‘Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach Chapter”’, ‘A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts’ reviewed by Chris Arthur

Reviewed by Chris Arthur

About the reviewer

Chris Arthur taught for many years at the University of Sussex. He is the author of Dialectics of …

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In 1985 it became possible for the first time in the United Kingdom to sit an A-level examination in philosophy, based on classic texts. Marx was one of the philosophers chosen: but where exactly did Marx put forward his philosophical views? The text chosen for study, as the appropriate source, was the first chapter of the book known to us as The German Ideology by Marx and Engels. This fact provides striking confirmation of the starting point of the volumes here reviewed: how did it come about that an untitled set of incoherent fragments, written in the 1840s and abandoned by their authors, achieve canonical status as the best place to find their new world outlook?

The English version set for study by the Examination Boards concerned was my own ‘student edition’ of 1970, which is still selling well 45 years later, despite its deficiencies (Arthur 1970, of which more below). The exam boards did not specify any commentaries. This deficiency was made good by the Royal Institute of Philosophy for which I gave the lecture on the Marx and Engels text. (Arthur 1986, 147)

The books by Carver and Blank here reviewed are companion volumes. However, each is freestanding and worthy of study in its own right without the other.

I turn first to the one giving a translation and textual analysis of the so-called ‘I. Feuerbach’ chapter: Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach Chapter”. The copy-text used for the translation is the German of 2004, edited by I. Taubert and H. Pegler, which is a ‘pre-publication’ of matter intended for the Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe, Volume I/5.

I begin with a warning. Given the title, those looking for an edition of ‘I. Feuerbach’, usable for study, will be disappointed, because its opening sections (equivalent to Marx-Engels Collected Works volume 5, 27-37 inclusive) are missing. Moreover the reader is nowhere warned of this, still less is the omission justified. What is translated here is a new version (in fact two versions – see below) of what is usually termed the ‘main manuscript’, paginated by Marx from 1 to 72 (almost equivalent to Marx-Engels Collected Works volume 5, 38-92). The reason the authors restrict themselves to this manuscript (in fact it is a collection of fragments excised from earlier manuscripts, numbered by Marx purely for convenience it seems) is that its ‘rough’ state means we can see it as work in progress, with all its deletions, corrections, and marginalia. By contrast the manuscripts (written months later) that comprise the putative beginning of the ‘chapter’ are fair copy. This means Carver and Blank see what can be unpacked from the ‘rough’, about the developing thinking of the authors. They say that in giving us the main manuscript as close as possible to the surviving pages (the handwriting marked as by Engels or Marx) they are not aiming at ‘a new edition’. What they do, rather, is to preface the text with a reflective discussion of various key passages, in order to illustrate what can be gained from the original writings. Carver and Blank are right to say that Marx and Engels were not so certain as they go along with respect to what exactly they need to say to set the ‘critical critics’ to rights. In this sense Marx and Engels’ own verdict that the manuscripts constitute an exercise in ‘self clarification’ is correct.

I did not find anything of great moment in the commentary. But the presentation of the text itself is fascinating; to the left is given a rendering of the raw material and to the right a smooth text ‘of the last hand’ for each author. As for their interpretation of the manuscripts, Carver and Blank show their hand by arguing that Marx had now broken with the term ‘alienation’. Thus those readings of the ‘early Marx’ that ‘rephilosophized’ him are in trouble because here we find him resolutely taking ‘the opposite anti-philosophical tack’. (27)

I turn now to the companion volume: A Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts. This is characterised by extraordinarily thorough scholarship, and tells a very interesting story. Some twenty editions are treated, together with their editorial matter, introductions, and so forth. The main finding is that there never was a book called ‘The German Ideology’ and that the manuscript ‘I. Feuerbach’ is way short of being its first chapter. What has come down to us is a literary collage, which has been constructed by various editors in various ways. Not only do the authors trace the variant versions but also what they call the ‘political history’ informing the editorial decisions concerned.

This is all great interest but it is far too detailed to be summarised in a review. However, Carver and Blank discover two main lines of editorial intervention: those concerned to produce a ‘study edition’ for a broad readership (justified explicitly by large claims about the substance of the supposed book and especially of its first chapter), and those aiming to produce an allegedly ‘historical-critical edition’ for the purpose of scholarship. (The distinction is explained on 174-5.) In both cases, however, there was a misplaced concern to produce a smooth text ‘of last hand’. ‘Popular’ editions characterised the earlier publications, although readers were blandly assured that the authors’ ‘intentions’ were followed. However, Carver and Blank argue that even the latest ‘critical’ edition has failed to adhere to the highest standards in that it fails to reproduce the manuscripts in the order in which they were actually written; they provide a plan of a ‘contextualised edition’ of the manuscripts which adheres to the chronological order.

It is worth underlining that the Feuerbach critique was never intended to be a ‘first chapter’ when Marx and Engels wrote the critiques of Bauer, Stirner, and the true socialists. It was only after these critiques were completed and sent for printing, that the necessity to take on Feuerbach, also, occurred to Marx and Engels. But the so-called chapter ‘I. Feuerbach’ was in fact never written, and, therefore, does not exist; what we have is only a collection of incoherent fragments written at different times. (81) The title of the published so-called chapter was culled from a pencilled note by Engels at the end of the main manuscript, probably written after Marx’s death. (122)

The most striking finding of modern scholarship reported here is the discovery by Galina Golowina (reported in 1980) that the various sections of ‘The German Ideology’ were not originally intended to be ‘chapters’ of such a book, but were independent journal articles. (94-7) According to Golowina, in 1845 Marx was planning a quarterly journal, over 20 sheets in size, for which he thought he had obtained backers, and for which he commissioned articles, including from he himself together with Engels, of course. This would certainly explain the fact that all the German Ideology sections take the form of critical review articles. Only after the quarterly project fell through did Marx and Engels decide to publish their own manuscripts separately. But they quickly lost interest in this in favour of other projects, such as Marx’s book against Proudhon. If this is true, it seems they never intended to write a book called The German Ideology, when they set about their various critiques.

I turn now to Carver and Blank’s criticism of my own 1970 edition of The German Ideology (mentioned above). They correctly situate its Introduction as in tune with the 1960s interest in ‘praxis philosophy’. As for the text, it was explicitly advertised as a ‘student edition’, and I attempted what they call a ‘logical’ rearrangement of the anti- Feuerbach chapter, a project which they oppose in principle. They criticise me for ignoring the 1966 G. Bagaturiya edition. Unfortunately, I was unaware of this until it appeared in English in 1969, in a new edition of the Marx–Engels Selected Works, by which time my work had already gone to press.

Regardless of its inadequacies I defend the principle of my own edition. Carver and Blank constantly assert (e.g. 4, 6) that they see no necessary contradiction between a historical-critical edition of the 1845-6 manuscripts and a book for a broad audience. I find this baffling. The substance of the projected ‘book’, The German Ideology, would have been hard-going even for contemporary readers well versed in the views of Stirner and company. Today, large parts of it are virtually unintelligible to those outside the academy. The most useful part of it is of course the Feuerbach chapter, but that itself is incoherent, and the order of the manuscripts does not follow any intrinsic logic. Thus there is a very strong case for a study edition of the ‘I. Feuerbach’ chapter. Moreover, since it is certain Marx and Engels would have radically re-ordered and rewritten it, there is nothing wrong in principle about an edition attempting to bring order to these fragmentary musings left ‘to the mice’ by their authors. (But I have come to doubt if any real improvement in readability can be achieved by such an exercise.)

However, the most striking issue that arises is that of why such unpromising, unpublished, jottings should be thought worthy of attention in the first place. Yet I felt impelled to put this material in the hands of my own students, and, as noted above, the A-level boards agreed with me about its value.

The answer to this is that there is nothing like it anywhere else. Despite the fact that Marx’s thought is here still in the process of development, page after page contain astonishing insights. Some statements have achieved almost scriptural status, for example ‘the ideas of the ruling class are the ruling ideas of the epoch’. Of course, care has to be taken not to read into it phrases (e.g. ‘materialist conception of history’) that are simply not there, but as a resource for studying ‘the germ of a new world outlook’ (as it has been dubbed) it stands alone.

More generally, students quickly become aware that Marx never published a book on ‘historical materialism’; nor one on ‘dialectic’; nor even one on the ‘method’ of the critique of political economy. What he did publish were substantive studies. An argument could be made that knowledge of Marx’s ‘philosophy’ and ‘method’ should always be elucidated in its specific embodiment in such works as Capital. But that would take us too far from our task here.

Carver and Blank’s key claim for their ‘political history’ is that the ‘long and complex history of editions of The German Ideology, variously founded on quite different principles, has gone unnoticed and therefore not studied until this volume’. (2) This is true, and the authors are to be congratulated on their achievement.

22 May 2015

References

  • Arthur C. J. 1970 Editor and Introduction The German Ideology by Marx and Engels (London: Lawrence & Wishart).
  • Arthur C. J. 1986 Marx and Engels: The German Ideology Philosophers Ancient and Modern ed. G. Vesey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press and Royal Institute of Philosophy).

11 comments

  1. Chris rightly asserts that Marx never wrote a book on ‘dialectics’; however he did add a summary of ‘the dialectic method’ to the Postface to the second edition of ‘Das Kapital’ (albeit written by a reviewer), the *only summary he published and endorsed in his entire life*. Now, that summary contains not one atom of Hegel (upside down or the ‘right way up’), and yet Marx still calls it ‘the dialectic method’. From that we may conclude that by the time he came to write ‘Das Kapital’ he had abandoned Hegel root and branch (except for a few Hegelian terms-of-art with which he merely ‘coquetted’, “here and there” — hardly a ringing endorsement!) This means that Marx’s ‘dialectic method’ more closely resembles that of Aristotle, Kant and the ‘Scottish Historical School’ (of Ferguson, Millar, Robertson, Smith, Hume and Steuart) — which is the ‘rational core’.

    I have set this argument out in detail at my site (where I have responded to several obvious and a few less obvious replies): Essay Nine Part One (I can’t post any links!)

    High time we copied Marx and ditched this failed theory.

  2. Chris notes that the text Blank and Carver claim to provide in ‘Marx and Engels’s “German Ideology” Manuscripts: Presentation and Analysis of the “Feuerbach Chapter”‘ is ‘a new version […] of what is usually termed the ‘main manuscript’, paginated by Marx from 1 to 72 (almost equivalent to Marx-Engels Collected Works volume 5, 38-92).’ Although this was undoubtedly their intention, what we are presented with in this volume fails even to amount to this much, as a result of two glaring omissions.

    Firstly, pp. 176-177 gives the first half of ‘Second page on printer’s sheet ‘20’ (in Engels’s sequence), numbered 30 by Marx’ (as per the running header), but the second half, which should follow on pp. 178-179, is omitted altogether, and instead we find there ‘Third page on printer’s sheet ‘20’ (in Engels’s sequence), numbered 31 by Marx’. Consequently thirteen lines of text (as given in Marx-Engels Collected Works) are missing (from ‘therefore think’, MECW 5:59, line 28 to ‘the division of mental and material’ MECW 5:60, line 1). This is entirely Blank and Carver’s responsibility, as the missing text is present in their source, the Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2003 edition (from p. 40, line 28 to p. 41, line 13).

    Secondly, pp. 354-357 should contain the ‘Third page on printer’s sheet ‘90’ (in Engels’s sequence), numbered 66 by Marx’ (as per the running header), but in fact just repeat the substance given on the preceding four pages, i.e. ‘Second page on printer’s sheet ‘90’ (in Engels’s sequence), numbered 65 by Marx’ (pp. 350-353). In MECW, the missing text comes to thirty-two lines, from p. 87, line 10 to p. 88, line 3. Again, this is entirely Blank and Carver’s responsibility, as the missing text is present in their source, the Marx-Engels-Jahrbuch 2003 edition (from p. 89, line 17 to p. 90, line 36).

    So notwithstanding their snide and snarky comments about the supposed failings of all previous editors of these manuscripts, Blank and Carver have ended up providing us with a version which in these crucial respects is inferior to the earlier English editions! And this on top of the omission of the chapter openings and related fragments (equivalent to MECW 5:27-37), as noted by Chris. This is a shame, as there is otherwise much of interest here.

  3. Excellent detective work Meade. There may well be other mistakes. As you say editors of critical editions should check and double check what they publish.

  4. Many thanks to Chris for his appreciative review, and to Meade for the detective work, for which I (speaking for myself and Daniel Blank) am very grateful. Considering the complexity of the project I am frankly surprised that these are the only mistakes discovered to date. Anyone finding other errors is urged to communicate with me direct, or via this excellent website. I shall, with the editor’s permission, be posting additional and corrected pages shortly. Naturally Daniel and I are hoping that a paperback edition of our two-volume study will incorporate necessary amendments.
    The Presentation and Analysis project was in fact turned down by a number of very well known publishers on grounds that the type-setting involved would be overly complex; one letter (from a prestigious university press) explained to me that the project was ‘too scholarly’. We were lucky that Palgrave Macmillan in New York agreed to take it on.
    The verso/recto format was assembled from just under 400 individual Word files so that the facing pages could be carefully (and, I had hoped, accurately) put together in Bogen/Seite order. The Word files shrank in length when projected into PDF/proofs, and I elected not to get started moving chunks of text along from page to page to make better use of space, as would have been done in the more leisurely olden days when publishers and typesetters were more responsive to scholarly authors. Many readers will know that typesetting (into which copy-editing has often been collapsed on a ‘sample’ basis) is now commonly outsourced to a globalized workforce. It was made very clear to me in emails that the managers there valued their contractual delivery-on-time to Palgrave Macmillan more than an obligation to pay me any individual attention – and extra time beyond a single week of their choice per volume– that I could expect or beg for. However, as is said, the responsibility for the errors is mine, since I handled the proof stages exclusively, and within corporate limitations, the workers did their best.
    In the social production of their existence, men inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will …. (Marx, ‘Preface’, 1859)
    As I say, I am hopeful that corrections to the present instances will circulate through the community.
    As explained in the Political History of the Editions of Marx and Engels’s ‘German ideology manuscripts’ (pp. 126-30, see also pp. 146-8) the actual Feuerbach chapter or essay-critique – as Engels stated in 1888 – was ‘not completed’. His remarks suggest that he is looking at the three ‘chapter openings’, possibly the two ‘fragments’, and probably the Vorrede single-page manuscript (unmentioned in the Jahrbuch 2003 ‘edition’, probably because it is physically in Moscow). These are all very short manuscripts, with a good deal of repetition, and in ‘fair copy’ state, i.e. they are not ‘rough draft’ as other retained manuscript pages are. It is unlikely that Engels bothered at that point – when he was actually concerned with Feuerbach and his political legacy – to look at the ‘rough draft’ pages of the so-called ‘main manuscript’ at all.
    The body of the so-called ‘Feuerbach chapter’ is the so-called ‘main manuscript’ (actually not a manuscript ‘of’ anything, but rather – as detailed in our Political History volume – a discontinuous set of three extractions from two unfinished critiques. The purpose of focusing on these pages, as explained (p. 2), is not to collect up materials that bear (or allegedly bear) some relation to Feuerbach (who was in any case something of a political football in the Marx-Engels v. Bauer-Stirner on-going scrap) but rather to capitalize on the evident roughness of the manuscript sheets themselves. In that respect they are unique (to my knowledge) in the Marx-Engels Nachlass, and moreover also unique in that they record the two working together in the same room (which can be attested from the manuscripts themselves and from independent accounts). Hence ‘Feuerbach chapter’ appears in scare quotes in the title to the Presentation volume, since ‘main manuscript’ isn’t such a well known (but equally factitious) moniker.
    At the obvious risk of being ‘too scholarly’, I note that the Presentation volume is a first attempt to interest English-speaking readers in tackling the ‘variants’ recorded in these very rough pages, or in plain language, attending to the precise points where Marx and/or Engels crossed one word or passage out, and substituted another (and sometimes another). With the exception of a German-language (but Japanese-edited) ‘edition’ of ‘The German Ideology’ – which rather similarly puts variants in the text – other variorum ‘editions’ push the curious reader into footnote listings, or – in the case of Jahrbuch 2003 – into a separate telegraphic format in a separate apparatus criticus volume (Apparat). Thus textual comparisons between the Presentation volume and the various ‘editions’, variorum or otherwise, of ‘The German Ideology’ are somewhat pointless (though see below), since the projects are differently conceived.
    From our perspective in the Presentation volume there is no point in (yet again) producing a collage-like ‘chapter’ ‘I. Feuerbach’ as if all the manuscripts to hand to pick through were ‘fair copy’. That practice is not only untrue to the physical state of the manuscripts, but also erases the most interesting aspects of a unique resource, namely the ‘laboratory’ messiness of contemporaneously (by Engels) and subsequently (by Marx) numbered ‘off-cut’ pages which the two fortunately left behind (have a look at the photos in Collected Works, vol. 5, pp. 34-5, 226). There may be more or less plausible uses for the various ‘editions’ of this ‘non-book’ with its ‘non-first-chapter’. But this seems to me an entirely separate matter from the historical facts – and intriguing tales of editorial politicking – recounted by us in our Political History volume, and on those points and that material we welcome scholarly engagement.
    The ‘Reflective Discussion’ section of the ‘Analytical Introduction’ in the Presentation volume presents a substantive argument concerning the development of the ‘conception’ or ‘outlook’ that Marx and Engels were developing at the time, and I would certainly appreciate some engagement – in this forum or elsewhere – with the claims made there. Similarly I would also welcome some engagement with the English translation that has been freshly done for our volume; there are differences from previous English versions of this material, as variously arranged. I got rid of ‘form of intercourse’ (for Verkehrsform), for instance; I hope no one misses it.
    Moreover readers will surely be interested to know that our Presentation volume is the first site ever in which the cut/paste sections of these rough manuscript pages have been restored to their proper points of composition, so that the flow of discussion will make sense (as much as it does) as Marx and Engels worked it out. Assiduous detectives will be aware that the so-called Texte mit Erledingungsvermerkt – presented in the Apparat volume of Jahrbuch 2003, but not in their Text volume – are ‘boxed’ sections marked out on some manuscript pages for (potential) use in the ‘fair copy’ manuscripts. These ‘fair copy’ manuscript pages have been edited since 1932 as II. Sankt Bruno and III. Sankt Max, and are similarly titled in English-language editions. The ‘boxed’ passages have thus always been excluded from ‘editions’ of the ‘Feuerbach chapter’ in ‘The German Ideology’, including the Jahrbuch 2003 presentation of Textzeugen (‘text instances’). Their Text volume is coyly somewhat removed from yet another ‘Feuerbach chapter’ of ‘The German Ideology’ (see our History volume, ch. 8).
    This exclusionary practice, from D.B. Ryazanov in the early 1920s to the Jahrbuch 2003 team, of course makes no sense whatsoever for anyone trying to read the Marx-Engels discussions as they sit on present day pages (in any language). These ‘additions’ – in comparison to present-day texts, but rather restorations in our terms – can be located graphically on the Bogen/Seite diagrams in the Jahrbuch Apparat volume, pp. 178-9. They are indicated there in diagonal cross-hatching per numbered rectangle = numbered page, and they are extensive, running to about 3000 words (and they are distinct from authorial excisions). From the perspective we adopted for the Presentation volume – that is, making use of very rough pages only, precisely for the reason that they are rough – readers will now have more material to look at than they have in other ‘editions’, and moreoever it is presented in a manner that is continuous with the Marx-Engels thought process at the time of composition. Again, it will be most interesting to see here – or elsewhere – some engagement with this new material.
    The ‘jist’ of our two-volume study – Political History and Presentation and Analysis – is rehearsed (with permission) in two articles in History of Political Thought:
    T. Carver, ‘The German Ideology Never Took Place’ 31:1 (Spring 2010), pp. 107-27.
    T. Carver, ‘“Roughing It”: The “German ideology” “main manuscript”’ 36:4 (Winter 2015), pp. 700-25.
    Proof corrections for that journal were by hand on paper in the traditional manner at (reasonable) leisure, and by email exchange with copy-editors, who kindly took time to deal with me over fine points of consistency and accuracy. Nonetheless there may be errors; queries and corrections to me, please.
    Terrell Carver
    t.carver@bristol.ac.uk

  5. In the Presentation and Analysis volume this new p. 177a (verso) should follow the existing p. 177. NB all text below is in the left-hand column of the manuscript; the right-hand column is blank.

    therefore think; hence in so far as they rule as

    a class & define the whole extent of a

    historical epoch, it is self-evident that they do

    this over its whole range, hence among other

    things dominating as intellectuals, as

    producers of ideas, regulating the production

    & distribution of the ideas of their time; hence

    {it is the case} that their ideas are the

    dominating ideas of the epoch. At a given time

    e.g. in a country where royal power,

    aristocracy & the bourgeoisie are struggling

    for dominance over the, hence where

    dominance is divided up, the concep{tion}

    doctrine of the separation of powers appears

    as the dominating idea which is then expressed

    as an “eternal law”. – The division of labour

    which we have already found above (p. ) to

    be one of the chief forces in history up to now

    also expresses itself in the mater{ial}

    dominant class as the division between

    intellectual & material

  6. In the Presentation and Analysis volume this new p. 177b (recto) should follow the new p. 177a and precede the existing p. 178. NB all text below is in the left-hand column of the manuscript; the right-hand column is blank.

    therefore think; hence in so far as they rule as

    a class & define the whole extent of a

    historical epoch, it is self-evident that they do

    this over its whole range, hence among other

    things dominating as intellectuals, as

    producers of ideas, regulating the production

    & distribution of the ideas of their time; hence

    {it is the case} that their ideas are the

    dominating ideas of the epoch. At a given time

    e.g. in a country where royal power,

    aristocracy & the bourgeoisie are struggling

    for dominance, hence where

    dominance is divided up, the

    doctrine of the separation of powers appears

    as the dominating idea which is then expressed

    as an “eternal law”. – The division of labour

    which we have already found above (p. ) to

    be one of the chief forces in history up to now

    also expresses itself in the

    dominant class as the division between

    intellectual & material

  7. The content below should replace the existing content on p. 354 (the running head is correct). NB all content below is in the left-hand column of the manuscript; the right-hand column is blank.

    by stunting it. While in the earlier periods self-

    engagement & the production of material life

    were separated in that they fell to different

    people & the production of material life was

    subordinated
    still regarded for as a mode of

    self-engagement on account of the limitations

    of the individuals themselves, now they

    diverge so that material life & as the self-

    engagement of the in general material life

    appears as the end, {whereas} the production

    of this material life, labour {insertion} (which

    but as we have seen,
    is now the sole possible,

    negative form of self-engagement) {end

    insertion} appears as the means.

    Therefore things have now got to the

    stage that the productive forces developed into

    a totality & coincident with a universal social

    interaction no longer app{priated} can be

    appropriated by individuals individuals must

    appropriate the totality of productive forces to

    hand as well as not only to achieve their self-

    engagement but even to secure their very

    existence. This appropriation is first

    conditioned by the object appropriated – the

    productive forces that have developed into a

  8. The content below should replace the existing content on p. 355 (the running head is correct). NB all content below is in the left-hand column of the manuscript; the right-hand column is blank.

    by stunting it. While in the earlier periods self-

    engagement & the production of material life

    were separated in that they fell to different

    people & the production of material life was

    still regarded as a subordinated mode of

    self-engagement on account of the limitations

    of the individuals themselves, now they

    diverge so that in general material life

    appears as the end, {whereas} the production

    of this material life, labour (which

    is now the sole possible, but as we have seen,

    negative form of self-engagement) appears as

    the means.

    Therefore things have now got to the

    stage that individuals must

    appropriate the totality of productive forces to

    hand not only to achieve their self-

    engagement but even to secure their very

    existence. This appropriation is first

    conditioned by the object appropriated – the

    productive forces that have developed into a

  9. The content below should replace the existing content on p. 356 (the running-head is correct). NB all content is in the left-hand column of the manuscript; the right-hand column is blank.

    totality & exist only within universal social

    interaction. From that aspect alone this

    appropriation must therefore have a universal

    character corresponding to the productive

    forces & to the social interaction. It is further

    conditioned by the individuals who The

    appropriation of these forces is itself nothing

    more than the development of the individual

    capacities corresponding to the material

    instruments of production. The appropriation

    of a totality of the instruments of production

    means is for that reason the development of a

    totality of capacities in the individuals

    themselves. Only the labourers {Proletarier}

    completely
    of the present day, excluded from

    all self-engagement, are in a position to

    establish their self-engagement, complete and

    no longer limited, which consists in the

    appropriation of a totality of productive forces

    & a totality of capacities entailed by this. All

    earlier revolutionary appropriations were

    limited, in that individuals, whose self-

    engagement was limited by constraints in the

    instrument of production & constraints in

    social interaction, appropriated this

    constrained instrument,

  10. The content below should replace the existing content on p. 357 (the running-head is correct). NB all content is in the left-hand column of the manuscript; the right-hand column is blank.

    totality & exist only within universal social

    interaction. From that aspect alone this

    appropriation must therefore have a universal

    character corresponding to the productive

    forces & to the social interaction. The

    appropriation of these forces is itself nothing

    more than the development of the individual

    capacities corresponding to the material

    instruments of production. The appropriation

    of a totality of the instruments of production

    is for that reason the development of a

    totality of capacities in the individuals

    themselves. Only the labourers {Proletarier}

    of the present day, completely excluded from

    all self-engagement, are in a position to

    establish their self-engagement, complete and

    no longer limited, which consists in the

    appropriation of a totality of productive forces

    & a totality of capacities entailed by this. All

    earlier revolutionary appropriations were

    limited, individuals, whose self-

    engagement was limited by constraints in the

    instrument of production & constraints in

    social interaction, appropriated this

    constrained instrument,

  11. Unfortunately the blog-formatting has stripped out some of the strikethroughs and other indications of ‘variants’ in the verso pages above. Readers interested in the original Word files may contact me direct.

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