Only one book by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels can be found in the office of Professor Harald Bluhm. A contradiction? After all, since 2008 he has been working on the “Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe”, an extensive editing project that will culminate in more than 110 volumes. “A large portion of the MEGA can be digitally accessed on the Internet, other volumes are available in my office in Berlin,” explains the professor of political theory and history of ideas at the University of Halle. He is on the road a lot these days as the MEGA’s project manager and as a researcher who himself studied the class concept of Marx as part of his doctorate. “Marx still influences the thinking of many people today,” says Bluhm. Since the financial crises in the 2000s, his theories and works have again received a lot of attention.

“Anyone who wants to seriously understand Marx needs to consult the MEGA. It is the world’s first, unique, international and ideology-free edition project on Marx and Engels. It is the gold standard of Marx research,” Bluhm is convinced. The core principles of the edition include absolute completeness, original language, a strictly chronological arrangement of the texts, a text structure that faithfully reproduces the original while retaining orthography and punctuation, as well as an exhaustive account of the text genesis of the manuscript and print versions. There are also comprehensive explanations of the text indexing.

The major project is divided into four sections: “The first section contains all the works, writings, articles and speeches by Marx and Engels, including the surviving preliminary drafts, later revisions and translations,” explains Bluhm. It does not include “Das Kapital” – the most famous book of Marx and Engels –, its extensive manuscripts or its various editions which are dealt with in the second section. All of the correspondence to and from Marx and Engels is summarised in the third section. The complete body of excerpts and notebooks will be processed in the fourth and final section of the MEGA. Teams of scientists in Germany, Russia, France, the Netherlands, the USA and Japan are working together on indexing and completing the MEGA, which is set for 2032. The work is very laborious, as Harald Bluhm can attest to: “Marx’s handwriting is difficult to decipher. There are even wine stains on some pages of the manuscript.” But it’s worth the effort: Over 62 volumes have been published so far, which are used by researchers from all over the world. The MEGA also forms the basis of almost all international editions of Marx.

Their meticulous and systematic way of working enables the MEGA staff to clear up some of the fiction surrounding Marx. “Marx must not be considered as an author who pursued a strict programme from the outset. As a social scientist, he studied mountains of data, material, and theories that have repeatedly forced him to change his positions.” Even “Das Kapital” is not a uniform work: “Marx altered his draft five times: First everything was focused on England, later on the USA. He even relativizes the falling profit rate, initially a key principle of his theory.” Of the three volumes that make up the work today, Marx only completed the first. The other two were finalised and published by Engels after Marx’s death. “The two volumes are based on manuscripts that Marx wrote before the first volume.” The section in the MEGA on “Das Kapital” comprises 15 volumes with more than 20,000 pages, documenting each intermediate step and each modification.

These countless manuscripts and revisions lead Bluhm to conclude that Marx failed in his self-imposed task of creating a holistic and critical representation of the capitalist mode of production - the real goal of “Das Kapital”. But they also show something else. “Marx was an empirical scientist through and through, who constantly checked himself and also revised himself in the face of the many developments of the bourgeois world.” The first modern sociology of knowledge emerged with Marx, which demands that the interests in knowledge be reflected and uncovered by the researchers.

In the current ‘Year of Marx’ there is a flood of publications and activities in honour of the great intellectual. Some of them are based on the work and findings of the MEGA. Others can only be described as peculiar: For example, the city of Trier, where Marx was born, sells ‘0 euro bills’ with a portrait of Marx on them for three euros. Capitalism in its purest form. “Marx, who had been expecting communism since the mid-19th century, had no idea of the developments of the 20th century and of our capitalist system today,” says Bluhm. Nevertheless, Marx had many basic insights, for example on crises, conflicts and capitalism, which have remained valid to this day. And it is worth taking a look at the original in order to understand them accurately.