Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (5)

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Preface

The fifth volume of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels contains a major joint work of the founders of Marxism, The German Ideology, together with the writings immediately connected with it.

They were all written between the spring of 1845 and the spring of 1847, during Marx’s stay in Brussels, where he moved in February 1845 following his deportation from France by the Guizot government. Engels came to Brussels from Barmen in April 1845 and remained till August 1846. This was the period when Marxism was finally evolved as the scientific world outlook of the revolutionary proletariat. Marx and Engels had arrived at the decisive stage in working out the philosophical principles of scientific communism.

It was in The German Ideology that the materialist conception of history, historical materialism, was first formulated as an integral theory. Engels said later that this theory, which uncovered the genuine laws of social development and revolutionised the science of society, embodied the first of Marx’s great discoveries (the second being the theory of surplus value) which played the main role in transforming socialism from a utopia into a science. The German Ideology is in effect the first mature work of Marxism. It immediately preceded the first published mature Marxist writings — The Poverty of Philosophy and the Manifesto of the Communist Party.

During the period when The German Ideology and the works closely connected with it were being written, Marx and Engels devoted their main efforts to joint theoretical and practical work aimed at setting out the revolutionary communist teaching and rallying around it the progressive elements of the proletariat and the revolutionary intelligentsia. Summing up the tasks they set themselves at that time,

Engels wrote later, in his work “On the History of the Communist League”: “We were both already deeply involved in the political movement, and possessed a certain following in the educated world, especially of Western Germany, and abundant contact with the organised proletariat. It was our duty to provide a scientific foundation for our view, but it was equally important for us to win over the European and in the first place the German proletariat to our conviction.”

Early in 1846, Marx and Engels founded the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee, which took steps to establish international contacts between the participants in the working-class movement, to spread the new communist ideas and to prepare the ground for the creation of a revolutionary proletarian party. In August 1846, Engels, on the Committee’s instructions, moved to Paris to develop revolutionary propaganda among the German and French workers.

The new revolutionary outlook of Marx and Engels was hammered out in struggle with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology. They directed their criticism in the first place against the idealist conception of history inherent in German post-Hegelian philosophy, including that of Ludwig Feuerbach, whose materialist views were inconsistent and essentially metaphysical.

The volume opens with Marx’s “Theses on Feuerbach”, of which Engels wrote in 1888 that they are “invaluable as the first document in which is deposited the brilliant germ of the new world outlook” (Foreword to Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy).

The “Theses on Feuerbach” were written in connection with the project of The German Ideology and represent the initial draft of a number of general ideas for the first chapter of this work. Nearly all the basic propositions of the “Theses” were further developed in The German Ideology. Essentially, they counterpose against contemplative and passive pre-Marxian materialism the dialectical materialist conception of the decisive role of material practice in human cognition. Practice, Marx stressed, is the starting point, the basis, the criterion and the purpose of all cognition, including philosophical theory. And in order to become an effective and active factor of social development, theory must be embodied in living revolutionary practical activity.

In the “Theses on Feuerbach” Marx put forward the materialist conception of “the essence of man”. In opposition to Feuerbach, who had only an abstract conception of “man” in isolation from social relations and historical reality, Marx emphasised that real men could only be understood as products of social relations. Marx then went much further than Feuerbach in the critical comprehension of religion and the ways of overcoming it. He pointed out that it was not enough to understand the earthly basis of religion. The condition for eliminating religion, the “Theses” underline, is the revolutionary elimination of the social contradictions which give rise to it.

Particularly important is the eleventh thesis, which says: “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it” (see this volume, p. 5). Marx himself separated this thesis from the preceding ten, as though underlining its summarising character. We must understand the world in order to change it, instead of interpreting it one way or another in order to reconcile ourselves with what exists. Such in substance is the true meaning of this thesis. Organically connected with it is another thought. The world cannot be changed by merely changing our notions of it, by theoretically criticising what exists; it must be understood, and then, proceeding from this, transformed by effective action, material revolutionary practice. This thesis concisely formulates the fundamental difference of Marxist philosophy from all earlier philosophy, including pre-Marxian materialism. It concentrates into a single sentence the effective, transforming character of the revolutionary theory created by Marx and Engels, its inseparable connection with revolutionary practice.

The basic principles of the new scientific world outlook, which Marx had formulated in the “Theses on Feuerbach”, were developed in The German Ideology. This work comprises two volumes. Volume I is devoted to criticism of the views of Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, and Volume II to criticism of “true socialism”. Despite all the efforts of Marx and Engels to have The German Ideology published, it did not appear in print during their lifetime, except for one chapter of Volume II. This circumstance does not, however, diminish its significance. In working on The German Ideology, Marx and Engels first and foremost clarified to themselves the basic aspects of the new world outlook. “We abandoned the manuscript to the gnawing criticism of the mice all the more willingly as we had achieved our main purpose — self-clarification,” Marx wrote in 1859 in the preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. The conclusions Marx and Engels reached constituted the theoretical basis for all their further scientific and political activity. They were able to impart them to their closest associates — future prominent proletarian revolutionaries. And they soon found an opportunity of making their conclusions public after giving them a more finished and perfect form. This was done in The Poverty of Philosophy, by Marx, and the Manifesto of the Communist Party, by Marx and Engels.

The German Ideology is remarkable for the great wealth and variety of its content, since the ideas developed in it relate to many aspects of the revolutionary teaching which was taking shape. Thus profound thoughts were expressed on questions pertaining to the theory and history of the state and of law, to linguistics, aesthetics and literary criticism. Not only were post-Hegelian philosophy and “true socialism” subjected to a detailed critical analysis, but digressions were also made into the history of philosophy and of socialist theories. And the new materialist interpretation of the history of social thought was in particular reflected in the positive treatment of the great social thinkers of the past.

The German Ideology is the continuation of previous works by Marx and Engels, mainly of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The Holy Family, and in a sense synthesises the ideas contained in them. At the same time, an immense step forward was made to a qualitatively new stage in the development of the philosophical foundations of the revolutionary proletarian outlook. It was in this work that for the first time the materialist way of understanding history became an integral conception of the structure of society and of historical periodisation. By virtue of the general dialectical law of the transformation of theory into method and of the unity of world outlook and method, organically inherent in the new revolutionary teaching, this conception appears in The German Ideology not only as the theory of society, but also as the method of understanding social and historical phenomena. Marx and Engels gave science a powerful weapon for the knowledge of social life, a means of elucidating both the general course of social development and the existing social relations. Thus they made possible the comprehension of social processes which is necessary for active and revolutionary interference in them. Marx himself saw in this work the methodological prerequisite for a new political economy. In a letter to the German publisher Leske on August 1, 1846, he pointed out that the publication of a polemical work against the German philosophers was necessary in order to prepare readers for his point of view in the field of economic science.

The German Ideology is a polemical work. Criticism of views hostile to the proletarian world outlook occupies a predominant place in it, often couched in a biting satirical form which gives it particular force and expressiveness. In the course of their attacks, Marx and Engels continually counterposed their own point of view to the views they were criticising.

Chapter I of Volume I of The German Ideology occupies a special place in the work as a whole. Unlike the other chapters, which are mainly polemical, it was conceived as a general introduction expounding the materialist conception of history. The basic theoretical content of the whole work is indeed concentrated in this chapter.

First of all Marx and Engels formulate the “premises” of the materialist conception of history. These premises are the real living people, their activity and the material conditions under which they live, both the conditions which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. Thus, what is underlined here is the historical character of the material conditions themselves, which are increasingly influenced by people’s activity. And there are two sides to it. First, production (people’s active relation to nature, their influence on it), and, secondly, intercourse (people’s relations to one another in their activity). Production and intercourse determine each other, but the decisive side of this mutual action is production. Subsequently, Marx and Engels introduced the term “relations of production” to distinguish the social relations people enter into in production, which are the basic relations underlying everything included under the term “intercourse”.

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels not only developed in all its aspects the thesis of the decisive role of material production in the life of society, which they had already formulated in their previous works, they also revealed for the first time the dialectics of the development of the productive forces and the relations of production. This most important discovery was formulated here as the dialectics of the productive forces and the form of intercourse. It illuminated the whole conceptual system of historical materialism and made it possible to expound the substance of the materialist way of understanding history as an integral scientific conception.

This discovery can be reduced to the following propositions. The productive forces determine the form of intercourse (social relations). At a certain stage of their development, the productive forces come into contradiction with the existing form of intercourse. This contradiction is resolved by social revolutions. In the place of the previous form of intercourse, which has become a fetter, a new one is evolved which corresponds to the more developed productive forces. Subsequently, this new form of intercourse in its turn ceases to Correspond to the developing productive forces, turns into their fetter and is replaced by an ensuing, historically more progressive form of intercourse. Thus, in the course of the entire historical development a link of continuity is established between successive stages. In disclosing the laws of social development, Marx and Engels arrived at a conclusion of immense significance: “... All collisions in history have their origin, according to our view, in the contradiction between the productive forces and the form of intercourse” (see this volume, p. 74).

The discovery of the laws of social development provided the key to the scientific understanding of the entire historical process. It served as the point of departure for the scientific periodisation of history. Thus, as Lenin commented: “His [Marx’s] historical materialism was a great achievement in scientific thinking. The chaos and arbitrariness that had previously reigned in views on history and politics were replaced by a strikingly integral and harmonious scientific theory, which shows how, in consequence of the growth of the productive forces, out of one system of social life another and higher system develops — how capitalism, for instance, grows out of feudalism” (Collected Works, Vol. 19, p. 25).

In The German Ideology Marx and Engels investigated the basic determinants of the sequence of phases in the historical development of social production. They showed that the outward expression of the level of development of the productive forces is always to be found in that of the division of labour. Each stage in the division of labour determines a corresponding form of property and, as Marx subsequently pointed out, the property relations are but “the legal expression” of the relations of production. The transition from primary historical relations to the ensuing stage in social development was determined by the development of the productive forces, resulting in the transition from an initial, natural division of labour to the social division of labour in the form which is expressed in the division of society into classes. This was the transition from pre-class to class society.

Along with the social division of labour there develop such derivative historical phenomena as private property, the state and the “estrangement” of social activity. just as the natural division of labour in primitive society determines the first, tribal (family) form of property so the increasing social division of labour determines the further development and change of the forms of property. The second form of property is the “ancient communal and state property”, the third form is “feudal or estate property” and the fourth is “bourgeois property”. The singling out and analysis of forms of property which successively replace one another and dominate at different stages of historical development provided the basis for the scientific Marxist theory of the social formations, the successive replacement of which is the principal feature of the whole historical process.

Marx and Engels examined the last, the bourgeois, form of private property in greater detail than the other historical forms of property, tracing its transition from the guild-system to manufacture and large-scale industry. This was the first time that these two principal stages in the development of bourgeois society, the manufacture period and the period of large-scale industry, had been singled out and analysed. Marx had already demonstrated in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 that the emergence of private property was historically conditioned, that it must necessarily come into being at a certain stage in the development of human society, and also that it must inevitably be subsequently abolished. It was proved in The German Ideology that it is only with the development of large-scale industry that the material conditions are created for the abolition of private property in the means of production. And it becomes evident that this abolition is necessary.

Proceeding from production to the sphere of intercourse, i.e., of social relations, the social system, Marx and Engels gave a materialist interpretation of the class structure of society and demonstrated the role of classes and the class struggle in social life. In The German Ideology, as compared with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and The Holy Family, the Marxist theory of classes and class struggle acquired mature features-those very features which, as Marx noted in his letter to Weydemeyer of March 5, 1852, distinguished this theory from the progressive bourgeois historians’ understanding of class struggle. It was demonstrated that the division of society into antagonistic classes and the existence of classes are connected with definite stages in the development of production, that the development of the class struggle must necessarily lead to a communist revolution carried out by the proletariat, and that this revolution will result in the abolition of classes and the creation of a classless society.

In The German Ideology considerable attention is devoted to the political superstructure, and in particular to the relation of the state and law to property. For the first time the essence of the state in general and the bourgeois state in particular was revealed....... The state is the form in which the individuals of a ruling class assert their ‘common interests, and in which the whole civil society of an epoch is epitomised” (see this volume, p. 90). In analysing the class nature and the main functions of the state at the capitalist stage of development, Marx and Engels pointed out that the bourgeois state “is nothing more than the form of organisation which the bourgeois are compelled to adopt, both for internal and external purposes, for the mutual guarantee of their property and interests” (see this volume, p. 90).

In dealing with the various forms of social consciousness, the ideological superstructure, Marx and Engels made clear the general correlation between the material sphere and the sphere of consciousness. Of particular importance is the classical formulation of the materialist solution to this basic question of philosophy: “Consciousness [das Bewusstsein] can never be anything else than conscious being [das bewusste Sein], and the being of men is their actual life-process.... it is not consciousness that determines life, but life that determines consciousness” (see this volume, pp. 36-37). The formation of consciousness is immensely influenced by the class structure of society. In their work Marx and Engels disclosed the class origins of the various forms of consciousness and showed that in a class society the dominating consciousness is the consciousness of the ruling class.

Summing up the substance of the materialist conception of history, Marx and Engels wrote: “This conception of history thus relies on expounding the real process of production-starting from the material production of life itself-and comprehending the form of intercourse connected with and created by this mode of production, i.e., civil society in its various stages, as the basis of all history; describing it in its action as the state, and also explaining how all the different theoretical products and forms of consciousness, religion, philosophy, morality, etc., etc., arise from it, and tracing the process of their formation from that basis; thus the whole thing can, of course, be depicted in its totality (and therefore, too, the reciprocal action of these various sides on one another). It has not, like the idealist view of history, to look for a category in every period, but remains constantly on the real ground of history; it does not explain practice from the idea but explains the formation of ideas from material practice, and accordingly it comes to the conclusion that ... not criticism but revolution is the driving force of history, also of religion, of philosophy and all other kinds of theory” (see this volume, pp. 53-54).

In their subsequent scientific work, Marx and Engels constantly developed and deepened their materialist conception of history and perfected the method of historical materialism by applying it in the various fields of the social sciences. The whole system of concepts — which in The German Ideology still bears the stamp of the formation process of the conception itself — was thus elaborated and ma de more precise, and the basic explanatory ideas of historical materialism were expressed in a more adequate terminology. In later works of Marx and Engels the various aspects of the concept “mode of production”, a basic term in historical materialism, were expounded; the internal law of development of the modes of production began to be formulated in terms of the dialectical interaction of productive forces and relations of production, and the latter were shown to play the main, decisive role-as was made clear already in The German Ideology — in the system of social relations. The term “social formation” firs appeared in Marx’s economic manuscript of 1857-58, Critique of Political Economy (the so-called Grundrisse), and the concept “social-economic formation” was first thoroughly expounded in the preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), thus providing for the better understanding of the successive replacement of social formations, the general outline of which was given in The German Ideology. It should be noted, too, that in the light of the subsequent development of the theory of scientific communism it becomes evident that, in speaking in The German Ideology of the “abolition of the division of labour”, and even of the “abolition of labour”, in communist society, Marx and Engels had in mind only the division of labour in the conditions of class-divided society — with its antithesis between mental and physical labour and people being tied down to certain occupations and professions — and, in particular, the capitalist form of the exploitation of labour, not work and its organisation in general.

The classical formulation of the basic propositions of the materialist conception of history was later set down by Marx in the already-mentioned preface to his book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.

This scientific materialist theory of social development served Marx and Engels as the theoretical foundation for their conclusions about the communist transformation of society. The principal conclusion from the materialist conception of history, already substantiated in The German Ideology, is the historical necessity of a proletarian, communist revolution. Marx and Engels stressed that “for the practical materialist, i.e., the communist, it is a question of revolutionising the existing world, of practically coming to grips with and changing the things found in existence” (see this volume, pp. 38-39).

The development of the productive forces within bourgeois society, Marx and Engels pointed out, provides the two basic material Premises of a communist revolution. These are: first, a high level of production, which is incompatible with private property and at the same time is necessary for the organisation of society on a communist basis; and, secondly, mass proletarianisation, the formation of the proletariat, the most revolutionary class in modern society. This definition of the premises of a communist revolution is one of the fundamental conclusions of scientific communism contained in The German Ideology.

It was in The German Ideology that Marx and Engels first spoke of the necessity for the proletariat to conquer political power as the only way of carrying out a communist revolution. They pointed out: “Every class which is aiming at domination, even when its domination, as is the case with the proletariat, leads to the abolition of the old form of society in its entirety and of all domination, must first conquer political power” (see this volume, p. 47). Thus we find expressed for the first time the idea of the dictatorship of the proletariat, though as yet only, in a most general form.

Marx and Engels stressed that a communist revolution is a dual process: a change in people’s conditions of life, and at the same time a change in the people themselves who carry out the revolution. This thought, already contained in the “Theses on Feuerbach”, was given its classical formulation in The German Ideology: “... The revolution is necessary, therefore, not only because the ruling class cannot be wing overthrown in any other way, but also because the class overthrow it can only in a revolution succeed in ridding itself of all the muck of ages and become fitted to found society anew” (see this volume, p. 53).

The German Ideology expounds the basic features of future communist society — the abolition of private property, of the class division of labour and of classes themselves, the transformation of production and all the social relations, and the disappearance of the state, the instrument of class domination. People’s own activity will cease to confront them as a power alien to them. The antagonism between town and country and between mental and physical labour will be eliminated. Labour will be transformed from activity people perform under compulsion into the genuine self-activity of free people. The real liberation and all-round development of every individual will be the highest aim of the communist organisation of society.

This view of the future communist society is presented in The German Ideology for the first time as an integral theory, free from all the artificial, dogmatic construing of the future system which was typical of the utopian Socialists despite all the brilliant conjectures they made. The foresight of Marx and Engels was based on an analysis of the real tendencies of social development and was the result of comprehension of its real laws. By expounding the specific features of future communism, Marx and Engels were laying the foundations of the scientific forecasting of social processes.

Not only the positive aspect of The German Ideology, the exposition of the authors’ views, but also the critical content of this work was of great significance in shaping the new revolutionary world outlook. This criticism was mainly directed against the idealist conceptions of German post-Hegelian philosophy. And by subjecting the views of the German philosophers to a critical analysis, Marx. and Engels in fact presented a radical and scientifically based criticism of previous philosophical thought as a whole. They demonstrated the untenability of the idealist interpretations of history inherent in all previous philosophy, sociology and historiography. The thinkers working in these fields could never understand the real social processes and their true character. At best they could grasp and more or less correctly describe only individual aspects of these processes without seeing the general connections determining them. The idealist interpretation of history, The German Ideology underlined, leads to only a superficial and illusory perception of the historical process, and explains it in an illusory way. The socialist theories based on a similar interpretation were likewise incapable of going beyond the bounds of fantastic notions and utopias.

A large part of The German Ideology is occupied by criticism of the Young Hegelians Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner. The need for such criticism arose, as Engels pointed out, from the fact that Bauer and Stirner were “the representatives of the ultimate consequences of abstract German philosophy, and therefore the only important philosophical opponents of Socialism — or rather Communism ...” (see MECW, Vol. 4, p. 241).

The German Ideology completes the criticism, begun in The Holy Family, of the subjective-idealist views of Bruno Bauer, with their mystification of the historical process and contraposition of the outstanding individuals, who were supposed to be the sole makers of history, to the “passive and inert” masses. By citations from the latest writings of Bruno Bauer and other Young Hegelians, Marx and Engels drove home their characterisation, given in The Holy Family, of Young Hegelian ideas as unscientific and anti-revolutionary. In this respect there is partial textual coincidence between the corresponding chapter in The German Ideology and the article “A Reply to Bruno Bauer’s Anti-Critique” written by Marx and Engels in refutation of the Young Hegelian leader’s attempt to dispute their criticism of his views in The Holy Family.

Most of the first volume of The German Ideology is taken up by a critical examination of the philosophical and sociological views of Max Stirner, formulated in his book Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum (The Unique and His Property). Stirner was a typical exponent of individualism and one of the first ideologists of anarchism. His views, reflecting a petty-bourgeois protest against the bourgeois system, enjoyed a considerable success among petty-bourgeois intellectuals and to some extent influenced the immature outlook of craftsmen who were becoming proletarians, while his failure to understand the role of the proletariat, whom he identified with paupers, and also his attacks on communism, made a resolute exposure of his views indispensable.

Marx and Engels demonstrated the artificial and far-fetched character of Stirner’s philosophical and sociological constructions and the fallacy of his theory that the way to the liberation of the individual lay through the destruction of the state and the implementation of every individual’s egoistic right to self-assertion. They pointed out that Stirner’s voluntaristic appeals to the rights of the individual did not in any way affect the existing social relations and their economic basis, and so, in effect, continued to sanction the preservation of the bourgeois social conditions which are the main source of inequality and oppression of the individual. Stirner’s seemingly revolutionary phrases were in fact a disguise for an apologia of the bourgeois system.

The exposure of Stirner’s anarchist views in The German Ideology was essentially a criticism of all such individualistic theories which substitute fruitless rebellion by isolated individuals for participation in the real revolutionary movement and preach total negation and destruction instead of the positive communist aims of struggle. Marx and Engels pointed out that the path outlined by Stirner and his like could by no means lead to the liberation of the individual. Only a communist revolution, carried out by the working class in the interests of all the working people, can break the fetters with which the individual is shackled by the existing capitalist system, and can lead to the genuine freedom and free development of the individual, to harmonious unity of public and personal interests.

The second volume of The German Ideology and Engels’ manuscript “The True Socialists”, which is its direct continuation, further show that, in substance, German “true socialism” was only a philistine variety of earlier petty-bourgeois social utopianism and that, under the pretence of “universal love for man”, the “true socialists” were spreading ideas of class peace, renouncing the struggle for democratic freedoms and revolutionary change. This was particularly dangerous at the time in Germany, where the struggle of all the democratic forces against absolutism and feudal relations was growing sharper while at the same time the contradictions between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie were becoming more and more acute. Marx and Engels likewise subjected to devastating criticism the German nationalism of the “true socialists” and their arrogant attitude to other nations. They criticised in detail the philosophical views of the “true socialists”, their aesthetic views, and the tendency of some of them to give socialism a religious tinge and to impart to it the character of a religious prophecy,

Both by its positive ideas and by its criticism of ideological trends hostile to the proletarian world outlook, including those couched in pseudo-revolutionary and socialist phrases, The German Ideology represented an important landmark in the development of Marxism. This work signified a decisive stage in the philosophical and sociological grounding of the theory of scientific communism, in the scientific demonstration of the world-historic role of the working class as the social force whose historical mission is to overthrow the exploiting capitalist system and create the new communist society.

The works contained in this volume have been translated from the original German text. The German Ideology, which forms the greater part of this volume, was never published in the authors’ lifetimes, except for one chapter, nor arranged by them for publication, and has come down to us incomplete. The text of The German Ideology has been re-checked and re-arranged in accordance with the researches of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, with a view to presenting it in a form corresponding as closely as possible to the layout and content of the manuscript. In particular, Chapter 1, “Feuerbach”, which was not finished by the authors and has reached us only in the form of several separate manuscripts, is presented in accordance with the new arrangement and subdivision of the text prepared by Georgi Bagaturia and edited by Vladimir Brushlinsky (first published in English in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1969, Vol. 1, and also separately under the title Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Feuerbach: Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks, Lawrence & Wishart, London 1973).

The whole work on this volume has been finalised by Lev Churbanov. He also prepared the Preface, the Notes and the Subject Index, which have been edited by Lev Golman (both of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism).

The Name Index, the Index of Quoted and Mentioned Literature and the Index of Periodicals were prepared by Nina Loiko, of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism.

The English translation of the bulk of The German Ideology, i.e., “The Leipzig Council”, and also Engels’ essay “The True Socialists”, was made by Clemens Dutt. The translation of Chapter 1, “Feuerbach”, Volume 1, was made by W. Lough, and that of Volume II by C. P. Magill, these two sections having been edited by Roy Pascal for the English edition published by Lawrence & Wishart, London, in 1938.

The English translations were edited for this volume by Maurice Cornforth, E. J. Hobsbawm and Margaret Mynatt for Lawrence & Wishart, and Salo Ryazanskaya, for Progress Publishers, and finally passed for the press by the editors Lydia Belyakova, Nadezhda Rudenko and Victor Schnittke, Progress Publishers.

The scientific editing was done by Georgi Bagaturia and Norair Ter-Akopyan (Institute of Marxism-Leninism).