On 8/28/20 8:12 AM, Alan Ginsberg wrote:
The article is behind a paywall. Would it possible for you to post the
text?
_._,_._,_
------------------------------------------------------------------------
https://www.ft.com/content/fb8013e0-6e5a-11e8-92d3-6c13e5c92914
Plan to publish full works of Marx is long tome in the making
Berlin academic leads 100-year project stymied by war and executions
Tobias Buck in Berlin JUNE 15 2018
Plan to publish full works of Marx is long tome in the making Berlin
academic leads 100-year project stymied by war and executions Gerald
Hubmann is in charge of the completion of the collected works of Marx
and Engels at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences Share on
Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on
LinkedIn (opens new window) Share Save Tobias Buck in Berlin JUNE 15 2018
Plan to publish full works of Marx is long tome in the making Berlin
academic leads 100-year project stymied by war and executions Gerald
Hubmann is in charge of the completion of the collected works of Marx
and Engels at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences Share on
Twitter (opens new window) Share on Facebook (opens new window) Share on
LinkedIn (opens new window) Share Save Tobias Buck in Berlin JUNE 15
2018 39 Print this page The 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birthday
prompted books, celebrations, and conferences while his home town of
Trier marked the occasion last month by putting up a 5.5m statue of the
German philosopher.
The greatest monument to Marx and his legacy, however, has remained
under construction, one page at a time, in a modest office in central
Berlin. Here, at the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences, Gerald
Hubmann is in charge of one of the most extraordinary book projects of
modern times: the completion — after almost a century of work — of the
collected works of Marx and Friedrich Engels, the twin prophets of
Communism. Capitalising on the excitement of this year’s Marx
bicentenary has not been a concern for Mr Hubmann. If all went well, he
said in an interview, the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe (known to
researchers by the apt acronym Mega) would be completed in another 15
years. So far he and a team of collaborators worldwide have released 66
volumes, with 24 volumes to go. An additional 20 volumes comprising
mainly of letters and excerpts will be published in digital form only.
Their work builds on a number of previous, and dramatically aborted,
attempts that stretch back to 1920s Moscow — since when this gargantuan
publishing task has experienced almost as many ups and downs as the
political ideas the two men spawned. Several of Mr Hubmann’s
predecessors ended up in front of a Soviet firing squad after the Stalin
regime grew alarmed at the project’s content and direction.
Work on the early edition was abandoned in 1941, with just 12 volumes
published. It restarted in the 1970s under a team of researchers from
the Soviet Union and East Germany but their progress, too, met a
historical roadblock, with the abrupt demise of the two sponsoring
countries in 1990. The task of finding, editing and publishing every
word written by the two men is grand not just in scale, but in political
complexity. Mr Hubmann, a 56-year-old literary scholar and specialist in
philosophy, argued that the current edition marked a radical departure.
“Even the earliest editions of Marx and Engels were not guided by a
desire for authenticity, but were meant to serve certain political
interests. That is what makes our edition different: our sole aim is to
publish the works of Marx and Engels completely and authentically,
according to recognised academic standards,” he said. He is convinced
that the lack of rigorous, unbiased editing in previous editions has
left generations of readers in the capitalist west and communist east
with a defective view of Marx and Marxism. “The image of Marx that we
had was too narrow and too ideological.
He was looked at with political interests and political aspects in mind.
But Marx saw himself above all as a researcher and a scientist,” he
said. Mr Hubmann pointed to Marx’s famous failure to complete his most
substantial work, Das Kapital, as indicative of the misunderstanding.
“If Marx had been a pure ideologue, or if he had only had political
goals in mind, he would have had no problem finishing Das Kapital — as
indeed others later did for him,” he said. “But this was not what Marx
was about. Marx simply had not completed his research and could not come
up with a conclusion.” Even 200 years after Marx’s birth, moves to
correct received interpretations and views of his work can be
politically explosive. The Chinese Communist party, for example, has
followed the progress closely. Last year, when Mr Hubmann and his team
released their long-awaited version of “The German Ideology” — a core
part of the Marx-Engels canon, which includes the famous observation
that “social existence determines consciousness” — scholars in Beijing
were far from pleased. The new version made clear that Marx and Engels
never planned to publish the work in its current form.
Instead, the manuscripts assembled and released under that title almost
half a century after Marx’s death were part of an aborted magazine
project by the two writers. “The Chinese cannot accept that there is no
work called The German Ideology. They see this as removing one of the
pillars of Marxism,” said Mr Hubmann. Manuscripts written by Marx and
Engels. It is not easy to decipher the intent and direction of their
output because of poor handwriting and a tendency to doodle Nor is it
easy to decipher the intent and direction of Marx and Engels’ prodigious
output. They often wrote side by side on a single page, making it hard
to work out what was written first and what was meant to replace other
passages. Marx’s famously poor handwriting is one obstacle; his tendency
to doodle another. Mice have chomped their way through some key pages.
Despite his decades of immersion in the work, Mr Hubmann said he was no
Marxist. His book-filled office in central Berlin is dominated by a
large bust of the German thinker, but the bronze head is placed
irreverently on a wooden crate marked “Fragile”. For all the academic
distance, Mr Hubmann said Marx had gained relevance and readers. Since
the 2008 financial crisis, the number of papers and books about the
philosopher has risen sharply. Every release of the collected works has
thousands of buyers while translations of the revised edition are under
way globally. “The first pages of the Communist Manifesto, where Marx
writes about the way that capitalism spreads across the world, its need
to establish connections everywhere, how everything that is solid melts
into air — there is a certain prophetic quality about this,” said Mr
Hubmann. “I feel very much reminded of today.”
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#935): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/935
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/76471553/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES<br />#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a
message.<br />#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.<br
/>#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
