A selection is an argument. Anyone who gathers a body of writing under one cover and calls it the essential part is making a claim about what the whole was for — and, by omission, a claim about what can be spared. The three-volume Selected Works of Marx and Engels that Progress issued in Moscow is one of the most widely circulated arguments of the twentieth century, printed in the millions and carried into party libraries on every continent. This first volume is where the argument sets its terms. It does not merely collect the early and middle writings; it stages the birth of a method, and it stages it in a particular way, for a particular end. This introduction is about that staging — not a reading of the works themselves, which stand on their own and are introduced separately, but a reading of the edition: what it puts in, what it leaves out, the order it imposes, and the apparatus it wraps around the whole.
Begin with where the volume begins, because a starting line is the most silent and the most decisive editorial act of all. It opens in 1845, with the Theses on Feuerbach — "the philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it" — and proceeds through the German Ideology, the Manifesto, the writings of 1848 to 1851, the journalism, and closes on the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, the famous few paragraphs in which the "base" of economic life is said to determine the "superstructure" of law, politics and consciousness. Read in sequence, the volume tells a clean story: a young philosopher breaks with philosophy, discovers that material production is the motor of history, and arrives at a finished doctrine. It is a story with a shape, and the shape is a straight line running to a destination.
Now notice what has to be left outside the door for the line to run straight. The volume starts in 1845; the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts were written in 1844. They are not here. The decision to begin the Selected Works one year late is the decision to begin after the manuscripts in which Marx worked out his theory of alienated labour — the argument that under private property the worker is estranged from the product of his hands, from the act of working, from his fellows and from his own nature as a species-being. That is not a minor omission of juvenilia. It is the removal of the most humanist, most ethically charged Marx there is, and it is done by the simple expedient of drawing the volume's opening line just past him. The effect, whether or not every editor intended it, is to make the "break" with the early Marx look like a fact of the record rather than a choice of the editors — to naturalise a beginning that was in truth selected. A generation of Western readers would later argue about an "epistemological break" between the young and the mature Marx; this edition had already legislated one, quietly, with a date.
It is not hard to see why the 1844 Marx was unwelcome in Moscow. A doctrine of alienation is a measuring-stick, and it measures any society in which labour is bought, commanded and estranged — including a society that has abolished the private owner but kept the estrangement, substituting the plan and the foreman for the market and the boss. The Marx who wrote that communism is "the positive supersession of human self-estrangement" hands the reader a standard by which the Soviet worker's daily experience could be judged and found wanting. Far safer to open with the Theses, where the accent falls on activity and on changing the world, and to close on the 1859 Preface, where the accent falls on iron necessity and the lawful succession of economic stages. Between those two poles the volume can present historical materialism as a science of inevitability rather than a theory of human liberation — and inevitability was the more useful of the two to a state that wished its own arrival to seem written into history.
The 1859 Preface, placed as the climax, is the load-bearing wall of that reading. It is a real and powerful text, and Marx meant every word of it; but in the Soviet canon it became something narrower than he intended — the skeleton key of "historical materialism," quoted to license a mechanical determinism in which economics moves and everything else obediently follows. What the apparatus around it never lingers on is the Preface's other, more awkward sentence: that "no social order is ever destroyed before all the productive forces for which it is sufficient have been developed." Marx wrote that as a warning against declaring a system finished before its time. A state that claimed to have leapt from peasant backwardness to socialism in a single generation had every reason to quote the Preface's determinism and to pass over its caution in silence. The determinism was applied to capitalism, whose doom it guaranteed; the caution was suspended for the USSR, whose voluntarist leaps it would have questioned. The same page served as prophecy and was spared as critique.
Around all of this sits the editorial apparatus of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism — the preface, the annotation, the name index — whose steady work is to smooth. It irons the development of two restless, self-correcting minds into a single ascending curve, retrofits later Leninist categories onto earlier texts, and presents the selection as if it were not a selection at all but simply Marx and Engels, entire and self-evident. That is the deepest editorial move in the book: to make the frame invisible, so that the reader mistakes a curated and dated canon for the natural shape of the thing itself.
None of which is a reason to think less of what the volume actually contains, which is extraordinary. The materialist conception of history announced in these pages is one of the genuine intellectual events of the modern age; the Manifesto remains the most consequential pamphlet ever written; the Theses still put the case for a philosophy that acts in eleven sentences no one has bettered. The living current runs right through this book. The point of reading the edition critically is not to devalue the works but to recover the freedom the framing took away — to see that the straight line was drawn, and could have been drawn otherwise.
Which is why this expanded edition restores the text the original selection was built to exclude. Appended at the end, under its own half-title, is the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 — the book that lay one year on the wrong side of the volume's opening line. Put back, it lets the reader do what the canon preferred they not do: read the alienation of 1844 and the historical materialism of 1859 as one continuous labour of the same mind, and decide for themselves where, if anywhere, the break falls. A selection is an argument. The honest answer to an argument is not to burn the book that made it, but to hand back the pages it left out.