ABSTRACT
Karl Marx died in 1883. A partial edition of his Mathematical Manuscripts came out in print 85 years after his death, in 1968. During the first years of this intervening period, these manuscripts arrived in Germany, together with the other unpublished manuscripts of Marx and Engels, from England. These manuscripts became the property of the Social Democratic Party of Germany 10 . We know that Engels considered Marx’s mathematical manuscripts to be important. He expressed his desire to publish them, in his preface to the second (1885) edition of Anti-Dühring. This wish remained unfulfilled during his life time. Frederick Engels died in 1895. After his death, it was the Social Democratic Party of Germany that became primarily responsible for publishing the said manuscripts. This party failed to fulfill this responsibility. What is more, one of the important leaders and theoreticians, first of the Social Democratic Party and subsequently of the Communist Party of Germany, Franz Mehring (1846–1919) declared, at the behest of some mathematicians (of whom exactly, we do not know), that Marx’s mathematical manuscripts are of no importance [19, p. 14; all references in this article are to the entries in the Bibliography appended at the end of Part One, pp. 14–19]. Before the Russian revolution of 1917, a Russian revolutionary emigrant David Borisovich Riazanov (Goldendakh) (1870–1938) worked for some time in the archives of the Social Democratic Party, in Berlin. At that time he noticed that a part of Marx’s mathematical manuscripts was not there in the archives. He located them at the residence of an important leader of the Social Democratic Party, Eduard Bernstein (1850–1932). Subsequently Riazanov approached a leader of the Austrian Social Democratic Party Frederick Adler (1879–1960) and, requested him to take the initiative for publishing the mathematical manuscripts of Marx. Riazanov’s attempt too failed to bear any fruit, but in the process ten mathematical note-books of Marx went into the personal custody of Adler.
