Until recently there existed no complete edition of the works of Marx and Engels in any language. The Marx-Engels Institute, under its director D. Riazanov, began to produce such an edition in the late 1920s; the collapse of the project in 1935 was no doubt connected with Riazanov’s dismissal and subsequent disappearance. However, eleven indispensable volumes did emerge between 1927 and 1935, under the title Karl Marx-Friedrich Engels:Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, commonly referred to as the MEGA edition. The MEGA contains works of both men down to 1848, and their correspondence, but nothing more. For the next thirty years, the field was held by the almost inaccessible Russian edition, the Marx-Engels Sochineniya (twenty-nine volumes, 1928–46).
Only in 1968 did the East Germans complete the first German definitive edition, the forty-one volume Marx-Engels Werke (MEW). Until then, the works of Marx and Engels existed only in separate editions and smaller collections on specific themes. For this reason, the translations into English have followed the same pattern – the only general selection being the Marx–Engels Selected Works (MESW), now expanded to a three-volume edition. Recently, however, the major gaps in the English translations have begun to be filled. Lawrence and Wishart have produced a complete translation of Theories of Surplus Value, as well as the first adequate translation of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy and Marx’s book on The Cologne Communist Trial. They plan to issue a complete English-language edition of even greater scope than the MEW, though this will inevitably take many years to complete. The Penguin Classics editions, previously published as the Pelican Marx Library, occupies an intermediate position between the MESW and the complete edition. It brings together the most important of Marx’s larger works, the three volumes of Capital and the Grundrisse, as well as three volumes of political writings and a volume of early writings.