Marx & Engels Collected Works Volume 19: v. 19 - Hardcover

Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0853154406 ISBN 13: 9780853154402

Publisher: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd, 1987

Synopsis

‘Indispensable to anyone with a serious interest in Marx, Marxism and the 19th century’ - EJ Hobsbawm

Volume 19 of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels contains further articles, letters and documents written between the end of January 1861 and the beginning of June 1864. The first half of the 1860s saw the continued rise of the bourgeois-democratic and national liberation movements that began in Europe and America after the world economic crisis of 1857. The industrial revolution in economically advanced countries led to a significant increase in the size of the proletariat, who began to pursue an independent struggle. In Germany and Italy, which had yet to complete their bourgeois revolutions, the movement for national unity gained fresh impetus; in Russia peasant unrest continued, and revolutionary ideas spread. In the USA, the Civil War broke out between the North and the South; there was growing opposition to the régime of the Second Empire in France; centrifugal tendencies intensified in the Austrian monarchy; in Mexico, the bourgeois revolution triumphed; in China, the Taiping peasant uprising entered its closing stage.

About the Collection

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were the authors of an integrated body of philosophical, economic and social-political views, the ideology of communism, which in our time has spread more widely and exercised a greater influence on the course of world history than any other.

This collection, spanning the years 1835 to 1895, is the product of an agreement and collaboration of British, American and Soviet scholars, translators and editors in 1969, and remains the most comprehensive collection of writings by Marx and Engels available in the English language.

About this title

About the Author

Born in Trier and exiled to London, Karl Marx (1818–1883) laid the groundwork for modern social science. In The Communist Manifesto (1848), he mapped how class struggle drives history, while in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1852), he detailed how political crises emerge when social structures buckle under economic transition. For over 175 years, his framework of historical materialism has explained how material conditions shape human society. Reimagined in the 21st century, Marx’s theories map onto platform capitalism. Today, massive tech monopolies own the digital means of production—cloud infrastructure and proprietary data—while generative AI automates cognitive labor in a modern echo of industrial mechanization. Across global gig economies and remote workforces, his concept of alienation endures: human intellect, harvested into algorithms, becomes a force that competes with workers and concentrates wealth in the hands of a new techno-bourgeoisie.

Born in Barmen, Friedrich Engels (1820–1895) documented the brutal realities of industrialization in The Condition of the Working Class in England (1845), exposing how structural neglect breeds systemic poverty. Co-authoring The Communist Manifesto (1848) with Karl Marx, Engels established a foundational analysis of class conflict that has shaped socio-economic thought for nearly a century and a half. In the 21st century, his insights sharpen a central claim: platform monopolies control digital infrastructure, while precarious gig workers and algorithmic management echo the factory exploitation he observed in Manchester. Engels’ critique endures, revealing how concentrated capital continually extracts value from labor.

Edition details

• Publisher: Lawrence & Wishart Ltd
• Publication date: 1987
• Language: German
• ISBN 10: 0853154406
• ISBN 13: 9780853154402
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 484