Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe

Part of a series on
Marxism
Theoretical works Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 The Condition of the Working Class in England The German Ideology The Communist Manifesto The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte Grundrisse Capital Critique of the Gotha Programme Dialectics of Nature The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State What Is to Be Done? The Accumulation of Capital Philosophical Notebooks Terrorism and Communism The State and Revolution Essays on Marx's Theory of Value History and Class Consciousness Prison Notebooks The Black Jacobins On Practice Theses on the Philosophy of History Dialectic of Enlightenment A Critique of Soviet Economics The Long Revolution Guerrilla Warfare The Wretched of the Earth Reading Capital The Society of the Spectacle Pedagogy of the Oppressed Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses Ways of Seeing How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Social Justice and the City Women, Race and Class Marxism and the Oppression of Women Imagined Communities Hegemony and Socialist Strategy The Sublime Object of Ideology Time, Labor and Social Domination The Age of Extremes The Origin of Capitalism Empire Late Victorian Holocausts Change the World Without Taking Power Caliban and the Witch An Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx's Capital Capitalist Realism Capital in the Anthropocene Towards Socialism or Capitalism? The Revolution Betrayed Literature and Revolution The Struggle Against Fascism in Germany Their Morals and Ours: The class foundations of moral practice
Philosophy Alienation Dialectical materialism Ideology Philosophy of nature Philosophy in the Soviet Union Reification Marxist ethics
Critique of political economy Capital (accumulation) Crisis theory Commodity Concrete and abstract labor Factors of production Falling profit-rate tendency Means of production Mode of production Capitalist Socialist Productive forces Scientific socialism Surplus product Socially necessary labour time Value-form Wage labour
Sociology Base and superstructure Bourgeoisie Class Class consciousness Classless society Commodity fetishism Communist society Critical theory Cultural hegemony Democracy Dictatorship of the proletariat Soviet Radical Democratic centralism Exploitation False consciousness Human nature Immiseration Imperialism Lumpenproletariat Metabolic rift Proletariat Private property Relations of production State theory Working class
History Class struggle Historical determinism Primitive accumulation Proletarian revolution World revolution Theory of historical trajectory
Aspects Aesthetics Archaeology Criminology Cultural analysis Cultural Studies Ethics Film theory Geography Historiography Literary criticism Marxism and religion Sociology Philosophy
Common variants Structural Autonomist Marxism–Leninism Guevarism Maoism Titoism Trotskyism Neo-Gramscianism Regulation school Third-worldist Hegelian Budapest School Frankfurt School Humanist Neue Marx-Lektüre Open Political Praxis School Both Black Classical Communization Feminist Leninism Neo Post Western
Other variants Analytical Austromarxism Centrist Council communism Eurocommunism Instrumental Marxism–Leninism–Maoism Nkrumaism Orthodox Revisionist Situationist Socialism with Chinese characteristics Wertkritik
People Marx Engels Morris Lafargue Rubin Kautsky Plekhanov Du Bois Connolly Lenin Luxemburg Liebknecht Kollontai Bogdanov Stalin Trotsky Grossman Zinoviev Bloch Lukács Korsch Bukharin Ho Serge Gramsci Galiev Pashukanis Bordiga Benjamin Mao Basu Mariátegui Horkheimer Dutt Brecht Marcuse Kalecki Fromm Cox Lefebvre James Adorno Padmore Sartre Deutscher Hoxha Beauvoir Sombart Nkrumah Sweezy Emmanuel Hill Bettelheim Draper Jones Hobsbawm Althusser Hinton Williams Freire Mandel Sivanandan Miliband Cabral Thompson Bauman Fanon Kosik Berger Castro Guevara Liebman Heller Guattari Mészáros O'Connor Wallerstein Mies Tronti Debord Amin Hall Nairn Parenti Negri Jameson Gonzalo Dussel Harvey Laclau Bahro Poulantzas Vattimo Badiou Harnecker Altvater Anderson Löwy Vogel Sison Easthope Rancière Berman Przeworski Cohen Therborn Losurdo Ture Postone Rodney Bannerji Spivak Newton Sakai Wood Federici Wolff Balibar Eagleton Kurz Hartsock Rowbotham Mouffe Geras Brenner Davis Massey Cleaver Bishop Haraway Panitch Clarke Jessop Davis Wright Fraser Burawoy Holloway Rose Screpanti Tamás Hampton Cano Žižek Berardi Sankara Hennessy McDonnell Douzinas Roediger Foster West Ghandy Marcos Heinrich Prashad Kelley Dean Lordon Linera Fisher Li Coulthard Malm Seymour Toscano Bhattacharya Moufawad-Paul Srnicek Horvat Hamza Saito
Journals Antipode Capital & Class Capitalism Nature Socialism Constellations Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory Historical Materialism Mediations Monthly Review New Left Review Race & Class Rethinking Marxism Science & Society Socialist Register
Related topics 21st-century communist theorists Anarchism Creative destruction Conflict theory Criticism of Marxism Communism Communalism Economic determinism History of communism Left-wing politics Marxian economics New Left Old Left Municipalism Political ecology Socialism Authoritarian Democratic Market Reformist Revolutionary Social Utopian Left-wing populism Universal class Vulgar Marxism Economism Worker cooperative Workers' council
Outline Communism portal Philosophy portal Socialism portal
v t e

Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe (MEGA) is the largest collection of the writing of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in any language. It is an ongoing project intended to produce a critical edition of the complete works of Marx and Engels that reproduces the extant writings of both authors in books of high-quality paper and library binding.

Being a scholarly and academic, historical-critical (historisch-kritische) edition, most MEGA volumes consist of separate text and appendix books, the latter giving additional information on the edited text.^[1] All material in MEGA is edited in the original language, resulting in mostly German- but also a considerable quantity of English- as well as French-language texts.

Initiated by the Institutes of Marxism–Leninism of the SED in Berlin and the CPSU in Moscow and published by Dietz Verlag (Berlin) as a series launched in 1975, MEGA contains all works published by Marx and Engels in their lifetimes and numerous previously unpublished manuscripts and letters.^[1]

After the fall of the Berlin Wall, publishing of MEGA was transferred to the Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung (IMES) in Amsterdam.^[2] The volumes are printed and bound by Walter de Gruyter in Berlin.^[3] The project is presently being overseen by Gerald Hubmann.^[4]

Sixty-five volumes of MEGA have been published so far.^[5] All volumes containing writings related to Das Kapital have been published. Most recently a text volume and accompanying apparatus volume containing Marx's ecological writings was published. The entire project is expected to be 114 volumes in total.^[5]

The MEGA of today was not the first attempt to publish a complete collection of the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in their original language.

In the 1920s and 1930s a first MEGA or MEGA¹ began being published by the Marx-Engels Institute in Moscow under the direction of David Riazanov, a Marxist scholar and revolutionary. MEGA¹ was originally intended to comprise 42 volumes, of which 12 volumes were published between 1927 and 1935.^[6][7] After Riazanov who edited the first five volumes of MEGA was removed as director of the Marx-Engels Institute in February 1931, Vladimir Adoratsky took his place as editor and published the next seven volumes.^[8] By the mid 1930s, MEGA¹ was silently discontinued.^[6]

A second attempt undertaken in the 1960s and continued to this day.^[9] The cooperation between German and Soviet editors, new editorial guidelines and innovative concepts led to the publication of a first sample volume in 1972, followed by the first volume of the new, second MEGA (or MEGA²) in 1975.^[6]

MEGA contains material written by Marx between 1835 and his death in 1883, and by Engels between 1838 and his death in 1895. The project is divided into four general sections:

• All philosophical, economic, historical and political works, publications, articles and speeches of Marx and Engels. Well-known works of Marx and Engels, including The German Ideology (volume I/5), The Class Struggles in France 1848-1850 (volume I/10), The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (volume I/11), Critique of the Gotha Program (volume I/25) and Anti-Dühring (volume I/27) are part of this section. It will comprise 32 volumes.^[10]

• This section contains Marx's major work, Capital: Critique of Political Economy (with all three volumes), and all the economic works and manuscripts related to it, beginning with the Grundrisse from 1857/58 (volume II/1). This section is so far the only completed one, it was finished with volume II/4.3 in 2012 and comprises 15 volumes in 23 books.^[11]

• The complete correspondence of Marx and Engels, both the exchange of letters between each other, as well as from Marx and Engels to third persons, whose letters to both authors are also completely printed in the edition. The section will comprise 35 volumes.^[12]

• The previously largely unpublished excerpts, notes and marginalia of Marx and Engels. The section will comprise 32 volumes.^[13]

Since 1990 MEGA is being published by the Internationale Marx-Engels-Stiftung (IMES) in Amsterdam.

The IMES is an international network of the International Institute of Social History, the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (BBAW), the Karl-Marx-Haus (KMH) of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation in Trier, the Russian State Archive for Social/Political History (RGA) and the Russian Independent Institute for the Study of Social and National Problems (RNI), the latter two in Moscow.^[2] The main task of the IMES is to continue the publication of the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe.

In 2015 the Gemeinsame Wissenschaftskonferenz (federal science conference) of the German federal states and the German national government decided to continue funding the publication of MEGA, albeit in a newly conceptualized form: All the letters in the third section of MEGA from 1866 to 1895 (from volume III/14 onwards) and large parts of the fourth section will only be published digitally in the future.

All further volumes of the first and important volumes of the fourth section will, however, still be published in printed form.^[14]

• Marx/Engels Collected Works (MECW)
• Marx-Engels-Werke (MEW)

• Official website of BBAW for the MEGA project
• Website of the Berliner Verein zur Förderung der MEGA-Edition e.V. (Berlin society for assistance of the MEGA edition) (German)
• Information on MEGA on the website of Marx. Dialectical Studies
• Table of contents of MEGA¹, 13 vols.