New Delhi, Feb. 23: Call it the market’s revenge on Marx or Marx’s revenge on the market.

But if you want to possess the proletariat’s bible, you’ll need to put some capital on the table and then some.

The complete works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels can cost up to Rs 1.5 lakh and come bearing the stamp of the US and Britain, two most potent symbols of capitalism.

No Indian publisher brings them out — not even Leftword, which has CPM general secretary Prakash Karat as its managing director.

Before the collapse of the USSR, the Soviet-owned Progressive Publishers used to sell the collected works in 50 volumes for Rs 3,000, or even less with discounts. The company wound up long ago but some old, worn-out volumes — though usually not the complete set — can still be found at the odd bookshop.

In Calcutta, where the communists are ruling for 30 years, it’s hard finding Capital Volume I, let alone the whole set, of Soviet vintage.

The London-based Lawrence & Wishart offers the Indian buyer a 33 per cent discount on the Marx-Engels complete works but the price still comes to £1,500 or Rs 1.15 lakh. That goes up to Rs 1.5 lakh when you add shipping. If you want one particular volume, it costs £48, that is, Rs 3,689.

The US, the Left’s enemy number one, offers a better deal. International Publishers, New York, sells the entire works for Rs 52,840 — at just over Rs 1,000 a volume on an average — but the price of each volume differs. Volumes 37, 48 and 50 cost $34.95 (Rs 1,384) each.

Ratish Kumar of Cosmo, the English-language publishing division of Current Books, the largest bookstore chain in communist-ruled Kerala, said: “We don’t have any stocks of the series, and because of the price only libraries can afford it.”

The last order had come from the Sree Sankaracharya Sanskrit University in Kalady, near Kochi, two years ago. “It cost them around Rs 1.5 lakh,” Kumar said.

Russia was the theme country at this year’s Delhi international book fair but not a single stall had the complete works of Marx and Engels.

“The price is the reason for the fall in demand,” said Ram Briksha of People's Publishing House, a bookstore on the JNU campus.

PPH still has old stocks of some 24 volumes of the Progressive Publishers edition and sells them at Rs 100 per volume with a “discount up to 10 per cent” on offer.

Industry sources say Indian publishers don’t bring out editions of the collected works as they believe they will not find enough buyers.

Leftword manager Sudhava Deshpande said his company had no plans to bring out the complete writings and preferred to publish books that explained the duo’s views on current issues.

As an example, Deshpande cited On the National and Colonial Questions by Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, edited by Aijaz Ahmad (Rs 325).

“With the fall of the Soviet Union, we don’t have the cheap editions of the Marx-Engels collected works. What we are doing is bringing to people what Marx and Engels thought on various issues such as nationalism, internationalism, etc,” Deshpande said.

It’s the market that rules, Marx would have been sad to learn. But then he might be pleased that the market puts a high price not just on his head but on his works, too.