The date on the spine is wrong by nineteen years, and Oizerman says so himself in his first sentence. "The first edition of this monograph appeared in 1962." What Progress issued in English in 1981 is the second Russian edition, and the preface dates that edition with some precision: it thanks Ye. P. Kandel and N. I. Lapin for reading the manuscript, it draws on the Institute of Marxism-Leninism biographies of Marx and Engels published for the anniversaries of 1968 and 1970, it registers the new Soviet edition of Chapter One of The German Ideology, and it records that the author attended the UNESCO conference on Marx in 1968. The most recent Russian scholarship it engages is from the early 1970s. The Progress dates that appear in the footnotes and bibliography — 1975, 1976, 1977 — are the translator's substitutions of English editions for Russian originals, and the book tells you so: the footnote to the Marx biography reads "Progress Publishers, 1977 (this is a translation of the second Russian edition, Moscow, 1973)". Strip those out and the text stops in the early 1970s.
So this is a book conceived under Khrushchev, revised under Brezhnev, and sold to English readers a decade after it was finished. That matters, because 1962 and 1974 are two different weather systems, and both are legible in the prose. The subject — how Marx and Engels became Marx and Engels between 1835 and 1848 — is one of the very few in Soviet philosophy where the thaw actually opened something, because the archive was opening at the same time: the second Russian and German editions of Marx and Engels, the Grundrisse, the new text of The German Ideology, and behind all of it the 1844 Manuscripts, which had been in print since 1932 and had been the property of everybody except the Soviet philosophical establishment for thirty years.
Teodor Ilyich Oizerman (1914–2017) was a real philosopher and this is a real book. He worked at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences, became a full Academician, and was among the best-informed people alive on the formation of Marx's thought. He outlived the state by twenty-six years and used the time to revise in public a good deal of what he had defended in it. What is in front of you is 185,000 words of close reading: the school essays, the letter to his father of November 1837, the doctoral dissertation on Democritus and Epicurus, the Rheinische Zeitung articles, the Kreuznach notebooks, the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, the 1844 Manuscripts, The Holy Family, the Theses on Feuerbach, The German Ideology, the Poverty of Philosophy, the Manifesto. It is organised chronologically and argued from the texts.
A great deal, and the point of this series is lost if that is not said first and said concretely.
Oizerman does the thing that separates a scholar from a compiler: he changes his mind in print and shows his working. There is an article, "Luther as Arbiter Between Strauss and Feuerbach", published pseudonymously in Ruge's Anekdota in 1843, which David Ryazanov attributed to Marx and printed in the first MEGA. Oizerman reviews the attribution, sets out Ryazanov's reasoning fairly — that the style fits, that Feuerbach would not have praised himself so extravagantly, that Feuerbach did not think it worth polemicising with Strauss — and then concedes the case is broken by a letter of Feuerbach's to Ruge. And he adds: "In the first edition of this monograph I also held that the article had been written by Marx." A doctrinal writer does not do that. He also disputes Ryazanov on the continuity of the League of the Just after 1839, and disputes him on the evidence rather than on his standing.
The reading of the 1844 Manuscripts is genuinely good. He treats alienated labour as an economic discovery, not an anthropological mood: "The concept of alienated labour is undoubtedly central to the MSS." He tracks Marx's derivation of private property from estranged labour, quotes the passages on species-being and on the "historical necessity of private property", and insists — correctly, and against a great deal of what was written about these pages in both hemispheres — that the manuscripts already contain the argument that alienation is abolished by a determinate change in property relations rather than by a change of heart. The word "alienation" occurs 217 times in this book. Whatever else the Brezhnev-era Soviet academy did with the young Marx, it did not hide him.
The chapter on the Theses on Feuerbach is careful about what the first thesis actually says, and about the fact that Engels only published them in 1888. The treatment of Engels's 1841 anti-Schelling pamphlets is better than most Western accounts because Oizerman takes Schelling's "positive philosophy" seriously enough to explain what Engels was against. There is an honest running acknowledgement that Marx and Engels held positions in 1843 they abandoned in 1845, and that "On the Jewish Question" is "not quite free of Feuerbach's anthropologism". He is not smoothing the road.
And the engagement with Western scholarship is by name, at length, and from the primary texts, in four languages. Althusser's Pour Marx, Marcuse's 1932 Die Gesellschaft article, Landshut and Mayer's 1932 edition, Hendrik de Man in Der Kampf, Fromm, Hyppolite, Calvez, Hook, Tucker, Rubel, Cornu, Schuffenhauer, Sass, Monke. He quotes Althusser approvingly — "I believe Louis Althusser is right to emphasise the following" — on the point that the Hegel Marx argued with was the Hegel of the Young Hegelian movement, not the Hegel of the library shelf. Two hundred pages later he calls him "clearly wrong" about the 1844 Manuscripts, and the reason he gives is a good one, borrowed from A. I. Malysh: wage-labour and surplus-value "are not merely not analysed in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, but are not even mentioned". You may think Oizerman has misread which side of the coupure Althusser stood on; the passage he quotes is the temptation Althusser sets up in order to demolish it. But he had the book, in French, and he argued with it. That is not nothing, and it was not always available.
The book's polemical spine is the young Marx problem, and it is worth watching closely, because Oizerman handles it with more skill than force and the place where skill gives out is exactly the place where the politics starts.
His position is not the crude one. He does not say the 1844 Manuscripts are a Hegelian embarrassment to be quarantined; he calls them, for all their "immaturity and incompleteness", a work of revolutionary communist humanism. Nor does he say there is no discontinuity. His formula is that both errors are the same error: "the efforts to contrast Marx's early writings and the mature Marxist works, and those to obscure the qualitative distinctions between them ultimately square with each other." One camp turns Marx into an economist who abandoned his humanism; the other turns him into a Hegelian who never had anything else. Both, he argues, are trying to detach the philosophy from the communism. Against Marcuse he plays Marcuse's own later retraction, from Reason and Revolution: Marx's early works "are in every respect only preliminary steps leading to his mature theory, steps whose importance should not be over-rated". It is a fair hit.
And then the argument stops being an argument. "That is why their concentration on the young Marx is a specific form of struggle against Marxism." Note the slide: from some interpretations of the early works are wrong to interest in the early works is an act of war. And note who is called as the witness. Oizerman appends a footnote quoting the West German scholar Dieter Henrich — the printed text has "D. Heinrich" — to the effect that "The return to the young Marx is a requirement of the Marxist opposition which is aimed against Lenin. It is the password of Ernst Bloch and his followers and also of the French Marxists outside the party and many Polish, Hungarian and Yugoslav intellectuals." Oizerman's comment: "It is indicative that the contrasting of Marx's early writings and of mature Marxist works is presented as a struggle against Leninism, a valuable admission which reveals the ideological meaning of the revisionist 'Back to Marx' slogan."
Read that twice. A Soviet Academician has taken a hostile Western critic's political map of Marxist heterodoxy — Bloch, the unaffiliated French, the Poles, the Hungarians, the Yugoslavs — and adopted it as his own, in a footnote, without a word of independent argument. In 1961, when Henrich wrote, and in 1974, when Oizerman reprinted him, those were not abstract categories. Bloch had left the GDR in 1961. The Polish and Hungarian names meant Kołakowski and Lukács, and the Hungarian ones had 1956 behind them. The Yugoslav ones meant the Praxis group, whose journal was suppressed and whose professors were suspended in Belgrade in the years between this book's two editions. Oizerman does not mention any of that; he does not need to. The footnote does the work. It converts a philological disagreement about the periodisation of Marx's development into a register of political tendencies, and the register was not maintained by philosophers.
This is the genre's hard limit, and it is worth naming exactly. Everything in this book that is a claim about the texts is arguable, and much of it is right. Everything in it that is a claim about who is entitled to read the texts a particular way comes from outside philosophy and is not argued at all.
Word-boundary counts, so you can weigh them. Trotsky: zero. Stalin: zero. Zhdanov: zero. Deborin: zero. Lukács: zero. Korsch: zero. "Western Marxism": zero. Dunayevskaya: zero. 1931: zero. The phrase "personality cult": zero.
Some of those are unremarkable — this is a book about the 1840s, and no one expects a chapter on the Left Opposition. Others are not. A study of the making of Marxist philosophy that discusses the reception of the 1844 Manuscripts at length, and names Marcuse, Landshut, de Man, Fromm and Althusser as the interpreters who matter, cannot name Lukács or Korsch, whose History and Class Consciousness and Marxism and Philosophy (both 1923) posed the whole question of Hegel in Marx before the Manuscripts were published, and were condemned by the Comintern for it. That absence is not a scholarly oversight. It is the shape of what could be printed.
And two presences are sharper than any absence.
M. B. Mitin appears in the honour roll of Soviet scholars who advanced the subject in the 1920s and 1930s, alongside Adoratsky, Fedoseyev, Svetlov and Sitkovsky, cited for Issues in Materialist Dialectics, Moscow, 1936; the accompanying footnote also cites Fedoseyev and Svetlov from Pod znamenem marksizma, the journal A. M. Deborin edited until January 1931, when a Party resolution condemned his school as "Menshevising idealism" and the young philosophers who had denounced it — Mitin among them — inherited the institutions. Deborin does not appear in this book at all. Mitin's 1936 volume is offered as ordinary scholarship, and 1936 is offered as an ordinary year.
David Ryazanov appears seven times, as the authority he was: founder of the Marx-Engels Institute, editor of the first MEGA, the man who put the 1844 Manuscripts into print in 1932 — that is, the man without whom this book's central subject would not exist as a subject. Oizerman disagrees with him twice, courteously, on evidence. He does not mention that Ryazanov was removed from the Institute and expelled from the Academy in 1931, exiled, and shot in 1938. Nobody expects a Soviet monograph of 1974 to say so. But the reader of a republished text is entitled to know that the scholarly apparatus of this book rests on an edition whose editor was killed, in a chapter that argues at length about who is trying to detach philosophy from politics.
The one moment when the present intrudes is the introduction's claim that the progress of the Soviet Union "in building a new exploitation-free and oppression-free society is, indeed, a fact that no anti-communist propaganda can detract from", and a Brezhnev quotation near the close, from Following Lenin's Course, warning of philosophical systems that "did not pass the test of time, fell to dust and perished ignominiously upon coming into contact with life". These are seams, not arguments. They are also, in a book about the 1840s, the only places where the twentieth century is allowed in.
There is no contemporaneous reply to cite, and the honest thing is to say so. A search across the English Biulleten' Oppozitsii (1929–41), the ETOL run of Fourth International (1940–56), the collected English Trotsky, Intercontinental Press (1968–86) and International Viewpoint (1982–2003) does not find Oizerman's name once. The anti-Stalinist left tracked the moments when the state broke into science — Zhdanov's appearance at the philosophy conference of June 1947, reported by Raya Dunayevskaya as "Freddie Forrest" in Fourth International in September 1948; the disgrace of Alexandrov the following year, reported by Ernest Germain, who was Mandel; the Lysenko affair, covered at length by R. H. Monroe and Joseph Hansen in 1951 — but it did not review Soviet monographs, and it did not follow Soviet Marx-scholarship as a field. That is a real gap in the tradition and not a point in its favour.
What the tradition did produce is a treatment of exactly this question, arrived at independently, from the other side of the line — and the interesting thing about it is how far it agrees.
George Novack's essay "Alienation", collected in Understanding History, was written in 1959 (he notes that the 1844 Manuscripts "did not appear in their first complete English translation until this year"). Its target is what he calls the "new socialist humanists": the intellectuals who, "impelled by the revelations at the 20th Congress and by the Polish and Hungarian events of 1956", went back to the young Marx looking for the theoretical origin of Stalinism. Novack thinks they have gone the wrong way. He grants the concept its due — "it must be admitted that the theory of alienation is by no means foreign to Marxism" — reconstructs its passage from Hegel through Feuerbach with real care, and then says the young-Marx enthusiasts "have not gone forward to genuine Marxism, as they mistakenly believe; they have landed behind it", back among the "true socialism" of Hess and Grün that the Manifesto had already ridiculed. On the periodisation he is nearly word for word with Oizerman: "The younger Marx, swayed by Feuerbach's humanism, analysed capitalist relations by counterposing what is dehumanised to what is truly human. The later Marx viewed them in terms of class oppositions."
Two men, one in Moscow and one in New York, defending the mature Marx against an anthropological reading of the 1844 Manuscripts, using much the same evidence. The disagreement is entirely elsewhere, and it is in Novack's third paragraph, which Oizerman could not have written in any decade of his working life:
Although the social soil is different, similar sentiments are widespread in the anticapitalist countries dominated by the bureaucratic caste... Despite the official propaganda that they have at least become masters of their own destinies, the people know that the powers of decision in the most vital affairs are exercised, not by them, but by bureaucratic caliphs.
That is the whole distance between the two books. Novack can defend the mature Marx and concede that alienation is a live description of Soviet life, because he holds — following Trotsky's analysis in The Revolution Betrayed (1936), of the bureaucracy as a privileged stratum sitting on a workers' state — that the October revolution produced a society whose own estrangements are a fit subject for materialist analysis. Oizerman cannot concede it, because his introduction has already declared the society exploitation-free. So alienation, in his book, is a category that stops working in 1917. It is available for capitalism, for the history of philosophy, for Hegel, for Feuerbach, for anything at all except the room the author was writing in. And once you cannot apply the category to yourself, "the return to the young Marx" really does become an enemy manoeuvre, because the only people with a live use for it are outside.
For the method rather than the politics, the counterweight is Novack's nine lectures of 1942, revised and published as An Introduction to the Logic of Marxism (5th ed., Pathfinder, 1971), delivered to a party facing federal prosecution during the war. Lecture VII, "The Marxist Revolution in Logic", covers precisely Oizerman's ground — the Young Hegelians, The Holy Family, The German Ideology — and covers it in a few thousand words rather than several hundred pages, but with the same conviction that the sequence can be reconstructed: in these writings, Novack says, "we can trace with unusual clarity and definiteness the successive stages in the evolution of the logic of Marxism." Read the two together and the difference is not in the scholarship. It is that one of them is allowed to ask what happened next.
As a study of Marx and Engels between 1835 and 1848, this is among the more useful books Progress ever exported, and readers who want the documentary detail — the notebooks, the correspondence, the periodisation, the German secondary literature — will find it here in a density that few English-language accounts match. It has no serious rival in this catalogue and it does not deserve to be shelved with the catechisms.
Read it, then, as a scholar's book with a censor's floorplan. The rooms are well built and you may walk through most of them freely. The doors that are locked are all on the same corridor, and they all lead to the same place: the twentieth century, and the question of what the philosophy Oizerman describes so carefully was made to do after it won.
Oizerman's own last sentence about Marx and Engels is that "By the mid-1840s, Marx and Engels already regarded their theory not as a dogma but as a guide to action." He believed that. The institution that commissioned the book had settled the matter the other way, and had shot the man who edited its sources.