----- Original Message ----- From: Siddhartha Chatterjee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Saturday, December 23, 2000 2:02 PM Subject: [MLL]Marx & Engels Natural Science Notebooks Synopsis of a paper to be presented at the Indian History Congress, January 2001. (Note: Pradip Baksi is the translator from the Russian of "The Mathematical Manuscripts of Karl Marx", Viswakos Parisad, Calcutta, 1993) For section - IV The Natural Science Notebooks of Marx and Engels : mid 1877 - early 1883 I.H.C. Membership No. - AM-18210 by Somnath Ghosh(AM-18210) and Pradip Baksi Synopsis : The present communication announces the publication in original German and French of the excerpts and notes of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Natural Science, made between the period - mid 1877 to beginning of 1883. The publication has been offered to us by the novel publication project, Marx Engels Gesammt Ausgabe (Marx-Engels Complete Publication) or MEGA, which itself has a very interesting history of development. These notes and excerpts remained unpublished until the end of 1999 and its publication at last, in December, 1999 has provided all concerned, with new source materials for the study of the historical interrelationship of the Natural and Social Sciences, and the socialist movement of the 19th century Europe. The publication, which in the notation of the publishing project MEGA has been designated as IV/31 (where the Roman numeral stands for the 'fourth section' - the section devoted to notes, excerpts and marginalia of Marx and Engels - of the complete publication project and the no. 31 indicates the serial number of this volume in the said section), is a volume of about 1000 pages - of which roughly 600 pages contain the excerpts and notes of Marx and Engels, designated as 'Text' portion, and the rest, of about 440 pages, of the said volume is the editorial 'Apparatus' dealing with chapterwise notes, corrections, editorial supplements etc. The text portion is again divided into two parts. The first part contains the notes and excerpts of Karl Marx on Inorganic and Organic Chemistry and Electricity, while the second portion contains Engels' notes and excerpts on Dynamics, Electricity and Ecology. Engels' made use of these excerpts in his famous Natural Science related work, Dialectics of Nature ( published in MEGA project as MEGA(2), I/26). The communication begins with a brief discussion on the history of the MEGA project itself. The process of publication of the works of Marx and Engels began almost 15 years after the death of Engels as a historico-critical complete publication endeavour. Since then it has experienced many changes and turn arounds, both in its editorial and policy-making body as also in the social system which controlled its progress. To begin with, it was under the aegis of Communist Russia and the Social Democrat Party (SPD) of Germany but the publishing project came to a halt after publishing only a few volumes as the relation between the two controlling authorities soured and this marked the end of the "first MEGA", currently termed as MEGA(1). With the advent of the Nazi regime of Hitler in 1933 the unpublished papers of Marx and Engels were taken out of the archives of the SPD and sent abroad and some years later they were ultimately sold to a Dutch Insurance Company. This company finally handed over those papers to the then newly established International Institute of Social History (IISH) in Amsterdam. In the end of 1960 the Institutes of Marxism and Leninism (IML) of both Moscow and Berlin began the work on the 'second MEGA' project, now known as MEGA(2), and for that they had to turn to the IISH. But IISH with its small staff were neither capable of nor willing to run such a big and ambitious project in collaboration with two partly controlled institutes (IML of Berlin and Moscow). Eventually IISH decided to allow the use of the documents in its possession, without itself taking any direct part in the project, while the two IML decided to make their materials accessible to the scholars of IISH. After 1989 the project MEGA suffered a severe jolt with the fall of the socialist regime in Germany, and MEGA came to a halt again. In the fall of 1990 the International Marx-Engels Foundation (IMES) was established in Amsterdam with the sole objective of completing the MEGA project. Since then MEGA is continuing as a project of publishing a purely academic edition within a truely international framework. This entire history of the progress of MEGA has been delineated as a short outline in the present communication. The chemistry notes and excerpts of Karl Marx published in this volume were contained in 6 notebooks left as a legacy for us by Marx himself. These excerpts were made from variety of sources : some of them were standard text books on chemistry of the contemporary period, such as the books written by Lothar Mayer, or Henry Enfield Roscoe or Carl Schorlemmer; while others were books on other sciences related to chemistry, such as physics and physiology. Right after the chemistry excerpts we find in the first part of the Text, the notes and excerpts on Electricity made by Marx in French and the source of these excerpts is a book in French by Edward Hospitalier, discussing the general applications of Electricity. The sources of Engels notes and excerpts of the same period are the works of : Peter Guthrie Tait and William Thomson (on Physics- in English), Hermann Helmholtz (on Conservation of Force- in German), LeRond d'Alembert (on Dynamics- in French), Gustav Wiedemann (on Galvanism and Electromagnetism- in German) and Carl Fraas (on Ecology - in German). Engels made use of these notes either in part and/or in full in preparing the draft articles titled : 'Tidal Friction', 'Measure of motion', 'Heat', 'Electricity' and 'The part played by Labour in Transition from Ape to Man' for his work 'Dialectics of Nature', as mentioned earlier. The present volume of MEGA (IV/31) not only gives us the outline of a new horizon of Marx's Natural Science Studies, hitherto unknown to us, and the background work for Engels' Dialectics of Nature, but it also offers us many new factual materials for the study of the history of Natural Sciences and Philosophy of the 19th century. 19th century is known to Historians of Chemistry as the period of triumphant march of Organic Chemistry and this development had behind it the Atomistic and Molecular theories, development of Periodic Systems and the theories of Structures of Chemical compounds and of Chemical Combinations. Carl Schorlemmer a friend of Marx and Engels was then a Professor of Chemistry in Manchester and Marx was initiated to the contemporary, standard works on chemistry through him. In these excerpts are documented the history of completion of the development of the so-called classical natural sciences of that time as well as the birth of some new possibilities from the womb of the classical sciences. These excerpts made from sources on Physics, Chemistry, Physiology and Ecology definitely point to the fact that Marx and Engels were engaged in giving shape to their dream of 'a single science, the science of history'- an idea, first put forward by them in their work, German Ideology. _______________________________________________ Marxist-Leninist-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To change your options or unsubscribe go to: http://lists.wwpublish.com/mailman/listinfo/marxist-leninist-list
