No profits, no communism...

May Day! May Day! Without Profits, Communism Is Doomed

By Gary North

Lawrence & Wishart, a profit-seeking leftist publisher of the collected works of Marx and Engels, is threatening legal action against Marxists.org, a website run by a remnant of the last remaining English-speaking Marxists.

Marxists.org posts English-language translations of the works of Marx, Engels, Lenin and other bourgeois members of the Inevitable Wave of the Future. These are free. That’s the problem. Lawrence & Wishart find it hard to compete against “free.”

Half a century ago, when I was writing Marx’s Religion of Revolution, I used at least one of the books published by Lawrence & Wishart. Most of the time, I used Progress Publishers editions. Progress Publishers, International Publishers, and Lawrence & Wishart got their translations from the Soviet Union, which subsidized the publication of books by Marx and Engels. This was a Marxist slave society’s efforts to keep the tiny world of Communist publishing alive in capitalist nations. I mean, how else were a tiny band of English-speaking Communists expected to make a decent living without relying on the Gulag archipelago to help them keep the flame burning in the West?

As a scholar, I had mixed feelings about the collapse of the Soviet Union. It was nice to see Lenin’s legacy goes the way of all flesh. But without the secret police to keep the faith alive in the USSR, the translation subsidies would cease. That was why the Marx-Engels Collected Works isn’t complete. The Communist revolution went belly-up too early. The Communists should at least have had the courtesy to wait to shut down the whole experiment until after the Collected Works were complete. Sure, a hundred million people died — maybe 130 million, depending on the accuracy of Mao’s records — in the experiment, but there weren’t that many volumes left to translate, were there? (Yes, as it turned out: at least 70.) They should have hung on a little longer. They owed it to the academic world.

So, Marxists.org posted some of Lawrence & Wishart’s USSR-funded translations online for free. Free! I mean, what kind of anti-capitalism is that? Anti-capitalism requires profits to persevere. Anyone who thinks that the proletarian revolution will come, despite some minor setbacks since 1991, is in a retirement home. His walker and his catheter are in good working order, but his eyes aren’t what they used to be. So, with the prospects of Communist growing dim, the publishers of Soviet-subsidized translations figured that they would have to make the copyright system work for them.

Lawrence & Wishart has found a way. It is going to license its material to an outfit that will digitize it and sell it to tax-funded university libraries. Why do libraries need to buy this, when it’s already digitized and online? Because it will soon be taken down. Why? Because libraries are supposedly willing to pay for it.

Of course, these expensive translations will not do any good for professors. So we are told by Professor Jonathan Sperber, who teaches history at the taxpayer-funded University of Missouri. That is because real scholars must read German to know what Marx and Engels wrote, at least when they wrote in German. Translations are for the rabble. Amateurs. Non-tenure-track adjunct professors. In short, losers. He said this: serious scholars of Marx and Engels ought to be using the Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe, which is "by far the most scholarly edition and prints all the material in the original language in which it was written." (By the way, it is nowhere near complete. It is projected at 120 volumes.) Marx-Engels-Gesamtausgabe has screened out amateurs. If you cannot read it in German, you cannot know the truth. But of course this truth was supposed to lead to a worldwide revolution. It is hard to organize a worldwide revolution if you have to read German. It kind of limits the market.

Dr. Sperber added that Lawrence & Wishart's decision will make it harder "for people at small colleges without good libraries, or who have no academic affiliation, and would like to study some of the less well-known and less easily accessible parts of Marx and Engels's oeuvre." (http://chronicle.com/article/Readers-of-MarxEngels/146251/) Note: for Dr. Sperber, it's not fashionable to speak of the works of Marx and Engels. We must speak of the oeurve of Marx and Engels.

He commiserates with Lawrence & Wishart. "Publishers in general have a hard enough time these days earning enough on books to keep publishing them. Small left-wing publishing houses find it more difficult than most." They always have.

So, it's hard times in Commieland. The realities of free publishing online, where the People -- or what's left of them -- can get their quota of Holy Writ, are these: a copyright-holding, profit-seeking firm is trying to make a few bucks by selling the Word as Revealed.

Without profits, Communism is doomed.

The cash nexus still rules.

It's not easy being a Commie. And let me tell you, Marx and Engels were Commies.

Link:
http://www.garynorth.com/public/12395.cfm