Hello, my lover Genossen, my dear comrades. I have come both to share some fun, social, Stalintime cheer, and to enter a case of concern for the future of Marx's and Engels' Works, specifically though not exclusively in the English Speech. The Stalintime cheer topic was the catalyst that made me think, and spurred my new worry.
This merry Stalintime, I was most fortunate to discover a practically complete set of the Marx-Engels Werke, in forty-two volumes, as it included the extra Verzeichnis and Ergänzung volumes. Most auspiciously, this volume was not located in the former Socialist Fatherland, but right here in the US. I had some help, thanks to the coming merry Stalintime, in paying the four-hundred-thirty dollar price. Mistake not my capacity for stupidity, however: I had previously attempted the hard way of building my collected set by obtaining copies from the Vaterland. I only tried on three volumes, Twenty-Three, Twenty-Four, and Twenty-Five, comprising the three volumes of Das Kapital. Before this, I only had volume Forty-Two, containing the Grundrisse, but that came from within the US, without incident. Volume Twenty-four/Two was the only book to sustain no sort of physical damage, but did have black mould in the last few pages. Volumes Twenty-Three/One and Twenty-Five/Three, coming together from the same seller, were heavily damaged for books labelled as 'good, unread condition', the former's page-gutters having cracked all the way down, and the latter's spine being simply mangled, looking like a stair-case, or a jagged ramp.
I have oft heard how much easier it was to procure socialist books in the days of the Eastern Bloc, thanks in part to Communist subsidisation of books, and their greater distribution, but Engels to tangles, I did not realise just how difficult such a task has become! I knew Leftist publications had become harder to find, and some had exploded in expenciveneß, in contrast to those days, read about that here). Just a brief note, that article was aimed at our academic and middle-claß (petit-bourgeois) comrades, not to those who truly cannot afford the proposition at the end. It should have croßed my mind immediately that works of multiple volumes not only cost more, oh no, if only that were the single obstacle, but that Western (id est Capitalist) publishers would never offer them unleß convinced of said volume-sets' immense profitability (I spoke a bit about this topic in the last paragraph of the article here). In my spirit, I recognise that the luck of my birth and my circumstances there on have been plentiful, which saddens me all the more that some remarkable, outstanding comrades will probably never have the chance to read the philosopher- and socialist- Masters' works.
That, still, is not the concern, as sad it is. My actual concern is for the works of Marx and Engels themselves (and can be expanded, I think, to any of the Leftist Masters' works, really). Dietz Verlag, that giant of GDR publishing, is dead (practically), and the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe is in the hands of the bourgeois intelligentsia's (post-Neo-liberal) Social-Democratic and Academic-Marxian hands... need I explain why this is obviously a serious problem, or a problem in the making? Firstly, liberals have recently rediscovered the age-old predeceßor to gate-keeping, wealth-gating. According to the MEGA article on Wikipaedia, it is estimated to finish at over one-hundred volumes! I am certain that I will not see a full set in the first sixty years of my life, if ever, and I am sure they will cost one-hundred to three-hundred dollars a volume (do not laugh, I have seen many academic publishers price single books this outrageously!) Next, I will have to worry about the Lenin Werke, or learn Rußian and read that collected set that the People's Biblium has. Secondly, there is the question of bias, like in editing and notes. Thirdly, there is the problem of translation; Progreß Publishers, that is, the Soviet Union, tied all of these Communist publishers together, and undoubtedly collaborated with Dietz Verlag (the DDR/SED) to bring it out in English, again, in collaboration with International Publishers (the CPUSA) and Lawrence and Wishart (the CPGB).
It is, in light of this evidence which I did poorly argue, (forgive me, it was very late at night, now it is early in the morning) undeniable that the Left has lost the structures and relations that would enable us to embark on monumental publishing projects as those undertaken by Leftist, especially Communist, organisations of the recent past. I fear that, even should my first and second concerns remain unrealised, that the third is almost inevitable, due to the very nature of translation publications. If we take the fifty volume Marx Engels Collected Works, and subtract it from, say, a one-hundred volume set of the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, then that means at least fifty per cent of the material must yet be translated, and then it will take even longer to publish them as physical editions. All of this, while we no longer poßeß the comradely infrastructure provided by the USSR and the socialist land that shared Marx's and Engels' speech they composed most of their writings in.
Wow, that merry Stalintime cheer evaporated rather quickly in the flame of depreßion, eh? Unlike many critical articles, I do not have anything close to a solution for this dilemma. I could append a silly meßage of 'be grateful, you have it well!', but that would simply be a parrying of the problem. Ah, I have a happy note we might end on: there is a publisher called Iskra Books out there, headed by the organisation that publishes Peace, Land, and Bread, and they have begun re-publishing the Stalin Works, among other interesting books (to buy the Stalin Works, go to Barnes and Noble or Amazon). In their 'Coming Soon' section, you will notice volume one of the Lenin Works is on the docket. Is this our answer, can this publisher fill the hole of Progreß Publishers' role? I will leave that to your discretion, dear comrades. I will be satisfied to in the meantime hope. Until then, I won't mourn, but organise to my damnedest power!
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