Marx and Engels Belong to the Workers of the World Workers Vanguard No. 1047	30 May 2014

Marx and Engels Belong to the Workers of the World

 

(Editorial Note)

 

Lawrence & Wishart, the British publisher of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (MECW), has compelled the Marxists Internet Archive to remove free digital versions of this 50-volume treasure from its Web site. This step is meant to further the publisher’s pursuit of private, profitable licenses with paying customers. In a particularly bitter and ironic twist, the ax fell on the eve of May Day, the international proletarian holiday. Restricting free public access to writings by the founders of the Marxist movement is a blow to working people, students and the oppressed at a time when a new generation is grappling with the inequalities and irrationality of the capitalist system—from Washington’s slashing of food stamps after bailing out the banks to European Union/IMF-imposed austerity against working people in Greece.

Lawrence & Wishart, formerly associated with the British Communist Party, complains that the left, which has howled in protest against this move, would have them commit “institutional suicide” rather than make financial ends meet in a capitalist world. In fact, we buy their well-translated and beautifully bound MECW and hope they will someday have the resources to bring out an index to this vital trove of writings. But restricting public access to Marxist writings is reprehensible and technologically as dim as a ten-watt incandescent bulb. Scans of these writings are out there in the world and streaming faster than hooch in a gin joint during Prohibition.

Lawrence & Wishart wrongly claim that the public will still have access to the MECW via university libraries. Working people, the poor and the unemployed are not exactly welcome to pad the hallowed halls of academia, whether in the U.S., Britain or elsewhere. Moreover, university libraries are drastically cutting back on subscriptions as the licensing costs for digital publications are beyond the grasp of all but the wealthiest enclaves of bourgeois privilege. Huge profit margins demanded by science publishers like Elsevier impede the very collaboration that is so vital to scientific advance. An annual, online-only subscription to the Journal of Comparative Neurology, for example, is currently $30,860!

Lawrence & Wishart’s action against the Marxists Internet Archive recalls earlier proprietary piggishness by the American Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The SWP threatened legal action against the Marxists Internet Archive in 2000 and demanded removal of digital versions of writings by Bolshevik leader Leon Trotsky as well as SWP founding documents, including the early Trotskyist organ Socialist Appeal. The publishing preferences of the SWP, which long ago repudiated Trotskyism, resemble a Third Worldist book-of-the-month club. The SWP nonetheless also claims ownership of genuine Marxist writers like Trotsky and founding American Trotskyist James P. Cannon because it is deeply concerned with cashing in on these works, which should be disseminated as freely and widely as possible.

Granted we live in a capitalist society driven by the profit motive, but it is informative to look at the policies and practices of the Bolsheviks, who saw further from the heights of their conquest of state power for the working people in the 1917 Russian October Revolution. The Third (Communist) International was launched to generalize the lessons of the Russian experience and extend the gains of October through international socialist revolution. The Comintern’s journal International Press Correspondence (known as InPreCor) was translated and published in several languages, and the words “Please reprint” appeared over the masthead. Later, the Soviet Union was behind the effort to translate the MECW into English and other languages, the project for which Lawrence & Wishart was awarded its copyright.

The Spartacist Publishing Company is not proprietary about Workers Vanguard or our other journals, and they are available on the International Communist League’s Web site (www.icl-fi.org). Books and bulletins produced by the Prometheus Research Library (the central archival repository of the Central Committee of the Spartacist League) are available in free digital versions on the PRL’s Web site (www.prl.org). The Prometheus Research Library also promotes and practices archival collaboration with the Marxists Internet Archive, the Riazanov Library, the Internet Archive and other libraries and researchers to help make the most complete history of the Marxist movement available to the public. This includes not only our own publications but also our archives of the publications of other tendencies in the international workers movement.

We appreciate the wider public access and search capabilities afforded by digital versions of Marxist publications. But this media form is no substitute for the print editions of journals of record and works of enduring value. We use, cherish and preserve print publications and encourage serious students of Marxism and fighters for social change to buy subscriptions to our press. We are proud of our history and programmatic fidelity and offer for sale indexed bound volumes of WV as well as other publications of our party.

Anyone wishing to fight the ravages of capitalism would do well to read the 1848 Communist Manifesto, in which Marx and Engels addressed their bourgeois critics:

“In your existing society, private property is already done away with for nine-tenths of the population; its existence for the few is solely due to its non-existence in the hands of those nine-tenths. You reproach us, therefore, with intending to do away with a form of property, the necessary condition for whose existence is the non-existence of any property for the immense majority of society.”

As they said of the “business” of revolutionary politics: “In a word, you reproach us with intending to do away with your property. Precisely so; that is just what we intend.”