New Marx Publications: a MEGA Update the Ongoing Marx-Engels

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New Marx Publications: A MEGA Update

KEVIN B. ANDERSON

The ongoing Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (Complete Writings, or MEGA) certainly shows that the serious scholarly publication of Marx’ s work is continuing. Perhaps more importantly, it also suggests that there may still be some significant parts of Marx’s work that have yet to see the light of day. Some indications of this came in December 1998, when the first post-Stalinist volume of the MEGA came off the press at Akademie Verlag in Berlin. The last volume had appeared in 1992, just after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Anumber of leading newspapers and magazines, especially German ones, reported the December 1998 publication of the new MEGA volume. Articles appeared in German in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung , the Frankfurter Rundschau, Neue Zü rcher Zeitung and Die Zeit. Outside Germany, Le Soir (Belgium), Pravda (Russia), and the Asahi Shimbun (Japan) also covered the story, but it unfortu- nately received little attention in the English-speaking world. Since then, two more volumes have appeared, both in 1999, with two more scheduled to appear soon.

MEGA Volume IV/3, the one published in December 1998, offers new background on Marx’s development during the period between the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844) and the German Ideology (1846) as well as the Communist Manifesto (1848). Volume IV/3 contains Marx’s 400-page 1844–7 notebooks on leading political economists of the time such as Louis Say, Jean Charles Leonard Sismondi, Charles Babbage, Andrew Ure, and Nassau Senior . None of these texts has been previously published in any language. All of the material appears here in the original languages in which Marx wrote. In this volume, much of the text is in French, because Marx during this period was reading French translations of the English political economists, his English being still rudimentary. Other parts of the text, especially Marx’s com- mentary in his own voice, tend to be in German. The editors’ notes, introductions, indexes, and other background material comprise an additional 400 pages, also in German. While the MEGA is obviously intended more for specialist scholars than the broader public, the new volume sold a surprising 1,000 copies in its first six months, a solid figure for such a specialised publication. And the editions the MEGA is estab- lishing will become the basis for translations into English and other languages.

In their general introduction to the volume, its editors – Georgi Bagaturia, Lev Churbanov, Olga Koroleva, and Ludmila Varina of Moscow , working together with

Historical Materialism, volume 9 (226–230) ©Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2001

226 Reviews Jürgen Rojahn of Amsterdam – have analysed these early explorations by Marx into both economic theory and the effects of capitalism on workers. They have also taken care to show that Marx’ s interests were far broader than is generally realised. For example, they point out that ‘Marx takes up Sismondi’s critique of colonialism’, including references to Britain’s Opium Wars against China (p. 467). They also note that, at another point, Marx connects his critique of private property to one of the family, when he writes: ‘Should private property exist? Should the family exist?’ (p. 471). Other notes by Marx on economist Pierre de Boisguillebert are related to what we know today as the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts .

The two additional volumes that appeared in 2000 will also add considerably to our knowledge of Marx and Engels. Volume IV/31 contains Marx’s excerpt notes during the last seven years of his life on natural sciences, including physiology, geology, chemistry, and physics, as well as notes by Engels on mechanics and electricity that were part of his work on Dialectics of Nature . Volume IV/32 contains an annotated bibliography of the 1,450 titles in the personal libraries of Marx and Engels, as well as a description of all annotations and dedications. Volumes III/9 and III/10, already in press and due out shortly, will comprise letters to and from Marx and Engels during the period January 1858 to May 1860.

Under new editorial guidelines established in 1993, the MEGA is no longer under the ideological control of Party bureaucrats, but of the International Marx-Engels Foundation (IMES). Based at the respected International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam and at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, the IMES has established a new organisational structure in which the MEGA is no longer constrained by any partisan or state-political allegiances. One can easily observe this change by a perusal of the lengthy editor’s introduction to the just-published Volume IV/3. One finds footnotes not only to a few scholars from the former Soviet Union and East Germany, but also, for the first time, to a wide range of international Marx scholars such as Ernest Mandel and Maximilien Rubel. The MEGA’s Academic Advisory Board has undergone a parallel transformation. It now includes, in addition to specialists from the former Soviet bloc such as Teodor Oizerman (Russia), a considerable num- ber of scholars from Western countries. Among the latter are Shlomo Avineri (Israel), Iring Fetscher (Germany), Eric Hobsbawm (Britain), Jürgen Kocka (Germany), Bertell Ollman (US), Gareth Stedman Jones (Britain), and Immanuel Wallerstein (US).

The new MEGA began to appear in 1975 in the former East Germany. Although the scholarly standard was high, as then MEGA Secretary, Jürgen Rojahn, noted: ‘Party pressures and constraints certainly were reflected in the introductions, commentaries, explanatory notes, and indexes’ ( Tagespiegel [Berlin], 18 December 1998, p. 32).

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