On Historical Materialism

Not a Soviet textbook but a box of primary sources, and that distinction governs everything.

Compiled by T. Borodulina, this gathers under one cover the founding texts of the materialist conception of history: Marx's Theses on Feuerbach and the 1859 Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, long passages from The German Ideology, Engels's late letters on historical materialism, the whole of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific and much of Ludwig Feuerbach - and then, filling the second and larger half of the book, Lenin. The translations come from Progress's own Selected Works of Marx and Engels and the forty-five-volume Collected Works of Lenin.

The material deserves to be taken on its own terms. The 1859 Preface is one of the few pages in the history of social thought that can honestly be called foundational: in a paragraph Marx compresses a whole method, from the claim that social being determines consciousness to the moment when relations of production that once fostered the productive forces turn into their fetters, and an epoch of social revolution begins. The German Ideology supplies the corollary that has never lost its edge, that the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas. And Socialism: Utopian and Scientific does the work of turning a philosophical insight into a research programme.

A reader who came to this book knowing none of it would come away with the real thing, in the authors' own words. What was made in Moscow in 1972 is only the container - the selection, the order, the notes and the index - and no thesis is stated in the front matter.

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, on what the container is doing around the texts it holds.