page 552

    The long-promised edition of the correspondence of the famous founders of scientific socialism has at last been published. Engels bequeathed the work of publishing it to Bebel and Bernstein, and Bebel managed to complete his part of the editorial work shortly before his death.

    The Marx-Engels correspondence, published a few weeks ago by Dietz, Stuttgart, consists of four big volumes. They contain in all 1,386 letters by Marx and Engels covering an extensive period, from 1844 to 1883.

    The editorial work, i.e., the writing of prefaces to the correspondence of various periods, was done by Eduard Bernstein. As might have been expected, this work is unsatisfactory both from the technical and the ideological standpoint. After his notorious "evolution" to extreme opportunist views, Bernstein should never have undertaken to edit letters which are impregnated through and through with the revolutionary spirit. Bernstein's prefaces are in part meaningless and in part simply false -- as, for instance, when, instead of a precise, clear and frank characterisation of the opportunist errors of Lassalle and Schweitzer which Marx and Engels exposed, one meets with eclectic phrases and thrusts, such as that "Marx and Engels were not always right in opposing Lassalle" (Vol. III, p. xviii), or that in their tactics they were "much nearer" to Schweitzer than to Liebknecht (Vol. IV, p. x). These attacks have no purpose except to serve as a screen and embellishment for opportunism. Unfortunately, the eclectic attitude to Marx's ideological struggle against many of his opponents is becoming increasingly widespread among present-day German Social-Democrats.

 
page 553

    From the technical standpoint, the index is unsatisfactory -- only one for all four volumes (Kautsky and Stirling are omitted, for instance); the notes to individual letters are too scanty and are lost in the editor's prefaces instead of being placed in proximity to the letters they refer to, as they were by Sorge, and so forth.

    The price of the publication is unduly high -- about 20 rubles for the four volumes. There can be no doubt that the complete correspondence could and should have been published in a less luxurious edition at a more reasonable price, and that, in addition, a selection of passages most important from the standpoint of principle could and should have been published for wide distribution among workers.

    All these defects of the edition will, of course, hamper a study of the correspondence. This is a pity, because its scientific and political value is tremendous. Not only do Marx and Engels stand out before the reader in clear relief in all their greatness, but the extremely rich theoretical content of Marxism is graphically revealed, because in their letters Marx and Engels return again and again to the most diverse aspects of their doctrine, emphasising and explaining -- at times discussing and debating -- what is newest (in relation to earlier views), most important and most difficult.

    There unfolds before the reader a strikingly vivid picture of the history of the working-class movement all over the world -- at its most important junctures and in its most essential points. Even more valuable is the history of the politics of the working class. On the most diverse occasions, in various countries of the Old World and the New, and at different historical moments, Marx and Engels discuss the most important principles of the presentation of the political tasks of the working class. And the period covered by the correspondence was a period in which the working class separated from bourgeois democracy, a period in which an independent working-class movement arose, a period in which the fundamental principles of proletarian tactics and policy were defined. The more we have occasion in our day to observe how the working-class movement in various countries suffers from opportunism in consequence of the stagnation and decay of the bourgeoisie, in consequence of the attention of the labour leaders being engrossed in the triv-

 
page 554

ialities of the day, and so on -- the more valuable becomes the wealth of material contained in the correspondence, displaying as it does a most profound comprehension of the basic aims of the proletariat in bringing about change, and providing an unusually flexible definition of the tasks of the tactics of the moment from the standpoint of these revolutionary aims, without making the slightest concession to opportunism or revolutionary phrase-mongering.

    If one were to attempt to define in a single word the focus, so to speak, of the whole correspondence, the central point at which the whole body of ideas expressed and discussed converges -- that word would be dialectics. The application of materialist dialectics to the reshaping of all political economy from its foundations up, its application to history, natural science, philosophy and to the policy and tactics of the working class -- that was what interested Marx and Engels most of all, that was where they contributed what was most essential and new, and that was what constituted the masterly advance they made in the history of revolutionary thought.

page 588




NOTES



  ^[157] The article "The Marx-Engels Correspondence" here published was the beginning of an extensive article that Lenin planned at the time of the publication of the German four-volume edition of the Marx-Engels Correspondence in September 1913. Lenin made a deep study of the correspondence; the Institute of Marxism-Leninism has in its possession a thick notebook (76 pages) in which Lenin summarised the letters and copied extracts from them.
    Lenin intended to publish "The Marx-Engels Correspondence" in the magazine Prosveshcheniye in 1914, and an announcement to that effect was printed in Proletarskaya Pravda No. 7 on December 14, 1913; the article, however, remained unfinished and was first published in Pravda on November 28, 1920, on the occasion of the hundredth anniversary of Engels's birth. On this occasion Lenin added a subtitle "Engels as One of the Founders of Communism" and provided a footnote to the title: "The beginning of an unfinished article written in 1913 or early 1914".    [p. 552]

  ^[158] Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, dritte Abteilung, Band 1, Marx-Engels Verlag GmbH, Berlin, 1929, S. 1 u. 20-21.    [p. 555]

  ^[159] Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, pp. 29-31.    [p. 555]

  ^[160] Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, dritte Abteilung, Band 1, Marx-Engels Verlag GmbH, Berlin, 1929, S. 3.    [p. 556]

  ^[161] Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, dritte Abteilung, Band 1, Marx-Engels Verlag GmbH, Berlin, 1929, S. 14.    [p. 556]

  ^[162] Popular Socialists -- a legal petty-bourgeois party formed in 1906 by the separation of part of the Right wing of the Socialist-Revolutionaries. The demands put forward by the party did not go beyond a constitutional monarchy.    [p. 556]

  ^[163] Engels an das Kommunistische Korrespondenz-Komitee in Brüssel, Paris, 1846, September 16. [Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, dritte Abteilung, Band 1, Marx-Engels Verlag GmbH, Berlin, 1929, S. 34.]    [p. 557]

  ^[164] See K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1955, pp. 35-36.    [p. 558]