The Social and Political Thought of Karl Marx [antikvár]

PREFACEAny discussion of Marx's thought is still suffering from the absence of a comprehensive critical edition of his works. The Marx-Engels Werhe edition, now being completed in East Berlin, is despite its shortcomings the most comprehensive efFort to collect Marx's and Engels' writings. Occasionally, however, it has to be supple-mented by references to other editions, especially Riazanov's superb Gesamtausgabe which was discontinued during the Stalin purges.In the present work, every efFort has been made to refer to English translations of Marx's works. In cases where no such trans-lation exists, I have rendered my own translation and referred the reader to the Germán edition I have used. Loyd D. Easton's and Kurt H. Guddat's selection Writings of the Young Marx on Philo-sophy and Society (Garden City, 1967), has unfortunately reached me too late to be used for this book.Anyone who adds another volume to the already prolific literature on Marx can be expected to be accused of either repetitiveness or immodesty. I would not have presumed to write this book had I not been convinced that the discussion of Marx's political and social ideas has suffered from a double distortion conditioned by the intel-lectual history of those ideas themselves. Seldom has the debate about Marx been successfully divorced from explicit or implied political objectives; and the rediscovery of Marx's earlier writings has created an imbalance in most prevalent views about the nature of Marx's thought. It is the intent of this book to emancipate Marx from both his disciples and his enemies and to conduct the discussion with an eye towards restoring the inner balance of Marx's thought as a political theory. It seems a truism, yet it has been repeatedly overlooked, that Marx's political theory should not be judged by Lenin's or Stalin's policies any more than Mill should be judged by Gladstone's performance. The dialectical relations between theory and practice have to be predicated upon a prior autonomous understanding of theory. It is the aim of this book to emancipate the discussion about Marx from the aftermath of the Cold War which is still lingering in many of the writings about Marx in the West. To