BY SARA LOBMAN
"We just got a call from a Readers Club member in Springfield, Massachusetts," Mary Nell Bockman reported in a recent phone call. "He had just read about Pathfinder's special sale of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels and wanted to arrange to order a set." Bockman, a volunteer at the Pathfinder Bookstore in Boston, is helping to publicize the special offer, which also includes huge discounts on the Collected Works of V.I. Lenin, as well as many smaller selections of the communist leaders' writings (see ad on pages 8-9). Work is under way on a mailing to members of the Pathfinder Readers Club, a flyer to take out on literature tables, and a big window display for the bookstore, she added.

The Pathfinder Bookstore in Atlanta sent in orders for two sets of the Marx and Engels collected works, along with a note from one Readers Club member who commented, "This is the kind of offer I've been waiting for."

So far 33 sets of the collected works have been ordered- 22 of the Marx and Engels and 11 of the Lenin- at the special discount price of $399 for Marx and Engels and $199 for Lenin. The regular prices are $1100 and $500 respectively. Thirteen customers have taken advantage of the layaway plan, which enables Readers Club members to reserve a set of the collected works with a down payment of 25 percent of the price with full payment due by March 31.

The majority of orders are from individuals who participated in setting up Pathfinder's new distribution center in New York over the past several weeks, indicating that there are still many more opportunities for sales around the world. So far, orders have come in from eight U.S. cities, as well as from the United Kingdom and Canada.

45 volumes of revolutionary weapons
The 45-volume collected works of Marx and Engels, or the similarly-sized collection of Lenin's writings, might seem a little intimidating at first. But each of the articles, letters, and speeches that are in these books were prepared by Marx, Engels, and Lenin for people just like many readers of the Militant-workers and young people disgusted by capitalism and ready to dedicate their lives to its overthrow and the construction of a socialist society. Many of the most important lessons of the last 150 years of working-class struggle can be found in their pages.

"On the History of the Communist League," for example, by Engels, is in volume 26 of the Collected Works. It describes the formation of the first organization of the modern communist movement on the eve of the revolutions of 1848. Engels explained how he first came to know and learn from revolutionary workers from across Europe who were living in London, including veterans of a workers uprising in Paris in 1839.

Heinrich Bauer, a shoemaker from Germany; Karl Schapper, a German compositor who had lived in Paris and was then trying to make a living as a language teacher; and Joesph Moll, a watchmaker from Cologne, made a particular impression on the young Engels. "They were the first revolutionary proletarians whom I had seen," he noted, recalling how Schapper and Moll would often "victoriously defend the entrance to a hall against hundreds of onrushing opponents."

Engels goes on to explain how he and Marx, who were just formulating a scientific explanation of the place of the working class in the fight for communism were able to hook up with these fighters, prepare the Communist Manifesto, and enter the battles around the bourgeois revolutions of 1848 as the conscious voice of the working-class vanguard.

An earlier piece in the same volume "Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49)" is about the newspaper that Marx edited for almost a year at the height of the revolution in Germany. It emphasized "in every point the specific proletarian character which it could not yet inscribe once for all on its banner."

"We began on June 1, 1848, with very limited share capital, of which only a little had been paid up and the shareholders themselves were more than unreliable," he reports. In fact, the very first issue, "which mocked at the inanity of the Frankfurt parliament, the pointlessness of its long-winded speeches, the superfluidly of its cowardly resolutions," lost them half their shareholders.

"The tone of the newspaper was by no means solemn," Engels adds. "We had altogether contemptible opponents and treated them, without exception, with the utmost scorn."

Another piece, again just in this one volume, includes Engels' preface to a pamphlet Marx wrote on protectionism and free trade.

Other smaller selections of writings by Marx, Engels, and Lenin are also available at a 50 percent discount. Readers who are not in a position to get the collected works may want to consider the 3-volume Selected Works of Lenin or the Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels. Both contain writings by the revolutionary leaders on a wide range of topics.

Socialist workers and youth around the country can take advantage of the sale to organize classes on some of the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin. Readers interested in participating in such discussions can contact the addresses listed on page 12.  
 
 
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