Friedrich Engels was een Duitse denker en sociaal hervormer wiens vroege ervaringen met industriële armoede in Engeland hem ertoe aanzetten sociale onrechtvaardigheid te analyseren. Na zijn ontmoeting met Karl Marx werden ze levenslange medewerkers, die samen baanbrekende werken schreven die het socialistisch denken vormden. Engels verdiepte zich in de oorsprong van de staat en het gezin en verwierf een reputatie vanwege zijn vrome atheïsme. Zijn geschriften blijven aanzetten tot reflectie over machtsstructuren en ongelijkheid.
A reprint of the 1934 'enlarged edition', a volume that added newly translated material to the title essay. It includes an introduction by Engels ["Do you want to know that this dictatorship of the proletariat looks like? Then look at the Paris Commune. That was the dictatorship of the proletariat"], Marx's first and second 'Manifesto On The Franco-Prussian War', the correspondence of Marx & Engels on the Commune, and Engels' 'The Program of the Blanquist Fugitives from the Paris Commune'.
The book presents a significant exploration of socialism, distinguishing between its utopian and scientific aspects. Recognized as a classic, it has been preserved and republished in a modern format to ensure its accessibility for current and future readers. The text has been reformatted and retyped for clarity, making it a valuable resource for those interested in the evolution of socialist thought.
Synopsis, Reviews, and Supplementary Material
Das Kapital, Karl Marx's seminal work, is the book that above all others formed the twentieth century. From Kapital sprung the economic and political systems that at one time dominated half the earth and for nearly a century kept the world on the brink of war. Even today, more than one billion Chinese citizens live under a regime that proclaims fealty to Marxist ideology. Yet this important tome has been passed over by many readers frustrated by Marx’s difficult style and his preoccupation with nineteenth-century events of little relevance to today's reader. Here Serge Levitsky presents a revised version of Kapital, abridged to emphasize the political and philosophical core of Marx’s work while trimming away much that is now unimportant. Pointing out Marx’s many erroneous predictions about the development of capitalism, Levitsky's introduction nevertheless argues for Kapital's relevance as a prime example of a philosophy of economic determinism that "subordinates the problems of human freedom and human dignity to the issues of who should own the means of production and how wealth should be distributed." Here then is a fresh and highly readable version of a work whose ideas provided inspiration for communist regimes' ideological war against capitalism, a struggle that helped to shape the world today.
The first volume of a political treatise that changed the world One of the most notorious works of modern times, as well as one of the most influential, Capital is an incisive critique of private property and the social relations it generates. Living in exile in England, where this work was largely written, Marx drew on a wide-ranging knowledge of its society to support his analysis and create fresh insights. Arguing that capitalism would cause an ever-increasing division in wealth and welfare, he predicted its abolition and replacement by a system with common ownership of the means of production. Capital rapidly acquired readership among the leaders of social democratic parties, particularly in Russia in Germany, and ultimately throughout the world, to become a work described by Marx friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels as “the Bible of the working class.” For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
Exploring the foundational ideas of communism, this work delves into the economic and social conditions that give rise to class struggles. It outlines key principles that underpin the communist ideology, emphasizing the importance of collective ownership and the critique of capitalism. The text serves as a precursor to the more comprehensive Communist Manifesto, offering insights into the historical context and philosophical underpinnings of communist thought. It is a significant contribution to political philosophy and the study of ideologies.
In the early-1870s, an ideological debate began to unfold in the German press on the shortage of affordable housing available to workers in major industrial areas. The rapid increase in industrial production necessitating an increase in industrial workers created a housing crisis. From June 1872 to February 1873, Fredrick Engels contributed a series of articles to the publication The Volksstaat (The People's State) titled "The Housing Question." Originally published as a booklet by the Co-Operative Publishing Society of Foreign Workers in the USSR and out of print for many years, INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHERS is proud to make this text available - as workers yet again face almost insurmountable obstacles to finding affordable housing. As Engels wrote in 1872, "What is meant today by housing shortage is the peculiar intensification of the bad housing conditions of the workers as the result of the sudden rush of population to the big towns; a colossal increase in rents, a still further aggravation of overcrowding in the individual houses, and, for some, the impossibility of finding a place to live in at all." Fredrick Engels' essays collected here as "The Housing Question" are just as relevant today, roughly 150 years after first written.
The most influential theory of the origins of women's oppression in the modern era, in a beautiful new edition.
Nearly two years before his powerful Communist Manifesto, Marx (1818—1883) co-wrote The German Ideology in 1845 with friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels expounding a new political worldview, including positions on materialism, labor, production, alienation, the expansion of capitalism, class conflict, revolution, and eventually communism. They chart the course of "true" socialism based on G. W.F. Hegel's dialectic, while criticizing the ideas of Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner and Ludwig Feuerbach. Marx expanded his criticism of the latter in his now famous Theses on Feuerbach, found after Marx's death and published by Engels in 1888. Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy, also found among the posthumous papers of Marx, is a fragment of an introduction to his main works. Combining these three works, this volume is essential for an understanding of Marxism.
