Dialectics and Natural Science. It is clear that Engels did not immediately cease his work in this field; he had not expected that editing Marx’s manuscript would take him so long. It was only in the mid-1880s that he lost hope of ever completing his work, and he wrote in the preface to the new edition of Anti-Dühring – at the end of 1885 – where he mentioned his works in the field of natural science, the results of which he had intended to publish alongside Marx’s mathematical works, noting that further advances in natural science might render his work partly or entirely superfluous. Engels, however, regarded the publication of further volumes of Capital as his most important task.
I cannot yet say anything about the content of these manuscripts. They require deciphering. I must say, however, that Engels’s manuscripts are quite easy to read, especially when compared with Marx’s almost illegible manuscripts. Perhaps our few physicists and chemists, who are familiar with the dialectical method, will be of assistance to us – provided, of course, that they prove to be just as intrepid and persistent in the field of deciphering manuscripts as they are in the field of investigating chemical and physical phenomena. And I know that even very brave people fear manuscripts as superstitious people fear ghosts.
There is no doubt that Engels will be proved right, that the progress of natural science over the last forty years will render his conclusions superfluous, leaving them with nothing but historical significance. But it must be said that it was a crime, literally an unforgivable one, against the memory of Engels, that these manuscripts of his were not published immediately after his death. All in all, they are hardly more than half or three-fifths the length of Anti-Dühring.
I would add that among Engels’s manuscripts there is also a major work on the medieval history of the Germanic peoples, which, as is evident from his letters to Marx, he was working on in the early 1880s in connection with the history of the German Markgenossenschaft. I shall also mention that, amongst a number of minor manuscripts of the most varied nature, there is a further major work on Ireland, probably written in the late 1860s.
I shall now, if you will allow me, move on without interruption to the second major part of Marx and Engels’ literary legacy: their correspondence. And in the form in which you are all familiar with it, it is, as acknowledged by Gustav von Schmoller, Wilhelm Oncken and other representatives of bourgeois scholarship, the most important source for the study of the political, social and intellectual history of the nineteenth century. One might have expected these four volumes to have been published with a modicum of scholarly rigour, so as not to dishonour the memory of Marx and Engels. In reality, however, this edition – for which Bernstein and Mehring bear the main responsibility – is beneath all criticism. [6] I have in my hands the first volume of the correspondence between Marx and Engels. All these countless inserts that you see represent omissions from the letters – which the editors have failed to mention – that we were able to verify against the originals; but these are merely major omissions. There is not a single letter in which those sacrilegious hands have not made alterations. Harsh expressions have either been replaced with milder ones or simply omitted. If Marx calls someone a donkey, our ‘governesses’ replace this expression with a milder word – a fool! These prudish publishers shy away from any strong language; yet Marx and Engels’ letters read like those of schoolgirls compared to the letters of Belinsky, who was brought up in the traditions of Russian matriarchy. And when Mehring tells you, in the preface to Marx’s biography, that he had no disagreements with Bernstein regarding the publication of the correspondence, and that he had neither the desire nor the reason to interfere with his work, one can only throw up one’s hands in exasperation. It is hard to imagine anything more philistine and petty-bourgeois than this ‘cleansing’ of Marx and Engels’s letters. Yet not a single shilling, not a single penny sent by Engels from Manchester has been omitted, nor has a single passage in Marx’s letters been left out that casts a shadow on him in the eyes of the philistines. Whilst the publishers go to great lengths to preserve the reputation of the old Liebknecht or Lassalle by toning down the epithets directed at them, they are merciless when it comes to Marx’s private life. Admittedly, the result was not what the publishers had expected.
One might say that I took part in this crime. My name is mentioned in the most flattering terms in the publishers’ preface to the correspondence. But all my assistance was provided without access to the originals. I was given only the proofs, and I was only able to ascertain exactly what the publishers had omitted from the first and second proofs. On one occasion, I behaved like a Russian barbarian. I published excerpts from a letter by Marx based on the first proof. A huge scandal ensued, because I forced them to change the typesetting of the first volume: it was no longer possible to cut out what I had already published. Later, I published some letters by Engels and Marx directly from the originals in Russian. Even before the war, I had managed to obtain from Bebel, for my work on the International, the original letters from Marx and Engels dating from the relevant years. I told Bebel that without them I would not work on this project, that I considered it beneath my dignity to use such a truncated edition. At Bebel’s insistence, Bernstein gave me these letters. Before handing these letters over to Bernstein, I photographed them all without saying a word. The same procedure had to be carried out with all the others. I can now say that this has been done: we have a complete photographic record of all the letters from Marx to Engels and from Engels to Marx held by Bernstein, and we also have letters which Bernstein does not possess.
Marx’s letters to Engels constitute the largest part–no less than three-quarters – of his literary legacy, which consists of his correspondence. Each of you will recall Marx’s most interesting correspondents – Ludwig Kugelmann, Friedrich Adolph Sorge, Joseph Wedemeyer, Nikolai-on (Nikolai Danielson). With the exception of the letters to Sorge, we have photographs of almost all of them. We also have Marx’s letters to his eldest daughter and to Arnold Ruge. Everything that could be done in this regard has already been done, and I can say that we have in our possession no less than 90 per cent of Marx’s letters. It remains to collect the originals or photographs of letters to various individuals who wrote to Marx with various enquiries.
The situation was worse when it came to Engels’s letters. When Marx died in 1883, his circle of correspondents was relatively small. Engels’s circle was considerably wider. From 1883 to 1895, his correspondence expanded as the international labour movement developed. It is important here to identify those correspondents to whom, after Marx and Engels’s relatives, the greatest number of letters were addressed. The most likely assumption was that, apart from Bebel and Victor Adler, Engels wrote the most letters to Kautsky and Bernstein. It was of the utmost importance to attempt to obtain these letters. The task was difficult, but it has been fully accomplished. We now have photographs of all of Engels’s letters to Kautsky, who imposed only one condition on me: I may not publish them before the summer of 1924.
I have also managed to obtain Engels’s letters to Bernstein. You will very soon see just how important this material is for Engels’s biography and for the history of the 1880s. [7], as Bernstein has granted me the right to publish these letters in Russian in a month’s time, in their entirety. What is more, Bernstein has promised to write an introduction for me about his relationship with Engels. All that remains is, over the next few years – in Bulgaria, Romania, Armenia, Italy, Portugal and Switzerland – to track down the letters that Engels wrote to his numerous correspondents. This task is made somewhat easier by the fact that Engels sent almost all such letters after first drawing up drafts of them. I have managed to find many such drafts. The drafts are extremely interesting. I have managed to find a draft of a lengthy letter from Engels to Zasulich, a draft of a letter to Loria, and a number of others, which make it possible to trace his correspondents.
But the correspondence of Marx and Engels also yields other interesting insights. They wrote a great deal, but they also received many letters. And so, an examination of this legacy provides crucial insights. I have brought photographs of all of Labriola’s letters to Engels; this amounts to approximately 160 pages. There are letters from various Russian revolutionaries to Engels; there are also most interesting letters to Marx, which reveal completely unknown facts. I shall shortly be publishing letters from Loria to Marx, and so on. They are highly characteristic of representatives of bourgeois science, who showered Marx with the most obsequious flattery in their letters. Among these letters are the already well-known letters from Charles Darwin and the previously unknown ones from Edwin Ray Lankester and John Morley. It will be of interest to everyone to learn that Carl Pearson, one of the greatest English scientists, whose name is well known to all those involved in eugenics and biometrics, whilst a student at the University of Cambridge, approached Marx with a proposal to translate Capital into English; he pointed out that among his fellow students at the university there was a group interested in Capital, who were reading it mainly in French. He considered himself well-suited to the task of translation because he was studying the history of German thought, had spent a couple of years at Heidelberg University, and endorsed all the fundamental principles of socialism. In his early works, you will find traces of such familiarity with a whole range of issues, which is lacking among ordinary English scholars and which is now explained by a certain ideological influence.
I shall now turn to the last group. I shall say a few words about the notebooks. I did not have them photographed, as there was not enough time. I have a list of these notebooks and a list of the books that Marx read. They provide interesting material for determining what Marx was interested in during certain periods of his life. There are a number of notebooks from 1840 and 1841, then from 1843 to 1845, and there are three notebooks from the 1850s and 1860s, as well as from the 1870s. Of particular interest among them are three voluminous notebooks: one on the history of the crisis of 1857, followed by notebooks comprising what amounts to a four-volume work providing a chronological overview of world history up to the mid-seventeenth century. There are also notebooks containing Marx’s mathematical exercises. I should add that nine years ago I discovered some of Marx’s mathematical works, which I passed on to Friedrich ‘Fritz’ Adler for publication. I have now received another mathematical manuscript from Bernstein.
This part of Marx and Engels’ written legacy has not yet been utilised. It is of particular interest to Marx’s biographers. It shows how Marx worked, how he went about his studies, and how extraordinarily conscientious he was in approaching every new subject he undertook. He retained this methodical and systematic approach to his work until the end of his life. Whilst by 1881–82 he had lost the capacity for intensive independent intellectual creativity, he never lost his ability to study. Sometimes, after looking through these notebooks, one wonders why he wasted so much time on such systematic, thorough note-taking; for to go to the trouble, as he did as late as 1881, of summarising a major work on geology chapter by chapter at the age of 63 – that was unforgivable pedantry. Another example: he received Lewis Henry Morgan’s work in 1878. Across 98 pages in small handwriting (you should be aware that a single page of his cursive handwriting always amounts to at least 2.2 printed pages), he produced an extremely detailed summary of Lewis Henry Morgan’s work, Ancient Society. This was how the elderly Marx continued to work. In view of the particular significance of these notes, I, as an exception, photographed the notes on Morgan and on two books – by John Lubbock and Henry Maine. These notebooks show that, in the second half of the 1870s, Marx devoted a great deal of time to the history of feudalism and land ownership.
This, in general, is the picture of what is new in the literary legacy of Marx and Engels. The question that needs to be raised here within the walls of this institution is precisely how we can, without delaying it for another 30–40 years, bring into circulation that colossal body of ideas, facts and reflections contained in these unpublished manuscripts.
First and foremost, we must address the question of publishing all of this in Russian. I must add, unfortunately, that under the agreement concluded with Bernstein, I am entitled to publish these manuscripts only in Russian. As for their publication in the original language, separate negotiations will have to be held on this matter. These have been postponed until next year, but we do hold the rights to publish them in Russian.
And so, I shall take the liberty of concluding this rather lengthy statement – which is not a report, but a statement on new data and new excavations – with a wish: may young, energetic, persistent and diligent workers finally come forward to help us, the Komsomol members of the 6th levy (призыва), to complete this work.
1. A reference ot the first three
volumes of Franz Mehring (Hrsg.): Aus dem literarischen
Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle.
4 Bände. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1902. Band 1:
Gesammelte Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Von
März 1841 bis März 1844. Band 2: Gesammelte
Schriften von Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Von Juli
1844 bis November 1847. Band 3: Gesammelte Schriften von
Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. Von Januar 1848 bis
Oktober 1850. Band 4: Briefe von Ferdinand Lassalle an
Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels. 1849 bis
1862.
https://archive.org/details/mehring-nachlass-1,
https://archive.org/details/mehring-nachlass-2,
https://archive.org/details/mehring-nachlass-3,
https://archive.org/details/mehring-nachlass-4.
2. Gustav Mayer, Friedrich
Engels: Eine Biographie. Erster Band: Friedrich
Engels in seiner Frühzeit. Springer, Berlin
1920.
https://archive.org/details/friedrichengelse00mayeuoft/.
3. It has now been published in the
first volume of the ‘Marx and Engels Archive’.
Архив
К. Маркса и Ф.
Энгельса. Под
редакцией Д.
Рязанова. Москва:
Государственное
издательство,
1924. Отдел второй.
Из неопубликованных
рукописей
Маркса и Энгельса.
V. К. Маркс и Ф.
Энгельс о Фейербахе.
1) Предисловие
редактора. 2)
Тезисы о Фейербахе.
3) Проект предисловия
к «немецкой
идеологии».
4) Л. Фейербах-Идеалистическая
и материалистическая
точки зрения.,
c. 191–256.
https://archive.org/details/arkhiv-marksa-engelsa.-tom-1.-1924.
4. I published this manuscript in the first issue of Socialist Economy (Социалистическое хозяйство) for 1924.
5. Karl Marx, Theorien über
den Mehrwert. Aus dem nachgelassenen Manuskript Zur
Kritik der politischen Ökonomie. Herausgegeben von
Karl Kautsky. 3 Bände (in 4 Teilen). Stuttgart: Verlag von
J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1905–1910. Band 1: Die Anfänge
der Theorie vom Mehrwert bis Adam Smith. Stuttgart: Dietz,
1905. Band 2 (Teil 1): David Ricardo. Stuttgart:
Dietz, 1905. Band 2 (Teil 2): David Ricardo.
Stuttgart: Dietz, 1910. Band 3: Von Ricardo zu den
Vulgärökonomen. Stuttgart: Dietz,1910.
https://archive.org/details/mehrwert-1,
https://archive.org/details/mehrwert-2.1,
https://archive.org/details/mehrwert-2.2,
https://archive.org/details/mehrwert-3.
6. Der Briefwechsel zwischen Friedrich Engels und Karl Marx 1844 bis 1883. Herausgegeben von August Bebel und Eduard Bernstein. 4 Bände. Stuttgart: J.H.W. Dietz Nachf., 1913.
7. These letters are now published in
the first volume of the Marx and Engels Archive.
Архив
К. Маркса и Ф.
Энгельса. Под
редакцией Д.
Рязанова. Москва:
Государственное
издательство,
1924. Письма Ф. Энгельса
к Э. Бернштейну,
c. >dash;400.
https://archive.org/details/arkhiv-marksa-engelsa.-tom-1.-1924.
Last updated on 11 October 2026