Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (46)

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Volume 46 of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels contains letters dating from January 1880 to March 1883. It was during these last few years of Marx’s life that Engels assumed the main burden of corresponding with leaders of the international working-class movement.

Marx concentrated on his economic research; he also studied the history and culture of primitive society, world history, agriculture and peasant conditions in different countries, notably socio-economic relations and the state of the peasant commune in Russia after the abolition of serfdom. He also pursued his interest in higher mathematics and collected new facts for Capital. His plans to complete Capital, however, were not destined to be realised by him. His health deteriorated rapidly, compelling him to devote much time to medical treatment and often live out of London. Deprived of his library, he could not work on the second and third volumes of Capital (see this volume, pp. 158, 161) and even failed to finish reading the proofs of the third German edition of the first volume (pp. 425, 434). All this is reflected in this volume.

Responding to Paul Lafargue’s request and prompted by the vital need of the workers’ movement, Engels in this period wrote Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (see present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 281-325), destined to become the most widely read Marxist book alongside the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, produced in the spring of 1880, was based on three chapters of Anti-Diihring. The introduction to the French edition was written by Marx and published over the signature of Paul Lafargue (see pp. 16, 332). The pamphlet played a conspicuous role in imparting the Marxist outlook to the French socialists. ‘...I have seen what a regular revolution the thing has wrought in the minds of many of the better people in France,’ wrote Engels (p. 300). This encouraged Engels to prepare a separate German edition (1882). To make it more comprehensible to factory workers (pp. 335, 352, 369), he revised the text, added a few new passages, and wrote a special preface (p. 331). An essay on the history of landownership in Germany from the ancient commune to the 1870s, ‘The Mark (see present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 439-56), was appended.

The essay, which later appeared under separate cover, entitled, Der deutsche Bauer. Was war er? Was er ist? Was könnte er sein?, completed Engels’ research of 1881-82 into the social system of the ancient Germans. Its inclusion as a supplement in the German-language edition of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was meant to arouse the German Social-Democrats’ interest in the peasantry as the working class’s potential ally. The importance Marx and Engels attached to this is reflected in Engels’ letter of 23 September 1882, urging Bebel to read up on the subject, thus gaining ‘solid foundations to go on in any debate [in the Reichstag] about landownership or agrarian questions’ (p. 336).

Engels tried to resume his study of the philosophy of natural science he had begun in 1873 and dropped owing to his work on AntiDuhring (see present edition, Vol. 25). But only short spells of time were available to him, though, as he put it, the book (Dialectics of Mature), ‘has also long been pending’ (p. 350). He managed to write a few fragments in 1880-82 (see Vol. 25, p. 660). The problems raised in Dialectics of Mature, and the history of primitive society which Engels studied in the early 1880s, were only partly reflected in his letters of that period.

By the 1880s, socialist workers’ parties had sprung up in Austria, France, Denmark, Spain, Portugal, Belgium, and the United States of America. The emergence of national working-class parties was an objective trend that had begun in the 1860s. The letters in this volume produce a fairly good cumulative picture of the help that Marx and especially Engels had given them in drawing up their programme and in their strategy and tactics.

Marx and Engels took the emergence of self-dependent national working-class parties as a sign of the times. They were critical of the untimely attempts at re-establishing the International and working out a single legislative political and economic programme for all countries where socialists could come to power. Since the matter had been put on the agenda of the impending international congress in Switzerland, called on the initiative of the Belgian socialists, the Dutch Social-Democrat Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis requested Marx in January 1881 to give his opinion on this score.

The reply to Nieuwenhuis (see p. 61) and Engels’ letter to Johann Philipp Becker of February 10, 1882, stressed it would be not only useless but also harmful to restore the International or hold international congresses at the time ‘in so far as they do not relate to the immediate, actual conditions obtaining in this or that specific nation’ (p. 67). The formation of mass socialist parties was still far from completed. Indeed, it had only just begun in some countries, so that a new, ‘reorganized International ... would only give rise to fresh persecution’ (p. 196). As Marx and Engels saw it, international contacts between socialist organisations were then, in fact, maintained through the socialist and workers’ press, and through contacts between recognized workers’ leaders (see p. 197). This meant new ways of consolidating the workers’ international unity were coming to the fore. Not until later, when the workers’ movement attained a higher level and the ideas of scientific socialism spread, would the ground be ready for ‘the establishment of an official, formal International’ (p. 198).

Marx’s and Engels’ contacts with the German working-class movement were especially strong. The Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany was then the largest proletarian political organisation in the world. It had proved its viability despite the difficult climate created by the Anti-Socialist Law of October 1878. Continuously persecuted, it managed to maintain its membership, establish an underground organ, the newspaper Sozialdemokrat, in Switzerland, and to keep alive its contacts with the masses.

The letters in this volume give a good idea of the diversity of Marx’s and Engels’ aid to the German Social-Democrats. They urged them to combat the reformist sentiment introduced by bourgeois intellectuals who, admitted to the party before the enactment of the Anti-Socialist Law, opposed the revolutionary tactics of the left wing, and tried, as Engels wrote, ‘to get rid of the Anti-Socialist Law at any cost and to do so ignominiously by means of moderation and meekness, tameness and toadyism’ (p. 279).

Engels countered this by examining the situation in the party and in Germany, and stressing that this course of action had no hope of succeeding. ‘After 3 years of unprecedented persecution...,’ he wrote to Eduard Bernstein on 30 November 1881, ‘our lads have returned, not only in all their former strength, but actually stronger than before’ (p. 153). And he amplified: ‘the movement... from being restricted to a few local centres, has only now come to be a national movement. And that is what frightens the bourgeois most of all’ (p. 154).

Engels had deep faith in the perseverance of the German workers. Bismarck’s policy, which amounted to war against the workers (a state of siege had been declared in a number of cities, and the like), he noted, only helped the German Social-Democrats’ influence to grow. ‘The infamies to which socialist workers everywhere have been subjected,’ Engels wrote Sorge on 20 June 1882, ‘have everywhere made them much more revolutionary than they were even 3 years ago’ (p. 279). Not submission, as suggested by the right-wing leaders (Bios, Hasenclever, and others), but workers’ pressure, Engels held, could force the government to repeal the Anti-Socialist Law.

The clash with the reformist elements in the party and division on fundamental and tactical issues were objectively unavoidable, because the right and left wings of the German Social-Democratic movement reflected the interests of different social groups. In principle, Marx and Engels considered à break with the reformists desirable because, as Engels wrote Bebel on 21 June 1882, the schism would ‘serve to elucidate the situation and we shall be rid of an element that in no way belongs to us’ (pp. 281-82). But considering the Anti-Socialist Law, Engels advised against needless haste, because in the circumstances the workers might think the break would weaken the party and augur loss of its gains. Division over controversial issues, he held, called for a public discussion, which, however, was practically impossible owing to the Anti-Socialist Law. All the same, Marx and Engels promised the party’s revolutionary leaders public support if matters should come to ‘a show-down with these gentry and the party’s left wing declares itself (p. 282).

Engels wrote a large number of letters to Bernstein, editor of the Sozialdemokrat, the party’s central organ. He offered advice as to the tactics the paper should follow to suit the conditions ofthat time. Engels commended the paper’s opposition to the reformist stance of the right-wing Social-Democratic deputies in the Reichstag (pp. 173, 203, 244), and advised its editors to seek workers’ support and apply for help to correspondents ‘from amongst the genuine workers — not those who have become “leaders’” (p. 188). This tactic, worked out jointly by Marx and Engels (see, e. g., p. 393), proved successful. T am delighted,’ Engels wrote Bernstein on 22 February 1882, ‘that subscriptions should have passed the 4,000 mark and that the paper should find regular distribution in Germany, despite the police, etc. It is an incredible feat for a German paper that is banned’ (p. 203).

At a difficult time for the German Social-Democrats, Marx and Engels undertook to represent the party in the international workers’ movement, explaining its political tactics. In their letters to various countries, they called on the working class to give its moral and material aid to the German Social-Democrats. Marx started collecting funds for victims of the Anti-Socialist Law, addressing himself, among others, to Friedrich Adolph Sorge and journalist John Swinton, who was close to the socialists in the United States. ‘Even if the monetary result were not important,’ he wrote Swinton on 4 November 1880, ‘denunciations of Bismarck’s new coup d’état in public meetings held by you, reported in the American press, reproduced on the other side of the Atlantic — would sorely hit the Pomeranian hobereau [Junker] and be welcomed by all the socialists of Europe’ (p. 41).

The letters in this volume show the part Marx and Engels played in organising the French Workers’ Party. They established contact with Jules Guesde and the editors of the Égalité through Paul Lafargue. This gave them an opportunity to influence the French labour movement. A big role here, as we have said, was played by Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. In March 1880, Engels contributed an article, ‘The Socialism of Mr Bismarck’, to the Egalité. It struck out against the Bonapartist social demagogy of that time. At the request of Benoît Malon, Marx drew up a Workers’ Questionnaire (see present edition, Vol. 24). More important still, he participated in drawing up the Workers’ Party programme, whose theoretical part he simply dictated to Guesde in the presence of Engels and Lafargue (see pp. 43-44). Later, Engels commented: ‘A masterpiece of cogent reasoning, calculated to explain things to the masses in a few words; I have seldom seen its like and, even in this concise version, found it astonishing’ (p. 148). This, indeed, was the programme the Workers’ Party congress adopted in the autumn of 1880 in Le Havre. Its adoption, Marx pointed out, opened an entirely new stage in the French workers’ struggle. This was when ‘the first real workers’ movement’ began in France, he said (p. 44).

The theoretical views of the members of the newly formed Workers’ Party, however, were still immature. The revolutionary wing headed by Guesde and Lafargue (Collectivists) and the reformist followers of Malon and Brousse (Possibilists) were entangled in a controversy. It had begun before the congress and was especially heated after it. Contrary to any revolutionary transformation of society, the Possibilists advanced the idea of the workers’ gradually winning a majority in the municipalities, thus paving the way for broader public services (services publics) and the gradual transfer of the means of production into the possession of the municipal authorities (municipal socialism).

In letters to Bebel and Bernstein, Engels predicted that a conflict within the Workers’ Party was objectively unavoidable. ‘It would seem,’ he wrote, ‘that any workers’ party in a large country can develop only through internal struggle, as indeed has been generally established in the dialectical laws of development.... Such being the case, it would be sheer folly to advocate unification. Moral homilies are of no avail against teething troubles which, circumstances being what they are today, are something that has got to be gone through’ (p. 343).

Marx and Engels sided with the Collectivists, who controlled the Egalité (p. 173). In his letters, Engels informed socialists in different countries of the reasons for the turmoil within the French Workers’ Party, and stressed the fundamental nature of the controversy (see pp. 196-97, 332-33, 370). The argument concerned diametrically opposite attitudes to the party’s political programme: whether the struggle against the bourgeoisie should be fought as a class struggle or whether the class nature of the movement and the revolutionary programme should be opportunistically renounced in all cases where such renunciation would win it more followers and more votes in elections. Engels pointed out that the Possibilists were ‘sacrificing the proletarian class character of the movement’ (p. 350).

In addition, Marx and Engels also called attention to the Guesdists’ theoretical faults and the many tactical mistakes they made in the heat of the struggle. To begin with, Guesde and Lafargue negated reforms in bourgeois society. They denied the need of fighting for démocratisation, and of combining struggle for society’s social reorganisation with struggle for démocratisation. In the absence of insight, Engels pointed out, ‘party politics cannot be pursued with success’ (p. 333). Engels therefore faulted Guesde’s utterances against the Radicals (Clemenceau) (ibid.), who had in the early 1880s worked for démocratisation of the French Republic and thereby furthered the vital tasks of the working-class movement in the country.

Engels deplored the Guesdists’ lack of political skill. He censured them for having involved themselves in a polemic on personal grounds which only obscured the fight for fundamental aims, and also for their contentiousness, quick temper, failure to wait for the right time of action, and for phrase-mongering (pp. 181, 154-55 et seqq.). These blunders prevented Marx and Engels from giving their full support publicly to the Collectivists.

All the greater was the importance that Marx and Engels attached to correct coverage in the socialist press of Germany of the state of affairs in the French Workers’ Party. They called on the French and German socialists regularly to exchange their newspapers — Egalité and Sozialdemokrat (pp. 360-61). In his many letters to the leaders of the German Socialist Workers’ Party, Engels never failed to refer to the struggle inside the French party. This was doubly necessary, because, having failed to grasp its substance, the editors of the Sozialdemokrat had initially backed the Possibilists (pp. 386-87). His letters to Bernstein, Bebel, and others, showing the social and political similarity of possibilism and reformist currents in the workers’ and socialist movements in other countries, finally prompted the editors of the Sozialdemokrat to back the Guesdists.

Marx and Engels were aware that the two distinct currents could no longer coexist within one party, it was time the Guesdists and Possibilists parted ways (see pp. 343, 350-51). At the St-Étienne congress in September 1882 the Possibilists had not only emasculated, but in effect totally rejected, the Havre programme by proclaiming local party branches fully autonomous as concerned programme issues (p. 341 ). That was why neither Engels nor Marx were discouraged by the fact that only a minority followed Guesde and Lafargue as a result of the split. Engels observed: ‘The whole of the “workers’ party”, both factions included, constitutes only a small and dwindling portion of the Parisian working-class masses’ (p. 333). The party, he said, was in the first stage of the internal struggle that the socialists in Germany had already passed (p. 351).

Marx and Engels believed that being champions of revolutionary principles, the Guesdists had a far better future than the Possibilists, even though the latter were in the majority. ‘To be momentarily in the minority — quoad [as to] organisation — and have the right programme,’ Engels wrote to Bernstein in November 1882, ‘is at least better than having no programme and a large, though almost entirely nominal and bogus, following’ (p. 389). Years later, he was proved right.

The correspondence of Marx and Engels in 1880-83 is evidence of their unflagging interest in the British labour movement, which was experiencing change, however slow, due to Great Britain’s changing economic situation. The prolonged depression had shaken the Empire’s industrial monopoly. The condition of the working people deteriorated. Radical workers’ clubs sprang up in London. This was a new symptom, Marx wrote to Pyotr Lavrov at the end of January 1882 (p. 185), and evidence of the appeal socialist ideas had won among a section of the working class which began to oppose the Liberal Party, Gladstone’s government, and ‘official trades-unionism’ (ibid.).

The labour movement’s vitalisation in the early 1880s also stimulated interest in scientific socialism among a part of the democratic intelligentsia. ‘The English,’ Marx wrote to Sorge in December 1881, ‘have latterly begun to take rather more notice oîCapitaV (p. 162). He had been asked for permission to translate it into English or to translate it himself (ibid.). In letters to his friends, Marx said the first honest reviews had appeared in the British press. He commended young English philosopher Belfort Bax’s article, ‘Karl Marx’, in the journal Modern Thought of December 1881, and described it as the first English publication ‘pervaded by a real enthusiasm for the new ideas themselves’ and standing up boldly against British philistinism (p. 163).

Engels’ letters contain the story of his association with The Labour Standard, a trades union newspaper, in 1881. The attempt at addressing trades union members directly, setting forth the basics of the Marxian political economy and propagating the ideas of scientific socialism, proved unsuccessful. In letters to the Labour Standard editor George Shipton of August 10 and 15, 1881, Engels deplored that the impact his articles had made on readers was very weak (pp. 123 and 121). He explained: ‘The British working man just doesn’t want to advance; he has got to be galvanised by events, the loss of industrial monopoly’ (p. 121).

Despite its various setbacks, Marx and Engels noted, the British bourgeoisie was able to offer more favourable conditions to more highly qualified workers thanks to Britain’s enormous colonial possessions and its supremacy in the world market. They saw this as the reason for the weakness of the British labour and socialist movement, the slow spread of socialist ideas in the labour movement, and the protracted formation of an independent labour party. But Engels’ contributions to The Labour Standard had not passed without influence. George MacDonald, a British socialist with Marxist leanings, pointed out, among others, that it had been Engels’ articles in The Labour Standard that prompted him to accept scientific socialism (see How I Became a Socialist, London, 1896, pp. 61-62).

Letters showing Marx’s and Engels’ relationship with Henry Mayers Hyndman, a prominent English radical, are of considerable interest. Marx tried to explain what factors he thought created possibilities for power to pass peacefully into the hands of the British working class. In December 1880, he wrote: ‘If you say that you do not share the views of my party for England I can only reply that that party considers an English revolution not necessary, but — according to historic precedents—possible. If the unavoidable evolution turn into a revolution, it would not only be the fault of the ruling classes, but also of the working class. Every pacific concession of the former has been wrung from them by “pressure from without’” (p. 49).

Marx’s letter to Hyndman of 2 July 1881 shed light on the reasons for their estrangement. Hyndman had put out a pamphlet, England for All, as a kind of commentary on the programme of the Democratic Federation he had founded the month before, in which he set out the content of a number of sections from the first volume of Capital without crediting Marx. The latter objected to this publication, chiefly because the Federation’s bourgeois democratic goals conflicted with the ideas borrowed from Capital. The pamphlet would have made sense, Marx pointed out, ‘for the foundation of a distinct and independent Working Class Party’ (p. 103). Later, however, even though, he was strongly critical of Hyndman (pp. 161-62, 234, 347), Marx admitted the objective usefulness of Hyndman’s pamphlet because it propagated the ideas of Capital (p. 163).

Numerous letters from 1880 to 1883 show Marx’s and Engels’ continual interest in Ireland. At the end of 1880 in a letter to John Swinton, Marx stressed the connection between the land questions in Ireland and England. Defeat of English landlordism in Ireland, he believed, would bring about the collapse of the land system in England (p. 40). But the Land League’s peasant war against English landlordism and Gladstone’s rule, and the heightened activity of Irish M.P.s under Charles Parnell, led Marx to conclude that Home Rule was the only possible solution of the Irish problem. This he wrote to Jenny Longuet at the end of April 1881 (see p. 90) and Eduard Bernstein in July 1882. ‘In the absence of a foreign war or the threat thereof,’ he wrote, ‘an Irish uprising has not the remotest prospect of success’ (p. 287), and amplified: ‘The only recourse remaining to the Irish is the constitutional method of gradual conquest, whereby one position is taken after another’ (pp. 287-88).

The letters also show that Marx and Engels followed events in North America. Engels noticed ‘the colossal speed with which the concentration of capitals’ was taking place there (p. 251). The two friends were aware that the labour movement in the United States followed a specific and anything but easy road. Apart from objective conditions (free land in the West, and so on), the spread of socialist ideas was hindered by strong sectarian tendencies imparted by German socialist immigrants, on the one hand, and the dissociation of socialist propaganda from the daily struggle of the workers, on the other, leaving the stage free for the spread of various radical bourgeois theories. Highly popular, for example, were the ideas of the radical economist Henry George. Nationalisation of landed property, which he considered the lever of social reconstruction, found a following among farmers and those workers who still dreamed of returning to the land and were angered by the plunderous ways of real estate profiteers, railroad companies, and the like. Marx, however, thought the attempt at blaming all social evils on private landownership wholly groundless. Contrary to George’s theory, cheap land in the United States was contributing to the growth of the capitalist system at a rate unheard of in Europe. In June 1881, writing of George’s ideas to Swinton and Sorge, Marx described them as ‘merely an attempt, tricked out with socialism, to save the capitalist régime and, indeed, to re-establish it on an even broader basis than at present’ (p. 101).

Marx’s and Engels’ ties with Russian revolutionaries and public leaders continued to expand. Their letters of 1880 to 1883 to Lavrov, Vera Zasulich, Danielson, Hartmann, Minna Gorbunova and others, reflect their lasting interest in the social-economic and political processes underway in Russia and in the life of their Russian acquaintances. Revolution was in the air in Russia. Marx and Engels held that the country stood ‘on the threshold of a world historical crisis’ (p. 18). As before they believed that events in Russia would create a revolutionary situation in Europe (see p. 209). And even though they were wrong about the time the crisis would break out, Engels predicted quite correctly in 1882 that the collapse of the Russian Empire would be a long process that would ‘go on for years’

(P. 208).

Intensive ideological search was under way within the Narodnik (Populist) movement, leading to its split and the emergence of two groups, Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) and Chorny Peredel (General Redistribution), whose members (Georgi Plekhanov and Vera Zasulich) founded the Emancipation of Labour group, the first Russian Marxist group, in 1883, after Marx’s death. The future of the peasant commune and its place in the social reorganisation, that is, the idea of non-capitalist development in Russia, was the central problem that occupied the Russian revolutionary movement at that time. Marx’s works, notably Capital, were fairly well known in Russia (see p. 45), and he was repeatedly asked to give his views on the matter (see, e.g., pp. 71-72).

The volume contains Marx’s letter to Vera Zasulich, outlining his ideas about the future of the peasant commune in Russia. The analysis in Capital, he observed, ‘does not adduce reasons either for or against the viability of the rural commune’, and added that it might become ‘the fulcrum of social regeneration in Russia’ provided ‘the deleterious influences which are assailing it from all sides’ are eliminated, and it is ensured normal conditions for spontaneous development (pp. 71-72). To be sure, the letter did not speak of the long reflections that led up to this answer. This we see from the drafts of the letter examining the development of the peasant commune after the abolition of serfdom in 1861 (see Vol. 24).

Marx had ties with the Executive Committee of Narodnaya Volya, which he and Engels considered a revolutionary party ‘of exceptional devotion and vigour’ (p. 18). They had always opposed terrorism as a means of political struggle, but regarded its terrorist acts in Russia’s specific conditions of the time as a reaction to governmental terrorism and the absence of elementary democratic freedoms for open political struggle.

The volume contains a number of letters concerning the question of national independence and the views of Marx and Engels on concrete independence struggles of oppressed peoples. Engels pointed out in a letter to Kautsky in February 1882 that ‘it is historically impossible for a great people to discuss this or that internal question in any way seriously so long as national independence is lacking’ (p. 191).

Marx and Engels considered the work of setting the West European proletariat free a priority, at least for Europe, with everything else being subordinate to that aim (see p. 205). They took the example of the liberation struggle of the Slav peoples to show that the value of any movement of oppressed nations in the historical setting of the time depended on whether it clashed with the interests of the working class. They were convinced that only ‘the victory of the proletariat will liberate them [the oppressed nations] in reality and of necessity’ (ibid.).

Until the end of his life, Marx followed developments in India. In February 1881, in a letter to Danielson, he observed that serious complications had arisen there for the British government, if not a general outbreak, caused by merciless exploitation of the indigenous population (see p. 63). It was the duty of the proletariat of Europe, Marx and Engels held, to back the liberation struggles of the oppressed peoples. Marx commended the meetings organised by the French followers of Guesde in defence of the popular movement in Egypt (see p. 297).

At the same time, Marx and Engels warned the European socialists against indiscriminate acceptance of national movements and their leaders, calling attention to the intrinsic contradictions of social processes. ‘As I see it,’ Engels wrote in reference to the National Party of Egypt and its leader Arabi Pasha in August 1882, ‘we can perfectly well enter the arena on behalf of the oppressed fellaheen without sharing their current illusions (for a peasant population has to be fleeced for centuries before it learns from experience), and against the brutality of the English without, for all that, espousing the cause of those who are currently their military opponents’ (p. 302). Reflecting on the future of the colonies, Engels said he was sure they would all become independent. But he refused to predict how exactly this would occur. As he saw it, revolutions could win in India and Algeria and Egypt. That, he added, ‘would certainly suit us best’ (p. 322), meaning the revolutionary proletariat in the advanced countries. Engels assumed, however, that the proletarian revolution would first occur in Europe, and the colonial countries would ‘have to be temporarily taken over by the proletariat and guided as rapidly as possible towards independence’ (ibid.).

Marx’s and Engels’ letters to each other in the last few years of their joint activity produce an inspiring picture of intellectual collaboration and intimacy. Engels, naturally, saw to it that Marx had the best doctors and the best health resorts in Europe, and even Algeria. ‘Your altruistic concern for me is unbelievable,’ Marx wrote in September 1882 (p. 326). But bereavements occurred one after the other: Marx’s wife died in 1881, and his eldest daughter Jenny in January 1883. This was a blow Marx could not survive. He passed away on 14 March 1883.

‘Mankind is the poorer for the loss of this intellect—the most important intellect, indeed, which it could boast today,’ wrote Engels (p. 462), who was destined to outlive his friend and carry on the cause to which they had both devoted their lives.

* * *

Volume 46 contains 257 letters by Marx and Engels, of which 138 are published in English for the first time and 119 were published in this language earlier, 45 of them in part only. Those previously published in English are indicated in the notes. The Appendices present four letters of Jenny Longuet’s and one of Jenny Marx’s. They contain thoughts expressed by Marx at one time or another and show his attitude towards various events. All the letters in the Appendices appear in English for the first time.

Obvious slips of the pen have been silently corrected. Proper and place names and separate words the authors had abbreviated, are given in full. Defects in the manuscripts are indicated in the footnotes, while passages of lost or illegible texts are indicated by omission points. Texts crossed out by the authors are reproduced in footnotes only where they substantially affect the meaning Foreign words and expressions are retained in the form in which they were used by the authors, with a translation where necessary in the footnotes, and are italicised (if underlined by the authors, they are given in spaced italics). English words and expressions used by Marx and Engels in texts written in German and French are printed in small caps. Longer passages written in English in the original are placed in asterisks.

The numbers of notes relating to the same facts and events given in the texts of different letters, are duplicated.

The texts of the letters and the notes were prepared by Alexander Zubkov. He also wrote the preface. The volume was edited by Valentina Smirnova. The name index and the indexes of quoted and mentioned literature and of periodicals were prepared by Victoria Reznikova (Institute of the History and Theory of Socialism).

The translations were made by Rodney Livingstone, Peter and Betty Ross and Stanley Mitchell and edited by Nicholas Jacobs (Lawrence & Wishart), K.M.Cook, Stephen Smith, Margarita Lopukhina, Andrei Skvarsky and Yelena Vorotnikova (Progress Publishers) and Norire Ter-Akopyan (USSR Academy of Sciences).

The volume was prepared for the press by the editor Margarita Lopukhina (Progress Publishers).