This edition includes four texts by Friedrich Engels and one text by Karl Marx concerning pre-capitalist social development.

The texts by Engels are published in Greek for the first time, while the text by Marx is available in a new translation. These are texts from the later period of the lives and thoughts of the two founders of communist ideology.

While in their early works of the 1840s they articulated the fundamental principles of the materialist conception of history, here they employ these principles for a more analytical study of the periods of social development that preceded capitalist society.

Engels and Marx's thoughts on these issues were utilized both in opposition to the bourgeois historiography of the time and in deepening the political intervention of labor parties.