''Die Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe'' (''MEGA'') is the largest collection of the

writing Writing is a medium of human communication which involves the representation of a language through a system of physically inscribed, mechanically transferred, or digitally represented symbols. Writing systems do not themselves constitute h ...

Karl Marx Karl Heinrich Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, historian, sociologist, political theorist, journalist, critic of political economy, and socialist revolutionary. His best-known titles are the 1848 ...

and

Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels ( ,"Engels"
'' language Language is a structured system of communication. The structure of a language is its grammar and the free components are its vocabulary. Languages are the primary means by which humans communicate, and may be conveyed through a variety of ...

. It is an ongoing project intended to produce a

critical edition Textual criticism is a branch of textual scholarship, philology, and of literary criticism that is concerned with the identification of textual variants, or different versions, of either manuscripts or of printed books. Such texts may range in da ...

of the complete works of Marx and Engels that reproduces the extant writings of both authors in books of high-quality paper and

library binding Library binding can be divided into the two major categories of "original" and "after market". The original category is as it says: the book was originally bound with the idea that it would be used in a library setting where the book would receiv ...

. Being a

scholarly The scholarly method or scholarship is the body of principles and practices used by scholars and academics to make their claims about the subject as valid and trustworthy as possible, and to make them known to the scholarly public. It is the me ...

and

academic An academy (Attic Greek: Ἀκαδήμεια; Koine Greek Ἀκαδημία) is an institution of secondary or tertiary higher learning (and generally also research or honorary membership). The name traces back to Plato's school of philosophy, ...

, historical-critical () edition, most ''MEGA'' volumes consist of separate text and appendix books, the latter giving additional information on the edited text. All material in ''MEGA'' is edited in the original language, resulting in mostly German- but also a considerable quantity of English- as well as French-language texts. Initiated by the Institutes of Marxism-Leninism of the

SED sed ("stream editor") is a Unix utility that parses and transforms text, using a simple, compact programming language. It was developed from 1973 to 1974 by Lee E. McMahon of Bell Labs, and is available today for most operating systems. sed w ...

Berlin Berlin ( , ) is the capital and List of cities in Germany by population, largest city of Germany by both area and population. Its 3.7 million inhabitants make it the European Union's List of cities in the European Union by population within ci ...

and the

CPSU "Hymn of the Bolshevik Party" , headquarters = 4 Staraya Square, Moscow , general_secretary = Vladimir Lenin (first) Mikhail Gorbachev (last) , founded = , banned = , founder = Vladimir Lenin , newspaper ...

Moscow Moscow ( , US chiefly ; rus, links=no, Москва, r=Moskva, p=mɐskˈva, a=Москва.ogg) is the capital and largest city of Russia. The city stands on the Moskva River in Central Russia, with a population estimated at 13.0 millio ...

and published by ''Dietz Verlag'' (Berlin) as a series launched in 1975, ''MEGA'' contains all works published by Marx and Engels in their lifetimes and numerous previously unpublished manuscripts and

letters Letter, letters, or literature may refer to: Characters typeface * Letter (alphabet), a character representing one or more of the sounds used in speech; any of the symbols of an alphabet. * Letterform, the graphic form of a letter of the alphabe ...

.Rojahn, Jürgen (1998): Publishing Marx and Engels after 1989: The fate of the MEGA.
/ref> After the fall of the Berlin Wall, publishing of ''MEGA'' was transferred to the ''Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung (IMES)'' in

Amsterdam Amsterdam ( , , , lit. ''The Dam on the River Amstel'') is the capital and most populous city of the Netherlands, with The Hague being the seat of government. It has a population of 907,976 within the city proper, 1,558,755 in the urban ar ...

.International Institute of Social History: Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe.
/ref> The volumes are printed and bound by

Walter de Gruyter Walter de Gruyter GmbH, known as De Gruyter (), is a German scholarly publishing house specializing in academic literature. History The roots of the company go back to 1749 when Frederick the Great granted the Königliche Realschule in Be ...

. The project is presently being overseen by Gerald Hubmann. Sixty-five volumes of ''MEGA'' have been published so far.marxforschung.de: Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA²) (German).
/ref> All volumes containing writings related to ''

Das Kapital ''Das Kapital'', also known as ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' or sometimes simply ''Capital'' (german: Das Kapital. Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, link=no, ; 1867–1883), is a foundational theoretical text in materialist phi ...

'' have been published. Most recently a text volume and accompanying apparatus volume containing Marx's

ecological Ecology () is the study of the relationships between living organisms, including humans, and their physical environment. Ecology considers organisms at the individual, population, community, ecosystem, and biosphere level. Ecology overlaps wi ...

writings was published. The entire project is expected to be 114 volumes in total.

Publication history

Background

The ''MEGA'' of today was not the first attempt to publish a complete collection of the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their original language.

First MEGA

In the 1920s and 1930s a ''first MEGA'' or ''MEGA¹'' began being published by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow under the direction of

David Riazanov David Riazanov (russian: Дави́д Ряза́нов), born David Borisovich Goldendakh (russian: Дави́д Бори́сович Гольдендах; 10 March 1870 – 21 January 1938), was a Russian revolutionary, historian, bibliographer ...

, a Marxist scholar and revolutionary. ''MEGA¹'' was originally intended to comprise 42 volumes, of which 12 volumes were published between 1927 and 1935.Marx. Dialectical Studies: The Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) Project.
/ref>
/ref> After Riazanov was removed as director of the Marx-Engels Institute in February 1931 (and killed in a perfunctory trial in 1938) and Hitler rose to power in Germany in 1933, ''MEGA¹'' was silently discontinued.

Second MEGA

Only after

Stalin's Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Ioseb Besarionis dze Jughashvili; – 5 March 1953) was a Georgian revolutionary and Soviet political leader who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until his death in 1953. He held power as General Secreta ...

death was a second attempt undertaken in the 1960s. The cooperation between German and

Soviet The Soviet Union,. officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR),. was a transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 to 1991. A flagship communist state, it was nominally a federal union of fifteen nation ...

editors, new editorial guidelines and innovative concepts led to the publication of a first sample volume in 1972, followed by the first volume of the new, ''second MEGA'' (or ''MEGA²'') in 1975.

Structure

''MEGA'' contains material written by Marx between 1835 and his death in 1883, and by Engels between 1838 and his death in 1895. The project is divided into four general sections:

I. Abteilung (Werke, Artikel, Entwürfe)

*All philosophical, economic, historical and political works, publications, articles and speeches of Marx and Engels. Well-known works of Marx and Engels, including ''

The German Ideology ''The German Ideology'' (German: ''Die deutsche Ideologie'', sometimes written as ''A Critique of the German Ideology'') is a set of manuscripts originally written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels around April or early May 1846. Marx and Engels ...

'' (volume I/5), '' The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850'' (volume I/10), ''

The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon ''The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon'' (german: italic=yes, Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Napoleon) is an essay written by Karl Marx between December 1851 and March 1852, and originally published in 1852 in ''Die Revolution'', a German mo ...

'' (volume I/11), ''

Critique of the Gotha Program The ''Critique of the Gotha Programme'' (german: Kritik des Gothaer Programms) is a document based on a letter by Karl Marx written in early May 1875 to the Social Democratic Workers' Party of Germany (SDAP), with whom Marx and Friedrich Engels wer ...

'' (volume I/25) and '' Anti-Dühring'' (volume I/27) are part of this section. It will comprise 32 volumes.

II. Abteilung (Das Kapital und Vorarbeiten)

*This section contains Marx's major work, '' Capital: Critique of Political Economy'' (with all three volumes), and all the economic works and manuscripts related to it, beginning with the ''

Grundrisse The ''Grundrisse der Kritik der Politischen Ökonomie'' (''Foundations of a Critique of Political Economy'') is an unfinished manuscript by the German philosopher Karl Marx. The series of seven notebooks was rough-drafted by Marx, chiefly for ...

'' from 1857/58 (volume II/1). This section is so far the only completed one, it was finished with volume II/4.3 in 2012 and comprises 15 volumes in 23 books.

III. Abteilung (Briefwechsel)

*The complete correspondence of Marx and Engels, both the exchange of letters between each other, as well as from Marx and Engels to third persons, whose letters to both authors are also completely printed in the edition. The section will comprise 35 volumes.

IV. Abteilung (Exzerpte, Notizen, Marginalien)

*The previously largely unpublished excerpts, notes and marginalia of Marx and Engels. The section will comprise 32 volumes.

Plan

Since 1990 ''MEGA'' is being published by the ''Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung (IMES)'' in Amsterdam. The IMES is an international network of the

International Institute of Social History The International Institute of Social History (IISH/IISG) is one of the largest archives of labor and social history in the world. Located in Amsterdam, its one million volumes and 2,300 archival collections include the papers of major figu ...

, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW), the Karl-Marx-Haus (KMH) of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in

Trier Trier ( , ; lb, Tréier ), formerly known in English as Trèves ( ;) and Triers (see also names in other languages), is a city on the banks of the Moselle in Germany. It lies in a valley between low vine-covered hills of red sandstone in the ...

, the Russian State Archive for Social/Political History (RGA) and the Russian Independent Institute for the Study of Social and National Problems (RNI), the latter two in Moscow. The main task of the IMES is to continue the publication of the ''Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe''. In 2015 the (federal science conference) of the German federal states and the German national government decided to continue funding the publication of ''MEGA'', albeit in a newly conceptualized form: All the letters in the third section of ''MEGA'' from 1866 to 1895 (from volume III/14 onwards) and large parts of the fourth section will only be published digitally in the future. All further volumes of the first and important volumes of the fourth section will, however, still be published in printed form.Press release of BBAW after GWK conference, October 30, 2015 (German).
/ref>

Footnotes

External links

Official website of BBAW for the ''MEGA'' project

Website of the ''Berliner Verein zur Förderung der MEGA-Edition e.V.'' (Berlin society for assistance of the ''MEGA'' edition) (German)

* ttps://karlmarx.lu/MegaI.htm Table of contents of ''MEGA¹'', 13 vols. {{DEFAULTSORT:Marx Engels Collected Works Political books 20th-century books Marxist works Books by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels