"This is a good start," says business manager Sara Lobman. "Many more sets will be sold in the next few weeks as people around the world learn about the sale and, in some cases, pool their resources to take advantage of it. Members of the Young Socialists are among those who decided to get the entire published writings of the these founders and historic leaders of the communist movement."
The works, which represent a fundamental tool for building and consolidating a working-class movement, have been placed on sale at an extraordinary introductory price intended to get them into the libraries of workers and fighters, including many who have been won to the movement out of struggles that have taken place over the last few years.
Until January 31, the Collected Works of Marx and Engels can be purchased for $399, and the Works of Lenin for $199. "We have a layaway plan for the Collected Works so that even if you don't have the full amount right now you can reserve a set of these writings," Lobman said.
Pathfinder Bookstores, branches of the Socialist Workers Party, and chapters of the Young Socialists around the world will be promoting the sale. Socialists in New York, for example, are planning classes on Marx, Engels, and Lenin's writings during the month of January as part of building up interest in the special offer among members of the Pathfinder Readers Club, socialist workers and youth, and others who want to learn more about building the communist movement today. In New York alone, five people have said they plan to place orders for the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, and three for the Lenin writings.
The individual titles now on sale include books and pamphlets that are not easily available. They take up some of the most basic questions that have faced the modern working class since its inception more than 150 years ago. Why is unemployment endemic to capitalism? Is a "fair day's wage for a fair day's work" possible in such a society? Can the unions play a revolutionary role in the fight to overturn the wages system? These are among the questions taken up by Frederick Engels in a series of popular articles written for the working-class press in Britain in 1881. Collected in the pamphlet The Wages System, these articles are available today as part of the special sale.
Was there ever any chance the North would lose the U.S. Civil War? What are the special challenges, and opportunities, facing the working-class movement in the United States? The collection Marx and Engels on the United States, drawn from articles and letters they wrote from the 1840s to the 1890s, looks at the rise of U.S. big business, the formation of a new, multinational working class in North America, and the prospects for a socialist revolution in a "New World" that had never been subjected to the traditions of a medieval past.
Also available as part of the sale is the pamphlet Genesis of Capital, one of the best introductions to Marx's three volume work. Made up of a full chapter of the first volume of Capital, the pamphlet describes the series of events - written in "letters of blood and fire" - in which peasants were driven from the land and stripped of the tools of production in order to convert them into the "rightless" proletarians required by the emerging factories in the cities.
On the Paris Commune, a collection of Marx and Engels's articles and letters on the class battles in Paris in 1871, where the working class held political power for the first time, opening a new stage in the struggle to overturn capitalism, is available at a special reduced price.
The Selected Works of Lenin, also part of the sale, makes available in three volumes some of the most important works of the leader and organizer of the October 1917 revolution in Russia. These include "State and Revolution," "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism," the "April Theses," and "Better Fewer but Better."
Titles in Spanish include many of the above, as well as Engels's Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State, the collection On Colonialism of articles by Marx and Engels, and Marx's Wage-Labor and Capital.
The special offer on all these books is available through Pathfinder bookstores around the world (see list on page 12), to anyone who is a member of the Pathfinder Readers Club. The Collected Works can be ordered through a local Pathfinder Bookstore or directly from Pathfinder.
Not a member of the Readers Club yet? You can join for only $10 a year. Membership not only enables you to take advantage of special offers like this; it also entitles you to a regular 15 percent discount off the price of any other Pathfinder title.