From the Guardian:
It's madness to 'privatise' Marx – thanks to Piketty he's back in vogue
Austerity and the financial crisis mean economics is in the news, so why is a publisher taking Marx and Engels offline?The M&E boys would probably have agreed with the publishers.
The global economic and financial crisis has led to a renewal of interest in Karl Marx. Only a few weeks ago the New York Times ran a forum with leading economists with the theme "Was Marx right?". Thomas Piketty's recent book, Capital in the 21st Century, conducts an implicit dialogue with Marx over how to understand capitalism and confront its contradictions. So it is very sad that at this moment the publisher Lawrence & Wishart is forcing the Marxists Internet Archive (MIA) to take down those parts of Marx's and Friedrich Engels' Collected Works that it had hosted on its website with the authorisation of the publisher. It is particularly unfortunate that it insisted this happen by the eve of May Day, when international working-class solidarity is celebrated worldwide.
The MIA is an extraordinary resource for scholars and activists, giving free access to the writings, not just of Marx and Engels, but of many other socialist thinkers. Lawrence & Wishart portrays itself as a struggling publisher that needs to assert its copyright over the Collected Works in order to avoid "institutional suicide". It has pointed out that "the work that went into producing them involved years of documentary research, collating and organising, the commissioning of hundreds of translations, and academic work on references and context"....MORE
Engels was quite the little capitalist, it's how he supported Marx when Marx's market speculations didn't pan out.
Previously:
Karl Marx Dabbles in the Market (and rationalizes his success)That's not to say I won't miss Marxists.org
Friedrich Engels: Global Macro With an Emphasis on Commodities
Karl Marx on Market Manias
Marx and Engels Meet The Jetsons
On Marx and "The Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall"
Here's the amusingly numbered Ch. 13 of Volume III, Das Kapital via Marxists.org.
I've never gotten much farther than Volume I, the first chapter of which is 'Commodities'.
