Every finished book is an argument in its Sunday clothes. Correspondence is the argument in its shirtsleeves — thought caught in the act, before it has decided what it wants to say. That is what makes this volume unlike almost anything else in the Marxist library. Here are Marx and Engels not lecturing the world but writing to each other and to their friends across half a century, from the first letter Engels sent to Marx in the autumn of 1844 to the last Engels wrote a few months before his death in 1895: arguing over proofs and rent theory and the state of the stock exchange, complaining about money and printers, sizing up men and movements, and — again and again — working out in the margins of a private letter ideas that would only later harden into doctrine. Lenin, in the appreciation the edition places at its head, put the value exactly. Its worth, he wrote, "is tremendous," because the two men "return again and again to the most diverse aspects of their doctrine," and if one had to name in a single word the focus of the whole correspondence, "that word would be dialectics." He meant that here you watch the method at work rather than its results laid out for inspection.
The present text is the Progress Publishers edition — first issued in Moscow in 1955, revised and enlarged in 1965, and given a third revised form in 1975, from which this printing descends. It was translated by I. Lasker and edited by S. W. Ryazanskaya, and it is a serious piece of scholarship: 265 letters chosen from a surviving correspondence of several thousand, furnished with a substantial body of explanatory notes, a name index that tells you who every obscure figure was, and a bibliography. A reader should understand from the outset that this is a selection, and that selection is itself an argument — a point we will return to, because who chooses the letters chooses, to a considerable degree, which Marx and which Engels the reader is allowed to meet.
Take first what is strongest here, because it is genuinely first-rate, and because it bears directly on the misuse to come. The glory of this collection is the handful of letters Engels wrote in his last years — to Joseph Bloch, to Conrad Schmidt, to Franz Mehring, to Borgius — in which, watching a younger generation turn his and Marx's work into a crude machine, he tried to pull the emergency brake. To Bloch, in September 1890, he set it down as plainly as it can be said. "According to the materialist conception of history," he wrote, "the ultimately determining factor in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Neither Marx nor I have ever asserted more than this. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic factor is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase." The economy is the base, but law, politics, philosophy, religion "also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles"; there is "an interaction of all these elements." And then the sentence that ought to be carved over the door of every Marxist school: "We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite antecedents and conditions." History is not a conveyor belt on which the economy delivers ready-made results; it is made by human beings, in circumstances they did not choose, out of the collision of "innumerable intersecting forces."
The same warning runs through the neighbouring letters. To Mehring, in 1893, Engels diagnosed the way ideas come to float free of their real roots: "Ideology is a process which is indeed accomplished consciously by the so-called thinker, but it is the wrong kind of consciousness" — the thinker mistakes the true motives driving him for the reasons he invents. And the deepest note is sounded not by Engels but by Marx, in the letter he drafted around 1877 to the editors of the Russian journal Otechestvenniye Zapiski (Notes of the Fatherland). Warned that Russian disciples were treating his account of how capitalism arose in Western Europe as a timetable that every nation must follow, Marx refused the honour. His sketch of the Western road, he insisted, must not be transformed into a passe-partout, a skeleton key: one "will never arrive there by using as one's master key a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being supra-historical." No formula, however grand, can be applied over the head of the actual, particular history it claims to explain. It is hard to imagine a sharper repudiation, from Marx's own hand, of the idea of Marxism as a universal recipe.
That is the summit of the book. It would be dishonest not to add that a correspondence is also an uneven and partial thing. Much of it is occasional — feuds with forgotten rivals, the grind of party administration, condolences and cash. The letters are elliptical, written by men who could assume everything between them and therefore spell out little; a reader without the notes will often be lost. And the record contains real tensions as well as triumphs, which the volume, to its credit, does not hide. Engels's last years carry the seed of a genuine problem: his growing confidence that the German workers' party could ride universal suffrage and its own swelling vote toward power gave a handle, after his death, to those who wanted to file Marxism down into patient parliamentary waiting. The Correspondence lets you see the founders whole — their reach and their blind spots — precisely because it was never composed for display.
Now turn the critical lens where a Progress edition asks it to be turned: not on the letters, but on the packaging. The editing is scholarly, but it is scholarship with a line to hold, and the line shows. It shows in the vocabulary of the notes and the index, where opponents are sorted with the flat finality of a verdict — this figure a "renegade," that one "opportunist," a third the bearer of "petty-bourgeois" views — the fixed epithets of a church rather than the distinctions of a historian. It shows, above all, in what such an apparatus is willing to say about omission when the omission is someone else's. One of the edition's own notes describes, with entire accuracy, how the leadership of the German party, printing Engels's last great essay in its paper Vorwärts (Forward), "distorted Engels' arguments and gave them an opportunist turn by omitting important passages on the revolutionary struggle." The note is correct: the 1895 bowdlerisation of Engels's introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France, which cut the fighting passages to leave a tame apostle of the ballot box, is one of the classic falsifications in the movement's history, and the edition is right to brand it. But read that sentence again and ask who is speaking. An apparatus that condemns the doctoring of a text by selective omission is an apparatus whose own entire method — in its selections, its introductions, its silences — was selective omission in the service of the current line. The charge is just. It is also a mirror.
For this is where the reflexive question becomes almost unbearable. Was the state that lovingly reprinted these letters faithful to them? The house that set Engels's warning to Bloch in type — the warning that reducing history to the economic factor produces "a meaningless, abstract, absurd phrase" — was the same house that turned out, by the ton, the textbooks of official dialectical and historical materialism in which history was reduced to exactly that: a base mechanically grinding out a superstructure, iron laws unrolling toward a guaranteed end, the whole of human striving demoted to the froth on an economic tide. Stalin's canonical summary of 1938 taught the doctrine Engels had called absurd, and taught it to millions as the last word of the founders. And the letters' manner — provisional, self-correcting, forever qualifying yesterday's formula in the light of a new fact — was the living rebuke to a Marxism that had become a catechism, a set of answers to be recited rather than a way of asking questions. The Correspondence, in short, is the internal refutation of Soviet Marxism, bound in the same buckram as the thing it refutes. The bureaucracy printed its own indictment and shelved it among the relics.
None of this convicts Marx or Engels; it measures the distance between them and the men who governed in their name, and the Fourth International's reading has always turned on that distance. The degeneration of the Russian Revolution was not written into the founders' doctrine. It grew from causes Marxism itself can explain — the isolation of a workers' state in a backward country once the German revolution failed, the ruin of the working class in the civil war, the encirclement — and it was completed by a bureaucratic caste that usurped the revolution and then rewrote its scriptures to license the theft. Trotsky, in The Revolution Betrayed, named the mechanism; the point for a reader of this book is that the falsification reached into the classics themselves. The living, dialectical, self-questioning Marxism of these letters had to be flattened into a fatalist doctrine precisely because a fatalist doctrine is what a conservative bureaucracy needs — a science that proves the present order is history's verdict and that the custodians of the science are history's appointed managers. The canonised text became the measure of the betrayal, not its cause.
Which is exactly why the book is worth so much more than its place on the shelf of sacred objects. Read against its own shrine, the Correspondence gives Marxism back as what its founders practised: not a passe-partout but a method, not a timetable but an argument that has to be made afresh for every new situation. "We make our history ourselves" is the opposite of the fatalism that was preached in Marx's name. The refusal of a "master key" that is "supra-historical" is the opposite of a doctrine imposed from above on peoples it never troubled to study. The recognition that ideology can be "the wrong kind of consciousness" is a tool that turns, with beautiful precision, on the official ideology that wielded it. Ernest Mandel, among others in this tradition, spent a lifetime recovering this open, investigative Marxism from under the cement of the manuals; these letters are the quarry he worked. Against the Stalinist caricature that froze Marx into a lawgiver, and against the liberal reflex that dismisses the whole enterprise as a machine for producing tyrants, the Correspondence offers the actual article — two enormously learned, quarrelsome, self-revising human beings, thinking in public with each other for fifty years, and never once mistaking their own formulas for the movement of the world. That is the inheritance worth claiming: not the classics under glass, but the workshop with the door left open.