ABSTRACT
Marx’s ‘Instructions’ were first published in German translation in the Geneva periodical Der Vorbote at the end of 1866. The relation between this and the English text, which appeared in print only in the following year, is a slightly puzzling one. Did Marx himself carry out the translation? Or did he originally write the ‘Instructions’ in German? Without any manuscript of either version it is impossible to give a wholly categorical answer, but we can make some inferences. The question has importance because of the changes found in the German version of the programme for education, where ‘mental education’ appears as geistige Bildung, and ‘technological training’ as polytechnische Erziehung (Wittig, 1964, pp.157-8). The shift from ‘technological’ to polytechnische is not significant, because Marx uses these terms interchangeably, both in the ‘Instructions’ and in Capital. But the use of Bildung and Erziehung here is questionable. The contrast between these expressions does not really correspond to the difference between ‘education’ and ‘training’. The phrase polytechnische Erziehung is in fact equivalent to ‘polytechnical education’, an expression which has since come into common use, partly on the authority of this text. But how true to Marx is such a reading?
