Editorial fidelity to Marx: did the editorial labor on Capital II/III, the 1895 Introduction, and the retrospective formulations distort or faithfully transmit Marx's work?

Friedrich Engels, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

The editorial labor on Capital II and III was scrupulous, marked, and indispensable — without it those volumes would not exist. The retrospective interpretive frame I articulated in the 1859 review of Marx's Contribution, in the 1888 Ludwig Feuerbach, and in the prefaces to Capital II and III is a faithful exposition of the materialist conception of history Marx developed; later readers who claim I distorted Marx are responding to a stylized image of "Engelsian Marxism" rather than to the texts.

The 1895 Introduction to Class Struggles in France was a strategic update on the changed conditions of class struggle, not a turn to reformism — Bernstein's editorial cuts produced the reformist version that has been wrongly attributed to me.12

Sources

  1. For that reason I wrote to both of them that your article contained a ready answer to the main point. If you cannot get these copies off please advise me of that fact. But here I must close, otherwise I'll never finish. Best regards Yours F Engels Notes Notes provided by the Moscow Editor. 1.
    Selected Correspondence, pp. 3126–3128
  2. When the German socialist theoretician Eduard Bernstein stayed at his house in Primrose Hill in early 1884, he recalled how Engels 'read to me, night after night, until the small hours of the morning, passages from Marx's manuscripts, and the synopsis of a book with which he connected Marx's extracts from the American writer Lewis Morgan's Ancient Society'.
    The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, pp. 16–18

Where the argument is made

  • Capital Volume II (edited and prefaced 1885)
  • Capital Volume III (edited and prefaced 1894)
  • Wage-Labor and Capital (1891 edition with my introduction)
  • the 1859 review of Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy
  • Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886, particularly chapter IV on the materialist conception of history)
  • the 1895 Introduction to Marx's "The Class Struggles in France"

How the argument was received

The editorial work was carried out 1883–1894 in twelve years of work after Marx's death. The 1895 Introduction was my last major published intervention. I have not retreated under sustained criticism from Korsch, Lukács, Heinrich, or Carver — though Carver's specific charge that the post-1859 interpretive frame diverged from Marx's own self-understanding deserves engagement on the texts rather than dismissal.