Who possesses Marx? Marx was a global citizen. The ideas travel and have travelled. In former times, we might have described this as cosmopolitan, or as pertaining to something called world literature, or to the international workers movement.

In the beginning, these stories were ‘German’, or at least European. Take up a pencil, make up a map of his travels, before you have a go at the itinerary his ideas subsequently took on.

The Germans have a strong claim to Marx, but like everything else, the global franchise today is that of the English language. English rules, and we are often ignorant even of what the Germans are thinking about Marx.

But the Germans are good at industry, and also at the Marx industry. Here, in this book, we find a window or two into the shop.

What is this project? it is almost the map of this world, or of these worlds. Its pages are lifted from the larger project, which comes in at millions of words, initially inspired by Labica’s Dictionnaire critique du marxisme from 1982.

So is it an encyclopedia? As you open its 700 pages in this format you are put in mind of earlier attempts, as in the Diderot and D’Alembert classic from 1745. Not only the girth but the ambition and its diversity. Dictionary? Woerterbuch: wordbook. The first four volumes were published in German twenty five years ago, with some versions in Spanish and Chinese. Another world; in the shadow of The Wall. At this point in time, 2024, we are up to nine German volumes. Oskar Negt referred to it as a Jahrhundertwerk. Message in a bottle, or Dampfboot.

This English volume provides a sample of this crazy, inspirational project. As the editors observe, German was the established language of international Marxism for decades. Not that these voices are only German, but they do commonly have a German dialect as well as dialectic. I can see one Australian, for the record, among its extensive list of contributors: Wal Suchting. The broader point is that the history of Marxism has its own biographical and bibliographical record of struggle. It possesses us; we do not possess it, even if it is open to repossession.

Staff of hundreds here are brought together by key drivers Wolfgang Fritz and Frigga Haug. Wolfgang is best known in English for Critique of Commodity Aesthetics, 1986; Frigga for Female Sexualization, 1987 and Beyond Female Masochism, 1980. Like us, they have spent decades giving free labour to a journal, Das Argument, a project even older than Thesis Eleven. Das Argument is now into its sixties. All this is a monument and memorandum to the labours of the Haugs and all their crew.

Like the French encyclopedists, our staff have a sense of presence, and humour. We go almost A to Z, from Action and Agency to Theses on Feuerbach. They include for example entries on Anticolonialism; Being a Marxist; Class, and Communism, to Cook, this latter inspired by the claim attributed to Lenin that every cook under socialism should govern, now rendered creatively by Frigga Haug as indicating women cooks – men are chefs, or at least they have cornered the market on that claim. Haug and Hauser together published a book called Kitchen and State in 1988. They remind us that there was a famous Frankfurt Kitchen as well as a Frankfurt School (or Berlin School). Utopia here is democratized and feminized at the same time.

We are up to date: cybertarait, Fanonism, Hacker; classical – Hope, and Crisis; tragic – Kronstadt. Landgrab; Limits to Growth; Marxism-Feminism. So much more. As my German father would have said, in English, it’s on for young and old.

The last entry, Theses on Feuerbach, makes no mention of its antipodean reflux, in the project of this journal, Thesis Eleven. That is fitting, given the ambitions of the project. So much work on Marxism is rendered invisible by the language of its writers, minor languages as tagged by Deleuze and Guattari; as for us, we have had a fair share of space, or time. The Germans also take Marxism back from the Bolsheviks, who stole it in 1917. But now even the world famous ‘Slovenian School’ writes with Bolshevik edge in English. Perhaps that is enough.

This is a book of the highest scholarly standards and apparatus. It is cultured and wideranging in the best traditions of classical Marxism – council communism, Labriola and Gramsci, Kautsky and Kollontai, Rosa and Bukharin, Grossman and Hilferding, Brecht and Korsch, and then all that was to follow after Althusser and Poulantzas, and the Haugs themselves. If you should read it in hard copy, you will need a solid armchair. I recommend dipping into this world of words, loitering as you might in the company of Diderot. These were the vocabularies of radicalism, revolution and reform. In their time, these words had wings. And now? in the Jetzzeit?