Selected Works Volume I (eBook)

A selection is an argument. Anyone who gathers a body of writing under one cover and calls it the essential part is making a claim about what the whole was for and, by omission, about what can be spared.

The three-volume Selected Works of Marx and Engels was one of the most widely circulated arguments of the twentieth century, printed in millions and carried into party libraries on every continent. This first volume is where the argument sets its terms.

It opens in 1845 with the Theses on Feuerbach and proceeds through The German Ideology, the Manifesto, the writings of 1848 to 1851, the journalism, and closes on the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy - the few paragraphs in which the base of economic life is said to determine the superstructure of law, politics and consciousness.

Read in sequence it tells a clean story: a young philosopher breaks with philosophy, discovers that material production is the motor of history, and arrives at a finished doctrine. The texts themselves are among the most important ever written, and having them in one volume in the standard translations is the reason the edition circulated as it did.

But a starting line is the most silent and decisive editorial act of all, and this one begins where it begins for a reason.

Volume One of three.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on the edition rather than the works - what it includes, what it omits, and the order it imposes.