Translations
List of works that have been translated.
Release 1, dated February 8, 2025.
Transcription & Translations courtesy of Levelling Spirit. They are largely machine-translated with light editing. The Archive links provide the material used for the English PDFs.
I wrote the brief texts that go along with some of these.
Bruno Bauer - Philo, Strauss und Renan, und das Urchristenthum (PDF) (Archive)
Eugen Dietzgen - Glosses on Stirner's “The Unique and Its Property” [Glossen zu Stirners Der Einzige und sein Eigentum] (PDF) (Archive)
I found out about this text from a friend, who noticed that it was in Anton Pannekoek’s archive. While it is ostensibly a critique of Stirner, it transforms into a defense of the philosophy of his father, Joseph Dietzgen, an atheistic monism wherein the cosmos is considered as an organism. Another copy exists in Karl Kautsky’s archive as well. The version this translation was made from is the one from Pannekoek. I assume that the link between Eugene Dietzgen, Kautsky and Pannekoek has something to do with a collection of Dietzgen’s essays that was published in 1902 (see the introduction by Pannekoek here). An interesting piece for its historical value.
Pannekoek’s Archive (see Map 193)
Georg von Vollmar - The Isolated Socialist State [Der isolirte sozialistische Staat] (PDF) (Archive)
In a confrontation that occurred on June 1927, Leon Trotsky took great pleasure in pointing out that the theory of Socialism in One Country, advocated by Stalin, had an embarrassing predecessor: that of the 1879 booklet by the German social democrat Georg von Vollmar, one of Bernstein’s predecessors in matters of revisionism, who had joined the ranks of the social patriots at the outbreak of WW1. In the Appendix “Socialism in One Country” from his 1936 book The Revolution Betrayed, we find Trotsky elaborate on his knowledge of these facts:
“In justifying his break with the Marxist tradition of internationalism, Stalin was incautious enough to remark that Marx and Engels were not unacquainted with the law of uneven development of capitalism supposedly discovered by Lenin. In a catalogue of intellectual curiosities, that remark ought really to occupy a foremost place. Unevenness of development permeates the whole history of mankind, and especially the history of capitalism. A young Russian historian and economist, Solntez, a man of exceptional gifts and moral qualities tortured to death in the prisons of the Soviet bureaucracy for membership in the Left Opposition, offered in 1926 a superlative theoretical study of the law of uneven development in Marx. It could not, of course, be printed in the Soviet Union. Also under the ban, although for reasons of an opposite nature, is the work of the long dead and forgotten German Social-Democrat, Vollmar, who as early as 1878 developed the perspective of an “isolated socialist state” – not for Russia, but for Germany – containing references to this “law” of uneven development which is supposed to have been unknown until Lenin. […] In this work [Vollmar’s The Isolated Socialist State], written when Lenin was eight years old, the law of uneven development receives a far more correct interpretation that that to be found among the Soviet epigones, beginning with the autumn of 1924. We must remark, incidentally, that in this part of his investigation Vollmar, a very second-rate theoretician, is only paraphrasing the thoughts of Engels – to whom, we are told, the law of unevenness of capitalist development remained ‘unknown.’”
Curiously, Trotsky’s interlocutor back in June 1927, Sergo Ordzhonikidze, plainly acknowledged that, “We read it.” Thanks to Yury Sorochkin’s research, we know that a Russian translation of it even circulated amongst that inner circle. “It emerged, in the course of the research for this study, that this was not the case. Not only was Stalin aware of Vollmar’s text’s existence, but he was also familiar with the abridged translation, made for him and at least one more member of Politburo personally in late November — early December 1926. This translation, with Stalin’s remarks, was found in his archive. While in December 1926 the concept of ‘socialism in one country,’ extrapolated from just one paragraph in Lenin’s 1915 article, was already developed and de facto adopted by the party leadership, the analysis of Stalin’s remarks on his copy of the translation suggests that Vollmar's text had a fundamental impact on Soviet policies of the late 1920s and 1930s, a detail previously never factored in.”
As Sorochkin points out, Stalin had formulated his theory of Socialism in One Country before he had read Vollmar. In fact, Stalin used Vollmar to validate his interpretation of Lenin’s 1915 text “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe”, which he had used to argue for Socialism in One Country. Lenin’s most relevant statement from that text being, “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence, the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone. After expropriating the capitalists and organising their own socialist production, the victorious proletariat of that country will arise against the rest of the world—the capitalist world—attracting to its cause the oppressed classes of other countries, stirring uprisings in those countries against the capitalists, and in case of need using even armed force against the exploiting classes and their states.”
Vollmar’s more direct influence can be found in the reframing of the Comintern rationale in 1928. We can even suggest that Karl Radek, in his own attempts at justifying the new course of Soviet Russia’s foreign policy, had a role to play in this appropriation of Vollmar. His latest biographer mentions in passing that, “He [Radek] had unearthed Georg von Vollmar's essay ‘On State Socialism’ [Uber Staatssozialismus], in which the latter had declared the full realization of socialist objectives possible in a closed nation-state. Radek interpreted this to mean that Soviet Russia could very well achieve a socialist, even communist system, even if it was surrounded by a capitalist world. Even before Stalin, he thus took up the idea of ‘socialism in one country’, without this idea initially materializing in the policy of the Bolsheviks.”
Vollmar’s text being made available was a necessity at this point.
Sources:
Ben Lewis has translated one of the classic formulations of Vollmar's revisionism here: https://marxismtranslated.com/2022/10/georg-von-vollmar-eldorado-and-social-democracys-next-tasks-1891-part-i/
Erik van Ree, The Political Thought of Joseph Stalin, A Study in Twentieth Century Revolutionary Patriotism (2002). p.43-44, p.94 (Trotsky-Ordzhonikidze exchange), p.261
Erik van Ree, Boundaries of Utopia Imagining Communism from Plato to Stalin (2015), p.87-89, p.184
Wolf-Dietrich Gutjahr, »Revolution muss sein« Karl Radek - Die Biographie (2012) p. 510 for the mention of Radek’s “rediscovery” of Vollmar. I can’t say if Lenin’s knowledge of Vollmar’s text that is strongly implied in this scholarly literature has anything to do with Radek, but it would seem to be worth looking into closely.
Yury Sorochkin, From J.G. Fichte's "The Closed Commercial State" to "Socialism in One Country": Intellectual Origins of Stalinism and Stalinist Utopia (2019), p.5 (for the detail on the emergence of an abridged translation of Vollmar for Stalin’s use); p. 74-87, 128-138 for a discussion of Vollmar’s influence.
Heinrich Laufenberg - Between the First and Second Revolution [Zwischen der ersten und zweiten Revolution] (PDF) (Archive)
A text by one of original German National Bolsheviks. Laufenberg’s career as an otherwise respectable center-left orthodox Marxist before WW1 does contain strands of the Fichtean-Lassallean brand of “national socialism” that he would later emphasize, including in the present text. As cited in the The Communist Left in Germany 1918-1921, “‘Lenin called Laufenberg’s text, Between the First and Second Revolutions, an “excellent pamphlet’. This pamphlet did, however, invoke a ‘national group identity’. The author concluded his text as follows: ‘According to this communist conception, all intellectual and manual workers belong to this active nation... Lassalle’s national tactics are enjoying a resurgence and comprise a whole in conjunction with international tactics...’”
Laufenberg’s link with Franz Mehring is of particular interest for anyone looking into this strand of 2nd International Marxism. I feel it is appropriate to quote this passage from Konrad Haenisch’s letter to his (soon to be former) friend Karl Radek:
“[…] my conscious and deeply felt Germanness has never prevented me from being a good internationalist; my internationalism has never prevented me from being a good German. And hasn't Mehring's Marxist socialism (who, as you know, doesn't judge the things of this day quite as I do) always had a strong national note? My internationalism has never been a hazy and watered-down cosmopolitanism, but, as I said, has grown out of a strong national feeling. I have always taken it very seriously when I say that we Social Democrats are the best patriots, and it has never been just a cheap agitprop phrase for me. On a purely personal level, I have always reverently admired Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky and Gorky. Zola, Maupassant and Flaubert I admired - only Lessing and Goethe, Schiller and Freiliggratb have always been part of me.”
We also learn from the Internet Archive’s description an interesting detail, which I will leave for others to investigate: “LC copy has ink stamp on front paste-down and front fly leaf: ‘Haupt-Archiv der NSDAP’, has partially legible ink stamp on front fly leaf: ‘[?] Bildungsschule Berlin’ and book label on p. [4] of cover: "N.S.D.A.P. Parteiarchiv”
Sources:
Lenin, Greetings To Italian, French and German Communists (1919)
Joist Grolle, Hamburg und seine Historiker (1997), in particular p. 82-85. The entire chapter “Die Proletarier und ihre Stadt, Heinrich Laufenberg gibt der Arbeiterbewegung eine Geschichte” is essential.
Wolf-Dietrich Gutjahr, »Revolution muss sein« Karl Radek - Die Biographie (2012), p. 119-120
Robert Sigel, Die Lensch-Cunow-Haenisch-Gruppe, Eine Studie zum rechten Flügel der SPD im Ersten Weltkrieg. p.39-40 (for Konrad Haenisch’s letter to Karl Radek)