Marx-Engels dictionary

The social movements of the 1960s in Western Europe and the United States stimulated a renaissance of serious study of Marx and Engels. Many hoped to develop a deeper understanding of the causes of the movements which brought them to political activism. If the 1960s activism was an awakening, the study of Marx is the act of political maturing.
THE PROBLEM
But, the Marxian classics are not easily understood, as generations of frustrated activists, scholars, and general readers have discovered. Part of the difficulty is terminological and that is the motivation for this dictionary. The causes for terminological difficulties are many. The first is simply time. Many of Marx's and Engels's terms have gone out of general use or have acquired a different meaning in the hundred or more years since they appeared. This problem is encountered in reading any text from another historical period. The second is ideological in the sense of the sociology of knowledge. The Marxian conceptual apparatus represents a point of view that was and continues to be radically different from the prevailing bourgeois mode of thought. It is a terminology designed to represent not the ideas of a ruling class but rather the antithesis of those ideas, that is the historical point of view of the working class. Marx and Engels stated that the ruling ideas of an age are the ideas of the ruling class. It follows that it is difficult for any member of a capitalist society to break out of the bourgeois modes of thought, to see society conceptually as did Marx. The third cause is scientific. Marx and Engels took the best currents of Western economic, political, and philosophic theory to produce a qualitatively new synthesis. The concepts of the new synthesis were just that-new. Hence Engels warned. readers of Capital: "There is, however, one difficulty we could not spare the reader: the use of certain terms in a sense different from what they have, not only in common life, but in ordinary Political Economy. But this was unavoidable. Every new aspect of a science involves a revolution in the technical terms of that science."