Selected Correspondence of Marx and Engels

Over 900 letters selected from the complete correspondence.

From http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/letters/index.htm

Converted to eBook by Andrew Lannan

Letters of Marx and Engels: before 1838

Engels To His Grandfather. December 20 1833

Marx to His Father. August 10-16 1835

Marx to His Father. November 10 1837

Engels - To My Grandfather

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 553

First published: F. Engels, Schriften der Frühzeit, Berlin, 1920;

Transcribed: Andy Blunden;

Barmen, December 20, 1833

O you dear Grandfather, who always treat us so kindly,

Always helping us when our work isn’t going so smoothly,

While you were here, you told me many a beautiful story

Of Cercyon and Theseus, and Argus the hundred-eyed monster,

The Minotaur, Ariadne, and Aegeus drowned in the ocean,

The Golden Fleece, the Argonauts and Jason defiant [247]

Mighty Hercules, Danaus, and Cadmus the hero,

And — I can’t remember all of the things that you told me;

Well, I wish you, Grandfather, a Happy New Year and a gay one,

Long, long years to come, with plenty of joy and no worries,

Everything good in life that can possibly happen to people,

All this is wished for you by your loving, affectionate grandson.

Friedr. Engels

Marx - Reflections of a Young Man

on The Choice of a Profession[1]

Source: MECW Volume 1

Written: between August 10 and 16, 1835

First published: in Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 1925

Translated from the Latin.

Transcribed: by Sally Ryan.

Nature herself has determined the sphere of activity in which the animal should move, and it peacefully moves within that sphere, without attempting to go beyond it, without even an inkling of any other. To man, too, the Deity gave a general aim, that of ennobling mankind and himself, but he left it to man to seek the means by which this aim can be achieved; he left it to him to choose the position in society most suited to him, from which he can best uplift himself and society.

This choice is a great privilege of man over the rest of creation, but at the same time it is an act which can destroy his whole life, frustrate all his plans, and make him unhappy. Serious consideration of this choice, therefore, is certainly the first duty of a young man who is beginning his career and does not want to leave his most important affairs to chance.

Everyone has an aim in view, which to him at least seems great, and actually is so if the deepest conviction, the innermost voice of the heart declares it so, for the Deity never leaves mortal man wholly without a guide; he speaks softly but with certainty.

But this voice can easily be drowned, and what we took for inspiration can be the product of the moment, which another moment can perhaps also destroy. Our imagination, perhaps, is set on fire, our emotions excited, phantoms flit before our eyes, and we plunge headlong into what impetuous instinct suggests, which we imagine the Deity himself has pointed out to us. But what we ardently embrace soon repels us and we see our whole existence in ruins.

We must therefore seriously examine whether we have really been inspired in our choice of a profession, whether an inner voice approves it, or whether this inspiration is a delusion, and what we took to be a call from the Deity was self-deception. But how can we recognise this except by tracing the source of the inspiration itself?

What is great glitters, its glitter arouses ambition, and ambition can easily have produced the inspiration, or what we took for inspiration; but reason can no longer restrain the man who is tempted by the demon of ambition, and he plunges headlong into what impetuous instinct suggests: he no longer chooses his position in life, instead it is determined by chance and illusion.

Nor are we called upon to adopt the position which offers us the most brilliant opportunities; that is not the one which, in the long series of years in which we may perhaps hold it, will never tire us, never dampen our zeal, never let our enthusiasm grow cold, but one in which we shall soon see our wishes unfulfilled, our ideas unsatisfied, and we shall inveigh against the Deity and curse mankind.

But it is not only ambition which can arouse sudden enthusiasm for a particular profession; we may perhaps have embellished it in our imagination, and embellished it so that it appears the highest that life can offer. We have not analysed it, not considered the whole burden, the great responsibility it imposes on us; we have seen it only from a distance, and distance is deceptive.

Our own reason cannot be counsellor here; for it is supported neither by experience nor by profound observation, being deceived by emotion and blinded by fantasy. To whom then should we turn our eyes? Who should support us where our reason forsakes us?

Our parents, who have already travelled life's road and experienced the severity of fate - our heart tells us.

And if then our enthusiasm still persists, if we still continue to love a profession and believe ourselves called to it after we have examined it in cold blood, after we have perceived its burdens and become acquainted with its difficulties, then we ought to adopt it, then neither does our enthusiasm deceive us nor does overhastiness carry us away.

But we cannot always attain the position to which we believe we are called; our relations in society have to some extent already begun to be established before we are in a position to determine them.

Our physical constitution itself is often a threatening obstacle, and let no one scoff at its rights.

It is true that we can rise above it; but then our downfall is all the more rapid, for then we are venturing to build on crumbling ruins, then our whole life is an unhappy struggle between the mental and the bodily principle. But he who is unable to reconcile the warring elements within himself, how can he resist life's tempestuous stress, how can he act calmly? And it is from calm alone that great and fine deeds can arise; it is the only soil in which ripe fruits successfully develop.

Although we cannot work for long and seldom happily with a physical constitution which is not suited to our profession, the thought nevertheless continually arises of sacrificing our well-being to duty, of acting vigorously although we are weak. But if we have chosen a profession for which we do not possess the talent, we can never exercise it worthily, we shall soon realise with shame our own incapacity and tell ourselves that we are useless created beings, members of society who are incapable of fulfilling their vocation. Then the most natural consequence is self-contempt, and what feeling is more painful and less capable of being made up for by all that the outside world has to offer? Self-contempt is a serpent that ever gnaws at one's breast, sucking the life-blood from one's heart and mixing it with the poison of misanthropy and despair.

An illusion about our talents for a profession which we have closely examined is a fault which takes its revenge on us ourselves, and even if it does not meet with the censure of the outside world it gives rise to more terrible pain in our hearts than such censure could inflict.

If we have considered all this, and if the conditions of our life permit us to choose any profession we like, we may adopt the one that assures us the greatest worth, one which is based on ideas of whose truth we are thoroughly convinced, which offers us the widest scope to work for mankind, and for ourselves to approach closer to the general aim for which every profession is but a means - perfection.

Worth is that which most of all uplifts a man, which imparts a higher nobility to his actions and all his endeavours, which makes him invulnerable, admired by the crowd and raised above it.

But worth can be assured only by a profession in which we are not servile tools, but in which we act independently in our own sphere. It can be assured only by a profession that does not demand reprehensible acts, even if reprehensible only in outward appearance, a profession which the best can follow with noble pride. A profession which assures this in the greatest degree is not always the highest, but is always the most to be preferred.

But just as a profession which gives us no assurance of worth degrades us, we shall as surely succumb under the burdens of one which is based on ideas that we later recognise to be false.

There we have no recourse but to self-deception, and what a desperate salvation is that which is obtained by self-betrayal!

Those professions which are not so much involved in life itself as concerned with abstract truths are the most dangerous for the young man whose principles are not yet firm and whose convictions are not yet strong and unshakeable. At the same time these professions may seem to be the most exalted if they have taken deep root in our hearts and if we are capable of sacrificing our lives and all endeavours for the ideas which prevail in them.

They can bestow happiness on the man who has a vocation for them, but they destroy him who adopts them rashly, without reflection, yielding to the impulse of the moment.

On the other hand, the high regard we have for the ideas on which our profession is based gives us a higher standing in society, enhances our own worth, and makes our actions un-challengeable.

One who chooses a profession he values highly will shudder at the idea of being unworthy of it; he will act nobly if only because his position in society is a noble one.

But the chief guide which must direct us in the choice of a profession is the welfare of mankind and our own perfection. It should not be thought that these two interests could be in conflict, that one would have to destroy the other; on the contrary, man's nature is so constituted that he can attain his own perfection only by working for the perfection, for the good, of his fellow men.

If he works only for himself, he may perhaps become a famous man of learning, a great sage, an excellent poet, but he can never be a perfect, truly great man.

History calls those men the greatest who have ennobled themselves by working for the common good; experience acclaims as happiest the man who has made the greatest number of people happy; religion itself teaches us that the ideal being whom all strive to copy sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind, and who would dare to set at nought such judgments?

If we have chosen the position in life in which we can most of all work for mankind, no burdens can bow us down, because they are sacrifices for the benefit of all; then we shall experience no petty, limited, selfish joy, but our happiness will belong to millions, our deeds will live on quietly but perpetually at work, and over our ashes will be shed the hot tears of noble people.

Marx

Letter from Karl to his Father

In Trier (1837)

First published: in Die Neue Zeit No. 1, 1897 [2];

Source: MECW, Volume 1;

Transcribed: in 1998 for MEIA by slr@marx.org

Berlin, November 10

Dear Father,

There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly indicating a new direction.

At such a moment of transition we feel compelled to view the past and the present with the eagle eye of thought in order to become conscious of our real position. Indeed, world history itself likes to look back in this way and take stock, which often gives it the appearance of retrogression or stagnation, whereas it is merely, as it were, sitting back in an armchair in order to understand itself and mentally grasp its own activity, that of the mind.

At such moments, however, a person becomes lyrical, for every metamorphosis is partly a swan song, partly the overture to a great new poem, which endeavours to achieve a stable form in brilliant colours that still merge into one another. Nevertheless, we should like to erect a memorial to what we have once lived through in order that this experience may regain in our emotions the place it has lost in our actions. And where could a more sacred dwelling place be found for it than in the heart of a parent, the most merciful judge, the most intimate sympathiser, the sun of love whose warming fire is felt at the innermost centre of our endeavours! What better amends and forgiveness could there be for much that is objectionable and blameworthy than to be seen as the manifestation of an essentially necessary state of things? How, at least, could the often ill-fated play of chance and intellectual error better escape the reproach of being due to a perverse heart?

When, therefore, now at the end of a year spent here I cast a glance back on the course of events during that time, in order, my dear father, to answer your infinitely dear letter from Ems, allow me to review my affairs in the way I regard life in general, as the expression of an intellectual activity which develops in all directions, in science, art and private matters.

When I left you, a new world had come into existence for me, that of love, which in fact at the beginning was a passionately yearning and hopeless love. Even the journey to Berlin, which otherwise would have delighted me in the highest degree, would have inspired me to contemplate nature and fired my zest for life, left me cold. Indeed, it put me strikingly out of humour, for the rocks which I saw were not more rugged, more indomitable, than the emotions of my soul, the big towns not more lively than my blood, the inn meals not more extravagant, more indigestible, than the store of fantasies I carried with me, and, finally, no work of art was as beautiful as Jenny.

After my arrival in Berlin, I broke off all hitherto existing connections, made visits rarely and unwillingly, and tried to immerse myself in science and art.

In accordance with my state of mind at the time, lyrical poetry was bound to be my first subject, at least the most pleasant and immediate one. But owing to my attitude and whole previous development it was purely idealistic. My heaven, my art, became a world beyond, as remote as my love. Everything real became hazy and what is hazy has no definite outlines. All the poems of the first three volumes I sent to Jenny are marked by attacks on our times, diffuse and inchoate expressions of feeling, nothing natural, everything built out of moonshine, complete opposition between what is and what ought to be, rhetorical reflections instead of poetic thoughts, but perhaps also a certain warmth of feeling and striving for poetic fire. The whole extent of a longing that has no bounds finds expression there in many different forms and makes the poetic "composition" into "diffusion".

Poetry, however, could be and had to be only an accompaniment; I had to study law and above all felt the urge to wrestle with philosophy. The two were so closely linked that, on the one hand, I read through Heineccius, Thibaut and the sources quite uncritically, in a mere schoolboy fashion; thus, for instance, I translated the first two books of the Pandect [3] into German, and, on the other hand, tried to elaborate a philosophy of law covering the whole field of law. I prefaced this with some metaphysical propositions by way of introduction and continued this unhappy opus as far as public law, a work of almost 300 pages. [4]

Here, above all, the same opposition between what is and what ought to be, which is characteristic of idealism, stood out as a serious defect and was the source of the hopelessly incorrect division of the subject-matter. First of all came what I was pleased to call the metaphysics of law, i. e., basic principles, reflections, definitions of concepts, divorced from all actual law and every actual form of law, as occurs in Fichte, only in my case it was more modern and shallower. From the outset an obstacle to grasping the truth here was the unscientific form of mathematical dogmatism, in which the author argues hither and thither, going round and round the subject dealt with, without the latter taking shape as something living and developing in a many-sided way. A triangle gives the mathematician scope for construction and proof, it remains a mere abstract conception in space and does not develop into anything further. It has to be put alongside something else, then it assumes other positions, and this diversity added to it gives it different relationships and truths. On the other hand, in the concrete expression of a living world of ideas, as exemplified by law, the state, nature, and philosophy as a whole, the object itself must be studied in its development; arbitrary divisions must not be introduced, the rational character of the object itself must develop as something imbued with contradictions in itself and find its unity in itself.

Next, as the second part, came the philosophy of law, that is to say, according to my views at the time, an examination of the development of ideas in positive Roman law, as if positive law in its conceptual development (I do not mean in its purely finite provisions) could ever be something different from the formation of the concept of law, which the first part, however, should have dealt with.

Moreover, I had further divided this part into the theory of formal law and the theory of material law, the first being the pure form of the system in its sequence and interconnections, its subdivisions and scope, whereas the second, on the other hand, was intended to describe the content, showing how the form becomes embodied in its content. This was an error I shared with Herr v. Savigny, as I discovered later in his learned work on ownership, the only difference being that he applies the term formal definition of the concept to "finding the place which this or that theory occupies in the (fictitious) Roman system", the material definition being "the theory of positive content which the Romans attributed to a concept defined in this way", [5] whereas I understood by form the necessary architectonics of conceptual formulations, and by matter the necessary quality of these formulations. The mistake lay in my belief that matter and form can and must develop separately from each other, and so I obtained not a real form, but something like a desk with drawers into which I then poured sand.

The concept is indeed the mediating link between form and content. In a philosophical treatment of law, therefore, the one must arise in the other; indeed, the form should only be the continuation of the content. Thus I arrived at a division of the material such as could be devised by its author for at most an easy and shallow classification, but in which the spirit and truth of law disappeared. All law was divided into contractual and non-contractual. In order to make this clearer, I take the liberty to set out the plan up to the division of jus publicum, which is also treated in the formal part.

I

jus privatum

II

jus publicum

I. jus privatum

a) Conditional contractual private law.

b) Unconditional non-contractual private law.

A. Conditional contractual private law

a) Law of persons; b) Law of things; c) Law of persons in relation to property.

a) Law of persons

I. Commercial contracts; II. Warranties; III. Contracts of bailment.

I. Commercial contracts

2. Contracts of legal entities (societas). 3. Contracts of casements (locatio conductio).

3. Locatio conductio

l. Insofar as it relates to operae.

a) locatio conductio proper (excluding Roman letting or leasing);

b) mandatum.

2. Insofar as it relates to usus rei.

a) On land: usus fructus (also not in the purely Roman sense);

b) On houses: habitatio.

II. Warranties

l. Arbitration or conciliation contract; 2. Insurance contract.

III. Contracts of bailment

2. Promissory contract

1. fide jussio; 2. negotiorum gestio.

3. Contract of gift

1. donatio; 2. gratiae promissum

b) Law of things

I. Commercial contracts

2. permutatio stricte sic dicta.

1. permutatio proper; 2. mutuum (usurae), 3. emptio venditio.

II. Warranties

pignus.

III. Contracts of bailment

2. commodatum; 3. depositum.

But why should I go on filling up pages with things I myself have rejected? The whole thing is replete with tripartite divisions, it is written with tedious prolixity, and the Roman concepts are misused in the most barbaric fashion in order to force them into my system. On the other hand, in this way I did gain a general view of the material and a liking for it, at least along certain lines.

At the end of the section on material private law, I saw the falsity of the whole thing, the basic plan of which borders on that of Kant [6], but deviates wholly from it in the execution, and again it became clear to me that there could be no headway without philosophy. So with a good conscience I was able once more to throw myself into her embrace, and I drafted a new system of metaphysical principles, but at the conclusion of it I was once more compelled to recognise that it was wrong, like all my previous efforts.

In the course of this work I adopted the habit of making extracts from all the books I read, for instance from Lessing's Laokoon, Solger's Erwin, Winckelmann's history of art, Luden's German history, and incidentally scribbled down my reflections. At the same time I translated Tacitus' Germania, and Ovid's Tristia, and began to learn English and Italian by myself, i. e., out of grammars, but I have not yet got anywhere with this. I also read Klein's criminal law and his annals, and all the most recent literature, but this last only by the way.

At the end of the term, I again sought the dances of the Muses and the music of the Satyrs. Already in the last exercise book that I sent you idealism pervades forced humour (Scorpion and Felix) and an unsuccessful, fantastic drama (Oulanem), until it finally undergoes a complete transformation and becomes mere formal art, mostly without objects that inspire it and without any impassioned train of thought.

And yet these last poems are the only ones in which suddenly, as if by a magic touch - oh, the touch was at first a shattering blow - I caught sight of the glittering realm of true poetry like a distant fairy palace, and all my creations crumbled into nothing.

Busy with these various occupations, during my first term I spent many a sleepless night, fought many a battle, and endured much internal and external excitement. Yet at the end I emerged not much enriched, and moreover I had neglected nature, art and the world, and shut the door on my friends. The above observations seem to have been made by my body. I was advised by a doctor to go to the country, and so it was that for the first time I traversed the whole length of the city to the gate and went to Stralow. I had no inkling that I would mature there from an anaemic weakling into a man of robust bodily strength.

A curtain had fallen, my holy of holies was rent asunder, and new gods had to be installed.

From the idealism which, by the way, I had compared and nourished with the idealism of Kant and Fichte, I arrived at the point of seeking the idea in reality itself. If previously the gods had dwelt above the earth, now they became its centre.

I had read fragments of Hegel's philosophy, the grotesque craggy melody of which did not appeal to me. Once more I wanted to dive into the sea, but with the definite intention of establishing that the nature of the mind is just as necessary, concrete and firmly based as the nature of the body. My aim was no longer to practise tricks of swordsmanship, but to bring genuine pearls into the light of day.

I wrote a dialogue of about 24 pages: "Cleanthes, or the Starting Point and Necessary Continuation of Philosophy" [7]. Here art and science, which had become completely divorced from each other, were to some extent united, and like a vigorous traveller I set about the task itself, a philosophical-dialectical account of divinity, as it manifests itself as the idea-in-itself, as religion, as nature, and as history. My last proposition was the beginning of the Hegelian system. And this work, for which I had acquainted myself to some extent with natural science, Schelling, and history, which had caused me to rack my brains endlessly, and which is so written (since it was actually intended to be a new logic) that now even I myself can hardly recapture my thinking about it, this work, my dearest child, reared by moonlight, like a false siren delivers me into the arms of the enemy.

For some days my vexation made me quite incapable of thinking; I ran about madly in the garden by the dirty water of the Spree, which "washes souls and dilutes the tea". I even joined my landlord in a hunting excursion, rushed off to Berlin and wanted to embrace every street-corner loafer.

Shortly after that I pursued only positive studies: the study of Savigny's Ownership, Feuerbach's and Grolmann's criminal law, Cramer's de verborum significatione, Wenning-Ingenheim's Pandect system, and Mühlenbruch's Doctrina pandectarum, which I am still working through, and finally a few titles from Lauterbach, on civil procedure and above all canon law, the first part of which, Gratian's Concordia discordantium canonum, I have almost entirely read through in the corpus and made extracts from, as also the supplement, Lancelotti's Institutiones. Then I translated in part Aristotle's Rhetoric, read de augmentis scientiarum of the famous Bacon of Verulam, spent a good deal of time on Reimarus, to whose book on the artistic instincts of animals I applied my mind with delight, and also tackled German law, but chiefly only to the extent of going through the capitularies of the Franconian kings and the letters of the Popes to them.

Owing to being upset over Jenny's illness and my vain, fruitless intellectual labours, and as the result of nagging annoyance at having had to make an idol of a view that I hated, I became ill, as I have already written to you, dear Father. When I got better I burnt all the poems and outlines of stories, etc., imagining that I could give them up completely, of which so far at any rate I have not given any proofs to the contrary.

While I was ill I got to know Hegel from beginning to end, together with most of his disciples. Through a number of meetings with friends in Stralow I came across a Doctors' Club [8], which includes some university lecturers and my most intimate Berlin friend, Dr. Rutenberg. In controversy here, many conflicting views were expressed, and I became ever more firmly bound to the modern world philosophy from which I had thought to escape, but all rich chords were silenced and I was seized with a veritable fury of irony, as could easily happen after so much had been negated. In addition, there was Jenny's silence, and I could not rest until I had acquired modernity and the outlook of contemporary science through a few bad productions such as The Visit [9], etc.

If perhaps I have here neither clearly described the whole of this last term nor gone into all details, and slurred over all the nuances, excuse me, dear Father, because of my desire to speak of the present time.

Herr v. Chamisso sent me a very insignificant note in which he informed me "he regrets that the Almanac cannot use my contributions because it has already been printed a long time ago" [10]. I swallowed this with vexation. The bookseller Wigand has sent my plan to Dr. Schmidt, publisher of Wunder's firm that trades in good cheese and bad literature. I enclose his letter; Dr. Schmidt has not yet replied. However, I am by no means abandoning this plan, especially since all the aesthetic celebrities of the Hegelian school have promised their collaboration through the help of university lecturer Bauer, who plays a big role among them, and of my colleague Dr. Rutenberg.[11]

Now, as regards the question of a career in cameralistics, my dear father, I recently made the acquaintance of an assessor, Schmidthanner, who advised me after the third law examination to transfer to it as a justiciary, which would be the more to my taste, since I really prefer jurisprudence to all administrative science. This gentleman told me that in three years he himself and many others from the Münster high provincial court in Westphalia had succeeded in reaching the position of assessor, which was not difficult, with hard work of course, since the stages there are not rigidly fixed as they are in Berlin and elsewhere. If later, as an assessor, one is awarded a doctor's degree, there are also much better prospects of obtaining a post as professor extraordinary, as happened in the case of Herr Gärtner in Bonn, who wrote a mediocre work on provincial legislation and is otherwise only known as belonging to the Hegelian school of jurists. But, my dear, very good father, would it not be possible to discuss all this with you personally? Eduard's condition, dear Mama's illness, your own ill health, although I hope it is not serious, all this makes me want to hurry to you, indeed it makes it almost a necessity. I would be there already if I was not definitely in doubt about your permission and consent.

Believe me, my dear, dear father, I am actuated by no selfish intention (although it would be bliss for me to see Jenny again), but there is a thought which moves me, and it is one I have no right to express. In many respects it would even be a hard step for me to take but, as my only sweet Jenny writes, these considerations are all of no account when faced with the fulfilment of duties that are sacred.

I beg you, dear Father, however you may decide, not to show this letter, at least not this page, to my angel of a mother. My sudden arrival could perhaps help this grand and wonderful woman to recover.

My letter to Mama was written long before the arrival of Jenny's dear letter, so perhaps I unwittingly wrote too much about matters which are not quite or even very little suitable. [12]

In the hope that gradually the clouds that have gathered about our family will pass away, that it will be granted to me to suffer and weep with you and, perhaps, when with you to give proof of my profound, heartfelt sympathy and immeasurable love, which often I can only express very badly; in the hope that you also, dear, ever beloved Father, taking into account my much agitated state of mind, will forgive me where often my heart seems to have erred, overwhelmed by my militant spirit, and that you will soon be wholly restored to health so that I can clasp you to my heart and tell you all my thoughts,

Your ever loving son,

Karl

Please, dear Father, excuse my illegible handwriting and bad style; it is almost 4 o'clock, the candle has burnt itself out, and my eyes are dim; a real unrest has taken possession of me, I shall not be able to calm the turbulent spectres until I am with you who are dear to me.

Please give greetings from me to my sweet, wonderful Jenny. I have read her letter twelve times already, and always discover new delights in it. It is in every respect, including that of style, the most beautiful letter I can imagine being written by a woman.

1838

Source: MECW Volume 2;

Transcribed: Andy Blunden;

Engels To Marie Engels. Aug 28-29

Engels To Friedrich and Wilhelm Graeber. September 1

Engels To Marie Engels. September 11

Engels To Friedrich and Wilhelm Graeber. September 17

Engels To Marie Engels. October 9-10

Engels To Marie Engels. November 13

Engels To Marie Engels. end of December

Engels To Marie Engels

In Barmen

Bremen, [188] Aug. 28, 1838

Dear Marie,

As soon as I saw your letter I realised at once that it was from you although I don’t know your handwriting. Because the letter is just like you — written in a terrible hurry, everything in a lovely confusion, sermons that are not a bit seriously meant: how are you, your health, news about Emilchen [Emilie Engels] and Adelinchen [Adeline Engels] accidents, all mixed up together. We had an accident here too, a house painter — the second in a week — fell from the scaffolding and died immediately.

It is a great surprise to hear that Emilchen and Adelinchen are leaving. The Treviranuses at any rate were quite astonished; they all thought that Karl [Karl Engels] was bringing them up.

August 29

It’s a very good thing that you want to go to Xanten and you should really go there if Mother [Elisabeth Engels promised Auntie [Friderike von Griesheim] and Grandmother [Franciska van Haar] that you would. You must arrange to go there during the grape season, for then you will be able to eat all you can manage. We have grapes in our garden here too, but they are not ripe yet. But we have apples which are ripe — Paradise apples; they are much more delicious than those on the big tree in Caspar [Engels]’s a yard, the one they have now cut down.

Just think, Marie, we’ve got a broody hen here with seven chicks hardly eight days old and when there’s nothing to do at the office, we go down to the yard and catch flies, gnats and spiders and then the old hen comes and takes them out of our hands and feeds them to the chicks. But there’s a black chick, the size of a canary, which gobbles up the flies out of our hands. And all these little creatures will become hens with croups and have feathers growing on their feet. I wager that you would be delighted with this hen and her chicks. You are a chicken yourself, just like them. You must tell Mother that next year she too should place some eggs under a hen. There are also pigeons here, not only at the ‘Treviranuses’ but also at the Leupolds’, crested pigeons and pouters, which are called crown pigeons (because they have a crest on their fronts which is called a crown here). The crested ones are particularly handsome. We — Eberlein and I — feed these every day. They don’t eat vetch, which doesn’t grow here, but they will eat peas or very small beech nuts, which are no bigger than peas.

You should see some time, when the market is full in the morning, what remarkable costumes the peasant women wear. Their caps and straw hats are especially remarkable. If I can only get a quiet look at one of them some time, I’ll try and draw her and send it to you. The girls wear very small red caps over their hair, which is coiled up in a bun, while old women have big close-fitting winged bonnets which hang over their foreheads, or big velvet caps trimmed with black frilled lace in front. It looks quite odd.

The window of my room looks out on an alley which is uncanny. If I’m still up late of an evening, round about eleven o’clock, things begin to get noisy in the alley and the cats squeal, the dogs bark, the ghosts laugh and howl and rattle the windows of the house opposite. But it’s all quite natural because the lamplighter lives in the alley and he goes on his rounds at eleven o’clock.

Now I have written two full pages and if I wanted to do what you do, I would now write: “Now you will probably be satisfied because I have told you so much. Next time I shall tell you just as much.” This is the way you do it; you write me two pages, with the lines set very far apart, and you leave the other two pages quite empty. But so that you can see that I don’t do the same as you and do not give tit for tat, I shall do my best to fill up four closely written pages for you.

This morning a barber came round and Herr Pastor [Georg Gottfried Treviranus] wanted me to have a shave for he said I looked quite revolting. But I do not do so. Father [Friedrich Engels] said that I should leave my razors locked up until I need them and he left a fortnight ago today and my beard certainly cannot have grown so much in that time. And now I shall not shave until I have a moustache as black as a raven. And you know, Mother told Father to give me a razor to take with me and Father answered that would be tempting me to start shaving, and he would buy me some himself in Manchester, but I don’t use them on principle.

I have just come back from the parade which takes place every day on the Domshof. There the great Hanseatic army, composed of about 40 soldiers and 25 bandsmen as well as 6 to 8 officers, does its exercises, and (if I leave out the drum major) they all have as much moustache between them as one Prussian hussar. Most of them have no beard at all; others just a suspicion of one. The parade lasts the whole of two minutes. The soldiers arrive, line up, present arms and go off again. But the music is good (very good, wonderful, beautiful, say the Bremen people). Yesterday one of these Hanseatic soldiers, who had deserted, was brought in. This fellow was a Jew and was taking religious instruction with Pastor Treviranus and wanted to be baptised. Then he deserted, without leaving the town, but wrote a letter to Pastor Treviranus saying he was in Brinkum and had been persuaded by a relative to go there. He asked the Pastor to intercede for him so that his punishment might be mitigated. The Pastor wanted to do this too, when the fellow was suddenly arrested near Bremen yesterday and it came out where he was. He will now probably get a stretch or sixty strokes, for the soldiers always get whipped here.

No Jews at all live in Bremen, only a couple of Jews with permits in the suburbs, but none can move into the town.

It has been raining again all day long today. Yesterday week it did not rain at all for once, otherwise it has rained every day even though often only a little. It was very hot on Sunday and yesterday too the air was somewhat oppressive although the sky was frequently overcast, but as for today, really it’s unbearable. You get soaking wet as soon as you put your nose out of doors. What is it like in your place? Now I am going to write to Mother.- Have you made it up again with the Kampermanns, old geese?

Adieu, Marie.

Your brother

Friedrich

Engels To Friedrich and Wilhelm Graeber

In Elberfeld

[Bremen] September 1 [1838]

To the Graeber brothers, of Barmen, now in Elberfeld. Acknowledging receipt of the esteemed letter of your Herr F. Graeber, I am taking the liberty to send you a few lines. Thunder and lightning, things are looking up. We will now begin right away with the plastic arts.

Namely with my fellow lodger by the name of George (pronounced as in English) Gorrissen, the greatest Hamburg fop that ever existed. Take the mean between the two drawings you see here, place it on a slim trunk and long legs, give the eyes a real boorish look, a speech exactly like Kirchner’s, only in the Hamburg dialect, and you have the most complete picture of this lout that you can get. I wish I could only draw him as well as last night when I drew him on a board, and it was so like him that everybody recognised him, even the maids. Even a painter [G. W. Feistkorn] who lives in our house and otherwise doesn’t think much of anything found it very good. — This G. Gorrissen is the most boorish fellow on earth; he is busy with some new nonsense every day and is inexhaustible in commonplace and boring ideas. The fellow already has on his conscience at least twenty hours that he has bored me.

The other day I bought myself Jacob Grimm’s defence;

it is extraordinarily good and is written with a rare power. I read no less than seven pamphlets about the Cologne affair in one bookshop.[189] — N.B. I have read things here and come across expressions – I am getting good practice especially in literature-which one would never a be allowed to print in our parts, quite liberal ideas, etc., arguments about the old Hanoverian he-goat, [Ernst August] really wonderful.

There are some sheets with very fine satirical drawings here. — One I saw was rather badly drawn but the faces are very characteristic. A tailor on a goat is being stopped by his master and the cobblers are looking on. What happens is expressed in the text underneath:

“Old master, don’t stop my charger!”

But about that next time, for I cannot now get this because the Principal [Heinrich Leupold] is sitting here. Otherwise he’s a terribly nice fellow, oh so good, you can’t imagine.

Excuse me for writing so badly, I have three bottles of beer under my belt, hurrah, and I cannot write much more because this must go to the post at once. It is already striking half-past three and letters must be there by four o'clock. Good gracious, thunder and lightning’ you can see that I've got some beer inside me. [... ]

Please have the goodness to scribble me something in reply right away; Wurm knows my address, and you can give it to him. Oh dear, what shall I write? Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. What a lamentable state! The old man, i. e., the Principal, is just going out and I am all mixed up, I don’t know what I'm writing. There are all sorts of noises going on in my head. Give my greetings to P. Jonghaus and F. Plümacher, and tell them to write, and I will bore them shortly with my scribbling too. Can you read my scrawl?

Roland, the knight of Bremen

What will you give me for a pound of muddlement? I have heaps in store. Oh dear.

Your devoted

Your Honour’s devoted

F. Engels

Engels To Marie Engels

In Barmen

[Bremen] Sept. 11 [1838]

Dear Marie,

“Hoping to receive another four-page letter from you, I remain, etc.” Yes, you little goose, you shall have four pages but they are according to the saying that with the same measure as you measure will it be measured unto you, [Cf. Matthew 7:2.] and even that is too much for you. For I manage to get as much on a small page like this as you do on a big one, and I forbid such a waste of paper in future; when Fatty writes so spread out, that’s a different matter. Do you understand me, little Mamsell? — If you don’t go to Xanten this year, you must say:

Console yourself with job

And anoint the monk with syrup.

I can’t help it, they say here in Bremen. You can imagine to yourselves that you have already been there, and don’t you, Marie, know how Hermann [Hermann Engels] went on when he had a glass of wine? He drank it very slowly so as to have the pleasure of it for a long time. So you should say to yourselves: If we were at Xanten now, we would not be able to be glad that we were still to go there, but now we have a whole hopeful year ahead of us and we can be glad to our fill. See, that’s the political way, Socrates and Eulenspiegel would say just the same thing. Remember this for the future. You see, I can lecture you just as well as you me. And when you write to me again, don’t begin every paragraph with “Just imagine.” How did you get such a noble habit? How can you say “I don’t know what else to write about” when you have not yet told me what kind of school report you and Anna [Engels] have and who worked out your programme this year. Fatty must also have cracked a joke or two during the eight weeks I've been away, couldn’t you perhaps have written to me about that? How much else may have happened that I cannot know anything about? Tell me, what kind of excuse is “I don’t know what else to write about.” I don’t know what to write about either. When I begin a line, I don’t yet know what to put in the following one, but something always comes to me, and I hope that what I write to you will be useful and of no little profit to you. But when you have filled two pages with lines wide apart, you immediately think you have performed a colossal Herculean labour, but what about me? When I have finished this letter to you, I must still write three others and they must he ready for posting tomorrow or the day after. And I have not much time, for the Panchita is being sent off to Havana this afternoon and so I have to copy letters instead of writing some of my own. I am expecting a letter from Strücker at midday today and then he'll be wanting an answer too, and I can’t write exactly the same thing to one as I have written to the other. So, you see that it would be right if you wrote me six pages and should not complain if I only wrote you one-sixth of a page? However, this lecture is already as long as your whole letter and so that you can see that I can also write about other things I will now make so free as to tell you that if I have brushes before this letter goes off, I will enclose a few drawings of Bremen peasant fashions. — But now you are right, I don’t know what else to write about, but I just want to see if I get anything more to do. The four pages will be filled, and quite honestly too. What is very unpleasant is that in the evenings the city gates are closed when it gets dark and whoever wants to go out or come in has to pay a toll and it now starts at seven o’clock, when you have to pay two groats, and this increases as it gets later. You pay three groats after nine and six groats at ten and twelve groats at eleven. If you are on horseback you have to pay even more. I too have had to pay toll once or twice. — The Consul [Heinrich Leupold] is at this moment talking to Herr Grave about the letters which have to be written this afternoon. I am listening with the greatest excitement like a rascal who sees the jury return and is waiting to hear “Guilty” or “Not guilty”. Once Grave starts writing, before I know where I am I have six, seven, eight or even more letters to copy, each of which may be of one, two or perhaps three pages. During the time I have been here I've already copied forty pages, forty pages in a huge copy-book. Another letter for Baltimore is lying in front of me now, and look — the four pages are full, it is 11.30 and I shall go to the post under the pretext of collecting the Consul’s letters but really to see if there is a letter from Strücker. Adieu, dear Marie, I'm looking forward to four big pages.

Your brother

Friedrich

Engels To Friedrich and Wilhelm Graeber

In Barmen

[Bremen, September 17-18, 1838] September 17. First the black ink, then the red ink from the beginning again.

Carissimi! In vostras epistolers haec vobis sit respondentia. Ego enim quum longiter latine non scripsi, vobis paucum scribero, sed in germanico-italianico-latino. Quae quum ita sint, [My dearest ones, let this be an answer to your letters. As I haven’t written in Latin for a long time, I shall write you only a little, but in German-Italian-Latin. This being so...... ] you will not get one more word in Latin, but only pure, unalloyed, unadulterated, perfect German. And now to deal at once with a matter of considerable importance, I want to tell you that my Spanish romance has been a failure; the fellow seems to be an anti-romantic and he looks like one too. But a poem of my own — The Bedouin — a copy of which I enclose, was inserted in a different paper; only the fellow went and changed the last verse and so created the most hopeless confusion. He does not seem to have understood “Your desert robes do not belong with our Parisian coats and vests, nor with our literature your song”, because it appears to be baroque. The main idea is to contrast the Bedouin, even in their present condition, and the audience, who are quite alien to these people. For this reason the contrast must not be expressed only by the bare description given in the two clearly distinguishable parts, but comes really to life only at the end through the contrast and the conclusion drawn in the last verse. There are also a number of other details expressed in the poem: 1) Delicate irony at the expense of Kotzebue and his supporters with Schiller counterposed as the good principle for our theatre; 2) grief over the present condition of the Bedouin as contrasted with their former condition. These two incidentals run parallel in the two main contrasts. Take the last verse away, and the whole thing falls apart. But if the editor wishes to make the conclusion less striking and ends with: “They jump at money’s beck and call, and not at Nature’s primal urge. Their eyes are blank, they're silent, all, except for one who sings a dirge”, then, first of all, this ending is feeble because it consists of previously used rhetorical phrases, and secondly, it destroys my main idea by replacing it with the subsidiary one — sorrow over the present condition of the Bedouin and the contrast with their former condition. So he has done the following damage: he has completely destroyed 1) the main idea, 2) the cohesion of the poem. However, this will cost the fellow an additional groat (=1/2 silver groschen) for he will get an answer from me in the form of a sermon. By the way, I wish I had never written the poem. I have completely failed to express the idea in a clear, pleasant form. Str.’s [Strücker] a fine phrases are simply phrases. Dattelland [Land of date-palms] and Bled-el-Djerid are one and the same thing, so one idea is expressed twice with the same words, and what dissonance — “schallend Laihen zollt” and “Mund gewande"! It gives one a peculiar feeling to see one’s verses in print like this. They have become something strange and one sees them with a much clearer eye than when they are handwritten.

I had a good laugh when I saw myself thus made public, but I soon lost any desire to laugh. As soon as I saw the changes I became very angry and raged in a most barbaric fashion. — Satis autem de hac re locuti sumus! [But we have said enough about this!]

I found a quite peculiar book this morning in an antiquarian’s shop — an extract from the Acta Sanctorum, unfortunately only for the first half of the year, with portraits, lives of the saints and prayers, but all very short. It cost me twelve groats, six silver grogchen, and I paid the same for Wieland’s Diogenes von Sinope, oder Swkrarhs mainomenos [The raging Socrates].

I doubt my ability and my productivity as a poet more and more every day since I read Goethe’s two essays Für junge Dichter in which I find myself described as aptly as could be, and from which it has become clear to me that my rhyming achieves nothing for art. All the same, I want to go on rhyming because, as Goethe says, it is “a pleasant addition” and I shall also probably get a poem or two published in some journal because other fellows also do so who are just as big if not bigger asses than I am, and because my efforts will neither raise nor lower German literature. But when I read a really good poem then fury seizes my soul to think that I couldn’t have done that. Satis autem de hac re locuti sumus! My cari amici, how much I miss you! When I remember how I often entered your room and there sat Fritz, so comfortable behind the stove, with his short pipe in his mouth, and Wilm rustled around the room in his long dressing-gown, could not smoke anything but four-pfennig cigars and cracked jokes which shook the whole room, and then the mighty Feldmann rose like zandos Menelaos and entered, and then Wurm came in in his long coat and with his stick in his hand, and then we all caroused and all hell was let loose — and now we have to make do with letters — it’s outrageous. But that you write to me a lot from Berlin too is combat and naturaliter, letters there only take a day longer than to Barmen. You know my address, but it doesn’t matter if you don’t for I have struck up such a close acquaintance with our postman that he always delivers my letters to the office. But still, honoris causa, you might put St. Martini Kirchhof No. 2 on the envelope if necessary. This friendship with the postman comes from our names being similar, his is Engelke. — Letter-writing is a bit hard for me today. The day before yesterday I sent off a letter to Wurm at Bilk and today I posted one to Strücker — the first was eight pages long, the second seven, and now you too want your ration. If you receive this letter before you go to Cologne, please do the following for me. When you get there will you find Streitzeuggasse and go to Everaert’s the printers at number 51 and buy me Volksbücher. I have Siegfried, Eulenpiegel and Helena. The ones I need most are Octavianus, Die Schildbürger (incomplete in the Leipzig edition), Die Haimonshinder, Dr. Faust and any of the others which are illustrated with woodcuts. If there is anything mystical there buy it as well, especially the Sibyllenweissagungen. You can go up to two or three talers in any case. Then send the books on to me by express post, tell me how much they come to and I shall send you a letter of credit drawn on my Old Man, who will gladly pay it. Or, better still, you can send the books to my Old Man, to whom I'll explain the whole business and he can give them to me as a Christmas gift or as he likes. — A new subject of study for me is Jacob Böhme. He is a dark but deep soul. But most of it must be studied terribly hard if one wants to understand any of it. He is rich in poetic ideas and a very allegorical man, his speech is quite original, for he gives all words a different meaning from the usual one. Instead of “essence” [Wesen], “substance” [Wesenheit], he says “torment” [Quat]. He calls God a “non-cause” [Ungrund] and a “cause” [Grund] because He has no cause or beginning of His existence, but is Himself the cause of His own and all other life. So far I have been able to find only three of his books — admittedly enough to begin with. — But here I want to insert my poem about the Bedouin.

Now the bell rings, and suddenly

The silken curtain swift ascends,

And all in hushed expectancy

Wait for the evening to commence.

No Kotzebue commands the scene

To set the merry audience roaring.

No Schiller of the earnest mien

Steps forth, his golden words outpouring.

Sons of the desert, proud and free,

Walk on to greet us, face to face;

But pride is vanished utterly,

And freedom lost without a trace.

They jump at money’s beck and call

(As once at lad from dune to dune

Bounded for joy). They're silent, all,

Save one who sings a dirge-like tune.

The audience, amazed and awed

By what these acrobats can do.

Applauds them, just as it applauds

The trumperies of Kotzebue.

Fleet nomads of the desert lands,

You've braved the sun’s fierce noontide rays

Through harsh Morocco’s burning sands,

Through valleys where the date-palms sway.

And through the garden paradise

Of Bled-el-Djerid once you swept.

You turned your wits to bold forays.

Your steeds to battle proudly stepped.

You sat there, where moon lustres spill

By rare springs in a palm-tree grove,

And lovely lips with gracious skill

A fairy-story garland wove.

Sleeping in narrow tents you lay

In love’s warm arms, with dreams all round

Till sunrise ushered in the day

And camels made their bellowing sound.

Go home again, exotic guests!

Your desert robes do not belong

With our Parisian coats and vests,

Nor with our literature your song!

[September] 18th Cur me poematibus exanimas tuis, [Why do you torture me with your poems?] you will be shouting. But I am going to torture you still more with them or rather because of them. Guilelmus [Wilhelm Graeber] has still got an exercise book of my verse, just as I wrote it. I'm now asking for this exercise book back and you can send it in the following way: you can cut out all the blank paper and you can then enclose a few sheets with every letter you write: it won’t increase the postage. If need be you can also add one or two bits of reading matter if you pack it cunningly and press the letter well, for instance, laying it for a night between a couple of dictionaries before you send it, so they won’t notice anything. — See that Blank gets the sheet I've enclosed for him. I am getting a terribly extensive correspondence, with you in Berlin, with Wurm in Bonn, and similarly with Barmen and Elberfeld. But if I didn’t have it, how would I kill the endless time I have to spend at the office without being allowed to read? The day before yesterday I spent with the Old Man, [Heinrich Leupold] id est principalis — his wife is called the Old Woman [Altsche] (the elk, alce in Italian, pronounced just like that) — in the country where his family lives, and I enjoyed it very much. The Old Man is an excellent fellow, he always scolds his boys in Polish. You Ledshiaks, you Kashubs, he shouts. On the way back I tried to give a philistine who was also there some idea of the beauty of Low German, but saw it was impossible. A philistine like that is really an unhappy soul yet over-happy nonetheless in his stupidity, which he regards as the greatest wisdom. I went to the theatre the other evening. They were playing Hamlet, but in a quite horrifying manner. So I would rather say nothing at all about it. — It’s good that you are going to Berlin. There will be more art there than you are likely to get at any other university except Munich; the poetry of nature, on the other hand, is lacking — sand, sand, sand! It is far better here. The roads outside the town are mostly very interesting and very charming with their groups of various trees. But the mountains, the mountains, that’s what you miss. What is also lacking in Berlin is the poetry of student life, which is at its best in Bonn, and to which the wandering about in the poetic surroundings contributes not a little. Well, you too will be going to Bonn one day. My dear Wilhelm, I would madly love to answer your witty letter with one equally witty, if it were not for the fact that I don’t feel at all witty and especially at the moment I am lacking precisely in that desire which one cannot give oneself and without which everything is forced. But I feel as if for me the end were near, as if my head no longer held a single idea, as if my life were being stolen away. The tree of my mind of its leaves is stripped, my witticisms too fine are clipped, the kernel out of the shell has been nipped. And my Mahamas"’ hardly merit the name, while yours robbed Rückert of all his fame; those here written with gout are smitten, they limp, they totter, fall, nay, have fallen to the bottom of the pit of oblivion, not climbed the peaks of readers’ opinion. Oh doom, here I sit in my room, and even if I hammered my head sore, only water would come out with a roar. That helps not a louse, it does not bring wit into the house. When I went to bed last night I banged my head and it sounded just like when you knock against a bucket of water and the water splashes against the other side. I had to laugh at the way my nose was properly rubbed in the truth. Yes, water, water! My room is full of spooks. Last night I heard a death-watch beetle in the wall. In the alley near me there is a noise of ducks, cats, dogs, hussies and people. And incidentally I expect a letter from you just as long if not longer than this one, et id post notas — let there be no mistake about it.

The most marvellous hymn book in existence is undoubtedly the one used here. It contains all the famous names in German poetry: Goethe (the song, Der Du von dem Himmel bist), Schiller (Drei Worte des Glaubens), Kotzebue and many others. Also songs against cow-pox and all kinds of other nonsense. It is sheer barbarism unequalled anywhere. One must see it to believe it. It is an appalling spoiling of all our beautiful songs, a crime which Knapp also made himself. guilty of in the Treasury of Songs.

The occasion of our sending a cargo of hams to the West Indies, reminds me of an extremely interesting story. Somebody once sent a cargo of hams to Havana. The letter with the bill did not arrive till later, and the recipient, who had already noticed that the cargo was 12 hams short, saw reckoned up in the bill: “Loss through rats — 12 pieces.” But those rats were the young office lads who had helped themselves to the hams. That’s the end of the story. — While I take the liberty to fill the remaining space with artistic renderings of outward appearances chosen at random (Dr. He), I must confess that I shall hardly be able to tell you much about my trip for I promised both Strücker and Wurm they would hear about it first. — I even fear that I shall have to write about it to them twice over, and to go through all that tedious stuff three times, mixed up with all kinds Of other nonsense, would really be too much.

But if Wurm cares to send you the exercise book, which he is hardly likely to receive before the end of the year, that’s all right with me. Otherwise I can’t do anything for you until you go to Bonn yourselves.

Your most humble

Servant

Greetings to P. Jonghaus. He can enclose a letter with yours. I would have written to him too but the fellow is certainly away.

Reply soon. Your Berlin address!!!!!!!

Friedrich Engels

Engels To Marie Engels

In Barmen

Bremen, Oct. 9, 1838

Dear Marie,

At last four full pages! Well, I shall have to praise you till you can no longer bear it, as they say. Riding is now over unfortunately, so I am mostly at home on Sundays, but I enjoy myself quite a lot. Either I listen to somebody playing or... or I write, and in the evening we do all kinds of crazy things. The day before yesterday, which, as you know, was Sunday, we put a ring in a cup of flour and then played the well-known game of trying to get it out with your mouth. We all had a turn — the Pastor’s wife, [Mathilde Treviranus] the girls, the painter [G. W. Feistkorn] and I too, while the Pastor [Georg Gottfried Treviranus] sat in the corner on the sofa and watched the fun through a cloud of cigar smoke. The Pastor’s wife couldn’t stop laughing as she tried to get it out and covered herself with flour over and over again, and when the painter’s turn came, he blew with all his might so that the flour puffed out right and left and descended like a cloud on his green and red dressing-gown. Afterwards we threw flour in each other’s faces. I blackened my face with cork, at which they all laughed, and when I started to laugh, that made them laugh all the more and all the louder. Then I laughed, ha ha ha ha ha, so loudly that all the others followed suit with he he he he he and ha ha ha ha ha, until it was just like in the story where the Jew has to dance in the bramble bush, and at last they all begged me to stop for heaven’s sake.

You are still a real goose if you let that Jettchen Troost bore you. Why don’t you tell her to go away?

Now the goose is starting to lecture me; that is touching. Tell me, goose, don’t you know the saying — I shall behave to you as you behave to me? Don’t you know that no matter how small you write, I still write twice as small? But let’s settle the matter once and for all. If you write me four pages then you shall get four pages back and there’s an end of it. Besides, if you only knew how many letters I've already written this week and how many I still have to write, you would have pity on me and be satisfied with two pages. Ask Strücker some time how much I've written to him, Ask Wurm some time — but he’s not there, so I shall tell you — at least twelve pages just like these and as much again across the page in red ink. But he writes just as much to me in reply. And I have also to write to Mother, Hermann [Engels], August [Engels, cousin], Rudolf [Engels], what do you think that adds up to? I think that as you can read the other letters you’ll be fair and only expect half as much from me as you write to me. — You say that I praise Anna [Engels] to the skies, no, so god over nit, dat do ek nit, [But not so good, I don’t do that] but if she writes me four pages and you only write three, isn’t she better than you? Apart from all this I’ll gladly admit that you are a loyal soul and write to me most diligently. But you must not presume to start such rows and quarrels with me and imagine all the right is on your side when you really ought to be on your knees begging forgiveness. — You complain about the shoulder-brace, but oh, my little goose, hold yourself straight and then they won’t put one on you. — We had the same weather here as you describe but now it’s horrible; it rains and drizzles continuously, sometimes it pours down and then we have a bit of blue sky every 24 hours and a ray of sunshine every half-year.

You want me to write what I would like for Christmas? Well, you needn’t make me what I've already got and you know what I haven’t got, so what shall I write? Embroider a cover for a cigar box or — I don’t know what, but you can keep nagging Mother a little every two or three days to send me the Goethe for Christmas Day. I really need it very badly, for you can hardly read anything without there being some reference to Goethe. Who was this man Goethe? Herr Riepe: Children, he was ... !

Your drawing of the poultry-yard I could comprehend quite easily and it is very practical — cats or polecats can’t get in and the hens can’t get out.

Last Friday I went to the theatre. They were playing Nachtlager in Granada, [An opera by Kreutzer] an opera which is very nice. Tonight they are giving Die Zauberflöte. [Mozart’s The Magic Flute] I must go to it. I really must manage to see what it is like. I hope it will be really good.

October 10. I went to the theatre. I liked Die Zaubflöte very much. I should like you to be able to come and see it with me some time, I bet you would like it very much. — Yes, Marie, what shall I write about now? Shall I grumble a bit for want of anything better? I can’t think of anything better and you will certainly be satisfied if the four pages are filled, no matter what is in them. Here in Bremen the merchants’ houses are all built in a very remarkable way. They are not built with their long sides facing the street like ours but with their short sides, so that the roofs are very close together, and the hall is very large and high, just like a small church.

They have hatches above and below, one on top of the other, which are closed by trapdoors and through which a hoist can move up and down. Up in the attic is the store-room and coffee, linen, sugar, whale-oil, etc., are brought up by the hoist. All halls have thus two rows of windows one above the other. — The Consul’s wife has now moved into town again with her four small children; they make an awful uproar.

Luckily two of them, Elisabeth and Loin (really Ludwig), go to school, so one does not have to listen to their noise all day long. But when Loin and Siegfried are together they make such a row that you just can’t stand it. The other day they started dancing on the linen chests, each armed with a gun and a sword; they challenged each other to a duel and Loin blew on his trumpet so loudly that it made your ears ring. I have a very nice place, in front of my desk there is a big window giving on to the hall and so I can see everything that happens.

Since you drew me the poultry-yard I'm drawing you the church as seen from the office. Farewell.

Your brother

Friedrich

Engels To Marie Engels

In Barmen

Bremen, Nov. 13, 1838

Dear Marie,

Both your letters gave me very great pleasure and I will see what I can do, time and space permitting, to tell you something. It is now past three o'clock and the letter must be posted by four. But I really don’t know anything much to tell you. Nothing out of the ordinary happens here, apart from the fact that the Bremen people have mounted their two splendid cannon at the main guardhouse again, that instead of saying “footstool” they say “footboard” here, that very many people are now wearing macintoshes here, that it was immensely cold last night and ice-ferns were formed on the window-panes and that the sun is now shining, and the like. Something else occurs to me that you should mention to Mother, namely, that I wrote to the Graebers at the end of September saying that when they went to Cologne they should send me Volksbücher and get the money from Father.’ But as they never got to Cologne, they have written to their cousin, so if he sends some per mezzo Pastor Graeber it would be fine, and I'm sure Father would do me the favour of settling the bill for me. If he doesn’t send any that will be all right too and you won’t be bothered with it. I would have written about this before now, but was only given noteworthy information of the correct procedure today. Wilhelm Graeber also writes to me — and this is certainly something for you — that there are no lavatories properly so-called in Berlin, only commodes, and these have to be hired separately and cost five silver groschen a month; as the sons of a pastor, however, they are exempted from this as from other taxes. They also tell me a great deal about their walking tour through the Harz Mountains and up the Blocksberg, and how ‘they travelled from Magdeburg to Berlin with a very tall Guards N. C. O. If you come to visit me some time I shall read you the whole story as well as that of the lovely Dorothee, which happened in Siebertal, in the Harz country, where a very, very rich man fell in love with a little girl of seven and gave her father a ring, telling him that he would come back and marry her when the ring fitted her, and how, when he did come back after ten years, the girl had already been dead for a year, and the gentleman himself also died of sheer boredom, about which Fritz Graeber composed a moving song, etc. But now the page is almost full and I shall just copy another letter which must go with it, and take them both to the post. Are you writing to Ida [Engels]? Herr Holler took a great liking to Julchen [Julie Engels] in Mannheim, but Karl [Engels] was very cross because he visited her so often. But don’t tell that to anyone else. Adieu, dear Marie.

Yours,

Friedrich

Engels To Marie Engels

In Barmen

[Bremen, end of December 1838]

Dear Marie,

Well, you really are making a good thing out of being ill, lying in bed most of the time, you lazy-bones. You'll have to get out of that habit. You must be up and about by the time you get this letter, do you hear? Thank you for the nice cigar-box cover. I can assure you that it has met with the most complete approval, not only for the choice of pattern, but also for the execution, from that most severe of critics, Herr G. W. Feistkorn, painter. Marie Treviranus also embroidered one for me but she took it back again and is now going to send it to Herr Pastor Hessel in Münster am Stein near Kreuznach, to whom she also promised one. She is making me a basket for cigars instead. The Pastor’s wife [Mathilde Treviranus] has crocheted a purse for me, and Leupold’s boys got a rifle that fires caps, as well as swords, and the Old Man [Heinrich Leupold] keeps calling them — Old Soldiers, Kashubs! I can’t make out that riddle of yours about the pond but I'll ask you one myself. Do you know what a Ledshiah is? (I don’t know myself. It’s a term of abuse which the Old Man uses very often.) If you can’t find the answer then hold this up against a mirror and then you will be able to read it. I have just heard that ‘there has been an addition to the Leupold family — a little girl.

I should also like to tell you that I have now started composing and am working on chorals. But it is terribly difficult. The measure and the sharps and the chords give one a lot of trouble. I haven’t got very far yet but I am sending you a specimen. It’s the first two lines of Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott.

I have not yet been able to do it for more than two voices, for four voices is still too hard. I hope I have not made any mistakes in the score, so try and play it some time.

Adieu, dear Marie.

Your brother

Friedrich

1839

Source: MECW Volume 2;

Transcribed: Andy Blunden.

Engels To Marie Engels. January 7

Engels To Friedrich Graeber. January 20

Engels To Friedrich Graeber. February 19

Engels To Hermann Engels. March 11-12

Engels To Marie Engels. March 12

Engels To Friedrich Graeber. April 8-9

Engels To Marie Engels. April 10

Engels To Friedrich Graeber. about April 23-May

Engels To Marie Engels. April 28

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber. about April 28-30

Engels To Marie Engels. May 23

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber. May 24 - June 15

Engels To Friedrich Graeber. June 15

Engels To Friedrich Graeber. July 12-27

Engels To Friedrich Graeber. after July 27

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber. July 30

Engels To Marie Engels. September 28

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber. October 8

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber. October 20-21

Engels To Friedrich Graeber. October 29

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber. November 13-20

Engels To Friedrich Graeber. December 9 1839 - February 5 1840

Engels To Marie Engels

In Barmen

[Bremen] Jan. 7, 1839

Dear Marie,

I hope you have now had that tooth extracted or that it was not necessary. — The riddle about the pond is very nice but you ought to be able to solve it yourself. Listen, composing is hard work; you have to pay attention to so many things — the harmony of the chords and the right progression, and that gives a lot of trouble. I'll see if I can’t send you something again next time. I am now working on another choral, in which the bass and soprano voices alternate. Have a look at this.

The accompaniment is still missing, and I'll probably make some changes too. It is obvious that most of it, except the fourth line, has been stolen from the Hymn Book. The text is the well-known Latin Stabat mater dolorosa juxta crucem lacrymosa Dum pendebat filius.

The Pastor [Georg Gottfried Treviranus] killed a pig in the wash-house at midday today. At first his wife would not have anything to do with the whole business, but he said he wanted to make a gift of it to her, so she had to take it. And the pig didn’t scream at all. Once it was dead all the females in the family came in. But the old granny would not let anyone take her place stirring the blood and it looked quite strange. They will be making the sausage tomorrow, that is really the thing for her.

You say you saw a monkey and that it was you. Do you know that on the wafer with which you sealed your little letter there was written: Je dis la vérité?

It also has a mirror drawn on it.

Tell Mother that she should not write “Treviranus”, she can leave out the Herr Pastor from the address altogether, the postman knows where I live anyway, as I fetch the letters from the post every day; besides, he might be tempted not to bring my letters to the office but to me at the Treviranus’ and there I only get them a couple of hours later when I come home.

Strücker wrote me that on the Sunday before New Year Hermann acted all sorts of things, including a waiter, etc. He must write to me about it. — Strücker was full of praise for his skill, saying that Hermann played the part of the waiter as well as if he had worked in a restaurant for three years. Is he growing a lot?

Tell Mother not to show my composition to Schornstein or he will say again — that is the end of everything. You see, I learn everything that happens. Next time I am in Barmen again I shall become the consul for Bremen like the Old Man. [Heinrich Leupold]

Addiós mi hermana

Yours,

Friedrich

Please excuse all the mistakes I have made in the bass part. I am not used to writing music. In case you could not read the last line but one, I am writing it out again for you.

Engels To Friedrich Graeber

[Bremen, January 20, 1839]

To Fritz Graeber

Florida

I

The Spirit of Earth speaks:

Three hundred years have rolled by since the hour

When the proud white folk came from far away

Across the seas, where their great cities tower.

The islands soon became the strong men’s prey;

I lifted up my clenched fist from the ocean

To see how far their arrogant feet might stray.

Woods clothed the land and flowers grew in profusion;

Through the deep valleys wandered by the score

My faithful tribesmen of the brown-skinned nation.

The Eternal Father mild saw fit to pour

Abundant blessings down. The White Men came;

Their ship, its course erratic, neared the shore.

The land seemed fair to them. They made their claim,

And seized it, like the islands, in their greed,

Sowing among my people serfdom’s shame.

The borders marked by furrows they denied,

And with their quadrants measured out my Hand,

Drawing strange lines across from side to side.

Ere long had passed, they swarmed across the land;

Only one finger did they fear to try.

Who ventured there was doomed to meet his end.

Upon this one remaining finger, I

Have placed a ring my brown-skinned folk compose.

They stand with spears poised, ready to let fly.

And if their shields in compact, serried rows

Fail me, if White Man’s arrogance breaks the ring,

This Hand, with White and Brown, I then propose

To plunge into the waters weltering.

II

The Seminole speaks:

Peace to my brethren I shall not proclaim;

War be my first word, battle be my last.

And when your eyes blaze up in sudden flame,

As forest fire is fanned by hurricane’s blast,

Then shall I say that you were truly right

To call me Word’s Sun, that Night flees fast.

E'en as your hunter’s lust flamed at the plight

Of innocent creatures that you forced to flee

From arrow following arrow in swift flight,

So would the White Men hunt you ruthlessly.

But let your speeding arrows make it clear

That they're the quarry, and the hunters-we.

They envy us our red skins; and in fear

That their revolting white may be discerned,

They swathe themselves in many-coloured gear.

Our country they have named the floral strand,

For flowers here in great profusion grow.

But blue, or white, or yellow, through the land

Into red raiment soon they all must go,

Bespattered with the White Man’s own red blood.

Flamingo bird shall not more crimson glow.

As slaves, we proved to be of little good.

They brought the cowardly Blacks across the sea:

They'll learn the strength and courage of our brood!

Come then, White Man, if your desire it be,

And you shall get the homage that’s your due.

From every bed of reeds, from every tree,

Seminole arrows wait to ambush you!

III

The White Man speaks:

Well, then! And so for the last time I will

Offer my brow to cruel Destiny

And freely turn to face the murderous steel!

O vengeful Fate, you are well known to me!

Always you've turned my joy in life to gall.

You think I ever knew Love’s ecstasy?

Mocking, she broke my heart, whom I did fall

In love with. Thenceforth, seeking consolation,

I fought for Freedom. Kings themselves have all

Trembled before our League. In trepidation,

Princes have seen how German youth can stand

As one. In seven years of expiation

I've fully paid my debt in iron bonds.

In a swift ship they bring me o'er the sea

To Liberty — but on an alien strand.

The coastline beckons! But at a cliff’s foot, see! —

The ship is wrecked. The folk on board all spring

Into the foaming waves. A plank bears me

Safely to shore, though bruised and shivering.

For the first time, my luck goes favourably.

In sand-choked seas the rest lie weltering.

But can I not escape my destiny?

The savages surround me, bind my limbs.

They seek to gain revenge by killing me.

For me, new Freedom, so I hoped, begins.

But Freedom fighters seek my murder here.

So must I expiate my brothers’ sins.

But what comes floating to the beach down there?

A crucifix In my Redeemer’s eye

Such tenderness! I miss His Word so dear.

As I lie here upon the hot sands dying,

He comes to me with bounteous clemency.

While I complain, God, with Hell’s fury vying,

Has now Himself become a corpse for me!

Here is my contribution to the next little party. I saw that there had been one at our place again and I was very sorry that I didn’t send anything in for it. Now in reply to your letter. — Aha! Why don’t you read the newspaper? If you did you would have seen what was and what was not printed about the business. It’s not my fault if you make a fool of yourself. The paper only contained official reports issued by the Senate and they were really what was to be expected. Plümacher’s comedy must be very good. I have written asking for it twice, but he has not uttered a word about it. As far as Jonghaus and his love are concerned, I have something to settle with him about that. You fellows always let yourselves be put off writing by “this and that”. Tell me, can’t you write to me for half an hour each day after you get a letter from me? Then you'd be finished in three days. I have all these letters to write — five of them — and I write much closer than you do and still I have them finished in four or five days. Yes, it’s terrible. You can have eight days, but on the ninth day after you receive my letter you must post your reply. There’s no other way. If I have made other arrangements with Wurm I herewith change them. You have eight days, otherwise the penalties that Wurm is threatened with come into force — no verses and you'll be kept waiting just as long as I am.

Here is a woodcut, à la Volksbücher, which shows you plainly how I'm on the look-out for you, that is, for your letters. I thought I would have got my letters off today (Sunday, Jan. 20) but it’s striking half past four and the post goes at five today. So my plans have gone awry again. Well, it has its good side anyway for now I can shit in peace and then write to you in peace. I have not yet been able to start a letter to Peter Jonghaus. Damn, there’s somebody sitting in the lavatory and I am bursting.

It’s remarkable that if you consider our greatest writers, they always seem to go in pairs, one complementing the other as, for example, Klopstock and Lessing, Goethe and Schiller, Tieck and Uhland. But ‘now Rückert is quite on his own and I'm curious whether he is going to be joined by anybody or whether he'll die off first; it almost looks like it. As a love poet, he could be paired with Heine, but unfortunately the two of them are otherwise so heterogeneous that you can’t possibly unite them. Klopstock and Wieland are at least contrasts, but Rückert and Heine have not the slightest other similarity and each stands absolutely on his own. The Berlin party of Young Germany [191] are a fine lot indeed! They want to transform our tune into one of “conditions and subtle relations”, which is as much as to say: we write something for the whole world, and to fill up the pages we describe things that don’t exist, and we call them “conditions”, or we dish up a hotchpotch and that goes under the name of “subtle relations”. This Theodor Mundt scribbles up something for the whole world about Demoiselle Taglioni, who “dances Goethe”, embellishes it with fine phrases from Goethe, Heine, Rahela and Stieglitz and talks the most priceless nonsense about Bettina b but all in so ultra-modern a fashion that it must he a delight for any empty-headed dandy or a young, vain, lascivious lady to read the like. This Kühne, Mundt’s agent in Leipzig, is editor of the Zeitung für die elegante Welt and it now looks like a lady whose figure was built for a crinoline and who is now stuck into a modern dress so that at every step you can see her charming bandy legs through the clinging dress. It is exquisite! And this chap Heinrich Laube! He daubs without stopping about characters that don’t exist, writes travel stories which are nothing of the sort, nonsense upon nonsense; it’s terrible. I don’t know what is going to happen to German literature. We have three men of talent: Karl Beck, Ferd. Freiligrath and Julius Mosen. The last is certainly a Jew and in his Ahasver, he makes the Wandering Jew defy Christianity on all accounts. Gutzkow, who is amongst the most reasonable of all, reproaches him because, he says, Ahasuerus is a mean character, a real haggling Jew [192]; Theodor Creizenach, likewise a juif, has now laid hold of Gutzkow in the Zeitung für die elegante Weit [193] in the most violent way, but Gutzkow stands too high above him. This Creizenach, a run-of-the-mill hack writer, praises Ahasuerus to high heavens as a crushed worm and abuses Christ as a self-wined, proud God Almighty; he also says that in the Volksbuch, it is true, Ahasuerus is nothing but a vulgar fellow, but that in the blotting-paper books of the fair pedlars Faust also is not much more than a common sorcerer, whereas Goethe has endowed him with the psychology of several “centuries”. This last is clear to be nonsense (if I'm not mistaken, that is quite a Latin construction), but I am concerned with it only because of the Volksbücher. Of course, if Theodor Creizenach damns them they must be very, very bad indeed, nevertheless I make bold to say that there is more depth and poetry in the Volksbuch Ahasuerus than in the whole of Th. Creizenach plus all his worthy companions.

I am now at work on a number of epigrams and I'm sending you those I have finished.

The periodicals

1. Telegraph [Telegraph für Deutschland]

You call yourself a quick writer, so who can doubt quick-written stuff is what your pages are filled with?

2. Morgenblatt [Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser]

If you read me through in the morning, by evening you'll have forgotten whether it was blank or printed pages you saw.

3. Abend-zeitung

If you cannot sleep at night, just take in your hand this paper and lovely slumber will come to you soon.

4. Literatur-Blatt

These leaves are the most critical in the whole literary forest. But how dry they are. The wind blows them down.

I can’t think of any more at the moment and so must stop now. As I have just noticed, I really must hurry up if I am to get the letters off tomorrow, malefactor that I am. We shall be having company any moment now, and tomorrow there will be an awful lot of running about and copying,, so that it will not be out of place to write very fast.

I am now reading Kaiser und Papst by Duller, a novel in four volumes. Duller has an undeserved reputation. His Wittelsbach romances. many of which are included in Hüllstett’s book, are .terribly bad. [194] He wanted to imitate a popular style but became familiar. His Loyola is an abominable mix-up of all the good and bad elements of a historical novel warmed up in the sauce of a bad style. His Leben Grabbes is horribly distorted and one-sided. [195] The novel I am reading is better; some of the characters are well described, others at least not too badly, isolated situations are pretty well handled, and the people he has invented are interesting. But to judge by the first volume, he is quite lacking in any sense of proportion in the importance given to the secondary characters, and in any new, original views on history. It is nothing to him to kill off his best-drawn character at the end of the first volume, and besides he has a great preference for peculiar kinds of death. Thus, one of the characters dies of rage at the very moment when he is about to plunge his dagger into his enemy’s breast, and this same enemy is standing on the edge of the crater of Etna, where he wants to poison himself, when a crevasse opens in the mountain and he is buried in a stream of lava. The volume ends after a description of the following scene: The waves of the ocean close over the sun’s head, parting and all a very piquant, but thoroughly trite and silly ending. That must also be the end of my letter.

Addio, adieu, adiós, adeus

Yours,

Friedrich Engels

Engels To Friedrich Graeber

[Bremen, February 19, 1839]

Et Tu, Brute? Friderice Graeber, hoc est res quam nunquam de te credideriml Tu jocas ad cartas? passionaliter? 0 Tempores o moria! Res dig.nissima memoria! Unde est tua gloria? [And you too, Brutus? Friedrich Graeber, this is a thing I should never have passionately? O times, O customs! Thing most worthy of being remembered. Where is your honour?] Where is your honour and your Christianity? Est itum ad Diabolum! Quis est, qui te seduxit? Nonne verb,um meum fruxit (has borne fruit)? O fili mi, verte [Gone to the Devil! Who is it that has led you astray? Have my words borne no fruit? O my son, turn back.] otherwise I'll beat you with rod and switch, cartas abandona, fac multa bona, et vitam ag-as integram, partem recuperabis optimam! Vides amorem meum, ut spiritum faulenzendeum egi ad linguam latitmm et dic obstupatw: quinam fecit Angelum ita tollum, nonsensitatis vollum, Plenum et, plus ancora much: hoc fecit [Leave the cards, do much good, and if you live a pure life u will win back the best part. You see my love in that I have driven this spirit of idleness to Latin, and say in stupefaction: who then has made the angel so mad, so full of folly and other things? This has been done by...] excessive card-playing. Recollect yourself, you evil-doer, think what is the purpose of your existence! Robber, think of how you are sinning against everything sacred and profane! Cards! They are cut from the skin of the devil. 0 you terrible people. I think of you only with tears or gnashing of teeth. Ha, I am filled with inspiration. On the nineteenth day of the second month of 1839, on the day when midday is at twelve o'clock, a storm seized me and carried me afar and there I saw them playing cards, and then it was time to eat. To be continued.

And behold, there arose from the Orient a dreadful thunderstorm, so that the windows rattled and the hailstones came beating down, but still they went on playing. Thereat a quarrel arose and the King of the Orient marched into battle against the Prince of the Occident and midnight echoed with the cries of the combatants. And the Prince of the Sea rose up against the lands in the Orient and a battle took place in front of his town, the like of which was never before seen by men. But they went on playing. And seven spirits came down from heaven. The spirit wore a long coat and his beard came down to his chest. He was called Faust. And the second spirit had a venerable fringe of grey hair round his bald head and he called out “Woe, woe, woe!” He was called Lear. And the third spirit was of great stature and enormous to behold and his name was Wallenstein. And the fourth spirit was like the children of Anak [Sons of Anak — aboriginal giants reported in the Old Testament to have inhabited Southern Palestine] and he carried a cudgel like to the cedars of Lebanon. He was called Hercules. And the fifth was made of iron through and through and his name was written on his brow — Siegfried — and by his side strode a mighty warrior whose sword gleamed like lightning. He was the sixth and his name was Roland. And the seventh spirit carried a turban on the point of his sword and swung a banner over his head on which was written — Mio Cid. And the seven spirits knocked on the door of the players, but they paid no heed. And behold, there arose from midnight a great brightness which spread over the whole earth like an eagle, and when it was gone I saw the players no more. But written in black letters on the door was Berlin [written in Hebrew] And I was struck dumb.

If my letter to Wilhelm [196] was not sufficient proof of my madness, I hope that it will not occur to any of you now to doubt it. If this is not the case, I am willing to give you even more convincing proof.

I have just seen in the Telegraph a review of the poems of Winkler, the Barmen missionary. [197] They are trounced terribly and a mass of extracts are given which have a distinct missionary flavour. If the paper comes to Barmen, that will be the end of Gutzkow’s reputation there, which is already low. These extracts are really infinitely revolting — Pol is an angel by comparison. Lord Jesus, heal the issue of blood of my sins (an allusion to the well-known story in the Gospel. [Luke 8:43]) and a lot more like this. I am despairing more and more about Barmen. It is finished as far as literary matters are concerned. What is printed there is, at best, piffle, with the exception of the sermons. Religious things are usually nonsense. Truly, it is not without justification that Barmen and Elberfeld are cried down as obscurantist and mystic. Bremen has the same reputation and resembles them in many ways. Philistinism linked with religious zealotry, with, moreover, in Bremen’s case, a vile constitution, hinders any uplifting of the spirit, and one of the most outstanding hindrances is F. W. Krummacher. — Blank is complaining so terribly about the Elberfeld preachers, especially Kohl and Hermann, that I should like to know whether he is right. He attacks them for their dryness more than anything else, with the sole exception of Krummacher. — What the missionary writes about love is extremely comical. Look, I shall give you something like it.

The Pietist Declares His Love

Respected maiden, after struggling hard and long

Against all worldly joys, because their lure was strong,

I come to Thee to ask if Thou wouldst not wish me

In honour bound Thy lawful wedded Spouse to be.

Although I love Thee not — that were too much to ask —

I love in Thee the Lord, who —

No — it won’t do. You can’t go making satires on things like this without dragging in the most sacred things behind which these people hide themselves. I should like to see a marriage in which the man does not love his wife but Christ in his wife; and is it not an obvious question there whether he also sleeps with Christ in his wife? Where can you find nonsense like this in the Bible? In the Song of Songs it says — “How fair and how pleasant art thou, O love, for delights!” [The Song of Solomon 7:6] But, to be sure, any defence whatever of sensuousness is attacked nowadays in spite of David, Solomon and God knows whom. I can get terribly annoyed over this kind of thing. In addition, these fellows pride themselves on having the true teaching and they damn anybody who does not so much doubt what is in the Bible, as interpret it in a different way from them. It is a pretty business. If anyone should dare to say that this or that verse is an interpolation, then they'll soon go for you. Gustav Schwab is the finest chap in the world, and even orthodox, but the mystics do not think anything of him because he is not always playing them religious songs in the style of: You say I am a Christian, and in one of his poems hints at a possible understanding between rationalists and Mystics. As far as religious poetry is concerned, it is at an end for the time being until someone comes along who can give it a new impetus. With both Catholics and Protestants everything goes on in the same old humdrum way. The Catholics compose hymns about the Virgin Mary, the Protestants sing the old songs with the most prosaic words in the world. These horrible abstractions — sanctification, conversion, justification and lord knows what loci communes [platitudes] and hackneyed flourishes. Out of anger at present-day religious poetry, out of very piety, that is, one might well go over to the devil. Is our time so shabby that it is impossible for anyone to set religious poetry on to new paths? Incidentally, I think that the most contemporary kind is that which I have used in my Sturm and Florida, concerning which I ask you for the most detailed review on pain of not-receiving-any-more-poems. It is inexcusable of Wurm to hold on to the letters.

Yours,

Friedrich Engels

Engels To Hermann Engels

In Barmen

Bremen, March 11 1839

Dear Hermann,

I request Your Honour not to plague me in future with beginnings of letters such as you learned from Herr Riepe and only permit myself for the moment to remark that it is winter with us every morning and summer every midday. For in the morning the temperature is minus five degrees, while it is plus ten degrees at midday. I continue to practise my singing and composing regularly. Here is a sample of the latter:

You can sing The Blind Man to that melody or you can leave it.

March 12. I'm very glad that you will soon be getting your dog. What is the breed of the mother and what does the animal look like? His Antiquity, Herr Leupold, is now arriving at the office and I will have to strike a more serious tone, as the great Shakespeare says. A new newspaper has just come out called the Bremer Stadtbote, [Courier] edited by Albertus Meyer, who is a very great blockhead. He used lure on the happiness of peoples, child education, and other topics, and when he wanted to get his lectures printed the worthy authorities would not agree, saying it would be far too nonsensical. He has the nature of a china merchant and has been in conflict with the Unterhaltungsblatte ever since his first issue. The way they go for each other would make you die laughing. Continuation in letter to Marie.

Your loving brother

Friedrich Engels

Engels To Marie Engels

In Barmen

Bremen, March 12, 1839

Dear Marie,

(Continuation of my letter to Hermann.) The Stadtbote is full of absolute nonsense and I am writing poems about it at the office which ridicule it by always praising it to the skies, just incoherent twaddle, and I send it to the paper signed Th. Hildebrandt and they print it in all innocence. I have got one in my desk at this very moment which I am going to send in. It runs like this:

Book Wisdom

He is not wise who from his reading draws

Nothing but floods of useless erudition.

For all his learning, life’s mysterious laws

Are a closed book beyond his comprehension.

He who acquires a thorough textbook grounding

In Botany, won’t hear the grass that grows.

Nor will he ever teach true understanding

Who tells you all the dogma that he knows.

Oh, no! the germ lies hid in man’s own heart.

Who seeks the art of. life must look within.

Burning the midnight oil will not impart

The secret of emotion’s discipline.

The man is lost who hears his own heart’s voice

And spurns it, Wilfully misapprehending.

Of all your words so noble and so wise

The most profound is human understanding.

So it goes, on and on, all mockery. Usually, when I am not quite sure what to send, I get hold of the Bote and scrape something together from that. The other day I sat Karl Leupold at my desk and dictated to him a rude letter to the Bote, [198] which they received and printed with the most fantastically stupid comments. But I must go out now. So I remain

Your loving brother

Friedrich

Engels To Friedrich Graeber

[Bremen] April 8 (nisi erro [if I am not mistaken]), 1839

My dearest Fritz,

This letter — yes, you think you are going to be greatly amused by it, but no, not so much. You, who not only by making me wait so long, but by desecrating the holiest mysteries which ever remained hidden from the human genius, have clouded my visions, angered and enraged me, must suffer a special punishment. You shall be bored, and how? With an essay. And about what? About that much-talked-about sheep — contemporary literature.

What did we have before 1830? Theodor Hell and his associates, Willibald Alexis, an aged Goethe and an aged Tieck, c'est tout. Then, like a thunderclap, came the July revolution, the most splendid expression of the people’s will since the war of liberation. Goethe dies, Tieck goes to seed more and more, Hell goes to sleep, Wolfgang Menzel goes on writing stodgy criticism, but a new spirit arises in literature — with Grün and Lenau above all among the poets. Rückert acquires a new verve, Immermann acquires importance, Platen the same, but that is not enough. Heine and Börne were already fully formed characters before the July revolution, but only now are they acquiring importance and upon them is arising a new generation, which turns to its account the lives and literatures of all peoples, Gutzkow leading. In 1830, Gutzkow was still a student and worked first of all for Menzel on the Literatur-Blatt, but not for long; they did not agree in their views. Menzel turned churlish; Gutzkow wrote the notorious Wally (die Zweiflerin), and Menzel made a terrible uproar about it, accusing Gutzkow of himself holding the views expressed by Wally in the novel, and actually succeeded in getting the harmless book banned. [199] Gutzkow was joined by the admittedly unimportant Mundt, who in order to make money started all kinds of undertakings, publishing other people’s articles cum suibus [Along with his own] Beurmann, a shrewd chap and fine observer, soon joined them, and then Ludolf Wienbarg and F. Gustav Kühne, and for these five writers (nisi erro, anno 1835) Wienbarg invented the name Junges Deutschland. [200] Opposing them was Menzel, who would have done better to stay at home, since it was for that very reason that Gutzkow demolished him, and then the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung, which sees idolatry in every allegory and original sin in every expression of sensuousness (perhaps Hengstenberg was so named on the principle of lucus a non lucendo, [Grove from not being light; ancient Roman etymologists derived words often by contrast and not by resemblance] i.e., perhaps he is gelded, castrated, a eunuch? [A play on the name Hengstenberg, Hengst meaning “stallion"]). These noble people accused Young Germany of wanting the emancipation of women and the restoration of the flesh and wanting as a side-line to overthrow a couple of kingdoms and become Pope and Emperor in one person. Of all these charges, only the one concerning the emancipation of women (in the Goethean sense) had any grounds, and it could only be brought against Gutzkow, who later disavowed the idea (as high-spirited, youthful over-haste). Through their standing by one another, their aims became more and more sharply defined; it was the “ideas of the time” which came to consciousness in them. These ideas of the century (so Kühne and Mundt said) are not anything demagogic or anti-Christian as they are made out to be, but are based on the natural right of every man and extend to everything in the present conditions which conflicts with it. Thus these ideas include: above all, participation by the people in the administration of the state, that is, constitutional matters; further, emancipation of the Jews, abolition of all religious compulsion, of all hereditary aristocracy, etc. Who can have anything against that? The Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung and Menzel have it on their consciences that they have so cried down the honour of Young Germany. As early as 1836-37, among these writers, who were bound together by unity of purpose, but not by any special association, the idea was clear and definite; by the high quality of their writing they won for themselves the recognition of the other, mostly wretched, writers and attracted all the young talents to themselves. Their poets are Anastasius Grün and Karl Beck; their critics are, first and foremost, Gutzkow, Kühne, Laube and, among the younger ones, Ludwig Wihl, Levin Schücking and others; they also try their hand at the novel, drama, etc. Recently, however, differences have arisen between Gutzkow and Mundt along with Kühne and Laube. Both have supporters — Gutzkow the younger people like Wihl, Schücking and others, Mundt only a few of the younger ones. Beurmann is keeping fairly neutral, so is the young, very talented Dingelstedt, but they incline very much towards Gutzkow. As a result of the quarrel Mundt has lost all his credit, and that of Kühne has fallen considerably because he is so contemptible that he denigrates everything Gutzkow writes. Gutzkow, on the other hand, behaves very nobly and dwells only on the great love between Mundt and Kühne, who engage in mutual praise. Gutzkow’s latest article in the Jahrbuch der Literatur shows that he is a quite extraordinarily honourable fellow. [201]

We have very few active writers apart from Young Germany. The Swabian school [202] has been passive ever since 1820. The Austrians Zedlitz and Grffiparzer are of little interest because they write in such a strange fashion (Zedlitz Spanish style, Grillparzer antique); among the lyric poets Lenau inclines towards Young Germany despite his ecclesiastical material, Frankl is an agreeable Uhland in miniature, K. E. Ebert is quite Bohemianised. The Saxons — Hell, Heller, Herlosssohn, Morvell, Wachsmann, Tromlitz — oh my God, they lack wit; the Marteau lot [203] and the Berliners (to whom you do not belong) are vile, the Rhinelanders — Lewald is by far the best writer of entertainment literature; his Europa is readable, but the reviews in it are terrible — Hub, Schnezler and Co. are not worth much, Freiligrath will yet turn to Young Germany one day, you'll see, Duller too, if he does not go to the dogs before then, and Rückert stands there like an old father and stretches out his hands in benediction over everyone.

April 9. So there is the moving essay. What shall 1, poor devil, do now? Go on swotting on my own? Don’t feel like it. Turn loyal? The devil if I wills Stick to Saxon mediocrity — ugittugitt (oh God, oh God — local expression of disgust). So I must become a Young German, or rather, I am one already, body and soul, I cannot sleep at night, all because of the ideas of the century. When I am at the post-office and look at the Prussian coat of arms, I am seized with the spirit of freedom. Every time I look at a newspaper I hunt for advances of freedom. They get into my poems and mock at the obscurantists in monk’s cowls and in ermine. But with their fine phrases — world-weariness, world-historic, the anguish of the Jews, etc. — I will have no truck, for they are already outdated. And I'm telling you, Fritz, when you become a pastor you can be as orthodox as you like, but if ever you become a pietist who rails against Young Germany and regards the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung as his oracle, then, truly, I'm telling you you'll have me to deal with. You must become a pastor in Gemarke a and drive out the damned, consumptive, sit-by-the-fire pietism which Krummacher has brought to such a bloom. Of course they will call you a heretic, but let one of them come and prove by the Bible or by reason that you are wrong. Meanwhile, Blank is a wicked rationalist and throws the whole of Christianity overboard, what will it lead to? Well, I have never been a pietist. I have been a mystic for a while, but those are tempi passati. I am now an honest, and in comparison with others very liberal, super-naturalist. How long I shall remain such I don’t know, but I hope to remain one, even though inclining now more, now less towards rationalism. All this will have to be settled. Adios, Friderice, Write more quickly and write a lot. Tuus.

Do hêst de mî dubbelt. [There you have me doubled]

Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels

Engels To Marie Engels

In Barmen

Bremen, April 10, 1839

Dear Marie,

Pardon me for not writing to you for so long. Now I'll tell you something nice. On Good Friday, the local Burgomaster, His Magnificence Dr. Groening, died and the election of a new one took place a week ago. The Right Honourable Senator Dr. J. D. Noltenius got the appointment and last Friday there was a big procession for his installation. First came the eight gentlemen servants, two of whom are at the service of every Burgomaster, each wearing short porcelain-white breeches, fine hose and bright red frock-coats, swords at their sides, and tricorns on their heads. Following them came the Burgomasters with His Magnificence Dr. Smidt, the shrewdest of them all and as good as King of Bremen, well to the fore; then Herr Dr. Duntze, who was muffled up to his chin in fur and who always takes a thermometer with him to the meetings of the Senate. Then the senators, preachers and citizens, some 600-800 people, perhaps more, who all went into a house or several houses where they ate, that is, they were all given macaroons, cigars and wine, ate as much as they could hold and crammed their pockets full. Youngsters gathered before the doors and made a din, and when anyone came out they all shouted after him, “hêt îst, hêt îst!” [Has eaten, has eaten!] They also did this to Alderman Hase, who turned round majestically and said: “I am Herr Alderman Hase.” Then they shouted: “Ollermann Hase hêt îst, Ollermann Hase hêt îst” And you can imagine how this strut of the Bremen state set the struts of his own body in motion in order to save himself. Last Saturday a new senator was elected in Dr. Noltenius’ place; Dr. Mohr received the honour and his tuck-in took place on Monday. It is the custom on these occasions that one of the new senator’s relatives has to drink the pig [das Schwein trinken], i. e., he has to drink himself under the table, which difficult task was carried out by Herr H. A. Heineken, a broker, to the satisfaction of all. For a great poet says:

To enjoy the weariness of life with melancholy

Is virtue and conceptions

Marie: “But Friedrich, how can you write such stupid stuff? There’s neither rhyme nor reason in it.” Friedrich: “I can’t help it” I have to fill the page somehow — aha, I've just remembered something. Last Sunday I went out riding with Neviandt and Roth, and Neviandt brought along a little Englishman, the size of Anna. We were hardly outside the town before the Englishman got hold of a whip and walloped the horse, so that it lashed out with forelegs and hind-legs. He remains sitting on it calmly, the animal jumps about in all directions, but he isn’t thrown. Then he dismounts to pick up his whip, which he had dropped, and, oh, magnificent stupidity, leaves the horse all by itself, and the horse wastes no time to think before doing a bunk. He runs after it, Neviandt dismounts and goes after him, but returns unsuccessful, John and the horse are gone. We ride to Horn, have a drop, and have scarcely started back before Mr. John comes galloping up pleine carrière [At full speed] The horse had been stopped on the way, he had mounted, ridden it back to the stable and got himself a new whip. So we turn round. Neviandt and I have rather wild horses and as we begin to trot a little Mr. John shoots past me at a mad gallop. My horse gets a fancy and goes off in high style. I twigged what it was up to, calmly let it run and tried to slow it down now and again, but when I'd just got it out of its mad rush, John shot past me and it was worse than ever. Waving his hat he kept shouting: “My horse runs better than yours, hurrah!” Finally his horse puffed up in front of a cart and behold, my Norma also stopped. If only the silly horses knew that their riders enjoy it when they rush off like that. I wasn’t in the least afraid and managed quite well. Adieu.

Yours,

Friedrich

Engels To Friedrich Graeber

In Berlin

[Bremen, about April 23-May 1, 1839]

Fritz Graeber, I am very busy at present with philosophy and critical theology. When you get to be eighteen years of age and become acquainted with Strauss, the rationalists and the Kirchen-Zeitung then you must either read everything without thinking or begin to doubt your Wuppertal faith. I cannot understand how the orthodox preachers can be so orthodox since there are some quite obvious contradictions in the Bible. How can you square the two genealogies of Joseph, Mary’s husband, the different accounts of the institution of the Eucharist (“this is my blood”; this is “the new testament in my blood” [Mark 14:24; Luke 22:20]), of the men possessed by the devil (one says simply that the devil left him, the other that he entered into the swine), the statement that the mother of Jesus went out to look for her son, whom she believed to be mad, although she had conceived him miraculously, etc., with the authenticity, the literal authenticity of the Evangelists? And the discrepancy in the “Our Father”, in the sequence of the miracles, John’s peculiarly deep interpretation, through which, however, the form of the narrative is obviously obscured — what about that? Christi ipsissima verba [Christ’s very own words] of which the orthodox boast come out differently in every gospel. Not to speak of the Old Testament. But nobody tells you this in dear old Barmen; there one is taught according to quite different principles. And on what does the old orthodoxy base itself? On nothing but — the old routine. Where does the Bible demand literal belief in its teachings, in its accounts? Where does a single apostle declare that everything he says is directly inspired? This is not surrendering reason in obedience to Christ, as the orthodox people affirm; no, it is a killing of the divine in man to replace it with the dead letter. I am therefore just as good a super-naturalist as I was before, but I have cast off orthodoxy. Thus I cannot now or ever believe that a rationalist who seeks with all his heart to do as much good as possible, should be eternally damned. That is at odds with the Bible itself, for it is written that no one is damned on account of original sin but only because of his own sins. But if a person resists original sin with all his might and does what he can, then his actual sins are only a necessary consequence of original sin and therefore they cannot damn him.

April 24. Ha, ha, ha! Do you know who wrote the article in the Telegraph? The author is the writer of these lines, but I advise you not to say anything about it, I could get into a hell of a lot of trouble. I know about Kohl, Ball and Hermann almost exclusively from reviews by W. Blank and Strücker, which I copied almost word for word. But that Kohl talks nonsense and Hermann is a feeble pietist, I know from my own ears. D. is Dürholt, office boy at Wittenstein’s in Unterbarmen. For the rest I am pleased with myself for not having said anything in the article that I cannot prove. There is only one thing which annoys me: I haven’t presented Stier in as important a light as I ought to have done. He is not to be disregarded as a theologian. Aren’t you astonished at my knowledge of the characters, especially of Krummacher and Döring (what I said about his sermon I heard from P. Jonghaus), and of literature? The remarks about Freiligrath must have been really good, otherwise Gutzkow would have cut them out. But the style is atrocious. — By the way, the article seems to have caused a sensation. I put all five of you under obligation on your word of honour not to tell anyone that I am the author. Understood? As far as abuse is concerned, I heaped most of it on you and Wilhelm because I had the letters to you right in front of me when the urge to abuse somebody overcame me. F. Plümacher especially must not get to know that I wrote the article. What a lad that Ball is though! He is to preach on Good Friday, does not feel like studying and so learns by heart a sermon he finds in the Menschenfreund and gives that. Krummacher is in church, the sermon seems familiar to him, and it finally occurs to him that he had preached that sermon himself on Good Friday 1832. Other people, who have read the sermon, also recognise it. Ball is called upon to account for it and must confess. Signum est, Ballum non tantum abhorrere a Krummachero, ut Tu quidem dixisti. [This is an indication that Ball has not such an aversion for Krummacher as you indeed said] I am very much obliged to you for the detailed review of Fawt. The treatment of this piece certainly bears the stamp of that wretch Raupach. [204] This low cur pokes his nose into everything and ruins not only Schiller by using his images and ideas over and over again in his tragedies, but also Goethe by maltreating him. I doubt very much if my poems will have a big sale; more likely they'll have a stinking one, since they are going for waste paper and bumf. I could not read what you wrote in red ink, so shall send you neither 5 silver groschen nor cigars. This time you will get either the canzone or part of the comedy which I have begun but not finished. Now I must go to my singing lesson. Adieu.

April 27

Fragments of a Tragicomedy

Horned Siegfried

I

The Palace of King Sieghard

Council Meeting

Sieghard

So you are gathered here again,

Strong members of our wide domain,

Around our lofty royal throne,

And all are present, save our son.

He’s in the woods on the rampage;

It’s time he learned to be his age.

He comes not to this cabinet

Where morning, noon and night we sweat.

Instead of hearing wise men’s words,

He goes and listens to the birds;

Instead of studying state affairs,

He’s after wrestling bouts with bears.

The only thing he wants us for

Is to demand we start a war.

We would have yielded to his plea

Had God, in His sagacity,

Not given us to realise

Such rashness would be most unwise.

Why let the country go to pot

By humouring the silly clot?

Councillor

All that Your Majesty has said

Hits it, as usual, on the head.

But grant your simple servant leave

To speak and say what I believe.

The ways of men are manifold;

The boy is but eighteen years old.

He has the urge to hunt and fight;

Wisdom will come with time all right.

Young courage ever seeks to roam,

But Wisdom quietly stays at home.

Young courage all too soon is tamed,

Its pride and strength are quickly lamed.

‘hen it returns to Wisdom’s door

And there finds happiness once more.

So let him, with your royal compliance,

Go fight with dragons and with giants.

The years will catch him up and get

The better of him anyway;

And so will life: they'll teach him yet.

He will heed Wisdom’s words one day,

Siegfried (entering)

And must I bid farewell, O Forest, to your trees?

No king’s fare can excel

Your sylvan luxuries.

Where but in wooded valleys

Can wild game run so free?

This very golden palace

Envies your greenery.

You'd scold me, Sire, as I can see

For roaming far afield once more.

Must I endure such misery

Each time I chase the fleeting boar?

Since sports and hunting both are banned,

Give me a charger and a sword

That I may fare to some far land,

As I so often have implored.

Sieghard

Do you persist in this obsession?

When will you ever show some sense?

Clearly, you'll never learn discretion

Until you curb your insolence.

But since ‘tis best to be compliant

And let you have your will, it seems —

Go: let the cudgel of some giant

Awake you from your foolish dreams.

Take sword and steed, and get you hence.

Don’t come back till you've learnt some sense.

Siegfried

What do I hear? A sword and steed!

Why ask for helm and coat of mail?

Why ask for pages? All I need

Is bold intent that cannot fail.

Swift through the forest’s wild ravine

The boisterous mountain torrent roars;

And, laying low the helpless pine,

He cuts himself his lonely course.

Like to that mountain stream I'll be,

Taking my course alone and free.

Councillor

Sire, be not heavy in your heart

That our young hero must depart.

The torrent comes to level ground,

And trees no longer crash all round.

Across the plain it finds its way

To fecundate the thirsty land.

The torrent’s fury turns to play

And ends by sinking in the sand.

Siegfried

Must I needs tarry longer

These castle walls about?

A trusty blade hangs yonder,

A charger neighs without.

Come, you stone pillar, yield

That shining blade so true.

I hasten far afield.

Father, farewell to you!

(Exit.)

II

A Forge in the Forest

Enter Siegfried. Enter the Master Smith

Master Smith

This is the mighty forge that makes

That lovely thing, the Long Short Story.

With poems, it fills the Almanacks

In all its celebrated glory.

And here we hammer magazines

Where verse and criticism unite.

The fire-glow of our smithy shines

Unceasing, morning, noon and night.

But first, take food, and wine, and rest.

Apprentice, pray escort our guest.

(Exit Siegfried with Apprentice.)

Master Smith

Now, journeymen, I'm right behind you.

To work, and raise a goodly din!

Strike on the anvil true, and mind you

Beat those novellas long and thin!

Heat up those lyrics in the forge;

On living fire let them gorge,

Then turn them out in one big mess

The public’s maw is bottomless.

And if there isn’t iron enough,

A tip from one who knows his stuff;

Three heroes of Scott’s, three women of Goethe’s,

A knight from Fouqué with his steely-hard strength,

Are more than sufficient for twelve story writers

To spin out novellas of suitable length.

For lyrics, Uhland’s verse affords

A treasure-store of flowery words.

So hammer with a right good zest:

Who turns the most out is the best!

Siegfried (returning)

Master, my thanks! The wine was good.

I quaffed twelve measures from the wood.

Master

(Damned scoundrel!) Kind of you to say

How much you liked my good Rhine wine.

Please be so kind to step this way

And meet this gallant team of mine.

Now here we have the very best;

He churns out tales, at my behest,

Both lewd and moral; his praises sang

None other than the great Wolfgang

Menzel, who in Stuttgart sits;

His name, it is Herr von Tromlitz.

And here is one almost as good;

He also is of noble blood:

The “C” of Wachsmann — a big one, mind —

His equal would be hard to find.

There’s not a single almanack

In which he hasn’t left his tracks.

Composing tales at breathless pace

He flings them in the public’s face.

A man of sweated toil is he, -

He hasn’t done a thing for verse,

But thanks to him, as most agree,

The public’s taste was never worse.

Taste I regard with trepidation,

For taste could mean our ruination.

Third, Robert Heller: famous due to

A shine as on I plate of pewter.

The public think it’s silver plate;

We don’t mind if they learn too late.

He sets himself a slower pace

And strives for characterisation.

He’s dealt a right smack in the face

To mystics — his abomination.

You know, the 4 Evangelists

Were only silly pietists.

He’s brought them down a peg or two,

And stripped a halo off or two,

And made them tea-time fare for us.

Just read The Sisters of Lazarus.

He also writes with grace and charm,

His prickly Roses will confirm.

Now here is one whose chief attainment

Is in scholastic entertainment.

Friedrich Nork, hairsplitter, poet.

The greatest — thinks the world should know it.

He tells his lies in lovely songs

And proves, from Oriental tongues,

That you're an Ass, Elijah the sun,

And East was where all speech began.

But don’t look for, ;anything sensibly logical,

Thoroughly reasoned or etymological.

Next is honest Heriosssohn,

Truly deserving of a throne:

A novelist and lyric-writer,

Piffie’s panegyric-writer.

His Comet Star, is something rare,

And read by nitwits everywhere.

Next, under Winkler’s guiding hand,

The Abend-Zeitung’s noble band.

Von Grosscreutz, Faber, and Thuringus —

What magic thrills those names can bring us!

But what more need have I to praise?

The public, with its curious ways,

Has long since raised them heaven-high

To join the stars up in the sky.

There are some others, absentees;

They're gathering deadwood from the trees.

No need to name the apprentice swarm:

They're all still rather weak of arm.

I hope they will, in time, make good,

Given one drop of novelist’s blood.

Siegfried

Good Master Smith, who may you be?

Master

Saxon literature’s spirit you see

Incarnate in my nothingness.

If you would know what I can do,

Observe this arm’s sinewiness

And how I hammer hard and true.

You look a likely lad, ‘ no shirker.

Why don’t you join us for a spell?

Siegfried

Done, Master! It would suit me well

To join you as a common worker.

Master

You can be one of Theodor Hell’s.

Go, try your hand at 2 nouvelles.

Siegfried

Ha! With bare fists I brought

The oak-trees to the ground;

Before my fierce onslaught,

The savage bear went down;

Wrestling the bull in rut,

I brought him to his knees;

Why, then, should I not

Swing at this art with ease?

No learner’s tasks for me —

No, not at any price!

Apprentice I won’t be.

Here is my masterpiece.

Hand me those bars, there. Neatly

I've snapped them, every one.

They're pulverised completely,

My blacksmith’s work is done!

Theodor Hell

Here, steady! What’s the big idea?

I'll hit you like that iron, d'you hear!

Siegfried

Why make that babbling sound?

Why take it all so ill?

Stop rolling on the ground.

Stand up, man, if you will!

Theodor Hell

Oh, help, oh, help!

Master

Young journeyman,

You strike your fellow hands, I see.

Quick march! Get moving — understand?

Unless you want your hide well tanned.

Siegfried

You're clearly just the man for me!

(Throws him down.)

Master

Ah, woe, woe! etc.

(Siegfried is sent into the forest, slays the dragon and, on returning, the Master;

scatters the journeymen in all directions, and goes away.)

III

In the Forest

Siegfried

O'er yonder, where that coppice grows,

I hear two men exchanging blows.

They're drawing near — such foolish pother;

They'll never silence one another!

I thought them giants in all their strength

With lances of a pine-tree’s length,

Not two Professors, all skin and bones,

Pelting each other with learned tomes.

(Enter Leo and Michelet.)

Leo

Stand up and fight, Hegelian whelp!

Michelet

Not with you, Bigot — you're past all help!

Leo

Here, take the Bible — smack on the head!

Michelet

Take Hegel, miserable drip, instead!

Leo

Blasphemer, I throw your Hegel back!

Michelet

This Bible will give you a pain in the neck!

Leo

What more do you want, you old corpse in the attic!

Michelet

You mean yourself, unbridled fanatic!

Siegfried

Pray tell me how this quarrel began.

Leo

Why, that foul-mouthed Hegelian

Would get the Bible in disgrace.

He really must be taught his place.

Michelet

Unpolished boor, and liar too,

He won’t let Hegel have his duel

Siegfried

And so you throw at one another

The very books that cause the bother?

Leo

It’s all the same. No Christian he.

Michelet

As good and better, believe you me.

It’s arrant nonsense, what he says.

Siegfried

Why don’t you go your separate ways?

Who started off this quarrel here?

Leo

I did. I say so without fear.

I fought for God and in God’s name.

Siegfried

Well, then, the horse you rode was lame.

He will never kill Christianity,

You won’t rescue it from calamity.

Let him pursue his chosen bent:

You may teach something different.

No more the Almighty’s name misuse

In your blind rage and wild abuse.

Now you go this way, you go that,

And stop exchanging tit for tat!

(Exeunt Leo and Michelet in different directions.)

Siegfried

Although they're peaceful, learned men,

I've never seen such fierce defiance;

They fight with all their might and main,

Though schooled in many a noble science.

But hunger plagues me now, and so

Down to the valley I shall go

To look for house or castle there,

Or failing them, my trusty bow

Will furnish me with ample fare.

That is as far as I've got. I have left out the bits of narration and only copied out the introduction and the satires. This is the last piece. Now it is the turn of the King of Bavaria a to be dealt with — but here it comes to a standstill. The thing lacks complexity and rounding off. Please ask Wurm to see about the poems for the Musenalmanach I must finish now, the post is going.

Yours,

Friedrich Engels May 1, 39

Engels To Marie Engels

In Barmen

[Bremen] April 28, 1839

Dear Marie,

You too are only going to get a little from me today so that I can get on to my comedy which I want to send you. It is quite true that the gentlemen ate six crates of macaroons. You can believe it or not, just as you like, but there were about 600 people.

Serves you right that you've got nettle-rash. Your fingers are always itching because you want to do something silly. Now you've got something to itch about. You are an old itching machine, and always will be.

And I advise you not to leave any empty spaces in your letter, otherwise I'll fill them with caricatures so as not to get out of practice.

Dios, my dear Marie.

Friedrich

This scrawl is called stenography.

The Dressing-up. Comedy in I act, for Marie

Scene 1

(The living-room. Mother is sitting by the table and heroine Emil and Hedwig. Marie is sitting by the stove reading; Rudolf is running about annoying everybody.)

Mother: Marie, stop reading. That’s not a book for you. All the stuff you read, it can’t be good for you.

Marie: Oh Mother. just this one story, then you can have the book back.

Emil: Mother, what does the word Kewatroze mean?

Mother: Oh, you mean quatorze — fourteen. You learnt that a long time ago. You mustn’t always forget everything again. Hedwig! Really, the child is running up to Marie and fighting with Rudolf. Hedwig, will you do your work? You're all naughty today.

(Enter Anna and Laura Kampermann.)

Anna: There. Mother, we've done our work and now we are going upstairs to dress up. That’s what we're going to do.

Mother: All right, but don’t make too much noise.

Hedwig: Mother, I can’t get this sum right.

Mother: Oh, just think a bit. I already did it with you once. Don’t be so scatter-brained!

Hedwig (starts to cry): But I still can’t get it right.

Anna: Mother, do you want to dress up as well?

Mother: What did you say? Go away. Leave me in peace. Always Mother this and Mother that. It’s unbearable.

Anna: Tell me, Mother, do you want to?

Mother: Yes, yes. Go on, away, with you.

(Exeunt Anna and Laura with shouts of delight.)

Marie: Here is the book, Mother. I've finished the story. I want to dress up too. Tell me, what shall I put on?

Mother: Oh, I've just been telling Anna to be quiet, are you starting now?

Rudolf (falls down and shouts): Oh Mother, o — oh Mother.

Mother: What’s the matter? (Goes to him.)

Emil: Mother, what does this sentence mean?

Hedwig: Mother, here’s a very funny figure.

Mother: Will you be quiet? All of you going on at once. I can’t bear it!

Emil: Mother, tell me. Won’t you help me? Oh Mother, Mother, I must go to the A. B. C.”

Mother: Then go.

Marie: Is it true, Mother, that you want to dress up?

Mother: Nonsense. Does it still hurt, Rudolf?

Hedwig: Yes, Mother. He has a big bruise on his head. What is this figure, Mother?

Marie: But you must dress up.

(Enter Anna.)

Anna: Mother, Laura is in the A. B. C. and Emil is standing outside brawling and banging on the door.

Mother: You too? I've got no time now.

(Enter Luise.)

Luise: Madam, Wendel is going to Gemarke. Have you got anything for him?

Mother: Yes, let me think. Be quiet, all of you. Rudolf, stop whining.

Marie: Anna, didn’t Mother say she wanted to dress up too?

Anna: Yes, Mother, you did.

Mother: Will you all be quiet. Out you go.

Emil (enters crying): Oh Mother, Laura wouldn’t let me into the lavatory and so I've... I've done something in....

All: He’s done something in his trousers!

Mother. That’s all I needed. Can’t we have a moment’s peace? All of you shouting at once. (Takes a horsewhip.) There, Emil, one, two, three, Anna, Marie, out with you. Tell Wendel to come himself.

(Enter two masked figures, a man and a woman.)

Mother. What’s this? Here’s something else now.

(The man runs to Mother and takes the horsewhip gently away from her. All leap about for joy. The woman stand near Mother and places a pince-nez on her nose.)

Mother. Nonsense! But you can’t help laughing at it. (/Enter Wendel.) Wendel, here’s a letter for the post. And this for the Cleners. Here’s the money for Hühnerbein the tailor. That’s all. (Exit Wendel. Mother sits down wearing a pince-nez.) Emil, you go first and get washed.

(The masked figures seize Emil, who is standing there with his mouth open, and chase him out of the room with shouts and blows.)

Hedwig: Oh Mother, now I see I've done two more sums than I am supposed to. Hurray!

Marie: Listen, Mother. Will you dress up now too?

Mother: Oh, nonsense

Marie: But listen, Mother, I want to tell you something.

(Says something in Mother’s ear.)

Mother: No, it’s impossible.

Marie: No, it’s not. You'll see. (Exeunt all.)

(Two hours later. Hedwig is wearing Rudolf’s clothes and Rudolf is wearing Hedwig’s, and both are wearing masks which they undo for each other. The others follow one after the other, all very curiously disguised.)

Hermann: Oh August,’ I have surely got the longest nose! Look, boy, I even have a beard like the one our Fritz once had!

August: But I have such nice green cheeks and a grey beard, and my nose is also much redder!

Marie: Look, Laura, I'm a nice boy, aren’t I? You are such a tiny thing under the hat, I am much bigger than you are, and my fancy paper hat is also bigger!

(Enter Mother in an old dressing-gown with Father’s fur dressing-gown over it, and a peaked nightcap on top of her bonnet, and the pince-nez on her nose.)

All shout: Oh Mother, Mother.

Hermann: August, that’s not my mother.

Mother: Will you be quiet, boy, and sit down at the table, all of you, until he comes.

(Pause. Enter Father, looks round astonished until at last all take their masks off and the children run about shouting and screaming for joy. Finale: a gigantic feast.)

I could have gone on with it but time will not allow. The post goes in half an hour, so I'll close.

Your brother

Friedrich

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber

In Berlin

[Bremen, about April 28-30, 1839]

Guglielmo carissimo! My very dear Wilhelm, I found your letter amongst those of the others and its words were sweet to me. But I cannot accept as either authentic or competent the judgment and the sentence passed by the five students. — For it is an act of kindness on my part when I enclose poems in my letters to you [in Greek].

Since you don’t wish to criticise St. Hanor, Florida and Sturm, you don’t deserve to get any more verses. Your assertion of intellectual weakness is in contradiction to your customary veracity. It will do no harm to liberty if my mind inclines towards Young Germany, for this is not a group of writers, like the romantic, demagogic and other schools, not a closed society; what they want and work for, is that the ideas of our century — the emancipation of the Jews and of the slaves, general constitutionalism and other good ideas — shall become part of the flesh and blood of the German people. Since these ideas are not far from the trend of my own mind, why should I hold aloof? For it is not as you say. [in Latin]: surrendering oneself to a tendency, sed: joining it; sequitur a continuation in my room, and, in writing a polyglottic letter, I will take now the English language, But no, my beautiful Italian, lovely and pure as the zephyr, with words like flowers from the loveliest of gardens, and Spanish, a language like the wind in the trees, and Portuguese, like the rustling of the sea on a shore of flowers and meadows, and French, like the quick murmur of a fountain, very amusing, and Dutch, like the smoke from a pipe of tobacco, very cosy [in mixture of French, Dutch, Spanish]: but our beloved German — that is all at once.

Like to the long, long waves of the sea is the language of Homer;

Aeschylus into the valley hurls one rock after another.

Tongue of the Romans — thus mighty Caesar addresses the legions,

Grasping the words that lie in profusion like angular boulders

Scattered around; from them there soars a Cyclopean building;

Whereas the new Italian tongue is graceful and charming,

Setting the poet in the middle of Earth’s most beautiful garden;

Petrarch filled cornucopias; Ariosto wove his bay-wreath.

Language of Spain: oh, hear how aloft in the leaves of the tree-top

Reigns the tremendous wind, and tremendous songs of the ancients

Swell and resound in its roar, and the grapes that hang from the vine-branch

Climbing the trunk of the tree, all swing to and fro in the leafage.

Portugal’s language — the murmur of waves on the flower — studded coastline,

Where in the reeds may be heard how Syrinx sighs with the Zephyr.

Hark to the tongue of the Franks. it runs, an exuberant streamlet,

Merrily taking its course and smoothing the obstinate sandstone

Under the rippling flow of its chattering, garrulous wavelets.

Language of England, all this time weather-beaten and grass-grown

Monument of great giants, that the brambles covered for all that,

Round it screams and howls the storm that would topple it over.

Ah, but the German tongue, it booms like the surf of the breakers

Washing the jagged-edged coral that carries the fairest of islands;

Towards it thunder the long, long waves of the music of Homer;

There, too, crash the gigantic rocks that Aeschylus tumbled;

There you will see the Commander-in-Chief’s Cyclopean building;

There you will see the fragrant garden of beautiful flowers;

Mighty the sounds that swell from the midst of the leaves in the tree-top;

Syrinx is heard in the reeds, and the rivulets polish the sandstone;

Many a giant building stands with the wind screaming round it:

Such is the German language, eternal and woven with wonders.

I wrote down these hexameters ex tempore, and I hope they'll make the nonsense on the previous page, out of which they came, more bearable to you. But discuss them as something extemporary.

April 29. To proceed with your letter in consistent continuation, the weather is marvellous today so that you, posito caso aequalitatis temporalis, are probably and rightly cutting all your lectures today. I wish I were with you. — I have probably already written to you that I have been venting my wit on the Bremer Stadtboteb under the name of Theodor Hildebrand; I have given it up now with the following letter.

Dear Bremen Courier,

Please don’t be offended If I've made you the laughing-stock of town. Remember, friend, that folk have always tended To ridicule what’s patently unsound.

Your sunshine days have very nearly ended

In the three months that you've been trotting round.

Have you been saying things you didn’t ought,

To give yourself such food for afterthought?

My poems cost little effort when I did them;

The donkey work was almost wholly done.

I took your articles and parodied them;

The subject-matter came from you alone.

Simply subtract the rhyme-schemes and the rhythm —

The image that remains is all your own.

Rage, if you like, at your respectful and

Obedient servant,

Theodor Hildebrand

You, too, should begin to write a little, either in verse or in prose, and then send things to the Berliner Conversationsblatt, if it still exists, or to the Gesellschafter. Later, you take it up more seriously, write short stories, which you get printed in magazines, then by themselves, you get a reputation, are acclaimed as a gifted, witty narrator. I see you all again, Heuser a great composer, Wurm writing profound studies on Goethe and the developments of the time, Fritz becoming a famous preacher, Jonghaus composing religious poems, you writing witty short stories and critical essays, and me — becoming the town poet of Barmen to replace Lieutenant Simons of shabbily treated memory (in Cleve). — As a further piece of poetry for you, there is also the song on the sheet for the Musenalmanach, which I don’t feel like copying out again. Perhaps I'll write another one besides. Today (April 30), because of the magnificent weather, I sat in the garden from 7 in the morning to half past 8, smoked and read the Lusiade until I had to go to the office. There’s no better way of reading than in a garden on a clear spring morning, with a pipe in your mouth, and the rays of the sun on your back. This afternoon I'll continue this pursuit with the Old German Tristan, and his sweet reflections on love. Tonight I'm going to the Ratsheller where our Herr Pastore is treating us to the Rhine wine which he has been given — in duty bound — by the new Burgomaster. In such stupendous weather I always get an immense longing for the Rhine and its vineyards, but what can I do about it? Write a couple of verses at most. I am willing to bet that W. Blank has written telling you that [I,] wrote the articles in the Telegraph and

that’s why you were all so angry about it. The scene is in Barmen and you can imagine what it is. — I have just had a letter from W. Blank in which he says that the article is causing a frantic uproar in Elberfeld. Dr. Runkel attacks it in the Elberfelder Zeitung, accusing me of falsehoods. I want to let him be given a hint that he should point out to me just one single falsehood, which he cannot, because everything I wrote was based on proven data which I have from eye-witnesses and ear-witnesses. Blank sent me the paper, which I at once dispatched to Gutzkow with the request to go on keeping my name secret. Krummacher declared recently in a sermon that the earth stands still and the sun rotates around it, and the fellow dares to trumpet this to the world on this April 21, 1839, and then he says that pietism does not lead the world back to the Middle Ages. It is scandalous. He should be expelled, or one day he will yet become Pope before you know, and then may a saffron-yellow thunderstorm strike him dead. Dios lo sabe, God knows what will become of Wuppertal. Adios. Yours, expecting a speedy reply or not sending any more poems,

Friedrich Engels

Engels To Marie Engels

In Barmen

Bremen, May 23, 1839

Dear Marie,

Now I ride out every Sunday in the country with R. Roth. Last Monday we went to Vegesack and Blumenthal and just when we wanted to have a look at the famous Bremer Schweiz (this is a very small strip of land with small sand-hills), an enormous pall of haze came down like a cloud and in five minutes it was almost quite dark, so that we were unable to enjoy the so-called beautiful view. —

But on Whit Monday it is really lively in these parts. Everybody goes out of town and it is dead quiet in Bremen, but at the town gates you see procession after procession of carriages, riders and walkers. And such a dust, it is terrible. For the roads are covered with sand to a depth of half a yard and of course it all goes up into the air. A broker called Jan Krusbecker has just arrived and I'll draw him for you.

He looks exactly like this. He has eyes like rockets and an always half-melancholy, half-smiling air. Adieu.

Your brother

Friedrich

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 448

Written: May 24-June15, 1839

First published: in considerably abridged in Die neue Rundschau, 9. Heft, Berlin, 1913, and in full in the book: F. Engels, Schriften der Frühzeit, Berlin, 1920

Bremen, May 24-June 15, 1839

My dear William,

Today is May 24, and still not a line from any of you. You are again qualifying for non-receipt of poems. I don’t understand you. Nevertheless, you shall have contributions on present-day literature.

Collected Works of Ludwig Börne. Vols. 1 and 2. Dramaturgische Blätter. — Börne, the great fighter for freedom and justice, is concerned here with questions of aesthetics. And here too he is in his element; what he says is so precise and clear, coming from such a true feeling for beauty and demonstrated so convincingly, that there can be no question of contradiction. It is all flooded in a sea of the most exuberant wit, and here and there, the firm and sharp ideas of freedom rise out of it like rocks. Most of these reviews (for that is what the book is made up of) were written at the time when the plays discussed had just appeared, that is, at a time when critical judgments on them were still blindly and hesitatingly groping about. But Börne’s vision penetrated to the innermost threads of the action. The most excellent are his criticisms of Schiller’s Tell, an essay which for more than twenty years has opposed the usual view without being refuted, precisely because it is irrefutable. [205] — Immermann’s Cardenio and Hofer, Raupach’s Isidor und Olga, Clauren’s Wollmarkt, with which other interests are connected, Houwald’s Leuchtturm and Bild, his criticism of which is so devastating that nothing, absolutely nothing, remains, and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. He reveals himself throughout as a great man who stirred up a controversy the consequences of which are still not to be foreseen, and these two volumes would already ensure Börne a place alongside Lessing. But he became a Lessing in a different field; may Karl Beck follow him as his Goethe!

Nächte. Gepanzerte Lieder by Karl Beck

I am a Sultan, driven by storms that blow,

My warrior hosts are armoured forms of song,

And grief has laid a turban on my brow

With many mysteries its folds among.

[from Der Sultan]

If such images are already contained in the second verse of a prologue, what will the book itself be like? If a youngster of twenty has such ideas, what kind of song will the mature man sing? — Karl Beck is a poetic talent without equal since Schiller. I find a remarkable affinity between Schiller’s Räuber and Beck’s Nächte, the same ardent spirit of freedom, the same unrestrained fantasy, the same youthful exuberance, the same mistakes. Schiller strove for freedom in the Räuber, which was an earnest warning to his servile age. But at that time such a striving could not yet take a definite form. In Young Germany, we now have a definite, systematic trend. Karl Beck comes forward and calls loudly to his age to recognise this trend, and to join it. Benedictus, qui venit in nomine Domini! [Blessed is he who cometh in the name of the Lord]

Der fahrende Poet. Poems by Karl Beck. The first work of the young poet has hardly appeared before he presents us with a second, which in power of expression, wealth of ideas, lyrical verve and depth is not a whit inferior to the first, but infinitely surpasses it in excellence of form and in its classicism. What an advance from Schöpfung in the Nächte to the sonnets on Schiller and Goethe in Der fahrende Poet! Gutzkow thinks that the sonnet form is harmful to the effect of the work as a whole, but I would maintain that this Shakespearean sonnet is precisely the medium between the epic stanza and the individual poem which this peculiar type of poetry requires. Of course, it is not an epic poem but a purely lyrical one with a loose epic thread running through it, still looser than in Byron’s Childe Harold. But it is a good thing for us Germans that Karl Beck was born.

Blasedow und seine Söhne. A comic novel by Karl Gutzkow. Vol. 1. This novel in 3 volumes is based on the idea of a modern Don Quixote — an idea which has already been frequently used but generally has been badly adapted, and by no means exhausted. The character of this modern Don Quixote (Blasedow, a country parson), as Gutzkow originally conceived him, was splendid, but something is clearly wanting in the execution. At any rate, this novel by the barely thirty-year-old Gutzkow (and which, moreover, is said to have been finished three years ago) is very inferior to Cervantes’ presentation which, of course, is the work of a mature man. On the other hand, the secondary characters — Tobianus seems to correspond to Sancho Panza — the situations and the language are excellent.

So much for my reviews. I shall continue when you have written. — Do you know when your letters arrived? On June 15! And the ones before came on April 15! That makes exactly two months! Is that right? I herewith decree that, on pain of not being sent any more poems, Wurm’s influence on the dispatch of letters be totally withdrawn. And if Wurm does not get his letter finished by the proper time, then send yours off without his. Isn’t 14 days long enough to write me two quarto-size pages? It is scandalous. You put no date on your letter again, I don’t think that’s right, either. — The article in the Telegraph is my own indisputable property, and pleased W. Blank enormously. It was also applauded very much in Barmen and, in addition, was quoted with praise in the Nuremberg Athenäum . [206] There may be individual exaggerations in it, but on the whole it gives a correct picture if seen from a reasonable standpoint. However, if read with the preconceived opinion that it is a jumbled botch, it must appear to be precisely that. — What you say about the comedy is justum. [correct]

Justus judex ultionis,

Donum fac remissionis.

[Upright judge who punishes,

grant me indulgence]

You have not made the slightest mention of the canzone. This to be rectified.

With regard to Leo and Michelet, I only know about the matter from Leo’s Hegelingen [207] and a number of works written against it, and from these I have learned: 1) that, according to his own statements, Leo has abandoned all philosophy for the past 11 years and therefore cannot pass any judgment; 2) that only his extravagant and boastful brain made him believe he had a vocation for it; 3) that he attacked conclusions which, by the specific character of the Hegelian dialectic, necessarily follow from generally accepted premises instead of attacking the dialectic itself, and failing which he should have let these conclusions stand; 4) that he resorted only to coarse exclamations and indeed abuse to refute what was written against him; 5) that he regards himself as being far superior to his opponents, puffs himself up, and then on the very next page smirks with an infinite humility; 6) that he only attacks four persons, though by so doing he attacked the whole school, which cannot be separated from them, for although Gans, etc., may indeed have dissociated themselves from them on particular points, they belonged so closely together that Leo was least of all capable of showing the points of difference between them to be important; 7) it is the spirit of the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung, which anticipated Leo, that is dominant in his whole libellous attack; conclusion: Leo would have done better to keep his mouth shut. What were those “most bitter experiences” which forced Leo to break away? Had he not attacked them already in his pamphlet about Görres and even more violently than in his Hegelingen? Anyone with the requisite knowledge (has Leo got it?) may participate in a scientific controversy, but whoever wishes to indulge in condemnation had better take care. And did Leo do that? Does he not, along with Michelet, also condemn Marheineke, whose every word, as though he were under police surveillance, the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung scrutinises to see if it is orthodox. If he had been consistent in his conclusions, Leo would have had to damn a number of people beyond counting, but for that he lacked the courage. Whoever wishes to attack the Hegelian school must himself be a Hegel and create a new philosophy in its place. And despite Leo, the school is spreading from day to day. As for the attack of the Hirschberg Schubarth on the political side of Hegelianism, doesn’t this come like the verger’s “Amen” to the popish Credo of the Lion of Halle, a lion which indeed does not disavow its cat-species? A propos, Leo is the only academic teacher in Germany who zealously defends the hereditary aristocracy. Leo also calls W. Menzel his friend!!!

Your true friend

Friedrich Engels, Young German

Weren’t you at Gans’ funeral? Why don’t you write anything about him?

Engels To Friedrich Graeber

In Berlin

Written: June 15 1839

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 453,

First published: in abridged in Die neue Rundschau, 10. Heft, Berlin, 1913, and in full in the book: F. Engels, Schriften der Frühzeit, Berlin, 1920

Bremen, June 15, 1839

Fritz Graeber: Gentlemen, here you see modern characters and conditions.

[208]

June 15. Your letters arrived today. I decree that Wurm must never again post the letters. To come to business, I was already aware of the gist of what you say about Joseph’s family trees and have the following to say in reply:

1) Where can you find in any genealogical table in the Bible a son-in-law in similar circumstances being called a son? Unless you can mention one I can only regard this as a forced, unnatural explanation.

2) Why did Luke, who wrote in Greek for Greeks, who could not know this

Jewish custom, not expressly say for their benefit that it was as you state?

3) What is the point of Joseph’s genealogical table at all? It is superfluous since all three synoptic gospels expressly declare that Joseph was not the father of Jesus.

4) Why does a man like Lavater not resort to this explanation, but rather let the contradiction stand? Finally, why does even Neander — who after all is more erudite than Strauss-say that this is an insoluble contradiction, responsibility for which should be laid on the Greek scholar who worked on Matthew’s Hebrew manuscripts?

Furthermore, I do not propose to be dismissed so easily with my other points, which you call “miserable hair-splitting”. The teaching of literal inspiration is carried by the Wuppertalers to such a degree that God is supposed to have invested each word with a particularly deep meaning, as I have heard often enough from the pulpit. I can well believe that Hengstenberg does not share this view, for it is obvious from the Kirchen-Zeitung that he has no clear opinions whatever, but at one moment concedes to one of the orthodox something which the next moment he holds up as a crime when it is said by a rationalist. But how far does the inspiration of the Bible go? Certainly not so far that one Evangelist can make Christ say “This is my blood” [Mark 14:24] and another “This cup is the new testament in my blood” [Luke 22:2]. Why then did God who surely foresaw the dispute between Lutherans and Reformers not prevent this wretched conflict by such a very small intervention? If there is inspiration, then only two things are possible: either God did it deliberately in order to cause the conflict, something which I should not like to impute to God, or God overlooked it, which is ditto inadmissible. One cannot say that this dispute has brought forth any good, and it would be completely unwarranted and contrary to all probability to suppose that, after having divided the Christian Church for 300 years, it will have a good effect in the future. It is precisely the passage about the Lord’s Supper which is important. And if there is a contradiction here, then all faith in the Bible is destroyed.

I want to tell you quite plainly that I have now reached a point where I can only regard as divine a teaching which can stand the test of reason. Who gives us the right to believe blindly the Bible? Only the authority of those who did so before us. Yes, the Koran is a more organic product than the Bible, for it demands belief in its entire, continuous content. But the Bible consists of numerous parts written by different authors, many of whom do not even themselves make any claim to godliness. Are we supposed to believe it against our reason, simply because our parents tell us to do so? The Bible teaches that rationalists will be eternally damned. Can you imagine that a man who has striven for union with God all his life (Börne, Spinoza, Kant), indeed that someone like Gutzkow, whose highest aim in life is to find the meeting point between positive Christianity and the culture of our time, that after death people like these should be banished from God for ever and ever and suffer God’s wrath physically and mentally without end in the most fearful torments? We must not torment a fly for stealing our sugar, yet God is supposed to torment such men, whose errors are equally unconscious, ten thousand times more cruelly and for all eternity? Further, a rationalist who is sincere — does he sin by his doubting? Not at all. He would then have to suffer the most terrible pangs of conscience all his life; if he strives for truth, Christianity would have to overwhelm him with incontestable truth. Does this happen? Further, how ambiguous is the position of orthodoxy with regard to modern education? It is claimed that Christianity has brought education with it everywhere. And now all of a sudden, orthodoxy orders that education shall be brought to a halt in the middle of its progress. What is the point of all philosophy, for example, if we believe the Bible, which teaches that God cannot he known through reason? Yet, despite this, orthodoxy finds a little philosophy, only not too much of it, quite useful. If geology brings results different from what Mosaic primeval history teaches, then it is decried (see the miserable article in the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung entitled “Die Grenzen der Naturbetrachtung , [Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung, March 20, 23 and 27, 1839]); if it brings results which seem to be the same as in the Bible, then it is appealed to. For example, it is appealed to if a geologist declares that the earth and the fossilised bones prove that there was once a great flood; but if another geologist finds evidence that these things belong to different ages and proves that these floods took place at different times in different places, then geology is damned. Is that honest? Furthermore: here we have the Leben jesu by Strauss, an irrefutable book; why does not someone write a devastating refutation? Why is this truly honourable man decried? How many have come out against him in the manner of a Christian, like Neander, and he is not one of the orthodox. Yes, truly, there are doubts, grave doubts, which I cannot refute. Then take the teaching about salvation. Why do we not draw from this the moral that if someone freely gives himself up for somebody else he should be punished? All of you would regard this as unjust; but shall what is unjust in the eyes of men be the highest justice in the eyes of God? Again, Christianity says: I free you from sin. That is what the rest of the world, the rationalist world, is also striving to bring about, and now Christianity steps in and forbids it to go on striving on the grounds that the path of the rationalists leads still further away from the goal. If Christianity could show us one single person whom it has made so free in this life that he no longer sins, then it would have some right to speak in this way; but until then, truly none at all. Again: Peter speaks of the reasonable, pure milk of the Gospel [1 Peter 2:2] I do not understand it. They tell me: This is enlightened reason. Now show me an enlightened reason to whom this is clear. So far I have not come across one; even to the angels it is a “high mystery”. — You think too well of me, I hope, to attribute all this to a sacrilegious scepticism or to boastfulness. I know that I am going to get into the greatest unpleasantnesses through this, but what forces itself on me so convincingly, I cannot drive away, no matter how much I might like to. If I should perhaps have hurt your conviction by my strong language, then I ask your pardon from the bottom of my heart. I only spoke as I think and as things have forced themselves on me. It is with me as with Gutzkow; when I come across someone who arrogantly dismisses positive Christianity, then I defend this teaching, which derives from the deepest needs of human nature, the longing for salvation from sin through God’s grace; but when it is a matter of defending the freedom of reason, then I protest against all compulsion. — I hope to live to see a radical transformation in the religious consciousness of the world-if only I was. clear about it myself! Still, that will come in due course, if only I have time to develop undisturbed and in peace.

Man is born free, he is free!

Your true friend

Friedrich Engels

Engels To Friedrich Graeber

In Berlin

Written: July 12 1839

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 457,

First published: abridged in Die neue Rundschau, 10.,Heft, Berlin, 1913, and in full in the book: F. Engels, Schriften der Frühzeit, Berlin, 1920

Bremen, July 12-27, 1839

Fritzo Graebero. July 12. Really, you could condescend to write to me. It will soon be five weeks since I received your last letter.-I chucked a mass of sceptical bricks at you when I last wrote; I would have understood the thing differently had I then been acquainted with Schleiermacher’s teaching. For that is still a reasonable kind of Christianity. Everybody finds it clear even if one does not actually accept it, and one can recognise its value without feeling obliged to adopt it. I have already accepted the philosophical principles which I found in the teaching. But I am not quite clear about his theory of salvation and I will guard against accepting it immediately as a conviction so that I may not soon have to change again. But I will study it as soon as I have the time and the opportunity. If I had come into contact with this teaching before, I would never have become a rationalist, but where do you hear about things like this in our Muckertal [Muckertal — valley of bigots; an allusion to Wuppertal]? I feel a blazing anger at this kind of thing, and will fight against pietism and literal belief as long as I can. What is this nonsense? What is rejected by science, the development of which now includes the whole of church history, should no longer exist in life either. Pietism may have been an historically justified element in the development of theology in former times. It obtained its lawful right, it lived and should not now refuse to make way for speculative theology. It is only out of this latter that any certainty can be developed. I cannot understand how one can still try to maintain literal belief in the Bible or defend the direct influence of God, since this cannot be proved anywhere.

July 26. So here you are. To business. It is quite remarkable how in your letter you cling to orthodoxy and yet manage to concede some points to a rationalising trend, thus providing me with a weapon. Joseph’s family tree. To my first objection you reply: “Who knows whether we have not often read son instead of son-in-law or nephew in the genealogical tables in the Bible?” Are you not destroying the whole credibility of the biblical genealogical tables when you say this? I cannot at all understand how the law is supposed to prove anything here. — To my second objection you reply: “Luke wrote for Theophilus.” Dear Fritz, what kind of inspiration is that which has such consideration for the level of knowledge possessed by the one into whose hands the book happens to come first? If there is not also consideration for all future readers, then I cannot acknowledge any inspiration at all. In general, you do not as yet seem to be clear about the concept of inspiration. 3) How Joseph’s genealogical table demonstrates the fulfilment of the prophecy, I am incapable of understanding. On the contrary, the Evangelists should have been above all concerned not to present Jesus as the son of Joseph, to destroy this view, and not at all to honour Joseph by thus presenting his genealogical table. — “To say that Jesus. was a son of Mary and that Mary was a daughter of Elijah would have been quite contrary to custom.” Dear Fritz, can custom have the slightest influence here? Make sure whether by talking like this you are not once more going against your conception of inspiration. Really, I cannot regard your explanation as anything but so completely forced that if I were in your place I would rather conclude that one or the other was wrong. — “Insoluble doubts must confront Christianity, and yet we can arrive at certainty through God’s mercy.” I doubt this influence of God’s mercy on the individual in the form in which you have it. I well know the feeling of happiness everyone has, rationalist or mystic alike, who places himself in a close, heartfelt relationship with God; but make yourself clear about it, think about it without using biblical phrases, and you will find that it is the consciousness that mankind is of divine origin, that you, as part of this mankind, can never be lost and that after all the countless struggles in this world, as in the next, you must return, divested of all that is mortal and sinful, to God’s bosom; that is my conviction, and I am at rest with it. To this extent, I can also tell you that God’s Spirit gives me testimony that I am a child of God and, as I have said, I cannot believe that you could say it in any other way. To be sure, you are much calmer about it, while I am still threshing around with all kinds of opinions and cannot let my conviction remain in its present undeveloped state; but because of that I can indeed acknowledge the difference quantitatively but not qualitatively. — I readily admit that I am a sinner and that I have a deep-rooted propensity to sin and I refrain completely from any justification by works. But I do not admit that this sinfulness lies in the will of man. I readily admit that though the possibility of sinning is not inherent in the idea of humanity, it must necessarily be inherent in its realisation. I am therefore certainly as penitent as anyone can possibly demand, but, my dear Fritz, no thinking person can believe that my sins can be remitted by the merits of a third party. When I think about this independently of all authority, then I find, like the new theology, that the sinfulness of man lies in the necessarily imperfect realisation of the idea, that it must therefore be the striving of everyone to realise in himself the idea of humanity, i.e., to make himself the equal of God in spiritual perfection. That is something quite subjective. How can the orthodox theory of salvation, which posits a third, something objective, accomplish this subjective development? I admit that I deserve to be punished, and if God wishes to punish me, let Him do so, but eternal banishment even of the least part of the Spirit from God — this I find it quite impossible to conceive or to believe. It is, of course, true that it is God’s mercy that He accepts us. Everything God does is mercy, but everything He does is likewise necessity. The unity of these contradictions constitutes an essential part of the essence of God. What you say later about God not being able to deny Himself, etc., sounds to me as if you wanted to evade my question. Can you believe that a man who strives for union with God ought to be rejected by God for all eternity? Can you? You can’t, so you beat about the bush. Is it not very base to believe that God would inflict further punishment for past wickedness, in addition to that already contained in the wicked deed itself? Alongside eternal punishment you must also set eternal sin, and alongside eternal sin eternal possibility of believing and, therefore, of being saved. The teaching of eternal damnation is terribly inconsistent. Furthermore: historical belief is for you a great essential of belief, without it belief is unthinkable. But you will not deny that there are people for whom it is quite impossible to have this historical belief. And should God require such people to do the impossible? Dear Fritz, just think — this would he nonsense and God’s reason is certainly higher than ours, but still not of a different kind, for otherwise it would no longer be reason. The biblical dogmas also are to be understood by using reason. — Not to be able to doubt, you say, is freedom of the mind? It is the greatest enslavement of the mind. He only is free who has overcome every doubt concerning his conviction. And I am not even demanding that you refute me. I challenge all orthodox theology to refute me. Christian scholarship is now all of 1,800 years old and has been unable to bring forward any counterarguments against rationalism, and has only repulsed a few of its attacks; nay, it shies away from the fight in the purely scientific field and prefers to drag the personalities of its opponents in the mud-what is a man to say to that? Indeed, is orthodox Christian teaching capable of being purely scientific? I say no. What more can it do than engage in a little classifying, explaining, disputing? I advise you to read some time Darstellung used Kritik des modernen Pietismus by Dr. C. Märklin, Stuttgart, 1839. If you can refute it (that is, not what is positive, but what is negative in it), you will be the world’s leading theologian. — “The simple Christian can rest quite content with this; he knows that he is a child of God, and it is not necessary for him to be able to give answers to all apparent contradictions.” Neither the simple Christian nor Hengstenberg can give answers to the “apparent contradictions”, for they are real contradictions; but truly, whoever rests content and prides himself on his faith, has in reality no basis whatever for his faith. True, feeling can confirm, but it can most certainly not furnish a basis-that would be like wanting to smell with one’s ears. What makes Hengstenherg so detestable to me is the really scandalous editing of the [Evangelische] Kirchen-Zeitung. Nearly all the contributors remain anonymous and the editor, therefore, has to be responsible for them; but if somebody who has been attacked in the paper takes him to task, then Herr Hengstenberg denies all knowledge of the matter, will not reveal the name of the author, but also disclaims all responsibility. This has already happened to many a poor devil who has been attacked by God knows what miserable lout in the Kirchen-Zeitung and the only answer he got from Hengstenberg when he approached him about it was that it was not he who wrote the article. The Kirchen-Zeitung still enjoys a big reputation among the pietist preachers because they do not read anything opposed to it, and so it keeps going. I have not read the latest issues, otherwise I would quote you examples. You cannot imagine how abominably the Kirchen-Zeitung slandered and abused Strauss in connection with his Zurich affair, [209] while all reports are unanimous in saying that he behaved quite nobly over the whole business. Why, for example, is the Kirchen-Zeitung so very eager to bracket Strauss with Young Germany? And unfortunately many people regard Young Germany as something terribly wicked.-You understood me quite wrongly with regard to the poetry of belief. I did not believe because of the poetry. I believed because I realised that I could no longer live only for the day, because I repented of my sins, because I needed communion with God. I gladly gave away immediately what I most loved, I turned my back on my greatest joys, my dearest acquaintances, I made myself look ridiculous to everybody everywhere. It was an immense joy to me when I found in Plümacher someone with whom I could talk about it, and I gladly put up with his fanaticism concerning predestination. You know yourself that I was in earnest, in dead earnest. I was happy then, that I know, and I am still just as happy; I had trust and joy when I prayed; I have them now too, I have them even more because I am struggling and need to be strengthened. But I have never experienced anything of that ecstatic bliss I heard so much about from our pulpits. My religion was — and is — quiet, blessed peace, and if I have it after my death then I shall be satisfied. I have no reason to believe that God will take it from me. Religious conviction is a matter of the heart and is only concerned with dogma insofar as dogma is or is not contradicted by feeling. Thus the Spirit of God may convince you through your feeling that you are a child of God-that is quite possible; but it most certainly cannot so convince you that you are a child of God through the death of Christ; otherwise feeling would be capable of thinking and your ears of seeing. — I pray daily, indeed nearly the whole day, for truth, I have done so ever since I began to have doubts, but I still cannot return to your faith. And yet it is written: “Ask, and it shall be given you.” [ Matthew 7:7] I search for truth wherever I have hope of finding even a shadow of it and still I cannot acknowledge your truth as the eternal truth. And yet it is written: “Seek, and ye shall find. Or what man is there of you, whom if his son ask bread, will he give him a stone?... how much more shall your Father which is in Heaven? [Matthew 7: 9-11]

Tears come into my eyes as I write this. I am moved to the core, but I feel I shall not be lost; I shall come to God, for whom my whole heart yearns. And this is also a testimony of the Holy Spirit and I live and die by it, even if the Bible says the opposite ten thousand times over. And don’t deceive yourself, Fritz, you may seem to be so sure, but a doubt will come before you know it, and the way your heart decides often depends on the merest coincidence. — But I know from experience that dogmatic faith has no influence whatever on one’s inner peace.

July 27

If you did what it says in the Bible, you should have nothing more to do with me. In the Second Epistle of John (if I'm not mistaken) it says that one should not greet the unbeliever, not even say haire [I greet you] to him. There are many such passages in the Bible and they have always angered me. But you do not do all it says in the Bible by a long way. Incidentally when orthodox evangelical Christianity is called the religion of love, that sounds to me like the most monstrous irony. According to your Christianity, nine-tenths of mankind will be eternally unhappy and only one-tenth happy. Fritz, and do you call that God’s infinite love? Just think how small God would appear if that was what His love amounted to. It is therefore clear that if there is a revealed religion, its God must indeed be greater than but not different from the one who is shown by reason. Otherwise all philosophy is not only empty but even sinful. Without philosophy there is no education; without education there is no humanity; without humanity, again, there is no religion. But even the fanatical Leo does not dare to revile philosophy in this way. And that is another of the inconsistencies of the orthodox. I could reach an understanding with men like Schleiermacher and Neander, for they are consistent. and have pure hearts. I look in vain for these qualities in the columns of the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung and other pietist journals. Especially for Schleiermacher I have enormous respect. If you are consistent you must, of course, consign him to damnation, for he does not teach the word of Christ in your sense, but rather in that of Young Germany, of Theodor Mundt and Karl Gutzkow. But he was a great man, and I only know one man now living who has equal intelligence, equal power and equal courage-and that is David Friedrich Strauss.

I was very pleased that you should rise up with such vigour to refute me, but one thing made me angry and I shall tell you straight out what it is. It is the contempt with which you speak of the striving of the rationalists for union with God, of their religious life. To be sure, you lie comfortably in your faith as in a warm bed, and you know nothing of the fight we have to put up when we human beings have to decide whether God is God or not. You do not know the weight of the burden one feels with the first doubt, the burden of the old belief, when one must decide for or against, whether to go on carrying it or to shake it off. But I tell you again, you are not so safe from doubt as you think, so do not delude yourself with regard to those who doubt. You could become one of them yourself, and then you too would ask for fair treatment. Religion is an affair of the heart and whoever has a heart can be devout; but those whose devoutness is rooted either in their understanding or in their reason have none at all. The tree of religion sprouts from the heart, overshadows the whole man and seeks its nourishment from the air of reason. But its fruits, which contain the most precious heart-blood, are the dogmas, and what goes beyond them is of the Evil one. This is what Schleiermacher teaches and I stand by it.

Adieu, dear Fritz. Think carefully about whether you really want to send me to hell and write me my sentence soon.

Yours,

Friedrich Engels

Engels To Friedrich Graeber

In Bonn

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 463.

First published: in the book: F. Engels, Schriften der Frühzeit, Berlin, 1920

Bremen, after July 27, 1839

Dear Fritz,

Recepi litteras tuas hodie, et jamque tibi respomurus sum. [I received your letter today, and I am already about to answer you.] I cannot write very much to you — you are still in my debt, and I am expecting a long letter from you. Is your brother Wilhelm on holiday too? Is Wurm now studying with you in Bonn? God bless fat Peter [Jonghaus] in his studia militaria. A little poem written on July 27 [the anniversary of the July 1830 revolution in France] may give you practice in liberalism and in reading ancient metre. Otherwise there is nothing in it.

German July Days 1839

How the waves mount up in the roaring gale, how the storm comes relentlessly onwardst

Tall as a man are the foaming waves, and the skiff goes rising and falling;

From the Rhine there blows a whirling wind that musters the clouds in the heavens,

That splits up oaks and whips up dust and lashes the waves in its fury.

Of you I think in my tossing skiff, you German kings and you princes.

How the patient people bore on their heads the gilded throne you ascended,

In triumph carried you through the land and sent the bold conqueror fleeing. [allusion to Napoleon I]

Brazenly arrogant then you became, you betrayed all the promises given.

Now a storm blows up out of France, and the people rise up in their masses,

And your throne is rocked like the skiff in the storm and your hand loses hold of the sceptre.

You above all, Ernst August, I challenge with angry defiance.

Despotic and reckless, you flouted the law-now hark to the storm as it rises!

The people look up with piercing eyes and the sword barely rests in the scabbard.

Speak! Are you safe on your golden throne, as I in my boat on the waters?

The business about the high waves on the Weser is quite true, also that I was sailing on it on the great day of the July revolution.

Give my regards to Wurm and tell him that he must write me a lot.

Yours,

Friedr. Engels

Engels To Friedrich Graeber

In Berlin

Written: July 30 1839

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 464.

First published: in part in Die neue Rundschau, 10. Heft, Berlin, 1913, and in full in the book: F. Engels, Schriften der Frühzeit, Berlin, 1920

Bremen, July 30, 1839

My dear Guglielmo,

What foul ideas you have about me! There can be no question either of the buffoon or of the loyal Eckart (or Eckkardt, as you spell it), [210] but only of logic, reason, consistency, propositio major et minor, etc. Yes, you are right. We won’t get anywhere with gentleness here, these pigmies — servility, aristocratic rule, censorship, etc. — have to be driven away with the sword. Of course, I ought now to be really bullying and raging, but since it is you I am writing to, I'll go easy with you so that you will not have to “cross yourself” when the “wild gallop” of my unruly poetic prose overtakes you. First of all I protest against your insinuations that I have been giving the spirit of the times one kick after another in the hindquarters in order to speed its progress. My dear man, what a mug do you think I really am with my poor snub nose! No, I'm leaving it well and truly alone; on the contrary, when the spirit of the times comes along like a hurricane and pulls the train away on the railway line, then I jump quickly into a carriage and let myself be pulled along a little. Yes, a man like Karl Beck — the mad idea that he is finished as a poet originates most certainly from that depraved Wichelhaus, about whom Wurm has thoroughly informed me. The idea that a young man of twenty-two who has written such ravishing poetry should suddenly stop — no, really, I have never come across such nonsense before. Can you believe that Goethe stopped being a poet of genius after he had written Götz, or Schiller after he had written the Räuber? Apart from which, history is supposed to have avenged itself on Young Germany! God preserve me. Indeed, if world history has been entrusted by the dear Lord God to the Bundestag as its hereditary fief, then it has avenged itself on Gutzkow by putting him in jail for three months. [211] But if, as we no longer doubt, it lies with public opinion (i. e., here, literary opinion), then it has avenged itself on Young Germany to the extent that it has allowed itself to be won by Young Germany fighting with the pen, and now Young Germany is enthroned as queen of modern German literature. What was Börne’s fate? He died like a hero in February 1837, and in his last days he had the joy of seeing his successors — Gutzkow, Mundt, Wienbarg, Beurmann — rise so powerfully; to be sure, the black clouds of disaster still hung over their heads and a long, long chain was drawn around Germany which the Bundestag mended whenever it threatened to snap. But he is laughing even now at the princes, and perhaps he knows the hour when the stolen crowns will fall from their heads. I will not vouch to you for Heine’s happiness — anyhow the fellow has been wallowing in the mud for quite a while now. Nor for Beck’s for he is in love and fretting over our dear Germany. I am with him in regard to the latter, apart from which I still have a lot of fighting to do. But never mind, our good Lord God has given me an excellent sense of humour, which is a great comfort to me. Are you happy, manikin? — Keep your views about inspiration to yourself, otherwise you will never be a preacher in Wuppertal. If I had not been brought up in the most extreme orthodoxy and piety, if I had not had drummed into me in church, Sunday school and at home the most direct, unconditional belief in the Bible and in the agreement of the teaching of the Bible with that of the church, indeed, with the special teaching of every minister, perhaps, I would have remained stuck in some sort of liberal supranaturalism for a long time. There are plenty of contradictions in the teaching — as many as there are biblical authors, and the Wuppertal faith has accordingly absorbed a dozen different individualities. As for Joseph’s family tree, Neander, as you know, attributes the one in Matthew to the Greek translator of the Hebrew original. If I am not mistaken, Weisse in his Life of Jesus [Die evangelische Geschichte] came out against Luke in much the same way as you do. Fritz’s explanation finally depends on such unnatural possibilities that it can’t be called an explanation at all. I am certainly a promohos, [Champion] but of the liberal party, not the rationalists. The contradictions are taking shape, the views stand in sharp opposition. Four liberals (who are also rationalists), one aristocrat who came over to us but, fearing to offend against his family’s hereditary principles, immediately ran back again to the aristocracy, an aristocrat with good expectations, as we hope, and various blockheads, this is the circus within which the disputes rage. I do my championing as an expert on antiquity, the Middle Ages and modern life, as a boor, etc., but the championing is already no longer necessary; my young fellows are coming along quite well. Yesterday I explained to them the operation of historical necessity during the period 1789-1839 and, in addition, learned to my astonishment that I was supposed to be rather superior to all the local prima pupils in debating. I had beaten two of them in an argument some time before and they had then sworn to get me involved with the cleverest among them so that he could beat me; but unfortunately for them, he was tremendously enamoured of Horace at the time, so I beat him hollow. Then they became terribly afraid. This erstwhile Horaceomane is now on very good terms with me and told me all about it yesterday evening. You would be immediately convinced of the correctness of my book reviews if you read the books they deal with. K. Beck is an enormous talent, more than that, he is a genius. He produces images like

One hears the thunder’s voice proclaim aloud

What’s written by the lightning on the clouds

[From Gang um Leipzig, K. Beck, Nächte. Gepanzerte Lieder. Erstes Märchen. Dritte Nacht]

in enormous profusion. Listen to what he says about Börne, whom he adores. He is speaking to Schiller:

Your Posa was no airy fantasy;

For did not Börne perish for us all?

He scaled the summits of humanity;

A Tell, he sounded Freedom’s clarion call.

Up there, he calmly whet his arrow-head

Took aim and shot. And Freedom’s arrow sped

...

Into the apple, into the round Earth.

[From Schillers Haus in Gohlis, K. Beck, Nächte. Erstes Märchen. Fünfte Nacht]

And how he describes the misery of the Jews and student life! It is capital, and now the Fahrende Poet! Man, have some sense and read him. Look, if you refute Börne’s essay on Schiller’s Tell then you can have all the royalties I am hoping to get for my translation of Shelley. [212] I'll forgive you for pulling my Wuppertal article [Letters from Wuppertal] to pieces so thoroughly, for I read it again recently and was astonished at the style. I haven’t written nearly so well since. Don’t forget Leo and Michelet next time. As I have said before, you are very much mistaken in thinking that we Young Germans want to support the spirit of the age. But just think for a moment — when this pneuma [wind] blows and blows right for us, would we not be fools if we did not set our sails? It will not be forgotten that you were at Gans’ funeral. [213] I'll get it mentioned in the Elegante Zeitunge [Zeitung für die elegante Welt] soon. The way you all afterwards beg so nicely for forgiveness for the little bit of rumpus you kicked up strikes me as very funny. You still can’t curse and swear, but here they all come: Fritz sends me to hell, accompanies me to the gate and pushes me in with a low bow so that he himself can then fly back to Heaven. You see everything double through your spar spectacles and take my three friends for spirits from the Venusberg. — Manikin, why are you calling for the loyal Eckart? Look, there he is, a little chap with a sharp, Jewish profile. His name is Börne and only give him a free hand and he will clear out all the Venus Servilia crowd. Then you also will make your most humble farewells-look, Mr. Peter [Jonghaus] is coming too, smiling with one side of his face and snarling with the other, turning towards me first the snarl and then the smile.

In our dear Barmen literary feeling is beginning to stir now. Freiligrath started a play-reading society in which, since his departure, Strücker and Neuburg (a clerk at Langewiesche’s) are the promahoi [champions] of liberal ideas. Now Herr Ewich has made the following sharp-witted discoveries: (1) that the spirit of Young Germany haunts this society, (2) that the society in pleno composed the “Letters from Wuppertal” in the Telegraph. He has also suddenly discovered that Freiligrath’s poems are the dullest stuff in the world and that Freiligrath stands far below de la Motte Fouqué and will be forgotten within three years. Precisely what was once asserted by Beck.

Schiller, Schiller, ever-vibrant spirit,

O greatest heart that beat in warmest breast,

Forever young, to us you were the Prophet

Who carried Freedom’s flag before the rest.

When all the world had stolen from the fray,

And the faint-hearted could do nought but pray,

Oh, you were truly prodigal of your blood;

Your warmest life, your deepest life you threw

Before the world in sacrifice from you.

Contented, cold, the world misunderstood,

All heedless of your heart’s deep misery,

And only heard the music of the spheres,

When to its ears came waves of poetry

That you had swelled with your own blood-red tears.

Who wrote that? — It is from Karl Beck’s Der Fahrende Poet with all his powerful verse and magnificent imagery, but also with his obscurity, his extravagant hyperboles and metaphors. For it is now settled that Schiller is our greatest liberal poet. He sensed the new era which would dawn after the French Revolution, which Goethe did not, even after the July revolution, and when it came too near to him so that he almost had to believe that something new was coming, he retired into his room and shut the door so as to remain comfortable. That detracts from Goethe a great deal; but he was forty years old when the revolution broke out, and a made man, so one cannot reproach him with it. To finish I'll draw you something.

I enclose masses of poems. Share them between you.

Yours,

Friedrich Engels

Engels To Marie Engels

In Barmen

Written: 28 September, 1839.

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 469.

First published: in the Deutsche Revue, Bd. 4, Stuttgart and Leipzig, 1920

Bremen, Sept. 28, 1839

Dear Marie,

It was high time your ladyship wrote to me at last; it has gone on long enough, Mamsell. But I'll forgive you your great crimes and tell you something. Tomorrow it will be two weeks since we rode out to Delmenhorst. This is a small Oldenburg country town with a menagerie, so called because the people of Oldenburg and Bremen are always going there, and when we had seen it, we rode back — and came home, you think? Yes, but after several adventures. In the first place, I sat half the way in the carriage and when we reached the place where I was to pick up my horse again, the riders had not yet arrived and so we had to go in, drink bad beer and smoke bad cigars. Finally, the riders turned up and by now it was eight o'clock and pitch dark. Once I had found my horse we rode on, paid the gate toll and rode through Neustadt. Then round the corner and riding directly at us came eight drummers beating a tattoo, all in a row, and our horses jumped about all over the place. The drummers beat louder and louder, and the noble street arabs of Bremen shouted, so that we soon got separated from one another. R. Roth and I were the first to find each other again, and we rode on to the other end of the town where we had to pay toll again because the philistine who hires out horses lives just outside the gate. Here we met the others, whose horses had run away with them, and we then made for home and had to pay toll a third time. Isn’t that an interesting story? You won’t be able to deny it, especially when you hear that since it was too late to eat at home, I went into the Club, ate beefsteak and eggs and heard a very entertaining conversation which was going on near me, about young dogs and dead cats. Indeed, very interesting, very amusing. I am now at the Club, which is the same kind of place as the Concordia or institute for improvement in Barmen. The best thing about it is the many newspapers — Dutch, English, American, French, German, Turkish and Japanese. This gave me the opportunity to learn Turkish and Japanese, so I now understand 25 languages. All this is, of course, of the greatest interest to a young lady who wants to go to a boarding-school in Mannheim. Jacob Schmitt was here too, and he will he back again next week and will go to the wine cellar with me. That is undoubtedly the best institution in Bremen. We also have a theatre again, but I haven’t been there yet.

Farewell, my dear

Yours for ever,

Friedrich

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 471

Written: 8 October 1839

First published: in part in Die neue Rundschau, 10. Heft, Berlin, 1913, and in full in the book: F. Engels, Schriften der Frühzeit, Berlin, 1920

Bremen, October 8, 1839

O Wilhelm, Wilhelm, Wilhelm! So at last we are hearing from you. Now, manikin, now you're going to hear something: I am now an enthusiastic Straussian. Just you come here, I have now got arms, shield and helmet; now I am secure, just you come here and I'll give you such a drubbing, despite all your theologia, that you won’t know where to run. Yes, Guillermo, jacta est alea [the die is cast] I am now a Straussian; I, a poor, miserable poet, have crept under the wing of the genius David Friedrich Strauss. Just hear what a fellow he is! There lie the four gospels in a crisp and colourful chaos; mysticism lies in front of them and adores them — and behold, in comes David Strauss like a young god and brings the chaos out into the light of day and — Adios faith! It is as full of holes as a sponge. He sees too much myth here and there, but only in unimportant matters, otherwise he is a man of real genius. If you can refute Strauss — eh bien, I'll become a pietist once again. — I could also have learned from your letter that Mengs was an important artist, if, unfortunately, I had not already known it for a long time. With Die Zauberflöte (music by Mozart) it is exactly the same. The reading-room is splendidly arranged, and among the most recent literary productions I draw your attention to König Saul, a tragedy by Gutzkow; Shizzenbuch by the same author; Dichtungen by Th. Creizenach (a Jew); Deutschland und die Deutschen by Beurmann; Die Dramatiker der Jetztzeit, Vol. 1, by L. Wienbarg, etc. I am very anxious to hear your opinion about Saul. Beurmann quoted extracts from my article in the Telegraph [214] in his Deutschland und die Deutschen, in which he speaks about Wuppertal. — On the other hand, I warn you against the Geschichte des polnischen Aufstands (1830-31) by Smitt, Berlin, 1839, which was undoubtedly written on the direct order of the King of Prussia [Frederick William III]. The chapter about the beginning of the revolution is headed with a motto from Thucydides which runs something like this: But we, who were unprepared for anything untoward, were suddenly invaded by them without any cause!!!! Oh, what gigantic nonsense! Splendid, on the other hand, is the history of this glorious uprising by Count Soltyk, which was published in German in Stuttgart in 1834 [215] — in your place, of course, it will have been banned, like everything good. Another important piece of news is that I am writing a short story which will be printed in January, always provided, of course, that it is passed by the censor, which is an annoying dilemma.

I really don’t know whether or not I should continue sending you poems, but I think I did send you my Odysseus Redivivus [216] lately and I beg you to let me have your criticisms of the last consignment. We have a novice here from your part of the country, someone called Müller, who is going to sail to the South Seas as a ship’s preacher. He is staying at our house and has the most extravagant views about Christianity, which you will understand when I tell you that he has spent his time recently under the influence of Gossner. It is not easy to have more exalted views about the efficacy of prayer and direct divine intervention in life. Instead of saying that one can sharpen one’s senses, one’s hearing, one’s sight, he says that when the Lord gives me a duty to fulfil, He is also bound to provide me with the power to fulfil it; of course there must be fervent prayer and hard work for one’s own part too, otherwise there is nothing doing. And so he restricts to believers only this familiar fact that holds for all men. Even a Krummacher would have to grant me that such an outlook is really too childlike and childish. — I am very pleased to hear that you have a better opinion of my Telegraph article. It was, of course, written in haste, as a result of which it has a style such as I only hope my short story will have, but also some one-sidednesses and half-truths. Krummacher, as you probably know, got to know Gutzkow in Frankfurt am Main and is said to be making up mirabilia [Curious stories] about it-proof of the correctness of Strauss’ views about myths. I am now taking to the modern style, which is without doubt the ideal of all style. Models for it are Heine’s writings, but especially Kühne and Gutzkow, although Wienbarg is its real master. Among earlier elements that have had a particularly favourable influence on it are Lessing, Goethe, Jean Paul and, above all, Börne. Oh, Börne — he writes a style that surpasses everything. Menzel, der Franzosenfresser is stylistically the best piece of work in German and likewise the first one that sets out to annihilate an author completely; and in your place it is also banned to make sure that no better style shall be written than what is turned out in the royal offices. The modern style unites in itself every excellence of style — compact brevity and pregnancy which hits the mark with a word, alternating with epic, calm description; simple language alternating with shimmering images and brilliant sparks of wit, a Ganymede with the strength of youth, roses twined round his head and in his hand the weapon that slew the python. At the same time, the greatest freedom is left to the author’s individuality, so that despite affinity none imitates the other. Heine writes dazzlingly, Wienbarg with cordial warmth and radiance, Gutzkow with a razor-sharp precision over which there sometimes plays a comforting sunlight. Kühne is pleasantly descriptive with rather too much light and too little shade. Laube imitates Heine and now Goethe as well, but in a wrong manner, for he imitates the Goethean Varnhagen, and Mundt likewise imitates Varnhagen. Marggraff still writes rather too generally and with too much puffing out of his cheeks, but that will pass, and Beck’s prose has not yet got beyond studies. — If you combine Jean Paul’s ornateness with Börne’s precision then you have the essentials of the modern style. Gutzkow has been able to assimilate the brilliant, light but dry style of the French most fortunately. This French style is like a thread of gossamer, the modern German like a wisp of silk (this image has unfortunately gone somewhat awry). My studies of Goethe’s divine songs show that I do not forget the old in my enthusiasm for the new. But one must study them musically and best of all in different musical settings. Here, for example, I reproduce Reichardt’s tune for the Bundeslied.

The first stanza of Goethe’s Bundeslied under the melody of Reichardt’s setting for this song:

“In hours of exaltation

That Love and Wine both bring,

This song with inspiration

United we shall sing!

God binds us all together,

Who come here at His call.

Keep our flames burning ever;

He lit them for us all.”

I have forgotten the bars again; get Heuser to put them in for you. The melody is marvellous and through its always harmonious simplicity it is better suited than any other to the poem. Wonderfully effective is the rise at v. 6 from E by a seventh to D, and the sudden fall at v. 8 from B by a ninth to A. I shall write to Heuser about Leonardo Leo’s Miserere.

In the next few days I shall send you a good friend, Adolf Torstrick, who is going to study there. He is jolly and liberal and understands Greek very well. The other Bremen people who are coming are not up to much. Torstrick will have letters from me to you. Receive him well, I hope you get to like him. Fritz has not yet written to me, the vermicle [An allusion to Gustav Wurm] was going to write to me from Elberfeld but didn’t do so out of laziness-for which please give him a dressing down. If Heuser — whom I cannot write to in Elberfeld for fear I miss him — should arrive, tell him he may hope for something from me soon.

Yours,

Friedrich Engels

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 474

Written: 20 October 1839

First published: in the book: F. Engels, Schriften der Frühzeit, Berlin, 1920

Bremen, October 20-21, 1839

October 20. To Herr Wilhelm Graeber. I am quite sentimental; it is a difficult case. I remain here deprived of all merriness. With Adolf Torstrick, the bearer of this, the last merriness leaves. How I celebrated October the 18th can be read in my last epistle to Heuser. Today beer-guzzling, tomorrow boredom, the day after tomorrow Torstrick is leaving, on Thursday the student mentioned in the above-mentioned epistle will return, whereupon there will follow two merry days and then a lonely, horrible winter. Not a soul in this place can be moved to come on the booze, they are all philistines. Here I sit with all that is left of my jolly songs, and my cocky, would-be student air, alone in the great desert, without boozing companions, without love, without any fun, alone with tobacco, beer and two acquaintances who can’t drink. “My son, here is my spear, drink with it my beer. When you drink comme il faut, it pleases your old father so,” [217] I want to sing, but to whom shall I give my spear, and I haven’t got the tune right, either. Only one hope remains for me, to meet you in Barmen in a year’s time, when I go home, and then, if too much of the pastor has not got into you and Jonghaus and Fritz, to go on the spree with you.

21st. Today has been a dreadfully boring day. Half-dead from slaving in the office. Then choir practice, enormous enjoyment. Now I must see that I write you something more. Verses at the next opportunity, I have no time left to copy them. Didn’t even have anything interesting to eat, all boring. And it’s so cold you can’t bear it in the office. Thank God, tomorrow we have hopes of getting some heating. I should be getting a letter from your brother Hermann soon; he wants to test my theology and massacre my conviction. That comes of being a sceptic; the thousand hooks with which one hung on to the old come loose and hook on to something else, and then there are arguments. The devil take Wurm, don’t get a word from the fellow, he is becoming worse and worse every day. I suppose he is taking to drinking brandy. Now give Torstrick a friendly welcome, make him tell you about me if it interests you, and put good beer before him.

Farewell.

Yours, Friedrich Engels

Engels To Friedrich Graeber

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 476

Written: 29 October 1839

First published: in: F. Engels, Schriften der Frühzeit, Berlin, 1920

Bremen, October 29, 1839

My dear Fritz,

I am not of the same mind as Pastor Stier. — On October 29, after a jolly fair, and one involving a difficult, dreadful correspondence, which by chance went to Berlin, and after a letter to W. Blank, who had to wait a long time, I am at last free for a good friendly tussle with you. You seem to have dashed off your essay on inspiration in a bit of a hurry, for it is hardly to be taken literally when you write: The apostles preached the Gospel in its purity and that ceased after their death. Among the apostles you must in that case also count the author of the Acts of the Apostles and of the Epistle to the Hebrews and prove that the Gospels were actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, whereas in respect of the first three the opposite is established. Further you say: I don’t believe that we must look in the Bible for any other inspiration than when the apostles and prophets came forward and preached to the people. Good; but does it not again require inspiration to record those sermons correctly? And if you concede to me in this sentence that there are uninspired passages in the Bible, where will you draw the line? Take the Bible and read — you won’t want to have a line missing except where there are real contradictions; but these contradictions entail a mass of consequences; the contradiction, for instance, that the stay of the children of Israel in Egypt only lasted four generations, while Paul in the Epistle to the Galatians (nisi erro [if I am not mistaken]) gives 430 years [Galatians 3: 17], which even my pastor, [Georg Gottfried Treviranus] who is eager to keep me in the dark, admits is a contradiction. You will not tell me that Paul’s words don’t count as inspired because he mentions the matter incidentally and is not writing history — what do I care for a revelation in which such superfluous and useless things occur. But if the contradiction is acknowledged both may be equally wrong, and Old Testament history appears in an ambiguous light, as in general — everybody admits it, except Pastor Tiele in Oberneuland near Bremen-biblical chronology is hopelessly lost as far as inspiration is concerned. This ranks Old Testament history even more in the realm of mythology, and it will not be long before this is generally acknowledged in the pulpits. — As regards Joshua’s making the sun stand still, the most telling argument you can use is that when Joshua said this, he was not yet inspired, and that later when, being in a state of inspiration, he wrote the book, he only told the story. The doctrine of redemption. — “Man is so fallen that of himself he can do nothing good.” Dear Fritz, please drop this hyperorthodox and not even biblical nonsense. When Börne, who himself had barely enough to live on in Paris, gave all the fees for his writings to poor Germans, for which he did not even get any thanks, that was, I hope, something good? And Börne had certainly not been “born again”. — You don’t need this sentence at all, provided you have original sin. Christ does not know it either, like so much else from the teaching of the apostles. — The doctrine of sin is what I have thought least about, but nevertheless it is clear to me that sin is necessary for mankind. Orthodoxy rightly perceives a connection between sin and earthly deficiencies, disease, etc., but it errs in presenting sin as the cause of these deficiencies, which occurs only in isolated cases. The two, sin and deficiency, condition each other, one cannot exist without the other. And since the powers of man are not divine, the possibility of sin is a necessity; that it actually had to occur was given in the crude stage of the first human beings, and that it has not ceased since is again quite psychological. Nor can it cease on earth since it is conditioned by all earthly circumstances, and God would otherwise have had to create men quite differently. But since He has created them thus He cannot demand of them to be absolutely without sin, but only to fight against sin; that this fight would suddenly cease with death and a dolce far niente would ensue, only the neglected psychology of earlier centuries could conclude. Indeed, if these premises are granted, moral perfection can be achieved only with the perfection of all other spiritual powers, with a merging into the world soul, and there I am with the Hegelian doctrine, which Leo attacked so violently. This last metaphysical sentence is, by the way, the kind of conclusion of which I do not yet know myself what to think. — Further, according to these premises the story of Adam can only be a myth, since Adam either had to be equal to God if he was created so free from sin, or had to sin if he was created with otherwise human powers. — That is my doctrine of sin, which is indeed still enormously crude and incomplete; but what need have I here of a redemption? — “ If God wanted to find a way out between punitive justice and redeeming love, the only means left was substitution.” Now just take a look at yourselves and see what sort of people you are. You reproach us with lowering our critical sounding lead into the depths of divine wisdom, and here you are actually setting limits to divine wisdom. Herr Professor Philippi could not have gone back on himself more flagrantly. And even granted the need of it as the only means — does substitution cease to be an injustice? If God is really so severe with men He must be severe here also and not turn a blind eye. Work this system out for yourself in sharp, definite terms, and the sore points will not escape you. — Then comes a really pompous contradiction to “substitution as the only means” when you say: “A man cannot be mediator even if by an act of God’s omnipotence he were freed of all sin.” So there is another way after all? If orthodoxy has no better representative in Berlin than Professor Philippi it is indeed in a bad way. — Throughout the entire deduction tacitly runs the principle that substitution is justifiable. That is a murderer whom you have hired for your purposes and who afterwards stabs you to death yourselves. Nor do you really want to tackle the job of proving that this principle does not contradict divine justice and, be honest and admit it, you yourselves feel that you would have to prove this against your innermost conscience; so you whisk past the principle and silently take the fact, dressed up in fine words about merciful love, etc., for granted. — “The Trinity is a condition of redemption.” That again is one of those half-true conclusions of your system. Two hypostases, of course, it would be necessary to assume, but the third only because it is traditional to do so.

“But in order to suffer and to die God had to become man, for apart from its being metaphysically unthinkable to postulate in God as such a capacity to suffer, there was also the ethical necessity conditioned by justice.” — But if you admit that it is unthinkable that God should be able to suffer, then it was not the God who suffered in Christ, but only the man, and “a man could not be mediator”. You are still so reasonable that unlike so many here you do not push the conclusion to the extreme point: “hence God must have suffered”, and hold fast to that. And what exactly this has to do with “ethical necessity conditioned by justice” also remains to be seen. If once the principle of substitution is to be granted, it is not necessary that the sufferer should be a man, if he is only God. But God cannot suffer — ergo we are no further than we were before. That is just the trouble with your deduction, at every step I must make new concessions to you. Nothing develops fully and entirely out of what has gone before. So here again I must concede to you that the mediator had also to be man, which has not yet been proved at all; for if I didn’t concede it I couldn’t accept what follows. “But the incarnation could not have taken place by means of natural procreation, for even if God had united Himself with a person born to a mother and father and freed from sin by His omnipotence, He would only have united Himself with that person and not with human nature. — In the body of the Virgin Mary Christ only assumed human nature, the person-forming power lay in his divinity.” — Do please see, this is sheer sophistry and is forced on you by the attacks on the necessity of supernatural generation. In order to put this matter in a different light, the professor interposes a third thing: personality. That has nothing to do with it. On the contrary, the union with human nature is the more intimate the more the personality is human and the spirit which animates it divine. A second misunderstanding here lies hidden in the background. You confuse the body and the person; that emerges even more clearly from the words: “On the other hand, God could not make Himself human quite so abruptly as He did the first Adam, otherwise He would not have stood in any connection with the substance of our fallen nature.” So it is a question of the substance, of the palpable, the corporeal? But the best of it is that the finest reason for the supernatural generation, the dogma of the impersonality of the human nature in Christ, is merely a gnostic consequence of the supernatural generation. (Gnostic, of course, not in reference to the sect but to gnwsis [Gnosis] in general.) If the God in Christ could not suffer, then still less could the impersonal man, and that is what comes of being profound. “So Christ appears without a single human trait.” That is a random assertion; all four Evangelists give a definite picture of the character of Jesus which in most of its features is the same in any of them. Thus we can maintain that the character of the apostle John was nearest to that of Jesus; but now if Christ had no human trait, this implies that John was the most excellent; and that might be a questionable assertion.

Thus far the reply to your deduction. I have not succeeded very well with it, I had no college notebooks, only invoice and account books. So please excuse unclarities here and there. — Your brother [Wilhelm Graeber] has not yet been heard of by letter. Du reste, if you acknowledge the honesty of my doubt, how will you explain such a phenomenon? Your orthodox psychology must necessarily rank me among the most wicked, obdurate sinners, especially as I am now wholly and utterly lost. For I have taken the oath to the flag of David Friedrich Strauss and am a first-class mythic; I tell you, Strauss is a grand fellow and a genius, and with powers of discernment such as nobody else has. He has taken away the ground from under your views, the historical foundation is lost beyond recall, and the dogmatic foundation will go down after it. Strauss cannot be refuted, that is why the pietists are so furious with him; Hengstenberg is making tremendous efforts in the [Evangelische] Kirchen-Zeitung to draw false conclusions from his words and to combine with that spiteful attacks on his character. That is what I hate in Hengstenherg and company. Strauss’ personality is no concern of theirs; but they strain themselves to blacken his character so that people should be afraid to join him. The best proof that they are unable to refute him.

But now I have theologised enough and will turn my eyes elsewhere. How splendid are the discoveries which the Deutsche Bund has made of demagogy and all so-called conspiracies is to be gathered from the fact that they could be printed on seventy-five’ pages. I have not yet seen the book, [218] but have read excerpts in newspapers which show me what precious lies our damned administration dishes out to the German people. The Deutsche Bund alleges with the most brazen effrontery that the political criminals were sentenced by their “legitimate judges”, although everybody knows that everywhere, especially where a public judicature exists, commissions were instituted, and what happened there under cover of darkness nobody knows, for the defendants had to swear not to say anything about the hearing. That is the justice which exists in Germany — and we have nothing, but nothing to complain of! — About six weeks ago there appeared an excellent book: Preussen und Preussenthum by J. Venedey, Mannheim, 1839, in which Prussian legislation, state administration, tax distribution, etc., are subjected to strict scrutiny, and the results are convincing: favours for the money aristocracy against the poor, endeavours to perpetuate absolutism, and the means to do this: suppression of political education, stupefying of the mass of the people, utilisation of religion; outward brilliance, restraintless bragging and a pretence of favouring education. The Deutsche Bund at once took care to ban the book and to confiscate the copies in stock; the last is only a pretence, since the booksellers are at most asked if they have any copies, to which, of course, every decent fellow says: No. — If you can get hold of the book there, do read it, for it isn’t just rodomontades, but adduces proofs from the Prussian Law. — What I would like best of all is if you could get Börne’s Menzel, der Franzosenfresser. This work is without doubt the best we have in German prose, both in respect of style and of power and wealth of thought; it is marvellous; anyone who doesn’t know it will not believe that our language possesses such power. ... [The end of the letter is missing]

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 481

Written: 13 November 1839

First published: in part in Die neue Rundschau, 10. Heft, 1913, and in: F. Engels, Schriften der Frühzeit, Berlin, 1920

Bremen, November 13-20, 1839

Nov. 13, 1839. Dearest Guilielme, why don’t you write? You all belong to the category of idlers and loungers. But I am a different fellow! Not only do I write to you more than you deserve, not only am I acquiring an exceptional acquaintance with all literatures of the world, I am also quietly making for myself in short stories and poems a memorial of glory which, unless the censor’s breath turns the bright gleam of steel to ugly rust, will shine in brilliant, youthful radiance through all German lands, Austria excepted. In my breast it ferments and boils, in my sometimes drunken head it glows quite exceptionally; I long to find a great thought which will clear the ferment and blow the glow into a bright flame. A splendid subject, compared with which all my previous ones are mere childishness, is working upwards in my mind. What I want to do is to reveal in a “fairy story” or something like that those foreshadowings of the modern world that showed themselves in the Middle Ages; I want to uncover those spirits who knocked under the hard crust of the earth for release, buried beneath the foundations of churches and dungeons. I want to try and resolve at least part of Gutzkow’s task: the true second part of Faust — Faust no longer an egoist but sacrificing himself for mankind — has yet to be written. There is Faust, there is the Wandering Jew, there is the Wild Huntsman, three types of the anticipated spiritual freedom which can easily be placed in connection and relation with Jan Huss. What a poetic background is given to me there, against which these three demons work their will! The idea of the Wild Huntsman, formerly begun in metre, has merged into it. These three types (why don’t you write, you fellows? Nov. 14) I shall treat in a most original manner; I promise myself a particular effect from the interpretation of Ahasuerus and the Wild Huntsman. To make the subject more poetic and the details more significant I can easily weave in other things from German tradition — but there is time for that yet. While the short story I am working on at present is more of a mere study in style and character portraying, this is to be the real thing on which I found my hopes for my name.

Nov. 15. No letter today either? What shall I do? What shall I think of you? I can’t understand you. Nov. 20. And if you don’t write today I shall geld you in thoughts and make you wait as long as you do me. An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a letter for a letter. But you hypocrites say: Not an eye for an eye, not a tooth for a tooth, not a letter for a letter, and fob me off with your damned Christian sophistry. No, better a good pagan than a bad Christian.

A young Jew has arisen, Theodor Creizenach, who writes most excellent poems and even better verses. He has written a comedy [Th. Creizenach, Der schwäbische Apoll] in which W. Menzel and company are ridiculed in the most priceless fashion. Everybody is now flocking to the modern school and building houses, palaces or little huts on the foundation of the great ideas of the time. Everything else is going to the dogs, sentimental little songs die away unheard, and the ringing horn waits for a huntsman to sound it for the hunting of tyrants; and God’s storm rustles in the tree-tops and the youth of Germany stand in the grove, clashing their swords and raising high their brimming cups; from the mountain-tops the burning castles blaze, thrones shake, altars tremble, and if the Lord calls in storm and thunder: Forward, forward! who will resist us?

[Further comes the following joking text: “We, Friedrich Engels, supreme poet in the Bremen town-hall cellar and privileged boozer, announce and make known to all and sundry, past, present, absent and future, that you are all asses, lazy creatures, who are wasting away from disgust with your own existence, scoundrels who don’t write to me, and so on, and so on. Written on our office stool at a time when we had no hangover. Friedrich Engels”.]

In Berlin lives a young poet, Karl Grün, of whom I have these days read a Buch der Wanderungen which is very good. But he is said to be twenty-seven already, and at that age he should be able to write better. Now and again he has very striking thoughts, but often dreadful Hegelian phrases. What does this mean, for instance: “Sophocles is the highly moral Greece which lets its titanic outbursts break against the wall of absolute necessity. In Shakespeare the concept of absolute character made its appearance.”

The night before last I had a great booze-up in the wine cellar on two bottles of beer and two and a half bottles of 1794 Rüdesheimer. My prospective publisher and diverse philistines were with me. Specimen of an argument with one of these philistines on the Bremen constitution: I: In Bremen the opposition to the government is not of the right kind since it consists of the money aristocracy, the aldermen who oppose the aristocracy of rank, the Senate. He: You cannot really maintain that, can you? I: Why not? He: Prove your assertion. — That sort of thing passes for argument here! Oh, you philistines, go and learn Greek, and come again. Anyone that knows Greek also knows how to argue rite. I can argue six such fellows to death at once, even if I am half-seas over and they are sober. These people cannot follow a thought through to its necessary conclusions for three seconds, but everything goes in spasms; you only need let them speak for half an hour, throw in a few seemingly innocent questions, and they contradict themselves splendidamente. They are dreadfully stolid people, these philistines; I began to sing, but they resolved unanimously against me that they would eat first, and then sing. They stuffed themselves with oysters, while I went on angrily smoking, drinking and shouting without taking any notice of them, until I fell into a blissful slumber. I am now a large-scale importer of banned books into Prussia; Börne’s Franzosenfresser in four copies, the Briefe aus Paris by the same, six volumes, Venedey’s Preussen und Preussenthum, most strictly prohibited, in five copies, are lying ready for dispatch to Barmen. The last two volumes of the Briefe aw Paris I had not yet read; they are magnificent. King Otto of Greece is given a terrible going-over; thus he says on one occasion:

“If I were God I would have great fun: I would let all the great Greeks rise again one night.”

[L. Börne, Briefe aus Paris, Brief 89]

Then comes a very fine description of how these Hellenes walk about in Athens, Pericles, Aristotle and others. Then it is announced: King Otto has come. Everybody gets up, Diogenes trims his lamp, and all hurry to Piraeus. King Otto has landed and is making the following speech:

“Hellenes, look up. The sky has taken on the Bavarian national colour.” (This speech is really too good, I must copy it out in full.) “For in the most ardent times Greece belonged to Bavaria. The Pelasgians lived in the Odenwald, and Inachus was born in Landshut. I have come to make you happy. Your demagogues, seditionists and journalists have brought your beautiful land to ruin. The fatal freedom of the press has thrown everything into confusion. Just see what the olive-trees look like. I would have come to you long ago, but I could not do so, for I have not yet been long in this world. Now you are a member of the Deutsche Bund; my ministers will inform you of the latest decisions of the Bund. I shall know how to safeguard the rights of my crown and by and by make you happy. For my civil list” (salary of the king in a constitutional state) “you shall annually give me 6 million piastres, and I allow you to pay my debts.” [ibid.]

The Greeks become confused, Diogenes shines his lamp in the king’s face, and Hippocrates has ordered six cartloads of hellebore to be fetched, etc., etc. This whole ironical poem is a masterpiece of biting satire and written in a style that is divine. The reason why you like Börne less is because you are reading one of his weakest and earliest works, the Schilderungen aus Paris. The Dramaturgische Blätter, the criticisms, the aphorisms, but above all the Briefe aus Paris and the marvellous Franzosenfresser stand infinitely higher. The description of the collection of paintings is very boring, there you are right. But the grace, the Herculean strength, the depth of feeling, the devastating wit of the Franzosenfresser are unsurpassable. I hope we shall meet at Easter or else in the autumn in Barmen, and then you shall get a better idea of this Börne. — What you write about Torstrick’s duel is indeed different from his own version, but in any case he is the one who had the most unpleasantness from it. He is a good fellow, but he lives in extremes, now drunk, then a little pedantic.

Continuation. If you are of the opinion that German literature has gradually fallen asleep, you are greatly mistaken. Don’t think that because you hide your head from it like an ostrich and don’t see it, it has ceased to exist. Au contraire, it is developing quite appreciably, as would be clear to you if you paid more attention to it and didn’t live in Prussia, where the works of Gutzkow, etc., first require a special and rarely granted permission. — You are equally mistaken in thinking I should return to Christianity. Pro primo, it is ridiculous to me that I no longer count with you as a Christian, and pro secundo, that you think anyone who for the sake of the Idea has stripped off what is fantastical in orthodoxy could submit to that strait jacket again. A true rationalist can perhaps do so by acknowledging that his natural explanation of miracles and his shallow moralising are insufficient; but mythicism and speculation cannot again descend from their dawn-reddened snow-capped peaks into the misty valleys of orthodoxy. — For I am on the point of becoming a Hegelian. Whether I shall become one I don’t, of course, know yet, but Strauss has lit up lights on Hegel for me which make the thing quite plausible to me. His (Hegel’s) philosophy of history is anyway written as from my own heart. Do see that you get hold of Strauss’ Charakteristiken und Kritiken, the essay on Schleiermacher and Daub is wonderful. [219] Nobody else writes so penetratingly, clearly and interestingly as Strauss. By the way, he is not at all infallible; even if his entire Leben Jesu should be discovered to be a collection of sheer sophistries, still the first thing that makes this work so important is its basic idea of the mythical in Christianity; and the discovery would not damage this idea, for it can always be applied anew to biblical history. And that he has not only conceived the idea but also carried it out with such undeniable excellence raises Strauss’ merit still higher. A good exegetist may be able to convict him here and there of a mistake or of falling into extremes, just as Luther was in detail open to criticism; but that, of course, does not matter. If Tholuck has ever said anything good about Strauss [A. Tholuck, Die Glaubwürdigkeit der evangelischen Geschichte] that is either a sheer accident or an apt reminiscence; Tholuck’s scholarliness is too diffuse and with that he is merely receptive, not even critical, much less productive. The good ideas Tholuck has had can easily be counted, and he himself destroyed any belief in the scientific character of his polemics as far back as ten years ago by his controversy with Wegscheider and Gesenius. Tholuck’s scientific effect has in no way been lasting, and his time is long past. Hengstenberg did at least once have an original, even if absurd thought: that of the prophetic perspective. — It is incomprehensible to me that you care for nothing that goes beyond Hengstenberg and Neander. With all due respect for Neander, he is not scientific. Instead of setting intellect and reason solidly to work in his writings, even if at some point he should come into opposition to the Bible, whenever he fears that might happen he lets science take care of itself and comes out with empiricism or pious sentiment. He is much too pious and amiable to be able to oppose Strauss. Precisely by these pious outbursts in which his Leben Jesu abounds he blunts the point even of his genuinely scientific arguments.

A propos — a few days ago I read in the paper that Hegelian philosophy has been banned in Prussia, that a famous Hegelian lecturer in Halle has been induced by a ministerial rescript to suspend his lectures and that it has been intimated to several junior Halle lecturers of the same colour (presumably Ruge, etc.) that they cannot expect appointments. It is said that by this same rescript the definitive ban on the Berlin Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik has been decided. I have not yet heard anything further. I cannot believe even the Prussian Government capable of such an unheard-of act of violence, although Börne prophesied it as long as five years ago, and Hengstenberg, an intimate friend of the Crown Prince [the future King Frederick William IV] as well as Neander, is said to be a declared enemy of the Hegelian school. If you hear anything of the business, write to me about it. Now I'll study Hegel over a glass of punch. Adios. Expecting a letter from you soon,

Friedrich Engels

Engels To Friedrich Graeber

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 487

Written: 9 December 1839

First published: in part in Die neue Rundschau, 10. Heft, Berlin, 1913, and in full in: F. Engels, Schriften der Frühzeit, Berlin, 1920

Bremen, December 9, 1839-February 5, 1840

December 9.

My dear fellow, your letter has just arrived; it is amazing how long one has to wait for you people. Nothing has been heard from Berlin since your and Heuser’s letter from Elberfeld. One ought to give oneself up to the devil if only his existence were proved. But you have now arrived and that is good.

Imitating you, I leave theology to the last as a worthy crowning to the pyramid of my letter. I busy myself very much with literary work; since I received Gutzkow’s assurance that my contributions are welcome I have sent him an essay on K. Beck; then I am composing a lot of verses, which, however, badly need polishing up, and also writing prose pieces to practise my style. The day before yesterday I wrote “Eine Bremer Liebesgeschichte”, yesterday “Die Juden in Bremen”; tomorrow I think I shall write “Die junge Literatur in Bremen”, “Der Jüngste” ["A Bremen Love Story”, “The Jews in Bremen”, “Young literature in Bremen”, “The Youngest"] (namely, the office boy) or something else of the kind. In a fortnight, if one is in the mood, one can thus easily scribble up to five sheets, then one polishes up the style, puts in verses here and there for variety, and publishes it as Bremer Abende. My prospective publisher came to see me yesterday; I read him Odysseus Redivivus, [220] which delighted him exceedingly; he will take the first novel from my factory and yesterday wanted desperately to have a small volume of poems. But unfortunately there aren’t enough of them, and — the censorship! Who would pass Odysseus? Incidentally, I don’t allow the censorship to keep me from writing freely; let them cross out as much as they like afterwards, I don’t commit infanticide on my own thoughts. Such censorship cuts are always disagreeable, but also honourable; an author who reaches the age of thirty or writes three books without cuts by the censor is not worth anything. Scarred warriors are the best. You must be able to tell by looking at a book that it has come out of a battle with the censor. By the way, the Hamburg censorship is liberal; in my last Telegraph essay on the German Volksbücher there are several pieces of very bitter sarcasm about the Bundestag and the Prussian censorship, but not a letter has been crossed out.

December 11. Oh, Fritz! For years I have not been so lazy as I am at this moment. Ha! it is beginning to dawn on me what I need — I must visit the tertium locum.

December 12. Really, what asses — I meant to say what good people — the Bremen people are! In this present weather the streets are terribly slippery, and they have strewn sand in front of the town-hall cellar so that the drunks will not fall.

The fellow on the side here suffers from world-weariness, he visited H. Heine in Paris and caught it from him; then he went to Theodor Mundt and learnt certain phrases indispensable for world-wearinessing. Since then he has become visibly thinner and is going to write a book on world-weariness as the only sure remedy against corpulence.

January 20 [1840]. I did not want to write to you until it was certain whether I shall stay here or go away. Now at last I can tell you that for the time being I shall stay here.

21st. I admit that I am not very keen to continue the theological debate. One misunderstands one another and by the time one replies, one has long since forgotten one’s ipsisima verba which are the point at issue, and so no purpose is achieved. A thorough discussion of the matter would require much more space, and it often happens to me that I cannot endorse in a subsequent letter things I said in an earlier one because they belonged so very much to the category of preconception of which I have freed myself in the meantime. Through Strauss I have now entered on the straight road to Hegelianism. Of course, I shall not become such an inveterate Hegelian as Hinrichs and others, but I must nevertheless absorb important things from this colossal system. The Hegelian idea of God has already become mine, and thus I am joining the ranks of the “modern pantheists”, as Leo and Hengstenberg say, knowing well that even the word pantheism arouses such colossal revulsion on the part of pastors who don’t think. Thus today at midday I was highly amused by a long sermon in the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung against Märklin’s pietism. [221] The good Kirchen-Zeitung not only finds it most peculiar that it is counted among the pietists, but finds also other curious things. Modern pantheism, i.e., Hegel, apart from the fact that it is already found among the Chinese and Parsees, is perfectly expressed in the sect of the Libertines, which was attacked by Calvin. [222] This discovery is really rather too original. But still more original is its development. It is already very difficult to recognise Hegel in what the Kirchen-Zeitung passes off as his views, and that again has a very far-fetched similarity with a most vaguely expressed proposition of Calvin’s on the Libertines. The proof was enormously amusing. The Bremer Kirchenbote puts it even better and says that Hegel denies the truth of history! It’s stupendous what nonsense sometimes comes out when somebody labours to make out that a philosophy which stands in his way and which he can no longer get round, is un-Christian. People who know Hegel only by name and have only read the notes in Leo’s Hegelingen want to overthrow a system which, being cast in a single mould, needs no clamps to hold it together. — This letter is presided over by an eminently unlucky star. God knows, I no sooner get down to it than the devil is let loose. I am always given office work.

These are two puppets which are so stiff contrary to my will. Otherwise they would be men.

Have you read Strauss’ Charakteristiken und Kritiken? See that you get it, the essays in it are all excellent. The one on Schleiermacher and Daub is a masterpiece. From the essays on the Württemberg demoniacs an enormous amount of psychology can be learnt. [223] Equally interesting are the other theological and aesthetic essays. — In addition I am studying Hegel’s Geschichtsphilosophie, an enormous work; I read out of it dutifully every evening, the tremendous thoughts grip me terribly. — Recently Tholuck’s old gossip sheet, the Literarische Anzeiger, fatuously raised the question why “modern pantheism” had no lyric poetry, though the ancient Persian, etc., had. [224] The Literarische Anzeiger can just wait until I and certain other people have got to the bottom of this pantheism, the lyric poetry will come all right. It is very fine, by the way, that the Literarische Anzeiger accepts Daub and condemns speculative philosophy. As if Daub did not also adhere to Hegel’s principle that humanity and divinity are in essence identical. There you have this dreadful superficiality; whether Strauss and Daub agree in principle they care little, but that Strauss does not believe in the marriage at Cana [225] while Daub does, suffices for them to elevate one into heaven and declare the other a candidate for hell. Oswald Marbach, the Volksbücher publisher, is the most confused of men, but especially (cum — tum) of the Hegelians. How a pupil of Hegel can say,

Heaven is also here on Earth. I can

Distinctly feel the God in me becoming Man,

is to me utterly incomprehensible, since Hegel distinguished the totality very sharply from the incomplete individual. — Nobody has done Hegel more harm than his pupils; only a few of them, like Gans, Rosenkranz, Ruge and others, were worthy of him. But an Oswald Marbach is truly the non plus ultra of all misunderstanders; such a godly fellow! — The Rev. Pastor Mallet, in the Bremer Kirchenbote, has declared Hegel’s system to be “loose talk”. [226] That would be serious, for if these blocks, these granite thoughts, fell apart, a single fragment of this Cyclopean building could kill not merely Pastor Mallet but all Bremen. If, for example, the thought that world history is the development of the concept of freedom were to fall with all its weight on the neck of a Bremen pastor — what sort of sigh would he give?

February 1. Today this letter must go off, come what may.

The Russians are beginning to become naive; they claim that the war against the Circassians has not yet cost as many human lives as one of Napoleon’s lesser battles. I should not have credited a barbarian like Nicholas with such naivety.

The Berliners, I hear, are terribly furious with me. I have belittled Tholuck and Neander to them and I have not put Ranke among the superos, and that has made them mad. In addition I have written to Heuser divinely extravagant stuff about Beethoven. — I have read a very pretty comedy, Weh dem, der lügt! [woe to him who lies!] by Grillparzer in Vienna, which is a long way above the present common run of comedies. There shines through it now and then a free noble spirit to which the Austrian censorship is an intolerable burden. One can see how much trouble it cost the author to draw an aristocratic nobleman in such a fashion that the noble censor raises no objection. O temper, o moria, Donner und Doria [The well-known Latin O tempora, o mores is here distorted to rhyme with the German], today the fifth of February is here and it’s a scandal that I am so lazy, but I cannot help it, God knows, I am doing nothing now. I have started several essays but they are not progressing, and whenever I want to write verses in the evening I have always eaten so much that I can’t prevent myself from falling asleep. — This summer I terribly want to make a journey into the Danish country, Holstein, Jutland, Zealand, Rügen. I must see that my Old Man sends my brother [Hermann] here, then I'll take him with me. I have an enormous longing for the sea, and what an interesting travel journal I could make of it; then it could be published with a few poems. We are having such divine weather now, and I can’t go out, I want to so terribly, it’s bad luck.

This is a fat sugar broker who is just leaving the house and whose standing phrase is “In my opinion”. When he has spoken to somebody at the stock exchange and is going away, he invariably says: “You fare well!” His name is Job. H. Bergmann.

There are touching people here. So I'll immediately draw you another picture from life:

This old fellow is drunk every morning and he then steps in front of his door and shouts, thumping his chest: “Ick bin Borger”, i.e., I thank Thee, God, that I am not like these Hanoverians, Oldenburgers, or worse, Frenchmen, but a Bremen Borger tagen baren Bremer Kind! [a burgher of Bremen, a true-born child of Bremen!]

The expression on the faces of the local old women of all classes is really horrid. In particular the one on the right with the snub nose is genuine Bremen.

The speech of Bishop Eylert at the festival of the Order [227] has one great merit: now we know what to think of the King [Frederick William III] and his perjury is official. The same king who in A. D. 1815, when he was feeling afraid, promised his subjects in a cabinet decree that if they got him out of the mess they should have a constitution, this same shabby, rotten, goddamned king now has it announced through Eylert that nobody is going to get a constitution from him, for “All for one and one for all is Prussia’s principle of government” and “No one puts old cloth on a new garment”. Do you know why Rotteck’s fourth volume [Allgemeine Weitgeschichte für alle Stände] is banned in Prussia? Because it says that in 1814 our majestic snotnose of Berlin recognised the Spanish constitution of 1812 and yet in 1823 sent the French into Spain to do away with that constitution and bring back to the Spaniards the noble gift of the Inquisition and torture. [228] In 1826 Ripoll was burnt at Valencia on instructions from the Inquisition, and his blood and that of 23,000 noble Spaniards who languished to death in prison for their liberal and heretic views is on the conscience of Frederick William III “""the Just""” of Prussia. I hate him, and besides him I hate only perhaps two or three others; I hate him with a mortal hatred, and if I didn’t so despise him, the shit, I would hate him still more. Napoleon was an angel compared with him, the King of Hanover [Ernst August] is a god if our King is a man. There never was a time richer in royal crimes than that of 1816-30; almost every prince then ruling deserved the death penalty. The pious Charles X, the vicious Ferdinand VII of Spain, Francis of Austria, that machine that was only good for signing death sentences and dreaming of Carbonari [229]; Dom Miguel, who is a greater scoundrel than all the heroes of the French Revolution taken together, and whom nevertheless Prussia, Russia and Austria gladly recognised when he bathed in the blood of the best Portuguese, and the parricide Alexander of Russia, as also his worthy brother Nicholas on whose abominable deeds it would be superfluous to waste another word — oh, I could tell you killing stories about how the princes love their subjects — I expect anything good only of that prince whose ears are boxed right and left by his people and whose palace windows are smashed by the flying stones of the revolution. Farewell.

Yours,

Friedrich Engels

1840

Source: MECW Volume 2;

Transcribed: Andy Blunden;

Engels To Levin Schucking. June 18

Engels To Levin Schucking. July 2

Engels To Marie Engels. July 7-9

Engels To Marie Engels. August 4

Engels To Marie Engels. August 20-25

Engels To Marie Engels. September 18-19

Engels To Marie Engels. October 29

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber. November 20

Engels To Marie Engels. December 6-9

Engels To Marie Engels. December 21-28

Engels To Levin Schücking

In Münster

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 494

Written: 18 June 1840

First published: in the Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich Schiller-Universität, Jena, jg. 7, Heft 4, 1957-58

Bremen, June 18, 1840

Dear Herr Schücking,

Once again my warmest thanks for your kindly reception and for the beautiful souvenir from Münster! [230] I read it through in Osnabrück at one sitting with great enjoyment, and I envy the poet [Annette Elisabeth Freiin von Droste-Hülshöff] for her original and tender images of nature, the many hidden splendours, the kinship with Byron, which you also, if I am not mistaken, stressed in your review. [231] It is a shame that these poems should have come and gone without making any impression; but what does this depth of feeling mean to the shallow reading public of our days? At the first opportunity I shall publicly do justice to the book. — Where is there a more beautiful ballad of its kind than Der Graf von Thal?

Now concerning our Shelley-plan, [232] had a talk with Schünemann straight away yesterday; at the mention of the fee of ten talers he shrank back as if struck by lightning and said at once he could not take it on. He is just back from the Fair where he himself inspected his masses of unsold books of every kind, pietistic novels, descriptions from Belgium, Spanish readers and other rubbish; in addition, he was foolish enough to make contracts in Leipzig for works on theology and on world and literary history at a low fee, so that he has his hands full. These stupid bookseller people believe they risk less on a commentary on the epistles of John, which costs perhaps two talers in fees and is badly produced, and will perhaps be bought by 20 students at most, than on Shelley, for which production and fees may cost relatively three times as much, but in which the whole nation will take an interest. Just now I was with Schünemann again to hear from his own mouth the final statement that on these conditions he cannot take it on; one sheet of poems, he said, contains only a quarter as much as a sheet of prose, so that the fee for a sheet would really come to 40 talers. I told him it was not child’s play to translate Shelley, and if he did not want it then he should leave it alone, for heaven’s sake; and that by the way he was standing in his own light. He: If only we would first give him a small specimen, he would print it, and then one could see what could be done. I: Schücking and Püttmann are not the people to agree to give specimens, and what specimens do for other people, their names do for them. Will you or won’t you? He: Not on these conditions. — Muy bien; to beg was beneath our dignity, so I left. — I am now of the opinion that this failure should by no means discourage us; if one will not do it, another will. Püttmann, who translated the first canto of Queen Mab, has sent it to Engelmann in Leipzig, and if he accepts, it will be easy to get him to take on the whole thing. Otherwise Hammerich in Altona and Krabbe in Stuttgart would perhaps be the ones we should approach first. But just now, immediately after the Easter Fair, is a very unfavourable moment for making our offers. If it were January I am sure Schünemann would have grabbed it with both hands. I want to go to him once more and ask him for a joke what kind of conditions he can offer us.

Friend Schünemann evaded my visits by flight; he is on an outing to the country. He would probably have offered five talers a sheet and asked, as he always loves to do, for a little specimen of three to four sheets in advance. The whole thing is the fault of none other than the pietist Wilh. Elias of Halle, on whose novel Glauben und Wissen, published by Schünemann, the latter loses about 2,000 talers. If I catch the fellow I'll challenge him to scimitars.

What do you say to all this? I shall write to Püttmann straight away today. I think it is too good a project simply to drop it. Any bookseller with a smattering of education (Schünemann is a blockhead) will take on the publication with pleasure.

I am eagerly looking forward to hearing your opinion on the matter, and in the meantime commend myself to your friendly goodwill.

Respectfully,

Friedrich Engels

What do you say to Gutzkow’s challenge to the Hallische Jahrbücher in the Telegraph?[233] Gutzkow seems to want to renew Menzel’s and Müllner’s critical terrorism; let him take care that the younger ones do not outgrow him!

Engels To Levin Schücking

In Münster

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 496

Written: 2 July 1840

First published: in Wissenschaftliche Zeitschrift der Friedrich Schiller-Universität, Jena, jg. 5, Heft 4-5, 1955-56

My dear Friend,

Your kind lines of the 22nd of last month reached me unfortunately only on the 26th, which was very disagreeable to me since the previous evening, asked by a local bookseller of whom I made inquiries about reasonable publishers, I had written to Hammerich in Altona and offered him the publication of the Shelley. So I received his reply only today, which was a rejection, since he says he is overwhelmed with publishing work.

As concerns G. C. A. Meyer senior, I am of the opinion that we should let him go in any case. Firstly, the fellow and his factory workers (Brinckmeier, Bärmann and Co.) are too common; secondly, Püttmann would never consent to write for his publishing house; thirdly, Meyer pays terribly low fees, and fourthly, we would get involved in a horrible mass of demand notes and other vexations to rake in the fees. I am at the moment myself having to send him demand notes for the fee for my articles in the Mitternachtzeitung, [Modern Literary Life. 1. Karl Gutzkow as Dramatist. II. Modern Polemics] which he does not want to fork out; and although in this case there is the middleman Brinckmeier between us, I could on no account make the offer. I am unfortunately still without a reply from Püttmann and hence cannot take any energetic steps. Moreover, Meyer will already have distributed everything to his subordinates and will not be able to let us have anything from Shelley. These publishers are used to having the pens in their service absolutely at their disposal, and which of us would put up with that?

I think the best is to give Püttmann, who in this respect is probably the most experienced among us, unrestricted authority to enter into a contract; he will no doubt carry the matter through to the satisfaction of us all and at all events with greater ease than I could. Moreover, he has already offered Queen Mab to W. Engelmann, who would be the right publisher for us. And one thing is of great importance here: you, like me, have so far written only for journals; Püttmann, on the other hand, has already had one work printed and another announced. [234] The infamous publishers pay attention to this kind of thing.

When your letter arrived, Schünemann had just started on a journey from which he is not yet back. I shall make him accept Coleridge, at any rate [235]; in a champagne fog at the Gutenberg festival, which was celebrated here with splendour, I drank brotherhood with him, by which he felt much honoured. If you have the manuscript so far ready, please send it to me.

The spiteful abuse of the Hallische Jahrbücher is in No. 97 or 98 of the Telegraph, which reaches us by post and therefore much earlier than it can you. I have again sent Gutzkow something and am curious to see how he receives it after the article in the Mitternachtzeitung (“Moderne Polemik” ).[236]

From Barmen I have just received a letter which incomprehensibly contains nothing about Püttmann. If you agree to Püttmann looking after the publishing side, I shall write to him immediately I hear from you and pass everything on to him. Also, please tell me how matters stand with the fee from the Rheinisches Jahrbuch; in a few days I shall send something to Freiligrath. In this case I don’t care so much about the money, but I would like to know in advance how I stand.

Your translation of Shelley and Coleridge in Pfizer’s Blätter [zur Kunde der Literatur des Auslands] I have read with pleasure [237]; today I shall finish Shelley’s Sensitive Plant and shall send it also to him. This splendid poem is written in a spirit which is still more akin than Byron to Droste’s works. These continue to give me great pleasure and I thank you for them once more.

With the assurance of my sincere respect I commend myself to your kind remembrance.

Bremen, 2/7.40

Yours most truly,

Fr. Engels

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 498

Written: 9 July 1840

First published: in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 2, 1930

Dear Marie,

Things will soon be too bad with you; you were going to write to me as soon as you arrived in Mannheim, and now I have been sitting here three weeks already and still no letter from you. If that goes on I shall have to make up my mind to write direct to Fräulein Jung so that you will be more or less made to prove your sisterly love for me.

I hope you are having better weather than we are, nothing but storm and rain, as in September and November. At sea ships are going down like flies which drop into a glass of water, and the Norderney steamer was barely able to get there. The day before yesterday I was in Bremerhaven, and there also it rained all morning. I was on the ships which take emigrants to America; they lie all together in the steerage, which is a large space as wide and long as the whole ship, the berths (that is what the beds are called) in sets of six side by side, and above them another six. There they all lie, men, women and children, and how horrible this stuffy place is, where there are often 200 people lying, especially during the first days of seasickness, you can well imagine. The air is in any case suffocating. Cabin passengers are better off, however, they have more room and a very elegantly furnished cabin. But when a storm breaks and the waves come over the ship, they are worse off; for the cabin has a glass skylight through which the light comes in; and when it is hit by a heavy wave, the glass comes ringing most politely into the cabin and the water after it. Then the whole cabin generally gets full of water, but the beds are so high that they remain dry. Just as we were leaving again at midday a great three-master called Marie, like you, and coming from the island of Cuba, sailed into the roads. Because of the low tide it could not enter the port and anchored in the roads. We went close to it in our steamer, and took off the captain; but there were already beginning to be waves in the roads, and the ship pitched a little. At once all the ladies grew pale and made faces as if they were going to be drowned; we had a couple of pretty tailor’s daughters on board to whom we behaved extremely gallantly, and with the straightest face in the world I made the geese believe the rolling and pitching would go on as far as Brake, which we were to reach only in an hour and a half. Unfortunately, however, it stopped again directly after Bremerhaven. Three unripe hats blew off into the water and were probably carried away to America, as well as a whole lot of empty wine and beer bottles. Apart from that I did not see much that was remarkable except a dead cat in the Weser which was making a voyage to the United States all on its own. I spoke to it, but it was rude enough not to reply.

Here you have a hasty sketch of Bremerhaven. On the left is the fort which guards the harbour, an old brick-built thing which the wind will soon blow over; next the locks through which ships are let into the harbour, which is a long narrow canal a little wider than the Wupper; behind that is the town, and farther to the right the Geest, a kind of river, and the church spire above it in the air, that is the church which has yet to be built. On the right in the distance is Geestendorf.

A few days ago I made the acquaintance of a man whose father is a Frenchman born in America, his mother a German, he himself was born at sea and his native tongue, since he lives in Mexico, is Spanish. So what is his Fatherland?

We now have a complete stock of beer in the office; under the table, behind the stove, behind the cupboard, everywhere are beer bottles, and when the Old Man [Heinrich Leupold] is thirsty he borrows one and has it filled up again for us later. That is now done quite openly, the glasses stand on the table all day and a bottle nearby. In the right-hand corner are the empty bottles, in the left the full ones, next to them my cigars. It is really true, Marie, the young people are getting worse and worse every day, as Dr. Hantschke says; who would have thought 20 or 30 years ago of such terrible wickedness as drinking beer in the office?

What is most convenient for you, shall I pay the postage for our correspondence and frank my letters and also pay for yours, which you will then send unfranked? If you have already written before this letter arrives, I shall not write to you again until you write me a sensible, long letter in reply to this one.

Adieu.

With true love,

Your brother

Friedrich

Bremen, July 7, 40

Fortunately, this letter has again been left lying around and thus gives me the opportunity to reply to your letter, which has just arrived. “I wish I too could play as well as she does! If I practise very hard, I shall get that far too?” You? Play a sonata of 20 pages? Goose that you are! Schornstein would, of course, be pleased. What wishes have I for Christmas? I have lost my cigar case, and if I don’t find it soon, can you make a new one for me? Thank Ada [Adeline Engels] for her greetings and greet her heartily from me; tell her she is the first to call me amiable, and I am not at all a cousin, but at most her very respectful kinsman. — When you write again, don’t address the letter to Treviranus, as I then get it later, but to F. E., Bremen, Martini No. 11. Then it will be brought to me in the office.

Farewell.

Yours,

Friedrich

Bremen, July 9, 1840

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 501

Written: 4 August 1840

First published: slightly abridged in the Deutsche Revue, Stuttgart and Leipzig, Bd. 4, 1920, and in full in: Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 2, 1930

Dear Marie,

Now I must tell you at once that for the future I shall not stand for any lessons from your pen. You must not think, my dearest little goose, that now you are at a boarding-school you can at once try to be wise and, besides, if I want any, I can get piles of books full of good instructions from the Pastor [Georg Gottfried Treviranus]. The beer stays in our office until it has been drunk, and since your arguing against it our beer trade has only improved, for we have firstly brown ale and secondly pale ale. That’s what comes of saucy little boarding-school misses interfering in the affairs of their gentlemen brothers.

So I shall not frank my letters. Only address yours: Herr F. E. in Bremen, that is enough. But leave the parson out of the address. Recently, from July 27th to 30th, we celebrated the July revolution which broke out ten years ago in Paris; we spent one evening in the town-hall cellar and the others in Richard Roth’s tavern. The fellow is still not back. There we drank the finest Laubenheimer in the world and smoked cigars-if you had seen them you would have learnt to smoke just for their sake. My cigar case has still not turned up again. Also, an acquaintance of mine [Höller], has come back, who has been in Pinselfahnien and Kaltermoria and has seen Mister Sippi (this should read Pennsylvania, Baltimore and Mississippi). This fellow is from Solingen, and the Solingen people are the most unfortunate in the world, for they cannot get rid of their Solingen German. The lad still says: im Sohmer is es sehr schön Wätter [Dialectal pronunciation of im Sommer ist es sehr schönes Wetter (in summer the weather is very fine)], and for Karoline he always says Kalinah.

It is sad, I have barely a groat left in my pocket and a mass of debts, both my own and cigar-shop debts. Now I am being pestered by the man from whom I bought plums for you, which I have not yet paid for, and the bookbinder has not been paid yet, then the three months after which I had to pay for the cigars I bought have long gone by, and Strücker does not send bills of exchange, and the Pastor is away travelling and cannot give me any money. But tomorrow he will be back, and then I shall put six louis d'or in my purse, and when I have eaten three groats’ worth of cake in a coffee-house I shall throw a double pistole on the counter: “Can you give me change?” And then he will say, “Unfortunately not”, then I shall turn out all my pockets for the three groats and go out of the door proud of my double pistoles. When I am back in the office I shall toss a pistole on the ginger-headed junior’s desk: “Derkhiem, see if you can get change”, and the fellow will be extremely happy, for, it gives him an opportunity to stay away from the office for an hour and to lounge around, which innocent pleasure he likes very much. For small change is very scarce here, and anyone who has five talers’ worth of change in his pocket is vastly content.

Recently, a pricelessly funny incident occurred here. In the paper there was an advertisement for a cook. A sturdy girl comes into the editorial office and says [The following conversation is in Low German]: “Hört Se mol, do hebb’ ick in der Zeitung lesen, dat se ‘ne Köksche sökt” [Listen, I have read in the paper that you are looking for a cook] “Jowol,” [Yes, indeed] says the clerk. “Wat mot de wol können?” [What must she be able to do?] asks the girl. “Jo, de mot Kloveer speelen un danzen un Französch, un singen, un neien un sticken — dat mot se all können.” [Well, she must play the piano and dance and speak French, and sing, and sew, and embroider- she must be able to do all that] “Donnerstag,” says the girl, “dat kann ech nit.” [Blast it, I can’t do that] But when she sees the whole office laughing, she asks: “Se wêt mek wol tom besten hebben? Donnerstag, ick lote mi nich mokeeren!” [Are you trying to make a fool of me? I don’t let people make fun of me, blast it!] And with that she goes for the clerk and wants to give him a good hiding; of course, she was gently put outside the door. The other day the Old Man [Heinrich Leupold] threw a driver out of the door. The fellow wanted Prussian gold and would not take louis d'or at the rate of 5 5/12 talers. We were having a row with him, when the Old Man came in: “What is going on here, confound it”, and took the fellow by the chest and threw him in the gutter. Thereupon the driver came quietly back and said: “So wer et nich meent, jetz will ech de Lujedor woll nehmen.” [I did not mean it like that, I will take the louis d'or now all right]

At the moment I have no envelope for my letter except this scribbled-over coffee bill, which will surely be welcome to you as a true coffee-sister.

Farewell and write soon

to your brother

Friedrich

Bremen, Aug. 4, 40

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 503

Written: 20 August 1840

First published: in the Deutsche Revue, Stuttgart and Leipzig, Bd. 4, 1920

My very dear Soeur,

I have just received your letter, and since I have nothing to do at the moment, I shall scribble you a few lines. Our office has been considerably improved. Up to now it was always very annoying to have to dash straight to the desk from a meal, when you are so dreadfully lazy, and to remedy this we have fixed up two very fine hammocks in the packing-house loft and there we swing after we have eaten, smoking a cigar, and sometimes having a little doze. I am convinced you will find this arrangement most suitable. Today I also had a letter from Roth, he will be back next Sunday [after] an absence of 4 months. So that you know: 1,700 marks banco at 137 per cent are 776 talers 24 groats louis d'or. I have checked it, it is quite correct. Herewith an engraving.

An old connoisseur of wines who has been given sour wine to drink. The one next to him is the commercial traveller from whom he bought the sour wine. I will also draw you a picture of the hair style for young gentlemen here:

Confound it! When I had written this I went home to eat, and when I came back I lit a cigar to lie down in the hammock. But it immediately broke down under me and when I went to hammer new nails in, the infamous Derkhiem called me, and now I can’t get away from the office again.

Thank God, I did have my siesta after all. I stole out of the office and took cigars and matches with me and ordered beer; then I went to the upper packing-house loft and lay down in the hammock and swung very gently. Then I went to the middle packing-house loft and packed two cases of platillas, and at the same time I consumed a cigar and a bottle of beer and sweated profusely, for it is so warm today that in spite of barely having got rid of a cold I want to go swimming in the Weser again. The other day I bathed and had a fellow row after me, and thus I swam four times across the Weser in one go, which no one in Bremen will so easily imitate.

Confound it! For two reasons: first, it is raining, second, my amiable young principal [Wilhelm Leupold] simply will not leave the office, and so I must let my cigar go out again. But I will chase him away all right. Do you know how I do it? I go into the kitchen and call out very loud: “Kristine, a cork-screw!” Then I open a bottle of beer and pour out a glass for myself. If then he has but half a groat’s worth of honour in him, he must go out, for that means as much as “Be off, Don Guillermo!”

So you now speak English so splendidly? Just wait, when you come home again I will teach you Danish or Spanish so that you can speak with me in a language the others don’t understand. Danske Sprag fagre Sprag, y el Español es lengua muy hermosa. [Danish is a charming language, and Spanish is a most beautiful language] Or would you prefer Portuguese? O portugues he huma lengoa muito graçosa, e os Portuguezes saõ naçaõ muito respeitavel. [Portuguese is a most graceful language, and the Portuguese are a most respectable nation]

But since you have not yet got so far I will spare you that.

Here you can see my hammock, containing myself smoking a cigar.

I have just heard that another 500 cases of sugar, that is, 250,000 lbs., have been sold. That can sweeten many a cup of coffee. Who knows whether the sugar in your cup won’t come from the same case from which I had to take samples! But all your sugar on the Rhine comes from Holland, where it is made from lumps, lumps of sugar, not of cotton-rag.

Soon there will be big manoeuvres in Falkenberg, 3 hours from here, where the Bremen, Hamburg, Lübeck and Oldenburg troops, a whole regiment all together, will show their tricks. They are poor, pathetic things, three of them together have not as much moustache as I have when I have not had a shave for three days; one can count every thread in their coats and they have no sabres, but Speckääle. A Speckaal is a smoked eel, but in soldiers’ language it is a leather scabbard for the bayonet which they carry instead of a sabre. For if they put the bayonet on the end of the rifle, these poor creatures would be very likely to run each other through the mug with it when they were marching, so they are sensible enough to carry it on their backs. They are miserable fellows, Kashubs and Ledshaks.

I just can’t think what else to write about.

God knows, my matter’s melted all away,

Yet I must fill this page up anyway,

Although it takes me pliers to pull it out;

And since by writing verses one can say

Little, and make it go a long, long way,

I end with rhyming doggerel, though I fear

That Pegasus, outraged, will surely rear

And throw me forcibly upon the sand.

The sun is setting. Darkling lies the land,

Save where through Western cloud-veils, bright and clear

Blazes the sunset’s incandescent brand.

It is a solemn, holy fire up there,

Flaming upon the tombstone of a day

That brought us many a thing so loved and dear,

Now dead and gone from us. The night holds sway

And gently draws her star-shot mantle over

Earth’s territories, near and far away.

And silence reigns. Birds in their nests seek cover,

Beasts hide in brushwood on the forest floor.

The midges’ dizzy evening dance is over;

Closed for the night is Life’s enchanting door.

As on the Third one of the Seven Days,

When only trees had been created for

Earth’s ornament, and beasts were yet to graze

In the green fields — so, ‘midst the leaves again

Only the wind intones his hoary lays.

It is the Almighty’s Spirit, who doth rain

On Earth a torrent of tremendous song.

He drives the storm on wings of cloud and rain,

He blows eternally, forever young,

But me, I've puffed the rhymes out of my lungs.

Full stop. If you understand it you are educated and can put a word in.

Adios, yours,

Friedrich

Bremen, Aug. 20, 40

Aug. 25. Roth came back the day before yesterday.

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Bremen, Sept. 18, 1840

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 507

Written: 19 September 1840

First published: in the Deutsche Revue, Stuttgart and Leipzig, Bd. 4, 1920

My most precious!

At the moment the equinoctial gales are raging frightfully; in our house a window was blown in last night and the trees are creaking most pitiably. Tomorrow and the day after there will be news of shipwrecks coming in! The Old Man [Heinrich Leupold] is standing by the window and pulling a wry face because the day before yesterday a ship went to sea in which he has 3,000 talers’ worth of linen which is not insured. You don’t say anything about the letter to Ida [Engels] which I enclosed in my previous letter; or did I forget to put it in? — I am now really staying here till Easter, which for various reasons is most welcome to me. So Ida has gone now; that will be very awkward for you.

We have quite a good camp here too, almost 3,000 men strong, Oldenburg, Bremen, Lübeck and Hamburg troops. I went there the other day, it was great fun. Right in front of the tent (a tavern owner has put up a big refreshments tent) sat a Frenchman, he was quite sozzled and could no longer stand on his feet. The waiters hung a big wreath round him, and he began to shout: Wreathe in gree-en the flo-owing bowl. [Matthias Claudius, Rheinweinlied] Afterwards they dragged him to the mortuary, that is, the hayloft, where he stayed on his back and fell asleep. When he was sober again, he borrowed a horse from somebody, mounted it and kept galloping up and down the camp. All the time he was on the point of falling off most agreeably. We had plenty of good fun there and especially fine wine. Last Sunday I rode to Vegesack, during which tour I had the pleasure of being drenched with rain four times, but I had so much inner heat that every time I dried immediately. But I had a dreadful horse with a terribly hard trot so that one’s bones were jarred to the marrow. — At this moment another 6 bottles of beer are being carried in for us, and they will at once enter upon the process of being lit — I was thinking of cigars, that should read of being emptied. — One bottle I have almost finished already and with it I smoked a cigar; presently, our Don Guillermo [Wilhelm Leupold], the young principal, will go out again, and then we shall start anew.

Sept. 19, 1840. You have a more boring life than we do. Yesterday afternoon there was no more work to do, and the Old Man was out, and Wilhelm Leupold did not show Up often either. So I lit a cigar, first wrote the above to you, then took Lenau’s Famt from my desk and read some of it. Afterwards I drank a bottle of beer and at half past seven went to Roth’s; we went off to the Club, I read Raumer’s Geschichte der Hohenstaufen and then ate beefsteak and cucumber salad. At half past ten I went home and read Diez’s Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen until I felt sleepy. Moreover, tomorrow is Sunday again and Wednesday is a day of penance and prayer in Bremen, and so we carry on gradually into the winter. This winter I shall take dancing lessons with Eberlein so as to accustom my stiff legs to a little graceful movement.

Here you have a scene in the Schlachte, i. e., the street which has the Weser on one side and where the goods are unloaded. The fellow with the whip is the wagoner who is about to drive away the sacks of coffee lying in the background; the fellow with the sack on the right is the Schlachte pirate who is loading them on the cart; by his side a cooper who has just taken a sample and is still holding it in his hand, and next to him is the bargeman from whose barge the sacks were unloaded. You won’t be able to deny that these figures are most interesting. When the wagoner drives he mounts the horse without saddle, stirrup or spurs, and keeps digging his heels into its ribs, like this:

Now it is raining again quite improperly for a Saturday evening, it should really rain only during the week, but from midday Saturday it should be fine. Do you know what superfine medium good ordinary Domingo coffee is? That again is one of those profound concepts which occur in the philosophy of the commercial profession and which your mental powers cannot understand. Superfine medium good ordinary Domingo coffee is coffee from the Island of Haiti which has a slight touch of green, is otherwise grey, and in which with ten good beans you get into the bargain four bad ones, six bits of stone and an eighth of an ounce of dirt, dust, etc. Now you will have grasped it. One pound of this now Costs 9 1/2 groats, that is 4 silver groschen and 8 123/137 pfennigs. I should not really betray these trade secrets, since one does not tell tales out of school, but because it is you I shall make an exception. — Just now our workman is saying: Herr Derkhiem, wann Se sek met de jungens gemein mokt, so mêt Se sek en beten mehr en Respekt hohlen, sons krigt Se dat Volk ganz unner de Föte, Heinrich, dat es en slimmen jung, do hebb’ ick manch’ en Tuck med har'd, Se met nich so veel domet speelen, Se möt se gliks wat achter de Ohren geven, anners helpt nich, un wann Se no'n Ohlen goht, de dait de jungem ok nix, de segt man blot [Herr Derkheim, if you make yourself cheap with the boys you must have a bit more self-respect, otherwise they will walk over you. That Heinrich, he is a bad lad, I have had a lot of trouble with him, you must not play so much with him but immediately give him a smack behind the ears, there is no help for it, and if you go to the Old Man, he won’t do anything to the boys but only say...]: Don’t bother me with the fellow. There you can practise our Low German a little. For the rest I am your most devoted

Friedrich

Bremen, 19.9.40

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 510

Written: 29 October 1840

First published: slightly abridged in the Deutsche Revue, Stuttgart and Leipzig, Bd. 4, 1920, and in full in: Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 2, 1930

Dear Marie,

Next time don’t write to me via Barmen again; Mother leaves the letters lying there until she writes herself, and that is often a long time. But what I wanted to write to you — only you must not write this home, for I want to surprise them with it next spring — I now have an enormous moustache and shall presently add to it a Henry IV and goatee beard. Mother will wonder when suddenly such a long, black-bearded fellow comes across the lawn. Next year, when I go to Italy, I too must look like an Italian.

This is written by little Sophie Leupold who has just been to visit me in the office, while the Old Man [Heinrich Leupold] and Eberlein, who eats here in the house, are at a big dinner. Oh, I could tell you interesting things about this dinner, of engagements which are not yet public and of stolen kisses, but that is not for a girl in a boarding-school. You will learn it soon enough when we are back at home. Then I shall sit in the garden and you'll bring me a big mug of beer and a sausage sandwich, and then I shall say: See, my dear sister, because you have brought the beer out to me and because it is such a fine summer evening, I will tell you of a big dinner which was celebrated in the year 1840, on the twenty-ninth of the month of October, in Bremen, Martini number eleven, in the Royal Saxon Consulate. But now I can tell you only this much, that quite enormous quantities of Madeira, Port, Pouillac, Haut Sauternes, and Rhine wine will be drunk this lunchtime. For although there are only five gentlemen, they are all very good drinkers, almost as good as I. — At the moment there is a Free Market here, and although I have not the honour to be introduced to Her Royal Highness, a Grand Duchess, and many Most Serene Princesses, we still have our fun. I am fortunately so short-sighted that I do not even know what the several exalted, more exalted, and most exalted personages look like who had the honour to drive past me. When next time such a most gracious lady is introduced to you, do tell me whether she is pretty, otherwise such personages don’t interest me at all. Our noble town-hall cellar is now so well fitted out it couldn’t be better; you sit so comfortably between the barrels. Last Sunday we had a moustache evening there. For I had sent out a circular to all moustache-capable young men that it was finally time to horrify all philistines, and that that could not be done better than by wearing moustaches. Everyone with the courage to defy philistinism and wear a moustache should therefore sign. I had soon collected a dozen moustaches, and then the 25th of October, when our moustaches would be a month old, was fixed as the day for a common moustache jubilee. But I had a shrewd idea what would happen, bought a little moustache wax and took it with me; it was then found that one had a truly very fine but unfortunately quite white moustache, while another had been instructed by his principal to hack the criminal thing off. Enough, that evening we had to have at least a few, and those who had none had to paint themselves one. Then I got up and proposed the following toast:

Moustaches always were the pride

Of gallant gentlemen far and wide.

Brave soldiers faced their country’s foes

In brown or black mustachios.

So, in these times of martial glory,

Moustaches are obligatory.

Philistines shirk the burden of bristle

By shaving their faces as clean as a whistle.

We are not philistines, so we

Can let our mustachios flourish free.

Long life to every Christian

Who bears his moustaches like a man.

And may all philistines be damned

For having moustaches banished and banned.

To this doggerel glasses were clinked with great enthusiasm, and then somebody else got up. His principal would not give him a key, and so he had to be home by ten o'clock, or he would not be let in. That is the plight of many a poor devil here. He said:

A plague befall

Principals all

Who won’t hand over the key of the door.

May flies and strands of hair infest

Their supper plates for evermore

And may their nights give them no rest.

Thereupon there was more clinking of glasses. So it continued until ten o'clock, then those without keys had to leave, but we, the fortunate ones with keys, remained seated and ate oysters. I ate eight, but could not manage any more, I still don’t enjoy the things.

Since you are so fond of calculations and even want to reward me for them with the Order of the Yellow Envelope, I shall graciously regale you with the remark that Courant now stands at 106 1/2 per cent, while a year ago it stood at 114. The louis d'or are falling so that anyone here in Bremen who had a million talers a year ago now only has 900,000, that is, 100,000 talers less. Isn’t that tremendous?

You still don’t write me anything of the screed for Ida [Engels], did you get it and have you passed it on or not? It would be awkward for me if I had not sent it and it had been left lying around and got into the hands of the Old Man. [Heinrich Leupold] So write to me and make it the long six-page letter you promised me. I shall return the compliment. Here on the envelope you shall again be regaled with a few calculations which you may take to heart. That I had to copy this letter out again is the fault of Herr Timoleon Miesegans in Bremen, the same one whom the Old Man once threw out of the house two years ago. Your respectful and devoted

Friedrich

Bremen, Oct. 29, 1840

Engels To Wilhelm Graeber

In Barmen

Bremen, Nov. 20, 1840

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 513

Written: 20 November 1840

First published: in Die neue Rundschau, 10. Heft, Berlin, 1913

My dear Wilhelm,

It is now at least six months since you wrote to me. What shall I say to such a friend? You don’t write, your brother [Friedrich Graeber] does not write, Wurm does not write, Grel does not write, Heuser does not write, not a line from W. Blank, I am still less aware of anything from Plümacher, sacré tonnerre [Confound it] what am I to say? When I last wrote to you, my roll of tobacco still weighed seven pounds, now there is barely a cubic inch of it left, and still no reply. Instead you lead a gay life in Barmen — wait, you fellows, as if I didn’t know of every glass of beer that you have since drunk whether you drank it in one draught or several.

You in particular should be ashamed to inveigh against my political truths, you political sleepyhead. If you are left to sit quietly in your rural parsonage, for you will hardly expect a higher position, and to go out for a walk every evening with Frau Pastor and eventually with the young little Pastors and nobody fires off a cannon-ball under your nose, you are blissfully happy and don’t trouble yourself about the sinful F. Engels who argues against the established order. Oh you heroes! But you will yet be drawn into politics, the current of the times will come flooding over your idyllic household, and then you will stand like the oxen before the mountain. Activity, life, youthful spirit, that is the real thing!

By now you will already have heard of the grandiose fun stirred up here by our mutual friend [Friedrich Wilhelm] Krummacher. It is now practically over, but it was a bad business. The Panielites formed up in battalions, stormed the militia arsenal and marched through the town with a large tricolour. They sang: “Free is the life we lead” and “Vivat Paniel, long live Paniel, Paniel is a worthy man!” The Krummacherians gathered in the Cathedral precincts, occupied the town hall, where the Senate was just in session, and plundered the armoury. Armed with halberds and spiked clubs they formed a square in the Cathedral precincts, aimed the two cannons which stand near the main guard post (though they had no powder) at Obernstrasse, from which the Panielites were coming, and so awaited the enemy. But when the latter arrived in front of the cannons, they entered the market from the other side, and occupied it. The 600-strong cavalry occupied the Grasmarkt, directly opposite the Krummacherians, and awaited the command to charge. At this point Burgomaster Smidt came out of the town hall. He stopped between the parties, planting his feet firmly on the stone on which Gottfried, a woman guilty of poisoning, was executed and which stands exactly half an inch above the pavement, and, turning to the Krummacherians, said: “You men of Israel!” Then he turned to the Panielites: “Anores ‘Aqhnaioi! [Men of Athens!], Then turning, now to the right, now to the left, he made the following speech: “Since Krummacher is an alien, it is not fitting that a quarrel which he has stirred up should be fought out within our good town. Therefore, I suggest to the honoured parties that they repair to the Burghers’ Common, which offers a most suitable terrain for such scenes.”

This was approved, and the parties marched out by different gates, after Paniel had armed himself with Roland’s stone shield and sword. The supreme command over the Krummacherians, who were 6,239 1/2 men strong, was taken over by Pastor Mallet, who took part in the campaign of 1813; he ordered powder to be bought and a few small cobbles to be taken along to load the cannons. Arriving on the Burghers’ Common, Pastor Mallet gave orders to occupy the churchyard which adjoins it and is surrounded by a wide ditch. He mounted the memorial to Gottfried Menken and ordered the cannons to be driven on to the cemetery mound. But for want of horses it had not been possible to bring out the cannons. In the meantime it was nine o'clock in the evening and pitch dark. The armies bivouacked, Paniel in Schwachhausen, a village, Mallet in the suburb. The headquarters was in the riding school before the Herdentor, which, however, was already occupied by a troupe of exhibition riders; but when Pastor Kohlmann of Horn held an evening service in the school, the riders ran away. This happened on October 17th. In the morning of the 18th, the two armies took the field. Paniel, who had 4,267 1/4 foot and 1,689 1/4 horse, attacked. A column of infantry led by Paniel himself attacked Mallet’s first battle-line, which consisted of the pupils of his catechism class and a few women zealots. When three old women had been speared and six catechumens shot, the battalion scattered and was driven by Paniel into the roadside ditch. On Paniel’s right wing stood Pastor Capelle with three cavalry squadrons formed by young office employees, who outflanked Mallet and attacked him from behind; he occupied the suburb and deprived Mallet of his operational base. Paniel’s left wing, under the command of Pastor Rothe, advanced on the Horn highway and pressed the Young Men’s Union, who did not know how to handle halberds, back on the main body of Mallet’s army. Then we, six of us, heard the shooting in the fencing lesson and rushed out in fencing jackets, gloves, masks and helmets; the gate was locked, an attack on the guard gave us the keys, and so we arrived on the scene of the battle, rapier in hand. Richard Roth of Barmen re-formed the scattered Young Men’s Union, while Höller of Solingen threw himself into a house with the remnants of the catechumens; three others and I unseated a few Panielites from their horses, mounted them and, supported by the Young Men’s Union, threw back the enemy cavalry; Mallet’s main army advanced, our rapiers spread cartes, tierces, terror and death, and in half an hour the rationalists were destroyed. Now Mallet came to thank us, and when we saw for whom we had been fighting, we looked at each other in astonishment.

Se non è vero, i come spero ben trovato. [If it is not true, I trust it is well invented] But now write soon! And urge Wurm to write to me.

Fr. Engels

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 516

Written: 9 December 1840

First published: in the Deutsche Revue, Stuttgart and Leipzig, Bd. 4, 1920

Most humble letter of thanks

of F. Engels, who has most graciously been awarded

the Order of the Yellow Envelope

Your Ladyship! Most respected Fräulein!

Your most obedient servant, whom Your Ladyship has most graciously condescended to invest most undeservedly with the Order of the Yellow Envelope, fails not most humbly to lay his most devoted thanks at Your Most Noble Highness’ exalted feet.

Nor could the same most obedient servant fail to admire the supreme grace with which Your Most Noble Highness allowed the covering note to reach Your most submissive servant open and accessible to all the world [I received your letter open. The wretched wafer had come off.-Note by Engels] so that everybody could convince himself of the lofty favour which Your Exalted gentleness and comprehensive wisdom have condescended to accord to me.

In conclusion, in most profound submission before Your Most Noble Highness, Your humble and most obedient servant commends himself to Your most gracious memory.

Fr. Engels

Bremen, Dec. 6, 1840

Dear Marie,

To fall out of the style which I chose for the first page of this letter, I am not in the least grateful to you for the poor wafers with which you seal your letters and which come off halfway. It is all the same to me which Order of the Envelope you want to honour me with, but for goodness’ sake stick a proper seal on them so that the thing does not come apart by the time it gets to Mainz. The day before yesterday, or was it yesterday, I am not sure, it was Anna [Engels]’s birthday, I celebrated it yesterday in Schwachhausen with a cup of coffee, cost me six groats, is that not brotherly love? Last Saturday week, when I became 20, I celebrated my birthday with a toothache and a swollen cheek, which was fiendishly painful. You will also have heard that Napoleon’s body has arrived in France, hey, that is going to be a row! I wish I were in Paris now, what fun! Do you read the newspaper? Did you believe there was going to be a war? What do you think of the Guizot-Soult Ministry? Do you also sing the bad song: “They shall not have it"? while, if you have good eyes, you can see the French border on the other side of the Rhine. We now have fencing lessons, I fence four times a week, today at midday too. On the other side of the page you can see how I lay about me.

Dec. 8th. Yesterday I had a hellish lot to do, and this morning too. Now I shall close this letter to you, and then I hope I shall be able to have a cup of coffee. Listen, for Christmas make me a new cigar case, in black, red and gold [Colours symbolising the unity of Germany], those are the only colours I like.

Oh, red as love then be our brethren’s token,

And pure as gold the purpose of our quest,

And chat in death our spirit be not broken,

Black be the riband worn around the breast.

From a banned student song. Here some blockheads have founded an association where they make speeches, and I am to be a guest and nolens volens make a speech. Oh dear, that will be a fine do! Incidentally, I can preach very well even without having studied beforehand, and when it is a matter of lying, there is no stopping me, I go on and on. If I were in the Landtag I would let nobody else get a word in. — Now I have had my portrait painted, with my moustache, and so that you can see what I look like, I copy the picture:

You see, I was painted when I was furious because the cigar would not draw. At that moment I looked so intelligent that the painter [G. W. Feistkorn] implored me to let myself be painted like that. I put aside all the bad cigars and smoked one of the awful things at every sitting. That was the worst torment for me.

Be glad that you have nothing to do with sample boxes, it is first-class stupidity and muddle, there you can stand all day by the open window in the packing-house loft in this cold weather and pack linen, it is something dreadful, and in the end nothing comes of it but nonsense.

My dear sister, I am your devoted

Friedrich

December 9, 1840

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Bremen Dec. 21, 40

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 519

Written: 21 December 1840

First published: in the Deutsche Revue, Stuttgart and Leipzig, Bd. 4, 1920

Dear Marie,

I cannot refrain from thanking you for the beautiful cigar case — the only thing wrong with it is that it is not black, red and gold. It accidentally came into my possession already today and was put to use at once. — Here it has been terribly cold, through the whole of December it has been freezing without interruption and it is still freezing. The Weser is frozen from here to Vegesack, four hours from here, which looks most remarkable. Recently some people from Barmen were here, and we had a jolly good time, visited all the taverns, kept the glasses going and at times felt a bit tipsy. Enclosed you will find a demand note [the “demand note” was written in Spanish as a joke by Engels himself] from my former Spanish teacher; if you can understand it I'll make you a present of a new hat. Perhaps there is somebody in your boarding-school who understands so much Spanish, and here the thing is getting in my way. — I must say, I hardly know what to write to you; a sugar refinery has burnt down here, and the Old Man [Heinrich Leupold] will not leave the office, although I am really dying for a cigar.

23rd. Yesterday evening we were having a fencing lesson when the nice news came that there was another fire and this time in Neustadt. We went there out of a sense of duty, and when we got there it was already out. That is what one gets for one’s trouble. You should always stay nicely at home until it is burning under your nose. Mother has sent me for Christmas an order for Goethe’s collected works; I went at once yesterday to fetch the first volumes that have appeared and last night read the Wahlverwandtschaften till midnight with great enjoyment. He is a fellow, Goethe! If you wrote German as he does I would excuse you from all foreign languages. Incidentally, it is quite unnecessary for you to leave a margin when you write to me, the octavo pages are narrow enough as it is, and I will not hear of this comfortable way of writing pages full and not writing much. Please note! says Professor Hantschke.

24th. You will now be in tremendous excitement, I can imagine, and in grand hopes. I am curious what will come of it. You will, of course, acquaint me by the first post with this important proceeding? I shall see that it gets into the newspaper here at once.

Here, in passing, are a few strokes, flourishes and signatures, with which I proved the skill of my hand to my junior, [Wilhelm Leupold] who prides himself on his rectangular strokes.

Dec. 28th. The Weser is now completely frozen over, so that people are driving on it in coaches. I believe one could skate as far as Vegesack, which is five hours by the Weser. In the afternoon all the beau monde goes for walks on it and the ladies slide on the ice so as to be lifted off by the gentlemen, which always gives them great pleasure. The trees look as if they were made of snow, they are so thickly covered with a white crust. — The Pastor’s wife [Mathilde Treviranus] has embroidered a black, red and gold purse for me for Christmas and Marie [Treviranus] has made me a black, red and gold tassel for my pipe, which is smashing. Today we have 9 degrees below freezing-point, what a life! I like nothing better than this cold, ineffective sun which rises over the winter-hard earth. No clouds in the sky, no dirt on the earth, everything as hard and solid as steel and diamond. The air is not so flabby and consumptive as in summer, you feel it now when you go out of doors. The whole town is full of glaciers, people no longer walk, they fall from one street into the other. Now one can’t help noticing that it is winter. I hope that in Mannheim, among other useful accomplishments, you will also learn to skate, so that you don’t come home a shivering, stay-at-home, not-to-be-moved-out-of-doors little lady, which I refuse to stand for. But if you do arrive afraid of the cold I shall tie you on a sleigh, put a burning sponge in the horses’ cars and chase you like that out into the open. Or I'll tie skates under you and carry you out to the middle of the pond and leave you to crawl on your own.

My very dear sister, if my hopes are not disappointed you will get this letter on New Year’s Day. On this holiday, greatly looked forward to by me and you too, I imagine, I wish you everything you desire, since this wish costs me nothing, and hope that your wishes for me will be at least equally Christian. May Mannheim be as much to your liking in the New Year as, to judge by your letters, it was in the old. (This I write in case this letter has first to be censored before it comes into your hands.)

Yours,

Friedrich

Bremen, Dec. 28, 40

1841

Engels To Marie Engels. February 18

Engels To Friedrich Graeber. February 22

Engels To Marie Engels. March 8-11

Engels To Marie Engels. April 5

Marx to Carl Friedrich Bachman. April 6

Engels To Marie Engels. Beginning of May

Marx to Dagobert Oppenheim. August 25

Marx to Oscar Ludwig Bernhard Wolf. April 7

Marx To Dagoben Oppenheim. August 25

Engels To Marie Engels. End of August

Engels To Marie Engels. September 9

Engels To Marie Engels. P.S. September 9

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 523

Written: February 18 1841

First published: in the Deutsche Revue, Stuttgart and Leipzig, Bd. 4, 1920

Dear Marie,

This time you shall get a really heavy letter. At first I even wanted to write to you on cardboard so that you would have to fork out quite a sum for postal charges, but unfortunately I could not get a piece with a smooth surface and so I must write on the heaviest paper to be found in our paper store. If you don’t know what a Paukstunde is that proves that in culture you have remained shamefully backward, but that you did not see it from the enclosed drawing proves also natural dullness, and one sees that not only the hops of education but even the malt of mother wit are lost on you. In your bad German a Paukstunde is the same as a fencing lesson. I have now also acquired a couple of rapiers and gloves, the only gloves I have, for I don’t care for kid-gloves, etc.

Concerning the Stabat meter dolorosa et cetera, it occurs to me, please look up whether this thing was composed by Pergolese. If so, please get me if possible a copy of the score; if instruments are included, I don’t need them, only the voices. But if it is by Palestrina or somebody else I don’t need it. [238] The day after tomorrow we are going to perform Paulus by Mendelssohn, the best oratorio written since Handel’s death. You will know it. I go to the theatre only rarely since the local one is terribly bad; I go occasionally, only when a new play is being shown, or a good opera I don’t know yet.

Since my last letter we have had a fine flood here. At Treviranus’ the water stood 12 to 14 inches deep in my room, and I had to flee to the Old Man [Heinrich Leupold] who with his usual kindness accommodated me for nearly a fortnight. But then the fun really started properly. There was a foot and a half of water at the front door, and to prevent it getting into the cellar, which has a hatch, we walled this up with cow-dung. But the malicious water then flowed from the neighbour’s cellar into ours through the wall, and so that it should not drown our fine barrels of rum and our potatoes, and above all the Old Man’s well-stocked wine cellar, we had to pump day and night for four nights running, and I pumped through all four of them. Wilhelm Leupold and I usually stayed up together, sat on the settee behind the table, with a few bottles of wine, sausage and a big piece of the finest Hamburg smoked meat on the table. We smoked, talked and pumped every half hour. It was most entertaining. At five o'clock the Old Man would come and relieve one of us. There were some touching incidents during the flood. In a house outside the town which was full of water up to the ground floor windows, people suddenly saw an enormous host of rats swimming along, which went in through the windows and occupied the whole house. Besides, there was no man in the house, only a lot of females terrified of rats, so that in spite of their fear, the delicate ladies had to resolve to attack the wild horde with sabres and sticks, etc. In a house lying quite close to the Weser the office clerks were just sitting at breakfast when a large block of ice came drifting along, charged through the wall and poked its immodest head into the room, followed by a good portion of water. Now I shall tell you a piece of news. You remember that I wrote you once very mysteriously about a big dinner given in the Royal Saxon Consulate at which great secrets were broached. Now I can tell you that the person who was the guest of honour at that dinner was the dame souveraine des pensées, the donna amada mas que la vida [Supreme lady of thoughts, lady loved more than life] of my second principal, the above-mentioned Wilhelm Leupold. During the flood he told me officially that his engagement would be announced at Easter, and I tell you this relying on your discretion; but you must not breathe a word about it, as it will only be made public at Easter. You see how I trust you, for if you talked about it, it could spread here to Bremen in three days, since there are gossiping females everywhere. And then I would be in a fine fix. — The name of W. Leupold’s fiancée is Therese Meyer, daughter of the Stick-Meyer in Hamburg; he is called Stick-Meyer because he has a walking-stick factory by which he has made a pile of money. She wears a blue spencer and a light-coloured dress, is 17 years old and as slim as you, if you have not put on weight in Mannheim. She is not even confirmed yet, isn’t that terrible?

Today I have shaved my moustache off again and buried the youthful corpse with much wailing. I look like a woman; it is shameful; and if I had known that without a moustache I should look such a sight I would not have hacked it off. As I stood before the mirror, scissors in hand, and had shorn off the right side, the Old Man came into the office and had to laugh out loud, when he saw me with half a moustache. But now I shall let it grow again, for I cannot show myself anywhere. In the Academy of Singing I was the only one with a moustache and always used to laugh at the philistines who could not marvel enough that I had the audacity to go so unshaven into decent society. The ladies, incidentally, liked it very much, and so did the Old Man. Only last night at the concert six young dandies stood around me, all in tail-coats and kid-gloves, and I stood among them in an ordinary coat and without gloves. The fellows made remarks all evening about me and my bristling upper lip. The best of it is that three months ago nobody knew me here and now all the world does, just because of the moustache! Oh, the philistines!

Yours,

Friedrich

Bremen, Feb. 18, 41

Engels To Friedrich Graeber

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 525

Written: February 22 1841

First published: in Die neue Rundschau 10. Heft, Berlin, 1913

Reverend Sir in spe,

You have done me the favour, habuerunt gratiam of writing to me mihi scribendi sc. literas. Multum gaudeo, tibi adjuvasse ad gratificationem triginta thalerorum, speroque, te ista gratificatione usum esse ad bibendum in sanitatem meam. Caire, Fulax tou Jristianismou megas Straussomastis, astrou ths urqodoxias, pausis ths twn pietistwn luphs, basileus ths exhghsewz!;!;!; hebrew ...[Have done me the favour of writing to me a letter. I am very glad that I was able to help you get a gratuity of thirty talers and hope you have used the money to drink my health. Greetings, guardian of Christianity, great hunter of Straussians, star of orthodoxy, comforter of grieving pietists, King of Exegesis!;!;! In the beginning, God created Heaven and Earth, and the spirit of God] hovered over F. Graeber, when he did the impossible and proved that twice two are five. O great hunter of Straussians, I beseech you in the name of all orthodoxy to destroy the whole infamous nest of Straussians and to pierce all the half-hatched Straussian eggs with your St. George’s lance. Sally forth into the desert of pantheism, brave dragon-slayer, engage Ruge rugiens [censuring] Leo, Ruge, who is wandering about looking for someone to devour, destroy the damned Straussian brood and plant the banner of the cross on the Sinai of speculative theology! Be moved by our entreaties, see, the faithful have now been waiting for five years for him who will crush the head of the Straussian snake. They have exhausted themselves, thrown stones and filth, yes, even dung at it, yet its poison-spurting head rises ever higher. Since you find it so easy to refute that all fine buildings collapse of their own accord, arise and refute Das Leben Jesu and the first volume of Dogmatik for the danger is becoming more and more imminent; Das Leben Jesu has already gone through more editions than all the works of Hengstenberg and Tholuck put together and it is becoming common practice to throw everyone who is not a Straussian out of literature. And the Hallische Jahrbücher is the most widely read journal in North Germany, so widely read that His Prussian Majesty [Frederick William IV] can no longer ban it, however much he would like to. The banning of the Hallische Jahrbücher, which heaps the grossest insults on him every day, would change a million Prussians who do not yet know what they should think about the King, into a million enemies overnight. And it is high time for you to act, otherwise you will be reduced to eternal silence by us despite the pious views of the King of Prussia. You should screw up a little more courage so that the battle can really begin. But you write in such a calm and detached fashion, as if the Orthodox-Christian shares stood at a premium of 100 per cent, as if the stream of philosophy flowed as calmly and peacefully between its ecclesiastical banks as it did in the time of the scholastics, as if the insolent earth had not thrust itself into a frightful eclipse between the moon of dogmatism and the sun of truth. Have you not noticed that the storm is raging through the forest and hurling down all the dead trees, that instead of the old ad acta devil, the critical-speculative devil has arisen and has an enormous following? We challenge you every day, insolently and derisively, to come out and fight; let it penetrate your thick skin for once — true it is 1800 years old and has become somewhat leathery — and mount your war-horse. But all your Neanders, Tholucks, Nitzsches, Bleeks, Erdmanns, and whatever they're called, are such weak, sensitive fellows on whom daggers would seem ludicrous; they are all so quiet and cautious, so fearful of scandal, that you can’t do anything with them. Hengstenberg and Leo do have some courage but Hengstenberg has been thrown from his saddle so often that he is quite crippled, and in the latest scuffle with the Hegelings, [239] Leo had his beard plucked out altogether so that he cannot really show himself decently in public. In any case, Strauss has not compromised himself in the slightest for if he still believed a couple of years ago that his Leben Jesu would not harm the church’s teachings, he could, of course, without abandoning any of his principles, have read a “System of Orthodox Theology” in the same way as many an Orthodox Christian reads a “System of Hegelian Philosophy”. But even if he really believed — as his Leben Jesu indicates — that dogmatism would not be harmed by his opinions, everyone knew in advance that he would soon abandon such ideas once he had begun to tackle dogmatism seriously. He says straight out in his Dogmatik what he thinks of the teaching of the church. However, it is a very good thing that he has moved to Berlin — this is where he ought to be and his spoken and written word can be more effective there than they would in Stuttgart.

The idea that I have gone to the dogs as a poet is being widely disputed and, in any case, Freiligrath refused to print my verses not because of the poetry but because of the views and lack of space. First of all, he is not such a liberal, and secondly, they arrived too late. Thirdly, there was so little space that many important poems intended for the last folios had to be left out. However, Das Rheinlied by N. Becker is really a very indifferent piece and has fallen into such bad odour that one can no longer praise it in any magazine. But the Rhein by R. E. Prutz [240] is quite a different kind of poem. And other poems by Becker are also much better. The speech he made at the torchlight procession was one of the most muddled things I have ever come across. The marks of honour bestowed by kings I decline with thanks. What’s all that about? A decoration, a golden snuff-box, a beaker from a king, these are a disgrace rather than an honour these days. We all decline such things with thanks and are pretty safe, thank goodness, for since my article about E. M. Arndt was printed in the Telegraph it would not occur even to the mad King of Bavaria [Ludwig I] to present me with such a fool’s cap and bells or to print the stamp of servility on my backside. The more scoundrelly, more cringing, more fawning a person is these days the more decorations he gets.

I am now fencing furiously and will soon hack you all to pieces. I have had two duels here in the last four weeks. The first fellow has retracted the insulting words of stupid boy which he said to me after I gave him a box on the ear, and the slap is still unexpiated. I fought with the second fellow yesterday and gave him a real beauty above the brow, running right down from the top, a really first-class prime.

Farewell.

Yours,

F. Engels

Bremen, 22.2.41

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Bremen, March 8, 1841

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 528

Written: 8 March 1841

First published: in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 2, 1930

Dear Marie,

“Your most respectful and obedient”, these were the last words I wrote in a business letter as I finished my work at the office today so as — so as — now how can I express it most delicately? Oh well, the verses won’t flow today, so I'd better say it straight out: so as to write to you. However, as I am still digesting my lunch, I haven’t got time to think much and must write whatever comes into my head. But my first thought is a cigar, which I shall now proceed to light since His Majesty has taken himself off, His Majesty being, of course, the Old Man [Heinrich Leupold] who has been given this title because we have decided to carry on as if we were at Court.

For it is now quite certain and sure that the whole Leupold counting-house will soon be transformed and have ministers and confidential gentlemen-in-waiting once again. You will be amazed when you see me with a golden key hanging from my black tail-coat! will, of course, be as stuck-up as I have always been — and I'm not cutting off my moustache to please any king. It is now in full flower again and growing and when I have the pleasure — as I don’t doubt I shall — of boozing with you in Mannheim in the spring, you will be amazed at its glory.

Richard Roth left here a week ago for a grand tour of South Germany and Switzerland. Thank God that I too am leaving this dreary hole where there is nothing to do but fence, eat, drink, sleep and drudge, voilà tout. I don’t know if you have heard that Father and I shall probably be going to Italy at the end of April in which case I shall do you the honour of visiting you. If you behave properly I may even bring you something, but if you are high and mighty, stiff and haughty, then you will be in for trouble. Nor will you escape just punishment if you write any more such nonsense as you did in your last letter but one, teasing me about the fencing lesson. I was very glad to hear that the Stabat mater is by Pergolese.

You must in any case get me a copy of the piano arrangement containing all the vocal parts with the score showing the singing parts above those which have to be played, as in a piano arrangement of an opera. It occurs to me that there are no tenor or bass parts in Pergolese’s Stabat mater. There are probably more sopranos and altos instead. Never mind.

If I really do go to Milan in the spring I shall meet Roth, and Wilhelm Blank from Elberfeld, and we'll have a high old time there with Turkish tobacco and Lacrime di Christo. Six months after we've gone, the Italians should still be talking about the three jolly Germans, so famous do we intend to make ourselves.

I was very much amused to read your description of your innocent carnival. I should like to have seen you. Nothing very amusing has happened here, apart from a couple of boring fancy-dress balls which I didn’t go to. In Berlin, too, the carnival was a terribly flat affair. They're still best at that sort of thing in Cologne.

There is one thing in which you are less fortunate than I. You cannot hear Beethoven’s Symphony in C Minor today, Wednesday, March 10, while I can. This and the Eroica are my favourites. Practise Beethoven’s sonatas and symphonies well, so that I shan’t be ashamed of you later on. I am going to hear them not just in the piano arrangement, but played by the full orchestra.

March 11. What a symphony it was last night! You never heard anything like it in your whole life if you don’t know this wonderful work. What despairing discord in the first movement, what elegiac melancholy, what a tender lover’s lament in the adagio, what a tremendous, youthful, jubilant celebration of freedom by the trombone in the third and fourth movements! Besides this I also heard a wretched Frenchman sing yesterday and it went something like this:

and so on, no melody or harmony and a pathetic French text and the whole joke was called L'Exilé de France. If all French exiles indulge in such caterwauling then nobody will want to have them anywhere. This boor also sang a song called Le toréador, which means the bull-fighter, with the refrain, every other second, of Ah que jaime 1'Espagne! This was even more pitiful-if that were possible sometimes with leaps of fifths, sometimes twisting about in chromatic passages as if to signify an attack of stomach-ache. If it hadn’t been followed by the tremendous symphony I would have run away and left the crow to squawk in his miserable, thin baritone. Meanwhile see that the next letters you send are folded better. This way [X] is very unpractical and in bad taste, it must be like this [x] or like this [X] please note.

Semper Tuus

Friedrich

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 531

Written: 5 April 1841

First published: in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 2, 1930

Why didn’t you write to me in Bremen? You really don’t deserve to hear from me again, but this time I shall make an exception and write you a few lines to cheer your lonely time in Mannheim. I have been installed in the room next to my old one, which is now the music room, where I have buried myself under a mass of Italian books, and emerge now and again for a turn at fencing with Hermann [Engels] or Adolf [von Griesheim]. I have just finished a few rounds with August [Engels], Hermann and Bernhard and as a result my hand is a bit shaky, so today as well my writing is very bad and learned-looking. When we went to Vohwinkel yesterday, I met nearly everyone who was at the gymnasium with me.

The weather is splendid here but today I have to go on a miserably boring visit to the Wemhöners. I'll remember you to Emil [Wernhöner] Luise Snethlage has linked up with Hermann Siebel and seems to be enjoying it. For the rest, Barmen is still the same old place, and all I ask of you is to fulfil your duty to me as quickly as

you possibly can. Yours,

Friedrich

Barmen, [241] April 5, 41

Letter from Marx to Carl Friedrich Bachman

in Jena

Written: April 6, 1841;

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 1, pg 379;

Publisher: International Publishers (1975);

First Published: Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 1926;

Translated: Clemens Dutt;

Transcribed: S. Ryan.

Dear Sir,

I send you herewith a dissertation for a doctor's degree on the difference between the natural philosophy of Democritus and the natural philosophy of Epicurus, and enclose the litterae petitoriae, curriculum vitae, my leaving certificates from the universities of Bonn and Berlin, and, finally, the legal fees of twelve friedrichsdors. At the same time, in the event of my work being found satisfactory by the faculty, I humbly beg you to hasten as much as possible the conferring of the doctor's degree since, on the one hand, I can only remain a few weeks longer in Berlin and, on the other hand, external circumstances make it highly desirable for me to obtain the doctor's degree before my departure.

I should like the leaving certificates to be returned, as they are originals.

I remain, Sir, with great respect,

Your most devoted servant,

Karl Heinrich Marx

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Barmen, about the beginning of May 1841

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 532

Written: May 1841

First published: in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 2, 1930

Dear Marie,

I started a letter to you last night but got no further than three lines when Anna [Engels’ sister] came and cut it off to use the rest of the paper herself. I got both your letters, including the one sent to Bremen, which made quite a journey before it reached me. Well, it’s pretty dry in these parts except for an occasional dinner with some May wine or a student drinking bout, or carousal or rainy weather. The best thing about the whole business is that I smoke the whole day long and this is undoubtedly a great and priceless pleasure. I received some very nice things in my trunk which arrived here from Bremen — a little cigar basket, ash-tray, tassel for my pipe, etc. Father has gone to Engelskirchen and I am sitting in his dressing-gown on his stool with his long pipe, puffing out smoke like anything. We'll be off to Milan [242] in eight or ten days and all we wish for is good weather. It’s raining cats and dogs here today. I am curious to know how you have developed in Mannheim — whether you are still the same silly, skinny chick you used to be, or whether you have picked up any new crazy ideas. Anna also gets up to daft tricks now and again and indulges in all kinds of silliness-with every third word she exclaims “Og, Drikes!” [What nonsense] Hermann [Engels’ brother] is developing a real talent as a hypochondriac and can often sit all day with a face utterly indifferent to the world, his mouth drooping, not uttering a word. If he suddenly gets into a tantrum, he can’t snap out of it. Emil [sibling] is still great at misunderstanding things. Hedwig [sibling] is not developing much character apart from a touch of obstinacy. Rudolf [sibling] is just like Hermann was, he wanders about dreaming half the day and gets up to silly tricks the rest of the time. What he likes best is when I give him a rapier and then knock it out of his hand. Little Elise [sibling] will become important but for the time being she’s still unimportant. She shows signs of amiability and will put you all in the shade in the end. And what about me? I might look interesting if, instead of my present young moustache, I still had the one I had in Bremen and my long hair.

You've had enough for today. I'll write to you from Milan — if it’s raining there.

Yours,

Friedrich

Letter from Marx to Dagobert Oppenheim

In Cologne

Written: [Bonn, approximately August 25, 1842];

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 1, pg 391-393;

Publisher: International Publishers (1975);

First Published: Rheinische Briefe und Akten zur Geschichte der politischen Bewegung 1830-1850, 1. Bd., Essen, 1919;

Translated: Clemens Dutt;

Transcribed: S. Ryan.

Dear Oppenheim,

I enclose a manuscript from Ruge. No. 1 that is not usable, but No. 2, on the state of affairs in Saxony, you will probably be able to use.

Send me Mayer's article in the Rheinische Zeitung on the system of local government and, if possible, all Hermes' articles against the Jews. I will then send you as soon as possible an article which, even if it does not finally settle the latter question, will nevertheless make it take another course.

Will the article on Hanover go through? At least try to make a small start with it soon. It is not so much a matter of this article itself as of a series of useful articles from that quarter which I can then promise you. The author of the article wrote to me yesterday:

"I do not think my attacks on the opposition will do harm to sales of the newspaper in Hanover; on the contrary, people there am fairly generally so far advanced that the views I put forward will be accepted as correct."

If it is in accord with your views on the subject, send me also the Juste-Milieu article for criticism. The subject must be discussed dispassionately. In the first place, quite general theoretical arguments about the state political system are more suitable for purely scientific organs than for newspapers. The correct theory must be made clear and developed within the concrete conditions and on the basis of the existing state of things.

However, since it has now happened, two things should be borne in mind. Every time we come into conflict with other newspapers, the matter can, sooner or later, be used against us. Such a clear demonstration against the foundations of the present state system can result in an intensification of the censorship and even the suppression of the newspaper. It was in this way that the South-German Tribüne came to an end. But in any case we arouse the resentment of many, indeed the majority, of the free-thinking practical people who have undertaken the laborious task of winning freedom step by step, within the constitutional framework, while we, from our comfortable armchair of abstractions, show them their contradictions. True, the author of the Juste-Milieu article invites criticism; but 1) we all know how governments respond to such challenges; 2) it is not enough for someone to express readiness to hear criticism, for which in any case his permission will not be asked; the question is whether he has selected the appropriate arena. Newspapers only begin to be the appropriate arena for such questions when these have become questions of the real state, practical questions.

I consider it essential that the Rheinische Zeitung should not be guided by its contributors, but that, on the contrary, it should guide them. Articles of the kind mentioned afford the best opportunity for indicating a definite plan of operations to the contributors. A single author cannot have a view of the whole in the way the newspaper can.

If my views do not coincide with yours, I would--if you do not find it inappropriate-give this criticism to the Anekdota, as a supplement to my article against Hegel's theory of constitutional monarchy. But I think it is better when the newspaper is its own doctor.

Hoping for an early reply from you,

Yours,

Marx

Letter from Marx to Oscar Ludwig Bernhard Wolf

in Jena

Written: Berlin, April 7 [1841]

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 1, pg 380.

Publisher: International Publishers (1975)

First Published: the yearlyArchiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 1926

Translated: Clemens Dutt

Transcribed: S. Ryan

HTML Markup: S. Ryan

Dear Herr Professor,

In expressing my most sincere thanks for your great kindness in fulfilling my request, I take the liberty of informing you that I have just sent my dissertation, together with the accompanying material, to the faculty of philosophy, and I beg you, in accordance with your kind offer, to be so good as to hasten the dispatch of the diploma. I thought that I had already made too great a claim on your kindness to dare to trouble you still further by sending my dissertation direct to you.

Assuring you of my most sincere gratitude and highest respect,

I remain

Yours most devotedly,

Karl Heinrich Marx

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Barmen, about the end of August 1841

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 533

Written: August 1841

First published: in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 2, 1930

Dear Marie,

If I have really got to write to you I must tell you in advance that it will not come to much, for nothing ever happens here. Weddings, parties, why yes, I go to them, I eat and drink, but afterwards I find it impossible to write a lot of tittle-tattle about them. And anyway you are not used to that kind of thing from me. I now sit in my little room upstairs nearly all day long, read and smoke like a chimney-stack, fence until the swords nearly crack, and amuse myself as best I can. This disgracefully bad weather is nearly driving me to desperation, you can’t go to Elberfeld without the risk of getting soaked three times over.

Unfortunately there’s only one halt between here and Elberfeld where one can stop if it gets too bad, namely, the Bierkirche. And you have to pay two silver groschen for a glass of beer there. Apart from this, nothing moves forward here, only backwards. I have not heard anything more about my departure for Berlin — there’s still plenty of time. I don’t bother about anything and let the others worry. If you want more letters from me, let’s hear from you, and write me something nice.

Your brother

Friedrich

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 534

Written: 9 September 1841

First published: in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 2, 1930

Dear Marie,

Mother says I didn’t write you a letter last time, only a mere scrawl which was not worth answering, and since you have not replied to it, I am almost forced to believe, to my very great sorrow, that you agree with her. Still, I must tell you that I am very hurt, not to say insulted, by such treatment and I am writing to you tonight only because I am in a good mood and have no wish to start quarrelling with you, for you certainly don’t deserve a letter. Apart from which I am doing Mother a favour, so now you know whom you have to thank for these lines. I have now been here about six weeks, have smoked a great deal of tobacco and have studied hard although there are some in the higher regions who maintain that I have been doing nothing. However, I shall be leaving for Berlin in a week or a fortnight to do my duty as a citizen, i. e., to do what I can to evade conscription [243] if possible and then come back to Barmen. We shall have to wait and see how this turns out.

We had arranged a trip to Altenberg for Saturday and Sunday but nothing will come of it because Blank and Roth cannot manage it. I must see whether we can organise something else. It has just occurred to me that I might go to the Beienburg again, as I have not been there for a long time.

Mother went to August’s [Engels’ uncle] for coffee yesterday and noticed that Fräulein Julie Engels was very quiet but Fräulein Mathilde Wemhöner was very talkative. You can draw your own conclusions from this.

Apart from this I have found Anna very jolly, Emil making progress as a humorist, Hedwig becoming very cheeky and Rudolf going the same awkward way as Hermann’ did at his age, and, for the rest, that Elise gives herself airs.

The letter you wrote to Father in English, which I have read today, is good on the whole, with only a few serious mistakes.

Du rests

Your brother

Friedrich

Barmen, Sept. 9, 41

Engels To Marie Engels

(Fragment)

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 542

Written: September 1841

First published: in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt., 1, Bd. 12, 1930

A nice story told in front of a Frenchman by that son of the gods, Albert Molineus, who is courting Ida [Engels]. Enfin, a la porte du ciel était Saint-Pétrus (instead of Saint Pierre) et le peintre Köttgen d'Elberfeld itait abordé par le musicien Weinbrenner: Eh bien, Köttgen, vous ne dites rien, racontez-nous donc quelque chose. Enfin, Köttgen dit: Enfin, j’ai eu cette nuit un fameux rêve. Enfin, dit Weinbrenner, qu'est-ce qu'il y avait donc? Enfin, dit Köttgen, je rêvais d'être à la porte du ciel. Alors il y avait tous les artistes célèbres, Meyerbeer, Horace Vernet etc. Enfin, Meyerbeer frappait à la porte; Pétrus dit: Qui est là? “Meyerbeer.” Les artistes nentrent pas ici, dit Pétrus. Enfin vint Horace Vernet. Qui est là, dit Pétrus. “Horace Vernet. “ Les artistes nentrent pas ici, dit Pétrus. Enfin Weinbrenner arrivait. Quest-ce qu'il y a là? dit Pétrus. Enfin, je suis Weinbrenner. Enfin, Pitrus dit: Entrez, s'il vous plait. [Saint Pétrus was standing at the Heavenly Gate and Köttgen, the Elberfeld painter, was approached by Weinbrenner the musician. Now then, Köttgen, you're very quiet, tell us something. At last Köttgen said: I had a wonderful dream last night. Well, said Weinbrenner, what was it about? Well, said Köttgen, I dreamt I was at the Heavenly Gate. All the famous artists were there — Meyerbeer, Horace Vernet, etc. Then Meyerbeer knocked on the Gate and Pétrus said: Who is there? “Meyerbeer.” No artists allowed in here, said Pétrus. So then Horace Vernet stepped forward. Who is there? said Pétrus. “Horace Vernet.” No artists allowed in here, said Pétrus. So then Weinbrenner came forward. What’s going on? said Pétrus. I am Weinbrenner. So then Pétrus says: Come in, please.]

The point of the joke — ainsi, Weinbrenner n’est pas d'artiste [Consequently Weinbrenner is not an artist] — was naturally omitted by the clever young man who spoke French so well. Now you know what kind of people are scrambling for the honour of becoming your brother-in-law.

Friedrich

[believed to be a P.S. to Engels’ letter to Marie of September 9, 1841]

1842

Engels To Marie Engels. January 5-6

Marx To Arnold Ruge. February 10

Marx To Arnold Ruge. March 5

Marx To Arnold Ruge. March 20

Engels To Marie Engels. April 14-16

Marx To Arnold Ruge. April 27

Engels To Arnold Ruge. June 15

Engels To Marie Engels. July 2

Marx To Arnold Ruge. July 9

Engels To Arnold Ruge. July 26 1842

Engels To Marie Engels. August 2-8

Marx To Arnold Ruge. November 30

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Berlin, January 5, 1842

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 536

Written: 5 January 1842

First published: in the Deutsche Revue, Stuttgart and Leipzig, Bd. 4, 1920

My dear Marie,

Your letter reminded me, to my enormous shame, how much I have neglected my duty to write to you. It was really disgraceful of me and there is no excuse whatever for this crime. So I'm setting to work immediately and replying to your nice letter which I received the day before yesterday. I had a dose of cannon fever yesterday. What happened was this: I was very unwell and felt really weak the whole morning and was then ordered to artillery practice and was nearly laid out at the gun, so I left and had a shocking fever all the afternoon. I felt a bit better this morning but still was not quite up to the mark at the gun-fire practice, although I have now almost recovered and have got myself two days sick-leave on account of catarrhal cannon fever, after which I hope I shall be able to handle the sponge properly again. Incidentally, don’t write home about this, it won’t be of any use. Do you know what the doctor prescribed for my cannon fever? A glass of punch before going to bed, isn’t that splendid medicine? You can see from this that an army surgeon is worth much more than, say, a Dr. Reinhold, with all his plasters, Spanish flies, leeches, etc., although he doesn’t need to know nearly as much. But we only apply powerful remedies here, genuine medical heavy artillery, bombs and shells and 24-pounders. Our prescriptions are very simple and I always cured myself that way in Bremen. First of all, beer; if that doesn’t help, then punch; if that doesn’t help either, then a swig of rum — that’s bound to help. That’s artillery medical treatment for you. But I'm sure you would laugh yourself sick if you saw me in my jerkin, standing beside the six-pounder, a long, thick sponge in my hand, and jumping around the guncarriage. My uniform, incidentally, is very fine, blue with a black collar adorned with two broad yellow stripes, and black, yellow-striped facings together with red piping round the coat tails. Furthermore, the red shoulder-straps are edged with white. I assure you the effect is most impressive and I'm worthy to be put on show. Because of this the other day I shamefully embarrassed Rückert, the poet, who is here at present. I sat down right in front of him as he was giving a poetry reading and the poor fellow was so dazzled by my shining buttons that he quite lost the thread of what he was saying. Apart from all this, as a soldier I enjoy the privilege of not having to knock at anyone’s door when I go to see them, nor having to say good day or pay them any other compliments. Someone once came to our Captain’s quarters and accidentally banged against the door with his scabbard. He got a week’s arrest, because the Captain insisted that he had knocked on the door. You see what kind of cutthroat I am. On top of it I shall soon be promoted to bombardier, which is a sort of non-commissioned officer, and I shall get gold braid to wear on my facings. So you must treat me with proper respect. Because once I'm a bombardier, I shall have all the privates in the whole Prussian army under my command and they will all have to salute me.

Why do you talk so much nonsense in your letter about old Fritz Wilm [Frederick William III] and about young Fritzchen Wilmchen [Frederick William IV]? You women should not interfere in politics, you don’t understand anything about it. But since you so much want to hear something about your beloved Majesty, I can tell you that His Supreme Royal Highness will leave for London on the 16th of this month in order to act as godfather to His Royal Highness, the little English prince [Edward], and will perhaps visit Paris on the return journey but most certainly Cologne, and in the spring he is going to Petersburg to celebrate the silver wedding of his noble brother-in-law, the All Highest Tsar of Russia, [Nicholas I] then return to amuse himself in Potsdam in the summer, to spend the autumn on the Rhine and then to amuse himself in Charlottenburg during the winter. Now I must go to a lecture.

Jan. 6, 1842

This morning I moved out of the front room into the back room, because the front one has been let to a man from my part of the country, a jurist from the Cologne area; in any case, it is badly heated. This is curious, for the back room is larger than the front one but it is always warm from a little heating while the front one is as cold as ice. Whatever I did, I could never get the ice-ferns on the windows in the front room to melt, but here at the back, it is a pleasure to watch the ice, which has frozen finger-thick during the last week, melting away as in spring, and the bright blue sky, which I was unable to see from my former room for so long, is gaily looking in. And I can once again see the barracks of the 2nd Guards Regiment of Mudlarks (as we call the Infantry) and the Veterinary School and everything attached to it.

We've got a Rhinelandish restaurant here where all our favourite home dishes — which are otherwise quite unknown here-are served. Every Saturday night we have fried potato cake along with a jug of coffee. Yesterday I had apple and potato. Our good old duck soup, which you know well, has a distinguished place there. And lots of other things which do not come to my mind. There is pork and sauerkraut for lunch today, which I'm looking forward to. The other day he was going to treat us to pannhas [Rhenish meat dish] but it didn’t come off because there is no buckwheat flour to be had, so we can’t have yeast pancakes either, which we have long been languishing for.

Splendid! The sun is beginning to shine well and truly, which I find most delightful, and so I shall go for a walk after dinner, and since Schelling is not lecturing tonight, I shall have the whole evening to myself and be able to work seriously and without interruption.

The local theatre is very fine — magnificent sets, splendid actors, but mostly bad singers. So I don’t very often go to the opera. Tomorrow there will be a new play, Columbus by Werder [244]. This is about Columbus who discovered America and Werder is a professor at the University here, the man who discovered the profundity of negation. Verily, verily I say unto you the theatre will be really full tomorrow night and I will be there contributing to its fullness. Two of the acts take place on a ship at sea, which should be interesting to watch.

Here you see me in uniform with my greatcoat draped round my shoulder in a most romantic and picturesque fashion — but strictly against regulations. If I were to go out like this into the street, I should risk being arrested at any moment-which isn’t very pleasant. For if I'm seen in the street with even one button on my uniform or one hook on my collar unfastened, any officer or N.C.O. can put me under arrest. So you see, it is quite dangerous to be a soldier, even in peacetime. One of the most delightful things is that we have to go to church every four weeks but I have always managed to dodge it, except once. You have to stand in the yard for an hour beforehand wearing your heavy decorated shako with its plumes and then when you are frozen right through, you go into the ice-cold church where you cannot even hear anything of the sermon, for the acoustics are so bad. Isn’t that delightful? Write again soon.

Your brother

Friedrich

The sealing-wafer isn’t one of the best.

Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge

in Dresden

Written: Trier, February 10 [1842]

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 1, pg 381-382.

Publisher: International Publishers (1975)

First Published: journal Documente des Socialismus, Bd I, 1902

Translated: Clemens Dutt

Transcribed: S. Ryan

HTML Markup: S. Ryan

Dear Friend,

I take the liberty of sending you a small contribution for the Deutsche Jahrbücher in the form of the enclosed criticism of the censorship instruction.

If the article is suitable for your journal, I ask you for the time being not to mention my name to anyone except Wigand, and also to Send me by post immediately the issues of the Deutsche Jahrbücher containing my article; because for the time being here in Trier I am completely excluded from the literary world.

It is obvious that it is in the interest of the cause that the printing should be expedited, if the censorship does not censor my censure.

If you do not know of a critic for Vatke's super-clever book on sin - were it not so devilishly clever, one would be tempted to call it stupid--my critical zeal is at your disposal.

It would perhaps be equally worth while to deal again with Bayer's work on the moral Spirit. Feuerbach's criticism was a friendly service. Honourable as is Bayer's moral frame of mind, his work itself is just as weak and even immoral.

I should be very glad if you would let Wigand know that my manuscript will reach you in a few days' time. Bauer's letter in which he demands that it should be sent off at last, came when I was very ill in bed and therefore was handed to me only a few days ago. Being busy on the enclosed article, I was not able to make the necessary corrections.

As I have now come to the end of some voluminous works, it goes without saying that all my forces are at the disposal of the Deutsche Jahrbücher.

With sincere respect,

Marx

My address is: Dr. Marx, Trier, to be delivered to Geheimer Regierungsrat von Westphalen.

Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge

In Dresden

Written: Trier, March 5 1842;

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 1, pp. 382-383;

Publisher: International Publishers, 1975;

First Published: Documente des Socialismus, Bd I, 1902;

Translated: Clemens Dutt;

Transcribed: S. Ryan.

Dear Friend,

I fully agree with the plan for the Anekdota philosophica and also think it would be better to include my name among the others. A demonstration of this kind, by its very nature, precludes all anonymity. Those gentlemen must see that one’s conscience is clear.

With the sudden revival of the Saxon censorship it is obvious from the outset that it will be quite impossible to print my “Treatise on Christian Art,” which should have appeared as the second part of the Posaune. But what about including it in a modified version in the Anekdota? The mass of material obnoxious to the censorship which now fills people’s minds perhaps makes it possible also to publish the Anekdota, as material accumulates, in a number of separate intalments! Another article which I also intended for the Deutsche Jahrbücher is a criticism of Hegelian natural law, insofar as it concerns the internal political system. The central point is the struggle against constitutional monarchy as a hybrid which from beginning to end contradicts and abolishes itself. Res publica is quite untranslatable into German. I would send both these articles immediately for your examination if they did not require the rewriting of a fair copy and, in pan, some corrections. The fact is that my future father-in-law, Herr von Westphalen, lay on his death-bed for three months and died the day before yesterday. During this period, therefore, it was impossible to do anything properly.

Regarding the other things, next time.

With sincerest respect,

Devotedly yours,

Marx

Apropos. Through an oversight, the manuscript on the censorship contains the phrase: “the censorship of tendency and the tendency censorship.” It should be: “the censorship of tendency and the tendency of censorship.”

Be so kind as to send me the reply directly by post to Trier.

Bauer has been suspended from his post, as he writes in a letter just received, par lit de justice.

Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge

in Dresden

Written: Trier, March 20 [1842];

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 1, pg 383-386;

Publisher: International Publishers (1975);

First Published: Documente des Socialismus, Bd I, 1902;

Translated: Clemens Dutt;

Transcribed: S. Ryan.

Dear Friend,

Novices are the most pious people, as Saxony proves ad oculos. Bauer once had the same sort of scene with Eichhorn in Berlin as you had with the Minister of the Interior. As orators, these gentlemen are as alike as two peas. On the other hand, what is exceptional is that philosophy speaks intelligibly with the state wisdom of these over-assured scoundrels, and even a little fanaticism does no harm. There is nothing more difficult than to make these earthly Providences believe that belief in truth and spiritual convictions exist. They are such sceptical state dandies, such experienced fops, that they no longer believe in true, disinterested love. How, then, is one to get at these roués except with the aid of what, in the highest circles, is called fanaticism! A guards lieutenant regards a lover whose intentions are honourable as a fanatic. Should people no longer marry because of that? It is a remarkable thing that the degradation of people to the level of animals has become for the government an article of faith and a principle. But this does not contradict religiosity, for the deification of animals is probably the most consistent form of religion, and perhaps it will soon be necessary to speak of religious zoology instead of religious anthropology.

When I was still young and good, I already knew at least that the eggs laid in Berlin were not the eggs of the swan Leda, but goose eggs. A little later I realised that they were crocodile eggs, like, for example, the very latest egg by which, allegedly, on the proposal of the Rhine Province Assembly, the illegal restrictions of French legislation concerning high treason, etc., and crimes of officials, have been abolished. But this time, because it is a question of objective legal provisions, the hocus-pocus is so stupid that even the stupidest Rhenish lawyers have immediately seen through it. At the same time, Prussia has declared with complete naivety that publicity of court proceedings would jeopardise the prestige and credit of Prussian officials. That is an extremely frank admission. All our Rhenish scribblings about publicity and publicising suffer from a basic defect. Honest folk continually point out that these are by no means political, but merely legal, institutions, that they are a right, and not a wrong. As though that were the question! As though all the evil of these institutions did not consist precisely in the fact that they are a right! I should very much like to prove the opposite, namely, that Prussia cannot introduce publicity and publicising, for free courts and an unfree state are incompatible. Similarly, Prussia should be highly praised for its piety, for a transcendental state and a positive religion go together, just as a pocket icon does with a Russian swindler.

Bülow-Cummerow, as you will have seen from the Chinese newspapers, makes his pen flirt with his plough. Oh, this rustic coquette, who adorns herself with artificial flowers! I think that writers with this earthly position--for, after all, a position on ploughland is surely earthly--would be desirable, and even more so if in the future the plough were to think and write instead of the pen, while the pen, on the other hand, were to perform serf labour in return. Perhaps, in view of the present uniformity of the German governments, this will come to pass, but the more uniform the governments, the more multiform nowadays are the philosophers, and it is to be hoped that the multiform army will conquer the uniform one.

Ad rem, since among us, loyal, moral Germans, politica is included in formalia, whence Voltaire deduced that we have the profoundest textbooks on public law.

Therefore, as regards the matter, I found that the article "On Christian Art" which has now been transformed into "On Religion and Art, with Special Reference to Christian Art", must be entirely redone because of the tone of the Posaune, which I conscientiously followed:

"Thy word is a lamp unto my feet, And light unto my path."

"Thy commandments make me wiser than mine enemies, For they are ever with me," and

"The Lord shall roar from Zion"

— this tone of the Posaune and the irksome constraint of the Hegelian exposition should now be replaced by a freer, and therefore more thorough exposition. In a few days, I have to go to Cologne, where I set up my new residence, for I find the proximity of the Bonn professors intolerable. Who would want to have to talk always with intellectual skunks, with people who study only for the purpose of finding new dead ends in every corner of the world!

Owing to these circumstances, therefore, I was not able, of course, to send herewith the criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of law for the next Anekdota (as it was also written for the Posaune); I promise to send the article on religious art by mid-April, if you are prepared to wait so long. This would be the more preferable for me, since I am examining the subject from a new point de vue and am giving also an epilogue de romanticis as a supplement. Meanwhile I shall most actively, to use Goethe's language, continue to work on the subject and await your decision. Be so kind as to write to me on this to Cologne, where I shall be by the beginning of next month. As I have not yet any definite domicile there, please send me the letter to Jung's address.

In the article itself I necessarily had to speak about the general essence of religion; in doing so I come into conflict with Feuerbach to a certain extent, a conflict concerning not the principle, but the conception of it. In any case religion does not gain from it.

I have heard nothing about Köppen for a long time. Have you not yet approached Christiansen in Kiel? I know him only from his history of Roman law, which, however, contains also something about religion and philosophy in general. He seems to have an excellent mind, although when he comes to actual philosophising, his writing is horribly incomprehensible and formal. Perhaps, he has now begun to write plain German. Otherwise he seems to be à la hauteur des principes.

I shall be very pleased to see you here on the Rhine.

Yours,

Marx

I have just had a letter from Bauer in which he writes that he wants to travel northwards again, owing to the silly idea that there he will be better able to conduct his proceedings against the Prussian Government. Berlin is too close to Spandau. At all events, it is good that Bauer is not allowing the matter to take its own course. As I have learned here from my future brother-in-law, aristocrat comme il faut, people in Berlin are particularly vexed at Bauer's bonne foi.

Engels To Marie Engels

In Mannheim

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 539

Written: 16 April 1842

First published: in the Deutsche Revue, Stuttgart and Leipzig, Bd. 4, 1920

Dear Marie,

This tender little flower [a pressed rose, with buds and leaves, in the top left-hand corner of the notepaper] which has lain in my portfolio for half a year,

and which I take out now and offer to you, will, I hope, compensate for the long time which, I admit it with remorse, I have kept you waiting. Herr Hösterey delivered your little note to me safely after His High-and-Mightiness had hidden it in his trouser pocket from the eyes of the Austrian customs officers, for which His Supreme Highness asked my pardon, and in delightful German indeed. My conscience will not allow me to keep you waiting any longer, so I write. What about? Well, I don’t know yet. That I was on parade drill this morning from 8 till half past eleven? That during this I got a very stiff telling-off from the Lieutenant-Colonel? That we have church parade next Sunday? That I have finished all my good cigars and that the beer at Wallmüller’s has been very bad these last few days? That I must go out now to collect a couple of pots of ginger which I ordered for the Snethlages? Well, that’s all there is to say. So — till tomorrow.

Today, Friday, April 15, I am going for a drive. The weather has greatly improved. A whole lot of carriages are lined in front of my house where they have taken up their quarters. The cabbies are usually drunk and entertain me vastly. It is very convenient for me if I ever want to take a trip in one of the cabs. I live very agreeably on the first floor, in an elegantly furnished room — the front wall of it is made up of three windows separated only by small pillars, so it is very bright and friendly.

I was interrupted yesterday when I had written this. Today I can tell you the glad news that we are probably not going on parade tomorrow because His Most Supreme Majesty, the King [Frederick William IV], has condescended to leave for Potsdam and Brandenburg. All of which suits me very well, for I have no desire to knock around that cursed palace yard tomorrow. Let us hope we shall have no parade at all. We now also have a most charming exercise on the Grützmacher, so called, which is a very large open space where you sink up to your knees in sand and which has the delightful peculiarity of being electric. When the 12th Guards Artillery Company, to which I belong, and which is also electric, but negative, arrives there, positive and negative electricity collide, causing confusion and chaos in the atmosphere and attracting the clouds. Otherwise I cannot think how to explain why it always rains or snows when our company is on the Grützmacher. Incidentally I have now been a bombardier for four weeks, and, in case you didn’t know, I wear braid and piping and a blue collar with red edgings. You won’t understand all this, but it is not really necessary, as long as you know that I am a bombardier, that’s enough.

You will certainly not have heard yet that Herr Liszt has been here and enchanted all the ladies by his piano playing. The Berlin ladies were so besotted by him that there was a free fight during one of his concerts for possession of a glove which he had dropped, and two sisters are now enemies for life because one of them snatched the glove from the other. Countess Schlippenbach poured the tea which the great Liszt had left in a cup into her Eau-de-Cologne bottle after she had poured the Eau-de-Cologne on to the ground. She has since scaled the bottle and placed it on top of her writing-desk to his eternal memory and feasts her eyes on it every morning, as can be seen in a cartoon which appeared about it. There never was such a scandal. The young ladies fought over him but he snubbed them frightfully, and preferred to go and drink champagne with a couple of students.

But there are a couple of pictures of the great, charming, heavenly, genial, divine Liszt in every house. I will draw you a portrait of him. Here is the man with the Kamchatka hair style. By the way, he must have earned at least 10,000 talers here and his hotel bill amounted to 3,000 talers — apart from what he spent in taverns. I tell you, he’s a real man. He drinks twenty cups of coffee a day, two ounces of coffee in every cup, and ten bottles of F. Liszt champagne, from which it can fairly safely be concluded that he lives in a kind of perpetual drunken haze, which may also be confirmed. He has now gone off to Russia and one wonders whether the ladies there will go as crazy too.

I must go out now, so I will close. Farewell and write soon.

Your brother

Friedrich

Berlin 16/4, 42

Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge

In Dresden

Written: Bonn, April 23 [1842];

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 1, pp. 387-388;

Publisher: International Publishers (1975);

First Published: journal Documente des Socialismus, Bd I, 1902;

Translated: Clemens Dutt;

Transcribed: S. Ryan.

Dear Friend,

You must not become impatient if my contributions are delayed for a few days more – but only for a few days. Bauer will probably inform you orally that this month, owing to all kinds of external muddles, it has been almost impossible for me to work.

Nevertheless, I have almost finished. I shall send you four articles: 1) “On Religious Art,” 2) “On the Romantics,” 3) “The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law” 4) "The Positivist Philosophers", whom I have teased a little. These articles, in content, are connected.

You will receive the article “On Religious Art” as a duodecimo extract, for the work has steadily grown into almost book dimensions, and I have been drawn into all kinds of investigations which will still take a rather long time.

I have abandoned my plan to settle in Cologne, since life there is too noisy for me, and an abundance of good friends does not lead to better philosophy.

I have sent the Rheinische Zeitung a long article on our last Rhine Province Assembly with a light introduction about the Preussische Staats-Zeiutng. In connection with the debates on the press I have returned again to the question of censorship and freedom of the press, examining it from other viewpoints.

Thus, Bonn remains my residence for the time being; after all, it would be a pity if no one remained here for the holy men to get angry with.

Yesterday Hasse came from Greifswald, in regard to whom the only thing I have admired is his enormous top-boots, like those of a village priest. He spoke, too, just like the top-boot of a village priest, he knew nothing about anything, is preparing to publish a book in several volumes about the boring Anselm of Canterbury, on which he has been working for ten years. He thinks that the present critical trend is a moment which must be overcome. He speaks of religiosity as a product of life experience, by which he probably means his successful rearing of children and his fat belly, for fat bellies undergo all sorts of experiences and, as Kant says: if it goes behind it becomes an F., if it goes upwards it becomes religious inspiration. What a man this pious Hasse is with his religious constipation!

We were very much amused with what you wrote in your letters about Vatke’s lack of a “full heart.” This super-clever, diplomatic Vatke, who would so much like to be the greatest critic and the greatest believer who always knows everything better than anyone else, this Vatke has for one party no heart, and for the other no head. Hic jacet Vatke – a notable example of what the passion for cards and religious music leads to.

Fichte, who has wrapped himself in the mantle of his unpopularity, has spread the half-ambiguous rumour that he has been invited to Tubingen. The faculty is not meeting his wish to be held fast by an increase in salary.

Sack has made a trip to Berlin with the most pious intentions to speculate on the insanity of his brother and to get himself appointed in his place.

Nothing but wars and debauchery, says Thersites, and if the university here cannot be reproached with wars, at least there is no lack of debauchery.

Do you not want to carry out your plan of a trip to the Rhine?

Yours,

Marx

Engels To Arnold Ruge

In Dresden

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 543

Written: 15 June 1842

First published: in the Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, 11. jg., 1. Heft, Leipzig, 1925

Dear Doctor,

Enclosed please find an article ["Alexander Jung, Lectures on Modern German literature."] for the [Deutsche] Jahrbücher. I have put the Dante thing to one side for the time being. I would have sent it sooner if I had had anything like enough time.

I got your letter after it had gone to a number of wrong addresses. Why didn’t I send Schelling und die Offenbarung to the Jahrbücher? 1) Because what I had in mind was a book of between 5 and 6 folios and this was cut down to 3 1/2 folios only in the course of my negotiations with the publishers. 2) Because up to then the Jahrbücher had been a little reserved about Schelling. 3) Because people here advised against attacking Schelling in a journal and told me rather to put out a pamphlet against him. Schelling, der Philosoph in Christo is also from my pen.

Apart from all this, I am not a Doctor and cannot ever become one. I am only a merchant and a Royal Prussian artillerist, so kindly spare me that title.

I hope to send you another manuscript very soon and in the meantime I remain

Yours sincerely,

F. Engels (Oswald)

Berlin, June 15, 42

Dorotheenstr. 56

Engels To Marie Engels

In Bonn

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 544

Written: 2 July 1842

First published: in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 2, 1930

Dear Marie,

I congratulate you on your discharge from the noble Mannheim Institute and from Fräulein Jung’s censorship of your letters. I did not want to write about it before so as not to make you even more discontented, but I can tell you now that all these boarding-schools are nonsense and that the girls in them, unless they have such a happy disposition as yours, become terribly spoiled and turn into empty-headed coquettes and blue-stockings. But it’s the fashion now in Barmen and nobody can do anything about it. Rejoice that you are now out of the convent and can sit at the window again and walk across the street and occasionally talk nonsense without these things being treated as crimes. But I must say one thing to you – don’t play me any silly tricks by joining in the Barmen jumps, namely, the jump into engagement. The noble young folk are rushing headlong into marriage, as if they were mad, and so blindly that they are knocking each other over. It is exactly like a game of blind man’s buff and where two of them catch each other, they get engaged, marry and live in blissful contentment. Just look at your two cousins. There’s Luise Snethlage who has caught a husband [Hermann Siebel] who’s not bad but his hair is grey, and pretty Ida [Engels] has managed to get hold of one too, but I don’t think much of him either. True, he’s my brother-in-law, so I shouldn’t run him down, but I'm vexed that they didn’t ask me whether I wanted this Saint-Pétrus, this lion, this dandy, this Albert Molineus for a brother-in-law, and so he'll have to pay for it. I tell you – if you want a suitor like that, I'll send you a dozen every day and each day a new dozen. It was generous of me to let the whole thing happen at all. I should at least have protested about it.

Even Schornstein has got himself engaged – it’s terrible! And Strücker definitely wants to become a husband – isn’t that strange? I begin to despair of the human race; I shall become a misanthrope if you, Marie, you too. – But no, you would not cause your brother such pain.

It’s raining very boringly again. I have been soaked at least four times this week in the service of the Fatherland – twice from rain and twice, to use a delicate expression, from perspiration. I'm now going to the reading-room to look at the newspapers; surely I shall not get wet there for the fifth time, shall 1?

Adieu.

Your brother

Friedrich

Berlin, July 2, 42

Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge

in Dresden

Written: Trier, July 9 [1842];

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 1, pg 398-391;

Publisher: International Publishers (1975);

First Published: Documente des Socialismus, Bd I, 1902;

Translated: Clemens Dutt;

Transcribed: S. Ryan.

Dear Friend,

If events had not apologised for me, I would have abandoned any attempt at an excuse. It stands to reason that I regard it as an honour to contribute to the Anekdota and only unpleasant extraneous circumstances prevented me from sending you my articles.

From April to the present day I have been able to work for a total of perhaps only four weeks at most, and that not without interruption. I had to spend six weeks in Trier in connection with another death. The rest of the time was split up and poisoned by the most unpleasant family controversies. My family laid obstacles in my way, which, despite the prosperity of the family, put me for the moment in very serious straits. I cannot possibly burden you with the story of these private scandals; it is truly fortunate that scandals of a public nature make it impossible for a man of character to be irritated over private ones. During this time I was writing for the Rheinische Zeitung, to which I should long ago have sent my articles, etc., etc. I would have informed you long before about these intermezzos, had I not hoped from day to day to be able to complete my work. In a few day's time I am going to Bonn and shall not touch a thing until I have finished the contributions for the Anekdota. Of course, in this state of affairs I was not able to elaborate in particular the article "On Art and Religion" as thoroughly as the subject requires.

Incidentally, do not imagine that we on the Rhine live in a political Eldorado. The most unswerving persistence is required to push through a newspaper like the Rheinische Zeitung. My second article on the Provincial Assembly, dealing with the question of clerical discords, was deleted by the censor. I showed in this article how the defenders of the state adopted a clerical standpoint, and the defenders of the church a state standpoint. This incident is all the more unpleasant for the Rheinische Zeitung because the stupid Cologne Catholics fell into the trap, and defence of the Archbishop would have attracted subscribers. Incidentally, you can hardly imagine how contemptible are oppressors and at the same time how stupidly they dealt with the orthodox blockhead. But the matter has had a successful ending: before the entire world, Prussia has kissed the Pope's mule, and our government automatons walk the streets without blushing. The Rheinische Zeitung has now put in an appeal about the article. In general, the fight for the Rheinische Zeitung is beginning. In the Kölnische Zeitung, the author of the leading articles, Hermes, – ex-editor of the former political Hannoverzeitung, has taken the side of Christianity against the philosophical newspapers in Königsberg and Cologne. If the censor does not again play some trick, a reply from me will be published in the next Supplement. The religious party is the most dangerous in the Rhine area. The opposition has of late become too accustomed to opposing within the church.

Do you know any details about the so called "Free"? The article in the Kölnische Zeitung was, to say the least, undiplomatic. It is one thing to declare for emancipation--that is honest; it is another thing to start off by shouting it out as propaganda; that sounds like bragging and irritates the philistine. And then, reflect on who are these "Free", a man like Meyen, etc. But, at any rate, if there is a suitable city for such ventures, it is Berlin.

I shall probably be drawn into a prolonged polemic with the Cologne Hermes. No matter how ignorant, shallow and trivial the man is, thanks precisely to these qualities he is the mouthpiece of philistinism and I intend not to let him go on chattering. Mediocrity should no longer enjoy the privilege of immunity. Hermes will also try to saddle me with "The Free", about whom, unfortunately, I do not know the slightest thing for sure. It is fortunate that Bauer is in Berlin. He, at least, will not allow any "stupidities" to be committed, and the only thing that disquiets me in this affair (if it is true and not merely a deliberate newspaper fabrication), is the probability that the insipidity of the Berliners will make their good cause ridiculous and that in a serious matter they will not be able to avoid various "stupidities". Anyone who has spent as much time among these people as I have will find that this anxiety is not without foundation.

How are you getting on with your Jahrbücher?

As you are at the centre of philosophical and theological news, I should like nothing better than to learn something from you about the present situation. True, the movement of the hour-hand is visible here, but not that of the minute-hand.

Old Marheineke seems to have considered it necessary to provide the whole world with documentary proof of the complete impotence of the old Hegelianism. His vote is a disgraceful vote.

Will the Saxons in this Assembly not denounce the censorship? Fine constitutionalism! Hoping to hear from you soon,

Yours,

Marx

Rutenberg is a weight on my conscience. I brought him on to the editorial board of the Rheinische Zeitung, but he is absolutely incapable. Sooner or later he will be shown the door.

What do you advise if the article on the Archbishop is not stamped for publication by the high police censorship? It must appear in print because of 1) our Provincial Assembly, 2) the government, 3) the Christian state. Should I, perhaps, send it to Hoffmann and Campe? It does not seem to me suitable for the Anekdota.

Engels To Arnold Ruge

In Dresden

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 545

Written: 26 July 1842

First published: in Die Internationale, jg. 2, Heft 26, Berlin, 1920

Dear Sir,

This time I am writing to inform you that I shall not be sending you anything.

I have decided to abandon all literary work for a while in order to devote more time to studying. The reasons for this are fairly plain. I am young and self-taught in philosophy. I have learnt enough to form my own viewpoint and, when necessary, to defend it, but not enough to be able to work for it with success and in the proper way. All the greater demands will be made on me because I am a “travelling agent” in philosophy and have not earned the right to philosophise by getting a doctor’s degree. I hope to be able to satisfy these demands once I start writing again – and under my own name. In addition I must not try to do too many things now, as I shall soon be again more fully occupied with business matters. Regarded subjectively, my literary activities have so far been mere experiments from the outcome of which I was to be able to learn whether my natural capacities were such as to enable me to work fruitfully and effectively for progress and to participate actively in the movement of the century. I can be satisfied with the results and now regard it as my duty to acquire by study, which I now continue with redoubled zest, also more and more of that which one is not born with.

When I return home to the Rhineland in October [245]. I hope to be able to meet you in Dresden and to discuss this with you further. In the meantime my good wishes and think of me now and again.

Yours,

F. Engels

Berlin, 26.7.42

Have you read Jung’s reply [246]? I think it is the best thing he has written so far. In the meantime, the other Jung [Georg], of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne, has arrived here and will look you up on his return journey in a few weeks’ time.

Engels To Marie Engels

In Ostende

Source: MECW Volume 2, p. 546

Written: 8 August 1842

First published: in Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 2, 1930

Berlin, August 2, 1842

Dear Marie,

I was very pleased with your long letter but since there were so many pages, all written crisscross, I read your sermon of disapproval very quickly and do not really know what you are reproaching me about. I can quite understand that Fräulein Jung must have pulled a nasty face when she read the true name given by Hermann [Engels] to her beloved Institute – a convent – and that she called him a frivolous fellow. Fortunately, not everybody has such a bad opinion of frivolity as your erstwhile Head Sin Recorder. And this is a good thing. Otherwise what would become of us both, I ask you? I too have to suffer being growled and shouted at by my Captain [Von Wedell] and think to myself: who cares, and cock a snook at him. And when he makes things too hard for me, as he did last Wednesday when everyone was dismissed except me, simply because my orderly had not got me excused, and I had to go to the artillery range at 12 noon just to see some impossible piece of nonsense not carried out — in such cases I just report sick, this time with toothache, and so save myself a night march and a two-hour exercise. Unfortunately, I have to report back for duty again today. However, I go for a stroll if I feel like it. Berlin is a big place and only three officers in our company know me, so it is highly unlikely that they'll bump into me. The only thing that could happen is that they might send the company doctor to see me, but that would take time and the worst that could happen if he didn’t find me at home would be that I would get a good telling off. Who cares!

You seem to have an enormous talent for making acquaintances. The girl is in Bonn for four weeks and already knows the names of half the University and has found herself an interesting lame student whom she encounters six times a day. The interesting lame student with the spectacles and fair beard! He undoubtedly had his legs shot up in a duel. Only why does he still limp when walking? Does he limp in an interesting way or ordinarily, like other lame people? Which foot is lame — the right one or both? Does he wear a hat with a red cock’s feather? Could he not be the diable boiteux [Limping devil, an allusion to the title character of Le Sage’s novel]? I'd like to know a great deal more about this interesting, lame, bearded, bespectacled, sharp-eyed student.

Have you continued to make friends in Ostende? Isn’t there an interesting lame Fleming there who meets you on the beach six times a day? Look:

Happily the Convent leaving,

Free to move again am I.

I can laugh and I can chatter,

In the window I can lie!

With Duennas watching round me,

Oh, what agony of mind,

Sitting at the daily lessons,

Cribbed and cabined and confined!

Oft I heard those Heidelbergers

Singing outside merrily;

Could not even reach the window

All the gallant lads to see!

Now I'm free at last, and want to

Taste my new-found liberty.

There’s a new life waiting after

All that grey monotony!

I'll look out my newest clothes and

Dress as pretty as I please.

I'll be off to see the poshest

Of the posh Academies!

Poppelsdorf and Königswinter!

Rolandseck and Drachenfels!

Goggle at my so sparkling eyes

And my sparkling teeth as well!

And I'll bet that though our fellow

Students may be quite a host,

Getting our address will take them

Eight days at the very most.

Landlord Stamm be truly grateful

That your lodging-house we chose.

Tippling students throng your garden,

And the money really flows.

Best of all, when I'm out walking,

How I'm crowded round and courted!

See the poor Professors’ daughters

All alone and unescorted!

Bottle-heroes Count d'Alviella,

Von Szczepansky come and linger:

See me twist those gallant fellows

Round and round my little finger!

Herr von Diest, the truly love-lorn,

Runs my errands all the while.

Chapeau plays his fife for dancing,

Bunsen sings to make me smile.

But there’s something always haunts me

When I leave the busy throng,

And it is a handsome student

Limping painfully along.

While the others are so busy

Doing all that I want done,

How am I to meet that handsome

Lame and interesting one?

Now I've left my town of Bonn

For the North Sea’s level shore.

No more rousing student ditties,

Just the ocean’s mighty roar.

With the French and with the Belgians

I go strolling by the seas, just as in the Convent, I must

Speak French only, if you please.

Once again, crowds of admirers

Follow me along the strip,

Follow me into the briny

When I take my morning dip.

Otherwise, it’s just like Bonn,

And I have no cause to grumble.

Food and lodgings both are decent,

And the landlord’s tolerable.

Yet, for all those bathers, someone’s

Missing, when all’s said and done.

Woe is me! I just can’t find that

Lame and interesting one!

This describes you perfectly, don’t you think? I want to set it to music for you so you can sing it. But you'll only get the score when I answer your next letter, otherwise I would spoil you by sending such a magnificent gift. I have other things to do than to praise you in song — that can only be permitted as a reward for an especially long letter.

You must try to learn the Flemish or Netherlandic dialect while you are in Ostende. It is a very clumsy language, but it has its advantages and anyway it is very comical. If you know Low German, you'll probably be able to understand Flemish.

I now have a dog whom I got from August Bredt of Barmen when he left here. It’s a handsome young spaniel, much bigger than our dear Mira and quite crazy. He has a great talent for boozing and if I go to a restaurant in the evening, he always sits near me and has his share, or makes himself at home at everybody else’s table. He’s also remarkable for an invisible collar. He is an excellent swimmer but too crazy to learn any tricks. I have taught him one thing. When I say “Namenloser” (that’s his name)"there’s an aristocrat!” he goes wild with rage and growls hideously at the person I show him.

While everybody has been forecasting that the Rhine wine will be splendid this year, the Grüneberger has turned out to be disgracefully bad. Do you know Grüneberger? Grüneberger is a Lausitz vine which only grows in sand and never produces good grapes except in a very wet year. When the hardness of the grapes turns from stone to wood, i. e., when you can cut into them with a knife, then they are ripe. They are pressed by steam-engine and people reckon that it takes a twelve horse-power machine working for an hour to press a hundred grapes. The best year for Grüneberger was ‘40. It cannot be put into casks because it splits the wood. When it is good you should eat a dozen pins, then drink a glass of Grüneberger, and if the pins are not dissolved or destroyed in five minutes it means the wine is no good. It is a very long-lasting wine for if you take a swig, your throat is sore for four weeks. It has a very fine bouquet and only a connoisseur can tell the difference between it and vinegar. A mixture of nitric acid and wine-vinegar comes closest in taste to this noble wine. Well, you've had enough now, and I still have to write to Mother. Adieu.

Your brother

Friedrich

Berlin, Aug. 8, 42

Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge

In Dresden

Written: Cologne, November 30 1842;

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 1, pp. 393-395;

Publisher: International Publishers 1975;

First Published: journal Documente des Socialismus, Bd I, 1902;

Translated: Clemens Dutt;

Transcribed: S. Ryan.

Dear Friend,

My letter today will be confined to the “confusion” with “The Free.”

As you already know, every day the censorship mutilates us mercilessly, so that frequently the newspaper is hardly able to appear. Because of this, a mass of articles by “The Free” have perished. But I have allowed myself to throw out as many articles as the censor, for Meyen and Co. sent us heaps of scribblings, pregnant with revolutionising the world and empty of ideas, written in a slovenly style and seasoned with a little atheism and communism (which these gentlemen have never studied). Because of Rutenberg’s complete lack of critical sense, independence and ability, Meyen and Co. had become accustomed to regard the Rheinische Zeitung as their own, docile organ, but I believed I could not any longer permit this watery torrent of words in the old manner. This loss of a few worthless creations of “freedom,” a freedom which strives primarily “to be free from all thought,” was therefore the first reason for a darkening of the Berlin sky.

Rutenberg, who had already been removed from the German department (where his work consisted mainly in inserting punctuation marks) and to whom, only on my application the French department was provisionally transferred – Rutenberg, thanks to the monstrous stupidity of our state providence, has had the luck to be regarded as dangerous, although he was not a danger to anyone but the Rheinische Zeitung and himself. A categorical demand was made for the removal of Rutenberg. Prussian providence, this despotisme prussien, le plus hypocrite, le plus fourbe, spared the manager an unpleasant step, and the new martyr, who has already learned to display consciousness of martyrdom in facial expression, behaviour and speech with some virtuosity, is exploiting this turn of events. He writes to all the corners of the earth, he writes to Berlin that he is the banished principle of the Rheinische Zeitung, which is adopting a different position in relation to the government. It goes without saying that this also evoked demonstrations from the heroes of freedom on the banks of the Spree, “whose muddy water washes souls and dilutes tea.”

Finally, on top of this came your and Herwegh’s attitude to “The Free” to cause the cup of the angry Olympians to overflow.

A few days ago I received a letter from little Meyen, whose favourite category is, most appropriately, what ought to be. In this letter I am taken to task over my attitude 1) to you and Herwegh, 2) to “The Free,” 3) to the new editorial principle and the position in relation to the government. I replied at once and frankly expressed my opinion about the defects of their writings, which find freedom in a licentious, sansculotte-like, and at the same time convenient, form, rather than in a free, i.e., independent and profound, content. I demanded of them less vague reasoning, magniloquent phrases and self-satisfied self-adoration, and more definiteness, more attention to the actual state of affairs, more expert knowledge. I stated that I regard it as inappropriate, indeed even immoral, to smuggle communist and socialist doctrines, hence a new world outlook, into incidental theatrical criticisms, etc., and that I demand a quite different and more thorough discussion of communism, if it should be discussed at all. I requested further that religion should be criticised in the framework of criticism of political conditions rather than that political conditions should be criticised in the framework of religion, since this is more in accord with the nature of a newspaper and the educational level of the reading public; for religion in itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to the earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality, of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself. Finally, I desired that, if there is to be talk about philosophy, there should be less trifling with the label “atheism” (which reminds one of children, assuring everyone who is ready to listen to them that they are not afraid of the bogy man), and that instead the content of philosophy should be brought to the people. Voilà tout.

Yesterday I received an insolent letter from Meyen, who had not yet received this work and who now questions me on every possible thing: 1) I should state on whose side I am in their quarrel with Bauer, about which I know absolutely nothing; 2) why did I not allow this and that to go through; I am threatened with being accused of conservatism; 3) the newspaper should not temporise, it must act in the most extreme fashion, i.e., it should calmly yield to the police and the censorship instead of holding on to its positions in a struggle, imperceptible to the public but nevertheless stubborn and in accordance with its duty. Finally, an infamous report is given of Herwegh’s betrothal, etc., etc.

All this is evidence of a terrible dose of the vanity which does not understand how, in order to save a political organ, one can sacrifice a few Berlin windbags, and thinks of nothing at all except the affairs of its clique. Moreover, this little man strutted like a peacock, solemnly laid his hand on his breast and on his dagger, let fall something about “his” party, threatened me with his displeasure, declaimed à la Marquis Posa, only somewhat worse, etc.

Since we now have to put up from morning to night with the most horrible torments of the censorship, ministerial communications, complaints of the Oberpräsident, accusations in the Provincial Assembly, howls from shareholders, etc., etc., and I remain at my post only because I consider it my duty to prevent, to the best of my ability, those in power from carrying out their plans, you can imagine that I am somewhat irritated and that I replied rather sharply to Meyen. It is possible, therefore, that “The Free” will withdraw for a while. Therefore I earnestly beg that you yourself help us by contributing articles, and also ask your friends to do the same.

Yours,

Marx

1843

Marx To Arnold Ruge. January 25 1843

Marx to Arnold Ruge. March 18 1843

Marx To Arnold Ruge. March 13 1843

Marx to Arnold Ruge. May 1843

Marx to Arnold Ruge. September 1843

Marx To Ludwig Feuerbach, October 3, 1843

Marx To Julius Frobel, November 21, 1843

Marx and Arnold Ruge to the Démocratie Pacifique. Dec 12 1843

Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge

in Dresden

Written: Cologne, January 25 [1843];

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 1, pg 396-398;

Publisher: International Publishers (1975);

First Published: journal Documente des Socialismus, Bd I, 1902;

Translated: Clemens Dutt;

Transcribed: S. Ryan.

Dear

You probably already know that the Rheinische Zeitung has been banned, suspended, and is under sentence of death. The termination of its life has been fixed for the end of March. During this period of grace before execution, the newspaper is being subjected to a double censorship. Our censor, a decent fellow, is under the censorship of von Gerlach, Regierungspräsident here, a passively obedient blockhead. When ready, our newspaper has to be presented to the police to be sniffed at, and if the police nose smells anything un-Christian or un-Prussian, the newspaper is not allowed to appear.

The ban resulted from the coincidence of several special causes: its wide circulation; my own "Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel," in which very highly placed statesmen were thoroughly exposed; our stubborn refusal to name the person who sent us the text of the law on marriage; the convocation of the provincial estates, which we could influence by our agitation; finally, our criticism of the ban on the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung, and on the Deutsche Jahrbücher.

The ministerial rescript, which will appear in the newspapers in a day or so, is if possible more feeble than the previous ones. The following are given as motives:

1) The lie that we had no permission, as though in Prussia, where not even a dog can exist without its police number, the Rheinische Zeitung could have appeared even a single day without fulfilling the official conditions for existence.

2) The censorship instruction of December 24 aimed at establishing a censorship of tendency. By tendency it meant the illusion, the romantic belief in possessing a freedom which one would not allow oneself to possess realiter. Whereas the rationalist Jesuitism which prevailed under the former government had a stern, rational physiognomy, this romantic Jesuitism demands imagination as its main requisite. The censored press should learn to live under the illusion of freedom, and of that magnificent man who majestically permitted this illusion. But whereas the censorship instruction wanted censorship of tendency, now the ministerial rescript explains that in Frankfurt a ban, suppression has been invented for a thoroughly bad tendency. It states that the censorship exists only in order to censor eccentricities of a good tendency, although the instruction said precisely the opposite – namely, that eccentricities of a good tendency are to be permitted.

3) The old balderdash about a bad frame of mind, empty theory, hey-diddle-diddle, etc.

Nothing has surprised me. You know what my opinion of the censorship instruction has been from the outset. I see here only a consequence; in the suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung I see a definite advance of political consciousness, and for that reason I am resigning. Moreover, I had begun to be stifled in that atmosphere. It is a bad thing to have to perform menial duties even for the sake of freedom; to fight with pinpricks, instead of with clubs. I have become tired of hypocrisy, stupidity, gross arbitrariness, and of our bowing and scraping, dodging, and hair-splitting over words. Consequently, the government has given me back my freedom.

As I wrote to you once before, I have fallen out with my family and, as long as my mother is alive, I have no right to my property. Moreover, I am engaged to be married and I cannot, must not, and will not, leave Germany without my fiancée. If, therefore, the possibility arose that I could edit the Deutscher Bote with Herwegh in Zurich, I should like to do so. I can do nothing more in Germany. Here one makes a counterfeit of oneself. If, therefore, you will give me advice and information on this matter, I shall be very grateful.

I am working on several things, which here in Germany will find neither censor nor bookseller, nor, in general, any possible existence. I await an early reply from you.

Yours,

Marx

M. to R.

Marx to Ruge

On the canal-boat going to D.,

March 1843

I am now travelling in Holland. As far as I can judge from the Dutch and French newspapers, Germany is sunk deep in the mire and will sink still deeper. I assure you, even if one has no feeling of national pride at all, nevertheless one has a feeling of national shame, even in Holland. The most insignificant Dutchman is still a citizen compared with the greatest German. And the verdict of the foreigners on the Prussian Government! A horrifying unanimity prevails; no one is any longer deceived about the Prussian system and its simple nature. After all, therefore, the new school has been of some use. The mantle of liberalism has been discarded and the most disgusting despotism in all its nakedness is disclosed to the eyes of the whole world.

That, too, is a revelation, although one of the opposite kind. It is a truth which, at least, teaches us to recognise the emptiness of our patriotism and the abnormity of our state system, and makes us hide our faces in shame. You look at me with a smile and ask: What is gained by that? No revolution is made out of shame. I reply: Shame is already revolution of a kind; shame is actually the victory of the French Revolution over the German patriotism that defeated it in 1813. Shame is a kind of anger which is turned inward. And if a whole nation really experienced a sense of shame, it would be like a lion, crouching ready to spring. I admit that in Germany even shame is not yet felt; on the contrary, these miserable people are still patriots. But what system is capable of knocking the patriotism out of them if not this ridiculous system of the new cavalier [Frederick William IV]? The comedy of despotism that is being played out with us is just as dangerous for him, as the tragedy once was for the Stuarts and Bourbons. And even if for a long time this comedy were not to be looked upon as the thing it actually is, it would still amount to a revolution. The state is too serious a thing to be turned into a kind of harlequinade. A ship full of fools[19] could perhaps be allowed to drift for quite a time at the mercy of the wind, but it would be driven to meet its fate precisely because the fools would not believe this. This fate is the impending revolution.

Letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge

in Dresden

Written: Cologne, March 13 [1843];

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 1, pp. 398-399;

Publisher: International Publishers (1975);

First Published: journal Documente des Socialismus, Bd I, 1902;

Translated: Clemens Dutt;

Transcribed: S. Ryan.

Dear Friend,

As soon as it is at all possible I shall set my course straight for Leipzig. I have just had a talk with Stucke, who seems to have been greatly impressed by most of the statesmen in Berlin. This Dr. Stucke is an extremely good-natured man.

As for our plan, as a preliminary I will tell you of my own conviction. When Paris was taken, some people proposed Napoleon’s son with a regency, others Bernadotte, while yet others suggested that Louis Philippe should rule. But Talleyrand replied: “Louis XVIII or Napoleon. That is a principle, anything else is intrigue.”

In the same way I could call almost anything else, other than Strasbourg (or at any rate Switzerland), not a principle, but an intrigue. Books of more than 20 printed sheets are not books for the people. The most that one can venture on there are monthly issues.

Even if the publication of the Deutsche Jahrbücher were again permitted, at the very best we could achieve a poor copy of the deceased publication, and nowadays that is no longer enough. On the other hand, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher – that would be a principle, an event of consequence, an undertaking over which one can be enthusiastic. It goes without saying that I am only expressing my own unauthoritative opinion, and for the rest submit myself to the eternal powers of fate.

Finally – newspaper affairs compel me to close – let me tell you also about my personal plans. As soon as we had concluded the contract, I would travel to Kreuznach, marry and spend a month or more there at the home of my wife’s mother, so that before starting work we should have at any rate a few articles ready. The more so since I could, if necessary, spend a few weeks in Dresden, for all the preliminaries, the announcement of the marriage, etc., take considerable time.

I can assure you, without the slightest romanticism, that I am head over heels in love, and indeed in the most serious way. I have been engaged for more than seven years, and for my sake my fiancée has fought the most violent battles, which almost undermined her health, partly against her pietistic aristocratic relatives, for whom “the Lord in heaven” and the “lord in Berlin” are equally objects of religious cult, and partly against my own family, in which some priests and other enemies of mine have ensconced themselves. For years, therefore, my fiancée and I have been engaged in more unnecessary and exhausting conflicts than many who are three times our age and continually talk of their “life experience” (the favourite phrase of our Juste-Milieu).

Apropos, we have received an anonymous reply to Prutz’s report against the new Tübingen Jahrbücher. I recognised Schwegler by the handwriting. You are described as an over-excited agitator, Feuerbach as a frivolous mocker, and Bauer as a man of wholly uncritical mind! The Swabians! The Swabians! That will be a fine concoction!

On the subject of your very fine, truly popular written complaint, we have inserted a superficial article by Pfützner – half of which, moreover, I have deleted – for lack of a better criticism and of time. P. P. does not go sufficiently deep into the matter and the little capers he cuts tend to turn him into a laughing-stock instead of making his enemy ridiculous.

Yours,

Marx

I have arranged for the books for Fleischer. Your correspondence published at the beginning is interesting. Bauer on Ammon is delightful. The “Sorrows and Joys of the Theological Mind” seems to me a not very successful rendering of the section of the Phenomenology: “The Unfortunate Consciousness.” Feuerbach’s aphorisms seem to me incorrect only in one respect, that he refers too much to nature and too little to politics. That, however, is the only alliance by which present-day philosophy can become truth. But things will probably go as they did in the sixteenth century, when the nature enthusiasts were accompanied by a corresponding number of state enthusiasts. I was most of all pleased by the criticism of the good Literarische Zeitung.

You have probably already read Bauer’s self-defence. In my opinion, he has never before written so well.

As far as the Rheinische Zeitung is concerned I would not remain under any conditions; it is impossible for me to write under Prussian censorship or to live in the Prussian atmosphere.

I have just been visited by the chief of the Jewish community here, who has asked me for a petition for the Jews to the Provincial Assembly, and I am willing to do it. However much I dislike the Jewish faith, Bauer’s view seems to me too abstract. The thing is to make as many breaches as possible in the Christian state and to smuggle in as much as we can of what is rational. At least, it must be attempted – and the embitterment grows with every petition that is rejected with protestations.

M. to R.

Marx to Ruge

Cologne, May 1843

Your letter, my dear friend, is a fine elegy, a funeral song[20] that takes one’s breath away; but there is absolutely nothing political about it. No people wholly despairs, and even if for a long time it goes on hoping merely out of stupidity, yet one day, after many years, it will suddenly become wise and fulfil all its pious wishes.

Nevertheless, you have infected me, your theme is still not exhausted, I want to add the finale, and when everything is at an end, give me your hand, so that we may begin again from the beginning. Let the dead bury their dead and mourn them. On the other hand, it is enviable to be the first to enter the new life alive; that is to be our lot.

It is true that the old world belongs to the philistine. But one should not treat the latter as a bugbear from which to recoil in fear. On the contrary, we ought to keep an eye on him. It is worth while to study this lord of the world.

He is lord of the world, of course, only because he fills it with his society as maggots do a corpse. Therefore the society of these lords needs no more than a number of slaves, and the owners of these slaves do not need to be free. Although, as being owners of land and people, they are called lords, in the sense of being pre-eminent, for all that they are no less philistines than their servants.

As for human beings, that would imply thinking beings, free men, republicans. The philistines do not want to be either of these. What then remains for them to be and to desire?

What they want is to live and reproduce themselves (and no one, says Goethe, achieves anything more), and that the animal also wants; at most a German politician would add: Man, however, knows that he wants this, and the German is so prudent as not to want anything more.

The self-confidence of the human being, freedom, has first of all to be aroused again in the hearts of these people. Only this feeling, which vanished from the world with the Greeks, and under Christianity disappeared into the blue mist of the heavens, can again transform society into a community of human beings united for their highest aims, into a democratic state.

On the other hand, people who do not feel that they are human beings become the property of their masters like a breed of slaves or horses. The aim of this whole society is the hereditary masters. This world belongs to them. They accept it as it is and as it feels itself to be. They accept themselves as they are, and place their feet firmly on the necks of these political animals who know of no other function than to be “obedient, devoted and attentive” to their masters.

The philistine world is a political world of animals, and if we have to recognise its existence, nothing remains for us but simply to agree to this status quo. Centuries of barbarism engendered and shaped it, and now it confronts us as a consistent system, the principle of which is the dehumanised world. Hence the most complete philistine world, our Germany, was bound, of course, to remain far behind the French Revolution, which once more restored man; and a German Aristotle who wanted to derive his politics from our conditions would write at the top of it: “Man is a social animal that is however completely unpolitical” [in contradistinction to the Greek Aristotle who in his Politics called man a political animal — Zöön politicon.] but he could not explain the state more correctly than has already been done by Herr Zöpfl, the author of Constitutionellen Staatsrechts in Deutschland [Zöpfl, Grundsatze des Allgemeinen und Constitutionell-Monarchistischen Staatsrechts]. According to him, the state is a “union of families” which, we continue, belongs by heredity and property to a most eminent family called the dynasty. The more prolific the families, the happier, it is said, are the people, the greater is the state, and the more powerful the dynasty, for which reason, too, in Prussia, an ordinary despotic state, a prize of 50 imperial talers is awarded for a seventh son.

The Germans are such circumspect realists that all their desires and their loftiest thoughts do not go beyond a bare existence, and this reality — nothing more — is taken into account by those who rule over them. These latter people, too, are realists, they are very far removed from any kind of thoughts and from any human greatness; they are ordinary officers and country squires, but they are not mistaken, they are right; just as they are, they are quite capable of making use of this animal kingdom and ruling over it, for here, as everywhere, ruling and using are a single conception. And when homage is paid to them and they survey the swarming mass of these brainless beings, what is more likely to occur to them than the thought that Napoleon had at the Berezina? It is said of Napoleon that he pointed to the crowd of drowning people below him and exclaimed to his companion: “Voyez ces crapauds!” [Just look at these toads!] This is probably a fabrication, but it is nonetheless true. Despotism’s sole idea is contempt for man, the dehumanised man, and this idea has the advantage over many others of being at the same time a fact. The despot always sees degraded people. They drown before his eyes and for his sake in the mire of ordinary life, from which, like toads, they constantly make their appearance anew. If such a view comes to be held even by people who were capable of great aims, such as Napoleon before his dynastic madness, how can a quite ordinary king in such surroundings be an idealist?

The monarchical principle in general is the despised, the despicable, the dehumanised man; and Montesquieu was quite wrong to allege that it is honour [Montesquieu, De l'esprit des lois]. He gets out of the difficulty by distinguishing between monarchy, despotism and tyranny. But those are names for one and the same concept, and at most they denote differences in customs though the principle remains the same. Where the monarchical principle has a majority behind it, human beings constitute the minority; where the monarchical principle arouses no doubts, there human beings do not exist at all. Why should someone like the King of Prussia, [Frederick William IV] to whom it has never been demonstrated that his role is problematical, not be guided exclusively by his whims? And when he acts in that way, what is the result? Contradictory intentions? Well, then nothing will come of it. Impotent trends? They are still the sole political reality. Ridiculous and embarrassing situations? There is only one situation which is ridiculous and only one which is embarrassing, and that is abdication from the throne. So long as whim retains its place, it is in the right. It can be as unstable, senseless and contemptible as it chooses, it is still good enough for ruling a people that has never known any other law but the arbitrary power of its kings. I do not say that a brainless system and loss of respect within the state and outside it will be without consequences, I do not undertake to insure the ship of fools, but I assert: the King of Prussia will remain the man of his time so long as the topsy-turvy world is the real world.

As you know, I have given much thought to this man. Already at the time when he still had only the Berliner politische Wochenblatt as his organ, I recognised his value and his role. Already when the oath of allegiance was taken in Königsberg, he justified my supposition that the question would now become a purely personal one.[21] He declared that his heart and his turn of mind would be the future fundamental law of the realm of Prussia, of his state, and in point of fact, in Prussia the king is the system. He is the sole political person. In one way or another, his personality determines the system. What he does or is allowed to do, what he thinks or what is attributed to him, is what in Prussia the state thinks or does. Therefore the present king has really performed a service by stating this so unambiguously.

But the mistake which people made for a time was to attach importance to the desires and thoughts that would be expressed by the king. This could not alter the matter in the slightest: the philistine is the material of the monarchy, and the monarch always remains only the king of the philistines; he cannot turn either himself or his subjects into free, real human beings while both sides remain what they are.

The King of Prussia has tried to alter the system by means of a theory which in this form his father [Frederick William III] really did not have. The fate of this attempt is well known. It was a complete failure. This was to be expected. Once one has arrived at the political world of animals, reaction can go no farther, and there can be no other advance than the abandonment of the basis of this world and the transition to the human world of democracy.

The old king had no extravagant desires, he was a philistine and made no claim to intellect. He knew that the state of servants and his possession of it required only a prosaic, tranquil existence. The young king was more alert and brighter and had a much higher opinion of the omnipotence of the monarch, who is only limited by his heart and mind. The old ossified state of servants and slaves disgusted him. He wanted to enliven it and imbue it wholly and entirely with his own desires, sentiments and thoughts; and in his state he could demand this, if only it could be brought about. Hence his liberal speeches and the outpourings of his heart. Not dead laws, but the full, vigorous heart of the king should rule all his subjects. He wanted to set all hearts and minds into motion for the benefit of his own heart’s desires and long-cherished plans. A movement did result; but the other hearts did not beat like that of the king, and those over whom he ruled could not open their mouths without speaking about the abolition of the old domination. The idealists, who have the audacity to want to turn men into human beings, spoke out, and while the king wove fantasies in the old German manner, they considered they had the right to philosophise in the new German manner. Of course, this was shocking in Prussia. For a moment the old order of things seemed to have been turned upside-down; indeed things began to be transformed into human beings, there even appeared renowned persons, although the mention of names is not permitted in the Diets. But the servants of the old despotism soon put an end to this un-German activity. It was not difficult to bring about a marked conflict between the desires of the king, who is enthusing about a great past full of priests, knights and feudal serfs, and the intentions of the idealists, who want only the consequences of the French Revolution and therefore, in the final count, always a republic and an organisation of free human beings instead of the system of dead objects. When this conflict had become sufficiently sharp and unpleasant and the hot-tempered king was sufficiently aroused, his servants, who previously had so easily guided the course of affairs, approached him and asserted that he was not acting wisely in inducing his subjects to make useless speeches, and that his servants would not be able to rule this race of vociferous people. In addition, the sovereign of all the posterior-Russians was alarmed by the movement in the minds of the anterior-Russians [Marx ironically calls the Prussians — in Latin Borussen, Vorderrussen — anterior-Russians, and Nicholas I the sovereign of all the Hinterrussen — posterior-Russians] and demanded the restoration of the old tranquil state of affairs. And so the result was a new edition of the old proscription of all the desires and thoughts of people in regard to human rights and duties, that is to say, a return to the old ossified state of servants, in which the slave serves in silence, and the owner of the land and people rules, as silently as possible, simply through a class of well-bred, submissively obedient servants. It is not possible for either of them to say what he wants: the slave cannot say that he wants to become a human being, nor can the ruler say that he has no use for human beings in his country. To be silent, therefore, is the only way out. Muta pecora, prona et ventri oboedientia. [The herd is dumb, prostrate and obedient to its stomach]

That is the unsuccessful attempt to abolish the philistine state on its own basis; the result has been to make it evident to the whole world that for despotism brutality is a necessity and humanity an impossibility. A brutal relationship can only be maintained by means of brutality. And now I have finished with our common task, that of taking a close look at the philistine and his state. You will not say that I have had too high an opinion of the present time; and if, nevertheless, I do not despair of it, that is only because it is precisely the desperate situation which fills me with hope. I am not speaking of the incapacity of the masters and of the indifference of the servants and subjects who let everything happen just as God pleases — although both together would already suffice to bring about a catastrophe. I simply draw your attention to the fact that the enemies of philistinism, in short, all people who think and who suffer, have reached an understanding, for which previously the means were altogether lacking, and that even the passive system of reproduction of the subjects of the old type daily enlists recruits to serve the new type of humanity. The system of industry and trade, of ownership and exploitation of people, however, leads even far more rapidly than the increase in population to a rupture within present-day society, a rupture which the old system is not able to heal, because it does not heal and create at all, but only exists and consumes. But the existence of suffering human beings, who think, and thinking human beings, who are oppressed, must inevitably become unpalatable and indigestible to the animal world of philistinism which passively and thoughtlessly consumes.

For our part, we must expose the old world to the full light of day and shape the new one in a positive way. The longer the time that events allow to thinking humanity for taking stock of its position, and to suffering mankind for mobilising its forces, the more perfect on entering the world will be the product that the present time bears in its womb.

Marx to Ruge

Kreuznach, September 1843

I am glad that you have made up your mind and, ceasing to look back at the past, are turning your thoughts ahead to a new enterprise.[22] And so – to Paris, to the old university of philosophy – absit omen! [May it not be an ill omen] – and the new capital of the new world! What is necessary comes to pass. I have no doubt, therefore, that it will be possible to overcome all obstacles, the gravity of which I do not fail to recognise.

But whether the enterprise comes into being or not, in any case I shall be in Paris by the end of this month,[23] since the atmosphere here makes one a serf, and in Germany I see no scope at all for free activity.

In Germany, everything is forcibly suppressed; a real anarchy of the mind, the reign of stupidity itself, prevails there, and Zurich obeys orders from Berlin. It therefore becomes increasingly obvious that a new rallying point must be sought for truly thinking and independent minds. I am convinced that our plan would answer a real need, and after all it must be possible for real needs to be fulfilled in reality. Hence I have no doubt about the enterprise, if it is undertaken seriously.

The internal difficulties seem to be almost greater than the external obstacles. For although no doubt exists on the question of “Whence,” all the greater confusion prevails on the question of “Whither.” Not only has a state of general anarchy set in among the reformers, but everyone will have to admit to himself that he has no exact idea what the future ought to be. On the other hand, it is precisely the advantage of the new trend that we do not dogmatically anticipate the world, but only want to find the new world through criticism of the old one. Hitherto philosophers have had the solution of all riddles lying in their writing-desks, and the stupid, exoteric world had only to open its mouth for the roast pigeons of absolute knowledge to fly into it. Now philosophy has become mundane, and the most striking proof of this is that philosophical consciousness itself has been drawn into the torment of the struggle, not only externally but also internally. But, if constructing the future and settling everything for all times are not our affair, it is all the more clear what we have to accomplish at present: I am referring to ruthless criticism of all that exists, ruthless both in the sense of not being afraid of the results it arrives at and in the sense of being just as little afraid of conflict with the powers that be.

Therefore I am not in favour of raising any dogmatic banner. On the contrary, we must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their propositions for themselves. Thus, communism, in particular, is a dogmatic abstraction; in which connection, however, I am not thinking of some imaginary and possible communism, but actually existing communism as taught by Cabet, Dézamy, Weitling, etc. This communism is itself only a special expression of the humanistic principle, an expression which is still infected by its antithesis – the private system. Hence the abolition of private property and communism are by no means identical, and it is not accidental but inevitable that communism has seen other socialist doctrines – such as those of Fourier, Proudhon, etc. – arising to confront it because it is itself only a special, one-sided realisation of the socialist principle.

And the whole socialist principle in its turn is only one aspect that concerns the reality of the true human being. But we have to pay just as much attention to the other aspect, to the theoretical existence of man, and therefore to make religion, science, etc., the object of our criticism. In addition, we want to influence our contemporaries, particularly our German contemporaries. The question arises: how are we to set about it? There are two kinds of facts which are undeniable. In the first place religion, and next to it, politics, are the subjects which form the main interest of Germany today. We must take these, in whatever form they exist, as our point of departure, and not confront them with some ready-made system such as, for example, the Voyage en Icarie. [Etienne Cabet, Voyage en Icarie. Roman philosophique et social.]

Reason has always existed, but not always in a reasonable form. The critic can therefore start out from any form of theoretical and practical consciousness and from the forms peculiar to existing reality develop the true reality as its obligation and its final goal. As far as real life is concerned, it is precisely the political state – in all its modern forms – which, even where it is not yet consciously imbued with socialist demands, contains the demands of reason. And the political state does not stop there. Everywhere it assumes that reason has been realised. But precisely because of that it everywhere becomes involved in the contradiction between its ideal function and its real prerequisites.

From this conflict of the political state with itself, therefore, it is possible everywhere to develop the social truth. Just as religion is a register of the theoretical struggles of mankind, so the political state is a register of the practical struggles of mankind. Thus, the political state expresses, within the limits of its form sub specie rei publicae, [as a particular kind of state] all social struggles, needs and truths. Therefore, to take as the object of criticism a most specialised political question – such as the difference between a system based on social estate and one based on representation – is in no way below the hauteur des principes. [Level of principles] For this question only expresses in a political way the difference between rule by man and rule by private property. Therefore the critic not only can, but must deal with these political questions (which according to the extreme Socialists are altogether unworthy of attention). In analysing the superiority of the representative system over the social-estate system, the critic in a practical way wins the interest of a large party. By raising the representative system from its political form to the universal form and by bringing out the true significance underlying this system, the critic at the same time compels this party to go beyond its own confines, for its victory is at the same time its defeat.

Hence, nothing prevents us from making criticism of politics, participation in politics, and therefore real struggles, the starting point of our criticism, and from identifying our criticism with them. In that case we do not confront the world in a doctrinaire way with a new principle: Here is the truth, kneel down before it! We develop new principles for the world out of the world’s own principles. We do not say to the world: Cease your struggles, they are foolish; we will give you the true slogan of struggle. We merely show the world what it is really fighting for, and consciousness is something that it has to acquire, even if it does not want to.

The reform of consciousness consists only in making the world aware of its own consciousness, in awakening it out of its dream about itself, in explaining to it the meaning of its own actions. Our whole object can only be – as is also the case in Feuerbach’s criticism of religion – to give religious and philosophical questions the form corresponding to man who has become conscious of himself.

Hence, our motto must be: reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but by analysing the mystical consciousness that is unintelligible to itself, whether it manifests itself in a religious or a political form. It will then become evident that the world has long dreamed of possessing something of which it has only to be conscious in order to possess it in reality. It will become evident that it is not a question of drawing a great mental dividing line between past and future, but of realising the thoughts of the past. Lastly, it will become evident that mankind is not beginning a new work, but is consciously carrying into effect its old work.

In short, therefore, we can formulate the trend of our journal as being: self-clarification (critical philosophy) to be gained by the present time of its struggles and desires. This is a work for the world and for us. It can be only the work of united forces. It is a matter of a confession, and nothing more. In order to secure remission of its sins, mankind has only to declare them for what they actually are.

Marx To Ludwig Feuerbach in Bruckberg

First published in part in:

K. Grun, Ludwig Feuerbach in seinem Brietwechsel und Nachlass,

sowie in seiner Philosophischen Charaiterentwicklung

Bd. I, Leipzig und Heidelberg, 1874;

in full in:

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Collected Works,

second Russ. ea., Vol. 27, 1962.

Translated into English by Jack Cohen for the Collected Works.

Kreuznach, October 3, 1843

Dear Sir,

A few months ago while passing through [Bruckberg], Dr. Ruge informed you of our plan to publish Franco-German Jahrbücher and asked at the same time for your collaboration. It has now been already settled that Paris is to be the place for printing and publication and that the first monthly number is to appear by the end of November.

Before I leave for Paris in a few days time I feel obliged to make a brief epistolary approach to you since I have not had the privilege of making your personal acquaintance.

You were one of the first writers who expressed the need for a Franco-German scientific alliance. You will, therefore, assuredly be one of the first to support an enterprise aimed at bringing such an alliance into being. For German and French articles are to be published promiscue in the Jahrbücher. The best Paris writers have agreed to cooperate. Any contribution from you will be most welcome and there is probably something at your disposal that you have already written.

From your preface to the 2nd edition of Das Wesen des Christenthums, I am almost led to conclude that you are engaged on a fuller work on Schelling or that you have something about this windbag in mind. Now that would be a marvellous beginning.

Schelling, as you know, is the 38th member of the [German] Confederation. The entire German police is at his disposal as I myself once experienced when I was editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. That is, a censorship order can prevent anything against the holy Schelling [...indecipherable word here...] from getting through. Hence it is almost impossible in Germany to attack Schelling except in books of over 21 sheets, and books of over 21 sheets are not books read by the people. Kapp's book is very commendable but it is too circumstantial and rather inaptly separates judgment from facts. Moreover, our governments have found a means of making such works ineffective. They must not be mentioned. They are ignored or the few official reviews dismiss them with a few contemptuous words. The great Schelling himself pretends he knows nothing about these attacks and he succeeded in diverting attention from Kapp's book by making a tremendous fiscal to-do about old Paulus' soup. That was a diplomatic master stroke.

But just imagine Schelling exposed in Paris, before the French literary world! His vanity will not be able to restrain itself, this will wound the Prussian Government to the quick, it will be an attack on Schelling's sovereignty abroad, and a vain monarch sets much greater store by his sovereignty abroad than at home.

How cunningly Herr von Schelling enticed the French, first of all the weak, eclectic Cousin, then even the gifted Leroux. For Pierre Leroux and his like still regard Schelling as the man who replaced transcendental idealism by rational realism, abstract thought by thought with flesh and blood, specialised philosophy by world philosophy! To the French romantics and mystics he cries: "I, the union of philosophy and theology," to the French materialists: "I, the union of flesh and idea," to the French sceptics: "I, the destroyer of dogmatism," in a word, "I ... Schelling!"

Schelling has not only been able to unite philosophy and theology, but philosophy and diplomacy too. He has turned philosophy into a general diplomatic science, into a diplomacy for all occasions. Thus an attack on Schelling is indirectly an attack on our entire policy, and especially on Prussian policy. Schelling's philosophy is Prussian policy sub specie philosophiae.

You would therefore be doing a great service to our enterprise, but even more to truth, if you were to contribute a characterisation of Schelling to the very first issue. You are just the man for this because you are Schelling in reverse. The sincere thought – we may believe the best of our opponent – of the young Schelling for the realisation of which however he did not possess the necessary qualities except imagination, he had no energy but vanity, no driving force but opium, no organ but the irritability of a feminine perceptivity, this sincere thought of his youth, which in his case remained a fantastic youthful dream, has become truth, reality manly seriousness in your case. Schelling is therefore an anticipated caricature of you, and as soon as reality confronts the caricature the latter must dissolve into thin air. I therefore regard you as the necessary, natural – that is, nominated by Their Majesties Nature and History – opponent of Schelling. Your struggle with him is the struggle of the imagination of philosophy with philosophy itself.

I confidently expect a contribution from you in the form you may find most convenient. My address is: "Herr Mäurer. Rue Vanneau No. 23, Paris, for the attention of Dr. Marx." Although she does not know you, my wife sends greetings. You would not believe how many followers you have among the fair sex.

Yours very truly,

Dr. Marx

Marx To Julius Fröbel in Zurich

First published in German and Russian

Printed according to the original

in the journal Voprosy istorii KPSS No. 4

Translated into English by Jack Cohen for the Collected Works.

Paris, November 21, 1843

rue Vanneau, No. 31, Faub. St. Germain

Dear Friend,

Your letter has just arrived, but with some very strange symptoms.

1) Everything which you say you enclosed is missing with the exception of Engels' article. This, however, is all in pieces and is therefore useless. It begins with No. 5.

2) The letters for Mäurer and myself were wrapped up in the enclosed envelope which is postmarked St. Louis. The few pages of Engels' article were in the same wrapper.

3) Mäurer's letter, which, like mine, I found open in the enclosed envelope, is also superscribed in a strange hand. I enclose the page with the writing.

Hence there are only two possibilities.

Either the French Government opened and seized your letters and your packet. In which case return the enclosed addresses. We will then not only initiate proceedings against the French Post-Office but, at the same time, publicise this fact in all the opposition papers. In any event it would be better if you addressed all packets to a French bookshop. However, we do not believe that the French Government has perpetrated the kind of infamy which so far only the Austrian Government has permitted itself.

There thus remains the second possibility, that your Bluntschli and associates have played this police-spy trick. If this is so, then (1) You must bring proceedings against the Swiss and (2) Mäurer as a French citizen will protest to the Ministry.

As far as the business itself is concerned, it is now necessary:

a) To ask Schuller not to issue the aforesaid document for the time being, as this must be the principal ornament of our first number.

b) Send the whole of the contents to Louis Blanc's address. No. 2 or 3, rue Taitbout.

c) Ruge is not yet here. I cannot very well begin printing until he has arrived. I have had to reject the articles so far sent to me by the local people (Hess, Weill, etc.) after many protracted discussions. But Ruge is probably coming at the end of this month, and if at that time we also have the document you promised, we can begin with the printing. I have written to Feuerbach, Kapp and Hagen. Feuerbach has already replied.

d) Holland seems to me to be the most suitable place providing that your police spies have not already been in direct touch with the government.

If your Swiss people have perpetrated the infamy I will not only attack them in the Réforme, the National, the Démocratie pacifique, the Siecle, Courrier, La Presse, Charivari, Commerce and the Revue indépendante, but in the Times as well, and, if you wish, in a pamphlet written in French.

These pseudo-Republicans will have to learn that they are not dealing with young cowhands, or tailors' apprentices.

As to the office, I will try to acquire one along with the new lodging into which I intend moving. This will be convenient from the business and financial viewpoint.

Please excuse this scraggy letter. I can't write for indignation.

Yours, Marx

In any case, whether the Paris doctrinaires or the Swiss peasant lads were responsible for the trick, we will get Arago and Lamartine to make an intervention in the Chamber. If these gentlemen want to make a scandal, ut scandalum fiat. Reply quickly for the matter is pressing. Since Mäurer is a French citizen, the plot on the part of the Zurichers would be a violation of international law, with which the cowhands shall not get away.

Letter to the Editor of the

Démocratie Pacifique

Written: Paris, December 10, 1843;

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 3, pg 132;

Publisher: International Publishers (1975);

First Published: the Démocratie pacifique, December 11, 1843;

Translated Jack Cohen for the Collected Works;

Transcribed: S. Ryan;

HTML Markup: S. Ryan.

No. 28 of the Bien public contains the following lines:

"The Kölnische Zeitung publishes a letter from Leipzig in which it is stated that a journal in French and German is due to appear shortly in Paris under the editorship of Dr. Ruge, to which M. de Lamartine and M. de Lamennais are said to have promised their collaboration.

"It is not true that M. de Lamartine has undertaken to write in any journal and, in particular, in the one in question, with M. de Lamennais.

"M. de Lamartine, who is wholly absorbed in his parliamentary work, is reserving for the Histoire des Girondins the little leisure that politics leaves him."

It is true that M. de Lamartine has not undertaken to write for the journal in question with M. de Lamennais, but we affirm that he has let us hope for his collaboration in the journal that we are proposing to found.

In addressing ourselves separately to these two famous personages, we have been prompted by the belief that for a work such as that of an intellectual alliance between France and Germany one should seek the support of all eminent representatives of progress in France.

Furthermore, we declare that the letter from Leipzig published by the Kölnische Zeitung, which gave rise to the article in the Bien public, did not emanate from us or from any of our friends.

Arnold Ruge,

former editor of the Deutsche Jahrbücher

Charles Marx,

former editor of the Rheinische Zeitung

Paris, December 10, 1843

1844

Marx to the Allegemeine Zeitung (Augsburg). Apr 14

Marx to Ludwig Feuerbach, August 11

Marx to Heinrich Börnstein. Autumn

Engels to Marx in Paris. Oct

Marx to Julius Campe. 7 October

Marx to Heinrich Börnstein. Not later than November

Engels to Marx in Paris. Nov 19

Marx to Heinrich Börnstein. Dec 30

Letter to the editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung (Augsburg)

First published: in the Allgemeine Zeitung Augsburg, No. 3, April 20, 1844;

Translated from German: by Jack Cohen for the Collected Works.

The diverse rumours which have been spread by German newspapers concerning the discontinuation of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher impel me to state that the Swiss publishers of the Jahrbücher suddenly withdrew from this enterprise for economic reasons and thus made impossible the continuation of this journal for the time being.

Paris, April 14, 1844

Karl Marx

Marx To Ludwig Feuerbach

In Bruckberg

Paris, August 11 1844

Written: August 11 1844;

First Published: Probleme des Friedens und des Sozialismus No. 2, 1958;

Source: From Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 3;

HTML Markup: Andy Blunden.

Dear Sir,

Since I just have the opportunity, I take the liberty of sending you an article of mine in which some elements of my critical philosophy of law [Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right. Introduction] are outlined. I had already finished it once but have since revised it in order to make it more generally comprehensible. I don't attribute any exceptional value to this essay but I am glad to have an opportunity of assuring you of the great respect and — if I may use the word — love, which I feel for you. Your Philosophie der Zukunft, and your Wesen des Glaubens, in spite of their small size, are certainly of greater weight than the whole of contemporary German literature put together.

In these writings you have provided — I don't know whether intentionally — a philosophical basis for socialism and the Communists have immediately understood them in this way. The unity of man with man, which is based on the real differences between men, the concept of the human species brought down from the heaven of abstraction to the real earth, what is this but the concept of society!

Two translations of your Wesen des Christenthums, one in English and one in French, are in preparation and almost ready for printing. The first will be published in Manchester (Engels has been supervising it) and the second in Paris (the Frenchman Dr. Guerrier and the German Communist Ewerbeck have translated it with the help of a French literary expert).

At present, the French will immediately pounce on the book, for both parties — priests, and Voltairians and materialists — are looking about for help from outside. It is a remarkable phenomenon that, in contrast to the eighteenth century, religiosity has now passed to the middle and upper classes while on the other hand irreligiosity — but an irreligiosity of men regarding themselves as men — has descended to the French proletariat. You would have to attend one of the meetings of the French workers to appreciate the pure freshness, the nobility which burst forth from these toil-worn men. The English proletarian is also advancing with giant strides but he lacks the cultural background of the French. But I must not forget to emphasise the theoretical merits of the German artisans in Switzerland, London and Paris. The German artisan is still however too much of an artisan.

But in any case it is among these “barbarians” of our civilised society that history is preparing the practical element for the emancipation of mankind.

For me the difference between the French character and our German character was never demonstrated so sharply and convincingly as in a Fourierist work which begins with the following sentences:

“In his passions that man reveals himself completely”. “Have you ever met a person who thought in order to think, who remembered in order to remember, who imagined in order to imagine, who wished in order to wish? Has this ever happened to you?... No, obviously not!”

The main driving force of nature as of society is, therefore, the magical, the passionate, the non-reflecting attraction and

“everything which exists, man, plant, animal or planet, has received an amount of power corresponding to its mission in the system of the universe”.

From this there follows: “The attractive powers are proportional to the destinies.”

Do not all these sentences give the impression that the Frenchman has deliberately set his passion against the pure activity of German thought? One does not think in order to think, etc.

In his critical Berlin Literatur-Zeitung, Bruno Bauer, my friend of many years standing — but now rather estranged — has provided fresh proof of how difficult it is for Germans to extricate themselves from the contrary one-sidedness. I don't know if you have read the journal. It contains much covert polemic against you.

The character of the Literatur-Zeitung can be reduced to the following: “Criticism” is transformed into a transcendental being. These Berliners do not regard themselves as men who criticise, but as critics who, incidentally, have the misfortune of being men. They therefore acknowledge only one real need, the need of theoretical criticism. People like Proudhon are therefore accused of having made some “practical” “need” their point of departure. This criticism therefore lapses into a sad and supercilious intellectualism. Consciousness or self-consciousness is regarded as the only human quality. Love, for example, is rejected, because the loved one is only an “object”. Down with the object. This criticism thus regards itself as the only active element in history. It is confronted by the whole of humanity as a mass, an inert mass, which has value only as the antithesis of intellect. It is therefore regarded as the greatest crime if the critic displays feeling or passion, he must be an ironical ice-cold sojoV. [Sage]

Thus Bauer says literally:

“The critic should participate neither in the sufferings nor in the joys of society; he should know neither friendship and love, nor hate and envy; he should be enthroned in a solitude, where only the laughter of the Olympian Gods over the topsy-turviness of the world resounds occasionally from his lips.”

The tone of Bauer's Literatur-Zeitung is therefore one of dispassionate contempt and he makes it all the easier for himself by flinging the results of your work and of our time as a whole at other people's heads. He only exposes contradictions and, satisfied with this occupation, he departs with a contemptuous “Hm”. He declares that criticism does not give anything, it is far too spiritual for that. Indeed, he plainly expresses the hope:

“the time is not distant when the whole of degenerate mankind will rally against criticism” — and criticism means Bauer and company — “they will then sort out this mass into different groups and distribute the testimonium paupertatis to all of them”.

It seems that Bauer has fought against Christ out of rivalry. I am going to publish a small booklet attacking this aberration of criticism. It would be of the greatest value to me if you would let me know in advance your opinion, and in general some speedy sign of life from you would make me happy. The German artisans in Paris, i. e., the Communists amongst them, several hundreds, have been having lectures twice a week throughout this summer on your Wesen des Christenthums from their secret leaders, and have been remarkably responsive. The short extract from the letter of a German lady which appeared in the feuilleton of Vorwärts! (No. 64) without the knowledge of the writer, is taken from a letter of my wife, who is now visiting her mother in Trier.

With best wishes for your well-being.

Yours,

Karl Marx

Marx To Heinrich Börnstein

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 8;

Written: autumn 1844;

First published: in Der Kampf, Jg. XXI, H. 10, Wien, 1928;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden for marxists.org 1999.

Dear Sir,

You would greatly oblige me if you would ascertain by Tuesday at the latest whether or not Frank is willing to undertake publication of the pamphlet against Bauer [The Holy Family].

It is of complete indifference to me which way he decides. I can find a foreign publisher any day. Only, in the case of this particular pamphlet, in which every word counts, it would be pleasant to have it printed under my own supervision and to be able to correct it personally.

At any rate I beg you to reply speedily.

Ready to reciprocate,

Yours faithfully

Dr Marx

P.S. Since the pamphlet is directed against Bauer and on the whole contains little to which the censor could object, I should hardly suppose that distribution in Germany would present any great difficulty.

Letter from Engels to Marx

in Paris

Written: [Barmen, beginning of October 1844]

First Published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 2, No.44, Stuttgart, 1900-01 and in full in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1913;

Transcribed: Ken Campbell;

HTML Markup: S. Ryan.

Dear Marx,

No doubt you are surprised, and justifiably so, not to have heard from me sooner; however I still cannot tell you even now anything about my return. I’ve been stuck here in Barmen for the past three weeks, amusing myself as best I can with few friends and many relations amongst whom, fortunately, there are half a dozen amiable women. Work is out of the question here, more especially since my sister [Marie] has become engaged to the London communist, Emil Blank, an acquaintance of Ewerbeck’s and, of course, the house is now in a hellish state of turmoil. Moreover, it’s clear to me that considerable obstacles will continue to be placed in the way of my return to Paris, and that I may well have to spend six months or a whole year hanging about in Germany; I shall, of course, do everything I can to avoid this, but you have no idea what petty considerations and superstitious fears I have to contend with.

I spent three days in Cologne and marvelled at the tremendous propaganda we had put out there. Our people are very active, but the lack of adequate backing is greatly felt. Failing a few publications in which the principles are logically and historically developed out of past ways of thinking and past history, and as their necessary continuation, the whole thing will remain rather hazy and most people will be groping in the dark. Later I was in Duesseldorf, where we also have some able fellows. The ones I like best, by the way, are my Elberfelders, in whom a humane way of thinking has truly become second nature; these fellows have really begun to revolutionise their family lives and lecture their elders whenever these try to come the aristocrat over the servants or workmen – and that’s saying a great deal in patriarchal Elberfeld. But besides this particular group there’s another in Elberfeld which is also very good, though somewhat more muddled. In Barmen the police inspector is a communist. The day before yesterday I was called on by a former schoolfellow, a grammar school teacher [1] , who’s been thoroughly bitten although he’s had no contact whatever with communists. If we could bring direct influence to bear on the people, we’d soon get the upper hand, but such a thing is virtually impossible, especially since we writers have to keep quiet if we’re not to be nabbed. Otherwise it’s safe enough here, no one bothers much about us so long as we keep quiet, and it seems to me that Hess’ fears are little more than phantoms. I’ve not been molested at all here so far, although the public prosecutor once insistently questioned one of our people about me, but up till now I haven’t had wind of anything else.

According to the paper here, Bernays [2] has been charged by the government here and taken to court in Paris. Let me know whether this is true, and also how the pamphlet [3] is getting on; presumably it’s finished by now. Nothing has been heard of the Bauers here, nobody knows anything about them. On the other hand, every one is still scrambling to get hold of the Jahrbücher. [4] My article on Carlyle [5] has, absurdly enough, earned me a tremendous reputation among the ‘mass’, whereas only very few have read the one on Economy. [6] That’s natural enough.

In Elberfeld, too, the clerical gentry have been preaching against us, at least Krummacher has; for the present they confine themselves to the atheism of the young, but I hope this will soon be followed by a philippic against communism. Last summer the whole of Elberfeld talked of nothing but these godless fellows. By and large, the movement here is remarkable. Since I was here last [7] , the Wupper valley has made greater progress in every respect than in the preceding fifty years. Social manners have become more civilised, participation in politics, in the opposition is widespread, industry has made enormous progress, new districts have been added to the towns, entire woods have been grubbed up, and the level of civilisation throughout the region is indeed above rather than below that in Germany as a whole, whereas only four years ago it was far lower. In other words this promises to be first-rate soil for our principle, and if only we can get our wild, hot-blooded dyers and bleachers on the move, the Wupper valley will surprise you yet. As it is, the workers had already reached the final stage of the old civilisation a few years ago, and the rapid increase in crime, robbery and murder is their way of protesting against the old social organisation. At night the streets are very unsafe, the bourgeoisie is beaten, stabbed and robbed; and, if the proletarians here develop according to the same laws as in England, they will soon realise that this way of protesting as individuals and with violence against the social order is useless, and they will protest, through communism, in their general capacity as human beings. If only one could show these fellows the way! But that’s impossible.

My brother [Hermann] is at present a soldier in Cologne and, so long as he remains above suspicion, will provide a good address to which letters for Hess, etc., may be sent. At the moment I myself am not sure of his exact address and cannot therefore let you have it.

Since writing the above I have been in Elberfeld, where I once again came across several communists I had never heard of before. Turn where you will, go where you may, you’ll stumble on a communist. A very impassioned communist, a cartoonist and aspiring historical painter by the name of Seel will be going to Paris in two months’ time. I’ll direct him to you; the fellow’s enthusiasm and his painting and love of music will appeal to you, and he may very well come in useful as a cartoonist. It’s possible, but not very probable, that I may be there myself by then.

A few copies of Vorwarts! [8] arrive here and I have seen to it that others place orders as well; ask the dispatch department to send specimen copies to the following in Elberfeld: Richard Roth, Captain Wilhelm Blank junior, F. W. Strijeker, Meyer, a Bavarian publican in the Funkenstrasse (a communist beerhouse), all to be sent through Baedeker, the communist bookseller, and under sealed cover. Once the fellows see that copies are coming in, they, too, will place orders. Also to W. Mueller, M.D., in Duesseldorf; and, if you like, to d’Ester, M.D., Loellchen, [9] the publican, your brother-in-law[10], etc., in Cologne. All of them, of course, through the booksellers and under sealed cover.

See to it that the material you’ve collected is soon launched into the world.[11] It’s high time, heaven knows! I too shall settle down to work and make a start this very day. The Teutons are all still very muddled about the practicability of communism; to dispose of this absurdity I intend to write a short pamphlet showing that communism has already been put into practice and describing in popular terms how this is at present being done in England and America. [12] The thing will take me three days or so, and should prove very enlightening for these fellows. I’ve already observed this when talking to people here.

Down to work, then, and quickly into print! Convey my greetings to Ewerbeck, Bakunin, Guerrier and the rest, not forgetting your wife, and write very soon to tell me all the news. If this letter reaches you safely and unopened, send your reply under sealed cover to F. W. Struecker and Co., Elberfeld, with the address written in as commercial a hand as possible; otherwise, to any of the other addresses I gave Ewerbeck. I shall be curious to know whether the postal sleuth-hounds are deceived by the ladylike appearance of this letter.

Goodbye for the present, dear Karl, and write very soon. I have not been able to recapture the mood of cheerfulness and goodwill I experienced during the ten days I spent with you. I have not as yet had any real opportunity of doing anything about the establishment we are to establish. [13]

Notes

BACKGROUND: This is the earliest extant letter of Engels to Marx, written soon after Engels’ return to Germany from England. On his way back to Germany, at the end of August 1844, he stopped in Paris, where he met Marx. During the days they spent together they discovered that their theoretical views coincided, and they immediately began their first joint work, directed against the Young Hegelians. Engels finished his part before leaving Paris, while Marx continued to write his. At first, they intended to call the book A Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Co. But while it was being printed, Marx added The Holy Family to the title.

This meeting of Marx and Engels in Paris marked the beginning of their friendship, joint scientific work and revolutionary struggle.

The extant original of this letter bears no date. The approximate time of its writing was determined on the basis of Engels’ letter to Marx of November 19 1844.

This letter was printed in English in full for the first time in: Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondences, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955.

1. Gustav Wurm.

2. Karl Bernays, one of the editors of the German newspaper Vorwärts!, published in Paris, was sued by the French authorities in September 1844 at the request of the Prussian Government for not having paid the caution-money required for the publication of a political newspaper. The real reason, however, was the article ‘Attentat auf den König von Prüssen’, published in Vorwärts!, No. 62, 3 August 1844. On 13 December 1844 Bernays was sentenced to two months’ imprisonment and a fine.

3. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism.

4. Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher

5. F. Engels, ‘The Condition of England. Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle.’

6. F. Engels, ‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’.

7. Engels left Germany in November 1842 and lived for nearly two years in England, working in the office of a Manchester cotton-mill of which the father was co-proprietor.

8. In July 1844, Marx began to contribute to the newspaper Vorwarts!, which prior to that – from early 1844 to the summer of the same year – reflected the moderate liberalism of its publisher, the German businessman H. Boernstein, and its editor A. Bornstedt. However, when Karl Bernays, a friend of Marx, became its editor in the summer of 1844, the newspaper assumed a democratic character. By contributing to the newspaper, Marx began to influence its policy and in September became one of its editors. Other contributors were Engels, Heine, Herwegh, Ewerbeck and Bakunin. Under Marx’s influence, the newspaper came to express communist views and attacked Prussian absolutism and moderate German liberalism. At the behest of the Prussian Government, the Guizot ministry took repressive measures against its editors and contributors in January 1845, when publication ceased.

9. J. A. Loellgen

10. Edgar von Westphalen.

11. Engels is referring to Kritik der Politik und National-ökonomie, a work which Marx planned to write. Marx began to study political economy at the end of 1843 and by spring 1844 he set himself the task of writing a criticism of bourgeois political economy from the standpoint of materialism and communism. The draft "Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844", written at that time, have reached us incomplete. Work on The Holy Family forced Marx to temporarily interrupt his study of political economy until December 1844. In February 1845, just before his expulsion from Paris, he signed a contract for his Kritik der Politik und National-ökonomie with the publisher Leske. In Brussels, Marx continued to study the works of English, French, German, Italian and other economists and added several more notebooks of excerpts to those compiled in Paris, although his original plan for the book was not carried out.

12. F. Engels, ‘Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence’ was published in the Deutsches Burgerbuch fur 1845 and not in pamphlet form.

13. This seems to refer to some literary plan.

Marx To Julius Campe

In Hamburg Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 7;

Written: 7 October 1844;

First published: in part in Das Goldene Tor, 1947;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden for marxists.org 1999.

7 October 1844, rue Vanneau 38

Messrs Hoffmann and Campe, Booksellers, in Hamburg Julius Campe, Esq.

Dear Sir, Engels and I have written a pamphlet of some ten sheets against Bruno Bauer and his supporters [The Holy Family].

It deals with themes from philosophy, history and idealism, contains a critique of the Mystères de Paris [novel by Eugène Sue] etc., and will not be without interest for Germany. Nor, by and large, will it be objectionable to the censors.

Should you wish to undertake its publication, I would request you to reply forthwith, since the pamphlet cannot but lose in interest if printing is delayed.[6] If Heine is still in Hamburg, would you be so kind as to convey to him my best thanks for the poems he sent. I have not yet had any real opportunity of doing anything about the first part, the ballads, as I wish to advertise the first part yet at the same time. [7]

Yours faithfully

Dr Marx

Marx To Heinrich Börnstein

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 8;

Written: not later than November 1844

First published: Ishihama Tomoyuki, In the Trace of Battles, Tokyo, 1926

Dear Sir,

Return the Feuerbach sheets [L. Feuerbach, Das Wesen des Glaubens im Sinne Luther’s] to me as soon as you have printed them. [8]

Yours faithfully

Marx

Letter from Engels to Marx

in Paris

Written: Barmen, 19 November 1844[1];

First Published: Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1913;

K. Marx and F. Engels, On Britain, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1953;

and Letters of the Young Engels, 1838-1845, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976;

Transcribed: Ken Campbell;

HTML Markup: S. Ryan .

No. 2

Barmen, 19 November 1844

Dear M.,

About a fortnight ago I received a few lines from you and Buergers dated 8 October and postmarked Brussels, 27 October. [1] At about the same time you wrote your note I sent off a letter to you, addressed to your wife, and trust that you received it. In order to make sure in future that our letters are not tampered with, I suggest we number them, thus my present one is No 2 and, when you write, let me know up to what number you have received and whether one is missing from the series

A couple of days ago I was in Cologne and Bonn. All goes well in Cologne. Grun will have told you about our people's activities. Hess is thinking of joining you in Paris, too, in a fortnight or three weeks time, provided he can get hold of sufficient money. You now have Buergers there as well and hence enough for a council. You will have all the less need of me and there is all the more need for me here. Obviously I can't come now since it would mean falling out with my entire family. Besides I have a love affair to clear up first and after all, one of us ought to be here because all our people need prodding if they are to maintain a sufficient degree of activity and not fall into all manner of shuffling and shifting. Jung, for instance as well as many others, cannot be convinced that the difference between us and Ruge is one of principle, [2] and still persists in believing that it is merely a personal squabble. When told that Ruge is no communist, they don't quite believe it and assert that in any case it would be a pity if such a 'literary authority' as Ruge were to be thoughtlessly discarded. What is one to say to that? One must wait until Ruge once again delivers himself of some monumental stupidity, so that the fact can be demonstrated ad oculos [3] to these people. I don't know, but there's something not quite right about Jung; the fellow hasn't enough determination.

We are at present holding public meetings all over the place to set up societies for the advancement of the workers [4] ; this causes a fine stir among the Teutons and draws the philistines' attention to social problems. These meetings are arranged on the spur of the moment and without asking the police. We have seen to it that half the rules-drafting committee in Cologne consists of our own people; in Elberfeld, at least one of them was on it and, with the help of the rationalists, [5] we succeeded at two meetings in thoroughly trouncing the pious; by a huge majority, everything Christian was banned from the rules. [6] It amused me to see what a ridiculous figure these rationalists cut with their theoretical Christianity and practical atheism. In principle they entirely agreed with the Christian opposition, although in practice, Christianity, which according to their own assertions forms the basis of the society, must nowhere be mentioned in the rules. The rules were to cover everything save the vital principle of the society! So rigidly did the fellows cling to this absurd position that, even without my putting in a single word, we acquired a set of rules which, as things are now, leaves nothing to be desired. There is to be another meeting next Sunday, but I shan't be able to attend because I am leaving for Westphalia tomorrow.

I am up to my eyebrows in English newspapers and books upon which I am drawing for my book on the condition of the English proletarians. [7] I expect to finish it by the middle or the end of January, having got through the arrangement of the material, the most arduous part of the work, about a week or a fortnight ago. I shall be presenting the English with a fine bill of indictment; I accuse the English bourgeoisie before the entire world of murder, robbery and other crimes on a massive scale, and I am writing an English preface [8] which I shall have printed separately and sent to English party leaders, men of letters and members of Parliament. That'll give those fellows something to remember me by. It need hardly be said that my blows, though aimed at the panniers, are meant for the donkey, namely the German bourgeoisie, to whom I make it plain enough that they are as bad as their English counterparts, except that their sweat-shop methods are not as bold, thorough and ingenious. – As soon as I've finished this, I shall make a start on the history of the social development of the English, [9] which will be still less laborious, since I already have the material for it and have sorted it out in my head, and also because I'm perfectly clear about the matter. Meanwhile I shall probably write a few pamphlets, notably against List [10] as soon as I have the time.

You will have heard of Stirner's book, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum [11] , if it hasn't reached you yet. Wigand sent me the specimen sheets, which I took with me to Cologne and left with Hess. The noble Stirner – you'll recall Schmidt of Berlin, who wrote about the Mysteres in Buhl's magazine [12] – takes for his principle Bentham's egoism, except that in one respect it is carried through more logically and in the other less so. More logically in the sense that Stirner as an atheist sets the ego above God, or rather depicts him as the be-all and end-all, whereas Bentham still allows God to remain remote and nebulous above him; that Stirner, in short, is riding on German idealism, an idealist who has turned to materialism and empiricism, whereas Bentham is simply an empiricist. Stirner is less logical in the sense that he would like to avoid the reconstruction effected by Bentham of a society reduced to atoms, but cannot do so. This egoism is simply the essence of present society and present man brought to consciousness, the ultimate that can be said against us by present society, the culmination of all the theory intrinsic to the prevailing stupidity. But that's precisely what makes the thing important, more important than Hess, for one, holds it to be. We must not simply cast it aside, but rather use it as the perfect expression of present-day folly and, while inverting it, continue to build on it. This egoism is taken to such a pitch, it is so absurd and at the same time so self-aware, that it cannot maintain itself even for an instant in its one-sidedness, but must immediately change into communism. In the first place it's a simple matter to prove to Stirner that his egoistic man is bound to become communist out of sheer egoism. That's the way to answer the fellow. In the second place he must be told that in its egoism the human heart is of itself, from the very outset, unselfish and self-sacrificing, so that he finally ends up with what he is combating. These few platitudes will suffice to refute the one-sidedness. But we must also adopt such truth as there is in the principle. And it is certainly true that we must first make a cause our own, egoistic cause, before we can do anything to further it – and hence that in this sense, irrespective of any eventual material aspirations, we are communists out of egoism also, and it is out of egoism that we wish to be human beings, not mere individuals. Or to put it another way. Stirner is right in rejecting Feuerbach's ‘man’, or at least the ‘man’ of Das Wesen des Christentums. [13] Feuerbach deduces his ‘man’ from God, it is from God that he arrives at ‘man’, and hence ‘man’ is crowned with a theological halo of abstraction. The true way to arrive at ‘man’ is the other way about. We must take our departure from the Ego, the empirical, flesh-and-blood individual, if we are not, like Stirner, to remain stuck at this point but rather proceed to raise ourselves to ‘man’. ‘man’ will always remain a wraith so long as his basis is not empirical man. In short we must take our departure from empiricism and materialism if our concepts, and notably our ‘man’, are to be something real; we must deduce the general from the particular, not from itself or, à la Hegel, from thin air. All these are platitudes needing no explanation; they have already been spelled out by Feuerbach and I wouldn't have reiterated them had not Hess-presumably because of his earlier idealistic leanings – so dreadfully traduced empiricism, more especially Feuerbach and now Stirner. Much of what Hess says about Feuerbach is right; on the other hand he still seems to suffer from a number of idealistic aberrations – whenever he begins to talk about theoretical matters he always proceeds by categories and therefore cannot write in a popular fashion because he is much too abstract. Hence he also hates any and every kind of egoism, and preaches the love of humanity, etc., which again boils down to Christian self-sacrifice. If, however, the flesh-and-blood individual is the true basis, the true point of departure, for our ‘man’, it follows that egoism – not of course Stirner's intellectual egoism alone, but also the egoism of the heart – is the point of departure for our love of humanity, which otherwise is left hanging in the air. Since Hess will soon be with you, you'll be able to discuss this with him yourself. Incidentally, I find all this theoretical twaddle daily more tedious and am irritated by every word that has to be expended on the subject of ‘man’, by every line that has to be read or written against theology and abstraction no less than against crude materialism. But it's quite another matter when, instead of concerning oneself with all these phantasms – for such even unrealised man remains until the moment of his realisation – one turns to real, live things, to historical developments and consequences. That, at least, is the best we can hope for so long as we're confined exclusively to wielding a pen and cannot realise our thoughts directly with our hands or, if need be, with our fists.

But Stirner's book demonstrates yet again how deeply abstraction is rooted in the Berliners' nature. Clearly Stirner is the most talented, independent and hard-working of the 'Free', [14] but for all that he tumbles out of idealistic into materialistic abstraction and ends up in limbo. From all over Germany comes news of the progress made by socialism, but from Berlin not a whisper. When property has been abolished throughout Germany these clever-clever Berliners will set up a democratie pacifique [15] on the Hasenheide – but the fellows will certainly get no further. Watch out! A new Messiah will presently arise in the Uckermark, a Messiah who will tailor Fourier to accord with Hegel; erect a phalanstery upon the eternal categories and lay it down as an eternal law of the self-developing idea that capital, talent and labour all have a definite share in the product. This will be the New Testament of Hegelianism, old Hegel will be the Old Testament, the 'state', the law, will be a 'taskmaster over Christ', [16] and the phalanstery, in which the privies are located in accordance with logical necessity, will be the 'new Heaven' and the 'new Earth', the new Jerusalem descending from heaven decked out like a bride, [17] all of which the reader will be able to find expounded at greater length in the new Revelation. And when all this has been completed, Critical Criticism will supervene, declare that it is all in all, that it combines in its head capital, talent and labour, that everything that is produced is produced by it, and not by the powerless masses – and sequestrate everything for itself. That will be the end of Berlin's Hegelian [peace]ful democracy.

If Critical Criticism [18] is finished, send me a few copies under sealed cover through the booksellers – they might be confiscated. In case you [didn't re]ceive my last letter, I repeat that you can write to me either [...] F. E. junior, Barmen, or under sealed cover to F. W. Struecker and Co., Elberfeld. This letter is being sent to you by a roundabout route.

Write soon – it's more than two months since I last heard from you – how goes it with Vorwarts? My greetings to all.

Your

[signature illegible]

[Address on envelope]

a Monsieur Charles Marx

Rue Vanneau N 38

Faubg. St. Germain, Paris

NOTES

From MECW

1. The letter written by Marx and Buergers to Engels on 8 October 1844 has not been found.

2. The disagreement between Marx and Engels on the one hand and Arnold Ruge on the other dated back to the time of the publication of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, under the editorship of Marx and Ruge. These disagreements were due to Ruge's negative attitude towards communism and the revolutionary proletarian movement, the fundamental difference between Marx's view and those of the Young Hegelian Ruge, who was an adherent of philosophical idealism. The final break between Marx and Ruge occurred in March 1844. Ruge's condemnation of the Silesian weavers' rising in June 1844 impelled Marx to criticize his views in the article "Critical Marginal Notes on the Article 'The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian.'"

3. "visibly"

4. A reference to the Associations for the Benefit of the Working Classes formed in a number of Prussian towns in 1844 and 1845 on the initiatives of the German liberal bourgeoisie, who were alarmed at the rising of the Silesian weavers in the summer of 1844, and hoped that the associations would help to divert the German workers from militant struggle. Despite the efforts of the bourgeoisie and the government authorities to give these associations a harmless philanthropic appearance, they gave a fresh impulse to the growing political activity of the urban masses and drew the attention of broad sections of German society to social questions. The movement to establish such associations was particularly widespread in the towns of the industrial Rhine Province.

Seeing the associations had taken such an unexpected direction, the Prussian Government hastily cut short their activity in the spring of 1845 by refusing to approve their statutes and forbidding them to continue their work.

5. Rationalists – Representatives of a Protestant trend which tried to combine theology with philosophy and to prove that "divine truths" can be explained by reason. Rationalism opposed pietism, an extremely mystical trend in Lutheranism.

6. At the meeting held in Cologne on 10 November 1844 and attended by former shareholders of and contributors to the Rheinische Zeitung, liberals Ludolf Camphausen, Gustav Mevissen, radicals Georg Jung, Karl d'Ester, Franz Raveaux and others among them, a General Association for Relief and Education was set up with the aim of improving the workers' condition (the measures to be taken included raising funds for mutual assistance and relief to the sick, etc.). Despite the opposition of the liberals, the meeting adopted democratic rules which provided for the workers' active participation in the work of the Association. Subsequently a definitive split took place between the radical-democratic elements and the liberals. The latter headed by Camphausen withdrew from the Association, which was soon prohibited by the Authorities.

In November 1844, an Educational Society was set up in Elberfeld. Its founders had from the very start to fight against the local clergy, who attempted to bring the Society under the influence and give its activity a religious colouring. Engels and his friends wished to use the Society's meetings and its committee to spread communist views. As Engels had expected, the statute of the Society was not approved by the authorities, and the Society itself ceased to exist in the spring of 1845.

7. F. Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England

8. F. Engels, "To the Working-Classes of Great Britain".

9. Originally Engels planned to write a book on the social history of England and to devote one of its chapters to the condition of the working class in England. But, realizing the special role played by the proletariat in bourgeois society, he decided to deal with this problem in a separate book, which he wrote on his return to Germany, between September 1844 and March 1845. Excerpts in Engels' notebooks made in July and August 1845, and the letters of the publisher Leske to Marx of 14 May and 7 June 1845 show that in the spring and summer of 1845 Engels continued to work on the social history of England. Though he did not abandon his plan up to the end of 1847, as is seen from an item in the Deutsche-Brusseler-Zeitung, No. 91 or 14 November 1847, he failed to put it into effect.

10. Engels did not write a pamphlet on Friedrich List's book Das nationale System der politischen ökonomie (Stuttgart und Tuebingen, 1841) though later he continued to discuss this idea with Marx, who in his turn intended to publish a critical analysis of List's reviews. Engels criticized the German advocates of protectionism, and List above all, in one of his "Speeches in Elberfeld."

11. The book came out at the end of October 1844, though imprinted as 1845

12. Review of Les Mysteres de Paris by Eugene Sue published in Berliner Monatsschrift.

13. The Essence of Christianity

14. "The Free" – A Berlin group of Young Hegelians formed early in 1842. Among its prominent members were Edgar Bauer, Eduard Meven, Ludwig Buhl and Max Stirner (pseudonym of Kaspar Schmidt). Their criticism of the prevailing conditions was abstract, devoid of real revolutionary content and ultra-radical in form. The fact that "The Free" lacked any positive programme and ignored the realities of political struggle soon led to differences between them and the representatives of the revolutionary-democratic wing of the German opposition movement. A sharp conflict arose between "The Free" and Marx in the autumn of 1842, when Marx had become editor of the Rheinische Zeitung.

During the last two years which had elapsed since Marx's clash with "The Free" (1843-44), Marx and Engels' disagreement with the Young Hegelians on questions of theory and politics had deepened still more. This was accounted for not only by Marx's and Engels' transition to materialism and communism, but also by the evolution in the ideas of the Bauer brothers and their fellow-thinkers. In the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, Bauer and his group renounced the "radicalism of 1842" and, besides professing subjective idealist views and counterposing chosen personalities, the bearers of "pure Criticism," to the allegedly sluggish and inert masses, they began spreading the ideas of moderate liberal philanthropy.

It was to the exposure of the Young Hegelians' view in the form which they had acquired in 1844 and to the defence of their own new materialistic and communistic outlook that Marx and Engels decided to devote their first joint work The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Co.

15. An ironical allusion to the Fourierist newspaper La Democratie pacifique known for its sectarian and dogmatic leanings.

16. Cf. Galatians 3:24

17. Cf. Revelation 21:1 and 2.

18. K. Marx and F. Engels, The Holy Family.

Marx to Heinrich Bornstein

In Paris

Published: Katalog 211 des Antiquariats Leo Liepmonssohn, Berlin, 1924;

Translated: by Peter and Betty Ross;

Transcribed: by zodiac@interlog.com, 1996.

[Paris, end of December 1844-beginning of January 1845]

Dear Sir,

It is impossible for me to let you have the review of Stirner before next week. Therefore deliver the specimen copy without my contribution; Buergers will let you have an article in its stead.

You shall have my article next week.

Yours faithfully

Marx

NOTES

Here, Marx writes about the Vorwarts! Pariser Deutsche Monatsschrift which Heinrich Boernstein planned to publish instead of the newspaper Vorwarts! The prospectus of the monthly published in German and French on 1 January 1845 (its publication date helps in determining the approximate date of this letter) stated that one of the reasons for the reformation of Vorwarts! was that no caution-money was needed for publishing a journal as distinct from a newspaper. The journal of eight printed sheets was to appear on the 16th of each month. The expulsion of Marx and other contributors to Vorwarts! from France prevented the publication of the first issue, the proof sheets of which had already been printed.

As is seen from this letter, and that of Engels to Marx written approximately 20 January 1845, Marx intended to write a critical review of Stirner's Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum at the end of December 1844 and originally wanted to publish it in the monthly Vorwarts! There is no information on whether this plan materialized. It is only known that two years later, Marx and Engels scathingly criticized Stirner's book in the German Ideology.

1845

Marx to Arnold Ruge. January 15

Engels to Marx. January 20

Marx to Heinrich Heine. Feb 02

Engels to Marx in Brussels. Mar 07

Engels to Marx. March 17

Marx to Heinrich Heine. March 24

Marx to Zacharius Lowenthal. May 9

Engels to Marie Engels. May 31

Engels to Julius Campe. October 14

Marx To Arnold Ruge

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 15;

Written: 15 January 1845;

First published: in Periodikum für wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus, No. 3, January, Munich, 1959.

Paris, 15 January 1845

To Dr Ruge

I have learned from a reliable source that the Préfecture de Police are now in possession of orders against you, myself and several others, whereby we are to leave Paris within 24 hours and France within the shortest possible time.[19] Börnstein can give you further details. In case you were not yet aware of this news, I deemed it proper to inform you of it.

K. Marx

Engels To Marx [20]

In Paris

Source, MECW Volume 38, p. 15;

Written: 20 January 1845;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 2, No. 44, Stuttgart, 1900-01 and in full in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1913

Barmen, about 20 January 1845

Dear Marx,

If I haven’t answered your letter before, it’s mainly because I was waiting for the Vorwärts you promised me. But as the thing has still not arrived, I've given up waiting, either for that or for the Critical Criticism [The Holy Family] of which I have no further news whatever. As regards Stirner, I entirely agree with you. When I wrote to you, I was still too much under the immediate impression made upon me by the book [M. Stirner, Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum] Since I laid it aside and had time to think it over, I feel the same as you. Hess, who is still here and whom I spoke to in Bonn a fortnight ago, has, after several changes of mind, come to the same conclusion as yourself. He read me an article, which he is shortly to publish, about the book [M. Hess, Die letzten Philosophen, published in pamphlet form in June 1845]; in it he says the same as you, although he hadn’t read your letter. I left your letter with him,[21] because he still wished to use some things out of it, and so I have to reply from memory. As regards my removal to Paris, there is no doubt that in some two years’ time I shall be there; and I've made up my mind too that at any cost I shall spend 4 to 6 weeks there next autumn. If the police make life difficult for me here, I'll come anyway, and as things are now, it may occur to these scum any day to molest us. Püttmann’s Bürgerbuch [Deutsches Bürgerbuch für 1845]. Will show us just how far one can go without being locked up or thrown out.

My love affair came to a fearful end. [reference to German saying, coined in 1809 by Major Ferdinand von Schill] I'll spare you the boring details, nothing more can be done about it, and I've already been through enough over it as it is. I'm glad that I can at least get down to work again, and if I were to tell you the whole sorry tale, I'd be incapable of anything this evening.

The latest news is that from 1 April Hess and I will be publishing at Thieme & Butz’s in Hagen the Gesellschaftsspiegel, a monthly in which we shall depict social misère and the bourgeois regime. Prospectus, etc., shortly.[22] In the meantime it would be a good idea if the poetical Ein Handwerker [23] would oblige by sending us material on misère in Paris. Particularly individual cases, exactly what’s needed to prepare the philistine for communism. Not much effort will be involved in editing the thing; contributors enough can be found to supply sufficient material for 4 sheets a month — we shan’t have much work to do with it, and might exert a lot of influence. Moreover, Leske has commissioned Püttmann to put out a quarterly, the Rheinische Jahrbücher, bulky enough to evade censorship, [24] which is to be communism unalloyed. You too will doubtless be able to have a hand in it. In any case it will do no harm if we have part of our work printed twice — first in a periodical and then on its own and in context; after all, banned books circulate less freely and in this way we'll have twice as much chance of exerting an influence. So you see we here in Germany have our work cut out if we're to keep all these undertakings supplied with material and at the same time elaborate greater things — but we shall have to put our backs into it if we're to achieve anything, and that’s all to the good when you're itching to do something. My book on the English workers [Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England] will be finished in two or three weeks, after which I shall set aside four weeks for lesser things and then go on to the historical development of England and English socialism.[25]

What specially pleases me is the general recognition, now a fait accompli, which communist literature has found in Germany. A year ago it began to gain recognition, indeed, first saw the light of day, outside Germany, in Paris, and now it’s already worrying the German man-in-the-street. Newspapers, weeklies, monthlies and quarterlies, and reserves of heavy artillery coming up — everything’s in the best of order. It’s certainly happened devilish fast! Nor has the underground propaganda been unfruitful. Every time I visit Cologne, every time I enter a pub here, I find fresh progress, fresh proselytes. The Cologne meeting has worked wonders. One gradually discovers individual communist groups which have quietly evolved without any direct cooperation on our part.

The Gemeinnütziges Wochenblatt which was formerly published together with the Rheinische Zeitung, is now also in our hands. It has been taken over by d'Ester who will see what can be done. But what we need above all just now are a few larger works to provide an adequate handhold for the many who would like to improve their imperfect knowledge, but are unable to do so unassisted. Do try and finish your political economy book, even if there’s much in it that you yourself are still dissatisfied with, it doesn’t really matter; minds are ripe and we must strike while the iron is hot. Presumably my English things cannot fail to have some effect either, the facts are too convincing, but all the same I wish I had less on my hands so that I could do some things which would be more cogent and effective in regard both to the present moment and to the German bourgeoisie. We German theoreticians — it may be ludicrous, but it’s a sign of the times and of the dissolution of the German national filth — cannot yet so much as develop our theory, not even having been able as yet to publish the critique of the nonsense. But now it is high time. So try and finish before April, do as I do, set yourself a date by which you will definitely have finished, and make sure it gets into print quickly. If you can’t get it printed in Paris, have it done in Mannheim, Darmstadt or elsewhere. But it must come out soon.

The fact that you enlarged the Critical Criticism to twenty sheets surprised me not a little. But it is all to the good, for it means that much can now be disseminated which would otherwise have lain for heaven knows how long in your escritoire. But if you have retained my name on the title page it will look rather odd since I wrote barely 1 1/2 sheets. As I told you, I have as yet heard nothing from Löwenberg [lion’s mountain — a pun on Löwenthal — lion’s valley, the Frankfort publisher’s name], nor anything about the publication of the book, which I most eagerly await.

Yesterday I received Vorwärts, which I haven’t seen since my departure. I was greatly amused by some of Bernays’ jokes; the fellow can make one laugh so heartily, which I seldom do when reading. For the rest, it is definitely bad and neither interesting nor instructive enough to induce many Germans to take it for any length of time. How does it stand now, and is it true, as I hear in Cologne, that it is to be turned into a monthly [18]? We're so terribly overburdened with work here that you can expect no more than an occasional contribution from us. You over there will also have to bestir yourselves. You should write an article every 4 or 6 weeks for it and not allow yourself to be ‘governed’ by your moods. Why doesn’t Bakunin write anything, and why can’t Ewerbeck be induced to write at least something humdrum? Poor Bernays is, I suppose, by now in jug. Give him my regards and tell him not to take this dirty business too much to heart. Two months is not an eternity, although it’s dreadful enough. What are the lads doing generally? You tell me nothing about it in your letters. Has Guerrier returned, and is Bakunin writing French? What’s become of the tot who used to frequent the Quai Voltaire every evening in August? And what are you doing yourself? How goes it with your situation there? Is the Fouine [marten, Arnold Ruge’s nickname] still living under your feet? Not long ago, the Fouine again let fly in the Telegraph [A. Ruge. ‘An einen Patrioten’, Telegraph für Deutschland, Nos. 203 and 204, December 1844] On the subject of patriotism, needless to say. Splendid how he rides it to death, how he doesn’t care a rap, provided he succeeds in demolishing patriotism. Probably that was the substance of what he refused to give Fröbel. German newspapers recently alleged that the Fouine intends to return to Germany. If it’s true I congratulate him, but it can’t be true, else he'd have to provide himself for the second time with an omnibus with privy, and that’s out of the question.

Not long ago I spoke to someone who'd come from Berlin. The dissolution of the caput mortuum [literally: dead head; the term is borrowed from the alchemists and figuratively means ‘the remnants'] of The Free [17] would appear to be complete. Besides the Bauers, Stirner also seems no longer to have anything to do with them. The few who remain, Meyen, Rutenberg and Co., carry on serenely, foregathering at Stehely’s every afternoon at 2 o'clock, as they have done for six years past [26], and amusing themselves at the expense of the newspapers. But now they have actually got as far as the ‘organisation of labour’, [allusion to Louis Blanc’s Organisation du travail] and they will get no farther. It would seem that even Mr Nauwerck has ventured to take this step, for he participates with zeal in popular meetings. I told you all these people would become démocrates pacifiques. At the same time they have much ‘acclaimed’ the lucidity, etc., of our articles in the [Deutsch-Französische] Jahrbücher. When next the devil drives I shall begin corresponding with little Meyen; one can, perhaps, derive some entertainment from the fellows even if one doesn’t find them entertaining. As it is, there’s never any opportunity here for an occasional outburst of high spirits, the life I lead being all that the most splendiferous philistine could desire, a quiet, uneventful existence, replete with godliness and respectability; I sit in my room and work, hardly ever go out, am as staid as a German. If things go on like this, I fear that the Almighty may overlook my writings and admit me to heaven. I assure you that I'm beginning to acquire a good reputation here in Barmen. But I'm sick of it all and intend to get away at Easter, probably to Bonn. I have allowed myself to be persuaded by the arguments of my brother-in-law [Emil Blank] and the doleful expression on both my parents’ faces to give huckstering another trial and for [...] days have been working in the office. Another motive was the course my love affair was taking. But I was sick of it all even before I began work; huckstering is too beastly, Barmen is too beastly, the waste of time is too beastly and most beastly of all is the fact of being, not only a bourgeois, but actually a manufacturer, a bourgeois who actively takes sides against the proletariat. A few days in my old man’s factory have sufficed to bring me face to face with this beastliness, which I had rather overlooked. I had, of course, planned to stay in the huckstering business only as long as it suited me and then to write something the police wouldn’t like so that I could with good grace make off across the border, but I can’t hold out even till then. Had I not been compelled to record daily in my book the most horrifying tales about English society, I would have become fed up with it, but that at least has kept my rage on the simmer. And though as a communist one can, no doubt, provided one doesn’t write, maintain the outward appearance of a bourgeois and a brutish huckster, it is impossible to carry on communist propaganda on a large scale and at the same time engage in huckstering and industry. Enough of that — at Easter I shall be leaving this place. In addition there is the enervating existence in this dyed-in-the-wool Christian-Prussian family — it’s intolerable; I might end up by becoming a German philistine and importing philistinism into communism.

Well, don’t leave me so long without a letter as I have left you this time. My greetings to your wife, as yet a stranger, and to anyone else deserving of them.

For the time being write to me here. If I have already left, your letters will be forwarded.

Your

F. E.

À Madame Marx. Rue Vanneau N 38, Paris.

Marx to Heinrich Heine

In Paris

Written: end of January-February 1845;

First published: abridged in Aus dem literorischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1902, and in full in Archiv fur die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, Jg. 9 Leipzig, 1921 and in The Letters of Karl Marx,selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, 1979;

Transcribed: by zodiac@interlog.com, 1996.

[Paris, end of January-February 1845]

Dear Friend,

I hope to have time to see you tomorrow. I am due to leave on Monday.[1]

The publisher Leske has just been to see me. He is bringing out a quarterly [2] in Darmstadt which is not subject to censorship. Engels, Hess, Herwegh, Jung and I, etc., are collaborating with him. He has asked me to solicit your cooperation -- poetry or prose. Since we must make use of every opportunity to establish ourselves in Germany, you will surely not decline.

Of all the people I am leaving behind here, those I leave with most regret are the Heines. I would gladly include you in my luggage! Best regards to your wife [3] from mine and myself.

Yours

K. Marx

NOTES

The letter has no date. The approximate date of its writing is established on the basis of Marx's mentioning in it his imminent departure from Paris due to the expulsion decree issued against him by the French authorities, and also his meeting with the publisher Leske during which he probably concluded the contract for publishing his Kritik der Politik und National-ökonomie, which was signed on 1 February 1845.

1. 3 February.

2. Rheinische Jahrbücher.

3. Mathilde.

Letter from Engels to Marx

in Brussels

Written: Barmen, 22 February-7 March 1845 [1]

First Published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 2, No.44, Stuttgart, 1900-01 and in full in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1913

Transcribed: Ken Campbell

HTML Markup: S. Ryan

Dear Marx,

After much writing here and there I have at last received your address from Cologne and at once sit down to write to you. The moment I heard of your expulsion [2] I thought it necessary to open a subscription list, so that the extra expense you have incurred thereby should be shared out communist-fashion between us all. The thing has made good progress and three weeks ago I sent fifty odd talers to Jung; I also approached the Duesseldorfers, who have collected the same amount, and in Westphalia, too, I have instigated through Hess the agitation necessary to that end. Meanwhile the subscription list here has not yet been closed. Koettgen, the painter, has been dragging his feet and thus I am not yet in possession of all the money we can expect. However, I hope everything will have come in within a few days, and then I will send you a bill on Brussels. Since I don't, by the way, know whether this will be enough to enable you to set up house in Brussels, I shall, needless to say, have the greatest pleasure in placing at your disposal my fee for my first English piece, [3] some of which at least I hope will soon be paid me, and which I can dispense with for the time being as my old man [4] is obliged to keep me primed. At least the curs shan't have the satisfaction of seeing their infamy cause you pecuniary embarrassment. The fact that you should have been compelled to pay your rent in advance is the height of turpitude. But I fear that in the end you'll be molested in Belgium too, [5] so that you'll be left with no alternative but England.

However, not a word more of the vile business. Kriege will already be with you by the time this arrives. The fellow's a capital agitator. He will tell you a great deal about Feuerbach. The day after he left here I received a letter from Feuerbach -- we had, after all, written to the fellow. [6] Feuerbach maintains that until he has thoroughly demolished the religious piffle, he cannot concern himself with communism to the extent of supporting it in print, and also that, in Bavaria, he is too much cut off from the mainstream of life to be able to do so. However, he says he's a communist and that his only problem is how to practise communism. There's a possibility of his visiting the Rhineland this summer, in which case he must come to Brussels and we'll soon show him how.

Here in Elberfeld wondrous things are afoot. Yesterday we held our third communist meeting in the town's largest hall and leading inn. [7] The first meeting was forty strong, the second 130 and the third at least 200. All Elberfeld and Barmen, from the financial aristocracy to epicerie [8] , was represented, only the proletariat being excluded. Hess gave a lecture. Poems by Mueller and Puettmann and excerpts from Shelley were read, also an article from the Burgerbuch on existing communist colonies.[9] The ensuing discussion lasted until one o'clock. The subject is a tremendous draw. All the talk is of communism and every day brings us new supporters. The Wuppertal communism is une verite, [10] indeed, already almost a force. You have no idea how favourable the soil is here. The most stupid, indolent, philistine people, hitherto without any interest in anything in the world, are beginning almost to rave about communism. How long it will still be tolerated I do not know, but the police at any rate are completely at a loss, themselves not knowing where they stand, and just at a time when the chief swine, the District President, is in Berlin. But should they impose a ban, we'll find some way round it and if we can't, we'll at least have stirred things up so mightily that every publication representing our interest will be voraciously read here. As I shall be leaving at Easter, it is all to the good that Hess should settle here and at the same time publish a monthly [11] at Baedeker's in Elberfeld; Kriege, I believe, has a prospectus of this. [12] In any case, as I have probably told you already, I shall be going to Bonn. [13] My projected journey to Paris has now fallen through, there no longer being any reason for me to go there, but anyhow I shall be coming to Brussels instead, the more so since my mother and two sisters [14] will be visiting Ostend in the summer. I must also pay another visit to Bielefeld and the communists there [15] and, if Feuerbach doesn't come, I shall go to him and then, provided I have the time and the money, visit England once again. As you see, I have a good deal ahead of me. Bergenroth told me that he, too, would probably be going to Brussels in a few weeks or so. Together with some Duesseldorfers, he attended our second meeting, at which he spoke. Incidentally, standing up in front of real, live people and holding forth to them directly and straightforwardly, so that they see and hear you is something quite different from engaging in this devilishly abstract quillpushing with an abstract audience in one's 'mind's eye'.

I am to request you once more on Hess' behalf -- and do so on my own as well -- to send Puettmann something for his quarterly. [16] It's essential that we all appear in the very first issue, so that the thing acquires some character. In any case, without us it will never so much as materialise.

25 February

Yesterday evening we got news that our next meeting was to be broken up by gendarmes and the speakers arrested.

26 February

Yesterday morning the chief burgomaster [17] forbade Mrs. Obermeyer to permit such meetings on her premises, and I received a tip to the effect that if the meeting was held notwithstanding, arrest and prosecution would follow. We have now of course given it up and can only wait and see whether we shall be prosecuted, though this seems hardly likely as we were wily enough not to provide a pretext, and the whole dirty business could only lead to the government's being made a terrible fool of. In any case the public prosecutors and the entire district court were present and the chief prosecutor himself took part in the discussion.

7 March

Since writing the above I have spent a week in Bonn and Cologne. The people in Cologne are now permitted to hold their meeting in connection with the Association. [18] As regards matters here, [16] a rescript has come in from the Duesseldorf government whereby further meetings are forbidden. Hess and Koettgen have protested. Won't do any good, of course, but these people will see from the tone of the protest that they can't get the better of us. Hess is once more tremendously sanguine because in all other respects everything is going so famously and we have made really tremendous progress. The good fellow is always full of dreams.

Our Gesellschaftsspiegel will be splendid, the first sheet has already been censored and everything passed. A mass of contributions. Hess is living in Barmen, in the Stadt London. It seems unlikely that Bergenroth will come to Brussels in the immediate future, though someone else will, whose name I won't mention as this letter will probably be opened. If it can somehow be managed, I too shall come to see you again in April. At the moment my chief problem is money, since the meeting caused some family ructions, after which my old man made up his mind to support me only as regards my 'studia' but not as regards communist aims of any description.

There's a whole lot more I should tell you if I knew of a safe address in Brussels, which in any case you must send me. Much of what has happened here could be harmful to a great many people if perused in a cabinet noir. [19] I shall stay here, then, another four weeks and leave for Bonn at the beginning of April. Anyhow, write to me again before then, so that I know how things are with you. Most of the money has been collected, though I don't yet know what it amounts to; it will be sent off directly. My manuscript [20] will be leaving any day now.

The Critical Criticism has still not arrived! [21] Its new title, The Holy Family, will probably get me into hot water with my pious and already highly incensed parent, though you, of course, could not have known that. I see from the announcement that you have put my name first. Why? I contributed practically nothing to it and anyone can identify your [22] style.

Let me know by return whether you are still in need of money. Wigand is due to send me some in about a fortnight's time and then all you have to do is dispose of it. I fear that the outstanding subscriptions will not amount to more than 120 or 150 francs.

Apropos, we here are planning to translate Fourier and, if at all possible, to produce a 'library of the best foreign socialist writers'. [23] Fourier would seem to be the best to start off with. We've found people to do the translation. Hess has just told me about a Fourier glossary brought out in France by some Fourierist or other. You will know of it. Could you send me particulars at once and, if possible, post me a copy. At the same time recommend what French writings you think suitable for translation for our 'library'. But look sharp; the matter is urgent, as we are already negotiating with a publisher. [24] How far have you got with your book? I must now get down to my manuscript, so goodbye for the present and write directly about the points I have mentioned.

Your

F. E.

Greetings to Kriege and Buergers.

Is Bernays there?

[On the fourth page of the letter]

A Madame Marx. Bois Sauvage, Plaine Ste Gudule, Chez Monsieur J. B. Lannoy, Bruxelles

NOTES

From MECW

[1] In the original the first date is written at the beginning of the letter and the second at the end of it.

[2] Marx, Ruge and Bernays were expelled from France for contributing to the newspaper Vorwarts! Expulsion decree issued 11 January 1845. Soon after his arrival in Brussels from Paris, Marx was followed by his wife Jenny Marx and daughter Jenny (born on 1 May 1844). It was with great difficulty that Jenny Marx had managed to get the money for the journey.

[3] F. Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England

[4] Friedrich Engels senior, Engels' father.

[5] Engels' apprehension proved to be well-founded. When Marx arrived in Brussels, the Belgian authorities demanded that Marx should undertake not to publish anything concerning politics in Belgium. Marx was compelled to undertake such an obligation on 22 March 1845. The Prussian Government, too, did not leave Marx in peace and pressed for his expulsion from Belgium. To deprive the Prussian authorities of the pretext for interfering in his life, Marx, officially renounced his Prussian citizenship in December 1845.

[6] Feuerbach's letter to Engels and that of Marx and Engels to Feuerbach have not been found.

[7] The meetings in Elberfeld on 8, 15 and 22 February 1845 were described by Engels in the third article of the series "Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany" published in The New Moral World in May 1845. Engels' speeches at the first two meetings were published in the Rheinische Jahrbücher zur gesellschaftlichen Reform. Further meetings were banned by the police.

[8] "grocers"

[9] F. Engels, 'Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence'.

[10] "a reality"

[11] This refers to the Geseltschaftsspiegel.

[12] Engels took part in preparing Geseltschaftsspiegel. It reflected his intention it expose the evils of the capitalist system and defend the interests of the workers by criticizing half-measures and advocating a radical transformation of the social system.

[13] In his letter to Marx of 20 January 1945.

[14] Apparently, Elise and Hedwig.

[15] The socialist circle in Westphalia and the Rhine Province, with which Engels maintained close contacts and whose members were Otto Luening and Julius Meyer, was mentioned in the report of the Prussian police superintendent Duncker to the Minister of the Interior Bodelschwingh of 18 October 1845. This report contains the following remark concerning Engels: "Friedrich Engels of Barmen is a quite reliable man, but he has a son who is a rabid communist and wanders about as a man of letters; it is possible that his name is Frederick."

[16] Rheinische Jahrbücher.

[17] Johann Adolph Carnap.

[18] This refers to the General Association for Relief and Education founded in Cologne in November 1844.

[19] Cabinets noirs (secret officers or black officers) were established under the postal departments in France, Prussia, Austria and a number of other countries to deal with the inspection of correspondence. They have been in existence since the time of the absolute monarchies in Europe.

[20] F. Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England.

[21] The Holy Family by Marx and Engels was published about 24 February 1845.

[22] The manuscript is damaged here, but the text is decipherable.

[23] The projected publication in Germany of the "Library of the Best Foreign Socialist Writers" was also discussed by Marx and Engels in their subsequent letters. Engels mentioned it in the third article of his series "Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany" published in May 1845 in The New Moral World. In early March 1845, Marx drew up a list of authors to be included in the "Library". This list shows that "Library" was intended to be an extensive publication in German of works by French and English utopian socialists. The project was not realized because of publishing difficulties. The only work completed was "A Fragment of Fourier's on Trade" compiled by Engels and published with his introduction and conclusion in the Deutsches Burgerbuch fur 1846.

[24] Julius Theodor Baedeker

Engels To Marx [28]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 26;

Written: 17 March 1845;

First published; in extracts in Aus dem Literarischen Nochlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1902 and in full in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 1, 1929

Barmen, 17 March 1845

Dear Marx,

Hess gave me your letter yesterday[39]. As regards the translations, the whole thing is not yet at all organised. I wanted Fourier — omitting, of course, the cosmogonic nonsense [40] — translated in Bonn by people there under my own eyes and my own direction and, the publisher being willing, to issue it as the first instalment of the proposed ‘library’. I talked this over occasionally with Bädeker, the publisher of the Gesellschaftsspiegel, and he seemed not disinclined, although he lacks the necessary finances for a larger ‘library’. But if we produce it in this form, we would doubtless be better advised to give it to Leske or somebody else equally able to spend something on it. As for translating the things myself, I simply won’t have the time this summer as I have to finish the English things. The first of them [The Condition of the Working-Class in England] went off to Wigand this week and since I stipulated that he pay me 100 talers on receipt of the manuscript, I expect to receive money in a week or a fortnight, and be able to send it to you. Meanwhile, there are fr. 122.22 c. on Brussels due 26 March [words probably added by Stephan Adolph Naut].

Herewith the remainder of the subscriptions; if the business hadn’t been so dreadfully held up by the Elberfelders, who could have got at least twenty more talers out of their amis-bourgeois, the amount would have been larger and have reached you sooner.

To return to the library, I don’t know whether it would be best to produce the things in historical sequence. Since Frenchmen and Englishmen would necessarily have to take turn and turn about, the continuity of the development would be constantly interrupted. In any case I believe that it would be better here to sacrifice theoretical interest to practical effectiveness, and to start off with the things which have most to offer the Germans and are closest to our principles; the best, that is, of Fourier, Owen, the Saint-Simonists, etc.

Morelly might also appear fairly early on. The historical development could be briefly outlined in the introduction to the series. In this way, even with the arrangement as proposed, people could easily find their bearings. We could do the introduction together — you taking France and England; this might actually be possible when I come to see you, as I intend to do in three weeks’ time. At least we could discuss the matter. But at all events it seems to me essential to start off with things that make a practical, effective impact upon the Germans and save us from repeating what others have said before us. If we were to seek to give a collection of sources on the history of socialism or rather, its history as revealed in and through the sources, a considerable time would, I fear, elapse before we finished it and, moreover, the thing would become boring. Hence I propose that we only use material whose positive content — at least the major part of it — is still of use today. Since you will be providing a complete critique of politics,[5] Godwin’s Political justice as a critique of politics from the political standpoint and the standpoint of the citizen and society, would, despite. the many excellent passages in which Godwin touches on communism, be excluded. And this more especially since, at the end of his work, Godwin comes to the conclusion that man must emancipate himself as much as possible from society and use it simply as a luxury article (Political justice, II, Vol. 8, Appendix to Chapter 8), and is altogether distinctly anti-social in his conclusions. However, it was a very long time ago that I made excerpts from the book, when many things were still not clear to me, and I must in any case look through it again, for it may well be that there’s more to the thing than I found at the time. But if we include Godwin, we cannot leave out his auxiliary, Bentham, although the fellow’s so tedious and theoretical.

Write to me about this and then we can consider further what is to be done. Since the idea occurred to both of us, it must be put into effect — the ‘library’, I mean. Hess will certainly be delighted to have a hand in it, and so will I, once I have the time — as Hess now has, having nothing to do at present save edit the Gesellschaftsspiegel.

If we're agreed on the principles, we can thrash out the details and at once get down to work during my visit, which I shall promote even more zealously with this in mind.

The Critical Criticism [The Holy Family] — I think I've already told you it had arrived — is quite outstanding. Your expositions of the Jewish question, the history of materialism and the Mystères [de Paris, E. Sue] are splendid and will make an excellent impact. But for all that the thing’s too long. The supreme contempt we two evince towards the [Allgemeine] Literatur-Zeitung is in glaring contrast to the twenty-two sheets we devote to it. In addition most of the criticism of speculation and of abstract being in general will be incomprehensible to the public at large, nor will it be of general interest. Otherwise the book is splendidly written and enough to make you split your sides. The Bauers won’t be able to say a word. By the way, if Bürgers reviews it in Püttmann’s first volume [Rheinische Jahrbücher — the review of The Holy Family did not appear in the journal] he might mention the reason — namely my short ten days’ stay in Paris — why I covered so little ground, restricting myself to what could be written without delving more deeply into the matter. Anyway, it looks odd, my having but 1 1/2 sheets in the thing while you have over 20. You'd have done better to have omitted the piece on the ‘conditions of prostitution’. It’s too slight and altogether unimportant.

It’s curious that another of my plans besides the library should have coincided with yours. I too intended to write a critique of Liste for Püttmann. [41] Fortunately I learned of your intention in good time through Püttmann. As I wished to discuss Liste practically, to develop the practical consequences of his system, I shall enlarge somewhat on one of my Elberfeld speeches (the transactions are to appear in Püttmann’s publication) in which I dealt briefly with this among other things. [32] In any case I assume from Bürgers’ letter to Hess and from my knowledge of your personality that you will deal with his premises rather than with his conclusions.

Just now I'm leading a real dog’s life. The business of the meetings and the ‘dissolute conduct’ of several of our local communists, with whom I, of course, consort, have again aroused all my old man’s religious fanaticism, which has been further exacerbated by my declared intention of giving up the huckstering business for good and all — while my public appearance as a communist has also fostered in him bourgeois fanaticism of truly splendid proportions. Now put yourself in my place. Since I am going away in a fortnight or so, I don’t want to cause ructions; I never take umbrage and, not being used to that, they are waxing bold. If I get a letter it’s sniffed all over before it reaches me. As they're all known to be communist letters they evoke such piously doleful expressions every time that it’s enough to drive one out of one’s mind. If I go out — the same expression. If I sit in my room and work — communism, of course, as they know — the same expression. I can’t eat, drink, sleep, let out a fart, without being confronted by this same accursed lamb-of-God expression. Whether I go out or stay at home, remain silent or speak, read or write, whether I laugh or whether I don’t — do what I will, my old man immediately assumes this lamentable grimace. Moreover my old man’s so stupid that he lumps together communism and liberalism as ‘revolutionary’, and, whatever I may say to the contrary, is constantly blaming me, e.g. for the infamies perpetrated by the English bourgeoisie in Parliament. In any case it is now the season of piety in this house. A week ago today a brother and sister of mine [Rudolf and Hedwig] were confirmed, today the whole tribe went toddling off to Communion — the body of the Lord did its work; this morning the doleful expressions surpassed themselves. Pour comble de malheur [to make matters worse] I spent yesterday evening with Hess in Elberfeld, where we held forth about communism until two in the morning. Today, of course, long faces over my late return, hints that I might have been in jug. Finally they plucked up enough courage to ask where I had been. — With Hess. — ‘With Hess! Great heavens!’ — Pause, intensified Christian dismay in their faces. — ‘What company you keep!’ — Sighs, etc. It’s enough to drive one mad. You have no idea of the malice of this Christian persecution of my ‘soul’. Now all my old man has to do is to discover the existence of the Critical Criticism and he will be quite capable of flinging me out of the house. And on top of it all there’s the constant irritation of seeing that nothing can be done with these people, that they positively want to flay and torture themselves with their infernal fantasies, and that one can’t even teach them the most platitudinous principles of justice. Were it not for my mother, who has a rare fund of humanity — only towards my father does she show no independence whatever — and whom I really love, it would not occur to me for a moment to make even the most paltry concession to my bigoted and despotic old man. But as it is, my mother is making herself ill with her constant fretting, and every time she gets particularly upset about me, she is afflicted with headaches for a week. It’s more than I can bear, I must get away, and hardly know how I shall be able to stand the few remaining weeks here. [42] But they'll pass somehow.

Otherwise there’s nothing new here. The bourgeoisie talk politics and go to church; what the proletariat does we know not and indeed could hardly know. The address to which you sent your last letter is still safe for the time being. This evening I hope to obtain the money, and Köttgen has just assured me that, as soon as he has more time — in a few days — he will be able to scrape up some more. But I don’t altogether credit this; Köttgen is ready and willing if he has a chance to shine, but otherwise is good for nothing and does nothing. Adios.

Yours

E.

Marx To Heinrich Heine [43]

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 30;

Written: 24 March 1845;

First published: in Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, jg. 9, Leipzig, 1921;

Brussels, rue Pachecho vis-à-vis

de l'hôpital St. Jean, No. 35

Dear Heine,

If I write you no more than a few lines today, you must excuse me on the grounds of the multifarious vexations I have had with the Customs.

Püttmann in Cologne has requested me to ask you if you couldn’t possibly send a few poems (perhaps also your German fleet?) for the Jahrbüch [Rheinische Jahrbücher] in Darmstadt, a periodical not subject to censorship. You can address the material to me. The latest date — but you'll probably have something immediately to hand — is 3 weeks hence. My wife sends her cordial regards to yourself and your wife. [Mathilde] The day before yesterday, I went to the local Administration de la sûret publique, [police headquarters] where I had to state in writing that here in Belgium I would publish nothing about current politics.

Renouard and Börnstein have had your Wintermärchen printed in Paris, New York being given as the place of publication, and have offered it for sale here in Brussels. This pirated edition is said, in addition, to be teeming with printer’s errors. More another time.

Yours

Marx

Marx To Zacharius Löwenthal

In Frankfurt Am Main

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 31;

Written: 9 May 1845;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXV, Moscow, 1934.

Brussels, 9 May 1845

12 rue de L'Alliance, hors de la porte de Louvain, No. 5 c/o: M. Reinhard

Dear Sir,

I would request you to send forthwith, in my name and at my expense — you may again draw a bill on me, including therein the postage on this letter — 3 copies of the Holy Family to Paris, to Mr Herwegh, rue Barbet-Jouy, Faub. St. Germain, Mr Heine, rue du Faub. Poissonniére No. 46, and to Mr Bernays, 12, rue de Navarin. I have had letters from various quarters complaining that no copies are to be had in Paris.

Yours faithfully

Dr Marx

You may draw the bill on me forthwith, but I would request you once again to send off the copies in question immediately.

Engels To Marie Engels [28]

In Barmen

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 32;

Written: 31 May 1845;

First published: in Deutsche Revue, jg. 45, Bd, 4, Stuttgart und Leipzig, 1920

Brussels, Saturday, 31 May 1845

Dear Marie,

To my regret I must today inform you that I shall be unable to be present at your wedding [with Emil Blank on 3 June 1845], the reason being the difficulties I have encountered over a passport. Last Wednesday I went to the Administration de la sûreté publique [police headquarters] and demanded a passport for Prussia. After some waiting and a lengthy discussion about my emigration and the fact that I could not obtain a passport from the Prussian envoy, I was finally informed that since I had only just arrived, I could not get a passport from him. If I had lived here a little longer, he — Mr Hody, the Directeur of the sûreté publique — would have been empowered to give me passports, but in the circumstances he could not. In any case, foreigners who settled here usually arrived with passports still valid for a year or six months, and hence his instructions were to give visas to newly arrived foreigners, but not to issue them with passports. Incidentally, if I had one or two connections, I would undoubtedly obtain a passport at the Foreign Affairs Ministry. I do indeed have such connections, namely in the person of a German doctor who had actually promised to obtain a passport for me should I run into difficulties. But this doctor was himself married only a fortnight ago and went to the Wallonian watering-places for his honeymoon.

He returned on Thursday and it was not till yesterday evening that I succeeded in seeing him; he was very willing to help, but he immediately told me that, since he was unable to go to the ministry before this morning, I couldn’t possibly get my passport until the day after tomorrow — Monday — and hence must put off my trip until Monday evening or Tuesday morning. I told him that I couldn’t wait as long as that, but he again declared that it wouldn’t be possible to help me obtain it any sooner; anyhow, he said, he was willing to try again. Well, this morning he sent me a note saying he had indeed made inquiries in person and would be unable to obtain a passport for me before Monday, maybe not until Monday evening. I replied at once, telling him to spare himself further exertion, as in that case I should have to abandon my trip altogether.

As you and the others will readily understand, I would only expose myself to unpleasantness, my other circumstances being what they are, were I to attempt to cross the border without a passport — which, indeed, Mr Hody advised me against, my exit permit being valid pour sortir de la Prusse, mais pas pour y rentrer [for leaving Prussia, but not for returning there] So it would seem that I must remain here and celebrate your wedding on my own and in my thoughts — sorry though I am for it. Anyhow you may be sure that I shall spend the whole day thinking of you and Emil [Blank], and that my best wishes will accompany you in marriage and on your honeymoon, although I shall not have the pleasure of expressing them orally. What I wish you above all is that the love which has brought you together and has made your relationship as beautiful, humane and decent as any I have encountered, will accompany you throughout your lives, help you to surmount all adversity with ease and be the making of your happiness. I rejoice wholeheartedly over your marriage because I know that you cannot he anything but happy in your life together and that — after you have been joined together — neither of you will be disappointed in the other. You may be sure that, of the many good wishes that will be proffered you, none is more sincerely meant, none is more cordial nor warmer than mine! As you know, of all my brothers and sisters, I loved you the best and you were the one in whom I always had most confidence — so you will believe what I say, without any need for solemn asseverations and unnecessary verbiage. Once again, I wish that your love may always remain constant, and there is much else I wish you besides — what, you will be able to guess. Be happy!

Well, I hope I shall soon receive a letter from Mrs Blank, for I expect Mrs Blank to take just as much interest in me as did Miss Engels. At all events I hope that, after a happy wedding and a happy honeymoon, I shall see you both this summer at Ostend or in England, and till then, once again farewell!

Warmest regards to everyone

Your devoted

Friedrich

Engels To Julius Campe [28]

In Hamburg

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 34;

Written: 14 October 1845;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXV, Moscow, 1934

Brussels, 14 October 1845

7, rue de l'Alliance

Dear Sir,

From your esteemed letter [44] I perceive that there is some misapprehension on your part as regards the line we would take in the work we proposed to you for publication. [45] We have no intention of defending protective tariffs any more than free trade, but rather of criticising both systems from our own standpoint. Ours is the communist standpoint, which we have advocated in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, the Holy Family, the Rheinische Jahrbücher, etc., and from which, too, my book The Condition of the Working-Class in England is written. As you will appreciate, this altogether precludes the submission of our work to the censor, and hence we cannot agree to the same. Should you, however, desist from this and be otherwise inclined to accept the work, we would beg you to be so good as to let us know before we enter into other commitments.

Yours very truly

F. Engels

1846

Engels to Marie Blank. Mar 7

Engels to Emil Blank. Apr 3

Marx to Heinrich Heine. Beginning Apr

Marx to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. May 5

Marx to Karl Ludwig Bernays. May 7

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. May 14-16

Engels to Marx. Jul 27

Engels and Marx to Moses Hesse. Jul 27 and Jul 29

Marx to Carl Friedrich Julius Leske. Aug 1

Engels to Marx. Aug 19

Engels to the Communist Correspondence Committee. Aug 19

Marx to Karl Ludwig Bernays. Aug

Engels to the Communist Correspondence Committee. Sep 16

Engels to Marx. Sep 18

Engels to Marx. After Sep 18

Engels to Marx. About Oct 18

Engels to the Communist Correspondence Committee. Oct 23

Engels to Marx. About Oct 23

Engels to Marx. Nov 2

Engels to Marx. Middle of Nov-Dec

Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov. Dec 28

Engels To Marie Blank

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 35;

Written: 7 March 1846;

First published: in Friedrich Engels, 1820- 1895. Leben und Werk. Eine Ausstellung der Stadt Wuppertal bearbeitet von Dieter Dowe, 1970;

Brussels, 7 March 1846

7, rue de l'Alliance, Saint-Josse-ten-Noode

Dear Marie,

Great was my joy on hearing the news that you had been blessed with a strong, sturdy boy who bears a close resemblance to your beloved spouse. I should have long since sent you my congratulations, having had Mother’s notification in my pocket for almost six days now. But so ordinary a letter of congratulation is so ordinary and ceremonious a thing that I should have been truly ashamed to send off promptly by return a polite, conventional communication of this kind to you, my most dearly beloved sister. On the contrary, I have waited six days in order that you may see that I speak from the heart. Anyone can send congratulations by return, but to wait six days is only possible for someone who is particularly affectionate; to send congratulations by return proves absolutely nothing and when done for purely formal reasons is in any case hypocrisy. To wait six days is to show proof of a deep emotion which cannot find expression in words. For that same reason I shall desist from sending the customary good wishes to the young comrade and for a long string of little brothers and sisters to follow him. This last would be superfluous, especially as you are in London where Queen Victoria sets so excellent an example [46] and besides enough space will probably be left at the end of this letter to enable you to copy out for yourself a sufficiency of choice felicitations, benisons, etc., etc., from whichever letter writer’s vade-mecum you may happen to light upon. True, I am sorry that, through your agency, I should already have become an uncle at the age of 26, being in any case too young for that and wanting in the necessary decorum. But the fact that little Elise has already become an aunt at the age of twelve, which is much worse, is some consolation and I can but assure you that I shall be as diligent as possible in the performance of my duties (of which I am totally ignorant) as uncle, provided you think it worth your while to explain them to me in detail beforehand. As I have seven more fellow-sufferers, co-aunts and co-uncles, the one-eighth [there were eight children in the Engels family — Frederick, Hermann, Emil, Rudolf, Anna, Hedwig, Elise and Marie] of the duties devolving upon myself will not in any case prove so very onerous and that is a further consolation. I am happy you are well and that I am too, and hope to see you in Ostend this summer at the latest. I am truly curious to observe you as a mama and to see what effect the earnestness of life, to which as ‘wife and mother’ you are now obliged to pay heed, has had on you. Lest that effect should become too great, I have written in as jovial a manner as possible.

But I would ask you for a reply, a reply, what’s more, that gives some hint of the earnestness of life, of the wife and mother, of the painstaking materfamilias or, as the Dutch would say, welgeliefde Echtgenoot [dearly beloved spouse]. So now it is your turn to write when you have the opportunity.

Love to Mother, Emil and Hermann.

Your

Friedrich

Engels To Emil Blank

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 36;

Written: 3 April 1846;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Brussels, 3 April 1846

7, rue de l'Alliance, St. Josse-ten-Noode

Dear Emil,

Be so kind as to send me £6 — or approx. 150 fr. — by return of post. I shall let you have it back in a week or two. My old man isn’t sending the money I was expecting on 1 April; apparently he intends to bring it with him when he comes for your child’s christening. But I've now got 150 fr. worth of things in pawn which I must redeem before my people arrive and therefore must have that amount at once. The whole mess is due to the fact that throughout this winter I have hardly earned a farthing from my writing and hence my wife [Mary Burns] and I have had to live almost exclusively on the money I was receiving from home, and that wasn’t so very much.[47] Since I now have a fair number of manuscripts either half or completely finished, this isn’t very likely to happen to me again. So send me the money and, as soon as I've had my remittance from home, I'll return it.

Your brother Fritz was here these few days and went home yesterday morning. In conclusion I would again enjoin discretion sur le content de cette lettre [concerning the contents of this letter].

With regards,

Your

F.

Marx To Heinrich Heine [48]

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 37;

Written: beginning of April 1846;

First published: in Archiv für die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, jg. 9, Leipzig, 1921.

Brussels, rue de I'Alliance, 5,

hors de la porte de Louvain

My dear Heine,

I am taking advantage of the passage through here of Mr Annenkov, a most engaging and cultured Russian and the bearer of this note, to convey my kindest regards to you.

A few days ago a short lampoon against you happened to fall into my hands — posthumous letters of Börne’s. [L. Börne, Urtheil über H. Heine. Ungedruckte Stellen aus den Pariser Briefen with passages from Börne’s letters to Jeannette Wohl with attacks on Heine] I should never have held him to be so dull, petty and inept as he here reads in black and white. And what miserable rubbish, too, the addendum by Gutzkow, etc. I shall be writing a detailed review of your book on Börne [Heinrich Heine über Ludwig Börne. Hamburg, 1840] for a German periodical. A more clumsy treatment than that suffered by this book at the hands of these Christian-Teutonic jackasses would be hard to find in any period of literature, and yet there’s no lack of clumsiness in Germany of whatever period.

If perchance you should have anything ‘special’ to tell me about your piece, do so quickly.

Yours

K. Marx

Marx To Pierre-Joseph Proudhon [49]

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 38;

Written: 5 May 1846;

First published: in Die Gesellschaft, Jg. IV, H. 9, Berlin, 1927.

Brussels, 5 May 1846

My dear Proudhon,

I have frequently had it in mind to write to you since my departure from Paris, but circumstances beyond my control have hitherto prevented me from doing so. Please believe me when I say that my silence was attributable solely to a great deal of work, the troubles attendant upon a change of domicile, [50] etc.

And now let us proceed in medias res [to the matter in hand] — jointly with two friends of mine, Frederick Engels and Philippe Gigot (both of whom are in Brussels), I have made arrangements with the German communists and socialists for a constant interchange of letters which will be devoted to discussing scientific questions, and to keeping an eye on popular writings, and the socialist propaganda that can be carried on in Germany by this means. [51] The chief aim of our correspondence, however, will be to put the German socialists in touch with the French and English socialists; to keep foreigners constantly informed of the socialist movements that occur in Germany and to inform the Germans in Germany of the progress of socialism in France and England. In this way differences of opinion can be brought to light and an exchange of ideas and impartial criticism can take place. It will be a step made by the social movement in its literary manifestation to rid itself of the barriers of nationality. And when the moment for action comes, it will clearly be much to everyone’s advantage to be acquainted with the state of affairs abroad as well as at home.

Our correspondence will embrace not only the communists in Germany, but also the German socialists in Paris and London. [52] Our relations with England have already been established. So far as France is concerned, we all of us believe that we could find no better correspondent than yourself. As you know, the English and Germans have hitherto estimated you more highly than have your own compatriots.

So it is, you see, simply a question of establishing a regular correspondence and ensuring that it has the means to keep abreast of the social movement in the different countries, and to acquire a rich and varied interest, such as could never be achieved by the work of one single person.

Should you be willing to accede to our proposal, the postage on letters sent to you as also on those that you send us will be defrayed here, collections made in Germany being intended to cover the cost of correspondence.

The address you will write to in this country is that of Mr Philippe Gigot, 8 rue de Bodenbrock. It is also he who will sign the letters from Brussels.

I need hardly add that the correspondence as a whole will call for the utmost secrecy on your part; our friends in Germany must act with the greatest circumspection if they are not to compromise themselves.

Let us have an early reply[53] and rest assured of the sincere friendship of

Yours most sincerely

Karl Marx

P.S. I must now denounce to you Mr Grün of Paris. The man is nothing more than a literary swindler, a species of charlatan, who seeks to traffic in modern ideas. He tries to conceal his ignorance with pompous and arrogant phrases but all he does is make himself ridiculous with his gibberish. Moreover this man is dangerous. He abuses the connection he has built up, thanks to his impertinence, with authors of renown in order to create a pedestal for himself and compromise them in the eyes of the German public. In his book on French socialists [Grün, Die soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien], has the audacity to describe himself as tutor (Privatdozent, a German academic title) to Proudhon, claims to have revealed to him the important axioms of German science and makes fun of his writings. Beware of this parasite. Later on I may perhaps have something more to say about this individual.

[From Gigot]

It is with pleasure that I take advantage of the opportunity offered by this letter to assure you how glad I am to enter into relations with a man as distinguished as yourself. Meanwhile, believe me,

Yours most sincerely

Philippe Gigot

[From Engels]

For my part, I can only hope, Mr Proudhon, that you will approve of the scheme we have just put to you and that you will be kind enough not to deny us your cooperation. Assuring you of the deep respect your writings have inspired in me, I remain,

Yours very sincerely

Frederick Engels

Marx To Karl Ludwig Bernays

In Sarcelles

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 40

Written: 7 May 1846;

First published: in Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, 1977, Budapest.

Brussels, 7 May 1846

Dear Mr Bernays,

The fee due to you for your manuscript — 500 fr. — will be paid at the end of the month.[54] In accordance with the contract with the bookseller-publisher, debts are not payable until after publication of the manuscripts.

I have the honour to be, sir,

Your obedient servant

Dr Charles Marx

Marx To Joseph Weydemeyer

In Schildesche Near Bielefeld

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 41

Written: 16 May 1846;

First published: in Beiträge zur Geschichte der deutschen Arbeiterbewegung, 1968.

Brussels, 14-16 May 1846

Dear Weiwi,

Herewith a belated letter. All manner of things have intervened. I had already intended to write to you from Liège[55] as arranged. But because of money problems I was averse to doing so. I readily put off such problems from one day to the next. But eventually, of course, one has to take the plunge.

You will shortly be getting an official letter from here. [56] The manuscripts will be with you shortly. [The German Ideology and other works intended for publication in the planned quarterly] The second volume is almost ready. As soon as the manuscripts for the first volume arrive (better to send them in two consignments) it would be most desirable that printing should begin.[57]

As to your idea about Limburg, it may be all right for pamphlets; books of more than 20 sheets are best printed in Germany proper. I think I've found a way of doing this which 1. will nominally leave Meyer out of it altogether, 2. will make things very difficult for the governments and 3. strongly commends itself insofar as the dispatch arrangements would be placed in very efficient hands.

Vogler, who resides here and has a commission agent in Leipzig, a man chiefly engaged in the dissemination of books liable to confiscation, would, you see, take over the whole book-selling side. The books themselves would be printed in Germany. In each case the editor would appear as publisher, i.e. ‘Published by the Author’. Vogler has offered his services on the following terms which I quote word for word from one of his letters to me:

‘In return for 10 per cent of the receipts at the Fair I undertake responsibility for all charges such as dispatch, carriage, delivery, cash collection, commission and the like, provided the books are delivered to me carriage paid Leipzig.'

Thus Vogler would make out the invoices here, and the books would be sent from the place of publication direct to his commission agent in Leipzig. The place of publication should not, of course, be in Prussia. Vogler’s account would be settled at each Easter Fair.

It seems to me that for the time being this would be the best course for books of more than 20 sheets. For pamphlets, your suggestion is certainly a good one. As regards a joint-stock bookseller I shall see what I can do. At all events it will create difficulties.

If Meyer agrees to Vogler’s proposal we could start at once — it would only be necessary to find some place of publication outside Prussia.

I had got thus far when your next letter arrived, the one addressed to Ph. Gigot as well as to me personally. Engels is sitting beside me at this moment to reply to the part concerning us all.[58] I frankly admit that the news it contains has affected me rather disagreeably.

I am, as you know, in a serious financial predicament. In order to make ends meet for the time being here, I recently pawned the last of the gold and silver as well as a large part of the linen. Moreover, so as to economise, I have given up our own establishment for the present and moved to the Bois Sauvage here. Otherwise I should have had to hire a new maid as the youngest child is now being weaned.

I have vainly cast around in Trier (chez my mother) and in Cologne chez one of her business acquaintances with a view to borrowing the 1200 fr. I need to set my affairs in order again. Hence the news about the booksellers is all the more unwelcome since I had hoped to get this money as an advance on the Political Economy.[59]

No doubt there are sundry bourgeois in Cologne who would probably advance me the money for a definite period.[60] But some time ago these people adopted a line that in principle is diametrically opposed to my own, and hence I should not care to be beholden to them in any way.

As to the fee for the publication, only the half for volume 1 is due to me, as you know.

As though one’s own misfortunes were not enough, I, as editor of the publication, am also getting a stream of urgent letters, etc., from every quarter. There is, in particular, the unpleasant matter of Bernays. As you know, he had already received 104 fr. on account through you. Bernays had given a bill of exchange due 12 May (to his baker), he couldn’t pay, so it had to be protested, which gave rise to further expenses, etc., etc. Now the baker wants to have him locked up. He wrote to me; I, of course, couldn’t help him, but to put the matter off temporarily, took the only possible course:

1. wrote a fruitless letter to Herwegh[61] in Paris, asking him to forward the amount to Bernays pending the appearance of his essay [54];

2. wrote a letter in French to Bernays to keep his creditor at bay if need be, in which I informed him that, on publication, he would receive a fee amounting to so and so much. Whereupon the citizen granted him an extension until 2 June. Bernays is liable for the expenses of the protest, etc., 120 fr. (I can’t remember the exact sum).

As you can see, misère on all sides! At this moment I'm at a loss what to do.

Some other time I shall write you a more substantial letter. You must excuse my silence on the grounds that all this financial stress has come on top of much work, domestic duties, etc.

Farewell.

Yours

M.

My wife and I send our warm regards to your betrothed. [Louise Lüning] Be it noted, and to anticipate any misunderstandings, that Hess has nothing more due to him from the two volumes I am now editing; on the contrary he still has some to hand back to us.[62]

My private address: An Bois Sauvage. Chez M. Lannoy, Plaine Ste Gudule, N. 19.

When writing to me privatum address letters: A Mr Lannoy, Plaine Ste Gudule, Bruxelles, under cover.

Engels To Marx

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 44;

Written: 27 July 1846;

First published: in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 1, 1929.

Ostend, 27 July 1846

11, rue St. Thomas

Dear Marx,

I've been out on several occasions hunting for lodgings for you, but I haven’t found anything much. Either too large or too small. Seldom two habitable rooms together, the bedrooms for the most part wretchedly cramped. Enfin yesterday I discovered 2 lodgings au choix [for your choosing]: 1. two large rooms, first and second floor respectively; each with bed, for 95 fr. a month, 30 fr. extra for the third bed, breakfast 1/2 fr. a day per head or stomach. 2. a small house belonging to the same propriétaire, one living-room downstairs, upstairs two communicating bedrooms, one of them tolerably, large, and a closet, at 150 fr. a month. Breakfast même prix. Whoever takes the house will have a maid’s services included. The two rooms mentioned above are part of a restaurant, ‘au duc de Brabant’, rue du lait battu, so meals could be had there if required. But in this respect you'd be quite independent there. At all events you would do well, if you are considering one of these two lodgings, to put up at the ‘duc de Brabant’ it’s cheaper than an hotel and, should you not like the rooms, you can ask the woman there to show you the house, which is situated in the rue des soeurs blanches No. 5, and if that doesn’t suit you either, you will no doubt find another. By the way, as compared with last year, there’s been a fearsome rise in the cost of lodgings as of everything, or rather, ‘and the same for everything’. Fr. 5 will cover the cost of dinner for the whole of your family, beef-steak 1 fr., cutlets idem, wine 2-3 fr. Beer bad, cigars bad and expensive, you'd be well advised to bring a few 100 from Brussels, in which case you can assume that the following table of expenses is correct:

Accommodation

fr. 125 — fr. 150

Breakfast

fr.  45 — fr.  45

(if you sometimes eat by the sea)

Dinner

fr. 150 — fr. 175

Supper, 2-3 beef-steaks

fr.  60 — fr.  90

(people stuff themselves here)

(per month)

Afternoon coffee on the beach, very necessary, 2 cups

fr.  18 — fr.  18

Laundering is very dear, at least

fr.  20 — fr.  30

(In addition bathing @ fr. 1.30 fr. 1.50 — Appr. 40 fr.)

fr. 418 — fr. 508

Besides this it would be desirable to have another 100 fr. for incidental expenses, for without it you can be very bored here. You needn’t stay here more than a month. Only those with broken backs, or who are complete and utter wrecks both inside and out, stay any longer. But you must so arrange the rent that, should you stay beyond the month, the additional period is paid à tant par jour, otherwise they will charge you for a full half month if you stay two days longer.

For the rest, life is very sluggish here. During the first few days a boring philistine from Barmen, la bête des bêtes [a monumental ass], was, with the exception of my family and imposed upon me by the same, my one and only companion. Yesterday Blank, whom you know, arrived from London and through him I at last made the acquaintance of a Frenchman qui a beaucoup d'esprit [who has a very lively mind] and who is an altogether excellent fellow, although he has spent 15 years in Elberfeld and speaks German par conséquent [as a result].

‘Finally I would touch on’ the Mrs Hess affair. It’s bad, but one cannot possibly let her suffer for the stupidities of the aforementioned Hess; I shall therefore try to smuggle her across the border if, that is, I get enough money from my old man for the journey to Paris, which is still not sure. Send the enclosed scribble to the beloved man of God [Moses Hess] in Cologne, to cheer him up. So the woman is in Brussels already?

Great men there are none here. They don’t arrive till August. No one has yet divulged the identity of the great Germans who are due to arrive. For the time being, therefore, I must content myself with the Prussian Bank project.[63] It’s farcical that the gents should imagine they're going to make a lot of money out of it. A few of these big bankers, who want to become ‘major stockholders’ and conclude their secret agreements with the bureaucrats, e.g. to the effect that their shares are not redeemable, that they are introduced by stealth onto the main board, etc., may perhaps allow themselves to be persuaded. But no one else. Delightful that neither the subscribers nor the amounts subscribed are to be made known. This means that they're expecting damned little money and are seeking, in true bureaucratic fashion, to cover themselves to some extent in case of failure.

Write soon and let me know whether you're coming and when.[64]

Your

E.

Yesterday these visions were to be seen in the sea by male and female spectators alike.

Engels and Marx To Moses Hess

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38 p.

Written: 29 July 1846;

First published: in Rheinische Zeitung, No. 105, April 30, 1931.

Ostend, 27 July 1846 rue St. Thomas, 11

Dear Hess,

As you see, I am no longer writing to you from Brussels. I shall remain here until 10 August and shall probably be leaving Brussels for Paris on the 11th. Marx has sent your letter on to me here. I shall gladly do my utmost to smuggle your wife across the border, but all the same it’s unfortunate that she should not have a passport. As I had already left Brussels a few days before her arrival, I know nothing of the whole affair except what you tell me in your letter. As I have said, I will do my utmost.

Your

Engels

Brussels, about 29 July 1846

Dear Hess,

In forwarding you these lines from Engels, I would only add that your wife is quite cheerful. Seiler is her squire and has introduced her to Vogler and wife, with whom she consorts almost daily. My wife cannot do very much as she is very unwell and mostly has to keep to her bed.

Your

M.

I was just about to send this letter off when I read your announcement about Ruge in the Kölnische Zeitung [M. Hess, ‘Erklärung’, Kölnische Zeitung, No. 209, 28 July 1846, supplement, announcing Hess’ forthcoming article on A. Ruge]. Since the printing of our stuff may be much delayed, I would advise you to get back your article on Ruge.[62] You will be able to use nearly all of it.

I wrote and asked the Westphalians [J. Meyer and R. Rempel] to send the manuscript to Daniels.[65] If he has not yet got it, arrange for the article on Ruge to be sent by them direct to you.

What sort of a book is this of Heinzen’s [K. Heinzen’s collection Die Opposition with A. Ruge’s articles ‘Der teutsche Kommunismus’ and ‘Der Rabbi Moses und Moritz Hess']? And what does Dottore Graziano write about you? Write and tell me.

[on the back of the letter in Karl Marx’s and Jenny Marx’s handwriting]

Mr M. Hess in Cologne

Hand to Mr Gottschalk, M. D.

Marx To Carl Friedrich Julius Leske [66]

In Darmstadt

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 48

Written: 1 August 1846;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

[Draft]

Brussels, 1 August 1846

Dear Sir,

Your letter in which you expressed your doubts about publication was answered by return. As to your query about its ‘scientific character’, I replied that the book is scientific, but not scientific as understood by the Prussian government, etc. If you would cast your mind back to your first letter, you then wrote in considerable anxiety because you had been cautioned by the Prussians and were then under investigation by the police. I at once wrote to you, saying that I would look around for another publisher.

I received yet another letter from you in which, on the one hand, you cancelled publication and, on the other, agreed that the advance be repaid in the form of a draft on the new publisher, whoever it might be.

If you received no further answer to this, it was because I believed I should very shortly be able to give you a positive answer, i.e. notification of another publisher. How this came to be delayed, you will presently hear. That I accepted as a matter of course your proposal about the repayment of the advance will be evident to you from the fact that, at the only place where I took steps to secure publication, I stipulated at the same time that the 1,500 fr. were to be repaid to you on acceptance of the manuscript. The proof of this can be produced at any time. Engels and Hess, by the by, are witnesses.

On the other hand you will recall that in Paris, as in the written contract, nothing was agreed about how revolutionary the form of the work was to be, and that, on the contrary, I even believed it necessary at the time to bring out both volumes simultaneously, because the publication of the first volume would entail the banning or confiscation of the second. Heinrich Bürgers from Cologne was present and can vouch for this. Legally speaking you were not therefore entitled to lay down new conditions or to refuse to publish as I, for my part, am not bound, from the legal viewpoint, either to repay the advance or to accede to your new proposals, or to modify my work. It hardly needs saying that I could not for a moment consider adopting a legal attitude towards you, more especially since you, for your part, were not contractually obliged to pay me an advance, which I was bound to regard, and did regard, purely as a friendly gesture. Though, hitherto, I have often and unhesitatingly released publishers (e.g. Wigand and Fröbel in the matter of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, and other publishing houses, as you will presently hear) from their contractual and legally enforceable obligations, despite great financial loss, it has never occurred to me to deprive any publisher of a single penny, even when I could legally do so. Why I should have made an exception precisely in the case of yourself, who had done me a particular favour, I utterly fail to understand.

Now as to the delay in replying:

Several capitalists in Germany had agreed to publish a number of writings by myself, Engels and Hess. [67] In this case there wag even a prospect of a really extensive series that would be totally immune from the attentions of the police.[68] Moreover, publication of my Kritik der Ökonomie, etc., had been virtually assured through a friend of these gentlemen. [Joseph Weydemeyer] This same friend remained in Brussels until May so as to convey safely across the border the manuscript of the first volume of the publication brought out under my editorship and with the cooperation of Engels, etc. From Germany he was to write to me, letting me know definitely whether or not the Nationalökonomie had been accepted. Such news as I got was indeterminate and a short while ago, after the greater part of the manuscript of the second volume of that publication had been dispatched to Germany, these gentlemen finally wrote informing me that the whole business had come to nothing, their capital being employed elsewhere. Hence the delay in giving you a definite reply. When everything had been settled, I arranged with Mr Pirscher of Darmstadt, who was staying here, to convey a letter to you from me.

Because publication had been agreed upon with the German capitalists, I had discontinued work on the Ökonomie. For it seemed to me very important to precede my positive development with a polemical piece against German philosophy and German socialism up till the present. This is necessary in order to prepare the public for the viewpoint adopted in my Economy, which is diametrically opposed to German scholarship past and present. It is, by the way, the same polemical piece I had already mentioned in one of my letters to you as having to be completed before the publication of the Ökonomie.

So much for that.

My answer to your latest letter is as follows:

I. In the event of your not publishing the work, I herewith declare it to be understood that you will recover the advance in the manner you have stipulated.

But it must be equally understood that, should I receive from another publisher a fee less than that agreed on with you, you will share the loss with me, since it was because of you, not me, that recourse had to be had to another publisher.

II. There is a prospect of publication for my book. The day before yesterday I received a letter from Germany [Hess’ letter to Marx of 28 July 1846] in which I was advised of the intention to start a joint-stock company for the publication of communist works, which will be happy to make its début with my book. However, I regard the thing as still so uncertain that I shall, if necessary, address myself to other publishers.

III. Since the all but completed manuscript of the first volume of my book has been lying idle for so long, I shall not have it published without revising it yet again, both as regards matter and style. It goes without saying that a writer who works continuously cannot, at the end of 6 months, publish word for word what he wrote 6 months earlier.

There is the further point that the Physiokraten in 2 folio volumes did not come out until the end of July and will not be arriving here for several days yet, although their publication was announced while I was still in Paris. Full account must now be taken of these.

So much of the book will now be rewritten that it could appear even under your imprint. After approval of the manuscript you would, moreover, be at liberty to bring it out under a foreign imprint.

IV. As to dates: because of my very impaired state of health, I am having to take salt-water baths at Ostend during August; moreover I shall be busy editing the 2 volumes of the above-mentioned publication. Hence nothing much can be done during August.

The revised version of the first volume will be ready for publication at the end of November. The 2nd volume, of a more historical nature, will be able to follow soon after it.

V. I have already told you in an earlier letter that, partly because of the fresh material collected in England,[69] and partly because of the requirements that have come to light as work proceeded, the manuscript will exceed the agreed number of sheets by more than 20 printed sheets. Since the contract had already been concluded, I had made up my mind, as you will recall from an earlier letter, to be content with the agreed fee, although the number of sheets had been increased by about 1/3. It would have spoiled the book had I brought out the fresh material separately. Not for a moment would I object to bearing a commercial loss in the interests of the work. Nor would I wish either to break the contract or to impair the effect of the book itself.

But since your earlier letter indicated that the resumption of the contract is a matter for me to decide, I feel compelled to include a new condition whereby the printed sheets over and above the agreed number are paid for on the same scale. This request seems to me all the more just as I shall in any case make very little out of the work because of my trip to England and my stay there undertaken solely on its account, and because of the large amount of very expensive literature I had to purchase.

Finally, if it can be done on some kind of reasonable terms, I would like the work to appear under your imprint, since you have always adopted such a liberal and friendly attitude towards me.

If need be, I could produce numerous letters I have received from Germany and France as proof that this work is most eagerly awaited by the public.

Yours faithfully

Dr Marx

I beg you to reply by return to the following address: à Mr Lannoy. An Bois Sauvage, Plaine Ste Gudule, N. 19, Bruxelles.

Engels To Marx

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38 p 52.

Written: 19 August 1846;

First published: in slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929;.

Paris, 19 August 1846

Cercle Valois, Palais Royal

Dear Marx,

Arrived here at last Saturday evening after a fatiguing journey and much tedium.[70] Immediately ran into Ewerbeck. The lad is very cheerful, completely tractable, more receptive than ever; in short I hope that — given a little patience — he and I will come to see pretty well eye to eye in all things. There are no longer any complaints about party strife — for the simple reason that he himself has been compelled to elbow out some of the Weitlingians here. Little has as yet transpired about what actually took place between him and Grün to create a breach between them; all we know is that Grün, by adopting now a fawning, now an arrogant, manner, was able to retain his more or less respectful affection. Ewerbeck has no illusions whatever about Hess, il n'a pas la moindre sympathie pour cet homme-là. [he has not the slightest sympathy for that man] In any case he has long, nourished a private hate against him, going back to the time they lodged together. I duly reprimanded him about the Westphalians.[71] That oaf Weydemeyer had written Bernays a Westphalianly lachrymose letter in which those noble fellows Meyer and Rempel were portrayed as martyrs in a good cause, gladly sacrificing their all, but whom we had rejected with contempt, etc.; and those two gullible Teutons, Ewerbeck and Bernays, sit down together, bemoan our hardness of heart and contentiousness and take the lieutenant at his word. Such superstition can scarcely be credited.

Grün has swindled the workers out of some 300 fr. on the pretext of having a pamphlet of 1½ sheets printed in Switzerland. [K. Grün, Die Preussischen Landtags-Abschiede] Now the money’s coming in, but the workers aren’t getting a penny of it. Now they're beginning to dun him for it. Ewerbeck realises how foolish it was of him to introduce this fellow Grün among the artisans. He is now afraid to accuse Grün publicly before them because he believes him capable of giving everything away to the police. But what a gullible fellow this Ewerbeck is! The wily Grün had himself  told Ewerbeck all about his shabby tricks — but presenting them, of course, as undiluted heroic acts des Dévouements [of sacrifice], and Ewerbeck swallows every word he says. Of the fellow’s earlier knaveries he knew only as much as the delinquent himself had thought fit to tell him. Ewerbeck, by the way, has warned Proudhon against Grün. Grün is back here, living away over in Ménilmontant, and scribbling the most dreadful articles for the Trier’sche. Mäurer has translated the relevant passages from Grün’s book [Die soziale Bewegung in Frankreich und Belgien] for Cabet; you can imagine Cabet’s rage. He has lost all credit even with the National.

I went to see Cabet. The old boy was extremely cordial, I listened to all his stuff, told him about God and the devil, etc. I shall go there more often. But we must not bother him with the correspondence.[51] Firstly, he has enough to do and secondly, he’s too mistrustful. Il y verrait un piège [he would see it as a trap] for making improper use of his name.

I have been leafing quickly through Feuerbach’s Das Wesen der Religion in Epigonen. Apart from a few happy insights, the thing’s entirely in the old style. At the beginning, where he confines himself purely to natural religion, he is compelled to remain on rather more empirical ground, but later on it’s all at sixes and sevens. Once again full of ‘essence’, ‘Man’, etc. I'll read it properly and very soon send you excerpts from the principal passages if they are interesting, so that you'll still be able to use it for the Feuerbach [72]. Meanwhile two passages only. [Das Wesen der Religion is quoted below according to the collection Die Epigonen, Leipzig, 1846. The end of the second quotation is paraphrased] The whole — some 60 pages — opens with the following definition of nature as opposed to the human essence:

‘The essence that is different from and independent of the human essence or God (!!), whose portrayal is the “Essence of Christianity” (1), the essence without human essence (2), human attributes (3), human individuality (4), is in truth nothing other than — nature’ (p. 117).

This is truly a masterpiece of tautology blared forth in tones of thunder. Not only that, but in this proposition he identifies the religious, imaginary phantom of nature wholly and entirely with real nature. Comme toujours. Again, a little further on:

‘Religion is the acceptance and acknowledgment of that which I am (!) ... To elevate dependence on nature to consciousness, to picture it to oneself, to accept, acknowledge it, means to elevate oneself to religion’ (p. 118).

Not long ago the minister, Dumon, was caught in his shirt-tails with the wife of a president. The Corsaire-Satan relates: ‘A lady who had petitioned Guizot said, “It is a pity that so excellent a man as Guizot est toujours si sévère et boutonné jusqu'au cou.” [is always so strict and buttoned up to the neck. Here and below is a close rendering of items in the Corsaire-Satan of 16-17 August 1846] Says the wife of an employé of travaux publics, “One cannot say as much of Mr Dumon, he is usually thought to be a little too much unbuttoned for a minister”.'

Some hours later during which time I paid a fruitless visit to the Café Cardinal to oblige little Weill — little Weill is somewhat riled because he isn’t getting his fees of 1,000 or so francs from the Démocratie pacifique which appears to be embroiled in a kind of great crisis and stopping of cash payments, and little Weill is too much of a Jew to allow himself to be fobbed off with banknotes on the first phalanstery of the future. By the way, the Fourierist gents become daily more tedious. The Phalange is nothing but nonsense. The information contained in Fourier’s posthumous work is confined entirely to the mouvement aromal and the mating of the planets which would appear to. take place plus ou moins from behind. The mating of Saturn and Uranus engenders dung-beetles — which in any case the Fourierists themselves are — but the chief dung-beetle is the Irishman, Mr Hugh Doherty, who in fact isn’t even a dung-beetle but only a dung-grub, a dung-larva — the poor creature is floundering about for the tenth time (10me article) in the question religieuse [H. Doherty, ‘La question religieuse’, La Phalange, T. IV, 1846] and still can’t discover how he can decently make his exit.

I haven’t yet seen Bernays. But according to Ewerbeck he isn’t getting along too badly and his worst complaint is boredom. The man is said to have grown very robust and healthy, his main activity, gardening, having apparently vanquished care so far as his human frame is concerned. He also, dit-on, holds the goats by the horns when his — ?wife? — , who can only be thought of between two question marks, is milking them. The poor devil naturally feels ill at ease in these surroundings; save for Ewerbeck who goes there weekly, he doesn’t see a soul, potters about dressed in a peasant’s blouse, never leaves Sarcelles, which is the most wretched village on this earth and doesn’t even have a pub, in short, he’s bored to death. We must see if we can get him back to Paris; within a month he would be his old self again. Since Börnstein, in his capacity as informer, must not know of my presence here, we have first written to Bernays[73] suggesting a rendezvous in Montmorency or somewhere else in the neighbourhood; afterwards we shall haul him off to Paris and spend a few francs on thoroughly cheering him up. That will make a different man of him. By the way, don’t let him suspect that I've written to you about him in this vein; in his high-flown. romantic mood, the good lad might feel it to be a moral injury.

The best of it is that in the house at Sarcelles there are 2 women, 2 men, several children, one of them dubious, and despite all this on n'y tire pas un coup. They don’t even practise pederasty. C'est un roman allemand.

Mrs Hess is on the look-out for a husband. She doesn’t give a fig for Hess. If there should happen to be something suitable, apply to Madame Gsell, Faubourg St. Antoine. There’s no hurry since the competition isn’t keen. Answer soon.

Your

E.

Address: 11, rue de l'arbre sec.

It goes without saying that anything I tell you now or later about Ewerbeck, Bernays and other acquaintances is strictly confidential.

I am not sending this post paid as I am short of money and can’t expect any before 1 October. But on that day I shall send a bill of exchange to cover my share of postal expenses.

Engels To The Communist Correspondence Committee [74]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 56

Written: 19 August 1846;

First published: in abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929.

Paris, 19 August 1846

11, rue de l'arbre sec

Committee

Carissimi [Dear Friends],

Our affair will prosper greatly here. Ewerbeck is quite taken up with it and only asks that a committee should not be officially organised in too great haste, because there’s a split in the offing. What remains here of the Weitlingians, a small clique of tailors,[75] is now in process of being thrown out, and Ewerbeck thinks it better that this should be accomplished first. However, Ewerbeck doesn’t believe that more than four or five of the people here will be available for the correspondence, which number is, indeed, fully adequate. In my next letter I hope to let you know who they are.

These tailors are really astounding chaps. Recently they were discussing quite seriously the question of knives and forks, and whether these had not best be chained. [probably in canteens which the utopian socialists planned to set up by way of experiment] But there are not many of them.

Weitling himself has not replied to the Parisians’ last, very rude letter, procured for him by us. He had demanded 300 fr. for practical experiments in connection with his invention,[76] but remarked at the same time that the money had probably been thrown down the drain. You can imagine what sort of answer they gave him.

The cabinet-makers and tanners, on the other hand, are said to be capital fellows. I have not yet seen them. Ewerbeck manages all that with his usual circumspection.

I shall now give you some gleanings from French periodicals, those, of course, which are not to be had in Brussels.

P. Leroux’s monthly is almost entirely taken up with articles on St.-Simon and Fourier by P. Leroux himself. [P. Leroux, ‘Saint-Simon et Fourier’ August 1846] In these he exalts St.-Simon to the skies, and does all he can to detract from Fourier and present him as an imitator who has debased and falsified St.-Simon. Thus he is at great pains to prove that the Quatre Mouvements [Ch. Fourier, Théorie des quatre mouvements et des destinies générales] are no more than a materialistically conceived plagiarism of Lettres d'un habitant de Genève. The fellow’s quite mad. Because at one point the latter work maintains that a system which is an encyclopaedic compendium of all the sciences could best be realised by the reduction of all phenomena, etc., to pesanteur universelle [universal gravity] it must be from this, we are told, that Fourier derived his whole theory of attraction. Needless to say, none of the evidence, quotations, etc., provide adequate proof that Fourier had even read the Lettres when he wrote the 4 Mouvements. On the other hand the whole Enfantin trend is described as Fourierism surreptitiously introduced into the school. The paper is called Revue Sociale, ou solution pacifique du problème du prolétariat.

Of the reformist newspaper congress,[77] the Atelier relates after the event [reference to the article ‘Du manifesto de la presse liberals’ in L'Atelier, No. 11, August 1846] that, not having attended, it was very surprised to find itself on the list of papers represented there. Le peuple de la presse had been kept out until the bases of the reform had been decided upon, and when the doors were then thrown open to the ouvrier papers so that they might vote their assent, it had thought it beneath its dignity to go there. The Atelier further relates that 150 ouvriers, probably Buchezists — which party, the French assure us, is about 1,000 strong — held a banquet, without police permission on 29 July to celebrate the July Days. [Engels relates the article ‘Un Banquet interrompu’, L'Atelier, No. 11, August 1846. July Days — revolution of 27-30 July 1830] The police intervened and, because they refused to undertake not to make political speeches or sing any of Béranger’s songs, they were dispersed.

Mr Wigand’s Die Epigonen are here. A dreadful din is heard as Mr Wigand vents his indignation. ‘An A. Ruge.’ He reproaches the latter with the common misfortunes both have endured during the past four years. Ruge, he says, was unable — in Paris — ‘to go hand-in-hand with fanatical communism’. Communism is a condition

‘hatched out in its own, ignorant brain, a narrow-minded and ignorant piece of barbarism which is to be forcibly imposed on mankind’.

Finally he brags about the great things he will do ‘so long as enough lead remains in the world to make type’. The candidat de la potence [candidate for the gallows], you see, has not yet given up hope of becoming the candidat de la lanterne. [candidate for the lamppost — allusion to the ambiguous position of bourgeois radicals, threatened with government repressions (gallows) for opposition, and in case of revolution — with reprisals by the people — lamppost]

I would draw your attention to the article in today’s National (mercredi 19) on the fall in the number of Parisian voters since 1844 from over 20,000 to 17,000.

Yours

E.

Paris has sunk low. Danton is selling wood in the Boulevard Bourdon. Barbaroux keeps a calico shop in the rue St. Honoré, the Réforme no longer has the strength to demand the Rhine, the opposition is searching for talent and cannot find it, the bourgeois gentry go to bed so early that everything has to be closed by 12 o'clock, and la jeune France accepts it without turning a hair. The police would certainly not have been able to enforce this had it not been for the early business hours kept by principals, whose motto is: ‘Morgenstunde hat usw’. [i.e., early to bed, early to rise etc.]

Mr Grün’s pamphlet, printed at the workers’ expense, is the one I once saw at Seiler’s: Die Preussischen Landtags-Abschiede. Ein Wort zur Zeit (anonymous); it consists mainly of plagiarisms from Marx’s essays (Deutsch-Französische-Jahrbücher) [Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’ and ‘Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction'] and monumental nonsense. To him, questions of ‘political economy’ and of ‘socialism’ are identical. Absolute monarchy developed as follows:

‘The Prince created for himself an abstract domain, and this intellectual domain was called — the State. The State became the domain of domains; as the ideal of the domain it abolishes the individual domain, just as it lets it subsist, and always abolishes it when it seeks to become absolute, independent, etc.'

This ‘intellectual’ domain, Prussia, ‘almost immediately becomes transformed into a domain in which prayers are said, a clerical domain [geistige — intellectual, and geistliche — clerical]!! The consequence of all this is: Liberalism in Prussia has already been overcome in theory, hence the Imperial Estates will no longer concern themselves with bourgeois questions but directement with the social question.

‘The slaughtering and milling tax is what really betrays the nature of taxes, to wit it betrays the fact that every tax is a poll tax. But whoever raises a poll tax is saying: “Your heads and bodies are my own, you are bound to me head and body. ... The slaughtering and milling tax matches absolutism too well etc.'

For two years the jackass has been paying octroi [city tolls on imported consumer goods existing since the Middle Ages] without realising it, believing that such a thing exists only in Prussia. Finally, apart from a few plagiarisms and stock phrases, this little pamphlet is liberal through and through, and German-liberal to boot.

It is generally held by the workers here that the Garantien [W. Weitling, Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit] was not written by Weitling alone. Besides S. Schmidt, Becker, etc., several Frenchmen are said to have provided him with material and in particular he had manuscripts of one Ahrens, of Riga, a worker in Paris, now in America, who also wrote the main part of Die Menschheit wie sie ist und sein soll. The people here once wrote to him in London and told him as much, whereat he became exceedingly angry and simply replied that this was slanderous.

[On the back of the letter]

Monsieur Charles Marx, 19, Plaine Ste Gudule, Bruxelles

Marx To Karl Ludwig Bernays [78]

In Sarcelles

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 60;

Written: August 1846;

First published: in MEGA, Berlin, 1979;

From: Bernays’ letter to Marx of August 1846.

Brussels, August 1846

Only when one previously critically combats these existing (for the sake of brevity let us say ‘bad') tendencies, can one write a positive account of one’s own with confidence.

ENGELS TO THE COMMUNIST CORRESPONDENCE COMMITTEE

in Brussels

Written: [Paris,] Wednesday, 16 September 1846

First Published: abridged in abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 1, 1929

Translation: Peter and Betty Ross

Transcribed: zodiac@interlog.com

HTML Markup: S. Ryan

Committee No. 2

[Paris,] Wednesday, 16 September 1846

Dear Friends,

Your news about Belgium, London and Breslau [1] was of great interest to me. [2] I told Ewerbeck and Bernays what was of interest to them. Keep me au fait [3] as well with the success of our enterprise and plus ou moins [4] the enthusiasm with which the various localities are taking part, so that I can expatiate on that to the workers here in so far as it is politic. What are the Cologne people [5] doing?

There's all manner of news from here.

I've had several meetings with the local workers, i.e. with the leaders of the cabinet-makers from the Faubourg St. Antoine. These people are curiously organised. Apart from the business of their league [6] having been thrown into the utmost confusion -- as a result of a serious dispute with the Weitlingian tailors -- these lads, i.e. 12-20 of them, foregather once a week; they used to hold discussions but, after they ran out of matter, as indeed they were bound to do, Ewerbeck was compelled to give them lectures on German history -- starting from scratch -- and on an extremely muddled political economy, a popular rendering of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. [7] Meanwhile I appeared. In order to establish contact with them, I twice discussed conditions in Germany since the French Revolution, my point of departure being the economic relations. What they glean from these weekly meetings is thrashed out on Sundays at Barriere meetings [8] attended by Cherethites and Pelethites, wife and children. [9] Here -- abstraction faite de toute espace de politique [10] -- such things as 'social questions' are discussed. It is a good way of attracting new people, for it's entirely public; a fortnight ago the police arrived and wanted to impose a veto but allowed themselves to be placated and did nothing further. Often more than 200 people foregather.

Things cannot possibly remain as they are now. A degree of lethargy has set in amongst the fellows which comes from their being bored with themselves. For they have nothing to set against the tailors' communism but popularisations a la Grun and green-tinted [11] Proudhon, [12] all this having been laboriously dinned into them, partly by no less a person than Mr Grun himself, partly by an old, bombastic master cabinet-maker and minion of Grun's, Papa Eisermann, but partly, too, by amicus [13] Ewerbeck. Naturally they soon ran dry, endless repetition ensued and, to prevent them going to sleep (literally, this was getting worse and worse at the sessions), Ewerbeck torments them with hair-splitting disquisitions on 'true value' (this last being somewhat on my conscience) and bores them with the primeval forests of the Teutons, Hermann the Cheruscan, and the most ghastly old German etymology according to Adelung, all of it quite wrong. By the way, the real leader of these people isn't Ewerbeck but Junge, who was in Brussels [14]; the fellow realises very well what ought to be changed, and might do a great deal since he has them all in his pocket and is ten times more intelligent than the whole clique, but he vacillates too much and always has some new bee in his bonnet. I haven't seen him for nearly 3 weeks -- he never turned up and isn't to be found -- which is why so little has as yet been achieved. Without him most of them are spineless and irresolute. But one must be patient with the fellows; in the first place we must rid ourselves of Grun, whose enervating influence, both direct and indirect, has been truly dreadful. And then, when we've got these platitudes out of their heads, I hope to be able to achieve something with the fellows, for they all have a strong desire for instruction in economics. This should not take long, as Ewerbeck who, despite his notorious muddle-headedness, now at its fullest flowering, has the best intentions in the world, is completely in my pocket, and Junge, too, is wholly on my side. I have discussed the correspondence [15] with six others; the plan was much acclaimed, specially by Junge, and will be implemented from here. But unless Grun's personal influence is destroyed and his platitudes eradicated, thus reinvigorating the chaps, nothing can be done in view of the considerable material obstacles to be faced (particularly engagements almost every evening). I have offered to confront Grun in their presence and to tax him with his personal rascalities, and Bernays also wishes to be there -- Ewerbeck too has a bone to pick with him. This will happen as soon as they have settled their own affairs with Grun, i.e. obtained a guarantee for the money advanced for the printing of Grun's Landtag shit. [17] But since Junge didn't turn up and the rest behaved towards Grun-like children, that matter, too, is still not in order, although with a little effort it could have been settled in 5 minutes. The unfortunate thing about it is that most of these fellows are Swabians.

Now for something to amuse you. In his new, as yet unprinted book, which Grun is translating, [18] Proudhon has a great scheme for making money out of thin air and bringing the kingdom of heaven closer to all workers. No one knew what it was. Grun, while keeping it very dark, was always bragging about his philosopher's stone. General suspense. At length, last week, Papa Eisermann was at the cabinet-makers' and so was I; gradually the old coxcomb came out with it, in a naively secretive manner. Mr Grun had confided the whole plan to him. Hearken, now, to the grandeur of this plan for world redemption: ni plus ni moins [19] than the already long extant in England, and ten times bankrupt LABOUR-BAZARS or LABOUR-MARKETS, associations of all artisans of all trades, a big warehouse, all work delivered by the associes valued strictly in accordance with the cost of the raw product plus labour, and paid for in other association products, similarly valued. [20] Anything delivered in excess of the association's needs is to be sold on the world market, the proceeds being paid out to the producers. In this way the crafty Proudhon calculates that he and his fellow associes will circumvent the profit of the middleman. That this would also mean circumventing the profit on his association's capital, that this capital and this profit must be just as great as the capital and profit of the circumvented middlemen, that he therefore throws away with his right hand what the left has received, has none of it entered his clever head. That his workers can never raise the necessary capital, since otherwise they could just as well set themselves up separately, that any savings in cost resulting from the association would be more than outweighed by the enormous risk, that the whole thing would amount to spiriting away profit from this world, while leaving the producers of the profit to cool their heels, that it is a truly Straubingerian idyll, [21] excluding from the very outset all large-scale industry, building, agriculture, etc., that they would have to bear only the losses of the bourgeoisie without sharing in its gains, all these and a hundred other self-evident objections he overlooks, so delighted is he with his plausible illusion. It's all too utterly preposterous. Paterfamilias Grun, of course, believes in the new redemption and already in his mind's eye sees himself at the head of an association of 20,000 ouvriers [22] (they want it big from the start), his family, of course, to receive free clothing, board and lodging. But if Proudhon comes out with this, he will be making a fool of himself and all French socialists and communists in the eyes of bourgeois economists. Hence those tears, that polemicising against revolution [23] because he had a peaceable nostrum up his sleeve. Proudhon is just like John Watts. In spite of his disreputable atheism and socialism, the latter regards it as his vocation to acquire respectability in the eyes of the bourgeoisie; Proudhon, despite his polemic against the economists, does his utmost to gain recognition as a great economist. Such are the sectarians. Besides, it's such an old story! [24]

Now for another highly curious affair. -- The Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung of 21 July, Paris, 16 July. Article on the Russian Embassy [25] ...

"That is the official Embassy -- but quite extraneous to it, or rather above it, there is a certain Mr Tolstoy who bears no title, is described, however, as 'confidant of the Court.' Formerly, with the Ministry of Education, he came to Paris charged with a Literary mission; there he wrote a few memoirs for his Ministry, sent them a few reports on the French daily press, then wrote no more but did all the more. He maintains a splendid establishment, is invited everywhere, receives everyone, busies himself with everything, knows everything and arranges much. He seems to me to he the actual Russian Ambassador in Paris.... His intervention works wonders" ( -- all Poles seeking a pardon addressed themselves to him -- ) "-- at the Embassy all bow down before him and in Petersburg he is held in great regard."

This Tolstoy is none other than our Tolstoy, that noble fellow who told us untruthfully that he wanted to sell his estates in Russia. [26] Besides the apartment to which he took us, the man has a magnificent hotel [27] in the rue Mathurin where he receives the diplomats. This has long been known to the Poles and to many of the French, but not to the German radicals amongst whom he thought it better to insinuate himself as a radical. The above article was written by a Pole known to Bernays, and was immediately taken up by the Corsaire-Satan and the National. On reading the article, all Tolstoy did was laugh heartily and crack jokes about having been found out at last. He is now in London, where he will try his luck, being played out here. It's a pity he is not coming back, otherwise I'd have had a joke or two to try out on him, eventually leaving my card in the rue Mathurin. After this, c'est clair [28] that Annenkov, whom he recommended, is also a Russian informer. Even Bakunin, who must have known the whole story since the other Russians knew it, is very suspect. I shall, of course, give him no hint of this, but wreak vengeance on the Russians. Even though these spies may not constitute any particular threat to us, we can't let them get away with it. They're good subjects for conspiratorial experiments in corpore vili. [29] For that they are not really too bad.

Father Hess. After I had happily consigned his spouse, [30] cursing and swearing about same, to oblivion, i.e. to the furthest end of the Faubourg St. Antoine where there is a wailing and gnashing of teeth (Grun and Gsell), I received not long since, through the agency of one Reinhardt, another letter in which the communist papa sought to re-establish relations. It's enough to make one split one's sides. As if nothing had happened of course, altogether in dulci jubilo, [31] and moreover altogether the same old Hess. After the remark that he was to some extent reconciled with 'the party' (the 'Yiddish' Circle appears to have become insolvent) -- and 'also anxious to resume work' (which event ought to be rung in with a peal of bells), comes the following historical note (dated 19 August):

'A few weeks ago we were within a hair's breadth of a bloody riot here in Cologne, Large numbers being already armed' (among them certainly not Moses). 'The affair did not come to a head because the military did not put in an appearance' (tremendous triumph for Cologne's pint-sized philistine), etc., etc...'

Then he tells of the civic assemblies [32] where 'we', i.e. 'the party' and Mr Moses, 'qua communists, won so complete a victory that we', etc.

'We drove, first the moneyed aristocrats ... and then the petty bourgeois, with glory' (none of them possessing any talent) 'from the field. Eventually we could have (!) carried everything in the assemblies' (e.g. made Moses Chief Burgomaster); 'a programme was adopted to which the assembly pledged its candidates, and which' (hear, hear) 'could not have been more radical even if drawn up by English and French communists' (!!!) (and by no one understood more foolishly than by Moses).... 'Keep an occasional eye' (sic) 'on my [wife]' (both parties would like me to take over the distaff side at my own expense and risk, j'en ai les preuves [33]).... 'and pass this onto Ewerbeck as a heartener.'

May God bless this 'heartener', this manna from the desert. I, of course, completely ignore the beast -- he has now written to Ewerbeck too (and this simply in order that a letter may be conveyed to his distaff side at the former's expense), and is threatening to come here in two months' time. If he visits me, I think I too shall be able to tell him something by way of a 'heartener'.

Now that I'm in full swing, I might as well conclude by telling you that Heine is here again and that the day before yesterday Ewerbeck and I went to see him. The poor devil is dreadfully low. He has grown as thin as a rake. The softening of the brain is spreading, and so is the facial paralysis. Ewerbeck says he might very easily die of pulmonary paralysis or of a sudden cerebral stroke, but could also drag on, sometimes better, sometimes worse, for another three or four years yet. He is, of course, somewhat depressed, melancholy and -- most significant of all -- extremely benign (and, indeed, seriously so) in his judgments -- Maurer is the only person about whom he constantly cracks jokes. For the rest his intellectual vigour is unimpaired, but his appearance, made stranger still by a greying beard (he can no longer be shaved round the mouth), is enough to plunge anyone who sees him into the depths of depression. The impression made by the sight of so splendid a fellow gradually wasting away is exceedingly painful.

I have also seen the great Maurer. "Manikin, manikin, how little you weigh!" The man's really a sight worth seeing, and I was atrociously rude to him, in return for which the jackass evinces a particular affection for me, and tells me I have a kindly face. He resembles Karl Moor six weeks dead. Reply soon.

Yours

E.

Write soon, as I shall in a fortnight's time [...] from here; such a business a letter [...] easily remain lying or be refused at the old place.

At the Fraternite there has been a tremendous dispute between materialists [34] and spiritualists.[35] The materialists, outvoted by 23 to 22, walked out. But that has not stopped the Fraternite from publishing a very nice article on the various stages of civilisation and their ability to continue developing in the direction of communism. [36]

You'll be amused by the following: Journal des economistes, August of this year, contains, in an article on Biedermann's article on communism, [37] the following: First, all Hess' nonsense, comically Gallicised; next, we read, comes M. Marx.

'M. Marx est un cordonnier, comme un autre Communiste allemand, Weitling, est un tailleur. Le premier (Mx) n'a pas une grande estime pour le communisme francais (!) qu'il a ete assez heureux d'etudier sur les lieux. M. ne sort (du) reste point non plus' (do you not recognise Mr Fix in this Alsatian expression?) 'des formules abstraites et ie se garde bien d'aborder aucune question veritablement pratique. Selon lui' (note the nonsense) 'l'emancipation du peuple allemand sera le signal de l'emancipation du genre humain; la tete de cette emancipation serait la philosophie et son coeur le proletariat. Lorsque tout sera prepare, le coq gaulois sonnera la resurrection germanique... Marx dit qu'il faut creer en Allemagne un proletariat universel (!!) afin de realiser la pensee philosophique do Cornmunisme'. [38] Signed T. F. (mort depuis).[39]

That was his last work. The previous issue carried an equally comical review of my book. [40] The September number contains an article on Julius which I have not yet read. [41]

[On the back of the letter]

Monsieur Charles Marx au Bois Sauvage, Plaine Ste Gudule, Bruxelles

NOTES

From MECW

[1] Polish name: Wroclaw.

[2] The letter of Marx and other members of the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee to Engels mentioned here has not been found.

[3] "acquainted"

[4] "more or less"

[5] Roland Daniels, Heinrich Burgers, Karl d'Ester

[6] A reference to the Paris communities of the League of the Just.

[7] Reference is probably to Engels' 'Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy'.

[8] Barriere meetings were Sunday assemblies of members of the League of the Just held at the Paris city gates (barrieres). As a police agent reported on 1 February 1845, 30 to 200 German emigrants gathered in premises rented for this purpose from a wine-merchant in avenue de Vincennes near the city gate.

[9] 2 Samuel 8:18; 15:18; 20:7, 23

[10] "all politics apart"

[11] A play on Grun (green)

[12] By 'tailors' communism' Engels means the utopian communism of W. Weitling and his followers.

Karl Grun, who visited Paris in 1846-47, preached 'true socialism' and Proudhon's petty-bourgeois reformist ideas among the German workers.

[13] "friend"

[14] Adolph Junge, a cabinet-maker from Dusseldorf, was a notable figure in the Paris communities of the League of the Just in the early 1840s. At the end of June 1846, after a short visit to Cologne, he returned to Paris via Brussels where he met Marx and Engels. In Paris he vigorously opposed Grun and other advocates of 'true socialism' and became an associate of Engels when the latter was in Paris. At the end of March 1847, the French police expelled Junge from the country.

[15] 5 May 1856

[17] [K. Grun,] Die preussischen Landtags-Abschiede.

[18] Grun's German translation of Proudhon's book was published in Darmstadt in February (Volume I) and in May (Volume II) 1847 under the title Philosophie der Staatsökonomie oder Notwendigkeit des Elends.

[19] "neither more nor less"

[20] By labour-bazars or labour markets Engels means equitable-labour exchange bazars which were organised by the Owenites and Ricardian socialists (John Gray, William Thompson, John Bray) in various towns of England in the 1830s for fair exchange without a capitalist intermediary. The products were exchanged for labour notes, or labour money, certificates showing the cost of the products delivered, calculated on the basis of the amount of labour necessary for their production. The organisers considered these bazars as a means for publicising the advantages of a non-capitalist form of exchange and a peaceful way -- together with cooperatives -- of transition to socialism. The subsequent and invariable bankruptcy of such enterprises proved their utopian character.

[21] Straubingers -- travelling journeymen in Germany. Marx and Engels used this term for German artisans, including some participants in the working-class movement of that time, who were still largely swayed by guild prejudices and cherished the petty-bourgeois illusion that it was possible to return from capitalist large-scale industry to petty handicraft production.

[22] "workers"

[23] Engels refers to Proudhon's letter to Marx of 17 May 1846, in which he turned down a proposal to work in the correspondence committees.

[24] H. Heine, 'Ein Jungling liebt cm Maedchen' from Lyrisches Intermezzo.

[25] Engels quotes from the article 'Die russische Allianz und die russisehe Gesandtschaft'.

[26] Engels had been misled by Karl Bernays and Heinrich Bornstein as he later pointed out in his letter to Marx of 15 January 1847. The item in the Allgemeine Zeitung dealt with the tsarist spy V. N. Tolstoy and not with the Russian liberal landowner G. M. Tolstoy whose acquaintance Marx and Engels had made in Paris.

[27] "mansion"

[28] "it's clear"

[29] "on the vile body"

[30] Sibylle Hess

[31] "sweetness and joy"

[32] During the campaign for the elections to the local councils in Cologne which started at the end of June 1846, it was obvious at the very first meetings that the Cologne communists had a considerable influence on the petty-bourgeois electors (the Prussian workers were virtually deprived of suffrage). In the course of the election campaign, disorders took place in Cologne on 3 and 4 August, and were suppressed by the army. The people indignantly demanded that the troops should be withdrawn to their barracks and a civic militia organised. Karl d'Ester, a Cologne communist, described these disturbances in an unsigned pamphlet Bericht iber die Ereignine za KoIn vow 3. und 4. Augstst und den folgenden Tagen, published in Mannheim in 1846.

[33] "have proof of it"

[34] By materialists Engels meant associates of Theodore Dezamy and other revolutionary representatives of French utopian communism who drew the socialist conclusions from the teaching of the eighteenth-century Frencls materialist philosophers. In the 1840s there existed in France a society of materialist communists which consisted of workers; in July 1847 eleven of its members were brought to trial by the French authorities.

[35] By spiritualists Engels must have meant the editors of the Fraternite who were influenced by the religious-socialist ideas of Pierre Leroux, and by the "Christian socialism" of Philippe Buchez and Felicite Lamennais.

[36] Engels seems to be writing about a series of articles 'La civilisation' published in the Fraternite in 1845 and 1846. The first article was entitled 'La civilisation est l'acheminement de l'esprit humain vers la communaute".

[37] The reference is to a review of K. Biedermann, 'Unsrc Gegenwart und Zukunft' written by Th. Fix and published in the Journal des Economistes, Vol. 15, No.57, August 1846.

Engels To Marx [92]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 67;

Written: 18 September 1846;

First published: slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929.

Paris, 18 September 1846

11, rue de l'arbre sec

Dear Marx,

A whole lot of things I wanted to write about privately have found their way into the business letter because that was the one I wrote first. No matter if the others read the rubbish for once.

Hitherto I have rather dreaded setting to work on the extracts from Feuerbach. Here in Paris the stuff strikes one as utterly insipid. But now that I've got the book [Feuerbach, Das Wesen der Religion] at home, I shall apply myself to it at the earliest opportunity. Weydemeyer’s sweet nonsense is touching. The fellow first declares that he wants to draft a manifesto in which he pronounces us blackguards and then expresses the hope that this won’t give rise to personal differences. Even in Germany such a thing would only be possible on the Hanoverian-Prussian border.

That you should still be in financial straits is abominable. I know of no publisher for our manuscripts [manuscripts for the quarterly, including that of The German Ideology] other than Leske who, while negotiations are proceeding, must be kept in the dark about our criticism of his firm. Löwenthal will certainly not take it. He has turned down, on all manner of rotten pretexts, a very good proposition from Bernays (a life of the old man here [Louis Philippe] in 2 volumes, the first to be printed forthwith and issued the moment the old man dies, the second to follow immediately afterwards). He’s also a coward and maintains he might be expelled from Frankfurt. Bernays has a prospect of acceptance by Brockhaus, who believes, of course, that the book is written in a bourgeois spirit.

Have the Westphalians [J. Meyer and R. Rempel] sent the manuscripts to Daniels?

And have you had any further details about the Cologne scheme? Hess wrote about it, you know.[93]

But Lüning’s rubbish is the most ludicrous of all. One can almost visualise the fellow as he daringly looses a hypocritical turd into his trousers. If we criticise them for their general baseness, [Marx and Engels, Circular Against Kriege] the noble fellow declares this to be ‘self-criticism’.[94] But soon these chaps will experience in their own persons the truth of the saying:

‘And if the noble fellow has no burn, on what does he propose to sit?'

[Goethe, Totalität]

And Westphalia seems gradually to be coming to realise that it has no bum or, in Moses’ [Hess] parlance, no ‘material basis’ for its communism.

Püttmann was not so wrong, where I am concerned, when he said that the people in Brussels were collaborating on Prometheus. Hear how cunningly this good-for-nothing set about it. Being also in need of money, I wrote to him suggesting that at last he fork out the fee he had owed me for so long.[95] The fellow answered that as to the fee for the first essay which he had printed in the Bürgerbuch, [Engels, Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence] he had instructed Leske to pay it to me (naturally not yet to hand), but so far as the one for the second essay in the second of the Rheinische Jahrbücher [Engels, The Festival of Nations in London] was concerned, — he had already received it from the publisher but, since the German soi-disant [so-called] communists had left him, big P, together with his other big P, Prometheus, most shamefully in the lurch — he, P No. 1, had been compelled to use the fees (including those due to Ewerbeck, etc.) for the printing of P No. 2 and would not be able to pay us same for another x weeks. Fine fellows, if you don’t give them a manuscript, they keep the money. In such a manner does one become one of the Prometheus collaborators and shareholders.

Yesterday evening, when I was with the workers here, I read the ‘London Address’ already in print.[96] Trash. They address themselves to the ‘people’, i.e. the presumed proletarians in Schleswig-Holstein which is haunted exclusively by loutish, Low-German peasants and guildish Straubingers.[86] They have learnt from the English this nonsense, this total disregard for actual circumstances, this inability to comprehend an historical development. Instead of answering the question, they want the ‘people’ — who, in their sense of the word, don’t exist at all there — to disregard it and behave peacefully and passively; it doesn’t occur to them that the bourgeoisie continues to do as it likes. Except for the denigration of the bourgeoisie, which is somewhat superfluous and entirely at odds with their conclusions (and for which free-trade catchwords could equally well be substituted), the thing could have been the work of London’s free-trade press, which does not want to see Schleswig-Holstein enter the Customs Union.[97]

That Julius is in the pay of the Prussians and writes for Rother has already been hinted at in the German papers.[98] Bourgeois [Heinrich Burgers], who was so delighted with his noble works, according to d'Ester, will be pleased when he hears of it.

A propos Schleswig-Holstein, the day before yesterday the Coachman [Georg Weber] wrote to Ewerbeck in 3 lines that caution should now be exercised in the matter of letters, since everything is being opened by the Danes. He believes that it could come to armed action.

Dubito [I doubt it], but it’s good that the old Dane [Christian VIII] should so rudely harry the Schleswig-Holsteiners.[99] By the way, did you read the famous poem ‘Schleswig-Holstein, Sea-girt Land’, in the Rheinischer Beobachter? [M. F. Chemnitz, ‘Schleswig-Holsteinische Bundeslied’, Rheinischer Beobachter, 16 Sept. 1846. Engels parodies the song] I can’t possibly remember the words, but it goes something like this:

Schleswig-Holstein, of like stock sprung, Schleswig-Holstein, sea-girt land,

Schleswig-Holstein, German tongue, — Schleswig-Holstein German strand,

Schleswig-Holstein, to action stung, Schleswig-Holstein, fiery brand,

Schleswig-Holstein, hardly wrung, Schleswig-Holstein, make a stand,

Schleswig-Holstein, lustily sung, ‘Schleswig-Holstein, may Danes be banned.

Schleswig-Holstein, loudly rung, ‘Schleswig-Holstein’, throughout th’ land!

Schleswig-Holstein, strong of lung, Schleswig-Holstein, weak of hand,

Schleswig-Holstein, loutish young, Schleswig-Holstein, beastly band.

Schleswig-Holstein, of like stock sprung; Keep troth, O Fatherland, is how the drivel ends. It’s a ghastly song, worthy of being sung by the Dithmarschen,[100] who in turn are worthy of being besung by Püttmann.

The Cologne bourgeois are bestirring themselves. They have issued a protest [Kölnische Zeitung, 10 Sept. 1846] against the gentlemen of the Ministry, which is the most a German citizen can do.[101] The poor Berlin pulpit-drubber [Frederick William IV]! He’s at loggerheads with every municipal council in his kingdom; first the Berlin theological controversy,[102] then the Breslau ditto, now the Cologne business. The rascal, by the way, is the spitting image of James I of England, whom he really seems to have taken for his model. No doubt, like the latter, he too will shortly start burning witches.

I did Proudhon a really crying injustice in my business letter. Since there was no room in this last letter, I must make amends here. For I believed he had perpetrated a trifling nonsense, a nonsense within the bounds of sense. Yesterday the matter came up again and was discussed at great length, and it was then I learned that this new nonsense is in truth wholly unbounded nonsense. Imagine: Proletarians are to save in the form of small shares. This will enable the initial building (needless to say no start can be made with fewer than 10,000-20,000 workers) of one or more workshops devoted to one or more trades, some of the shareholders to be occupied there and the products to be sold, 1) to the shareholders (who thus have no profit to pay for) at the price of the raw material plus labour, and 2) any surplus to be sold on the world market at the current price. As the association’s capital is increased by new shareholders joining or by new savings of the old ones, this will be used for building new workshops and factories and so on and so forth, until all the proletarians are employed, all the country’s productive forces have been bought up, thereby depriving the capital still in bourgeois hands of the power to command labour and produce profit! Thus capital is abolished by ‘finding an authority under which capital, i.e. the interest system’ (Grünification of the erstwhile drott d'aubaine,[103] brought somewhat closer to the light of day) ‘so to speak disappears.’ In this sentence, repeated countless times by Papa Eisermann, hence learned by rote from Grün, you will readily discern a glimmering of the original Proudhonian flourishes. By dint of proletarian savings, and by waiving the profit and interest on their capital, these people intend, for the present, to buy up the whole of France, no more nor less, and later, perhaps, the rest of the world as well. Was ever more splendid plan devised, and if you want to perform a tour de force, what quicker way than to coin five franc pieces out of silver moonshine? And the workers here, fools that they are — the Germans, I mean — believe this rubbish, they who can’t keep six sous in their pockets to visit a marchand de vin on the evenings of their meetings, propose to buy up toute la belle France with their savings. Rothschild and company are mere dabblers compared with these mighty accapareurs [buyers-up]. It’s enough to make anyone throw a fit. Grün has so confused the fellows that the most nonsensical platitude makes more sense to them than the simplest fact adduced for the purpose of economic argument. It is disgraceful that one should still have to pit oneself against such barbaric nonsense. But one must be patient, and I shall not let the fellows go until I have driven Grün from the field and have swept the cobwebs from their brains. The only fellow clear-headed enough to see through the whole nonsense is our lunge who was in Brussels. Ewerbeck, too, has crammed the fellows’ heads with the most crackbrained stuff. You've no idea what desperate confusion the fellow is in; at times he verges on madness, being unable to tell you today what he saw with his own eyes, let alone heard, yesterday. To show to what extent he has been under Grün’s thumb, it need only be said that when last winter Walthr, of Trier,[104] was complaining to all and sundry about the censors, Grün represented him as a martyr to the censorship, one who was waging the noblest and bravest of battles, etc., and induced Ewerbeck and the workers to draw up and sign a highly pompous address to this jackass, Walthr, thanking him for his heroism in the struggle for freedom of speech!!!! Ewerbeck is hanging his head in shame and is furiously angry with himself; but the stupidity has been done, and now it’s a question of knocking out of him and the workers the few platitudes he has dinned into his own head with toil and sweat before drumming same into the workers with no less toil and sweat. For he understands nothing until he has learnt it by rote and even then usually misunderstands it. If he were not so tremendously well-intentioned, besides being such an amiable chap — more so now than ever before, — there would be absolutely nothing doing with him. I can’t help wondering how I manage to get on with him; sometimes he makes quite apposite remarks, only to relapse at once into some colossal inanity — as, for instance, in his divinely inspired lectures on German history, whose every word is so beset with howlers and follies that it’s difficult not to burst out laughing. But, as already mentioned, tremendous zeal and remarkable readiness to join in everything with imperturbable good humour and self-mockery. I like the fellow better than ever, in spite of his silliness.

There is little to be said about Bernays. I have been out there several times and he here once. Coming here probably this winter, only short of money. Westphalians sent him 200 francs by way of a bribe; he accepted the money, but naturally did nothing further about it. Weydemeyer had offered him the money previously; he writes to say he must have 2,000 francs, otherwise it won’t be any use to him. I told him what the Westphalians’ answer would be — that they were unable to turn anything into liquid cash etc., and so it literally was. In token of his gratitude he is keeping the 200 francs. He is living quite happily, makes no secret to anyone of his whole calamitous story, is on quite happy terms with other people, lives like a peasant, works in the garden, eats well, sleeps, I suspect, with a peasant girl, and has also ceased to parade his sorrows. He is even coming to entertain more lucid and sensible views about party disputes, although, whenever something of the kind occurs, he likes to imagine himself more or less in the role of a Camille Desmoulins, and is generally unsuited to be a party man; there’s no arguing with him about his legal opinions because he always tries to break off with the objection that economy, industry, etc., is not his subject and, on the rare occasions we meet, no proper discussion takes place. I think, however, that I have already succeeded in partly breaching his defences and, if he comes here, I shall probably be able to cure him finally of his misapprehensions.

What is everyone doing there?

Your

E.

QUERY: Ought not the people in London [London leaders of the League of the Just — K. Schapper, J. Moll and H. Bauer] to be told the story of the Tolstoy affair, which is absolutely correct? If he continues to play the same role among the Germans, they might at some time dreadfully compromise one or two Poles.. And supposing the fellow were to cite you?

Bernays has written a pamphlet as part of the Rothschild controversy [105]; a German edition is appearing in Switzerland and a French one here in a few days’ time.

Engels To Marx [106]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 73;

Written: after 18 September 1846;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Paris, after 18 September 1846

7. they should change the §§ on the sharing of dividends into §§ on the sharing of losses, for, failing all this, they would go bankrupt already as a result of the celebrated principle of bearing the whole loss but sharing the profit. They would therefore have to do twice as much business as any other publisher in order to keep going — but the fact remains that hitherto all publishers dealing exclusively, or merely for preference, in banned works — Fröbel, Wigand, Leske — have, in the long run, been ruined: 1. by confiscation, 2. by being excluded from markets, which — always happens, 3. by sharp practice on the part of commission agents and retail dealers, 4. by police threats, prosecution, etc., 5. by competition from publishers who only occasionally print something objectionable, who are therefore less subject to police interference and who, moreover, also have a better chance of obtaining manuscripts that will appeal, whereas the abovementioned stereotypes are left holding the rubbish and books that do not appeal. The book trade’s struggle with the police can be waged with profit only if large numbers of publishers take part in it; it is essentiellement guerrilla warfare, and one can only make money if one seldom takes such a risk. The market is not large enough to make a spécialité of the article.

For the rest it makes no difference whether the company is ruined, for ruined it will be no matter what kind of start it makes; but where there’s a guarantee, it will be ruined too quickly, a high fever being induced with three crises, of which the third is certainly fatal. In view of the not over-copious supply of manuscripts to be expected, a mild consumption would be more appropriate. It’s only regrettable that too big a hole is made in its capital if it does its own printing. It ought to have sufficient to enable it to print for about 1 1/2 years; for supposing a capital of 3,000 talers expended in the first year, the Eastertide settlement would, given profitable trading, produce approx. 1/3, or a minimum of 2,000 talers. Hence for the second year it ought to have at least 1,000 talers over and above those 3,000 talers. Thus 1/3-1/4 of the capital is permanently tied up in remainders, bad payers, etc. It might be possible to raise this amount by inducing the shareholders to subscribe an additional loan repayable over a period. It is essential, by the way, to consult a publisher first, in order to find out exactly how much of the capital employed remains tied up at the end of the first year, or how much time it takes to turn the total capital over once. I am not sure about it myself, but I have reason to believe that in the above calculations I have underestimated rather than overestimated the capital permanently tied up.

With his 20 per cent of the profits the manager will grow rich. Even if 10 per cent of any losses are passed to the reserve fund, there will be a handsome deficit.

As for the consequences the guarantee would entail for the authors, the less said the better. In my opinion it should be refused if it is tendered in respect of longer works. Once the company has established itself on that basis, we could no longer offer other publishers anything without their believing that the company had turned it down. Quite apart from the fact that the same reasons for which we refused it to the Westphalians obtain here as well. Neither our honour nor our interest would incline us to accept.

To particularise: 7 in the general purposes committee [Tendenzkomitee] is excessive, three, at most 5, is enough Otherwise we shall get jackasses on it, if not intriguers. The general purposes committee must after all be +- resident in Brussels. In which case, with 7 members, how can there be any choice? No reason at all to have so many. In any case it’s we who will have to do the work, and I am ready to take on my share, so what do we want with all those members? Besides, if it is the same with the opinions of the general purposes committee as with those of the Provincial Diets, [107] what then? All those written opinions will make a devil of a lot of work, but there could be no question of our getting out of it. As I said, I am ready to take on my share.

QUERY: If the bourgeoisie nominates a truly socialist supervisory council, which passes outre [overrides] our opinions, what then?

Engels To Marx [108]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38 p.

Written: 18 October 1846;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Paris, about 18 October 1846

23, rue de Lille, Faubourg St. Germain

Dear M.,

At last, after much reluctance, I have brought myself to read Feuerbach’s twaddle [Das Wesen der Religion] and have discovered that we can’t go into it in our critique [Feuerbach. Opposition of the Materialist and Idealist Outlooks]. Why, you will see when I have given you the gist of it.

‘Das Wesen der Religion’, Epigonen, Vol. 1, pp. 117-78.

‘Man’s sense of dependence is the basis of religion’, p. 117.

As man is dependent first of all on Nature, so ‘Nature is the first, original object of religion’, p. 118.

('Nature is simply a general term to denote beings, things, etc., which man distinguishes from himself and his products')

The first religious manifestations are festivals at which natural processes, changes of season, etc., are symbolised. The particular natural conditions and products in the midst of which a tribe or a people lives, become part of its religion.

In his development man was assisted by other beings which, however, were not beings of a higher order, angels, but beings of a lower order, animals. Hence animal worship (there follows an apology in which pagans are defended against the attacks of Jews and Christians, trivial).

Nature, even in the case of Christians, always remains concealed behind religion. The attributes upon which the difference between God and Man is founded, are attributes of Nature (primal, basic). Thus omnipotence, eternity, universality, etc. God’s true content is no more than Nature; i.e. in so far as God is seen only as the creator of Nature and not as a political and moral law-giver.

Polemic against the creation of Nature by an intelligent being, against creation out of nothing and so on — for the most part vulgar materialism ‘humanised’, i. e. translated into cosy German, fit to touch the citizen’s heart. — Nature in natural religion is not the object as nature, but as

‘personal, live, sentient being ... as emotional being, i.e. subjective human being’ (p. 138).

Hence men worship it and seek to influence it with human incentives. This is primarily because Nature is fickle.

‘The sense of dependence on Nature, combined with the idea of Nature as an arbitrarily active, personal being, is the basis of sacrifice, the most important act in natural religion’ (p. 140).

But since the aim of sacrifice is a selfish one, it is man who is the final goal of religion, the divinity of man its final aim.

Next come trivial glosses and solemn disquisitions to the effect that primitive people who still adhere to natural religion, deify things they regard as unpleasant, such as plague, fever, etc.

‘As man, from a purely physical being, becomes a political being, distinguishing in general between himself and Nature, concentrating upon himself’ (!!!), ‘so his God also becomes a political being distinct from Nature.’ ‘Hence man’ arrives at ‘the distinction between his being and Nature, and consequently at a God distinct from Nature, initially only by uniting with other men into a community in which powers distinct from Nature [Feuerbach has ‘powers of nature’ — Naturmächten] and existing only in the mind or the imagination’ (!!!), ‘the power of the law, of opinion, of honour, of virtue, becomes the object of his sense of dependence....'

(This hideous sentence appears on p. 149.) The power of Nature, the power over life and death, is degraded to an attribute and tool of political and moral power. Intermezzo on p. 151 on oriental conservatives and accidental progressives.

‘In the Orient, man does not let man blind him to Nature.... To him the King himself is not objectified as an earthly, but as a celestial, divine being. But beside a god, man only disappears where the earth is emptied of gods.... Only there do men have space and room for themselves.'

(A nice explanation for the stability of Orientals. It’s all those idols and the space they take up.)

‘The Oriental is to the Occidental what the countryman is to the townsman, the former is dependent on Nature, the latter on men,’ etc., etc., ‘hence only townsmen make history'

(here, and here alone, we catch a distant, if somewhat evil-smelling, breath of materialism).

‘Only he who is able to sacrifice the power of Nature to the power of opinion, his life to his name, his existence in the flesh to his existence in the mouths and minds of posterity, is capable of historical deeds.'

Voilà. Everything that is not Nature is imagination, opinion, balderdash. Hence, too, ‘human “vanity” alone is the principle of history'!

P. 152: ‘As soon as man becomes conscious of the fact that ... the consequence of vice and folly is unhappiness, etc., that of virtue and wisdom, ... happiness, and hence that intelligence and will are the powers determining the fate of man ... he will also see Nature as a being dependent on intelligence and will.'

(Transition to monotheism — Feuerbach distinguishes the above illusory ‘consciousness’ from the power of intelligence and will.) With the domination of the world by intelligence and will, supernaturalism makes its appearance, creation from nothing, and monotheism, which is further specifically elucidated in terms of the ‘unity of the human consciousness’. Feuerbach deemed it superfluous to point out that without the One King, the One God could never have come into being, that the Oneness of the God controlling the multifarious natural phenomena and holding together the conflicting forces of Nature is only the image of the One, the Oriental Despot who apparently or in fact holds together conflicting individuals whose interests clash.

Lengthy drivel against teleology, aping the old materialists. At the same time Feuerbach commits the very howler in regard to the real world which he accuses the theologians of committing in regard to Nature. He makes bad jokes at the expense of the theologians’ assumption that without God Nature would dissolve into anarchy (i. e. without belief in God, it would be reduced to tatters), that God’s will, intelligence, opinion is what binds the world; and he himself believes that it is opinion, the fear of public opinion, of laws and other ideas, which now holds the world together.

In the course of an argument against teleology, Feuerbach appears as an out-and-out laudator temporis praesentis [Eulogist of the present; paraphrase of ‘laudator temporis acti’ — Horace, Ars Poetica]: The very high death-rate among children in the early years of life is attributable to the fact that

‘Nature in its opulence sacrifices without compunction thousands of individual members'; ... ‘it is the result of natural causes that ... e.g., one child in 3-4 dies in the first year of life, and one child in 25 in the fifth year, etc.'

With the exception of the few passages here specified, there is nothing worthy of note. Of the historical development of the various religions one learns nothing. At most they provide examples to support the above trivialities. The main bulk of the article consists in polemic against God and the Christians, altogether in his previous manner, except that now that he’s run dry, and despite all his repetitions of the old drivel, dependence on the materialists is much more blatantly apparent. If one were to make any comment on the trivialities concerning natural religion, polytheism, and monotheism, one would have to compare them with the true development of these forms of religion, which means they would first have to be studied. But so far as our work is concerned, this is as irrelevant to us as his explanation of Christianity. The article casts no fresh light on Feuerbach’s positive philosophical attitude, and the few theses worthy of criticism which I have cited above only confirm what we have already said. If the fellow still holds any interest for you, try and get hold of Vol. I of his Collected Works, either directly or indirectly, from Kiessling; he’s written a kind of preface to it which might yield something. I have seen passages from it in which Feuerbach speaks of ‘ailments of the head’ and ‘ailments of the stomach’, a feeble apology, as it were, for not concerning himself with matters of real import.[109] Exactly what he wrote and told me eighteen months ago.

I have just received your letter[110] which, because of my move, had remained at my old lodgings for a few days. I'll give the Swiss publishers a try. But I hardly imagine that I'll find a taker [refers to attempts to find a publisher for The German Ideology]. None of the fellows have the money to print 50 sheets. In my opinion we shall get nothing printed unless we split the things up and try to place the volumes separately, first the philosophical stuff, which is the most urgent, and then the remainder. 50 sheets at once is so dangerously big that many publishers won’t accept it simply because they cannot.

Then, of course, there was Kühtmann, or whatever his name is, in Bremen, who was turned against us by Moses [Hess] and Weitling; the fellow wanted to print bannable books but not pay much; we could quite well approach him with this manuscript. What do you say to splitting the stuff up and offering one volume here and the other there? Vogler knows Kühtmann’s address in Bremen. I've just about finished List.[111]

I saw the things in the Volks-Tribun [Aus einem Privatbriefe von Wilhelm Weitling — from W. Weitling’s letter to H. Kriege of 16 May 1846, Die kommunistischen Literaten in Brüssel und die kommunistische Politik, An unsere Freunde and Adresse der deutschen Socialreformer zu Philadelphia an Hermann Kriege und die Socialreformer in New York, Der Volks-Tribun, 20, 27 June, 4 and 18 July 1846] about three weeks ago.[112] Never before have I come across anything so ludicrously stupid. Brother Weitling reached the peak of infamy in that letter to Kriege. As for the details, incidentally, I can no longer remember enough to make any comment on them. I too am of the opinion that we should reply [113] to both Kriege’s and the Straubingers’ [86] proclamation, rubbing their noses in the fact that they are denying having said what we reproached them for saying, while at the same time proclaiming in their reply the very stupidities they are denying; and that Kriege in particular, with his high moral pathos and indignation at our mockery, should get the dressing-down he deserves. Since these copies are at the moment going the rounds of the Straubingers here, I shall have to wait 4-5 days before I can get hold of them.

The Straubingers here are baying ferociously at my heels. Notably 3-4 ‘educated’ workers who have been initiated into the secrets of true humanity by Ewerbeck and Grün. But by dint of a little patience and some terrorism I have emerged victorious with the great majority behind me. Grün having abjured communism, these ‘educated’ ones showed a strong inclination to follow suit. At that I went into action, so intimidating old Eisermann that he no longer turns up, and launched a debate on the pros and cons of communism and non-communism This evening a vote will be taken on whether the meeting is communist or, as the ‘educated’ ones say, ‘in favour of the good of mankind’. I am certain of a majority. I stated that, if they were not communists, I didn’t give a fig for them and would attend no more. This evening Grün’s disciples will be definitely overthrown, and then I shall have to start from scratch.

You can’t imagine what demands these educated Straubingers made on me. ‘Leniency’, ‘gentleness’, ‘warm brotherliness’. But I duly trounced them and every evening managed to silence the whole opposition of 5, 6, 7 fellows (for at the start I had the whole boutique against me). More anon about all this business, which shows up Mr Grün in a variety of lights.

Proudhon is expected here in a fortnight. Then the sparks will fly.

There’s been some talk of a periodical here. [Die Pariser Horen] That manikin with the cigar, Mäurer, maintains that he will be able to raise the money for it. But I shan’t believe the fellow until the money’s actually there. If anything comes of it, we have so arranged matters that the thing will be entirely in our hands. I have authorised Mäurer, the ostensible editor, to print his own drivel in it, this being unavoidable. All the rest will pass through my hands, and I have an absolute veto. What I write will, of course, be pseudonymous or anonymous. At all events, should the thing materialise, it will not fall into the hands either of Hess or of Grün, or of any other muddled school. It would have its uses as a new broom, but not a word to anyone until it has materialised; it should be decided within the week.[114] Farewell and write soon.

E.

Engels To

The Communist Correspondence Committee

In Brussels

Paris, 23 October 1846

Committee letter (No. 3)

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 81-86;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1913.

There is little to be said about the Straubinger business here. The main thing is that the various differences I have had to thrash out with the lads hitherto are now settled: Grün’s chief follower and disciple, Papa Eisermann, has been chucked out, the rest, so far as their influence over the great majority is concerned, have been completely routed, and I have carried through a unanimous resolution against them.

Briefly this is what happened:

The Proudhonian association scheme was discussed on three evenings. At the beginning I had nearly the whole clique against me and at the end only Eisermann and the three other Grünians. The main thing was to prove the necessity for revolution by force and in general to reject as anti-proletarian, petty-bourgeois, and Straubingerian Grün’s true socialism, which had drawn new strength from the Proudhonian panacea. In the end I became infuriated by my opponents’ endless repetition of the same arguments and really pitched into the Straubingers, which aroused great indignation among the Grünians but succeeded in eliciting from the worthy Eisermann an open attack on communism. Whereupon I lashed him so mercilessly with my tongue that he never showed his face again.

I now made use of the lever – the attack on communism – provided by, Eisermann, the more so since Grün never ceased his intrigues, going from workshop to workshop, summoning the people to come to him on Sundays, etc., etc., and, on the Sunday’ following the above-mentioned session, was himself so abysmally stupid as to attack communism in the presence of 8-10 Straubingers. I therefore declared that, before I took part in any further discussion, the question of whether or not we were meeting here as communists must be put to the vote. If the former were the case, we must see to it that attacks on communism such as those made by Eisermann never recur; if the latter, and if they were simply a random collection of individuals who had met to discuss a random selection of subjects, I would not give a fig for them, nor would I ever return. This aroused much horror among the Grünians who, they said, foregathered here for ‘the good of mankind’, for their own enlightenment, men of progress and not biased system-mongers, etc., etc., the description ‘a random collection’ being in no way applicable to such respectable company. Moreover, they first wanted to know what communism really was (these curs, who for years have called themselves communists and only deserted out of fear of Grün and Eisermann, these two last having used communism as a pretext for worming their way in among them!). Of course I did not allow myself to be caught by their amiable request to tell them, ignorant as they were, in 2 or 3 words what communism was. I gave them a highly simple definition which went as far as and no further than the foregoing points at issue, which, by positing community of goods, ruled out, not only peacefulness, tenderness and consideration for the bourgeoisie and/or the Straubinger fraternity, but also and finally the Proudhonian joint-stock society along with its retention of individual property and all that this involves; a definition which, furthermore, contained nothing that could give rise either to divagations or to any circumvention of the proposed vote. I therefore defined the aims of communists as follows: 1. to ensure that the interests of the proletariat prevail, as opposed to those of the bourgeoisie; 2. to do so by abolishing private property and replacing same with community of goods; 3. to recognise no means of attaining these aims other than democratic revolution by force.

Two evenings were spent discussing this. During the second, the best of the 3 Grünians, sensing the mood of the majority, came over to me unreservedly. The other two kept contradicting each other without being aware of the fact. Several chaps, who had never spoken before, suddenly opened their traps and declared themselves unequivocally for me. Up till then Junge had been the only one to do so. Some of these homines novi [new men], although trembling with fear lest they dry up, spoke quite nicely and all in all seem to have quite a sound intellect. In short, when it was put to the vote, the meeting was declared to be communist in accordance with the above definition by 13 votes to 2, the latter being those of the pair who had remained true to Grün – one of whom subsequently declared himself exceedingly eager to be converted.

Thus a clean sweep has at last been made and we can now begin, so far as is possible, to do something with these fellows. Grün, who was easily able to extricate himself from his financial predicament because the principal creditors were those same Grünians, his principal followers, has gone down a great deal in the opinion of the majority and of some of his followers and, despite all his intrigues and experiments (e. g. attending the Barrière meetings wearing a cap, etc., etc.), has been a resounding failure with his Proudhonian society. Had I not been there, our friend Ewerbeck would have fallen for it. La tête baissée [with his eyes shut].

One could hardly help but admire Grün’s stratagem! Doubting his chaps’ intelligence, he tells them his stories over and over again until they can rattle them off from memory. After every session-nothing was easier, of course, than to reduce such an opposition to silence-the whole defeated gang went scuttling off to Grim, told him what I had said-naturally all of it distorted-, and had their armoury renewed. When next they opened their traps, one could always tell from the first couple of words exactly what the whole sentence would be. In view of this tale-bearing, I was careful not to provide the fellows with anything general which might assist Mr Grün in further embellishing his true socialism; nevertheless, writing not long ago in the Kölner on the occasion of the Geneva Revolution, the cur exploited and variously distorted sundry things I had said to the Straubingers, whereas here in Paris he had drummed the opposite into them. He is now engaged in political economy, the worthy man.

You’ll have seen Proudhon’s book advertised. I shall get hold of it one of these days; it costs 15 fr. so it’s too expensive to buy.

The above-mentioned audience, before whom the performance took place, consists of approx. 20 cabinet-makers, who otherwise foregather only at the Barrière and then with all and sundry, having no really closed association of their own, save for a choral club, though some also belong to the rump of the League of the Just. If we could assemble openly we would soon have over 100 chaps from the cabinet-makers alone. I know only a few of the tailors-who also attend the cabinet-makers’ meeting. Nowhere in Paris have I been able to find out anything at all about blacksmiths and tanners. Not a soul knows anything about them.

Not long ago Kriege, as one of the just, laid his report before the ‘Halle’ (central authority). Of course I read the missive; but since this constituted a breach of the oath, for which the penalty is death by dagger, rope or poison, you must nowhere record same in writing. The letter proves, just as did his riposte to our attack, that he had benefited greatly from the latter and that he was now more concerned with the things of this world. He gave a long account of their difficulties. The first instalment of this American Straubingers’ story concerned their misfortunes – evidently Kriege was at the helm and his management of the money side was big-hearted to say the least, the Tribun was given away, not sold, the funds consisted in charitable gifts, in short, by trying to re-enact Chapters III-VI of the Acts of the Apostles not even omitting Ananias and Sapphira, they finally found themselves up to their eyes in debt. The second period, in which Kriege became simply the ‘registrar’, other chaps having apparently taken over the financial side, was that of recovery. Instead of appealing to the fulness of men’s hearts, they now appealed to their lightly tripping feet and to their ± uncommunist side generally, discovering to their surprise that all the money they needed could be raised by organising balls, picnics, etc., etc., and that human frailty could be exploited for the benefit of communism. Pecuniarily speaking, they were now thoroughly flush. Among the ‘obstacles’ they had to overcome, the doughty Tecklenburger also counts the manifold calumnies and aspersions they, amongst others, had had to endure ‘and this recently at the hands of the “communist” philosophers in Brussels’. For the rest he indulges in some trivial prattle against the colonies, recommends ‘Brother Weitling’ to them (i. e. to his most inveterate foes), but for the most part remains fairly down-to-earth, if also somewhat unctuous, and only from time to time is there a little sighing about brotherliness, etc.

Do you get the Réforme there? If you don’t read it, let me know and I will send you accounts of anything special that appears in it. For the past four days it has been picking on the National for refusing to express unconditional approval of a petition for electoral reform which is circulating here. This, the Réforme maintains, was entirely due to its partiality for Thiers. Not long ago it was rumoured here that Bastide and Thomas had resigned from the National, leaving only Marrast, and that the latter had allied himself with Thiers. This was denied by the National. However, changes have been made in its editorial department, but I am not aware of the details; for the past year it is known to have been particularly well-disposed towards Thiers; now the Réforme is pointing out how greatly it has compromised itself by this partiality.

Moreover, it is only opposition to the Réforme, which has of late led the National to commit follies such as denying, purely out of malice, and until it could do so no longer, etc., the story, first told by the Réforme, of the Portuguese counter-revolution.’ The Réforme is now at great pains to carry on a polemic no less brilliant than that of the National, but without success.

Having got to this point in my letter, I once again went to the Straubingers, where the following transpired: Grün, too impotent to harm me in any way, is now having me denounced at the Barrière. Eisermann is attacking communism at the public Barrière meeting at which, owing to the presence of informers, no one, of course, can answer him back without incurring the risk of being thrown out; Junge answered him furiously (but yesterday we warned him against this). Thereupon Eisermann declared Junge to be the mouthpiece of a third person (myself, of course), who had suddenly irrupted amongst the people like a bomb, and he himself well knew how they were primed for the Barrière discussions, etc., etc. In short, what all his chatter amounted to was an out-and-out denunciation to the police; for four weeks ago the landlord in whose house the affair happened said: il y a toujours des mouchards parmi vous [There are always informers among you], and once, at that time, the police inspector also turned up. He accused Junge in so many words of being a ‘revolutionary’. Mr Grün was present throughout and prompted Eisermann on what to say. This was the dirtiest trick of all. According to the facts as I know them, I hold Grün fully responsible for everything Eisermann says. There’s absolutely nothing to be done about it. That numskull Eisermann cannot be attacked at the Barrière because this would elicit yet another denunciation of the weekly meeting; Grün is too cowardly to do anything himself and in his own name. The only thing that can be done is to have it explained to the people at the Barrière that communism wasn’t discussed because that might have exposed the whole meeting to danger from the police.

It’s high time I heard from you.

Yours

E.

Engels To Marx [119]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 86

Written: 23 October 1846;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Paris, about 23 October 1846

Dear M.,

Have received the thing against Kriege.[120] Not bad. Since you alone signed, Kriege will no doubt put the more peremptory tone of the first document [Marx and Engels, Circular Against Kriege] down to my personal account, and eat humble pie in respect of the second, but little do I care. Let him give free rein to his personal malice and paint me as black as may be in the eyes of the American Straubingers,[86] if that gives him any pleasure.

You will see from the Committee letter’ how successful I was with the Straubingers here. The devil knows, I didn’t spare them. I attacked their worst prejudices, and told them they were not proletarians at all. But Grün also played very beautifully into my hands.

For heaven’s sake don’t stamp your letters to me. If it hadn’t been for that damned Leske, who finally sent me a worthless bill of exchange, which I had to return, for the old stuff I had sent to Püttmann [Engels, Description of Recently Founded Communist Colonies Still in Existence] — if the cur hadn’t left me in the lurch, I'd send you 25 fr. immediately for Committee funds. But meanwhile I shall take upon myself at least the cost of the correspondence with me. If I failed to stamp my previous letter, it was because it was too late and I could only get it off by dropping it straight into the letter box. As soon as Leske sends me the money, you'll get a share of it.

None of the Straubingers are to be allowed to see the reply to Kriege. Otherwise it wouldn’t be safe from Grün. We must be careful not to let anything disturb the chap until he’s finished his work on Proudhon’s book, with notes by K. Grün [Proudhon, Philosophie der Staatsökonomie oder Nothwendigkeit des Elends]. Then we'll have him. In it he completely retracts a mass of things he has previously said, and delivers himself up body and soul to the Proudhonian system of redemption. Then there'll be no more exploitation, unless he is willing to turn his coat again.

Is Weitling still in Brussels [121]?

I think I shall be able to pull it off with the Straubingers here. True, the fellows are horribly ignorant and, their condition in life being what it is, completely unprepared. There is no competition whatever among them, wages remain constantly at the same wretched level; the struggle with the master, far from turning on the question of wages, is concerned with ‘journeymen’s pride’, etc. The slop-shops are now having a revolutionising effect on the tailors. If only it were not such a rotten trade!

Grün has done a frightful amount of harm. He has turned all that was distinct in these fellows’ minds into woolly daydreams, humanitarian aspirations, etc. Under the pretence of attacking Weitlingian and other doctrinaire communism, he has stuffed their heads full of vague literary and petty-bourgeois catchphrases, maintaining that all else was system-mongering. Even the cabinet-makers, who have never, save a few exceptions, been Weitlingians, entertain a superstitious fear of ‘bread-and-butter communism’ [Löffelkommunismus] and — at least before the resolution was passed — would sooner have associated themselves with the woolliest daydreams, peaceable philanthropic schemes, etc., than with this ‘bread-and-butter communism’. Here utter confusion reigns.

A few days ago I wrote to Harney, gently attacking the pacific nature of the fraternal democrats [122] and told him, by the way, that he should continue to correspond with you.

Your

E.

[On the back of the letter]

Monsieur Charles Marx

42 rue d'Orléans

Faubourg de Namur

Affranchi. Bruxelles

Engels To Marx [123]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 88;

Written: 2 November 1846;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Paris, 2 November 1846

23, rue de Lille

Where is the long letter you promised so long ago? Make sure you send Bernays the manuscript, he only needs what you have[124] since he still has the printed stuff. He has sent nothing to America; whatever may have appeared there was printed without his knowledge or consent. [K. L. Bernays, Das entschleierte Geheimniss der Criminal-Justiz. Eine kommunistische Anschauungsweise, Der Volks-Tribun, 27 June and 4 July 1846] However a lot of copies were printed, and some may have gone as presents from Leske to all points of the compass. We shall investigate the matter. Perhaps through Grün or Börnstein. I have written to Switzerland about the manuscripts, [reference to The German Ideology] but it would seem that the cur [J. M. Schläpter] has no intention of replying.[125] Apart from him, there’s no one but Jenni; I've played a prank on him and would rather not write, enclose a short note for the fellow in your next. I shall send it on, but it’s only for form’s sake, the fellow’s almost certain to refuse. The first man wrote to published a short pamphlet by Bernays [Rothschild. Ein Urtheilsspruch vom menschlichen Standpunkte aus], but even if he does take the thing, it would appear, à ce qu'écrit Püttmann, that he is bankrupt. Voilà. I despair of Switzerland. Good advice costs money. Things being what they are, we shall certainly not get rid of 2 volumes together. At most 2 volumes to 2 different publishers. Write about this as well.

Your

E.

I have only just read what the little man [Karl Ludwig Bernays] has written above about his flight from solitude. It’s a good thing we've got him here. He is gradually cheering up again. Greetings to the whole boutique.

Engels To Marx [126]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 89;

Written: November/December 1846;

First published: in slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 in full in MEGA, 1929.

Paris, middle of November-December 1846

Dear Marx,

The reasons for the brief letter I recently sent Gigot are the following. During the investigation into the disturbances in the Faubourg St. Antoine in October, a multitude of Germans were arrested and questioned, the whole of the second batch consisting of Straubingers. [127] Some of these numskulls, who have now been sent across the border, must have talked a great deal of nonsense about Ewerbeck and myself; in fact, in view of their paltriness, nothing else could have been expected of the Straubingers than that they should have been scared to death and have given away all that they knew and more. On top of that, such Straubingers as I was acquainted with, secretive though they were concerning their own miserable affairs, shamefully sounded the alarm about my meetings with them. That’s how these lads are.

At the Barrière, as I have already written and told you, the noble Eisermann delivered himself of a further, detailed avis aux mouchards [notification to the informers] in which he attacked me. Junge was also guilty of some gross indiscretions; the fellow is a trifle swollen-headed, he wishes to be sent to Calais and London at the expense of the French government. In short, M. Delessert set one spy after another at the heels of myself and Ewerbeck, who has long been under suspicion and has an expulsion order hanging over his head. These spies succeeded in following us to the marchand de vins, where we sometimes forgathered with the Faubourg stalwarts. This was proof enough that we were the leaders of a dangerous clique, and not long afterwards I learned that M. Delessert had requested M. Tanneguy Duchâtel to issue an expulsion order against me and Ewerbeck, and that there was a splendid pile of documents relating to the case in the Prefecture, almost next door to the place where the whores are medically examined. Needless to say, I had no desire to let myself be banished on the Straubingers’ account. I had already anticipated something of the kind when I noticed the nonchalance with which the Straubingers were holding forth for all to hear and arguing all over the place about who was right, Grün or I. I was sick and tired of the whole business, there was no putting the lads to rights; even in discussion they wouldn’t speak their minds frankly just like the people in London, and I had achieved my main object, the triumph over Grün. It was an excellent opportunity of honourably ridding myself of the Straubingers, vexing as the whole affair was in other respects. I therefore let it be known to them that I could no longer remain their tutor and that, furthermore, they should watch their step. Ewerbeck at once decided to go on a journey and appears, indeed, to have departed forthwith [128] — at any rate, I haven’t seen him since. Where he has gone, I do not know. The police had also been looking for the little man (Bernays) who, however, had withdrawn to his old place because of a variety of escapades (it’s remarkable what mad scrapes he gets into as soon as he sets foot in the civilised world). When he will return to Paris, I don’t know, but in no circumstances will he move into lodgings where he had intended to, hence the address that was given you is useless. He has safely received his manuscript. Meanwhile I can thank the noble police for having reft me from the arms of the Straubingers and reminded me of the pleasures life has to offer. If the suspicious individuals who have been following me for the past fortnight are really informers, as I am convinced some of them are, the Prefecture must of late have given out a great many entrance tickets to the bals Montesquieu, Valentino, Prado, etc., etc. I am indebted to Mr Delessert for some delicious encounters with grisettes and for a great deal of pleasure, car j'ai voulu profiter des journées et des nuits qui pouvaient être mes dernières 4 Paris. Enfin [since I wanted to take advantage of the days and nights which might well be my last in Paris. Anyway], since in other respects I've been left in peace up till now, everything would appear to have quietened down. But in future address all letters to Monsieur A. F. Körner, artiste-peintre, 29, rue neuve Bréda, Paris, with an envelope inside bearing my initials, taking care that nothing shows through.

You will understand that, in the circumstances, I have had to leave W. Weitling entirely to his own devices. Having seen none of our people, I have no idea whether he has been or still is here. Nor does it matter. I don’t know the Weitlingians at all and, he'd get a fine welcome amongst those I know; because of their eternal clashes with his tailor friends, they feel the most frightful animosity towards him. .

The affair with the London people [129] is annoying precisely because of Harney and because they, of all the Straubingers, were the only ones with whom one could attempt to make contact frankly and without arrière-pensée. But if the fellows are unwilling, eh bien, let them go. In any case one can never know if they won’t produce another address as miserable as the one to Mr Ronge or to the Schleswig-Holsteiners.[130] On top of that, there’s their perpetual envy of us as ‘scholars’. By the way, we have two methods by which we can rid ourselves of them should they rebel: either make a clean break with them, or simply allow the correspondence to lapse. I would be for the latter, if their last letter admits of an answer which, without giving undue offence, is lukewarm enough to rob them of any desire to reply quickly. Then another long delay before answering — and two or three letters will be enough to consign this drowsy correspondence to its last sleep. For how and why should we ridicule these fellows? We have no press organ and even if we had one, they are no writers but confine themselves to an occasional proclamation which no one ever sees, still less cares about. If we are to ridicule the Straubingers at all, we can always avail ourselves of their fine documents; if the correspondence finally does lapse, well and good; the rupture will be gradual and attract no great attention. In the meantime we shall quietly make the necessary arrangements with Harney, taking care that they owe us the final letter (which they will in fact do, once they have been made to wait 6-10 weeks for an answer), and then leave them to clamour. An immediate rupture with the fellows would bring us neither gain nor gloire. Theoretical disagreements are hardly possible with the fellows since they have no theory and, sauf for their possible unspoken misgivings, they wish to learn from us: nor are they able to formulate their misgivings, so that all discussion with them is impossible except, perhaps, face to face. In the case of an open rupture they would bring up against us all that generalised communist thirst-for-learning stuff: we'd have been glad to learn from the learned gentlemen, if they'd had something decent, etc. Practical party differences would — since there are only a few of them on the committee and a few of us too — soon degenerate into mere personalities and ill-natured exchanges, at least on the face of it. As a party we can enter the lists against literary men, but not against Straubingers. They are, after all, a couple of 100 strong, vouched for among the English by Harney, proclaimed in Germany by the Rheinischer Beobachter, etc., etc., a rabid and by no means impotent communist society; they are, furthermore, the most tolerable of the Straubingers, and can certainly not be bettered so long as there is no change in Germany. We have learnt from this business that, in the absence of a proper movement in Germany, nothing can be done with the Straubingers, even the best of them. It is better after all to let them quietly go their own way, attacking them only as a whole, en bloc, than to provoke a dispute which might only serve to sully our reputations. Vis-à-vis ourselves, these lads declare themselves to be ‘the people’, ‘the proletarians’, and we can only appeal to a communist proletariat which has yet to take shape in Germany. In addition, the Prussian Constitution is in the offing, and we might then be able to make use of the fellows’ signatures, etc., etc. — Anyway, my words of wisdom will doubtless arrive too late and you will already have passed and acted on a resolution in this matter. I would, by the way, have written earlier, but I was waiting to see what turn the affair with the police would take.

I have just received a reply from the Swiss publisher [Johann Michael Schläpfer]. The letter, enclosed herewith, only confirms my belief that the fellow’s a scoundrel. No ordinary publisher would accept so amiably after keeping one waiting x weeks. Now we shall have to see what the Bremen man [Kühtmann] says, and then we can always do as we think fit. Then again. there’s the. fellow at Belle-Vue near Constance; perhaps something might be arranged with him [131]; I could try him again if the Bremen man’s not agreeable. Meanwhile I'll make some more enquiries in Herisau — if only we had a decent fellow in Switzerland to whom one could send the manuscript [The German Ideology] with instructions to hand it over only against payment in cash. But the only one there is that thirsty paterfamilias Püttmann!

During the recent bad spell, one of my innocent, incidental pastimes, besides girls, has been to concern myself to some extent with Denmark and the other northern countries.[132] What an abomination! Rather the smallest German than the biggest Dane! Nowhere else is the misère of morality, guilds and estates still carried to such a pitch. The Dane regards Germany as a country which one visits in order to ‘keep mistresses and squander one’s fortune on them’ (while travelling in Germany, he had a mistress who ran through the better part of his fortune, we read in a Danish school book). He calls the German a tydsk [German] windbag, and regards himself as the true representative of the Teutonic soul — the Swede in turn despises the Dane as ‘Germanised’ and degenerate, garrulous and effete — the Norwegian looks down on the Gallicised Swede and his aristocracy and rejoices in the fact that at home in Norge [Norway] exactly the same stupid, peasant economy is dominant as at the time of the noble Canute, and he, for his part, is treated en canaille [scornfully] by the Icelander, who still continues to speak exactly the same language as the unwashed Vikings of anno 900, swills whale oil, lives in a mud hut and goes to pieces in any atmosphere that does not reek of rotten fish. I have several times felt tempted to be proud of the fact that I am at least no Dane, nor yet an Icelander, but merely a German. The editor of the most advanced Swedish newspaper, the Aftonbladet, has twice been here in Paris to seek enlightenment on the organisation of labour, has for years taken the Bon Sens and the Démocratie pacifique; he solemnly conferred with Louis Blanc and Considérant, but found himself out of his depth, and returned home none the wiser. Now as before he loudly advocates free competition or, as the Swedes have it, freedom of nourishment or else själfförsörjningsfrihet, freedom of self-supply (which sounds even better than freedom to pursue a trade). Of course, they're still up to their necks in the guild nonsense and, in the parliaments, it’s precisely the bourgeois who are the most rabid conservatives. Throughout the whole country there are only two proper towns, à 80,000 and 40,000 inhabitants respectively, the third, Norrköpping, having only 12,000 and all the rest perhaps 1,000, 2,000, 3,000. At every post station there’s one inhabitant. In Denmark things are scarcely better, since they have only one solitary city there, in which the guilds indulge in the most ludicrous proceedings, madder even than in Basle or Bremen, and where you aren’t allowed on the promenade without an entrance ticket. The only thing these countries are good for is to show what the Germans would do if they had freedom of the press, viz., what the Danes have actually done, immediately found a ‘society for the proper use of the free press’, and print almanacs full of Christian good intentions. The Swedish Aftonbladet is as tame as the Kölner Zeitung, but considers itself ‘democratic in the true sense of the word’. On the other hand the Swedes have the novels of Fröken Bremer and the Danes of Councillor of State (Eta traad) Oehienschläger, Commander of the Order of the Dannebrog.[133] There’s also a terrific number of Hegelians there and the language, every third word of which is filched from the German, is admirably suited to speculation.

A report was begun long ago and will follow within the next few days.[134] Write and tell me if you have Proudhon’s book. [Proudhon, Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère]

If you wish to make use of Proudhon’s book, which is bad, for your own book, I will send you the very extensive excerpts I have made. It’s not worth the 15 francs it costs.

Letter from Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov[1]

in Paris

Written: December 28, 1846 Rue d'Orleans, 42, Faubourg Namur;

Source: Marx Engels Collected Works Vol 38, pg 95;

Publisher: International Publishers (1975);

First Published: in full in the French original in M.M. Stasyulevich i yego sovremenniki v ikh perepiske, Vol III, 1912;

Translated: Peter and Betty Ross;

Transcribed: S. Ryan.

My dear Mr Annenkov,

You would long since have had a reply to your letter of 1 November had not my bookseller delayed sending me Mr Proudhon's book, Philosophie de la misère, until last week. I skimmed through it in two days so as to be able to give you my opinion straight away. Having read the book very cursorily, I cannot go into details but can only let you have the general impression it made on me. Should you so desire, I could go into it in greater detail in another letter.

To be frank, I must admit that I find the book on the whole poor, if not very poor. You yourself make fun in your letter of the 'little bit of German philosophy' paraded by Mr Proudhon in this amorphous and overweening work, but you assume that the economic argument has remained untainted by the philosophic poison. Therefore I am by no means inclined to ascribe the faults of the economic argument to Mr Proudhon's philosophy. Mr Proudhon does not provide a false critique of political economy because his philosophy is absurd—he produces an absurd philosophy because he has not understood present social conditions in their engrènement,[2] to use a word which Mr Proudhon borrows from Fourier, like so much else.

Why does Mr Proudhon speak of God, of universal reason, of mankind's impersonal reason which is never mistaken, which has at all times been equal to itself and of which one only has to be correctly aware in order to arrive at truth? Why does he indulge in feeble Hegelianism in order to set himself up as an esprit fort?[3]

He himself provides the key to this enigma. Mr Proudhon sees in history a definite series of social developments; he finds progress realised in history; finally, he finds that men, taken as individuals, did not know what they were about, were mistaken as to their own course, i. e. that their social development appears at first sight to be something distinct, separate and independent of their individual development. He is unable to explain these facts, and the hypothesis of universal reason made manifest is ready to hand. Nothing is easier than to invent mystical causes, i.e. phrases in which common sense is lacking.

But in admitting his total incomprehension of the historical development of mankind—and he admits as much in making use of high-flown expressions such as universal reason, God, etc.—does not Mr Proudhon admit, implicitly and of necessity, his inability to understand economic development?

What is society, irrespective of its form? The product of man's interaction upon man. Is man free to choose this or that form of society? By no means. If you assume a given state of development of man's productive faculties, you will have a corresponding form of commerce and consumption. If you assume given stages of development in production, commerce or consumption, you will have a corresponding form of social constitution, a corresponding organisation, whether of the family, of the estates or of the classes—in a word, a corresponding civil society. If you assume this or that civil society, you will have this or that political system, which is but the official expression of civil society. This is something Mr Proudhon will never understand, for he imagines he's doing something great when he appeals from the state to civil society, i. e. to official society from the official epitome of society.

Needless to say, man is not free to choose his productive forces—upon which his whole history is based—for every productive force is an acquired force, the product of previous activity. Thus the productive forces are the result of man's practical energy, but that energy is in turn circumscribed by the conditions in which man is placed by the productive forces already acquired, by the form of society which exists before him, which he does not create, which is the product of the preceding generation. The simple fact that every succeeding generation finds productive forces acquired by the preceding generation and which serve it as the raw material of further production, engenders a relatedness in the history of man, engenders a history of mankind, which is all the more a history of mankind as man's productive forces, and hence his social relations, have expanded. From this it can only be concluded that the social history of man is never anything else than the history of his individual development, whether he is conscious of this or not. His material relations form the basis of all his relations. These material relations are but the necessary forms in which his material and individual activity is realised.

Mr Proudhon confuses ideas and things. Man never renounces what he has gained, but this does not mean that he never renounces the form of society in which he has acquired certain productive forces. On the contrary. If he is not to be deprived of the results obtained or to forfeit the fruits of civilisation, man is compelled to change all his traditional social forms as soon as the mode of commerce ceases to correspond to the productive forces acquired. Here I use the word commerce in its widest sense—as we would say Verkehr in German. For instance, privilege, the institution of guilds and corporations, the regulatory system of the Middle Ages, were the only social relations that corresponded to the acquired productive forces and to the pre-existing social conditions from which those institutions had emerged. Protected by the corporative and regulatory system, capital had accumulated, maritime trade had expanded, colonies had been founded—and man would have lost the very fruits of all this had he wished to preserve the forms under whose protection those fruits had ripened. And, indeed, two thunderclaps occurred, the revolutions of 1640 and of 1688. In England, all the earlier economic forms, the social relations corresponding to them, and the political system which was the official expression of the old civil society, were destroyed. Thus, the economic forms in which man produces, consumes and exchanges are transitory and historical. With the acquisition of new productive faculties man changes his mode of production and with the mode of production he changes all the economic relations which were but the necessary relations of that particular mode of production.

It is this that Mr Proudhon has failed to understand, let alone demonstrate. Unable to follow the real course of history, Mr Proudhon provides a phantasmagoria which he has the presumption to present as a dialectical phantasmagoria. He no longer feels any need to speak of the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth centuries, for his history takes place in the nebulous realm of the imagination and soars high above time and place. In a word, it is Hegelian trash, it is not history, it is not profane history—history of mankind, but sacred history—history of ideas. As seen by him, man is but the instrument used by the idea of eternal reason in order to unfold itself. The evolutions of which Mr Proudhon speaks are presumed to be evolutions such as take place in the mystical bosom of the absolute idea. If the veil of this mystical language be rent, it will be found that what Mr Proudhon gives us is the order in which economic categories are arranged within his mind. It would require no great effort on my part to prove to you that this arrangement is the arrangement of a very disorderly mind.

Mr Proudhon opens his book with a dissertation on value which is his hobby-horse. For the time being I shall not embark upon an examination of that dissertation.

The series of eternal reason's economic evolutions begins with the division of labour. For Mr Proudhon, the division of labour is something exceedingly simple. But was not the caste system a specific division of labour? And was not the corporative system another division of labour? And is not the division of labour in the manufacturing system, which began in England in the middle of the seventeenth century and ended towards the end of the eighteenth century, likewise entirely distinct from the division of labour in big industry, in modern industry?

Mr Proudhon is so far from the truth that he neglects to do what even profane economists do. In discussing the division of labour, he feels no need to refer to the world market. Well! Must not the division of labour in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, when there were as yet no colonies, when America was still non-existent for Europe, and when Eastern Asia existed only through the mediation of Constantinople, have been utterly different from the division of labour in the seventeenth century, when colonies were already developed?

And that is not all. Is the whole internal organisation of nations, are their international relations, anything but the expression of a given division of labour? And must they not change as the division of labour changes?

Mr Proudhon has so little understood the question of the division of labour that he does not even mention the separation of town and country which occurred in Germany, for instance, between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Thus, to Mr Proudhon, that separation must be an eternal law because he is unaware either of its origin or of its development. Throughout his book he speaks as though this creation of a given mode of production were to last till the end of time. All that Mr Proudhon says about the division of labour is but a resume, and a very superficial and very incomplete resume at that, of what Adam Smith and a thousand others said before him.

The second evolution is machinery. With Mr Proudhon, the relation between the division of labour and machinery is a wholly mystical one. Each one of the modes of the division of labour had its specific instruments of production. For instance, between the mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century man did not make everything by hand. He had tools and very intricate ones, such as looms, ships, levers, etc., etc.

Thus nothing could be more absurd than to see machinery as deriving from the division of labour in general.

In passing I should also point out that, not having understood the historical origin of machinery, Mr. Proudhon has still less understood its development. Up till 1825—when the first general crisis occurred—it might be said that the requirements of consumption as a whole were growing more rapidly than production, and that the development of machinery was the necessary consequence of the needs of the market. Since 1825, the invention and use of machinery resulted solely from the war between masters and workmen. But this is true only of England. As for the European nations, they were compelled to use machinery by the competition they were encountering from the English, in their home markets as much as in the world market. Finally, where North America was concerned, the introduction of machinery was brought about both by competition with other nations and by scarcity of labour, i.e. by the disproportion between the population and the industrial requirements of North America. From this you will be able to see what wisdom Mr Proudhon evinces when he conjures up the spectre of competition as the third evolution, as the antithesis of machinery!

Finally, and generally speaking, it is truly absurd to make machinery an economic category alongside the division of labour, competition, credit, etc.

Machinery is no more an economic category than the ox who draws the plough. The present use of machinery is one of the relations of our present economic system, but the way in which machinery is exploited is quite distinct from the machinery itself. Powder is still powder, whether you use it to wound a man or to dress his wounds.

Mr Proudhon surpasses himself in causing to grow inside his own brain competition, monopoly, taxes or police, balance of trade, credit and property in the order I have given here. Nearly all the credit institutions had been developed in England by the beginning of the eighteenth century, before the invention of machinery. State credit was simply another method of increasing taxes and meeting the new requirements created by the rise to power of the bourgeois class. Finally, property constitutes the last category in Mr Proudhon's system. In the really existing world, on the other hand, the division of labour and all Mr Proudhon's other categories are social relations which together go to make up what is now known as property; outside these relations bourgeois property is nothing but a metaphysical or juridical illusion. The property of another epoch, feudal property, developed in a wholly different set of social relations. In establishing property as an independent relation, Mr Proudhon is guilty of more than a methodological error: he clearly proves his failure to grasp the bond linking all forms of bourgeois production, or to understand the historical and transitory nature of the forms of production in any one epoch. Failing to see our historical institutions as historical products and to understand either their origin or their development, Mr Proudhon can only subject them to a dogmatic critique.

Hence Mr Proudhon is compelled to resort to a fiction in order to explain development. He imagines that the division of labour, credit, machinery, etc., were all invented in the service of his idée fixe, the idea of equality. His explanation is sublimely naive. These things were invented for the sake of, equality, but unfortunately they have turned against equality. That is the whole of his argument. In other words, he makes a gratuitous assumption and, because actual development contradicts his fiction at every turn, he concludes that there is a contradiction. He conceals the fact that there is a contradiction only between his idée fixes, and the real movement.

Thus Mr Proudhon chiefly because he doesn't know history, fails to see that, in developing his productive faculties, i.e. in living, man develops certain inter-relations, and that the nature of these relations necessarily changes with the modification and the growth of the said productive faculties. He fails to see that economic categories are but abstractions of those real relations, that they are truths only in so far as those relations continue to exist. Thus he falls into the error of bourgeois economists who regard those economic categories as eternal laws and not as historical laws which are laws only for a given historical development, a specific development of the productive forces. Thus, instead of regarding politico-economic categories as abstractions of actual social relations that are transitory and historical, Mr Proudhon, by a mystical inversion, sees in the real relations only the embodiment of those abstractions. Those abstractions are themselves formulas which have been slumbering in the bosom of God the Father since the beginning of the world.

But here our good Mr Proudhon falls prey to severe intellectual convulsions. If all these economic categories are emanations of God's heart, if they are the hidden and eternal life of man, how is it, first, that there is any development and, secondly, that Mr Proudhon is not a conservative? He explains these evident contradictions in terms of a whole system of antagonisms.

In order to explain this system of antagonisms, let us take an example.

Monopoly is good because it is an economic category, hence an emanation of God. Competition is good because it, too, is an economic category. But what is not good is the reality of monopoly and the reality of competition. And what is even worse is that monopoly and competition mutually devour each other. What is to be done about it? Because these two eternal thoughts of God contradict each other, it seems clear to him that, in God's bosom, there is likewise a synthesis of these two thoughts in which the evils of monopoly are balanced by competition and vice versa. The result of the struggle between the two ideas will be that only the good aspects will be thrown into relief. This secret idea need only be wrested from God and put into practice and all will be for the best; the synthetic formula concealed in the night of mankind's impersonal reason must be revealed. Mr Proudhon does not hesitate for a moment to act as revealer.

But take a brief glance at real life. In present-day economic life you will find, not only competition and monopoly, but also their synthesis, which is not a formula but a movement. Monopoly produces competition, competition produces monopoly. That equation, however, far from alleviating the difficulties of the present situation, as bourgeois economists suppose, gives rise to a situation even more difficult and involved. Thus, by changing the basis upon which the present economic relations rest, by abolishing the present mode of production, you abolish not only competition, monopoly and their antagonism, but also their unity, their synthesis, the movement whereby a true balance is maintained between competition and monopoly.

Let me now give you an example of Mr Proudhon's dialectics.

Freedom and slavery constitute an antagonism. There is no need for me to speak either of the good or of the bad aspects of freedom. As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America.

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North America, the most progressive nation, would he transformed into a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly into the New World. After these reflections on slavery, what will the good Mr Proudhon do? He will seek the synthesis of liberty and slavery, the true golden mean, in other words the balance between slavery and liberty.

Mr Proudhon understands perfectly well that men manufacture worsted, linens and silks; and whatever credit is due for understanding such a trifle! What Mr Proudhon does not understand is that, according to their faculties, men also produce the social relations in which they produce worsted and linens. Still less does Mr Proudhon understand that those who produce social relations in conformity with their material productivity also produce the ideas, categories, i.e. the ideal abstract expressions of those same social relations. Indeed, the categories are no more eternal than the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products. To Mr Proudhon, on the contrary, the prime cause consists in abstractions and categories. According to him it is these and not men which make history. The abstraction, the category regarded as such, i.e. as distinct from man and his material activity, is, of course, immortal, immutable, impassive. It is nothing but an entity of pure reason, which is only another way of saying that an abstraction, regarded as such, is abstract. An admirable tautology!

Hence, to Mr Proudhon, economic relations, seen in the form of categories, are eternal formulas without origin or progress.

To put it another way: Mr Proudhon does not directly assert that to him bourgeois life is an eternal truth; he says so indirectly, by deifying the categories which express bourgeois relations in the form of thought. He regards the products of bourgeois society as spontaneous entities, endowed with a life of their own, eternal, the moment these present themselves to him in the shape of categories, of thought. Thus he fails to rise above the bourgeois horizon. Because he operates with bourgeois thoughts and assumes them to be eternally true, he looks for the synthesis of those thoughts, their balance, and fails to see that their present manner of maintaining a balance is the only possible one.

In fact he does what all good bourgeois do. They all maintain that competition, monopoly, etc., are, in principle—i.e. regarded as abstract thoughts—the only basis for existence, but leave a great deal to be desired in practice. What they all want is competition without the pernicious consequences of competition. They all want the impossible, i.e. the conditions of bourgeois existence without the necessary consequences of those conditions. They all fail to understand that the bourgeois form of production is an historical and transitory form, just as was the feudal form. This mistake is due to the fact that, to them, bourgeois man is the only possible basis for any society, and that they cannot envisage a state of society in which man will have ceased to be bourgeois.

Hence Mr Proudhon is necessarily doctrinaire. The historical movement by which the present world is convulsed resolves itself, so far as he is concerned, into the problem of discovering the right balance, the synthesis of two bourgeois thoughts. Thus, by subtlety, the clever fellow discovers God's secret thought, the unity of two isolated thoughts which are isolated thoughts only because Mr Proudhon has isolated them from practical life, from present-day production, which is the combination of the realities they express. In place of the great historical movement which is born of the conflict between the productive forces already acquired by man, and his social relations which no longer correspond to those productive forces, in the place of the terrible wars now imminent between the various classes of a nation and between the various nations, in place of practical and violent action on the part of the masses, which is alone capable of resolving those conflicts, in place of that movement—vast, prolonged and complex—Mr Proudhon puts the cacky-dauphin [4] movement of his own mind. Thus it is the savants, the men able to filch from God his inmost thoughts, who make history. All the lesser fry have to do is put their revelations into practice.

Now you will understand why Mr Proudhon is the avowed enemy of all political movements. For him, the solution of present-day problems does not consist in public action but in the dialectical rotations of his brain. Because to him the categories are the motive force, it is not necessary to change practical life in order to change the categories; on the contrary, it is necessary to change the categories, whereupon actual society will change as a result.

In his desire to reconcile contradictions Mr Proudhon does not ask himself whether the very basis of those contradictions ought not to be subverted. He is exactly like the political doctrinaire who wants a king and a chamber of deputies and a chamber of peers as integral parts of social life, as eternal categories. Only he seeks a new formula with which to balance those powers (whose balance consists precisely in the actual movement in which one of those powers is now the conqueror now the slave of the other). In the eighteenth century, for instance, a whole lot of mediocre minds busied themselves with finding the true formula with which to maintain a balance between the social estates, the nobility, the king, the parliaments [5] etc., and the next day there was neither king, nor parliament, nor nobility. The proper balance between the aforesaid antagonisms consisted in the convulsion of all the social relations which served as a basis for those feudal entities and for the antagonism between those feudal entities.

Because Mr Proudhon posits on the one hand eternal ideas, the categories of pure reason, and, on the other, man and his practical life which according to him, is the practical application of these categories, you will find in him from the very outset a dualism between life and ideas, between soul and body—a dualism which recurs in many forms. So you now see that the said antagonism is nothing other than Mr Proudhon's inability to understand either the origin or the profane history of the categories he has deified.

My letter is already too long for me to mention the absurd case Mr Proudhon is conducting against communism. For the present you will concede that a man who has failed to understand the present state of society must be even less able to understand either the movement which tends to overturn it or the literary expression of that revolutionary movement.

The only point upon which I am in complete agreement with Mr Proudhon is the disgust he feels for socialist sentimentalising. I anticipated him in provoking considerable hostility by the ridicule I directed at ovine, sentimental, utopian socialism. But is not Mr Proudhon subject to strange delusions when he opposes his petty-bourgeois sentimentality, by which I mean his homilies about home, conjugal love and suchlike banalities, to socialist sentimentality which—as for instance in Fourier's case—is infinitely more profound than the presumptuous platitudes of our worthy Proudhon? He himself is so well aware of the emptiness of his reasoning, of his complete inability to discuss such things, that he indulges in tantrums, exclamations and irae hominis probi, [6] that he fumes, cures, denounces, cries pestilence and infamy, thumps his chest and glorifies himself before God and man as being innocent of socialist infamies! It is not as a critic that he derides socialist sentimentalities, or what he takes to be sentimentalities. It is as a saint, a pope, that he excommunicates the poor sinners and sings the praises of the petty bourgeoisie and of the miserable patriarchal amourous illusions of the domestic hearth. Nor is this in any way fortuitous. Mr Proudhon is, from top to toe, a philosopher, an economist of the petty bourgeoisie. In an advanced society and because of his situation, a petty bourgeois becomes a socialist on the one hand, and economist on the other, i.e. he is dazzled by the magnificence of the upper middle classes and feels compassion for the sufferings of the people.

He is at one and the same time bourgeois and man of the people. In his heart of hearts he prides himself on his impartiality, on having found the correct balance, allegedly distinct from the happy medium. A petty bourgeois of this kind deifies contradiction, for contradiction is the very basis of his being. He is nothing but social contradiction in action. He must justify by means of theory what he is in practice, and Mr Proudhon has the merit of being the scientific exponent of the French petty bourgeoisie, which is a real merit since the petty bourgeoisie will be an integral part of all the impending social revolutions.

With this letter I should have liked to send you my book on political economy, but up till now I have been unable to have printed either this work or the critique of German philosophers and socialists [7] which I mentioned to you in Brussels. You would never believe what difficulties a publication of this kind runs into in Germany, on the one hand from the police, on the other from the booksellers, who are themselves the interested representatives of all those tendencies I attack. And as for our own party, not only is it poor, but there is a large faction in the German communist party which bears me a grudge because I am opposed to its utopias and its declaiming.

Ever yours

Charles Marx

P.S. Perhaps you may wonder why I should be writing in bad French rather than in good German. It is because I am dealing with a French writer.

You would greatly oblige me by not keeping me waiting too long for a reply, as I am anxious to know whether you understand me wrapped up as I am in my barbarous French.

Footnotes

Marx's profound and precise criticism of Proudhon's views, and his exposition of dialectical and materialist views to counterbalance them, produced a strong impression even on Annenkov, who was far from materialism and communism. He wrote to Marx on 6 January 1847: 'Your opinion of Proudhon`s book produced a truly invigorating effect on me by its preciseness, its clarity, and above all its tendency to keep within the bounds of reality' (MEGA-2, Abt III, Bd. 2, S 321).

When in 1880 Annenkov published his reminiscences 'Remarkable Decade 1838-1848', in the Vestnik Yevropy, he included in them long extracts from Marx's letter. In 1883, the year when Marx died, these extracts, translated into German, were published in Die Neue Zeit and New-Yorker Volkszeitung.

The original has not been found. The first English translation of this letter was published in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, 1846-1895, Martin Lawrence Ltd., London. 1934.

Here Marx uses the word 'cacadauphin' by which during the French Revolution opponents of the absolutist regime derisively described the mustard-coloured cloth, recalling the colour of the Dauphin's napkins, made fashionable by Queen Marie Antoinette.

Parliaments—juridical institutions which arose in France in the Middle Ages. They enjoyed the right to remonstrate government decrees. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their members were officials of high birth called noblesse de robe (the nobility of the mantle). The parliaments, which finally became the bulwark of feudal opposition to absolutism and impeded the implementation of even moderate reforms, were abolished in 1790, during the French Revolution.

the anger of an upright man.

The German Ideology

1847

Engels to Marx. Jan 15

Marx to Roland Daniels. Mar 7

Engels to Marx. Mar 9

Marx to Engels. May 15

Marx to Georg Herwegh. Jul 27

Marx to Georg Herwegh. Aug 8

Marx to Moses Hess. Sep 2

Engels to Marx. Sep 28-30

Marx to Werner von Veltheim. Sep 29

Engels to Lucien-Leopold Jottrand. Sep 30

Engels to Marx. Oct 25-26

Engels to Georg Herwegh. Oct 26

Engels to Marx. Nov 14-15

Engels to Marx. Nov 23-24

Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov. Dec 9

Engels To Marx [138]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 107;

Written: 15 January 1847;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929.

Paris, Friday, 15 January 1847

Dear Marx,

I would have written to you sooner had Bernays not left me in the lurch. That damned Börnstein, who was one of the people of whom I inquired about your coming here,[139] was never to be found, and I therefore entrusted the matter to Bernays, who said he would come to town on Monday at the latest, bringing a letter for you. Instead I received late last night the enclosed scrawl which the lazy fellow had dashed off in Sarcelles the day before yesterday evening, the explanation it contains being hardly of the kind to necessitate 5-6 days’ study. But that’s the sort of chap he is. I shall, by the way, speak to Börnstein personally, for I'm far from satisfied with this explanation and, to be honest, there is no one whose word I trust less than that of Bernays. For six months the man’s been drumming into me that you could come here any day, with bag and baggage, and, now that it comes to the point, he makes all this to-do about a passport. As though you needed a passport! No one asks for it at the frontier; Moses [Hess] came here without anyone asking just as I did and, if you stay with me, I should like to know who is going to ask for it. At most, a Belgian passeport pour l'intérieur to establish your identity if necessary, or Mr Leopold’s well-known missive: Cabinet du Roi — which would suffice for all eventualities. Heine is of exactly the same opinion and, as soon as I can get hold of Börnstein, I'll ask him about it.

Bernays, too, had invented the Tolstoy affair, or rather had been led by Börnstein to believe it, for Börnstein can make him believe anything he chooses. All the various items of news contained in Bernays’ earlier letters to us come from the same source and, having on a number of occasions witnessed the air of infallibility assumed by Börnstein when spouting his suppositions, his tittle-tattle and his own fabrications to Bernays, who takes everything at its face value, I no longer believe a single word of all those important news items ‘from the best of sources’ which he has conveyed to us in the past.

I saw with my own eyes how Börnstein, merely by affecting omniscience, made Bernays believe (and you know with what enthusiasm Bernays believes once he does believe) that the National had been sold lock, stock and barrel, body and soul, to Thiers, argent+-comptant. [cash more or less down] The little man [Bernays] would have been willing to stake his life on it. He’s as incorrigible in this respect as in his highly exalted mortally melancholy disposition. Pendant le cours de la dernière quinzaine il a été seize fois au bord du désespoir. [in the course of the past fortnight he has been sixteen times on the brink of despair]

Cela entre nous. [between ourselves] I shall ask Börnstein again what he thinks about your coming here; Heine, as already mentioned, maintains that you can come in all confidence. Or would you prefer to go to the French Ambassador and demand a passport on the strength of your Prussian emigration certificate?

It was very good of you to let me know about Moses’ advent. The worthy man came to see me, didn’t find me in, I wrote and told him to arrange a rendezvous. This took place yesterday. The man has changed a great deal. His head is adorned with youthful locks, a dainty little beard lends some grace to his angular jaw, a virginal blush hovered about his cheeks, but la grandeur déchue se peignait dans ses beaux yeux [fallen greatness was reflected in his fine eyes] and a strange modesty had come over him. Here in Paris I have come to adopt a very insolent manner, for bluster is all in the day’s work, and it works well with the female sex. But the ravished exterior of that erstwhile world-shaking high-flyer, Hess, all but disarmed me. However, the heroic deeds of the true socialists, his disciples (of whom more anon), and his own, unchanged inner self, restored my courage. [140] Suffice it to say that my treatment of him was so cold and scornful that he will have no desire to return. All I did for him was to give him some good advice about the clap he had brought with him from Germany. He was also a complete fiasco with a number of German painters, some of whom he had known before. Only Gustav Adolf Köttgen has remained faithful to him.

The man in Bremen [Kühtmann, publisher who could possibly print The German Ideology] is at any rate preferable to the one in Switzerland [J. M. Schläpfer]. I cannot write to the Swiss, 1. because I have forgotten his address, 2. because I don’t want to propose to the fellow a lower fee per sheet than you are proposing to the Bremen man. So [let me know] your proposals for the Bremen man, and at the same time send me the fellow’s address. He paid Bernays well for his bad Rothschild pamphlet [K. L. Bernays, Rothschild. Ein Urtheilsspruch vom menschlichen Standpunkte aus], but he cheated Püttmann, printing his stuff [Püttmann’s Prometheus], but indefinitely postponing payment of the fee on the pretext that his capital was tied up.

Splendid that you should be attacking Proudhon in French. I hope the pamphlet will be finished by the time this reaches you. That you can anticipate as much as you wish of our publication goes without saying so far as I am concerned. I too believe that Proudhon’s association amounts to the same thing as Bray’s plan.[141] I had quite forgotten about the good Bray.

You may have read in the Trier’sche Zeitung about the new Leipzig socialist periodical called Veilchen [Violets], a sheet for inoffensive modern criticism!! [Report from Leipzig of 6 January 1847 in Trier’sche Zeitung, 12 January 1847] wherein Mr Semmig, as Sarastro, bellows:

“We know no thought of vengeance within these temple walls, where love leads back to duty who'er from duty falls, by frie-ie-ie-iendship’s kindly hand held fast, he finds the land of light at last.” [Mozart’s opera The Magic Flute]

But unfortunately, unlike the late Reichel, he hasn’t got a bass voice to match. Here Sarastro-Semmig is sacrificing to the 3 deities: 1) Hess — 2) Stirner — 3) Ruge — all in one breath. The two former have [plumbed]. the depths of knowledge. This humble sheet, or humble violet is the craziest thing I have ever read. Such unobtrusive and at the same time insolent insanity is possible only in Saxony.

If only we could rewrite the chapter on ‘true socialists’ now that they've spread in every direction, now that the Westphalian school, the Saxon school, the Berlin school, etc., etc., have set themselves up separately, alongside the lonely stars of Püttmann, etc.[142] They could be classified according to the celestial constellations. Püttmann the Great Bear, and Semmig the Little Bear, or Püttmann Taurus, and the Pleiades his 8 children. Anyway, he deserves horns if he hasn’t already got them. Grün Aquarius and so on.

A propos Grün, I intend to revise the article on Grün’s Goethe [Grün, Über Goethe vom menschlichen Standpunkte], reducing it to a 1/2 or 3/4 sheet and adapting it for our publication [The German Ideology], if you are agreeable; write to me soon about this.[143] The book is too characteristic; Grün extols all Goethe’s philistinisms as human, making out that Goethe, the citizen of Frankfurt and the official [144], is the ‘true human being’, while passing over if not reviling all that is colossal and of genius. To such an extent that this book provides the most splendid proof of the fact that human being = German petty bourgeois. This I had no more than touched on, but I could elaborate it and more or less cut out the remainder of the article, since it isn’t suitable for our thing. What do you think?

Your

Engels

[On the back of the letter]

Monsieur Charles Marx, 42, rue d'Orléans, Faubourg de Namur, Bruxelles.

Marx To Roland Daniels

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 110

Written: 7 March 1847;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Brussels, 7 March 1847

Dear Daniels,

You or one of the others in Cologne may get a letter from Hess about communist affairs. I would urgently ask that none of you should answer until I have provided you with documents and letters through W [probably Georg Weerth or Joseph Weydemeyer]. At all events, I must again urgently request you to come here. I have some important things to tell you which cannot be communicated by post. If you can’t come, then H. Bürgers must spend a few days here. You or your representative will stay with me .... [remainder of the letter is missing, save for the next sentences, which are written in the margin. After the words ‘with me’ Marx added ‘see above']

So either you or H. Bürgers come to Malines as soon as possible.

Forward the enclosed letter to Zulauff,[145] Grünstrasse, Elberfeld.

Do not come to Brussels but to Malines and write the day before to say when you or Bürgers are coming.

You can neglect your bourgeois affairs for a day or two.

Your

Marx

Engels To Marx

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38 p. 111

Written: 9 March 1847;

First published: slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929.

Paris, Tuesday, 9 March 1847

Dear Marx,

The wee pamphlet enclosed was delivered to me this morning by Junge; Ewerbeck had brought it to them a few days ago. Having looked at the thing, I declared it to be by Moses [Hess] and explained this to Junge, point by point. This evening I saw Ewerbeck, who confessed that he had brought it to them and, after I had thoroughly demolished the thing, came out with the information that he himself, Ewerbeck, was the author of the pretty concoction. He wrote it, he maintains, during the months that followed my arrival here, inspired by the first rapture into which he had been thrown by the novelties I communicated. That’s how these lads are. While mocking Hess for decking himself out in borrowed plumes that didn’t suit him, and forbidding the Straubingers[146] to convey what I had told them to Grün lest he purloin it, he sits him down and — with the best intentions in the world, as always — conducts himself no whit better. Moses and Grün could not have more thoroughly bungled matters than this homespun clap-doctor. I, of course, first made fun of him a little and ended up by forbidding him ever to give vent to such stuff again. But it’s in these people’s bones. Last week I sat down and, partly out of foolishness, partly because I absolutely had to have some money, wrote for anonymous publication a letter, pullulating with smutty jokes, in which I expressed gratitude to Lola Montez.[147] On Saturday I read him some bits out of it, and this evening he tells me, with his customary bonhomie, that this inspired him to produce something similar and that he did so the very next day on the same subject, handing it in to Mäurer for his anonymous periodical [H. Ewerbeck, ‘Hier Baiern! — Hier Andalusia!’, Die Pariser Horen, April 1847] (it really does appear quite sub rosa and only for the benefit of the editors, being censored by Madame Mäurer, who has already blue-pencilled a poem by Heine). He was, he said, telling me about this in good time to save his honour and avoid committing a plagiarism! This fresh masterpiece by this passionately keen author will, of course, simply be my joke translated into a solemnly effusive style. This most recent exercise of the short gut, though of no significance, shows how extremely urgent it is that either your book or our manuscripts [The Poverty of Philosophy and The German Ideology] should appear as soon as possible. The fellows are all worried by the thought that such splendid ideas should remain so long concealed from the people, and can think up no better way of getting this load off their minds than by voiding as much of it as they think they have passablement [tolerably well] digested. So don’t let the Bremen man [Kühtmann] slip through your fingers. If he doesn’t reply, write again and accept a minimum, if needs must. Each month they lie idle these manuscripts lose 5-10 fr. per sheet in exchangeable value. A few months from now, with la diète prussienne [148].. en discussion, la querelle bien entamée à Berlin [the Prussian Diet in debate, the dispute well under way in Berlin], Bauer and Stirner will not fetch more than 10 fr. per sheet. With such a topical work one gradually gets to the stage where the high fee demanded as a writer’s point d'honneur has to be completely set aside.

I spent about a week with Bernays in Sarcelles. He too does stupid things. Writes for the Berliner Zeitungs-Halle and is happy as a sand-boy that his soidisant [self-styled] communist anti-bourgeois expectorations appear in it. The editors and censors naturally allow anything purely anti-bourgeois to stand, but delete the few references that might also reflect unpleasantly on themselves. Fulminates about Juries, ‘bourgeois freedom of the press’, the representation system, etc. I explain to him that this means literally working pour le roi de Prusse [for the King of Prussia, i. e. for nothing], and indirectly, against our party — usual warm-hearted outpourings, impossibility of effecting anything; I point out that the Zeitungs-Halle is in the pay of the government, obstinate denials, references to symptoms which, in the eyes of everyone save the sensitive inhabitants of Sarcelles, precisely bear out my contention. Result: Inability of warm heart, ingenuous enthusiasm, to write contrary to its convictions, to comprehend any policy that spares those who hitherto were the objects of its mortal hatred. ‘Ain’t in me nature!’ the inevitable ultima ratio [last argument]. I have read x of these articles dated from Paris; they are on ne peut plus [as much as they could be] in the interests of the government and in the style of true socialism. I feel inclined to give up Bernays and to meddle no more in the high-minded and repellent family woes in which he plays the heros des dévouements, [hero of devotion] of boundless devotion. Il faut avoir vu cela. [It has to be seen] The stench is like five thousand unaired featherbeds, multiplied by the release therein of innumerable farts — the result of Austrian vegetable cookery. And though the fellow should ten times tear himself away from the riff-raff and come to Paris, he will return to them as often. You can imagine the kind of moralising humbug all this puts into his head. The mode composé [complex kind of] family in which he lives is turning him into a perfect narrow-minded philistine. He'll never get me to come to his boutique again, nor is he likely to feel any urgent desire to see so unfeeling an individual as myself.

You will very soon be receiving the pamphlet on the Constitution [Engels, The Constitutional Question in Germany]. I shall write it on separate sheets, so that you can insert and discard. [149] If there’s any prospect of Vogler paying something, ask him if he will take the Lola Montez joke — approx. 1 1/2-2 sheets, but you needn’t tell him the thing originated with me. Let me know by return, for otherwise I shall try in Belle-Vue. You'll have seen from the Débats or the Constitutionnel that, as a result of complaints made by Württemberg, the Great Council has made it impossible for the scoundrelly Schläpfer in Herisau to go on publishing revolutionary stuff; he himself has confirmed this in letters to us and has asked that nothing further be sent to him. All the more reason, therefore, to maintain contact with the man in Bremen. If nothing at all comes of it with him, there remains only the publishers and booksellers in Belle-Vue near Constance. Au reste, should the placing of our manuscripts clash with the placing of your book, then, for heaven’s sake, chuck the manuscripts into a corner, for it’s far more important that your book should appear. We're neither of us likely to make much out of our work in that quarter.

In yesterday’s (Monday’s) Kölner Zeitung you may have seen a smug article on the scandalous affair of Martin du Nord. [probably a report from Paris ‘Affaire Martin du Nord’ published in the Kölnische Zeitung, 8 March 1847] That article was by Bernays — from time to time he takes Börnstein’s place as correspondent.

The police here are in a very ugly mood just now. It would seem that, by hook or by crook, they are determined to exploit the food shortage to provoke a riot or a mass conspiracy. First they scatter all manner of leaflets about; put up placats incendiaires [inflammatory posters], and now they have even manufactured and strewn around fire-raising devices which, however, were not set alight, in order to make plain to the épicier [grocer] the lengths to which diabolical wickedness can go. On top of this they began a fine game with the communistes matérialistes [150] arresting a whole mass of fellows, among whom A knows B, B knows C, C knows D, etc., and now, on the strength of these acquaintanceships and a few statements made by witnesses, they transmogrify the whole lot of them, for the most part unknown to each other, into a ‘gang’. The trial of this ‘gang’ is soon to take place, and if the old complicité morale be added to this new system, any individual you care to name can be sentenced without more ado. Cela sent son Hébert. [it stinks of Hébert] By this means, nothing could be easier than to pin something even on père Cabet.

If at all possible, do come here some time in April. By 7 April I shall be moving — I don’t yet know where to — and about that time I shall also have a little money. So for a time we could enjoy ourselves famously, squandering our all in taverns. However, since the police are being beastly at the moment [151] (besides the Saxon I wrote to you about, my old opponent Eisermann was banished; both have remained here, cf. K. Grün in the Kölner Zeitung [Grün’s Über die Ausweisung von Eisermann und Anderen, 1 March 1847]), it might be as well to follow Börnstein’s advice. Try to obtain a passport from the French Ambassador on the grounds of your emigration; if that doesn’t work, we'll see what can be done at this end — no doubt there is still a conservative deputy who can be persuaded to help. It’s absolutely essential that you get out of ennuyante [vexatious] Brussels for once and come to Paris, and I for my part have a great desire to go carousing with you. Either mauvais sujet [scamp] or schoolmaster; these are the only alternatives open to one here; a mauvais sujet among disreputable good-for-nothings, et cela vous va fort mal quand vous navez pas d'argent [and that suits you very badly when you have no money] or schoolmaster to Ewerbeck, Bernays and Co. Or else submit to wise counsel from the leaders of the French radicals which one must later vindicate among the other jackasses lest they unduly flaunt their bloated Germanness. If I had an income of 5,000 fr. I would do nothing but work and amuse myself with women until I went to pieces. If there were no Frenchwomen, life wouldn’t be worth living. Mais tant qu'il y a des grisettes, va! Cela n'empêche pas [but so long as there are grisettes, well and good! That doesn’t prevent] one from sometimes wishing to discuss a decent topic or enjoy life with a measure of refinement, neither of which is possible with anyone in the whole band of my acquaintances. You must come here.

Have you seen L. Blanc’s Revolution [Histoire de la révolution française, 1847]? A wild mixture of correct hunches and unbounded craziness. I only read half of the first volume while at Sarcelles Ça fait un drô1e d'effet. [it makes a curious impression] Hardly has he surprised one with some nice observation when he falls head over heels into the most dreadful lunacy. But L. Blanc has a good nose and, despite all the lunacy, the scent he is on is by no means bad. Yet he will get no further than the point he has already reached, being ‘rooted to the spot by a spell’ — ideology.

Do you know Achille de Vaulabelle’s Chute de l'Empire, Histoire des deux Restaurations? Came out last year, a republican on the National, and in the historiographical manner of the old school — before Thierry, Mignet, etc. Abysmal lack of insight into the most ordinary relations — in this respect even Capefigue in his cent jours does infinitely better — but interesting on account of the Bourbon and allied basenesses, all of which he catalogues, and of a fairly exact representation and criticism of the facts in so far as his national and political interests don’t obtrude. On the whole tediously written, however, precisely because of a lack of perspective. The National is a bad historian, and Vaulabelle is said to be Marrast’s amicus.

Moses has vanished completely. He promises to give lectures to those ouvriers with whom I do not ‘consort’, makes himself out to be Grün’s opponent and my intimate friend! God knows and so does Moses that, at our second and last entrevue [interview] in the Passage Vivienne, the painter Körner and I left him standing agape, in order to lead astray two girls Körner had picked up. Since then I have only met him once, on mardi gras when he was dragging his world-weary self through the most dreadful downpour and the most and boredom in the direction of the Exchange. We didn’t even deign to recognise each other.

I will take care of the letter to Bakunin [152] as soon as I am sure of his address — up to now it is still chanceux [a matter of chance].

Apropos, do write to Ewerbeck about the wee pamphlet and make fun of him a little; he is most humbly presenting ambas posaderas [both buttocks] and is anxious to see blows rained down upon them — you know what I mean.

Well then, write soon and see to it that you come here.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 117;

Written: 15 May 1847;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929.

Brussels, 15 May 1847

Dear Engels,

As you know, Vogler has been under arrest in Aachen since the beginning of May. [The original is inaccurate: Vogler was arrested at the beginning of April 1847 and returned to Brussels on 17 June] This has for the time being precluded the possibility of getting the pamphlet [Engels, The Constitutional Question in Germany] you sent here into print. The first 1/3 of it I liked very much. The other 2/3 will in any case need some alteration. Something more specific on this point in my next.

I enclose the print of your cartoon. I sent it to the Brüsseler-Zeitung.[153]

As for the truly nauseous article by Grün or his associates in the Trier’sche Zeitung [Reference to a report from Paris of 13 April published in the section ‘Frankreich’ of the Trier’sche Zeitung, No. 107, 17 April 1847] it is of course now too late; it would have been good if at the outset you had published a two-line counterstatement in the same rag.

I cannot go to London, not having sufficient funds. But we hope to send Wolff over. And then it will be enough that the two of you are there.[154]

Voce [as regards] money:

You will remember that Hess owes me and my brother-in-law Edgar [von Westphalen] money from the Gesellschaftsspiegel. So I am drawing a bill on him from here, payable 30 days at sight. Bernays likewise has owed me 150 fr. since May of last year. So he too will also be presented with a bill.

I would therefore ask you to do the following:

1. First send me the addresses of both;

2. Inform both of them of the facts and tell the jackasses

3. that if they believe they will be unable to pay the respective sums by 15 June, they are nevertheless to accept the bills. I shall then arrange for cover in Paris. Naturally you will only inform the jackasses of the latter if absolutely unavoidable.

At the moment I'm in such financial straits that I have had to have recourse to drawing bills, and after all I don’t intend to make the two jackasses a present of anything. Should the asses only feign acceptance of the bills, I must, of course, know at once.

Since the matter is very pressing, I expect you not to let a day go by before setting everything in order and informing me.

Here in Brussels I have managed to hunt out an escompteur. [bill discounter]

I cannot write to you at any greater length. About 12 days ago Breyer let a vein, but in my right arm instead of the left. Since I went on working as though nothing had happened, the wound festered instead of closing. The thing could have been dangerous and cost me my arm. Now it’s as good as healed. But the arm’s still weak. Mustn’t be overtaxed.

Your

Marx

[From Gigot]

My dear Fritzchen,

I am just in the middle of reading your pamphlet — so far it has amused me greatly — and feel really happy that I ain’t no German. May God or Reason or Race preserve us from the petty bourgeoisie!

Avec laquelle j'ai l'honneur d'être. [with which I have the honour to be]

Yours most truly

Philippe

P.S. Do drop me un demi mot [a few words] sometime.

Marx To Georg Herwegh

In Paris

Brussels, 27 July 1847

Faubourg d'lxelles, rue d'Orléans 42

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 118;

Written: 27 July 1847;

First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934

Dear Herwegh,

Engels has just arrived here for a few weeks from Paris, [155] whence he has brought the following anecdote; I should be glad if you would elucidate it at the earliest opportunity.

Bernays told Ewerbeck: Herwegh came to see me and said that Marx had welcomed him in such a friendly manner that he seemed to want something of him. Bernays then gave Ewerbeck his unqualified permission to pass on this bon mot.

I would not, of course, put pen to paper on account of this piece of gossip had it not achieved a kind of notoriety among my acquaintances in Paris.

I would therefore request you to tell me categorically by return whether or not there is any truth in this.

Your

Marx

Marx To Georg Herwegh [155a]

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 119;

Written: 8 August 1847;

First published in: 1848. Briefe von und an Georg Herwegh, Munich, 1896;

Brussels, 8 August 1847

Dear Herwegh,

I hasten to acknowledge receipt of your letter. I learn no more from it than I already knew in advance, namely that the whole thing was the most miserable piece of tattle. All I wanted was a few lines from you in order to show Engels in black and white the nature of German petty bourgeois gossip in Paris. I assure you that, since I moved from Paris, and despite all the precautions I have taken to make myself unfindable and inaccessible, these old women have continued to pursue me with trifles of this kind. Only by being excessively rude can one free oneself of these fools.

I am only sorry to have disturbed you with such stuff in your retreat. — It’s typical of these old women to want to hush up and sugar over any genuine party struggle while mistaking for revolutionary activity the German habit of gossiping and making trouble. Les malheureux. [the wretches] Here in Brussels we don’t suffer from that misère at least.

The Prussian Embassy here has been vigilantly shadowing and observing Bornstedt in order to catch him out in some transgression or other. At last they've succeeded. They denounced him and brought down 3 actions on his head: 1) fiscal, for contravening the stamp law, 2) political, for saying in his paper that Louis Philippe ought to be killed, 3) an action for calumniating a Belgian grandee, Mr Osy, whom Bornstedt had accused, and rightly so, of profiteering on corn.

None of the 3 actions is of any consequence here, and they will almost certainly result in making the Prussian Embassy, already little esteemed, appear ridiculous. What have Louis Philippe, Osy and the Belgian stamp law to do with them?

The examining magistrate himself declared that all these actions were pour le roi de Prusse. [for the King of Prussia, i. e. for nothing] The Brüsseler-Zeitung, on the other hand, which, despite its many failings, does have some merit and might well have improved,[156] particularly now that Bornstedt has expressed his readiness to help us in every way, is threatened with a sudden pecuniary disaster. How have the noble Teutons behaved in this affair? The booksellers have cheated Bornstedt because he couldn’t prosecute them. The opposition of all shades, instead of lifting a finger to help, whether in the literary or financial sense, found it more convenient to take exception to the name of Bornstedt. And will such people ever be short of excuses for doing nothing? Now it’s the man who’s no good, now the wife, now the policy, now the style, now the format — or even the distribution is more or less risky, etc., etc. These gentry want things presented to them on a platter. If there’s only one opposition paper which is immune from censorship, which is a thorn in the flesh of the government, and whose editor, by the very logic of the enterprise, shows himself complaisant towards all that is progressive, is not this above all an opportunity to be exploited? And, if the paper is inadequate, to make it adequate? But no, our Germans always have 1,000 wise sayings up their sleeve to show why they must let an opportunity slip. An opportunity to do something is to them only a source of embarrassment.

My manuscripts, too, are faring in much the same way as the Brüsseler-Zeitung, and on top of that the jackasses keep writing to me day after day, asking why I'm not having anything published, and even reproach me for having written French in preference to nothing at all. One will long have to atone for having been born a Teuton.

Farewell. Warm regards to your wife and yourself from my wife and me.

In Paris you'll find an additional list of errata for my French scrawl [The Poverty of Philosophy]. Without it some passages are unintelligible.

As soon as you have an hour to spare and nothing better to do, write to your

Marx

[Postscript from Jenny Marx to Emma and Georg Herwegh]

I take advantage of this little space to send you, dear Mrs Herwegh, and your dear husband my hearty greetings. How are you and your two youngsters? They came a little en retard compared to my three. We only need a girl to make three couples. My girls are wonderful, but the boy, the boy!! Un petit monstre. Our best greetings, remember sometimes

Your

Jenny Marx

Marx To Moses Hess

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 121;

Written: 2 September 1847;

First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934'

Brussels, 2 September 1847

Dear Hess,

Present yourself today in the Chaussée d'Etterbeck, in the Grand Salon, also known as Palais royal.

Marx

Engels To Marx [157]

In Zalt-Bommel

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 122;

Written: 30 September 1847;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Brussels, 28-30 September 1847

Tuesday, 28 September

Dear Marx,

There has recently been a very curious business here. All those elements among the local Germans who are dissatisfied with us and what we do have formed a coalition for the purpose of overthrowing you, me and the communists in general, and competing with the Workers’ Society. [158] Bornstedt is exceedingly displeased; the story emanating from Otterberg, passed on and confirmed by Sandkuhl and exploited by Crüger and Moras, to the effect that we were simply exploiting him, Bornstedt, has made him furious with all of us; Moras and Crüger, who go about complaining of our alleged cavalier treatment of them, have put his back up even further. Seiler is annoyed because of the unpardonable neglect he suffered at the founding of the Workers’ Society, and because of its good progress, which has given the lie to all his predictions. Heilberg is seeking to take spectacular if unbloody revenge for all the slights that have been, and are being, daily meted out to him. Bornstedt, too, is seething because his gifts of books and maps have failed to buy him the status of an influential democrat and honorary membership of, and a place for his bust in, the Society, instead of which his typesetter [Karl Wallau] will, tomorrow evening, put his name to the vote like that of any ordinary mortal. He is also vexed that he, the aristocratic homme d'esprit, should find much less opportunity to make fun of the workers than he had hoped. Then Moras is annoyed at having been unable to win over the Brüsseler-Zeitung for Heinzen. Enfin all these heterogeneous elements agreed upon a coup that was to reduce us one and all to a secondary role vis-à-vis Imbert and the Belgian democrats, and to call into being a society far more grandiose and universal than our uncouth Workers’ Society. All these gentlemen were fired by the idea of taking the initiative in something for once, and the cowardly rascals deemed the moment of your absence admirably suited to that end. But they had shamefully miscalculated.

They therefore decided quite on the sly to arrange a cosmopolitan-democratic supper and there to propose without prior warning a society à la fraternal democrats [122] with workers’ meetings, etc., etc. They set up a kind of committee onto which as a matter of form they co-opted the, to them, completely harmless Imbert. After hearing all kinds of vague rumours, it was not until Sunday evening at the Society that I learned anything positive about it from Bornstedt, and on Monday the meal was to take place. I could get no details from Bornstedt except that Jottrand, General Mellinet, Adolf Bartels, Kats, etc., etc., would be there, Poles, Italians, etc., etc. Although I had no inkling whatever about the whole coalition (only on Monday morning did I learn that Bornstedt was somewhat piqued and that Moras and Crüger were moaning and plotting: about Seiler and Heilberg I knew nothing), nonetheless I smelled a rat. But it was essential to attend because of the Belgians and because nothing democratic must be allowed to take place in little Brussels without our participating. But something had to be done about forming a group. Wallau and I accordingly put the matter forward and advocated it vigorously, upon which some thirty immediately agreed to go. On Monday morning I was told by Lupus that, besides the président d'honneur, old Mellinet, and the actual chairman, Jottrand, they would have to have two vice-chairmen, one of whom would be Imbert and the other a German, preferably a working man. Wallau was, unfortunately, out of the running since he didn’t speak French. That’s what he'd been told by Bornstedt. He, Lupus, had replied that in that case it must be me. I told Lupus that it must be him, but he refused point-blank. I was also reluctant because I look so awfully young, but finally I thought that, for all eventualities, it would be best for me to accept.

We went there in the evening.[159] Bornstedt was all innocence, as though nothing had as yet been arranged, merely the officials (toujours à l'exception de l'Allemand) , and a few registered speakers, none of whose names, save for Crüger and Moras I was able to discover; he kept making off to see to the arrangement of the place, hurried from one person to the next, duping, intriguing, bootlicking for all he was worth. However I saw no evidence of any specific intrigue; this didn’t transpire till later on. We were at the Estaminet Liégeois in the Place du Palais de Justice. When it came to electing the officials, Bornstedt, contrary to all that had been agreed, proposed Wallau. The latter declined through Wolff (Lupus) and had me proposed, this being carried in style. Thus thwarted, the whole plot collapsed. They now +- lost their heads and gave themselves away. After Imbert had proposed the health of the martyrs de la liberté, I came out with a toast in French au souvenir de la revolution de 1792 and, as an afterthought, of the anniversaire du 1er vendémiaire an I de la république.[160] [the anniversary of the First Vendémiaire of the first year of the Republic — 22 September 1792, the day when the Republic was proclaimed, fell on the First Vendémiaire according to the republican calendar] Crüger followed me with a ludicrous speech during which he dried up and had to resort to his manuscript. Then Moras, who read out an harangue almost entirely devoted to his humble self. Both in German. So confused were their toasts that I have absolutely no recollection of them. Then Pellering in Flemish. The lawyer Spilthoorn of Ghent, speaking French au peuple anglais then, to my great astonishment, that hunchbacked spider Heilberg, with a long, school-masterly, vapid speech in French in which he 1) patted himself on the back as editor of the Atelier Démocratique; 2) declared that he, Maximus Heilberg, had for several months been pursuing — but that must be said in French: The Association of Belgian Working Men, that is the goal I have been pursuing for several months (i. e. since the moment I deigned to take cognisance of the final chapter of the Poverty of Philosophy). He, then, and not Kats and the other Belgians. ‘We shall enter the lists when our elders are no longer there’ etc., etc. [Marseillaise] He will achieve what Kats and Jottrand could not do; 3) proposed to found a fraternal democracy and to reorganise the meetings; 4) to entrust the elected bureau with the organisation of both.

Well now, what confusion! First lump together the cosmopolitan business and Belgian meetings on Belgian affairs and 2) instead of dropping this proposal because everything’s going wrong for you, pass it on to the existing bureau! And if he had my departure in mind, should he not have known that it would be unthinkable to bring anyone else but you into the bureau? But the numbskull had already written the Whole of his speech and his vanity wouldn’t allow him to omit anything by which he could seize the initiative in some way. The thing, of course, went through, but in view of the highly factice albeit noisy enthusiasm, there could be no question of putting the confused proposal into better order. Next A. Bartels spoke (Jules wasn’t there), and then Wallau demanded the floor. But how intense was my astonishment when suddenly Bornstedt thrust himself forward and urgently demanded the floor for Seiler as a speaker whose name was higher up the register. Having got it, Seiler delivered an interminably long, garrulous, silly, absurdly vapid and truly shameful speech (in French) in which he talked the most hair-raising nonsense about pouvoirs législatif, administratif et exécutif, gave all manner of wise advice to the democrats (as did Heilberg, who invented the most wondrous things about teaching and questions of education), in which Seiler, further posing en grand homme spoke of democratic societies, in which I participated and which I may perhaps even have directed (literally), and finally, with the latest news to come from Paris; etc., etc., actually dragged in his precious bureau.[161] In short, it was ghastly. Several speakers followed, a Swiss jackass, Pellering, Kats (very good), etc., etc., and at ten o'clock Jottrand (who blushed with shame for the Germans) declared the sitting closed. Suddenly Heilberg called for silence and announced that Weerth’s speech at the free-trade congress [162] would be appearing next day in a supplement to the Atelier which would be sold separately!!! Then Zalewski also spoke, whining a while about the union between that unfortunate Poland and that great, noble and poetical Germany — finally all went home quietly enough but very much out of temper.

Thursday, 30 September

Since the above was written a great deal more has happened and various things have been decided. On Tuesday morning, when the whole plot was clear to me, I hurried round to counter it; that same night at 2 o'clock I went to see Lupus at the bureau i could not Bornstedt he balloted out of the Workers’ Society? Wednesday called on all and sundry, but everybody was of the opinion that we couldn’t do it. On Wednesday evening, when I arrived at the Society, Bornstedt was already there; his attitude was equivocal; finally Thomis came in with the latest issue; my anti-Heinzen article which I'd brought him as long ago as Monday and, not finding him in (2 o'clock in the afternoon), had taken to the printers, was not in it. [Engels, ‘The Communists and Karl Heinzen’. First article, dated 26 September was not printed in No. 78, 29 September; it appeared in the next issue on 3 October 1847] On my questioning him, he said there had been no space. I reminded him of what you and he had agreed.[163] He denied it; I waited till Wallau arrived and he told me there had been space enough but that on Tuesday Bornstedt had had the article fetched from the printers and had not sent it back again. I went to Bornstedt and very rudely told him as much. He tried to lie his way out. I again reverted to the agreement, which he again denied, save for a few trivial generalities. I passed some insulting remarks — Crüger, Gigot and Imbert, etc., etc., were present — and asked: ‘Do you intend to publish the article on Sunday, oui ou non?’ — ‘We'll have to discuss it first.’ — ‘I refuse to discuss it with you.’ — And thereupon I left him.

The sitting began. Bornstedt, chin cradled in his hands, sat looking at me with a curiously gloating expression. I stared back at him and waited. Up got Mr Thomis, who, as you know, had demanded the floor. He drew a prepared speech out of his pocket and read out a series of the most peculiar aspersions on our sham battle.[164] This went on for some time but, as it showed no signs of finishing, there was a general muttering, a mass of people demanded the floor, and Wallau called Thomis to order. The latter, Thomis, then read out some half dozen inane phrases on the question and withdrew. Then Hess spoke and defended us pretty well. Then Junge. Then Wolff’ of Paris who, though he dried up 3 times, was much applauded. Then several more. Wolff had betrayed the fact that our opposition had been purely formal. So I had to take the floor. I spoke — to the great discomfiture of Bornstedt, who had believed that I was too much preoccupied with personal squabbles — I spoke, then, about the revolutionary aspect of the protectionist system, completely ignoring the aforesaid Thomis, of course, and proposed a new question. Agreed. — Pause. — Bornstedt, badly shaken by the vehement way I had addressed him, by Thomis’ ratting on him (there were echoes of Bornstedt in his speech) and by the vehemence of my peroration — Bornstedt came up to me: My dear boy, how terribly impassioned you are, etc., etc. In short, I was to sign the article. — No. — Then at least we should agree on a short editorial introduction. — Very well, eleven o'clock tomorrow at the Café Suisse.

There followed the matter of the admission of Bornstedt, Crüger, Wolff. Hess was the first to get up; he addressed 2 questions to Bornstedt about Monday’s meeting. Bornstedt lied his way out, and Hess was weak enough to declare himself satisfait. Junge went for Bornstedt personally because of his behaviour at the Society and because he had introduced Sandkuhl under a false name. Fischer came out very energetically against Bornstedt, quite impromptu but very well. Several others likewise. In short, the triumphant Mr von Bornstedt had almost literally to run the gauntlet of the workers. He took a severe drubbing and was so thunderstruck — he, who of course believed he had well and truly bought his way in with his gifts of books — that he could only answer evasively, feebly, concedingly — in spite of the fact that Wallau, fanatically in support of him, was a wretched chairman who permitted him to interrupt the speakers at any and every opportunity. Everything was still hanging in the balance when Wallau directed the candidates to withdraw and called for a vote. Crüger, proposed by me as an exceptionally guileless man, who could in no way harm the Society, and purement et simplement seconded by Wolff, got through. In the case of Bornstedt, Wallau came out with a long, impassioned speech on his behalf. Then I stood up, went into the whole matter of the plot in so far as it concerned the Society, demolished Bornstedt’s evasions, each by means of the other, and finally declared: Bornstedt has intrigued against us, has sought to compete with us, but we have won, and hence can now admit him into the Society. During my speech — the best I have ever made — I was constantly interrupted by applause; notably when I said: these gentlemen believed that all had been won because I, their vice-chairman, was going away, but it had not occurred to them that there is, amongst us, one to whom the position belongs by right, one who alone is able to represent the German democrats here in Brussels, and that is Marx — whereupon tremendous applause. in short, no one spoke after me, and thus Bornstedt was not done the honour of being thrown out. He was standing outside the door and listening to it all. I would rather have said my say while he was still in the room, but it could not be done, because I had to spare myself for the final blow, and Wallau broke off the discussion. But, like Wolff and Crüger, he had heard every word. As opposed to him, Wolff was admitted almost without a hitch.

In short, at yesterday’s sitting Bornstedt, Crüger, etc., etc., suffered such an affront that they cannot honourably frequent the Society again, and they've had enough to last them a long time. But frequent it they certainly will; the shameless Bornstedt has been so reduced by our even greater insolence, by the utter failure of all his calculations, and by our vehemence, that all he can do is trot around Brussels whining to everyone about his disgrace — the lowest depths of debasement. He came back into the hall raging but impotent and, when I took my leave of the Society and was allowed to go with every imaginable mark of respect, he departed seething. Bürgers, who has been here since the day before yesterday evening, was present while we discussed Bornstedt.

Throughout, the behaviour of our workers was really splendid: the gifts, 26 books and 27 maps, were never mentioned, they treated Bornstedt with the utmost frigidity and lack of consideration — and, when I spoke and had reached my peroration, I had it in my power to have him rejected by a vast majority. Even Wallau admits as much. But we treated him worse than that by adopting him with scorn and contumely. The affair has made a capital impression on the Society; for the first time they have had a role to play, have dominated a meeting despite all the plotting, and have put in his place a fellow who was trying to set himself up against them. Only a few clerks, etc., etc., are dissatisfied, the vast majority being enthusiastically on our side. They have experienced what it means to be associated.

This morning I went to the Café Suisse, and who should fail to turn up but Bornstedt. — Weerth and Seiler, however, were there to meet me; they had just been talking to Bornstedt, and Seiler was obsequiousness and ingratiation personified. 1, of course, gave him the cold shoulder. Yesterday’s sitting, by the way, was so dramatic, and evolved so splendidly towards its climax that sheer aesthetic emotion momentarily turned Wolff of Paris into a party man. Today I also went to see A. Bartels and explained to him that the German Society was in no way responsible for what had happened on Monday, that Crüger, Bornstedt, Moras, Seiler, Heilberg, etc., etc., were not even members, and that the whole affair, staged without the knowledge of the German Society, was in fact a bid to set up a rival faction. A letter in similar vein, signed by all the committee members, is to be sent to Jottrand tomorrow, when I and Lupus will also be going to see Imbert. I have further written the following letter to Jottrand about the place on the organising I committee of the Brussels fraternal democrats which will become vacant on my departure:

‘Sir, Being obliged to leave Brussels for a few months, I find myself unable to carry out the functions which the meeting of the 27th instant saw fit to entrust to me. — I therefore request you to call on a German democrat resident in Brussels to participate in the work of the committee charged with organising a universal democratic society. I would take the liberty of proposing to you one of the German democrats in Brussels whom the meeting, had he been able to attend it, would have nominated for the office which, in his absence, it honoured me by conferring upon myself. I mean Mr Marx who, I am firmly convinced, has the best claim to represent German democracy on the committee. Hence it would not be Mr Marx who would he replacing me there, but rather I who, at the meeting, replaced Mr Marx. I am, Sir, etc., etc.'

I had in fact already agreed with Jottrand that I would advise him in writing of my departure and propose you for the committee. Jottrand is also away and will be back in a fortnight. If, as I believe, nothing comes of the whole affair, it will be Heilberg’s proposal that falls through; if something does come of it, then it will be we who have brought the thing about. Either way we have succeeded in getting you and, after you, myself, recognised as representatives of the German democrats in Brussels, besides the whole plot having been brought to a dreadfully ignominious end.

This evening there was a meeting of the community [165] at which I took the chair. With the exception of Wallau who, by the way, allowed himself to be converted and whose conduct yesterday was, indeed, excusable on various grounds for which I made allowance — with this one exception, then, the enthusiasm about the Bornstedt affair was unanimous. The fellows are beginning to feel their own importance. They have at last taken their stand as a society, as a power, vis-à-vis other people, and the’ fact that everything went with such a splendid swing and that their victory was so complete has made them enormously proud. Junge’s in the seventh heaven, Riedel is beside himself with joy, even little Ohnemans goes strutting about like a fighting-cock. Anyway, as I said before, this affair has given, and will continue to give, the Society a tremendous impetus, both internal and external Fellows who otherwise never open their traps have attacked Bornstedt. And even the plot has helped us: firstly Bornstedt went about telling everyone that the German democratic Workers’ Society had arranged the meeting and secondly we denied it all and, as a result of both these things, the society has become a general topic of conversation among Belgian democrats and is regarded as a highly significant, plus ou moins mysterious power German democracy is growing very strong in Brussels, Bartels remarked this morning.

By the way, you too are to be included in the committee’s letter to Jottrand. Gigot will sign himself ‘Secretary in Marx’s absence’.

Settle your financial affairs as quickly as possible and come back here again. I'm itching to get away, but must first wait until these plots have run their course. Just now I can’t possibly leave. So the sooner you come the better. But first put your financial affairs in order. At all events I'll remain at my post as long as I possibly can; si c'est possible, until you arrive. But for that very reason it’s desirable that you come soon.

Your

Engels

Marx To Werner von Veltheim

In Ostrau near Halle

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 131;

Written: 29 September 1847;

First published: in the Neues Deutschland, 5 May 1976.

Zalt-Bommel, 29 September 1847

Dear Veltheim,

It will surprise you to receive a letter from me, whom you will by now have all but forgotten.

I will explain to you briefly the reason why I am writing.

You know the present state of affairs in Germany respecting the press. The censorship makes virtually every rational undertaking impossible. On the other hand, such a confusion of views prevails that German literature, after having laboriously achieved a certain unity, is threatened with disintegrating again into a host of local literatures — those of Berlin, Saxony, the Rhineland, Baden, etc.[166] Within these fragmented literatures, moreover, we find in turn a welter of the most heterogeneous religious, political and social views.

Friends in Germany have drawn my attention to the fact that precisely now, in this state of anarchy, the needs of the day would be exactly met by a comprehensive and regular review which, while maintaining a critical attitude towards all these parties and views, would not derive its criticism from preconceived principles, but would rather portray the correlation between Germany’s political, religious and social parties and aspirations, and also their literature, on the one hand, and German economic conditions, on the other — a review in which, therefore, political economy would play a leading role. That a periodical would be out of the question in Germany itself was a point upon which all were agreed.

It was therefore decided in Brussels to bring out, subsequent to an issue of shares, a periodical of this kind, the editorial side of which would be under my supervision. It was also decided to establish our own type-setting and printing shop out of the proceeds of the shares in order to reduce the costs of production.

Since subscriptions for these shares are being collected all over Germany — at 25 talers a share — I should like to ask you whether you and your acquaintances might wish to associate yourselves with this enterprise.

To me it seems beyond dispute that clarity of consciousness can be introduced into the now highly fragmented German movement, as into the modern movement generally, only by elucidating in the first place the relations of production and examining and appraising the other spheres of social existence in connection with them.

An exact statement of income and expenditure would be rendered annually. The number of shares amounts to two hundred. [167]

When you reply kindly do so to the following address: A Mr Charles Marx, Bruxelles, Fbg Namur, Rue d'Orléans 42.

I am only here in Holland for a few days on a family matter and am staying with my uncle.

Yours faithfully

Karl Marx

Have you heard anything of Edgar?

Engels To Lucien-Leopold Jottrand

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 132;

Written: 30 September 1847;

First published: slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Russian Edition, 1934.

Brussels, 30 September 1847

Dear Sir,

Being obliged to leave Brussels for several months, I find myself unable to carry out the functions which the meeting of 27 September saw fit to entrust to me.[159]

I therefore request you to call on a German democrat resident in Brussels to participate in the work of the committee charged with organising a universal democratic society.

I would take the liberty of proposing to you one of the German democrats in Brussels whom the meeting, had he been able to attend it, would have nominated for the office which, in his absence, it honoured me by conferring upon myself. I mean Mr Marx, who, I am firmly convinced, has the best claim to represent German democracy on the committee. Hence it would not be Mr Marx who would be replacing me there, but rather I who, at the meeting, replaced Mr Marx.

Assuring you, Sir, of my profound esteem, I am,

Yours very sincerely

Frederick Engels

Mr Marx, who was absent from Brussels at the time of the meeting, lives at 42, rue d'Orléans, Faubourg de Namur.

Engels To Marx

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 133;

Written: 26 October 1847;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Paris, 25-26 October 1847

Dear Bartholomäus,

Only today am I able to write to you because it was only today that I managed to see little Louis Blanc – after terrible tussles with the portière. As a result of my long conversation with him, the little man is prepared to do anything. He was courtesy and friendliness itself, and seems to have no more urgent wish than to associate with us as closely as possible. There is none of the French national patronage about him. I had written to tell him that I was coming with a mandat formel to him from the London, Brussels and Rhineland democrats, and also as a Chartist agent.[168] He asked for details about everything; I described the condition of our party to him in the most glowing terms, spoke about Switzerland, Jacoby, the Badeners as allies [169] etc., etc.

You, I said, were the chief: You can regard Mr Marx as the head of our party (i. e. of the most advanced section of German democracy, which I was representing vis-à-vis him) and his recent book against Mr Proudhon as our programme. Of this he took most careful note. Then finally he promised to comment on your book in the Réforme. He told me a great deal about the mouvement souterrain [underground movement] that is now going on among the workers; he also said that the workers had printed 3,000 copies of his Organisation du travail cheaply and that at the end of a fortnight a further edition of 3,000 copies had been needed — he said the workers were more revolutionary than ever, but had learned to bide their time, no riots, only major coups that would be sure to succeed, etc., etc. By the way he too would seem to have got out of the habit of patronising the workers.

When I see such things as M. de Lamartine’s new programme, I can’t help laughing! In order to assess the present state of French society properly you have to be in a position which enables you to see a little of everything, to visit a minister in the morning, a merchant in the afternoon, and a working man in the evening.’

The coming revolution, he went on, would be quite different from, and much more drastic than, all previous ones, and it would be sheer bêtise [stupidity] to keep on thundering only against kings, etc., etc.

By and large, he was very well-behaved and perfectly cordial. You see, the man is all right, he has the best intentions in the world. He spoke of you with great sympathy and said he was sorry that you and he had parted rather froidement [coldly], etc., etc. He still has a special hankering after a German and French review to be published in Paris. Might come in useful later.

As to Ruge, after whom he inquired, I warned him; he has appointed himself panegyrist of the Prussian Diet, and this even after the result.[170] — So he’s taken a step back? — Yes, indeed.

With père Flocon I am hitting it off well. I first approached him as if I were an Englishman and asked him in Harney’s name why he so ignored the Star. Well, yes, he said, he was sorry, he’d be only too glad to mention it, only there was no one on the editorial staff who understood English! I offered to write a weekly article for him [171] which he accepted de grand coeur. When I told him I was the Star’s correspondent, he seemed quite moved.[172] If things go on like this we shall have won over this whole trend in four weeks. Flocon wishes me to write an essay on Chartism for his personal benefit, he hasn’t the vaguest idea about it. I shall call on him presently and ensnare him further in our net. I shall tell him that the Atelier is making approaches to me (which is true; I am going there this evening), and that, if he behaves decently, I shall turn them down. That will touch his worthy heart.

When I’ve been here a little longer and have grown more accustomed to writing French, I’ll make a start on the Revue indépendante.

I quite forgot to ask L. Blanc why he hadn’t accepted your Congress article.[173] I shall tax him with it when he next comes to see me. By the way I doubt whether he has, in fact, received your book. He was quite unable to remember having done so today. And before I went away he spoke in very uncertain terms about it. I shall find out within a day or two. If he hasn’t got it, I shall give him my copy.

Just imagine, little Bernays, who trots round here and plays the martyr — one betrayed by everybody, one ‘who has helped everybody with money or good advice’ (littéralement) — this creature has a horse and gig! It’s Börnstein’s, of course, but no matter. This same chap who makes himself out to be an oppressed, penniless martyr one day, boasts the next that he is the only one who knows how to earn money. He has been plodding away at 21 sheets (!) on the Praslin affair[174] which are coming out in Switzerland. [Bernays, Die Ermordung der Herzogin von Praslin] The nub of the matter is this: not la duchesse but le duc is the martyr! My response to his prating about martyrdom was to remind him that he has long owed me 60 fr. He is becoming every inch the industrialist and brags about it. In any case he’s cracked. — Even Ewerbeck is furious with him.

I have not yet seen Cabet. He is happy, it seems, to be leaving, having noticed that things are showing signs of disintegrating here. Flocon wants to commence the attack, not so L. Blanc, and rightly, although L. Blanc has a finger in all manner of pies and looks forward with glee to seeing the bourgeoisie jolted out of their security by the sudden onset of revolution.

I have been to see père Flocon. The good man was cordiality itself, and the honest frankness with which I told him about my affair with the Atelier nearly brought tears to his eyes. From the Atelier I went on to talk about the National: ‘When in Brussels we were discussing the question of which faction of French democracy to approach, we were unanimously agreed that our very first move should be to make contact with the Réforme, there being a strong and well-founded bias against the National abroad. In the first place this paper’s national prejudices prevent any rapprochement’ — ‘yes, yes, that’s true,’ said Flocon, ‘and this was precisely why the Réforme was founded; we declared from the very outset that we were not out for conquests’ — ‘and then,’ I went on, ‘if I am to believe my predecessors, for I myself have never been to the National those gentlemen always give the impression of wanting to patronise foreigners, which for that matter is perfectly consistent with their national prejudices; we for our part have no need of their patronage; it is not patrons we want, but allies. — ‘Ah, yes, but we’re not at all like that; it would never occur to us: — ‘True, and I have nothing but praise for the way the gentlemen of the Réforme proceed.’

But how helpful it was that I reminded little Blanc of our affairs. Your Congress speech had, it appears, been mislaid; today he hastened to look for it and send it to Flocon with a very urgent note requesting him to print it forthwith. I explained the thing to Flocon; the man was unable to understand the why, how and when because Blanc had sent it to him without any further explanation. Flocon greatly regretted that the thing had become so outdated; while parfaitement d’accord with it, he thought it was now too late. Nevertheless he would see whether it could not be included in an article. He would, he said, do his very best.

The article in the Réforme on Lamartine’s pious intentions was by L. Blanc, as you will have seen. It isn’t bad, and in all respects a thousand times better than perpetual Flocon. Undoubtedly he would attack Lamartine very harshly, did he not happen to be his rival just now.

People, you see, are as well-disposed as one could wish. My relations with them are already ten times better than Ewerbeck’s ever were. I shall now utterly forbid the latter to write for the Réforme. He can relieve himself in the National and there compete with Venedey & Co.; he’ll do no harm there, and anyway nothing of his will be published.

Afterwards I again visited the Atelier. I took with me an amendment to an article in the last issue on English working men which will also be included. The fellows were very well-behaved; I told them un tas d’anecdotes about English workers, etc. They requested me most urgently to collaborate, which I shall only do, however, if needs must. Just imagine, the rédacteur en chef thought it would be a good idea if the English workers were to dispatch an address to their French counterparts, calling on them to oppose the libre-échange movement and champion the cause of travail national. Quel héroïque dévouement! But in this he failed even where his own people were concerned.

By the way, I was not compelled to make any concessions to these people. I told L. Blanc that we were in agreement with them on all practical and current questions and that on purely theoretical questions we were marching towards the same goal; that the principles propounded in his first volume agreed in many respects with our own and that, regarding the rest, he would find it more fully developed in your book. As for the religious question, we regarded this as altogether secondary, as a question which should never be allowed to become a pretext for strife between men of the same party. For all that, I went on, a friendly discussion of theoretical questions was perfectly feasible and indeed desirable, with which he was parfaitment d’accord.

Lupus was perfectly right in assuming that I would very soon meet the management.[175] Barely three days after my arrival here I ran into Seiler in the Boulevard des Italiens. You will long since have heard that he has done a bolt and has no intention of returning. He is going the rounds of the French correspondence bureaux in search of a berth. Since then I have repeatedly failed to find him and don’t know how his affairs are going. If he meddles with the Réforme we shall have to disown him.

Ask that accursed Bornstedt what he means by not sending me his paper. [Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung] I cannot forever be chasing after the Straubingers[86] for it. Should he feign ignorance of my address, give it to him, 5, rue Neuve Saint-Martin. I’ll send him a few articles as soon as ever can.

Hellish confusion among the Straubingers. In the days immediately preceding my arrival, the last of the Grünians were thrown out, an entire community of whom, however, half will return. We are now only thirty strong. I at once set up a propaganda community and I rush round speechifying. I was immediately elected to the district [Paris District Committee of the Communist League] and have been entrusted with the correspondence. Some 20-30 candidates have been put up for admission. We shall soon grow stronger again. Strictly between ourselves, I’ve played an infernal trick on Mosi. [Moses Hess] He had actually put through a delightfully amended confession of faith.[176] Last Friday at the district I dealt with this, point by point, and was not yet half way through when the lads declared themselves satisfaits. Completely unopposed, I got them to entrust me with the task of drafting a new one [Engels, ‘Principles of Communism’] which will be discussed next Friday by the district and will be sent to London behind the backs of the communities. Naturally not a soul must know about this, otherwise we shall all be unseated and there’ll be the deuce of a row.

Born will be coming to see you in Brussels; he is going to London.[177] He may arrive before this letter. He will be travelling, somewhat rashly, down the Rhine through Prussia, always provided they don’t cop him. Drum something more into him when he arrives; the fellow is the most receptive of all to our ideas and with a little preparation will be able to do good service in London.

Great heavens, I was on the point of forgetting all that avalanche of trash unloosed upon me from the heights of the Alps by the great Heinzen. [K. Heinzen, ‘Ein “Repräsentant” der Kommunisten’, Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, 21 October 1847 — written in reply to Engels’ ‘The Communists and Karl Heinzen’] It is truly fortunate that it should all have been packed into one issue; nobody will plough his way through it. I myself had to break off several times. What a blockhead! Having first maintained that he can’t write, I now find myself compelled to add that he can’t read either, nor does he seem particularly conversant with the four rules of arithmetic. The ass ought to read F. O’Connor’s letter in the last Star, addressed to the radical newspapers, which begins with ‘You Ruffians’, and ends with ‘You Ruffians’, [F. O’Connor, ‘To the Editors of the Nottingham Mercury, the Nonconformist, the Dispatch, the Globe, the Manchester Examiner and Lloyds’ Trash’, The Northern Star, No. 522, 23 October 1847] then he would see what a miserable duffer he is in the matter of invective. Well, you will be duly hauling this low, stupid lout over the coals. [Marx, Moralising Criticism and Critical Morality] I’m very glad that you intend to keep your answer quite brief. I could never answer such an attack, simply couldn’t bring myself to — save perhaps with a box on the ears.

Tuesday

My article [The Commercial Crisis in England. — The Chartist Movement. — Ireland] has appeared in the Réforme. Curiously enough Flocon hasn’t altered one syllable, which greatly surprises me.

I have not yet called on père Heine. As you can well imagine, with all this business, I’ve had a devilish lot to do and a fearsome amount of running about and writing.

I have written to Elberfeld about the Free Trade — protective tariff business and am daily expecting a reply. [178] Write again soon. My regards to your wife and children.

Your

Engels

You really should read O’Connor’s article in the last Star attacking the six radical newspapers; it’s a masterpiece of inspired abuse, in many places better than Cobbett and approaching Shakespeare.

What bug can have bitten poor Moses to make him thus perpetually air in the newspaper his fantasies on the consequences of a revolution by the proletariat? [a reference to M. Hess, ‘Die Folgen einer Revolution des Proletariats’, Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, 14 and 31 October, 7 and 11 November 1847]

Marx To Georg Herwegh

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 140;

Written: 26 October 1847;

First published in: 1848. Briefe von und an Georg Herwegh, Munich, 1898

Brussels, 26 October 1847

rue d'Orléans, 42, Faubourg Namur

Dear Herwegh,

I wanted to give Engels a letter to bring you, but there was so much pressing business on the day of his departure that this was lost sight of and forgotten.

I had further been asked by Countess Hatzfeld to write you a few lines of introduction for her. I imagine that by now you will already have made her acquaintance. For a German woman, she has developed great vigour sparring with her husband.[179]

Here in Brussels we have founded two public democratic societies.

1. A German Workers’ Society[158] which already has about 100 members. Besides debates of quite a parliamentary nature, there is also social entertainment with singing, recitation, theatricals and the like.

2. A smaller cosmopolitan-democratic society to which Belgians, French, Poles, Swiss and Germans belong. [159]

If you come up here again you'll find that even in little Belgium more can be done by way of direct propaganda than in big France. Moreover, I believe that, however minor it may be, public activity is infinitely refreshing for everyone.

It is possible, there being now a liberal ministry [formed in August 1847] at the helm, that we shall run into some trouble with the police, for liberals always remain liberals.

But we shall be able to deal with them. Here it is not as in Paris, where foreigners confront the government in isolation.

Since it is impossible in present circumstances to make any use of the book trade in Germany, I have agreed with Germans from Germany to produce a review-monthly — supported by subscriptions to shares.[167] In the Rhine Province and Baden a number of shares have already been bought up. We intend to make a start as soon as there’s enough money to last 3 months.

If subscriptions in any way permitted, we would establish our own type-setting room here, Which could also be used for printing separate works.

Now I should like you to tell me:

1. Whether you, for your part, would also be prepared to drum up a few subscriptions for shares (25 talers per share).

2. Whether you are prepared to collaborate and to figure as a collaborator on the title page.

But I would ask you, since you have in any case long owed me a letter, to overcome for once your aversion to writing and to reply soon. I also wanted to request you to ask Bakunin by what route, to what address and by what means a letter can be conveyed to Tolstoy.

My wife sends her warm regards to you and your wife.

The strange business of the Prussian Embassy in Paris[180] is certainly indicative of our sovereign’s [Frederick William IV of Prussia] mounting and impotent rage.

Farewell.

Your

Marx

[The address written by Jenny Marx on the fourth page of the letter]

Dr Gottschalk, General Practitioner in Cologne.

[Beneath it Karl Marx has written]

Dear Herwegh,

Due to an oversight, the above wrong address nearly appeared on this letter.

Engels To Marx

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 142;

Written: 15 November 1847;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Paris, 14-15 November 1847

Dear Marx,

Yesterday, having sent friend Reinhardt several times to see Frank about your book [The Poverty of Philosophy], I learned, suddenly and at last, that that cur, Frank, had begun by sending several of the free copies to Frenchmen, in every case demanding 15 sous expenses, and in every case getting the copies back again.[181] Thereupon he calmly hung on, not only to those he had got back, but also to such as had not yet been sent out, and it was not until a few days ago that he sent them to the addressees without demanding 15 sous. The conspiration de silence was thus of Mr Frank’s making! I at once hurried along to L. Blanc, whom a few days previously I had again failed to find in because he was en garde (le petit bonhomme en bonnet à poil! [on guard (the little manikin in a busby)]; this time I did find him in and the copy had still not arrived! I have at last got my own copy back, which may be of help in case of need. Today, Sunday, nothing can be done. I have arranged to meet Reinhardt tomorrow, whereupon he will go with me to see Frank, which should have happened earlier but did not happen through negligence on Reinhardt’s part. He must introduce me to Frank, since I have no other means of establishing my bona fides with the fellow. I shall get him to give me the copy for L. Blanc and take it along with me. But what an ass Flocon is! L. Blanc told me yesterday that Flocon had objected to your libre-échange [free-trade] article[173] which was a trifle muddled!!! The muddle-headed creature! I naturally objected, oh, said the little man it’s not I who thought that, quite the contrary, I liked the article very much, and indeed I don’t know what Mr Flocon ... but anyway (with a somewhat equivocal grimace intended for Flocon), that’s what he told me. All in all the editorial board of the Réforme is quite the most wretchedly constituted. The article on the English crisis and all economic topics en général are churned out by a poor, worthy penny-a-liner whose schooling appears to have been confined to the financial articles of a correspondence bureau, and who sees everything through the eyes of a third-rate Parisian clerk in a fourth-rate bank, and judges it with the infallibility peculiar to such an ‘empiric’ as the English say. Flocon understands nothing of the matter and seems to me to grow more ignorant day by day. At best he’s a man of good will. Indeed, L. Blanc also makes no secret of his contempt for him.

Monday

I did not find the accursed Reinhardt at home. I shall go there again this evening. Come what may, I must get the whole business cleared up by tomorrow, If I don’t write to you again at once, it means that everything’s in order.

Yesterday evening the election of delegates took place.[182] After an extremely muddled session I was elected with a 2/3 [majority]. This time I had engaged in no intrigues whatsoever, there had been little opportunity for any. The opposition was merely a fiction; a working man was proposed for appearances’ sake, but those who proposed him voted for me.

The money is coming in. Write and tell me whether you and Tedesco are going. If that proves impossible, I can hardly go there and ‘congress’ on my own, that wouldn’t make sense. If neither of you can go, the whole business will fall through and will have to be postponed for a few months. Should this be the case, write and tell London, so that all can be advised in good time.

Flocon had further told L. Blanc that if your article was to be accepted it would need altering a little, precisely to make it ‘clearer’. L. Blanc asked me once again to remind Flocon on his behalf about the article; but in the circumstances I think it would be far better to let the matter drop. For Flocon to make the article clearer — that would be the last straw! Such block-headed stubbornness is beyond my comprehension and, as I have mentioned, Blanc plus ou moins apologised to me for his colleague. But what can be done in such a case? I shall let Flocon do what he wants, have little to do with him and deal mainly with L. Blanc, who is the most reasonable of the lot. There’s absolutely nothing one can do with the National, it’s becoming more narrow-minded every day and is increasingly allying itself with Barrot and Thiers, witness the Lille Banquet.[183]

Seiler will have written to tell you that your book’s going very badly here. That’s not true. Frank has told Reinhardt that he is pretty well satisfied with the sales. Despite his preposterous behaviour he has, I believe, disposed of some 40 copies. More about this shortly. Seiler — he called on me recently, met with a very cool reception and did not come again — maintains that he has left sufficient in the way of bedding, furniture, paper, etc., etc., to cover Wolff’s and Heilberg’s needs. See to it, if that is so, that Lupus, at least, isn’t swindled again, this time by Heilberg. But no doubt it’s all so much hot air.

Rothschild has made a profit of 10 million francs on the new loan — 4 per cent net.

I shall not be able to pass through Brussels on my way to London, since money is too short. We shall have to arrange to meet in Ostend — on the evening of the 27th (Saturday), and cross over on Sunday so that we can make a start on Monday. On that day, the 29th, the Polish anniversary, there may be something fraternally democratic going on, in which case we shall have to attend. That would be quite a good thing. You make a French speech in London and then we print it in the Réforme.[184] The Germans absolutely must do something to hold their own with the French. A single speech would be of more help than ten articles or a hundred visits.

You'll have seen in The Northern Star, 2 October, the demand put forward by Harney and the fraternals for a democratic congress. [Manifesto of the Fraternal Democrats To the Democracy of Europe, from 22 September 1847, The Northern Star, 2 October 1847] Do lend it your support, as I shall do among the French. We could try and hold it if possible next year in London, perhaps at the same time as our own. Should it come about, it might have a very salutary effect on the French and humble them somewhat. Should it fail to materialise, the fault will lie with the French and they will at least be compelled to declare themselves. It would be even better if Brussels could be the venue[185]; in London Feargus [O'Connor] might get up to some kind of foolishness.

Otherwise nothing new. Give the enclosed to Bornstedt [seems to refer to Engels’ second article in German Socialism in Verse and Prose; the first one was published in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, 21 November 1847] and write soon telling me whether you are going to London.

Your

E.

Write to the painter’s [Körner] address if you still have it. It is better.

Heine sends his regards. Is extremely weak and somewhat languid. Who actually sent your article to L. Blanc? He says the name at the foot of the letter was quite unknown. That could well be the reason why he allowed the matter to hang fire.

[On the back of the letter]

Monsieur Charles Marx,

42, rue d'Orléans, Faubourg d'lxelles, Bruxelles

Engels To Marx [186]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 146;

Written: 24 November 1847;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Paris, 23-24 November 1847

Dear Marx,

Not until this evening was it decided that I should be coming. Saturday evening, then, in Ostend, Hôtel de la Couronne, just opposite the railway station beside the harbour, and Sunday morning across the water. If you take the train that leaves between 4 and 5, you'll arrive at about the same time as I do.

If, contrary to expectations, there is no packet-boat to Dover on Sundays, write and tell me by return. I. e., since you will receive this letter on Thursday morning, you must make inquiries at once and, should a letter be necessary, it must be posted the same evening – before five o'clock, I think – at the main post office. So if you want to make any changes as regards the meeting place there is still time. If I haven’t heard by Friday morning I shall count on meeting you and Tedesco on Saturday evening at the Couronne. We shall then have time enough to talk things over; this congress must be a decisive one, as this time we shall have it our own way.

For a long time now I have been completely at a loss to understand why you have not put a stop to Moses’ gossip. It’s been giving rise to the most devilish confusion for me here and the most tedious contradictory speeches to the workers. Entire district sittings have been wasted over it, nor is there any possibility of effectively combating this ‘vapid’ nonsense in the communities; particularly before the elections there could be no question of it.

I expect to see L. Blanc again tomorrow. If not, I shall in any case see him the day after tomorrow. If I have nothing to add at the end of this letter, you will hear the sequel on Saturday.

By the way, Reinhardt talked nonsense to me about the number of copies sold [The Poverty of Philosophy] – not 37, but 96 had been sold a week ago today. That same day I myself took your book to L. Blanc. All the copies had been despatched save to Lamartine (not here), L. Blanc and Vidal, whose address cannot be found. I have had it taken to the Presse.

By the way, Frank’s dispatch arrangements have been truly appalling.

At least see that Moses doesn’t get up to any nonsense during our absence! Au revoir, then!

Your

E.

Tuesday evening

Verte [PTO]

Give a little thought to the Confession of Faith. I think we would do best to abandon the catechetical form and call the thing Communist Manifesto. Since a certain amount of history has to be narrated in it, the form hitherto adopted is quite unsuitable. I shall be bringing with me the one from here, which I did [Principles of Communism]; it is in simple narrative form, but wretchedly worded, in a tearing hurry. I start off by asking: What is communism? and then straight on to the proletariat – the history of its origins, how it differs from earlier workers, development of the antithesis between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, crises, conclusions. In between, all kinds of secondary matter and, finally, the communists’ party policy, in so far as it should be made public. The one here has not yet been submitted in its entirety for endorsement but, save for a few quite minor points, I think I can get it through in such a form that at least there is nothing in it which conflicts with our views.

Wednesday morning

Have just received your letter [187] to which the above is an answer. I went to see L. Blanc. I'm remarkably unlucky with him – il est en voyage, he’s travelling and will perhaps be back today. I shall go there again tomorrow and, if necessary, the day after.

I can’t be in Ostend by Friday evening because the money won’t have been got together until Friday.

This morning your cousin Philips came to see me.

Born should make quite a good speech if you drum something into him. It’s good that the Germans are represented by a working man.[188] But Lupus must be purged of all trace of his excessive modesty. The good fellow is one of those rare people who have to be thrust into the foreground. Not Weerth, for heaven’s sake, as representative! A man who was always too lazy, until pitchforked by his succès d’un jour at the Congress.[189] And who, to boot, wishes to be an independent member He must he kept to his own sphere.

Marx To Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 150;

Written: 9 December 1847;

First published: in Russian in Letoppisi marksizma, 1928.

London, 9 December 1847

Dear Annenkov,

Party considerations, into which I cannot enter here, obliged me to pay a visit to London.[190] I took advantage of this visit both to put the Brussels Democratic Association in touch with the English Chartists and to harangue the latter at a public meeting. You perhaps saw some reports about it in the English and French press.

But when I set out on this trip — and I am compelled to stay here a few days longer — I left my family behind in the most difficult and direst of circumstances. It is not simply that my wife is ill and the children likewise. My economic situation just now is so critical that my wife is being veritably harassed by creditors and is in the most wretched financial straits.

How this crisis came about is easily explained. The German manuscripts are not being published as a whole. Those parts that are being published, I am supplying gratis, simply in order to launch them on the world. My anti-Proudhon pamphlet [The Poverty of Philosophy] has sold very well. However I shall not receive a share of the proceeds until Easter.

By itself, my wife’s income is insufficient and I have been negotiating with my own mother for quite some time to extract at least part of my fortune. There would now seem to be an immediate prospect of this. But that is of no help at the present moment.

In this situation, which I am not ashamed frankly to disclose to you, you would in truth save me from the worst if you could arrange to let my wife have a sum of between 100 and 200 francs. I shall, of course, be unable to repay you until my money matters have been settled with my family.

If you are able to agree to my proposal, I would request you to send the money to my old address: M. Charles Marx, Bruxelles, Faubourg Namur, rue d'Orléans, 42. However my wife must not be able to deduce from your letter that I wrote to you from London. I'll tell you the reason later.

Another time, I trust, I shall be able to send you more cheerful news.

Yours

K. Marx

1848

Engels to Marx. 14 January

Engels to Marx. 21 January

Marx to Engels. Between 7 and 12 March

Engels to Marx. 8-9 March

Marx to Engels. 16 March

Engels to Marx. 18 March

Engels to Emil Blank. 26 March

Engels to Emil Blank. 28 March

Marx and Engels to Etienne Cabet. 5 April

Engels to Emil Blank. 15 April

Marx to Engels. About 24 April

Engels to Marx. 25 April

Engels to Marx. 9 May

Karl Marx to the Editor of the Newspaper L'Alba in Florence, May 1848

Engels to Emil Blank. 24 May

Engels to Karl Friedrich Koppen. 1 September

Marx to Engels. About 29 or 30 October

Marx to Engels. First half of November

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 13 November

Marx to Engels. 29 November

Marx to Eduard von Muller-Tellering. 5 December

Engels to Marx. 28 December

Marx to Wilhelm Stieber. About 29 December

Engels To Marx[191]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 152;

Written: 14 January 1848;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929

Paris, 14 January 1848

Dear Marx,

If I haven’t written to you it was because I have as yet still not been able to get hold of that accursed Louis Blanc. Decidedly, he is showing bad will. But I'm determined to catch him every day I go to him or lie in wait for him at the café. Père Flocon, on the other hand, is proving more amenable. He is delighted at the way the Brüsseler-Zeitung and The Northern Star defended the Réforme against the National. Not even the blâme against L. Blanc and Ledru-Rollin have succeeded in flustering him, any more than my announcement that we have now decided in London to come out openly as communists. He, of course, made some capital assertions you are tending towards despotism, you will kill the revolution in France, we have eleven million small peasants who at the same time are the most fanatical property owners, etc., etc., although he also abused the peasants, — after all, he said, our principles are too similar for us not to march together; as for us, we will give you all the support in our power, etc., etc.

I was enormously tickled by the Mosi [Moses Hess] business, although annoyed that it should have come to light. Apart from you, no one in Brussels knew of it save Gigot and Lupus — and Born, whom I told about it in Paris once when I was in my cups. Well, no matter. Moses brandishing his pistols, parading his horns before the whole of Brussels, and before Bornstedt into the bargain!!, must have been exquisite. Ferdinand Wolff’s inventiveness over the minutes made me split my sides with laughter — and Moses believes that! If, by the by, the jackass should persist in his preposterous lie about rape, I can provide him with enough earlier, concurrent, and later details to send him reeling. For only last July here in Paris this Balaam’s she-ass made me, in due form, a declaration of love mingled with resignation, and confided to me the most intimate nocturnal secrets of her ménage! Her rage with me is unrequited love, pure and simple. For that matter, Moses came only second in my thoughts at Valenciennes, my first desire being to revenge myself for all the dirty tricks they had played on Mary.

The strong wine proves to be no more than a 1/3 bottle of Bordeaux. It is only to be regretted that the horned Siegfried did not have his unhappy lot publicly minuted by the Workers’ Society.[158] He is perfectly at liberty, by the way, to avenge himself on all my present, past and future mistresses, and for that purpose I commend to him 1) the Flemish giantess who lives at my former lodgings, 87 chaussée d'Ixelles on the first floor, and whose name is Mademoiselle Joséphine, and 2) a Frenchwoman, Mademoiselle Félicie who, on Sunday, the 23rd of this month, will be arriving in Brussels by the first train from Cologne on her way to Paris. It would be bad luck if he were to succeed with neither. Kindly pass on this information to him in order that he may appreciate my honourable intentions. I will give him fair play.

It is nearly all up with Heine. I visited him a fortnight ago and he was in bed, having had a nervous fit. Yesterday he was up but extremely ill. He can hardly manage three steps now; supporting himself against the wall, he crawls from armchair to bed and vice versa. On top of that, the noise in his house, cabinet-making, hammering, etc., is driving him mad. Intellectually he is also somewhat spent. Heinzen desired to see him but was not admitted.

I was also at Herwegh’s yesterday. Along with the rest of his family he has influenza and is much visited by old women. He told me that L. Blanc’s 2nd volume [Histoire de la révolution française] has been quite eclipsed by the enormous success of Michelet’s 2nd volume [Histoire de la révolution française]. I have not yet read either because shortage of money has prevented me from subscribing to the reading room. By the way, Michelet’s success can only be attributed to his suspension[192] and his civic spirit.

Things are going wretchedly with the [Communist] League here. Never have I encountered such sluggishness and petty jealousy as there is among these fellows. Weitlingianism and Proudhonism are truly the exact expression of these jackasses’ way of life and hence nothing can be done. Some are genuine Straubingers,[86] ageing boors, others aspiring petty bourgeois. A class which lives, Irish-fashion, by depressing the wages of the French, is utterly useless. — I am now making one last attempt, if that doesn’t succeed, I shall give up this kind of propaganda. I hope that the London papers [i. e. documents of the Second Congress of the Communist League] will arrive soon and help to liven things up somewhat again; then I shall strike while the iron is hot. Not yet having seen any results from the Congress, the fellows are naturally growing completely supine. I am in contact with several new workers introduced to me by Stumpf and Neubeck but as yet there is no knowing what can be made of them.

Tell Bornstedt: 1) In the matter of his subscriptions [to the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung], his attitude towards the workers here should not be so rigorously commercial, otherwise he'll lose them all; 2) the agent procured for him by Moses is a feeble Jeremiah and very conceited, but the only one who still will and can attend to the thing, so he had better not rub him up the wrong way; the fellow has, moreover, gone to great pains, but he can’t put in money — which, for that matter, he has done already. Out of the money coming in to him he has to cover the expenses correspondence, etc. involves for him; 3) if he is sending separate issues, he should never send more than 10-15 at most of [...] one issue, and these as opportunity offers. The parcels go through Duchâtel’s ministry, whence they have to be fetched at considerable expenditure in time and where the ministry exacts a fearsome postal charge in order to ruin this traffic. A parcel of this kind costs 6-8 francs, and what can one do if that’s what they ask? Esselens in Liège wanted to appoint a courier to deliver it. Write to Liège and tell them this will be arranged. 4) The issues that were still here have been sent by third party to South Germany. Should occasion offer, Bornstedt should send us a few more issues to be used as propaganda in cafés, etc., etc. 5) Within the next few days Bornstedt will be receiving an article [Engels, The Movements of 1847] and the thing about the Prussian finances. But you must again cast an eye over the part about the committees of 1843 [193] and alter it where necessary, since my memory of the subject was very hazy at the time of writing.

If the Mosi business eventually leads to your attacking him in the Brüsseler-Zeitung, I shall be delighted. How the fellow can still remain in Brussels, I fail to understand. Here’s another opportunity to send him into exile at Verviers. The matter of the Réforme will be attended to.

Your

E.

[On the back of the letter]

Monsieur Philipp Gigot

8.-Rue Bodenbroeck, Bruxelles

Engels To Marx

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 155;

Written: 21 January 1848;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Paris, Friday evening, 21 January 1848

Dear Marx,

At last I have run L. Blanc to earth and at the same time found out why I could never get hold of him. Just listen — this little literary lord receives visitors only on Thursdays! and then only in the afternoon! Of this he never informed me, either directly or through his doorkeeper. I found him, of course, surrounded by a crowd of jackasses, amongst whom Ramon de La Sagra, who gave me a pamphlet which I shall send on to you. [R. de La Sagra, Organisation du travail] I have not yet read it. However I was finally able to have a few minutes’ talk with him about our affairs. He reluctantly admitted that he had not yet had time to read your book [The Poverty of Philosophy] ... I have leafed through it and seen that M. Proudhon is attacked with some acerbity. — Well then, will you be able to write the article for the Réforme you promised us? — An article, good gracious no, I'm so hard pressed by my publishers — but I'll tell you what to do: write the article yourself and I'll see that it appears in the Réforme. This was then agreed. After all you'll lose nothing by it. At least I'll present our views more correctly than he would have done. I shall draw a direct, parallel between these and his own — that is the most that can be done: naturally a conclusion detrimental to the Réforme cannot be drawn in the Réforme itself. I shall see to this forthwith.[194]

Why didn’t you tell Bornstedt not to write to the Réforme about your thing? My article was finished when Bornstedt’s appeared in the Réforme along with the Chartist things [an item about Marx’s speech at the meeting of the Brussels Democratic Association on 9 January 1848, published in La Réforme on 19 January, along with Engels’ report The Chartist Movement] whose publication I was awaiting before taking mine in. It was appreciably longer than the brief notice in which, to boot, your name is distorted. ['Man’ instead of ‘Marx'] I told Flocon he must correct the printer’s error; he had not done so yesterday and I haven’t seen today’s Réforme. It is of little moment anyhow. As soon as your speech [On the Question of Free Trade] appears, send me 4-5 copies for the Réforme, L. Blanc, de La Sagra (for the Démocratie pacifique), etc.; I can now make a longer article of it as the notice was so abominably brief.

As for L. Blanc, he deserves to be castigated. Write a review of his Révolution for the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung and prove to him in practice how far above him we are; the form amicable, but the content leaving no doubt as to our superiority. We'll see that it reaches him. The petty sultan must be made to quake a little. The theoretical aspect, alas, is for the time being our only strength, but this carries much weight in the eyes of these champions of science sociale, of the law of sufficient production etc. Comical, these fellows, with their chasing after this unknown law. They wish to find a law by which they will increase production tenfold. Like the wagoner in the fable, they seek a Hercules who will drag the social wagon out of the mire for them. Yet there Hercules is, in their own hands. The law of sufficient production consists in one’s ability to produce suffisamment. If they cannot do so, no magic formula will avail. Inventors who take out a brevet [patent] do more for production suffisante than the whole of L. Blanc with his profound, high-flying aspirations to la science.

I wrote Bernays a very ironical letter in reply to his last, expressing regret that his impartiality should have robbed me of the ultimate consolation — that of being a beautiful soul misunderstood — à la Praslin. [allusion to Bernays, Die Ermordung der Herzogin von Praslin] Raising his eyebrows reproachfully, he returns me the note,[195] observing that this marks the end of our correspondence. Sela [The end].

Otherwise nothing new. Write soon.

Your

E.

[on the back of the letter]

Mr Karl Marx in the German Workers’ Society, Brussels

Marx To Engels [196]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 158;

Written: 12 March 1848;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Paris, between 7 and 12 March 1848

10, rue neuve Ménilmontant (Boulevard Beaumarchais)

Dear Engels,

Get Breyer to pay you the 100 francs which he solemnly promised me to repay within a week, get 30 from Gigot, 10 from Hess. I hope that, as things are now, Breyer will keep his promise.

Maynz will cash the bill for 114 fr. at Cassel’s and give you the money. Collect these various sums and use them.

They spoke kindly of you at the Réforme. Flocon is ill and I haven’t yet seen him. The rumour spread by Seiler is circulating among the Germans generally. Allard has not yet been ousted by the revolution. I advise you to come here.

Central Authority has been constituted here,[197] since Jones, Harney, Schapper, Bauer and Moll are all on the spot. I have been nominated chairman and Schapper secretary. Members are: Wallau, Lupus, Moll, Bauer and Engels.

Jones left for England yesterday; Harney is ill. Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 158;

Written: 9 March 1848;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929.

Brussels, 8-9 March 1848

3, rue Neuve Chaussée de Louvain

Dear Marx,

I hope I shall hear from you tomorrow.

All is quiet here. On Sunday evening Jottrand told the Association Démocratique about what had happened to you and your wife.[198] I arrived too late to hear him, and only heard some furious remarks from Pellering in Flemish. Gigot spoke as well, and reverted to the matter. Lubliner published an article about it in the — Émancipation. [L'Émancipation, 7 March 1848] The lawyers here are furious. Maynz wants to take the matter up in court and says that you should institute a civil action on the grounds of violation of domicile, etc. Gigot is also to lodge a complaint. It would be capital if this were done, although the government has made it known that the fellow [Darbeck] would be dismissed. Yesterday Maynz provided Castiau with the documents he needs to interpellate on this score; I think this will happen tomorrow or the day after.[199] The affair has caused a considerable sensation and has greatly helped to mollify anti-German sentiment.

Lupus was taken to the railway station last Sunday morning at 11 o'clock and packed off to Valenciennes, whence he has written and where he must still be: He did not appear before any tribunal. Nor was he even escorted home to pick up his things![200]

They've left me unmolested. From various remarks the fellows have let fall, it would seem that they are afraid of expelling me because they previously issued me with a passport, and this might be used against them.

It’s a bad business in Cologne. Our three best men are in jug. [201] I have been speaking to someone who took an active part in the business. [Peter Nothjung] They wanted to go into the attack, but instead of supplying themselves with weapons, which were easily obtainable, they went to the town hall unarmed and let themselves be surrounded. It is said that most of the troops were on their side. The thing was initiated without rhyme or reason; if the chap’s reports are to be believed, they could very well have gone into the attack and in 2 hours all would have been over. But everything was organised with appalling stupidity.

Our old friends in Cologne appear to have kept well in the background, although they, too, had decided to go into action. Little d'Ester, Daniels, Bürgers put in a brief appearance but went off again at once, although the little Dr was needed on the city council just then. [202]

Otherwise the news from Germany is splendid. In Nassau a revolution completed, in Munich students, painters and workers in full revolt, in Kassel revolution on the doorstep, in Berlin unbounded fear and indecision, in the whole of western Germany freedom of the press and National Guard proclaimed; enough to be going along with.

If only Frederick William IV digs his heels in! Then all will be won and in a few months’ time we'll have the German Revolution. If he only sticks to his feudal forms! But the devil only knows what this capricious and crazy individual will do.

In Cologne the whole of the petty bourgeoisie is for union with the French Republic; at the moment memories of 1797 are uppermost in their minds.[203]

Tedesco’s still in jug. I don’t know when he'll be appearing in court.

A fulminating article about your affair has gone off to The Northern Star.

On Sunday evening remarkable calm at the sitting of the Democratic Association. Resolved to petition the Chambers, demanding their immediate dissolution and new elections in accordance with the new census. The government does not wish to dissolve but will have to. Tomorrow evening the petition will be adopted and signed during the session.

Jottrand’s petition to the Burgomaster and city council met with a very courteous rejection.

You have no idea of the calm that reigns here. Last night, carnival just as usual; the French Republic is scarcely ever mentioned. In the cafés you can get French newspapers with hardly any difficulty or delay. If you didn’t know that they must, for better or for worse, you'd think it was all finished here.

On Sunday Jottrand — furious about your persecution — made a really good speech; Rogier’s brutalities have brought him to recognise the class antithesis. He fulminated against the big bourgeoisie and entered into details — perhaps rather trite and illusory but economic nonetheless — to demonstrate to the petty bourgeoisie that a well-paid working class with a high rate of consumption in a republic would provide better custom for them than a Court and a not very numerous aristocracy. Altogether à la O'Connor.

It being now too late to catch the post with this letter, I shall finish it tomorrow.

Thursday

Nothing new — I saw your article in the Réforme — so there’s a rumpus going on in England as well, so much the better.

If you haven’t written by the time this arrives, do write at once. Ironically enough, my baggage has just arrived from Paris costing me 50 fr.! with customs, etc., etc.

Adieu.

Your

Engels

It would seem that the Deputy Inspector of Police who came to your house has already been dismissed. The affair has aroused great indignation among the petty bourgeois here.

[On the back of the letter]

Monsieur Charles Marx aux soins de Madame Gsell, 75, Boulevard Beaumarchais, Paris.

Marx To Engels [204]

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 161;

Written: 16 March 1848;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Paris, 16 March 1848

Dear Engels,

I never have a minute these days to write at any length. I confine myself to essentials.

Flocon is very well disposed towards you.

The Straubingers[86] here are all more or less furious with you (set-to with Sch[erzer]., etc.).

As regards my things, take them with you as far as Valenciennes and have them sealed there. Everything will go through exempt. As regards the silver, it has already been hallmarked here in Paris.

In Valenciennes you must in any case go to the man whose address I enclose. On Vogler’s advice my wife sent him the keys to the trunks (which are in Brussels), but without a way-bill. You must fetch these keys from him, otherwise everything will be broken open by the customs here.

As regards the money, tell Cassel he must give you the bill if he won’t pay it. Then perhaps Baillut will pay it.

Get Gigot to settle accounts and at least give you the balance.

As regards Breyer, you must go to see him again and point out what a shabby trick it would be if he made use of my ill-fortune to avoid payment. He must hand over at least part to you. The revolution hasn’t cost him a sou.

The bourgeoisie here are again becoming atrociously uppish and reactionary, but they'll see.

Bornstedt and Herwegh are behaving like scoundrels. They have founded a black, red and gold association [205] in opposition to us. The former is to be expelled from the [Communist] League today.

Your

M.

At the moment I am unable to find the way-bill and this letter must go off.

Dismiss Gigot if he doesn’t begin to show signs of activity.

just now the fellow ought to be more energetic.

My warmest regards to Maynz; also to Jottrand. I have received the latest Débat social.

My regards to Vogler likewise.

I shall write at length to Maynz and Jottrand.[206]

Farewell.

Engels To Marx

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 163;

Written: 18 March 1848;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Brussels, Saturday 18 March 1848

Dear Marx,

I shall send off your things.

Write a few lines to M. Victor Faider, lawyer, either direct or enclosed [in a letter] to Bloss, thanking him for the steps he has taken on behalf of you and your wife, and authorising him to take further steps. Faider, who has suddenly turned out to be a zealous republican, has constituted himself your defence counsel and as such will reply to the Moniteur belge [reference to a tendentious item on Marx’s expulsion from Belgium in Le Moniteur belge, 12 March 1848] and follow the matter up. He hopes you won’t disavow him and, to enable him to take a determined stand, you would do well to send him a note. It is better that a Belgian, rather than Maynz, should pursue the case and, since he has offered his services, he will probably do his job properly.

You really must send the way-bill. The thing is badly needed; Maynz asks after it daily.

Tedesco’s been released and left for Liège immediately, without seeing a soul. Esselens was here for a few days, but he didn’t see him.

The Bourse, finance, industry and trade here are in the throes of an unprecedented crisis. In the Café Suisse, Commerce is moping about with nothing to do, Messrs Kauwerz, Lauffs and Co. go creeping round with their tails between their legs, the workers have held meetings and handed in petitions, a general and serious food shortage. Cash is nowhere to be had, and withal a compulsory loan of 60 millions! It'll be the Bourse that will impose the Republic on them here.

Lüning returned here to be confronted with the news that there’s a hue and cry after him in Prussia; he is going to send for his wife and come to Paris.

Before he fled, Dronke was accepted into the [Communist] League by Willich and Co. I subjected him to a fresh examination here, expounded our views to him and, since he declared himself to be in agreement with them, confirmed his admission. One could hardly have done otherwise, even if there had been an element of doubt. However, the fellow’s very modest, very young and seems to all appearances very responsive, so I think that, with a little supervision and some study, he will turn out well. In my presence he retracted all his earlier writings. [reference to E. Dronke’s ‘Berlin’, ‘Polizei-Geschichten’ and ‘Aus dem Volk’ published in 1846 and showing influence of ‘true socialism'] Unfortunately he lives with Moses who will thus be working on him in between whiles, but, as we know, that is of no consequence. With Lüning, to whom he had become frightfully attached, only a couple of words were needed to unsaddle him.

Moses, by the way, is friendlier than ever — just try to understand the fellow!

I can’t do anything with Cassel, since Maynz has the ordre not me. Breyer pleads the financial crisis, the impossibility, just now, of arranging a deferred settlement of his old bills, the refusal of all his patients to pay. He even says that he intends to sell his one and only horse. However I will see what is to be had, for I can hardly manage with the money from Maynz, and Hess’ payment, which was the first, has already gone the way of all flesh. Gigot is also in a fix. I shall go and see Breyer again today.

Tomorrow’s Débat social will contain a detailed refutation, blow by blow of the Moniteur [the article ‘Encore et toujours l'expulsion de M. Marx’ in Le Débat Social of 19 March 1848 appears to have been written by V. Faider].

You must further tell Faider that, if he has to have a special power of attorney, you will send him one.

Also write a few lines to M. Bricourt, membre de la Chambre des Représentants, who spoke up admirably on your behalf in the Chamber [199] and, at Maynz’s request, put some searching questions to the Minister, and who has instituted an enquête into the affair. He is the deputy for Charleroi and, after Castiau, the best of the lot. Castiau has just been to Paris.

Look through the enclosed scrawls and send it to the Réforme.

The fellows here need to be constantly provoked.

If possible I shall leave on Monday[207]. But money matters are perpetually thwarting my designs.

I am getting no news at all from England, whether through letters or the Star.

In Germany things are going very well indeed, riots everywhere and the Prussians aren’t giving way. So much the better. I hope we shan’t have to remain very long in Paris.

How excellent that you are throwing out Bornstedt. The fellow has proved so unreliable that his expulsion from the League is essential. He and Weerth are now allied and Weerth is running round here as a fanatical republican.

Lamartine is becoming daily more depraved. In all his speeches the man addresses himself exclusively to the bourgeoisie and seeks to pacify them. Even the Provisional Government’s Electoral Proclamation is directed wholly at the bourgeoisie in order to reassure them. Small wonder that the creatures are becoming uppish.

Adios, au revoir.

F. E.

All letters to be sent here to the address I have given; in my absence Bloss will give them to Gigot.

[on the back of the letter]

M. Marx

Rue neuve Ménilmontant

Engels To Emil Blank

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 165;

Written: 26 March 1848;

First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Paris, 26 March 1848

Dear Emil,

After the glorious February revolution and Belgium’s stillborn March revolution, I came back here last week. I wrote to Mother asking for money so that within a few days I could return to Germany[208] where we are starting up the [Neue] Rheinische Zeitung again. Mother is now very anxious to see me back in Germany, partly because she believes that there might again be some shooting here in the course of which I could get hurt, partly because she wants me to return anyway. However she also says in her letter:

‘How I can he expected to send you the money, I really don’t know, since a few days ago Fould notified Father that he was doing no more business, and since several good bills sent him by Father came back and were protested. Write and tell me, then, how I can be expected to let you have the money.'

The simplest thing would be for you to send me 20 pounds in banknotes, these being highly regarded here, and at once arrange with my old man to reimburse you. In this way I shall get my money quickly and be able to leave, whereas I would otherwise be stuck here for another week before getting money from Barmen, let alone Engelskirchen. I am therefore writing to Barmen this very day for them to repay you the £20, and I would ask you to arrange matters in the way I have just said, since bills are no longer any good.

You can send half of the bisected banknotes to me today, addressed to 19ter rue de la Victoire, Paris, and the remainder next day to Mlle Félicité André, same street and No. This will foil letter thieves.

Here things are going very well,[209] i.e. the bourgeoisie, who were beaten on 24 February and 17 March, are once more raising their heads and railing horribly against the Republic. But the only result of this will be that a thunderstorm quite unlike anything they have known before will very soon break over them. If the fellows persist in their insolence, some of them will very soon be strung up by the people. In the provisional government they have a certain party, namely Lamartine, the soft-soaper, whose life will also soon be forfeit. The workers here, 200,000-300,000 strong, will hear of no one but Ledru-Rollin, and they are right. He is the most resolute and radical of all. Flocon, too, is very good; I've been to see him once or twice and am about to do so again; he’s a thoroughly honest fellow.

We have nothing to do with the great crusade which is departing from here to set up the German republic by force of arms. [210]

My kindest regards to Marie [Blank] and the little ones and reply by return.

In haste,

Your

Frederick

Engels To Emil Blank [211]

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 167;

Written: 28 March 1848;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Paris, 28 March 1848

Dear Emil,

Today I received the first four halves of the 4 £5 notes and would ask you to send the other halves immediately, since I must get away as soon as possible. Many thanks for your willingness to come so promptly to my assistance in this emergency. Your subscription to the [Neue] Rheinische Zeitung has been registered.

As regards the parties here, there are, properly speaking, three major ones, not counting the minor ones (Legitimists [supporters of the Bourbon dynasty overthrown in 1830] and Bonapartists who simply intrigue, mere sects without influence among the people, in part wealthy, but no hope whatever of victory). These three are, first, those defeated on 24 February, i.e. the big bourgeoisie, speculators on the Bourse, bankers, manufacturers and big merchants, the old conservatives and liberals. Secondly, the petty bourgeoisie, the middle class, the bulk of the National Guard which, on 23 and 24 Febr. sided with the people, the ‘reasonable radicals’, Lamartine’s men and those of the National. Thirdly, the people, the Parisian workers, who are now holding Paris by force of arms.

The big bourgeoisie and the workers are in direct confrontation with each other. The petty bourgeois play an intermediary but altogether contemptible role. The latter, however, have a majority in the provisional government (Lamartine, Marrast, Dupont de I'Eure, Marie, Garnier-Pagès and, occasionally, Crémieux as well).

They, and the provisional government with them, vacillate a great deal. The quieter everything becomes, the more the government and the petty-bourgeois party incline towards the big bourgeoisie; the greater the unrest, the more they join up with the workers again. Recently, for instance, when the bourgeois had again become fearfully uppish and actually dispatched a column of National Guards 8,000 strong to the Town Hall to protest against a decree of the provisional government, and more especially against Ledru-Rollin’s vigorous measures,[212] they did in fact succeed in so intimidating the majority of the government, and in particular the weak-kneed Lamartine, that he publicly disavowed Ledru. But on the following day, 17 March, 200,000 workers marched on the Town Hall, proclaimed their implicit confidence in Ledru-Rollin and compelled the majority of the government and Lamartine to recant. For the time being, then, the men of the Réforme (Ledru-Rollin, Flocon, L. Blanc, Albert, Arago) again have the upper hand. They, more than anyone else in the government, still represent the workers, and are communists without knowing it. Unfortunately little Louis Blanc is making a great ass of himself with his vanity and his crack-brained schemes.[213] Ere long he will come a terrible cropper. But Ledru-Rollin is behaving very well.

The most unfortunate thing is that the government, on the one hand, has to make promises to the workers and, on the other, is unable to keep any of them because it lacks the courage to secure the necessary funds by revolutionary measures against the bourgeoisie, by severe progressive taxation, succession duties, confiscation of all émigré property, ban on the export of currency, state bank, etc. The men of the Réforme are allowed to make promises which they are then prevented from keeping by the most inane conservative decisions.

In addition there is now a new element in the National Assembly: the peasants who make up 5/7 of the French nation and support the party of the National, of the petty bourgeoisie. It is highly probable that this party will win, that the men of the Réforme will fall, and then there'll be another revolution. It’s also possible that, once in Paris, the deputies will realise how things stand here, and that only the men of the Réforme can stay the course in the long term. This, however, is improbable.

The postponement of the elections for a fortnight is also a victory for the Parisian workers over the bourgeois party.[214]

The men of the National, Marrast and Co., cut a very poor figure in other respects as well. They live in clover and provide their friends with palaces and good positions. Those from the Réforme are quite different. I've been to see old Flocon several times; the fellow lives as before in poor lodgings on the fifth floor, smokes cheap shag in an old clay pipe, and has bought nothing for himself but a new dressing-gown. For the rest his way of life is no less republican than when he was still editor of the Réforme, nor is he any less friendly, cordial and open-hearted. He’s one of the most decent fellows I know.

Recently I lunched at the Tuileries, in the Prince de Joinville’s suite, with old Imbert who was a réfugié in Brussels and is now Governor of the Tuileries. In Louis-Philippe’s apartments now the wounded lie on the carpets, smoking stubby pipes. In the throne-room the portraits of Soult and Bugeaud have been torn down and ripped and the one of Grouchy cut to shreds.

Going past at this very moment, to the strains of the Marseillaise, is the funeral cortège of a working man who died of his wounds. Escorting him are National Guards and armed populace at least 10,000 strong, and young toffs from the Chaussée d'Antin, have to escort the procession as mounted National Guards. The bourgeois are enraged at seeing a working man thus given the last honours.

Your

F. E.

Marx and Engels

To Étienne Cabet

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 169;

Written: 5 April 1848;

First published: in English in the journal Science and Society, 1940.

Paris, 5 April 1848

Dear Citizen,

During the last two days of our stay in Paris we presented ourselves at your house several times. But we always found your offices [of Le Populaire] so crowded with people that our all too limited time prevented us from taking our turn and waiting. We therefore regret that we have to leave without having had one last interview with you.

Mr Ewerbeck, who will be delivering this, will take it upon himself to inform us of the address we should use when writing to you.[215]

We do not doubt for one instant that we shall shortly be able to give you favourable news of the progress of the communist movement in Germany.

Meanwhile, please accept our respectful greetings.

Y ours very sincerely

K. Marx, F. Engels

Engels To Emil Blank

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 170;

Written: 15 April 1848;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Barmen, 15 April 1848

Dear Emil,

I am safely back here again.[216] The whole of Barmen is waiting to see what I shall do. They believe I'm going to proclaim the republic forthwith. The philistines are trembling with vague fear — what of, they themselves don’t really know. At any rate, it is believed that, now I am here, much will speedily resolve itself. C. and A. Ermen were quaking visibly when I walked into their office today. I, of course, am not meddling in anything but waiting quietly to see what happens.

The panic here is ineffable. The bourgeoisie are calling for confidence but confidence has gone. Most of them are fighting for existence, as they themselves put it. This doesn’t fill the workers’ bellies, however, and from time to time they rebel a little. General dissolution, ruin, anarchy, despair, fear, rage, constitutional enthusiasm, hatred of the Republic, etc., are rampant, and the fact is, for the time being, the richest people are the most tormented and frightened. And the exaggerations, the lies, the ranting and the railing, are enough to drive one out of one’s mind. The most placid of citizens is a real enragé. [madman — ironically comparing the German citizens with the men of the most radical trend during the French Revolution]

But they're in for a surprise when once the Chartists make a start. The business of the procession was a mere bagatelle. In a couple of months, my friend, G. Julian Harney, to whom pray address the enclosed letter, 9 Queen Street, Brompton, will be in Palmerston’s shoes[217]. I'll bet you twopence and in fact any sum. All is well with your mother and mine. They are expecting your brother Hermann; Anna is in Hamm. My regards to Marie and the children. À bientôt.

Your

F.

Marx To Engels

In Barmen

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 171;

Written: 24 April 1848;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Cologne about 24 April 1848

Apostelnstrasse Nr. 7

Dear Engels,

A good many have already been subscribed for here, and we must shall probably soon be able to make a start. [218] But now you must without fail make demands on your old man and in general declare definitively what is to be done in Barmen and Elberfeld.

A prospectus (written by Bürgers ) [Bürgers, ‘Prospectus for the Founding of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, later published in Das Westphälische Dampfboot, 17 May 1848], etc., has been sent from here to Hecker in Elberfeld.

Have you no address for Dronke? He must be written to forthwith.

Answer by return. I might come to your part of the world if things don’t look too fearsome with you.[219]

Your

M.

Engels To Marx[220]

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 172;

Written: 25 April 1848;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Barmen, 25 April 1848

Dear Marx,

I have just received the prospectus [H. Bürgers, ‘Prospectus for the Founding of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung'] along with your letter. There’s damned little prospect for the shares here. [Wilhelm] Blank, to whom I had already written about it[221] and who is still the best of the lot, has become practically a bourgeois; the others even more so since they became established and came into conflict with the workers. All these folk shun the discussion of social questions like the plague, calling it seditious talk. I have lavished on them the finest rhetoric, and resorted to every imaginable diplomatic ploy, but always hesitant answers. I am now going to make one final effort; if it fails, that will be the end of everything. In 2-3 days you'll have definite news about how things have gone. The fact is, after all that even these radical bourgeois here see us as their future main enemies and have no intention of putting into our hands weapons which we would very shortly turn against themselves.

Nothing whatever is to be got out of my old man. To him even the Kölner Zeitung is a hotbed of agitation and, sooner than present us with 1,000 talers, he would pepper us with a thousand balls of grape.

The most advanced of the bourgeois here find their party represented pretty much to their satisfaction by the Köln Zeitung. So what do you want us to do? ‘

Moses’ agent, Schnaake, who was here last week, would seem to have been calumniating us too.[222]

I have no address for Dronke except: Adolf Dominicus, merchant, Coblenz (his uncle). His old man is living in Fulda, a grammar school headmaster, I think. It’s a little backwater: Dr E. Dronke junior, Fulda, would probably reach him if he’s there. But it’s foolish of him not to write, if only to let us know his whereabouts.

I have had a letter from Ewerbeck asking whether we have received a supposedly important letter which he sent to the agreed address in Mainz. If you haven’t had it, write and inform Mainz (Philipp Neubeck, teacher candidate, Rentengasse (Heiliger Geist), Mainz).

Ewerbeck is having the Manifesto translated into Italian and Spanish in Paris and to that end wants us to send him 60 fr. which he has undertaken to pay. Yet another of those schemes of his. They will be splendid translations. [223]

I am working on the English translation, which presents more difficulties than I thought. However, I'm over half way through, and before long the whole thing will be finished. [224]

If even a single copy of our 17 points [Demands of the Communist Party in Germany] were to circulate here, all would be lost for us. The mood of the bourgeoisie is really ugly. The workers are beginning to bestir themselves a little, still in a very crude way, but as a mass. They at once formed coalitions. But to us that can only be a hindrance. The Elberfeld political club [225] issues addresses to the Italians, advocates direct election but resolutely eschews any discussion of social questions, although in private these gentlemen admit that such questions are now coming to be the order of the day, always with the proviso that we should not take precipitate action!

Adios. Write soon in greater detail. Has the letter been sent to Paris, and did it have any results? [226]

Your E.

Engels To Marx

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 174;

Written: 9 May 1848;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Barmen, 9 May 1848

Dear Marx,

Herewith:

1. The list of the shares so far subscribed for, 14 in number.

2. A proxy for you. [227]

3. One for d'Ester (Bohnstedt is an acquaintance of his).

4. One for Bürgers.

It was unavoidable that Bohnstedt and Hecker should have given their proxies to personal acquaintances.

Hühnerbein will appear there in person on behalf of himself and two others here.

The list is not yet closed. Although I have called on Laverrière and Blank x times, I haven’t found them at home. Zulauff has taken over the former.

Two others, with whom I made no headway, will be worked upon by Hecker.

Today Zulauff is going to Ronsdorf, where he has good prospects.

The two kinds of people who prove the most difficult are, firstly, the republicans in kid gloves [a nickname of the moderate bourgeois republicans in France, followers of Armand Marrast], who fear for their fortunes and smell communism in the air and, secondly, the local panjandrums, who regard us as rivals.

Neither Nohl nor Bracht were to be persuaded. Of the jurists, Bohnstedt is the only one with whom anything can be done. All in all we've made fruitless moves enough.

Tomorrow I am going to Engelskirchen for 2 days. Let me know at once the results of the shareholders’ meeting.

A beginning has also been made with a community of the [Communist] League.

Your

Engels

Marx To The Editor of the Newspaper L'Alba [6]

Source: MECW Volume 7, p. 11;

Written: at the end of May 1848;

First published: in L'Alba, June 29, 1848.

Dear Sir,

A new daily newspaper will be published in Cologne from the first of June; it will be called Neue Rheinische Zeitung and will be edited by Herr Karl Marx. This paper will advocate in these latitudes the same democratic principles that L'Alba represents in Italy. There can therefore be no doubt about the line we shall take on the questions now pending between Italy and Austria. We shall defend the cause of Italian independence, we shall fight to the death Austrian despotism in Italy as in Germany and Poland. We extend a fraternal hand to the Italian people and want to prove to them that the German nation entirely repudiates the policy of oppression which in your country is carried through by the same men who in our country too have always combated freedom. We shall do our utmost to promote the union of, and good understanding between, two great and free nations which have, until now, been led to believe by a nefarious system of government that they were each other’s enemy. We shall therefore demand the immediate withdrawal from Italy of the brutal Austrian soldiery, and that the Italian people be placed in a position to express its sovereign will in the question of the form of government which it wants to choose.

In order to enable us to follow Italian affairs, and in order to give you the opportunity of judging the sincerity of our promises, we suggest an exchange of papers. Thus we propose to send you the Neue Rheinische Zeitung every day and to receive from you L'Alba regularly. We hope that you will accept this proposal and ask you to start sending us L'Alba as soon as possible so that already in our first issues we can make use of it.

If you wish to send us other information as well we should be pleased to receive it, and assure you that anything likely to serve the cause of democracy in any country will be given our most careful consideration.

Fraternal greetings.

For the editorial board of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung

Dr. Karl Marx, Editor

Engels To Emil Blank [228]

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 175;

Written: 24 May 1848;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Cologne, 24 May 1848

14, Höhle

Dear Emil,

I arrived here in Cologne last Saturday. The [Neue] Rheinische Zeitung will be appearing on 1 June. But if we are not at once to come up against obstacles, some preliminary arrangements must be made in London, and we are taking the liberty of entrusting these to you since there’s nobody else there.

1. Arrange at any newsman’s for a subscription to The Telegraph (daily paper) and The Economist, weekly paper, from the time this letter arrives until 1 July. The newsman, whose address you can give us to save being bothered again later on, should include both papers in one wrapper or paper band — in the way papers are customarily sent — and dispatch them daily, addressed to Mr W. Clouth, St, Agatha, 12, Cologne, via Ostend. [229]

2. Please forward the enclosed letters.

3. Pay the cost of the subscription to the two papers, the postage of this letter, etc., etc., and charge them at once to the dispatch department of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, St Agatha, 12, Cologne, stating to whom the sum is to be sent, and it will be done at once.

The necessary capital for the newspaper has been raised. Everything is going well, all that remains is the question of the papers, and then we can start. We are already getting The Times and, for the first month, we need no other English papers than the two above-mentioned. Should you ever happen upon something worthy of note in another paper, we should be grateful if you would send it to us. Any expense will, of course, immediately be refunded. Papers containing detailed information on trade, the state of business, etc., etc., are also desirable. Write some time and let me know what papers are now to be had there, so that we know how we stand.

I didn’t, of course, see Marie, as I had to leave before she arrived. But I'll be going over there some time soon, when things here are really under way. Barmen, by the way, is more boring than ever and is filled with a general hatred for what little freedom they have. The jackasses believe that the world exists solely to enable them to make tidy profits and, since these are now at a low ebb, they are screeching gruesomely. If they want freedom they must pay for it, as the French and English have had to do; but these people think they ought to have everything for nothing. Here things are looking up a little, if not very much. The Prussians are still the same as ever, the Poles are being branded with lunar caustic and, at the moment of writing, Mainz is being bombarded by the Prussians because the Civic Guard arrested a few drunken and rampaging soldiers[230] — the sovereign National Assembly in Frankfurt hears the firing and doesn’t seem to take any notice.[231] In Berlin Camphausen is taking it easy, while reaction, the rule of officials and aristocrats grows daily more insolent, irritates the people, the people revolt and Camphausen’s spinelessness and cowardice lead us straight towards fresh revolutions. That is Germany as it now is! Adieu.

Your

F. E.

Engels To Karl Friedrich Köppen

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 177;

Written: 1 September 1848;

First published: in French in L'Humanité, November 1920.

Cologne, 1 September 1848

My dear Köppen,

I return your article herewith. I should already have sent it before but had lost your address in the turmoil of the removal and the mass of business this involved. [232]

Marx will have told you how often we thought of you during the sleepless night of exile. I can assure you that you were the only one of the Berliners whom we recalled with pleasure. Come to that, the sleepless night of exile was pleasurable after all and I look back on it longingly from out of this tedious philistine farce known as the German revolution! But one must be able to make sacrifices for the dear fatherland, and the greatest sacrifice is to return to that fatherland and write leading articles for this gross and boorish public. Farewell.

Tout à vous

F. Engels

Marx To Engels [233]

In Geneva

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 177;

Written: 30 October 1848;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Cologne, about 29 or 30 October 1848

Dear Engels,

As your letter only arrived this evening, there is no time left to make enquiries about bills. I haven’t even time to go home. I send you the enclosed, which happens to be to hand and, in addition, a draft of 50 talers from Schulz on a citizen of Geneva [J Köhler] where you might also obtain help in other ways.

I sent 50 talers to you and Dronke in Paris a long time ago and at the same time sent your passport to Gigot in Brussels.

Since 11 October the paper has been appearing again, quite unchanged. It is not the time now to go into details, as haste is necessary. As soon as you can, write some news items and longer articles. Now that everyone save Weerth is away, Freiligrath having only joined us a few days ago, I am up to my eyes and unable to undertake work of a more detailed kind, and in addition the public prosecutor’s office is doing all it can to rob me of my time.

Write by return. Shall I send your underclothing, etc.? Plasmann ready to do so immediately. [234]

Your father has paid him, by the way.

By the way, your old man has written to Gigot asking where you are. He wants, so he says, to send you some money. I sent him your address.

Your

K. Marx

[From Louis Schulz]

P. S. Should be obliged if you would open enclosed letter to J. Köhler by the Lake, or rue du Rhône, and deliver same, whereupon he will pay you 250 fr. for my account against sight draft on me. Friendly greetings.

Louis Schulz

Marx To Engels

In Lausanne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 178;

Written: first half of November 1848;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929

Cologne, first half of November 1848

Dear Engels,

I am truly amazed that you should still not have received any money from me. I (not the dispatch department) sent you 61 talers ages ago, 11 in notes, 50 as a bill, to Geneva, enclosed in a letter to the address you gave. So make inquiries and write immediately. I have a postal receipt and can reclaim the money.

I had further sent 20 talers to Gigot and, later, 50 to Dronke for all of you, each time out of my cashbox. A total of some 130 talers.

Tomorrow I shall send you some more. But inquire about the money. The bill included a note recommending you to one of Lausanne’s financial philistines.

I am short of money. I returned from my journey with 1,850 talers; I received 1,950 from the Poles. I spent 100 while still on my journey. I advanced 1,000 to the newspaper (and also to yourself and other refugees). This week there are still 500 to be paid for the machine. Balance 350. And withal I haven’t received a cent from the paper.[235]

As regards your editorship, I 1) announced in the very first issue [Marx, Editorial Statement Concerning the Reappearance of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung] that the committee was to remain unchanged, 2) explained to the idiotic reactionary shareholders that they are at liberty to regard any of you as no longer belonging to the editorial staff, but that I am at liberty to pay as high fees as I wish and hence that they will be no better off financially.

It would have been, perhaps, more sensible not to advance so large a sum for the newspaper, as I have 3-4 court actions hanging over me, [236] can be locked up any day and then pant for money as doth the hart for cooling streams. But whatever the circumstances, this fort had to be held and the political position not surrendered.

The best thing — once you have settled the financial business in Lausanne — is to go to Berne and carry out your proposed plan. Besides, you can write for anything you want. Your letters always arrive in reasonably good time.

To suppose that I could leave you in the lurch for even a moment is sheer fantasy. You will always remain my friend and confidant as I hope to remain yours.

K. Marx

Your old man’s a swine and we shall write him a damned rude letter.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Düsseldorf

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 180;

Written: 13 November 1848;

First published: in Düsseldorf 1848. Bilder und Dokumente, 1948.

Cologne, 13 November 1848

Dear Lassalle,

At your democratic-monarchist club [237] you should resolve the following:

1. General refusal to pay taxes — to be advocated specially in rural areas;

2. Dispatch of volunteer corps to Berlin;

3. Cash remittance to the Democratic Central Committee in

Berlin.[238]

For the Rhenish Democratic Provincial Committee [239]

K. Marx

(Private)

Dear Lassalle,

If you could send me some money, whether it be the 200 talers or the amount for the loan certificates, you would greatly oblige me. Send it to my wife, Cecilienstrasse 7. I have had a summons [240] today and it is generally believed that I shall be arrested tomorrow.

Your

Marx

Marx To Engels

In Berne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 181;

Written: 29 November 1848;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929

Cologne, 29 November 1848

Dear Engels,

The papers have been sent to you. If this was not done sooner the fault lies with that jackass Korff who, because I was overworked, a circumstance aggravated by repeated summonses, has so far failed to carry out my orders.

In the meantime remain in Berne. I shall write to you as soon as you can come. Seal your letters better. One of them had been opened, as I indicated in the paper, without, of course, mentioning your name. [Marx, ‘Letters Opened']

Write in detail about Proudhon and, since your geography is good, about the dirty business in Hungary (nations swarming like bees). [Engels, Proudhon and The Magyar Struggle] Don’t forget me [i.e., The Poverty of Philosophy] in the piece on Proudhon, since our articles are reprinted by a great many French newspapers.

Write something, too, attacking the Federal Republic, to which end Switzerland provides the best opportunity. [Engels, The National Council]

K. Heinzen has published his old trashy piece attacking us. [K. Heinzen, Die Helden des teutschen Kommunismus, 1848]

Our paper continues to stand by the principle of émeute [uprising], but despite all my summonses in court, it has succeeded in sailing clear of the Code pénal.[241] It is now very much en vogue. We are also issuing posters daily.[242] La révolution marche. Write diligently.

I have devised an infallible plan for extracting money from your old man, as we now have none. Write me a begging letter (as crude as possible), in which you retail your past vicissitudes, but in such a way that I can pass it on to your mother. The old man’s beginning to get the wind up.

I hope to see you again soon.

Your

Marx

Marx To Eduard von Müller-Tellering

In Vienna

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 182;

Written: 5 December 1848;

First published: in the Volksstimme, Frankfurt a. M., 22 October 1897.

Cologne, 5 December 1848

My dear Tellering,

You would already have had the missing issues [Neue Rheinische Zeitung], but most of them are missing. Hence I am still busily trying to get hold of the copies you lack.

As regards your feuilleton, you must excuse me for not having read it through yet, owing to my being overworked. If it is not suitable for our newspaper you shall have it back.

Regarding the addresses, all your letters have arrived. As a precaution, write to Herr Werres, Unter Huthmacher 17. The address is wholly above suspicion.

Just now our newspaper is sans sou. But the subscribers [...?] The jackasses are at last beginning to feel that our prophecies have invariably been right; unless we're suppressed by the government we shall have surmounted our troubles by the beginning of January, and then I shall do everything in my power to reward you in accordance with your services. Your articles are incontestably the best we receive, completely in line with our own tendency, and since they have been reprinted from our paper by French, Italian and English periodicals, you are contributing a great deal to the enlightenment of the European public.[243]

I cannot describe to you what sacrifices in terms of money and patience I have had to make to keep the newspaper going. The Germans are crack-brained jackasses.

Give my kindest regards to your Wife and rest assured of my constant friendship.

Yours

K. Marx

Engels To Marx

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 183;

Written: 28 December 1848;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Berne, 28 December 1848

Dear Marx,

How are things? Now that Gottschalk and Anneke have been acquitted,[244] shan’t I be able to come back soon? The Prussian curs must surely soon tire of meddling with juries. As I have said, if there are sufficient grounds for believing that I shall not be detained for questioning, I shall come at once. After that they may, so far as I'm concerned, place me before 10,000 juries, but when you're arrested for questioning you're not allowed to smoke, and I won’t let myself in for that.

In any case the whole September affair[245] is crumbling away to nothing. One after another they're going back. So write.

Apropos, some money would come in very handy towards the middle of January. By then you should receive plenty.

Your

E.

Marx To Wilhelm Stieber [246]

In Berlin

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

[Draft] Cologne, about 29 December 1848

The editorial department is in receipt of your letter and accepts the correction dated Frankfurt [’stieber’, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 30 December 1848, supplement]. As to your threat of a libel action, this only reveals your ignorance of the Code pénal, whose paragraph relating to libel does not apply to the report appearing in No. 177. [247] Moreover, to set your mind at rest be it said that this report was sent to us by a Frankfurt Deputy before the Neue Preussische Zeitung divulged the same news. Your earlier activities in Silesia did not seem to us to belie the contents of the said report, although we did, on the other hand, think it strange that you should exchange your more remunerative and honourable post in Berlin for one which, albeit legal, is precarious and equivocal.

As to your protestations regarding your activities in Silesia [Neue Preussische Zeitung, 20 December 1848], we shall endeavour to place material at your disposal, either publicly or in private, as you wish.

On the grounds of their novelty, we shall excuse the lectures on democracy and democratic organs contained in your letter.

1849

Engels to Marx. 7-8 January

Marx to Eduard von Muller-Tellering. 15 January

Marx to Ernst Dronke. 3 February

Engels to Daniel Fenner von Fenneberg. 1 March

Marx to Colonel Engels. 3 March

Marx to Colonel Engels. Before 15 April

Marx to Engels. Before 15 April

Marx to Engels. 23 April

Marx to Hermann Brehmer. 6 May

Marx to Eduard von Muller-Tellering. 6 May

Marx to Andreas Stifft. 6 May

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. l June

Marx to Engels. 7 June

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 13 July

Marx to Caroline Scholer. 14 July

Engels to Jenny Marx. 25 July

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 31 July

Marx to Engels. End of July

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. End of July

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. Mid-August

Marx to Engels. 17 August

Marx to Engels. 23 August

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 23 August

Engels to Jakob Lukas Schabelitz. 24 August

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 5 September

Engels to George Julian Harney. 5 October

Marx to Louis Bauer. 30 November

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 19 December

Engels to Jakob Lukas Schabelitz. 22 December

Engels To Marx

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 185;

Written: 8 January 1849;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Berne, 7-8 January 1849

Dear Marx,

Having recovered, after several weeks of sinful living, from my exertions and adventures,[233] I feel, firstly, a need to get down to work again (striking proof of this being the enclosed Magyar-Slav article [The Magyar Struggle]) , and, secondly, a need for money. The letter is the more urgent and if by the time this arrives, you haven’t yet sent me anything, do so forthwith, for I've been sans le sou these past few days, and it’s impossible to touch anyone in this rotten town.

If only something worth writing about happened in this rotten country. But it’s all local rubbish of the rottenest kind. However I'll shortly be sending a few general articles about it. If I have to stay abroad much longer I shall go to Lugano, particularly if something blows up in Italy, as seems likely.

But I keep thinking that I shall soon be able to return. This lazing about in foreign parts, where you can’t really do anything and are completely outside the movement, is truly unbearable. I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that detention for questioning in Cologne is better than life in free Switzerland. So do write and tell me if there isn’t some chance of my being treated as favourably as Bürgers, Becker, etc., etc. [248] Raveaux is right: even in grace and favour Prussia [249] one is freer than in free Switzerland. Every little nonentity here is at one and the same time a police spy and an assommeur.[assassin] I saw an example of this on New Year’s Eve.

Who the devil was responsible for inserting recently that boring religio-moral article from Heidelberg [Ein Aktenstück des Märzvereins, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 29 December 1848] on the March Association [250]. To my pleasure I have also noticed that Henricus occasionally exhales an article — witness the sighs extending over 2 issues on the subject of the Ladenberg circular. [H. Bürgers, ‘Hr. v. Ladenberg und die Volksschullehrer’, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 30 December 1848]

Our newspaper is now much quoted in Switzerland, the Berner Zeitung borrows a lot as does the [Schweizerische] National-Zeitung, and this then goes the rounds of all the other papers. Also much quoted, more so than the Kölnische, according to the National, etc., etc., in Swiss papers in the French language.

You'll have included the advertisement. [re daily publication of the Berner Zeitung as from 1 January 1849 printed in Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 3, 5, and 7 January] Herewith a copy of ours in the Berner Zeitung. Greetings to the whole company.

Your

E.

Missed the post yesterday. Today, then, I'll merely add that since 1 January the Neue Rheinische Zeitung has no longer been arriving here. Do ascertain whether it’s being regularly dispatched. I've looked into the question of a subscription, but it’s no good. I'd have to subscribe for a 1/2 year; I shan’t be staying as long as that and anyway I haven’t any money. As I said, it’s important it should arrive here, not simply on my own account, but mainly because the Berner Zeitung, which is well disposed towards us and edited by a communist, [Niklaus Niggeler] is doing everything to make it en vogue here.

Marx To Eduard von Müller-Tellering

In Ratibor

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 189;

Written: 15 January 1849;

First published: in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1946.

Cologne, 15 January 1849

Dear Tellering,

You always calculate your posting days wrongly because you imagine that the post from Austria and Berlin arrives here regularly. But it’s always 1-2 days late and is exceedingly irregular. I got your first letter from Vienna on the evening of the 10th. On the 11th I promptly sent a post-restante letter to Oderberg enclosing 50 talers in money orders [251]. Hence you'll have to return to Oderberg in any case, so as to pick up the money.

You will receive the newspapers, provided you write and tell me, immediately you get back from Oderberg, whereabouts you intend to live in the interim.

Despite Geiger’s malevolence, I hope to see the matter of your passport finally settled within 2-3 days. But you must also tell me where our Berlin friend is to send your passport to.

If you have to keep away from Vienna — which would be an irreparable loss to the paper and would mean your appointing a deputy responsible for day-to-day information — Breslau would seem to me to be the most suitable place to stay. I frequently think sorrowfully of your wife, who deserves a more comfortable lot.

I am enclosing an issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which will, I trust, be of interest to you on account of the leading article on the Magyars [Engels, The Magyar Struggle].

Write to me as soon as you possibly can. In France the fun will begin anew in the spring. The bourgeois republic’s infamy has advanced too rapidly towards the ‘heyday of its transgressions’ [Shakespeare, Hamlet].

Yours

K. Marx

Marx To Ernst Dronke

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 190;

Written: 3 February 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Cologne, 3 February 1849

Dear Dronke,

Your letter, passed on to me by Engels, I shall answer briefly as follows:

1. As regards your coming here: When I wrote ‘Don’t come to Germany until I write to you’, Kratz had told me that your case was not yet quite settled.[252]

2. Later I wrote to Kapp instead of to you because Kapp was bombarding me with threatening letters. The draft I gave Kapp wasn’t honoured by Korff. In the meantime I had declared at the shareholders’ meeting that either Korff or I must resign from the paper [Neue Rheinische Zeitung]. Moreover, during this period Plasman had again sequestered the postage money, and the paper, as Engels discovered on his arrival, was expecting to announce its insolvency any day.

3. As regards the Meyerbeer business, I know nothing whatever about it. You will appreciate that in a situation in which the compositors were daily rebelling over a few talers, I would hardly have spurned 150 talers.

4. As regards my letter about Kapp, I was justified in writing it. During the most ghastly period of all, Kapp was threatening to attack us publicly. If you put yourself in our situation at that time, you will understand my vexation. As regards Weerth’s comment (which, by the by, referred not to you, but to Imandt, who was writing to us incessantly), this is the first I have heard of it.

5. As regards the 25 talers remitted on 14 January, these were dispatched to you in the presence of witnesses via Ewerbeck’s address. The Post Office here will provide information about this tomorrow. Nota bene: Kapp received 15 talers from me at the same time.

6. As regards my not answering, Lupus will testify that I wrote to you frequently.

7. If the tone of one of my letters was waspish, this was, a) because I was going through an atrociously bad patch with the paper and was under attack from all the paper’s correspondents and creditors, b) because, in a letter to Freiligrath, Imandt depicted you, Kapp, etc., as complaining bitterly about me, while the precious Beust, I think it is Beust (I am not quite sure), was sending similar letters here.

Within a few days the paper must either go under or else consolidate itself, in which case we shall immediately send you more money of which, at the moment, there is a complete lack. However the business of the 25 talers must be cleared up.

That I have constantly regarded you as co-editor of the paper is apparent not only from the new announcement in the various papers [Bestellungen auf die Neue Rheinische Zeitung für das nächste Quartal, Januar bis März 1849] but also from the fact that I placed your article about the expulsion of the Frankfurt refugee [F. Wiedecker] under ‘Cologne’. [E. Dronke, ‘Allianz der europäischen Polizei’, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 11 January 1849]

Your

Marx

[From Wilhelm Wolff]

In entire agreement with the above

Your

Lupus

Engels To Daniel Fenner von Fenneberg

In Frankfurt Am Main

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 191;

Written: 1 March 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, 1962.

Cologne, 1 March 1849

Dear Sir,

I would have replied to you before now had I not first had to consult various other people about your matter. I do not think it advisable for you to make any sort of public appearance here; out of craving for advancement, the chief of police here is capable de tout as we have experienced only today in the unjustified expulsion of a local Polish refugee. I would further advise you, should your passport not be absolutely impeccable, to choose any route to Paris other than via Cologne and Brussels. You would get through Cologne well enough, but you would undoubtedly he arrested at the Belgian border and transported by prison van to the French border, after having, perhaps, spent several days in prison. I myself experienced this 5 months ago, [233] and every day fresh reports reach us of these infamies perpetrated against the refugees by the Belgians. You even run the risk of having all your money taken from you by the scoundrels and not getting a farthing back, as happened to the refugee, von Hochstetter.

If I can be of service to you in any other way, it would be a pleasure.

Yours faithfully

F. Engels

Marx To Colonel Engels

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 192;

Written: 3 March 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Draft, Cologne, 3 March 1849

To Colonel Engels, Deputy Commandant

Sir,

The day before yesterday two non-commissioned officers [Dust and Hover] of the 8th Company, 16th Infantry Regiment, came to my rooms to speak to me privately. I had left for Düsseldorf. They were therefore turned away. Yesterday afternoon two of these gentlemen again presented themselves and demanded a private interview.

I had them shown into a room where I Joined them almost immediately. I invited the gentlemen to sit down and asked them what they wanted. They told me they wanted to know the name of the writer of the article (No. 233 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 28 February) against Captain von Uttenhoven[253]. I replied to these gentlemen, 1) that the article in question had nothing to do with me since it had appeared below the line and was therefore an advertisement; 2) that they were at liberty to insert a refutation gratis; 3) that they were at liberty to sue the paper. Upon the gentlemen’s remarking that the whole of the 8th Company felt themselves to be insulted by the advertisement, I returned that nothing but the signatures of all the members of the 8th Company would convince me of the accuracy of that statement, which in any case was irrelevant.

The non-commissioned officers thereupon declared that if I failed to name, to ‘deliver up’ the ‘man’, they would ‘no longer be able to restrain their men’, and ‘evil would result’.

I told the gentlemen that little or nothing was to be achieved by trying to threaten or intimidate me. They then withdrew muttering under their breath.

Relaxation of discipline must have gone very far and all sense of law and order must have ceased if’ like a robber band, a Company can send delegates to an individual citizen and attempt with threats to extort this or that confession from him. In particular, I fail to understand the meaning of the sentence: ‘We can no longer restrain our men’.

Are these ‘men’, perhaps, to exercise jurisdiction on their own initiative, do these ‘men’ have other than legal resources at their command?

I must beg you, Sir, to institute an inquiry into this incident and to give me an explanation for this singular presumption. I would be sorry to be obliged to have recourse to publicity.

Marx To Colonel Engels

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 194;

Written: 15 April 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Draft, Cologne, before 15 April 1849

To Colonel Engels, Commandant

Sir,

Being convinced that Royal Prussian non-commissioned officers would not deny words spoken in private, I did not call in any witnesses to the conversation in question. As to my alleged remark that ‘the courts, as has recently been seen, can do nothing to me’,[254] even my political opponents will concede that, were I to harbour such a foolish thought, I would not express it before a third party. And do not the non-commissioned officers themselves admit that I explained to them that things below the line are no concern of mine and that in any case I am responsible only for the section of the paper signed by me? Hence there was absolutely no reason to speak of my position vis-à-vis the courts.

I am all the happier to refrain from pressing for a further inquiry as it was my concern, not that the non-commissioned officers should be punished, but simply that they should be reminded, from the lips of their superiors, of the limits of their duties.

As for the kind remark with which you conclude, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung has demonstrated, by its silence over the recent friction among the military themselves, how great is its consideration for the prevailing mood of unrest.

Marx To Engels

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 195;

Written: 15 April 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1929 and in MEGA, 1929.

Cologne, before 15 April 1849

Dear Engels,

Leave out the article on B. Dietz until the facts have been ascertained. We shall ourselves write to Brussels on the subject.

By the way, try to find out the name of the printer’s apprentice who reported the matter to Dietz without authority.

Your

Marx

[on the back of the letter]

Herr Engels, local

Marx To Engels

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 195;

Written: 23 April 1849;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Hamburg, 23 April 1849

Dear Engels,

Your letter didn’t reach me till today [255] as I had already left Bremen on Wednesday morning. Nothing doing in Bremen. Rösing went bankrupt a year ago and is now living solely on the interest from what remains of his wife’s capital. Hence nothing doing.

On the other hand I shall certainly be able to make shift here.

As for the signature, cannot Werres sign?

18 April 1849

As for interim money arrangements, as long as I'm away the following should be noted: before I left, Plasmann solemnly promised to make whatever advances were necessary. Perhaps St. Naut feels some scruple about resorting to this source. If necessary, do so yourself.

All this week the paper has been very skimpy, which assorts ill with my present mission.

Warmest regards to my wife and the others.

Write by return whatever happens, and keep your chin up. Les choses marcheront.

Your

K. Marx

[Inside the envelope]

Address: Rohde, Merchant, Bleichenbrücke.

Marx To Hermann Brehmer

In Breslau

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 196;

Written: 6 May 1849;

First published: in G. Becker, Neue Dokumente von Karl Marx aus dem jahre 1849, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 1974.

Harburg, 6 May 1849

To Mr Brehmer in Breslau

I warmly recommend to you the bearer of these lines, Mr Bruhn, whose name you will still recall from the events in Southern Germany last year. [256]

Yours very truly

Karl Marx

Marx To Eduard von Müller-Tellering

In Breslau

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 197;

Written: 6 May 1849;

First published: in G. Becker, Neue Dokumente von Karl Marx aus dem jahre 1849, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 1974.

Harburg, 6 May 1849

Dear Tellering,

I warmly recommend to you the bearer, Mr. Bruhn, who is one of our principal agitators in Germany.

Yours very truly

Dr Karl Marx

Marx To Andreas Stifft

In Vienna

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 197;

Written: 6 May 1849;

First published: in G. Becker, Neue Dokumente von Karl Marx aus dem jahre 1849, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, 1974.

Harburg, 6 May 1849

To Dr. Stifft in Vienna

Dear Stifft,

Post tot discrimina rerum [After so many vicissitudes — Virgil, Aeneid], I am glad to have an opportunity of reminding you of my existence. Each new number of the Vienna paper [Der Radikale] gives me the real satisfaction of knowing beyond doubt that you have not been swallowed up by the counter-revolutionary monster.[257] I trust that we shall yet find ourselves seated side by side at a convention.

The bearer, Bruhn, is one of my best friends and a proficient, active revolutionary. I recommend him to you most highly.

Yours

K. Marx

Marx To Joseph Weydemeyer [258]

In Frankfurt Am Main

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 198;

Written: 1 June 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Bingen, 1 June 1849

Dear Weydemeyer,

I beg you in my own and Freiligrath’s names to take the printer of Freiligrath’s poem [Freiligrath’s ‘Abschiedswort der Neuen Rheinischen Zeitung’ published in the newspaper’s last number, 19 May 1849, printed in red ink] to court for piracy and sue him for damages.

My general attorney is St. A. Naut in Cologne, and I should be much obliged if you would write to him about this matter.

Vale faveque.'

K. Marx

Marx To Engels [259]

In Kaiserslautern

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 198;

Written: 7 June 1849;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929.

Paris, 7 June 1849 45, rue de Lille

Dear Engels,

I am not writing to you at any great length in this letter. First I want you to tell me in your reply whether it arrives intact. I believe that letters are again being opened con amore. [enthusiastically]

Here a royalist reaction is in full swing, more barefaced than under Guizot, and comparable only to that after 1815. Paris is morne. [dreary] On top of that the cholera is raging mightily. For all that, never has a colossal eruption of the revolutionary volcano been more imminent than it is in Paris today. Details to follow. I consort with the whole of the revolutionary party and in a few days’ time I shall have all the revolutionary journals at my disposal.

As for the Palatinate-Baden envoys here, Blind, alarmed by a real or pretended attack of cholera, has moved into the country some hours away from Paris.

As for Schütz, the following should be noted:

1. The Provisional Government has placed him in a false position by failing to keep him informed. The French demand des faits and where can he get them from if not a soul writes to him? Dispatches must reach him as often as possible. It is clear that at this moment he can achieve nothing. All that can be done is to throw dust in the eyes of the Prussian Government by enabling him to have frequent meetings with the leaders of the Montagnards.[260]

2. A second, unpardonable mistake on the part of the Gouvernement provisoire du Palatinat is their entrusting a crowd of rotten Germans with this or that mission behind the back of the official envoy. This will have to cease once and for all if Schütz is to maintain at least the prestige of his position vis-à-vis the Montagnards and just now-vis-à-vis Prussia — that is the whole point of his mission.

Apart from that, it goes without saying that he doesn’t learn very much, since he consorts only with a few official Montagnards. I shall, incidentally, keep him always informed.

For my part I must ask you to write to me at least twice a week regularly and immediately every time anything important happens.

The Kölnische Zeitung feuilleton on the Palatinate movement, dated Dürkheim an der Haardt, states among other things:

‘Some anger has been aroused by Mr Marx, editor of the [Neue] Rheinische Zeitung. He is said to have told the Provisional Government that since his time had not yet come, he intended temporarily to retire.'

How does that fit in? The miserable Germans here, with whom, by the way, I avoid any meeting, will seek to proclaim this throughout the whole of Paris. I therefore think it advisable for you to see that an item appears in the Karlsruher Zeitung or the Mannheimer AbendZeitung stating expressly that I am in Paris as the representative of the democratic Central Committee. Another reason why I think this would be useful is that for the time being, as no immediate results are to be obtained here, the Prussians must be made to believe that the most frightful intrigues are going on here. We must frighten the aristocrats.

Ruge is a complete nonentity here.

What is Dronke doing?

You must, by the way, see that you raise money for me somewhere. You know that I spent the latest sums received to honour the obligations of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and, in the present circumstances, I cannot live a completely retired life, still less get into financial difficulties.

If at all possible let me have an article in French in which you sum up the whole Hungarian affair.[261]

Show this letter to d'Ester, to whom my best regards. If I am to write to a different address, let me have it.

M.

Write to me at the following address: M. Ramboz, 45 rue de Lille

[On the back of the letter]

Herrn Fr. Engels, inquire at Dr d'Ester’s.

Marx To Joseph Weydemeyer

In Frankfurt Am Main

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 201;

Written: 13 July 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Paris, 13 July 1849

45, rue de Lille. Address: M. Ramboz

Dear Weydemeyer,

Dronke will already have written to tell you that you must sell the red newspapers at any price.[262]

I am here with my family, sans le sou.[263] And yet an opportunity has come my way of making 3,000-4,000 fr. in a few weeks. For my pamphlet against Proudhon, [The Poverty of Philosophy] which he has done everything in his power to suppress, is beginning to sell here, and it is up to me to infiltrate reviews of it into the more important papers, thus necessitating a second edition. But for this to be of any help I would have to buy up the copies still available in Brussels and Paris in order to become sole propriétaire.

300-400 talers would enable me to carry out this operation and at the same time maintain myself here during the early days. You might, perhaps, be able to help me in this.

Namely, as follows:

A lady in Rheda — Lüning is also in touch with her — sent 1,000 talers to Carl Post for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, but recovered the money when that paper went under. Might she not, perhaps, be persuaded by your intervention to make me this advance? My claim to such an advance is, I believe, all the greater as I contributed more than 7,000 talers to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung which, after all, was a party enterprise.

If at all possible, pursue this matter, but without mentioning it to anybody. I tell you that, unless help is forthcoming from one quarter or another, I shall be lost since my family is also here and the last piece of my wife’s jewellery has already found its way to the pawnbrokers.

I await your reply by return.

Your

K. Marx

Marx To Caroline Schöler

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 202;

Written: 14 July 1849;

First published: in MEGA2, 1981.

Paris, 14 July 1849

45, rue de Lille

[Appended to Jenny Marx’s letter to the same addressee]

Dear Lina,

Would you be so kind, when you write to my wife, as to enclose a note to the red Orlando furioso [Ferdinand Wolff — red Wolff — is compared to the title character of L. Ariosto’s poem]? You must help me a little in the act I am putting on.

Yours very sincerely

K. Marx

Engels To Jenny Marx [264]

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 202;

Written: 25 July 1849;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Vevey, Vaud Canton,

25 July 1849

Dear Mrs Marx,

You as well as Marx will be wondering why you have not heard from me for so long. Here are the reasons. On the same day as I wrote to Marx (from Kaiserslautern) there came news that the Prussians had occupied Homburg, thereby cutting off communications with Paris. So I couldn’t send the letter off and went to join Willich. In Kaiserslautern I had completely disassociated myself from the so-called revolution; but when the Prussians arrived, I couldn’t resist the urge to take part in the war. Willich being the only officer who was any good, I joined him and became his adjutant. I was in four engagements, two of them fairly important, particularly the one at Rastatt,[265] and discovered that the much-vaunted bravery under fire is quite the most ordinary quality one can possess. The whistle of bullets is really quite a trivial matter and though, throughout the campaign, great deal of cowardice was in evidence, I did not see as many as a dozen men whose conduct was cowardly in battle. But all the more ‘brave stupidity’. In short, I came through the whole thing unscathed, and as it turns out, it was as well that one member of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was present, since the entire pack of democratic blackguards were in Baden and the Palatinate, and are now bragging about the heroic deeds they never performed. It would have been said again that the gentlemen of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung were too cowardly to fight. But of all the democratic gentry, the only ones to fight were myself and Kinkel. The latter joined our corps as a musketeer and did pretty well; in the first engagement in which he took part, his head was grazed by a bullet and he was taken prisoner.

Having covered the withdrawal of the Baden army, our corps entered Switzerland 24 hours later than everyone else, and yesterday we arrived here in Vevey. During the campaign and the march through Switzerland it was quite impossible for me to write so much as a line. But now I hasten to send some news, and write to you with all the more dispatch for having heard — somewhere in Baden — that Marx had been arrested in Paris. Since we never received any newspapers, we learnt nothing. Whether or not it is true, I have never been able to find out. You can imagine the state of anxiety I am in as a result, and I beg you most urgently to set my mind at rest and to put an end to my doubts about Marx’s fate. Since I have had no confirmation of this rumour of Marx’s arrest, I still hope it is false. But that Dronke and Schapper are in jug, I can hardly doubt. Enough — if Marx is still at liberty send him this letter with the request that he write to me immediately. If he should not feel safe in Paris, he will be completely safe here in the Vaud Canton. The government describes itself as red and supporter of permanent revolution. In Geneva likewise. Schily from Trier is there; he held a command in the Mainz corps.

If I get any money from home, I shall probably go to Lausanne or Geneva and see what I can do. Our column, which fought well, bores me and there isn’t anything to do here. In battle, Willich is brave, cool-headed and adroit, and able to appreciate a situation quickly and accurately, but when not in battle he is a more or less tedious ideologist and a true socialist. Most of the people in the corps whom one can talk to have been sent elsewhere.

If only I could be sure that Marx is at liberty! I have often thought that, in the midst of the Prussian bullets, my post was much less dangerous than that of others in Germany and especially Marx’s in Paris. So dispel my uncertainty soon.

Tout a vous

Engels

Address: F. Engels, refugié allemand, Vevey, Suisse (If possible under cover as far as Thionville or Metz.)

Marx To Ferdinand Freiligrath

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 204;

Written: 31 July 1849;

First published: in part in Die Neue Zeit, Ergänzungshefte No. 12, 1911-12 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Russian Edition, 1934.

Paris, 31 July 1849

Dear Freiligrath,

I must confess that I am much astonished by Lassalle’s behaviour. I had approached him personally and, since I myself had at one time made the countess [Sophie von Hatzfeldt] a loan and was, besides, aware of Lassalle’s liking for me, it would never have occurred to me that he would compromise me in this way. On the contrary, I had impressed upon him the need for the utmost discretion. The direst straits are better than public begging. I have written to him on the subject. [266]

I find the business unspeakably annoying.

Let us talk politics, since it will distract us from this private unpleasantness. In Switzerland things are becoming ever more complicated and now, as regards Italy, there is Savoy into the bargain. It would seem that, if needs be, Austria proposes to recoup her loss of Hungary at Italy’s expense. The incorporation of Savoy by Austria would, however, be the undoing of the present French government if tolerated by the latter. The majority in the French Chamber is clearly falling apart. The Right is splitting up into Philippists pure and simple, Legitimists who vote with the Philippists, and Legitimists pure and simple, who have recently been voting with the Left.[267] What Thiers and company are planning is to make Louis Napoleon Consul for ten years, until the coming-of-age of the Count of Paris [Louis Philipp Albert] who will then replace him. If, as is almost certain, the assemblée reimposes the taxes on drink,[268] it will arouse the antagonism of all the wine-growers. With each reactionary measure it alienates yet another section of the population.

But most important of all just now is England. We must have no illusions about the so-called Peace Party[269], of which Cobden is the acknowledged leader. Nor should we have any illusions about the ‘unselfish enthusiasm’ of the English for Hungary, which has resulted in the organisation of meetings throughout the country.

The Peace Party is simply a cloak for the Free Trade Party. The same content, the same object, the same leaders. just as, at home, the Free Traders attacked the aristocracy in its material basis with the repeal of the Corn and Navigation Laws, [270] so now in their foreign policy, they are attacking it in its European connections and ramifications — by seeking to break the Holy Alliance [271]. The English Free Traders are radical bourgeois who wish to break radically with the aristocracy in order to rule without let or hindrance. What they overlook is the fact that they are thus, willy-nilly, bringing the people onto the stage and into power. Exploitation of the peoples, not by means of medieval warfare but solely by means of trade warfare — that’s your Peace Party. Cobden’s behaviour in the Hungarian affair had an immediately practical nexus. Russia is now seeking to negotiate a loan. Cobden, the representative of the industrial bourgeoisie, forbids this deal of the financial bourgeoisie’s, and in England the Bank is ruled by industry, whereas in France industry is ruled by the Bank.

Cobden’s attack on Russia has been more formidable than any of either Dembinski or Görgey. [Reference to Cobden’s speech at a meeting held on 23 July 1849 in support of Hungary, see The Times 24 July 1849 and The Northern Star, 28 July 1849] He revealed how pitiable was the condition of her finances. She is, he says, the most wretched nation. Each year the Siberian mines bring the State no more than £700,000: the duty on spirits brings it 10 times as much. True, the gold and silver reserve in the vaults of the Bank of Petersburg amounts to £14,000,000, but it serves as a metallic reserve for a paper circulation of £80,000,000. Hence, if the Tsar [Nicholas I] dips into the vaults of the Bank, he will depreciate the paper money, and thus bring about a revolution in Russia herself. Consequently, the proud English bourgeois exclaims, the absolutist colossus cannot stir unless we make him a loan, and this we shall not do. Once again we are waging, by purely bourgeois means, the bourgeoisie’s war against feudal absolutism. The golden calf is mightier than all the calves on the thrones in the world. Of course the English Free Trades also have a direct interest where Hungary is concerned. Instead of Austrian trade barriers, as hitherto, a trade agreement and some Sort of Free Trade with Hungary. The money, which they are now without doubt secretly remitting to the Hungarians, they will assuredly get back ‘with profit and interest’ in return by way of trade.

The English bourgeoisie’s attitude to continental despotism is a reversal of the campaign they conducted against the French from 1793 to 1815. The importance of this development cannot be overrated.

Kindest regards to you and your wife d from me and my wife.

Your

K. Marx

Marx To Engels[43]

In Vevey

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 207;

Written: end of July 1849;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Paris, end of July 1849

Dear Engels,

I have suffered a great deal of anxiety on your account and was truly delighted when yesterday I received a letter in your own hand. I had got Dronke (who is here) to write to your brother-in-law asking for news of you. He, of course, knew nothing.

My whole family is here [263]; the government wanted to banish me to Morbihan, the Pontine marshes of Brittany.[272] So far I have frustrated their intention. But if I am to write to you in greater detail, both about my own circumstances here and about affairs in general, you must let me have a safer address, for things are really appalling here.

You now have the best opportunity to write a history of or a pamphlet on the Baden-Palatinate revolution. [273] Had you not taken part in the actual fighting, we couldn’t have put forward our views about that frolic. It would be a splendid chance for you to define the position of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung vis-à-vis the democratic party generally. I am positive that the thing will sell and bring you money.

I have embarked on negotiations with a view to starting a politico-economic (monthly) periodical in Berlin which would have to be largely written by us two. [274]

Lupus [Wilhelm Wolff] is also in Switzerland, I believe in Berne. Weerth was here yesterday; he is setting up an agency in Liverpool. Red Wolff is living here with me. Finances are, of course, in a state of chaos.

Freiligrath is in Cologne now as heretofore. If my wife were not in an all too interesting condition, I would gladly leave Paris as soon as it was financially possible to do so.

Farewell. Convey my kindest regards to Willich and write by return to the address: M. Ramboz, rue de Lille, 45.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Joseph Weydemeyer [275]

In Frankfurt Am Main

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 208;

Written: end of July 1849;

First published: in Die Gesellschaft, 1930.

Paris, end of July 1849

Dear Weydemeyer,

I have heard from Dronke that it’s no go with the Westphalian lady. Well, it can’t be helped.

Now I should appreciate your advice as to how best to publish pamphlets.

I should like to start with the pamphlet on wages of which only the beginning appeared in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. [Wage Labour and Capital] I would write a short political foreword to it on the present status quo. Do you think that, e.g., Leske would be agreeable? But he would have to pay, as soon as he had the manuscript in his hands, and pay well, since I know that this pamphlet will attract and will find a mass of subscribers in advance. My present financial condition will not permit me to settle my outstanding account with Leske. [276]

Were Leske then to find that the thing is well received, we could continue in this way.

Yesterday I had a letter from Engels; he is in Switzerland and, as Willich’s adjutant, has taken part in four encounters.

The sword of Damocles still hangs over my head; my expulsion has neither been rescinded nor, for the moment, is it being enforced.

Awkward though the present state of affairs may be for our personal circumstances, I am nevertheless among the satisfied. Things are going very well and the Waterloo suffered by official democracy may be regarded as a victory.[277] ‘Governments by grace of God’ are taking it upon themselves to avenge us on the bourgeoisie, and to chastise them.

One of these days I may perhaps send you a short article for your paper [Neue Deutsche Zeitung] on the state of affairs in England. [278] Just now I find it too boring, having already discussed the matter in a number of private letters.

Write to me direct and to my own address: 45, rue de Lille, Monsieur Ramboz.

My best regards to your wife and yourself from my wife and me. The former very poorly, the natural consequence of her all too interesting condition. Good-bye, my friend, and reply soon.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Joseph Weydemeyer

In Frankfurt Am Main

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 209;

Written: mid-August 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Paris, mid-August 1849

Weydemeyer,

I will gladly fall in with Rühl’s suggestion[279] if he agrees to take over the whole of the business side, at which I am no good and for which he will he paid a commission.

1) But I have no publisher on hand to make the necessary advances,

2) the subscription lists seem to me superfluous. Announcements in the Westdeutsche and other papers in the Rhineland and elsewhere would achieve the same purpose. The thing should be advertised particularly in the Berlin, Hamburg, Leipzig and Breslau papers.

The news about your paper [Neue Deutsche Zeitung] is very bad. I shall at once write and inform Naut, the trusty old business manager of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and acquaint you with the result.[280]

You would already have had my article but for the fact that the illness of my wife and all the children has meant that I have been a kind of male nurse for the past week.

Best regards to your wife.

Your

K. M.

I hope for a reply as soon as possible.

Marx To Engels [228]

In Vevey

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 210;

Written: 17 August 1849;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929.

Paris, 17 August 1849

Dear Engels,

I don’t know whether my first letter — in reply to the first one you sent my wife arrived safely, since your address was very uncertain. I would have already replied to your second[281] had I not been prevented by the fact that the whole of my family here was ill. Let me repeat once again how anxious my wife and I were on your account and what a delightful surprise it was to have definite news of you.

You will see from the date that, as a result of my protest, the Ministry of the Interior has for the time being left me unmolested here in Paris. The Morbihan département, to which I had been directed, is lethal at this time of year — the Pontine marshes of Brittany.[282] It would not be prudent just now to write about the 13 June affair.[260] I don’t believe, or at least don’t know whether secrecy of the mails is being observed.

The general situation here may he summed up in a couple of words: the majority disintegrating into its original, mutually hostile elements, Bonapartism hopelessly compromised, ill-will among the peasants because of the retention of the 45 centimes, the wine-growers furious at the threatened retention of the tax on drink, [260] the current of public opinion once again anti-reactionary, in the Chamber, now prorogued, and in the Ministry, reaction, growing exclusive and concerned with expelling the Barrot-Dufaure clique from the Cabinet.[283] As soon as this comes about you can look for an early revolutionary resurrection.

I don’t know whether in Switzerland you have any chance of following the English movement. The English have taken it up again at exactly the same juncture at which it was broken off by the February revolution. As you are aware, the Peace Party [269] is nothing but the Free-Trade party under a new guise. But this time the industrial bourgeoisie is acting in a manner even more revolutionary than during the Anti-Corn Law League agitation. [270] In two ways: 1) the aristocracy, whose roots have been attacked at home by the repeal of the Corn Laws and the Navigation Acts, is further to be ruined in the sphere of foreign policy, in its European ramifications. Reversal of Pitt’s policy. Anti-Russian-Austrian-Prussian, in a word, pro Italy and Hungary. Cobden has formally threatened to proscribe bankers who make loans to Russia, has unleashed a veritable campaign against Russian finances. 2) Agitation for universal suffrage, in order to effect the total political severance of the tenants from the landed aristocracy, to give the towns an absolute majority in Parliament, to nullify the House of Lords. Financial reform, in order to curb the Church and cut off the political revenues of the aristocracy.

Chartists and Free Traders have joined hands in these two propaganda campaigns. Harney and Palmerston apparently friends. At the last meeting held in London, O'Connor and Colonel Thompson both of one mind. [284]

Consequences of this economic campaign against feudalism and Holy Alliance incalculable.

Hungary splendid. But this rotten Prussia? What do you think of it? The pallid canaille [H. Heine, Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen] are now being fattened in Saxony, Baden, the Palatinate. If they send an army to the aid of the Austrians, it will be so contrived that they themselves remain in Bohemia and wax fat there. But wretched Prussia — I only fear that it’s too craven — lost as soon as it participates in the Hungarian affair, which in any case is turning into a general war.

Now, my dear friend, what should we for our part do? We must launch out into a literary and commercial venture, I await your proposals. Red Lupus [Ferdinand Wolff] is here, in the same house as myself; Dronke in Paris likewise, but he’s an insignificant little chap of the school of E. Meyen. Lupus [Wilhelm Wolff] is in Zurich. Address: Dr. Lüning. You don’t need to write separately to M. Ramboz. It’s my pseudonym.

So the address is simply:

Monsieur Ramboz, 45, rue de Lille.

Salut!

Ch. M.

Marx To Engels [43]

In Lausanne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 212;

Written: 23 August 1849;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929.

Paris, 23 August 1849

Dear Engels,

I am being banished to the Morbihan département, the Pontine marshes of Brittany[272]. I need hardly say that I shall not consent to this veiled attempt on my life. So I am leaving France.[285]

They won’t give me a passport for Switzerland, hence I must go to London, and that tomorrow. In any case, Switzerland will soon be hermetically sealed and the mice would be trapped all at one go.

Besides, in London there is a positive prospect of my being able to start a German newspaper. [Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue] I am assured of part of the funds.

So you must leave for London at once. In any case your safety demands it. The Prussians would shoot you twice over: 1) because of Baden, 2) because of Elberfeld.[286] And why stay in a Switzerland where you can do nothing?

You will have no difficulty in coming to London, whether under the name of Engels or under the name of Mayer. As soon as you say you want to go to England, you will receive a one-way passport to London from the French Embassy.

I count on this absolutely. You cannot stay in Switzerland. In London we shall get down to business.

For the time being my wife will remain here. Continue to write to her at the same address: 45, rue de Lille, M. Ramboz.

But once again, I confidently count on you not to leave me in the lurch.

Your

K. M.

Lupus [Wilhelm Wolff] is at Dr Lüning’s, Zurich. Write and tell him also about my plan.

Engels To Joseph Weydemeyer [287]

In Frankfurt Am Main

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 213;

Written: 23 August 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels. Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Lausanne, 23 August 1849

8, Place de la Palud

Dear Weydemeyer,

After so many vicissitudes — after umpteen arrests in Hesse and the Palatinate,[288] after 3 weeks of sybaritic living in Kaiserslautern, after a glorious 4 weeks’ campaign in which, for a change, I buckled on my sword-belt and acted as Willich’s adjutant, after 4 weeks of tedious cantoning with the refugee detachment in the Vaud Canton, I am at last finding my feet here in Lausanne. The very first thing I shall do is sit down and compose a merry tale of the whole Palatinate-Baden frolic. But since I no longer have any contact with Germany and do not even know which towns are or are not under martial law, I don’t know what publisher to approach. I'm no longer acquainted with such folk. You are on the spot and hence will be better able to say which are the right publishers with whom to negotiate something of this kind; it will, of course, be quite innocuous and will not involve any risk of confiscation or prosecution. There might be such a one in Frankfurt. But he must have money. Please be good enough to write to me about this, if possible by return, so that I can take the necessary steps at once.

I recently saw your red [Max Joseph] Becker, very jaunty, in Geneva; he was tippling with the popular man, Esselen, and other easy-going diis minorum gentium [second-rate luminaries] in the country.

Warm regards to your wife and all our acquaintances

from your

Engels

Engels To Jakob Lukas-Schabelitz

In Basle

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 214;

Written: 24 August 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Lausanne, 24 August 1849

8, Place de la Palud

Dear Schabelitz,

I am most obliged to you for promptly forwarding a letter to me. Since I cannot have my letters sent direct and knew of no other address, I was compelled to put you to this trouble. You may be receiving one or two more for me and would, perhaps, be kind enough to send these on to me also.

I am at present stuck in Lausanne where I am writing my reminiscences of the farcical Palatinate-Baden revolution [Engels, The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution] you know me too well to credit me with political participation in this affair which was lost before it began. In Karlsruhe and Kaiserslautern I poked quiet fun at the provisional government’s blunders and lack of resolution, I refused all posts, and it was not until the Prussians arrived that I joined Willich at Offenbach and took part in the campaign as his adjutant. Now at headquarters, now in the face of the enemy, the whole time in correspondence with the High Command, in constant touch with d'Ester, who, as ‘red camarilla’, was spurring on the government, in various engagements and, finally, at the battle of Rastatt,[265] I had the opportunity of seeing a great deal and learning a great deal. As you know, I am sufficiently critical not to share the illusions of the run-of-the-mill, vociferous republicans and to detect the despondency lurking beneath the bravado of the leaders.

As befits the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the thing will take a view of the affair different from that of other prospective accounts. It will disclose many a shabby trick and, in particular, will contain much that is new concerning the goings-on in the Palatinate, about which hitherto virtually nothing has been known. It won’t be big — about 4-6 sheets.

Up till now I have not had leisure enough to look round for a publisher. I would not care to send the manuscript to Germany, there is a danger of its being intercepted in the post. Since I am largely unfamiliar with the book trade in Switzerland, I thought I would write — and ask you whether your old man might be the kind of publisher who would accept such work and — NB — pay for it, for I need money, one has to live. That the thing will be pleasant to read goes without saying, and my name is guarantee enough that it will be bought in Germany (it won’t he liable to confiscation, the subject doesn’t lend itself thereto). If, then, your worthy papa is prepared to do business, I shall rely on you, if not, it can’t be helped. In that case you will not, at any rate, refuse to advise me about other possible German publishers, since I am very much in the dark in regard to the German book trade as well.

Write and tell me about this if possible by return.

Best regards

from your

F. Engels

Marx To Ferdinand Freiligrath [43]

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 216;

Written: 5 September 1849;

First published: in Fr. Mehring, ‘Freiligrath und Marx in ihrem Briefwechsel’, Die Neue Zeit, Ergänzungsheft, 12 April 1912.

London, 5 September 1849

Dear Freiligrath,

Address: Karl Blind, 18 Roberts Street,

Peterson’s Coffeehouse, Grosvenor Square;

therein the letter to me under cover.

I can only write a word or two since I have had a kind of cholerine for the past 4-5 days and feel dreadfully listless.

My wife has written and asked me to acknowledge receipt of your letter enclosing 100 fr. Just imagine what blackguards the Paris police are; they have even been harassing my wife and it was only with difficulty that she succeeded in obtaining permission to remain in Paris until 15 September. We had rented our lodgings there up to that date.

I am now in a really difficult situation. My wife is in an advanced state of pregnancy, she is obliged to leave Paris on the 15th and I don’t know how I am to raise the money for her journey and for settling her in here.[289]

On the other hand there are excellent prospects of my being able to start a monthly review [Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue] here; but I am pressed for time and the first weeks constitute the real difficulty.

Lassalle seems to have been offended by my letter to you and another I wrote to him. This was certainly very far from my intention, and I should already have written to him, if my present condition did not make letter-writing a real burden to me.

Once I am more or less on my feet again I shall write to you in greater detail about politics. I look forward to a few lines from you soon. Best regards to your wife, Daniels, etc.

Your

K. Marx

Engels To George Julian Harney [290]

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 217;

Written: 5 October 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Genoa, 5 October 1849

My dear Harney,

You will have got the few lines I sent you through Colonel Willich.[291] This is to inform you, and by you Marx, that I am this morning arrived here in Genoa, and that, wind and weather favourable, I am going under sail for London to-morrow morning on board the English schooner Cornish Diamond, Capt-n Stevens. My journey will be of about 4 or 5 weeks so that by the middle of November I shall be in London.

I am very happy to have found so soon an opportunity of leaving this damned police atmosphere — indeed I never saw it so organised as here in Piedmont.

Ever truly thine

F. Engels

Marx To Louis Bauer

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 218;

Written: 30 November 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Draft, London, 30 November 1849

Sir,

In view of the inimical relations now obtaining between the two societies to which we belong — in view of your direct attacks upon the refugee committee here, [292] at any rate upon my friends and colleagues in the same — we must break off social relations if we are not mutually to expose ourselves to equivocal interpretations. Yesterday evening I thought it unseemly, in the presence of my wife, to express my views on this collision.

While expressing my utmost obligation to you for your medical assistance, I would beg you to send me your account.

Yours truly

Dr K. Marx

Marx To Joseph Weydemeyer [293]

In Frankfurt Am Main

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 218;

Written: 19 December 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

London, 19 December 1849

4 Anderson Street, Kings Road, Chelsea

Dear Weydemeyer,

An unconscionable time has elapsed since I last wrote to you. Civil vexations of every kind, all manner of business and, finally, the general difficulty I have in bringing myself to write a letter, will explain to you my long silence. I have at last, after so many vicissitudes, succeeded in giving reality to my Revue [Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue] that is to say, I have a printer and a distributor in Hamburg. [J. E. M. Köhler and J. Schuberth] Otherwise we do everything at our own expense. The worst of it is that in Germany so much time is always lost before one can get to the point of publication. I have little doubt that by the time 3, or maybe 2, monthly issues have appeared, a world conflagration will intervene and the opportunity of temporarily finishing with political economy will be gone.[294]

As you live in the heart of Germany and hence are more familiar with the details than we are, you might perhaps find time to describe, for our Revue, briefly and concisely in a few main features, the present condition of South Germany and everything connected with it.[295]

I would further request you to insert the following announcement in your paper [Marx and. Engels, ‘Announcement of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue’ published in the Neue Deutsche Zeitung, edited by Weydemeyer, 16 and 26 January and 5 February 1850] but not until you have seen the announcement in the Kölnische Zeitung for which the bookseller in Hamburg will be responsible. Perhaps you could send a copy to Westphalia. For you will see from the announcement that, besides our circulation through the book trade, we want to establish another by asking our party comrades to draw up subscription lists and send them to us here. For the time being we shall have to keep the price fairly high and the number of sheets low. Should our resources increase as a result of a wider circulation, this defect will be remedied.

What do you think of the row between Proudhon, Blanc and Pierre Leroux? [296]

Willich sends you his regards, and likewise Engels, red Wolff [Ferdinand Wolff] and Weerth.

Here in England the most important movement is probably taking place at this moment. On the one hand, protectionist agitation supported by the fanaticised rural population — the consequences of the free corn trade are now beginning to be felt in the form I predicted years ago [Marx, Speech On the Question of Free Trade] — on the other, the Free Traders who, as financial and Parliamentary reformers, [284] are extending the wider political and economic logic of their system to home affairs and, as Peace Party, [269] to foreign affairs; finally, the Chartists who, while acting in concert with the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy, have at the same time resumed with increased vigour their own party activity against the bourgeois.[297] The conflict between these parties will be tremendous and the outward form of agitation will become more tempestuously revolutionary if, as I hope — and not without good reason — the Tories come to power in place of the Whigs. Another event as yet imperceptible on the Continent, is the mighty industrial, agricultural and commercial crisis now looming up. Were the Continent to postpone its revolution until after the onset of this crisis, England might from the start have to be an ally, albeit an unpopular one, of the revolutionary Continent. An earlier outbreak of revolution — unless directly motivated by Russian intervention — would in my view be a misfortune since at this particular time, with trade still on the up and up the mass of the workers in France, Germany, etc., as well as the entire strata of tradesmen, etc., though perhaps revolutionary in words, are certainly not so in reality.

You know that my wife has made the world richer by one citizen [Heinrich Guido — Fawksy]? She sends her warm regards to you and your wife. My best regards to the latter also.

Write soon.

Your

K. Marx

Apropos, can you find out Citizen Hentze’s address for me?

You will have seen friend Heinzen’s inane bragging in the newspapers. This fellow, who was done for by the revolution in Germany — before that his things enjoyed a certain vogue because the petty bourgeois and the commercial traveller liked to see printed in black and white the idiocies and rodomontades they themselves served mysteriously between the cheese and the biscuits at the wine-shop — is endeavouring to rehabilitate himself by compromising the other refugees in Switzerland and England — those who have really worked — in the eyes of those countries’ governments, [298] by kicking up a row, and earning himself a lucrative martyrdom by threatening shortly to gobble up a hundred thousand of millions of men at lunch.

Engels To Jakob Lukas-Schabelitz

In Basle

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 221;

Written: 22 December 1849;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

London, 22 December 1849

6 Macclesfield Street, Dean Street, Soho

Dear Schabelitz,

I received your letter and, if I failed to answer it from Lausanne, it was for a variety of reasons, but more especially my great circumnavigation of the globe from Genoa to London, which kept me 5 weeks afloat. The reason I didn’t let Bamberger have my manuscript [The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution] was because I wanted to have it published either as a pamphlet of my own or, failing that, in the Revue which we already had in mind at the time. This Revue has now come into being and in January the first issue will appear in Germany — as you will have already seen from a somewhat premature announcement in the Berner Zeitung. We should be very pleased if you or your old man would make yourselves more or less responsible for sales in Switzerland and open an account direct with us. The copies would reach you through our Hamburg commission agent, [Julius Schuberth] and you might perhaps be able to take over some kind of general agency for Switzerland, since we prefer in any case to work only with sound houses and I don’t know the fellow who put his name to the announcement in Berne. [Davoine] You might tell me some time whether the man’s any good. Consider, then, how this might be arranged and let me know on what terms. At all events, these would have to provide for quarterly accounts and payments, at least as regards sums received from regular subscribers. We also require this of our Hamburg commission agent. [Theodor Hagen]

Kindly have the enclosed announcement inserted in the National-Zeitung [Marx and Engels. ‘Announcement of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue, — published in the Schweizerische National-Zeitung, 10 January 1850] and, should you from time to time require a fill-in, use this one for preference.

Besides the general introduction (by Marx), the first issue will contain a first article by me on the campaign for an imperial constitution, an article by little [Wilhelm] Wolff on the last days of the Frankfurt and Stuttgart parliaments, a survey of events by Marx and myself and, if feasible, the first of a series of lectures on economics which Marx is giving at the Workers’ Society here.[299] Also miscellanea, perhaps something more by red [Ferdinand] Wolff. The latter, Marx, Weerth and I, are now here and Lupus will, if at all possible, be joining us shortly.

All in all, things are going quite well here. Struve and Heinzen are intriguing with all and sundry against the Workers’ Society and ourselves, but without success. They, together with some wailers of moderate persuasion who have been thrown out of our society, form a select club at which Heinzen airs his grievances about the noxious doctrines of the communists.[300]

Write to me as soon as possible on the business question.

Your

F. Engels

Happy New Year in advance.

Be so kind as to send me forthwith a parcel containing Mieroslawski’s ‘Rapports sur la campagne en Bade’, Daul’s ‘Tagebuch eines pp.’, the Becker-Esselen screed, and anything else of importance that has appeared on the Baden business, i.e. that contains facts and not hot air. You can either draw the amount on me, or charge it to the account of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung against future business transactions.

1850

Marx to Eduard von Muller-Tellering. 1 January

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 8 January

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 11 January

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 4 February

Marx to Louis Bauer. 5 February

Engels to Eduard von Muller-Tellering. 7 February

Engels to Julius Schuberth, Theodor Hagen and Stephen Naut. 4 March

Marx to Eduard von Muller-Tellering. 12 March

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 9 April

Engels to Julius Schuberth. c. 11 April

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 22 April

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 25 April

Engels and Marx to Francois Pardigon. 6 May

Engels to Theodor Schuster. 13 May

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 8 June

Marx to Heinrich Burgers. 25 June

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 27 June

Marx to Karl Blind. 17 July

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 29 October

Marx to Engels. 19 November

Marx to Engels. 23 November

Engels to Marx. 25 November

Marx to Engels. 2 December

Marx to Hermann Becker. 2 December

Engels to Emil Blank. 3 December

Engels to Marx. 17 December

Marx To Eduard von Müller-Tellering

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 229;

First published: in Marx and Engels Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

On 3 March 1850, the court of honour, presided by Willich, expelled Tellering from the London German Workers’ Educational Society. Tellering wrote a letter of protest, slandering Engels. This letter of Marx was in reply to Müller-Tellering.

[Rough copy]

London, 12 March 1850

For the letter you wrote yesterday to the Workers’ Society, I would send you a challenge, were you still capable of giving satisfaction after your disgraceful calumnies against Engels and after the well-founded sentence of expulsion pronounced by the Workers’ Society executive committee. I await you on a different field to strip you of the hypocritical mask of revolutionary fanaticism behind which you have so far skilfully contrived to hide your petty interests, your envy, your unassuaged vanity and your angry discontent over the world’s lack of appreciation for your great genius — a lack of appreciation that began with your failure to pass your examination.

Had you reflected a little, you would have been obliged to assume that if, as a witness, I was compelled to report a fact detrimental to yourself, I for my part would do everything in my power to avoid a scandal which must doubly compromise me: in the eyes of the Workers’ Society, to which you were recommended by me, and in the eyes of the public, for whom you exist only in as much as you were a contributor to my newspaper.

Your letters to me, and they are available for publication, prove that you did all you could to foist upon me the role of ‘democratic Dalai Lama and incumbent of the future’. What proof have you that I ever accepted that absurd role? The only thing you could reproach me with is that I did not immediately break with you or denounce you to the others after the Klapka affair, on the compromising nature of which I forthwith bluntly expressed my views to you in the presence of witnesses. I admit my weakness. Only Becker’s statement that, 4 weeks prior to the appearance of your glib pamphlet attacking the Westdeutsche Zeitung, you again offered to collaborate on that paper, a statement supported by the testimony of Freiligrath and Hagen, only your wholly unsubstantiated calumnies against Engels convinced me that what I had regarded as an isolated instance of precipitancy was the connecting link of an entire system. It was, by the way, wise of you not after all to appear yesterday at the final appointment which Willich had yet again arranged for you at your request. You knew what was to be expected from a confrontation with me.

K. Marx

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 241;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

In mid-November 1850, Engels left London for Manchester, where he worked in the Ermen and Engels firm, first as a clerk and later as a partner until June 1869. He took up this work, in spite of his dislike of it, mainly to provide material assistance for Marx and his family, while Marx concentrated on his studies. Marx’s son, Heinrich Guido, nicknamed because he was born on Guy Fawkes Day, 5 November 1849, marking the anniversary of the Gunpowder plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament in 1605.

[London,] 19 November 1850

Dear Engels,

Just a line or two to let you know that our little gunpowder plotter, Fawksy, died at ten o'clock this morning. Suddenly, from one of the convulsions he had often had. A few minutes before, he was still laughing and joking. The thing happened quite unexpectedly. You can imagine what it is like here. Your absence at this particular moment makes us feel very lonely.

In my next letter I shall tell you something about Harney from which you will see what an ominous situation he’s in.

Your

K. Marx

If you happen to feel so inclined, drop a few lines to my wife. She is quite distracted.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 242;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1929.

London, 23 November 1850

Dear Engels,

Your letter did my wife a great deal of good. She’s in a really dangerous state of excitation and exhaustion. She had nursed the child [Fawksy] herself and had fought for its existence under the most difficult circumstances and at the greatest sacrifice. And on top of this, the thought that the poor child was a victim of bourgeois misère, although it never wanted for any particular care.

Mr Schramm is thoroughly beseilered and is just now at his most loathsome. For two whole days, 19 and 20 November, he never showed his face in our house, then came for a moment and immediately disappeared again after one or two fatuous remarks. He had volunteered to accompany us on the day of the funeral; he arrived a minute or two before the appointed hour, said not a word about the funeral, but told my wife that he had to hurry away so as not to be late for a meal with his brother. With my wife in such an irritable state, you can imagine how offensive was the conduct of this person, to whom so much friendship has been extended in our house.

Jones has explained Harney’s true situation to me. He is sous le coup de la justice.[threatened with persecution] The entire contents of his paper are such as to make it liable to stamp duty. The government is merely waiting for its circulation to increase in order to nab him. The proceedings against Dickens have been instituted solely as a precedent in respect of Harney. If he is arrested he may, besides the actual sentence, have to serve 20 years through being unable to produce securities.

Bauer and Pfänder have won their case. Their counsel was Roberts.

Your

K. M.

1851

Marx to Engels. 6 January

Marx to Engels. 7 January

Engels to Marx. 8 January

Marx to Engels. 22 January

Engels to Marx. 25 January

Marx to Engels. 27 January

Engels to Marx. 29 January

Marx to Hermann Becker. c. 1 February

Marx to Engels. 3 February

Engels to Marx. 5 February

Marx to Hermann Becker. 8 February

Marx to Engels. 10 February

Marx to Engels. 11 February

Engels to Marx. 12 February

Engels to Marx. 13 February

Marx to Engels. 23 February

Marx to Engels. 24 February

Engels to Marx. 25 February

Engels to Marx. 26 February

Marx to Engels. 26 February

Engels to Marx. 26 February

Engels to Marx. 27 February

Engels to Marx. 28 February

Marx to Hermann Becker. 28 February

Marx to Engels. 1 March

Marx to Engels. 8 March

Engels to Marx. 10 March

Engels to Marx. 17 March

Marx to Engels. 17 March

Engels to Marx. 19 March

Marx to Engels. 22 March

Marx to Engels. 31 March

Marx to Engels. 2 April

Engels to Marx. 3 April

Marx to Hermann Becker. 9 April

Engels to Marx. 11 April

Marx to Engels. 15 April

Engels to Marx. 15 April

Engels to Marx. 1 May

Engels to Wilhelm Wolff. 1 May

Marx to Engels. 3 May

Marx to Engels. 5 May

Engels to Marx. c. 6 May

Engels to Marx. 8 May

Engels to Marx. 9 May

Engels to Marx. 15 May

Marx to Engels. 16 May

Engels to Marx. 19 May

Marx to Engels. 21 May

Engels to Marx. 23 May

Engels to Marx. 27 May

Marx to Engels. 28 May

Marx to Roland Daniels. 2nd half May

Marx to Engels. 16 June

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 19 June

Engels to Marx. 27 June

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 27 June

Engels to Marx. c. 6 July

Engels to Ernst Dronke. 9 July

Marx to Engels. 13 July

Marx to Engels. c. 17 July

Engels to Marx. 17 July

Engels to Marx. c. 20 July

Engels to Marx. 30 July

Marx to Engels. 31 July

Engels to Marx. c. 1 August

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 2 August

Engels to Wilhelm Wolff. 6 August

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 7 August

Marx to Engels. 8 August

Engels to Marx. c. 10 August

Engels to Marx. c. 11 August

Marx to Engels. 14 August

Marx to Hermann Ebner. 15-22 August

Marx to Engels. c. 20 August

Engels to Marx. 21 August

Marx to Engels. 25 August

Engels to Marx. c. 27 August

Marx to Engels. 31 August

Engels to Marx. 1 September

Engels to Marx. 8 September

Engels to Marx. 11 September

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 11 September

Marx to Engels. 13 September

Engels to Marx. 19 September

Engels to Marx. 23 September

Marx to Engels. 23 September

Engels to Marx. 25 September

Engels to Marx. 26 September

Marx to Amalie Daniels. 4 - 8 October

Marx to Engels. 13 October

Engels to Marx. 15 October

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 16 October

Marx to Engels. 19 October

Marx to Engels. 25 October

Engels to Marx. c. 27 October

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 31 October

Marx to Engels. 24 November

Engels to Marx. 27 November

Marx to Adolf Cluss. Early December

Marx to Engels. 1 December

Marx to Hermann Ebner. 2 December

Engels to Marx. 3 December

Marx to Engels. 9 December

Engels to Marx. 10 December

Engels to Marx. 11 December

Engels to Marie Blank. 15 December

Engels to Marx. 16 December

Engels to Jenny Marx. 18 December

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 19 December

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 27 December

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 258;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

London, 7 January 1851

Dear Engels,

I am writing to you today, to lay before you a questiuncula theoretica [a small question of theory] naturally naturae politico-economicae [of a political economic nature].

You know, to begin ab ovo [at the beginning], that according to Ricardo’s theory, rent is nothing else but the difference between the production costs and the price of agricultural produce, or, as he also expressed it, the difference in the price at which the produce of the poorest land must be sold in order to cover costs (the tenant-farmer’s profit and interest being always included in the costs), and that at which the produce of the best land can be sold.

The increase in rent proves, according to his own exposition of his theory, that:

1. Recourse is had to ever poorer types of soil, or that the same amount of capital, successively employed on the same land, does not give the same yield. In a word: the soil deteriorates in like proportion to the increasing demands the population must make upon it. It becomes relatively less fertile. Wherein Malthus discovered the real basis for his theory of population, and wherein his disciples now seek their last sheet-anchor.

2. Rent can only rise when the price of corn rises (at least according to economic laws); it must fall when the latter falls.

3. When a country’s overall rental rises, this can only be explained by the fact that a very large mass of relatively poorer land has been brought under cultivation.

Now these 3 propositions are everywhere refuted by history.

1. There is no doubt that, with the advance of civilisation, ever poorer types of soil are brought under cultivation. But equally, there is no doubt that, as a result of the progress of science and industry, these poorer types of soil are relatively good as against those previously regarded as good.

2. Since 1815 the price of corn has fallen, irregularly but steadily, from 90 to 50 shillings and, before the repeal of the Corn Laws even lower. Rent has steadily risen. Thus in England. Mutatis mutandis everywhere on the Continent.

3. In all countries, as Petty has already observed, we find that, when the price of corn fell, the country’s overall rental rose.

The main point of all this is to adjust the law of rent to progress in fertility in agriculture generally, this being the only way, firstly, to explain the historical facts and, secondly, to eliminate the Malthusian theory of the deterioration, not only of the ‘hands’, but also of the soil.

I believe that the matter can be explained simply, as follows:

Let us assume that, at a given state of agriculture, the price of wheat is 7 shillings a bushel and one acre of the best quality land, subject to a rent of 10 shillings, produces 20 bushels. The return per acre thus = 20x7 or = 140 shillings. In this case the production costs amount to 130 shillings. Hence 130 shillings is the price of the product of the poorest land under cultivation.

Let us assume that there is a general improvement in agriculture. If this be presupposed, we at the same time assume that science, industry and population are in a state of growth. A general increase in the fertility of the land resulting from improvements presupposes these conditions, as against the fertility fortuitously induced by a favourable season.

Say the price of wheat falls from 7 to 5 shillings a quarter. The best land, No. 1, which formerly yielded 20 bushels now yields 30 bushels. This now returns, instead of 20x7, or 140 shillings, 30x5, or 150 shillings, i.e. a rent of 20 shillings instead of 10 as formerly. The poorest land, which bears no rent, must produce 26 bushels, for, in accordance with our foregoing assumption, the requisite price of these is 130 shillings and 26x5=130. If the improvement, i. e. the general progress of science, which goes hand in hand with the overall progress of society, growth of population, etc., is not so general as to enable the poorest land that must be brought under cultivation to produce 26 bushels, the price of corn cannot fall to 5 shillings a bushel.

As before, the 20 shillings rent is an expression of the difference between production costs and the price of corn on the best land, or between the production costs on the poorest and those on the best land. Relatively speaking, one piece of land is no less infertile by comparison with the other than before. But fertility in general has improved.

All that is presupposed is that, if the price of corn falls from 7 to 5 shillings, consumption or demand increases correspondingly, or that productivity does not exceed the demand that may be expected when the price is 5 shillings. False though this hypothesis might be if the price had fallen from 7 to 5 as the result of an exceptionally abundant harvest, it is a necessary one where fertility has increased gradually and as a result of measures taken by the producers themselves. In any case, all we are concerned with here is the economic feasibility of this hypothesis.

From this it follows that:

1. Rent may rise although the price of agricultural produce falls, and yet Ricardo’s law still holds good.

2. The law of rent, as laid down by Ricardo in its simplest form and leaving aside its exposition, does not presuppose the diminishing fertility of the land, but only — and this despite the general increase in fertility that accompanies the development of society — the varying fertility of fields or the varying results obtained by the capital successively employed on the same land.

3. The more general the improvement in the land, the greater the variety of the fields it will embrace, and the country’s overall rental may rise, although there is a general fall in the price of corn. E. g., given the above example, it is simply a question of the number of fields producing over 26 bushels at 5 shillings without actually having to go as high as 30, i.e. of the extent to which the quality of the land varies as between the best and the poorest. This has nothing to do with the ratio of rent of the best land. In fact it has nothing to do directly with the ratio of rent at all.

As you know, the real joke where rent is concerned is that it is generated by evening out the price for the resultants of varying production costs, but that this law of market price is nothing other than the law of bourgeois competition. Even after the elimination of bourgeois production, however, there remains the snag that the soil would become relatively more infertile, that, with the same amount of labour, successively less would be achieved, although the best land would no longer, as under bourgeois rule, yield as dear a product as the poorest. The foregoing would do away with this objection.

I should like to have your views on the matter.

Having bored you with this muck, I am sending you by way of comic relief the enclosed bundle of letters from Dr Magnus Gross (doubly great Great! Greatest of the Great!) of Cincinnati. You will see that if Monsieur Gross is not grand, he is nevertheless gros. Tellering II in nuce. [in miniature] These Coblenzers are all alike! Send the things back to me with, if you have the time and the inclination, a line or two for Dronke.

Your

K. M.

Engels to Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 263;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Manchester, 8 January 1851

Dear Marx,

Herewith post office order for £1, particulars as before. My buyer — our clerk — having apparently paid out a great deal of late, seems anxious not to take too much money from the firm all at once. He is rather reluctant — I don’t press him overmuch, cela se conçoit [as is understandable] I myself have been involved in very heavy outlays as a result of my trip to London, otherwise I would gladly send you the whole amount; as it is, I must for today confine myself to fulfilling the obligation of an ordinary consignee and send you half the amount in part payment. The second half will follow — at the latest — in the early part of February, perhaps sooner; as soon, that is, as the firm sends my old man a letter containing the payments made to me.

Jones was up here and bearded his opponents at a public meeting in their own den. Leach and Donovan opposed him. The debate, however, wasn’t quite what I had expected. Petty stratagems on both sides; much chronique scandaleuse [gossip] which partly made up for the absence of some of London’s amenities. On Jones’ part, superiority of rhetorical talent. Leach, on the other hand, tremendously imperturbable but at times abysmally absurd. Donovan, a common, intriguing, local panjandrum. Jones, by the way, because of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and my presence, was compelled to proclaim himself a Red Republican and supporter of the nationalisation of landed property, while Leach, on the other hand, took his stand as the wholehearted representative of the cooperative societies, insofar as they reject political agitation. These societies, incidentally, would now seem to be very numerous in Lancashire, and Jones and his friends are afraid that, if some sort of alliance were formed between them and the Chartists, they would gain control of the Chartist movement. This circumstance explains many of the concessions Harney thought fit to make them.

The success of Jones’ performance here was all that could be expected; he put forward as the point to be decided between himself and the Manchester Chartist Council the question of recognising the Executive in London; the votes were evenly divided, although Leach and Co. had had about 3 hours in which to fetch their people to the meeting and a crowd of them had duly turned up. At the beginning, when the company was simply a random gathering (Leach had counted on Jones’ not arriving before 9 o'clock but, much to the former’s chagrin, he was there as early as 8), Jones was given an enthusiastic reception.

When in the company of Chartists whom he wishes to win over or attach more closely to his person, Jones is by no means as naive as he is with us. He is very wide awake. Perhaps a little too much so — at least, the likes of us ‘notice the design’ [Goethe, Torquato Tasso].

One of Harney’s friends here is a boring Scotsman of infinite sensibilities and hence interminable speeches; a second is a small, resolute, aggressive lad, about whose intellectual capacity I have not yet made up my mind; a third, a man whom Harney did not mention to me, one Robertson, seems to me to be far and away the most intelligent. I shall try to start up a small club with these fellows, or organise regular meetings to discuss the Manifesto with them. Harney and Jones have a host of friends here, and O'Connor a host of hidden enemies but, until he makes a downright fool of himself in public, it won’t be possible to bring about his — official — downfall here. At the meeting, by the way, Jones referred to him and Reynolds with the scantest possible respect.

Recently my brother-in-law [Emil Blank] told me some good news concerning myself: my prospective American partner was in London and from a conversation between the two of them it transpired that I was not the man to be of use to his firm. Thus America is put off pretty well indefinitely, since no fresh plan can now be hatched without my consent.

Best regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

Engels to Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 260;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[Manchester,] Wednesday evening, 29 January [1851]

Dear Marx,

Your silence and your astonishment at my silence became suddenly explicable to me when today my old witch of a landlady, after some sharp cross-examination hunted out your letter of 7 inst. from among a pile of books in my room where it had been peacefully slumbering since 8 January. I happened to be out that evening, and this person had simply placed the letter on top of the books; later, when tidying up, she had in her haste put another book on top of it, and as that pile of books has remained untouched all this while, the letter might, without your reminder, have gone on slumbering there till Doomsday. Had I been studying Russian this month instead of physiology, this wouldn’t have happened.

Anyhow, your new thing about land rent is absolutely right. The increasing infertility of the land concomitant with an ever-increasing population in Ricardo has always seemed to me implausible, nor have I ever been able to discover any evidence in support of his ever-rising price of corn, but with my notorious sloth en fait de théorie, I have silenced the inward grumbling of my better self and have never gone to the root of the matter. There can be no doubt that you have hit on the right solution, thereby entitling yourself afresh to the title of economist of land rent. If there were still right and justice on this earth, all land rents for at least a year would now be yours, and that would be the least which you could claim.

I have never really been able to accept Ricardo’s simple proposition in which he represents land rent as the difference in the productivity of various types of land and, seeking to prove this proposition, 1) acknowledges no other factor than the bringing under cultivation of ever poorer types of soil, 2) completely ignores advances in agriculture and 3) finally abandons almost entirely the bringing under cultivation of poorer types of soil, and instead continually proceeds from the assumption that capital, employed successively on a particular field, contributes less and less to the increase in the yield. Convincing as was the proposition to be proved, the factors adduced in proof of that same proposition were wholly alien to it. You will remember that, in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, I already invoked the progress made by scientific agriculture as against the theory of increasing infertility of course very crude and not at all closely argued. You have now cleared up the matter, which is yet another reason why you must make haste to finish the Economy and get it published. If we could somehow get an article of yours on land rent into an English periodical, it would create a tremendous stir. Think it over. Je me charge de la traduction. [I will attend to the translation]

Enclosed I return Mr Great-Gross. In my next I shall include a line or two for the delectable Dronke, but tonight I'm too sleepy to do any more work. A fine band of scallywags, Gross, Wilhelmi, and the progressive pamphleteer from Cincinnati [L A Hine]! The fellows must really imagine that we're on our physical, moral and intellectual beam ends to ask such things of us. C'est amusant, cependant [it’s amusing however], and I laughed heartily at these backwoods saviours of society and their proposals, including fee for Dronke. Dr Siegfried Weiss’ ‘sharp and spicy’ is outdone by the ‘red, piquant, sarcastic and versatile’ of the ‘Adonis of a long-forgotten Beauty’. Que Dieu le bénisse [may God bless him]!

Tomorrow the statements will go off to Bremen together with the necessary instructions. Mr Schramm might really have rewritten his; it’s so wretchedly scrawled that it will probably give rise to misunderstanding.

The O'Connor conference here has turned out to be sheer humbug. Ostensibly representing the whole of English Chartism, it consists of 8 men who represent 4 towns: Manchester, Bradford, Warrington and Sowerby. Of these, Warrington and Bradford belong to the opposition and see eye to eye with the Executive. Mantle, the Warrington representative, who doesn’t give a fig for the majority, opened the proceedings with the motion that the conference, seeing their utter insignificance and contemptibility, should resolve to go home forthwith, and tomorrow he will extort from them a vote of confidence for the Executive, i.e. for Harney and Jones, from which O'Connor will be unable to abstain. On the question of union with the financial reformers 3 voted for and 2 against, 3 abstaining, among them O'Connor, whom Mantle had unfortunately intimidated by his insolent conduct; otherwise the fellow would have voted in favour, thereby making a colossal and irretrievable fool of himself. At the conference O'Connor, Leach, McGrath, Clark and a certain Hurst formed the majority. At a dinner given for O'Connor on Monday, Mr Thomas Clark proposed the following toast: The Queen: Her Rights and no more; the People: Their rights and no less. Here again Mantle, a fiery, undiplomatic hothead, stopped O'Connor from getting up and drinking the toast.

The letter to Weerth has gone off and should be in his hands within a few days, provided he isn’t buried in the heart of Morocco.

No more for today.

Your

F. E.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 273;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 3 February 1851

Dear Engels,

Is it on Mary [Burns: Irish working woman to be Engels' first wife] you're studying physiology, or elsewhere? If the first, I can understand that this n'est pas de l'hébreux [isn’t Hebrew] nor even Russian.

Up till now all that my new theory of rent has yielded is the commendable state of mind to which every worthy man necessarily aspires. However, I am at least satisfied that you should be satisfied with it. An inverse relationship of the fertility of the soil to human fertility must needs deeply affect a strong-loined paterfamilias like myself, the more so since mon mariage est plus productif que mon industries [my marriage is more productive than my industry].

I shall now submit to you just one illustration of the currency theory, my study of which might be described by Hegelians as a study of ‘otherness’, of the ‘alien’, in short of the ‘holy’.

The theory of Mr Loyd and tutti frutti [all sorts of others], from Ricardo onwards, consists in the following:

Let us assume that we have a purely metallic currency. If there were too much of it here, prices would rise and hence the export of commodities decrease. Their import from abroad into this country would increase. Thus imports would rise above exports. Hence an unfavourable balance of trade. An unfavourable rate of exchange. Hard cash would be exported, the currency would shrink, the prices of commodities would fall, imports decrease, exports increase, money flow back again; in short, the situation would attain its former equilibrium.

In the converse case likewise, mutatis mutandis.

The moral of this: since paper money must imitate the movement of metallic currency, and since artificial regulation must here take the place of what, in the other case, is natural law, the Bank of England must increase its paper issues if bullion flows in (e.g. by the purchase of government securities, exchequer bills, etc.) and reduce it by the reduction of discounts, or by the sale of government paper, if bullion decreases. However I contend that the Bank should take the opposite course and increase its discounts if bullion decreases and let them take their normal course if it increases. Upon pain of unnecessarily intensifying the impending commercial crisis. However, more of that une autre fois. [some other time]

What I wish to elucidate here goes to the basic principles of the matter. For my contention is that, even with a purely metallic currency, the quantity thereof, its expansion or contraction, has nothing to do with the outflow and inflow of precious metals, with the favourable or unfavourable balance of trade, with the favourable or unfavourable rate of exchange, except in the most extreme cases, which practically never occur but are theoretically determinable. The same contention is made by Tooke, but I have found no proof of it in his History of Prices for 1843-47.

As you can see, it’s an important matter. Firstly, the whole theory of circulation is denied in its very fundamentals. Secondly, it is shown that the progress of crises, even though the credit system be a condition of the same, is concerned with currency only in so far as crackbrained meddling by the authorities in its regulation may aggravate an existing crisis, as in 1847.

Note that in the following illustration it is assumed: The inflow of bullion goes hand in hand with flourishing trade, prices not yet high but rising, a surplus of capital, excess of exports over imports. The outflow of gold vice versa, mutatis mutandis. Now this is the assumption of those against whom the polemic is directed. They cannot gainsay it. In reality there may be 1,001 cases in which there is an outflow of gold, although the prices of other commodities in the country exporting it are far lower than in those to which the gold is being sent, e.g. as in England in 1809-11 and 1812, etc., etc. Yet the general assumption is, firstly, right in abstract, and, secondly, accepted by the currency chaps. Hence not to be debated here for the time being.

Let us assume, then, that a purely metallic currency is in circulation in England. But that does not presuppose that the credit system has ceased. Rather, the Bank of England would turn itself into both a deposit and lending bank. Save that its loans would consist simply in cash. If this assumption were to be rejected, what appears here as a deposits of the Bank of England would appear as hoards of private individuals and the loans of the Bank as loans of private individuals. Thus, in this context, the term Bank of England deposits is simply an abbreviation, to present the process, not in fragmented form, but concentrated in a focus.

Case I. Influx of bullion. Here the matter is very simple. A great deal of idle capital, hence increase in deposits. In order to make use of them the Bank would lower its rate of interest. Hence, expansion of business in the country. The circulation would only rise if business increased to the extent that additional currency was required to conduct it. Otherwise the surplus currency issued would flow back into the Bank as deposits, etc., as a result of maturing bills, etc. Thus currency does not act here as a cause. Its increase is ultimately the consequence of a greater amount of capital put to use, not vice versa. (Hence, in the case under discussion, the first consequence would be growth of deposits, i.e. of idle capital, not of circulation.)

Case II. This is where the matter really begins. Export of bullion is assumed. Beginning of a period of pressure. Unfavourable rate of exchange. At the same time a poor harvest, etc. (or else dearer raw materials for industry) necessitate ever larger imports of commodities. Suppose that the accounts of the Bank of England at the beginning of such a period appear as follows:

a)

Capital

£14,500,000

Government Securities

£10,000,000

Rest

£  3,500,000

Bills of Exchange

£12,000,000

Deposits

£12,000,000

Bullion or Coin

£  8,000,000

£30,000,000

£30,000,000

The Bank is in debt, since it has been assumed that no notes exist, only the 12 millions of Deposits. According to its principle (in common with the deposit and circulation banks, only a third of its liabilities have to be in cash), its 8 millions of bullion is too large by half. To make more profit it lowers the interest rate and raises its discounts, e.g. by 4 millions, which are exported for corn, etc. The Bank’s accounts then appear as follows:

b)

Capital

£14,500,000

Government Securities

£10,000,000

Rest

£  3,500,000

Bills of Exchange

£16,000,000

Deposits

£12,000,000

Bullion or Coin

£  4,000,000

£30,000,000

£30,000,000

From these figures it follows that:

Merchants, as soon as they have to export gold, act first upon the Bank’s bullion reserve. The gold thus exported diminishes its (the Bank’s) reserve without having the slightest effect on the currency. Whether the 4 millions are in its cellars or aboard a ship bound for Hamburg is all the same so far as the currency is concerned. It finally becomes evident that a significant drain of bullion, in this case £4 millions sterling, can take place without in any way affecting either the currency or the business of the country in general. Throughout the whole period, that is, during which the bullion reserve, which was too large in relation to liabilities, is being reduced to no more than its due proportion to the same.

c) But let us suppose that the circumstances which necessitated the drain of 4 millions continue, shortage of corn, rise in the price of raw cotton, etc. The Bank grows concerned about its security. It raises the interest rate and limits its discounts. Hence, pressure in the world of commerce. What effect does this pressure have? Withdrawals are made from the Bank’s deposits, its bullion falls proportionately. Should the deposits fall to 9 millions, i.e. be reduced by 3 millions, those 3 millions must come from the Bank’s bullion reserve. This would therefore fall (4 millions — 3 millions) to 1 million against deposits of 9 millions, a proportion which would be dangerous to the Bank.. If, then, the Bank wishes to maintain its bullion reserve at one third of the deposits, it will diminish its discounts by 2 millions.

The accounts would then appear as follows:

Capital

£14,500,000

Government Securities

£10,000,000

Rest

£  3,500,000

Bills of Exchange

£14,000,000

Deposits

£  9,000,000

Bullion or Coin

£  3,000,000

£27,000,000

£27,000,000

It follows that, as soon as the drain becomes so great that the bullion reserve reaches its due proportion in relation to deposits, the Bank will raise the interest rate and reduce the discounts. But then the deposits begin to be affected and, as a result of their decrease, the bullion reserve decreases but so, to an even greater extent, does the discount of bills. The currency is not in the least affected. A portion of the bullion and deposits withdrawn fills the vacuum which the contraction of the Bank’s accommodation creates in the circulation at home, while another portion finds its way abroad.

d) Supposing that imports of corn, etc., continue and the deposits sink to 4,500,000, the Bank, in order to maintain the necessary reserve against its liabilities, would reduce its discounts by a further 3 millions, and the accounts would appear as follows:

Capital

£14,500,000

Government Securities

£10,000,000

Rest

£  3,500,000

Bills under discount

£11,000,000

Deposits

£  4,500,000

Bullion or Coin

£  1,500,000

£22,500,000

£22,500,000

On this assumption the Bank would have reduced its discounts from 16 to 11 millions, that is, by 5 millions. The necessary requirements of the circulation replaced by the deposits withdrawn. But simultaneously shortage of capital, rise in the price of raw materials, decrease of demand, hence of business activity, hence ultimately of the circulation, of the necessary currency. The surplus portion of the same would be sent abroad in the form of bullion to pay for imports. The currency is the last to be affected, and it would only be reduced to less than the necessary quantity should the bullion reserve fall below the minimal proportion to deposits.

With regard to the above, it should also be noted that:

1. Instead of reducing its discounts, the Bank could dispose of its public securities, which, on this assumption, would be unprofitable. However same result. Instead of reducing its own reserve and discounts, it would reduce those of private persons who put their money in public securities.

2. I have assumed here a drain of 6,500,000 on the Bank. In 1839 there was one of 9-10 millions.

3. The process assumed in the case of a purely metallic currency can lead, as with paper, to a closure of the till, as happened twice in Hamburg in the eighteenth century.

Write soon.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

Manchester, February 5, 1851

The Free Traders here are making use of prosperity, or semi-prosperity, to buy the proletariat, and John Watts is acting as broker. You know Cobden’s new plan: a National Free School Association to put through a bill empowering townships to impose local taxes on themselves for the erection of schools. The thing is being pushed splendidly. In Salford a Free Library and Museum have already been established as well — with lending library and reading-room gratis. In Manchester the Hall of Science — and here, as the Lord Mayor of Manchester most graciously acknowledged, Watts was really the broker — has been bought up by public subscription (about £7,000 was collected altogether) and will also be transformed into a Free Library. At the end of July the affair is to be opened — with 14,000 volumes to begin with. All the meetings and assemblies held for these objects resound with the praises of the workers, and especially of the worthy, modest, useful Watts, who is now on the best of terms with the Bishop of Manchester. I am already looking forward to the outburst of indignation at the ingratitude of the workers which will break loose from every side at the first shock.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 283;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 10 February 1851, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

When you wrote saying that it would soon be time to attack Louis Blanc, you were a clairvoyant, to say the least.

Now hearken to the following story:

A few days or perhaps a week ago, I ran into Landolphe and from the embarrassed way in which he greeted me and my wife, noted that there was something ‘rotten’ in the state of our ami chevaleresque [chivalrous friend] our Bayard of the Montagne. Eh bien! Landolphe and Louis Blanc have joined up with the Willich-Schapper committee, from which Mr Adam has resigned! And only a fortnight previously Landolphe had been raving and ranting about Barthélemy and I had been telling him about the affair of Messrs Willich and Schapper. Qu'en dis-tu? Not a word from these worthies to apprise me of it.

The nub of the matter is as follows:

On 24 February Church Street [i.e., the Fraternal Society of French Social Democrats] are holding a banquet to which they have invited Blanc and Ledru-Rollin and, among others, Landolphe. Louis Blanc, anxious to show Ledru-Rollin that he too has a cosmopolitan committee behind him, and to punish Church Street for treating him and Ledru as ‘of equal importance’, rallied his army from Great Windmill Street [i.e., the German Workers' Educational Society] and from the pub where the feckless Poles foregather.

Encore un coup! Quen dis-tu?

A few days ago Church Street received a printed circular (combining a manifesto) with an invitation to a monster banquet on 24 February, and signed primo Landolphe and, immediately after, Schapper, L. Blanc. Intense indignation in Church Street! Intense delight in Great Windmill Street!

In the circular-manifesto Louis Blanc does not speak in the name of a nation, but in the name and on behalf of the eternal formula: liberté, égalité, fraternité! The only fly in the ointment so far as I'm concerned is that I still owe Landolphe £1/10s. which ought now to be sent him forthwith through [Ferdinand] Wolff.

You can easily imagine how greatly Willich and Schapper have grown in their own esteem and how they fancy us beaten!

But we'll beat them in a different sense. We are well on the way to driving Corporal and Carpenter Willich mad, literaliter mad.

You will recall the letter written to Willich by Schramm on [Herman] Becker’s behalf, in which he offered him military dictatorship, abolished the press, and cast mild aspersions on Schapper’s moral character.

Eh bien! Willich, the uneducated, four times cuckolded jackass, fell into the trap. He has been bombarding Becker with letters, already has an envoy awaiting dispatch, treats Schapper de haut en bas [superciliously], ignores, insults and intrigues against that worthy man in every possible manner, has already adopted the overbearing manner of a Cromwell II, has grown irascible, no longer tolerates contradiction, and has entrusted Becker with the task of starting a revolution in Cologne, after which he declares himself ready to assume the supreme leadership.

A short time ago, while in company, he suddenly jumped up shouting that his letters from Paris and Cologne had not yet arrived - it was on the occasion of the last French ministerial crisis - complained that his (stupid head) was in a whirl, whirl, whirl, dashed off to Bond Street and had a bucket of water poured over it. I now have a shower-bath prepared for him which should have quite the opposite effect. In a few days’ time Becker is going to let me have Willich’s letters and then I shall spring the mine.

A fresh swarm of democratic scallywags here, Frenchmen driven out of Brussels, Heise from Cassel, Oppenheim from Brussels, Günther from Frankfurt, etc. Fortunately, however, I have seen none of the latter.

You did receive my last letter, didn’t you?

Your

K. M.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 285;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 11 February 1851

Dear Engels,

Iterum Crispinus! [i.e., “the same again"]

I have just learned that there was a meeting earlier this evening in the Tottenham Court Road in honour of the late Bem. On the platform were: Chairman Schapper, etc., Louis Blanc and the remaining members of the new League of Peoples Committee. In one of the front rows of the auditorium sat Harney and wife. The bulk of those present were from Great Windmill Street [i.e., the London German Workers’ Educational Society]. Applause greeted Schapper’s inevitable speech, ‘war to the knife’, delivered in English. Louis Blanc spoke no better. Vive la guerre! Tausenau, also present, spoke about Bem. Harney delivered a long and, they say, good harangue in which he finally hailed Blanqui, Barbès and, last of all, Louis Blanc, as the socialist Messiah.

Qu'en dis-tu?

Suppose you attended a meeting presided over by Th. Clark Esq., and it was your presence and your speeches alone that lent any real weight to the meeting, would friend Harney regard that as loyal?

Not content, then, with boosting Ruge in his Friend of the People, he must needs indirectly boost Schapper-Willich as well.

Last Sunday he sent for me. The purpose being to persuade Jones to accept the title, ‘Friend of the People’. I didn’t go. If that’s what he wants, let him turn to L. Blanc, Landolphe, Schapper or Willich. I am fatigué of this public incense so tirelessly used by Harney to fill the nostrils of les petits grands hommes.

Apart from this accident, namely, that you, too, Brutus (Harney), if you don’t take sides against us at least play the neutral, while Engels does his best for you in Manchester, Eccarius writes for your paper [The Friend of the People] and I occasionally work on Jones for you — apart from that, I am greatly pleased by the public, authentic isolation in which we two, you and I, now find ourselves. It is wholly in accord with our attitude and our principles. The system of mutual concessions, half-measures tolerated for decency’s sake, and the obligation to bear one’s share of public ridicule in the party along with all these jackasses, all this is now over.

Now, I'd appreciate an early answer to this note, too. I hardly see anyone here save Pieper and live in complete retirement. So you'll realise that I miss you all the more and feel the need to talk things over with you.

You'll see from tomorrow’s newspapers that the grant was rejected by a majority of 102 votes.

Your

K. M.

Engels to Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 289;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[Manchester,] Thursday, 13 February 1851

Dear Marx,

I had been more or less expecting this business with Harney. I saw the notice of the Bem meeting in The Friend of the People, which stated that the Germans, French, Poles and Hungarians, as well as the fraternal democrats would be taking part, and it was quite clear that these could be none other than Great Windmill Street & Co. I forgot to draw your attention to this announcement before. There’s no possibility of my pursuing the matter any further today. But tomorrow I shall write a letter to Harney in which I shall tell him not to print the manuscript I sent him, as I shall not be providing a sequel, and in which I shall at the same time explain the whole business to him in detail. If this letter is of no avail, the whole rigmarole will have to be dropped until Mr Harney returns of his own accord, which will happen very soon. I have a very strong suspicion that he will be up here shortly and then I shall duly take him to task. It’s about time he realised that we're in earnest with him, too. At any rate, so as to save time and avoid writing twice I shall send the letter to you to be passed on to him as quickly as possible once you've read it.

Personally I find this inanity and want of tact on Harney’s part more irritating than anything else. But au fond it is of little moment.

At long last we again have the opportunity — the first time in ages — to show that we need neither popularity, nor the support of any party in any country, and that our position is completely independent of such ludicrous trifles. From now on we are only answerable for ourselves and, come the time when these gentry need us, we shall be in a position to dictate our own terms. Until then we shall at least have some peace and quiet. A measure of loneliness, too, of course — mon Dieu, I've already had a 3 months’ spell of that in Manchester and have grown used to it, and this, moreover, as a bachelor, which here, at any rate, is excessively boring. Besides we have no real grounds for complaint if we are shunned by the petits grands hommes; haven’t we been acting for years as though Cherethites and Plethites were our party when, in fact, we had no party, and when the people whom we considered as belonging to our party, at least officially, sous réserve de les appeler des bêtes incorrigibles entre nous [with the reservation that between ourselves we called them incorrigible fools], didn’t even understand the rudiments of our stuff? How can people like us, who shun official appointments like the plague, fit into a ‘party’? And what have we, who spit on popularity, who don’t know what to make of ourselves if we show signs of growing popular, to do with a ‘party’, i.e. a herd of jackasses who swear by us because they think we're of the same kidney as they? Truly, it is no loss if we are no longer held to be the ‘right and adequate expression’ of the ignorant curs with whom we have been thrown together over the past few years.

A revolution is a purely natural phenomenon which is subject to physical laws rather than to the rules that determine the development of society in ordinary times. Or rather, in revolution these rules assume a much more physical character, the material force of necessity makes itself more strongly felt. And as soon as one steps forward as the representative of a party, one is dragged into this whirlpool of irresistible natural necessity. By the mere fact of keeping oneself independent, being in the nature of things more revolutionary than the others, one is able at least for a time to maintain one’s independence from this whirlpool, although one does, of course, end up by being dragged into it.

This is the position we can and must adopt on the next occasion. Not only no official government appointments but also, and for as long as possible, no official party appointments, no seat on committees, etc., no responsibility for jackasses, merciless criticism of everyone, and, besides, that serenity of which all the conspiracies of blockheads cannot deprive us. And this much we are able to do. We can always, in the nature of things, be more revolutionary than the phrase-mongers because we have learnt our lesson and they have not, because we know what we want and they do not, and because, after what we have seen for at least three years, we shall take it a great deal more coolly than anyone who has an interest in the business.

The main thing at the moment is to find some way of getting our things published; either in a quarterly in which we make a frontal attack and consolidate our position so far as persons are concerned, or in fat books where we do the same without being under the necessity of mentioning any one of these vipers. Either way suits me; in the long run, and with reaction on the increase, it seems to me that the feasibility of the former is decreasing and that the latter will come more and more to be the expedient to which we must apply ourselves. What price all the gossip the entire émigré crowd can muster against you, when you answer it with your political economy?

Tomorrow, the letter for Harney. En attendant, salut.

Your

F. E.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 291;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

London, 23 February [1851]

Dear Engels,

For a week you've had no news of me, firstly because I was awaiting the documents from Cologne and wished to tell you about them, secondly because I had to wait for further details about our ‘ex-friend’. The former have not yet arrived. As to the latter, I am now rather better informed.

Harney received your letter all right.

According to what I am told by Tessier du Mothay, who is now here, the Louis Blanc affair originated as follows:

The association in Church Street gave itself out to be a philanthropic association for assistance to French political refugees. Ledru-Rollin, L. Blanc, Adam, everyone, in short, made this a pretext for participating in it. Politics were banned by the statutes. Then 24 February hove into view. As you know, when presented with the opportunity of making themselves important, the French prepare for it as long in advance and treat it with as much solemnity as the prospective lying-in of a pregnant woman. Even if the association was merely a philanthropic one, so the argument ran, its members in their capacity as Frenchmen must nevertheless celebrate 24 February [the anniversary of the February 1848 revolution in France]. A definite evening was fixed for a debate on this important matter. On that evening both Ledru and Blanc were present. The latter delivered a carefully prepared, spuriously temperate, Jesuitical speech, in which he sought to prove that a political banquet contravened the association’s statutes, that it would simply make France aware of their dissensions, etc., and, amidst much pious talk of fraternité, the Corsican mandrake, vented his chagrin at not having been included in the provisional government by Ledru and Mazzini. He got his answer. Despite his speech, which none admired more sincerely than he did, it was decided to hold the banquet.

And what does la blanche Louise [Louis Blanc] do now? She declares that, as a result of this decision, the association has dissolved itself thereby restoring to each his individual freedom, and that he will make use of this restitution of his ‘free will’ and organise a banquet without any spirit of faction, pure fraternité and other delectable tit-bits.

His eyes turned naturally to Barthélemy, knowing as he did that the latter, the Germans, Poles, etc., together formed a compact mass. On the other hand Landolphe, le bel homme was entrusted with the mission of winning over our dear Harney. L. Blanc was even gracious enough to invite Harney to the dinner, though, during the past six months, he and Landolphe have been consigning him to the devil. What magnanimity!

On the other hand L. Blanc drafted a manifesto which, as our dear would say, is out and out. You will have read it in The Friend of the People. It even repudiates the ‘aristocracy of the mind’, thereby on the one hand ostensibly providing a motive for condescending to the dii minorum gentium [second rate luminaries] and, on the other, holding out to Schapper & Co. the immediate and cheerful prospect of an ‘aristocracy of stupidity.’ But this manifesto — feeble platitudes, naturally — is regarded by L. Blanc as the ‘wisest possible thing’ to which human nature, under the most happy circumstances, could aspire. It was intended not only to astound the whole of Europe but also and more particularly to give Ledru-Rollin a slap in the face, and to lead all the Blanquists in France to believe that, out of sheer intrepidity of principle, the incorruptible little man had disassociated himself from Church Street.

Thus the worthy Harney has made himself the tool of a vulgar intrigue and, what is more, an intrigue directed against Ledru-Rollin to whom, at the same time, he goes running and whose banquet he will also honour with his presence tomorrow. In order further to nettle this, despite his qualités très aimables and respectables, highly impressionable plebeian — impressionable, that is, to famous names, in whose shadow he feels touched and honoured — and in order at the same time to show Ledru-Mazzini that the Napoleon of socialism cannot be thwarted with impunity, the little man goes and solicits the felicitations of the Parisian workers. These ‘Parisian workers’, whose appearance on the scene was bound to make the blood rise to our dear’s head, are, of course, none other than the notorious 25 délégués des Luxembourg, who have never been delegated by anyone, and who, throughout Paris, are the object, now of the hatred, now of the risée of the other workers, — fellows whose importance is no greater than that of the members of the Pre-parliament or the Committee of Fifty in Germany. They feel a need for a petit bon dieu quelconque, a fetish, and there is something monstrous about the little man’s appearance which all along has made it a suitable object of worship. He for his part assures them that they are the greatest men and the truest socialists on earth. And had he not already nominated them pairs of the future Workers’ Republic? Hence, whenever he raises a finger, they offer their felicitations and, whenever they offer their felicitations, he publicly expresses his heartfelt thanks. And he raised a finger this time. In these professional felicitators Harney, of course, sees Paris, the whole of Paris.

Before I take leave of the mandrake, two more items which I learned from Tessier, both of them highly characteristic of this fausse pleureuse [crocodile].

Louise never speaks extempore. He writes down every word of his speeches and learns them by heart in front of the looking-glass. Ledru, on the other hand, always improvises and, on important occasions, confines himself to a few matter of fact notes. Hence, quite aside from the difference in personal appearance, Louise is completely incapable of making the slightest impression when alongside Ledru. He therefore welcomed any pretext that permitted him to avoid comparison with this dangerous rival!

So far as his historical works are concerned, he wrote them in the same way that A. Dumas wrote his feuilletons. He never studies more material than is needed for the next chapter. This is how such books as the Histoire des dix ans are produced. In this way it lends a certain freshness to his accounts. For what he’s conveying is at least as new to him as it is to the reader; on the other hand the thing as a whole is weak.

So much for L. Blanc. Now for our dear.

He was not content with merely attending the fellows’ meeting. Indeed not. He has turned their banquet of 24 February which, without him, would have been a complete fiasco, into a London event. A thousand tickets have already been sold for the banquet, which is being held in the City. It was Harney who placed the majority of the tickets, as Jones informed me the day before yesterday. O'Connor, Reynolds, hundreds of Chartists will be there. Harney has been drumming them up. Again according to Jones, he is en route all day, carrying out L. Blanc’s orders.

He has even perpetrated a little piece of perfidy with regard to Jones by getting him to translate L. Blanc & Co.’s manifesto and then asking him whether he would have any objection to being named as the translator. That was on Wednesday. So by then he already had your letter, although he gave no hint of this to Jones. Jones saw in his question merely an appeal to his own ‘socialist’ sentiments — and naturally replied that he had no objection.

Jones told me that, as a result of my arguments, he might stay away from the banquet, though he couldn’t say for certain. The reason for his indecision is perfectly sensible. Were he not to turn up, he would forfeit some of his popularity since, thanks to our dear, this banquet has become a Chartist occasion. He is also afraid that Reynolds might intrigue behind his back.

Jones disapproves of the behaviour of our dear [Julian Harney], whom I have not ‘seen again’. He tried to excuse it on the grounds that, if the Chartists failed to attend either of the banquets, they would be accused of political apathy, or of antipathy towards the foreign revolutionaries. To this I replied that in that case Harney, etc., should have held a Chartist meeting to celebrate the rotten 24 February instead of constituting a pedestal for a dwarf and half a dozen jackasses — a dwarf who never describes Harney as anything but a ‘brave garçon’, and who, if a movement were to go into action in London tomorrow, or in one year’s or 20 years’ time, would produce official documents to prove that he had set these pauvres Anglais dans la route du progrès [poor English on the path of progress] a path which led from 1688 to 24 February 1851, when Louis Blanc heard himself acclaimed by the whole of London, as once before by 50,000 workers in the courtyard of the Réforme, which holds barely 50 men. And how many crocodile’s tears about this event that never happened will he consign to paper!

Harney has become embroiled in this business, firstly, because of his inordinate admiration for official great men, which we have often derided in the past. Secondly, because he loves theatrical effects. He is truly avid of applause, if not actually vaniteux [vain]. There is no disputing that he himself is profoundly susceptible to the stock phrase and generates the most copious and impassioned gas. Is more deeply bogged in the democratic mire than he would care to admit. He has a twofold spirit, one inculcated by Frederick Engels, and one that is all his own. The former is for him a kind of straitjacket. The latter is he himself in puris naturalibus [in a state of nature]. But there is in addition a third, a spiritus familiaris [familiar spirit], and that is his worthy spouse. She has a great predilection for gants jaunes [dandies] à la Landolphe and Louis Blanc. She hates me, for one, as a frivolous fellow who might endanger her ‘property to be watched upon’. I have irrefutable proof that this female has more than one of her long plebeian fingers in this pie. The extent of Harney’s thraldom to this spiritus familiaris, and of the petty Scottish wiliness with which she conducts her intrigues, will be apparent to you from the following: You will recall how on New Year’s Eve she insulted Miss Macfarlane in the presence of my wife. Later she told my wife, with a smile on her lips, that Harney had not seen Miss Macfarlane throughout the evening. Later she told him that she had declined her acquaintanceship because the cleft dragoon had evoked the dismay and ridicule of the whole company and of my wife in particular. And Harney was idiotic and cowardly enough not to give Miss Macfarlane a chance to avenge the insult, thus breaking in the most unworthy manner with the only collaborator on his insignificant little rag [The Friend of the People] who really had any ideas. On his rag, a rara avis [rare bird].

What lends added weight to this meeting is the stir created in London by little Johnny’s [John Russell] resignation and the avènement [accession to power] of Stanley-d'Israeli.

There’s nothing the Frenchmen fear more than a general amnesty. It would rob all the local cardboard heroes of their halos.

A. Ruge, in company with Struve, Kinkel, Schramm, Bucher, etc., has been trying to bring into being a Volksfreund or, as our Gustav would have it, a Deutscher Zuschauer. Came to nought. Some of the others did not want Winkelried’s patronage, some, like the ‘easy-going’ Kinkel, demanded payment in cash, ce qui ne fait Pas le compte de M. Ruge [which didn’t suit Ruge’s book]. His chief aim was, as you will know, to extract money from the reading public. This was frustrated by Julius, since he too wants to bring out a paper here.

K. Heinzen is redacteur en chef [editor-in-chief] of the bankrupt New York Schnellpost and has entered into a hair-raising polemic with Weitling.

You would do well to write sometime soon to Red Becker in New York and inform him about l'état actuel des choses. [current state of things]

Enclosed a letter from Dronke. Send it back to me by return; if you wish to write yourself with it, tant mieux [so much the better].

Your remittance was a great help to me as I couldn’t possibly go on owing the bel homme a farthing any longer.

In my next letter, something about French literature of 1830-48.

Write, too, and tell me whether my sums are right.

Your

K. M.

Incidentally, in our dealings with our dear — for he will seek to come back as soon as he has done with this great historical event — we must assume an air of superiority and make him feel that he has ‘lost’.

Apropos! Harney has had himself elected to a Chartist deputation to Church Street, whence, having made his entrée, he will repair to the City, where he will make himself at home.

Since, incidentally, there was nothing naive about his action, it follows that he arranged everything with the ‘bel’ homme behind my back and was no less reticent towards yourself.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 322;

First published: slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 31 March 1851, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

While you busy yourself with military history, I am conducting a little campaign in which I am likely to be vanquished by and by, and from which neither Napoleon nor even Willich — the communist Cromwell — would have been able to extricate themselves.

You should know that I had to pay £31/10 shillings to old Bamberger on 23 March, and £10 to the Jew, Stiebel, on the sixteenth, all on current bills. I first got Jenny to ask my mother-in-law outright. The answer to this was that Mr Edgar [von Westphalen] had been sent back to Mexico with the remainder of Jenny’s money, and I couldn’t extract a single centime.

Then I wrote to my mother, threatening to draw bills on her and, in case of non-payment, to go to Prussia and get myself locked up. I had really intended to take the latter course if such should be the case, but this device ceased to be feasible from the moment the jackasses began to fill the press with their jeremiads about the workers deserting me, my declining popularity and the like. As it was, the thing would have looked like a piece of political histrionics, a more or less deliberate imitation of Jesus Christ-Kinkel. The time-limit I set my mater was 20 March.

On 10 March she wrote and told me they intended to write to our relations; on 18 March she wrote to say the relations had not written which was intended to mean the matter was concluded. I at once replied, saying that I stood by my first letter.

On 16 March, with Pieper’s help, I paid Stiebel his £10. On 23 March, after I had made a number of fruitless moves, the bill for old Bamberger was inevitably protested. I had a frightful scene with the old man who, moreover, was frightfully abusive about me to the worthy Seiler. Through his banker in Trier the idiot had asked for information about me from the banker, Lautz. This fellow, my mater’s banker and my personal enemy, naturally wrote and told him the most absurd things about me and, on top of that, thoroughly stirred up my mater against me.

As regards old [Simon] Bamberger, I had no alternative but to make out two bills for him, one on him in London to run for 4 weeks from 24 March, the other, payable in Trier in 3 weeks, on my mater in order to cover the first. I at once advised my mater of this. Today, at the same time as your letter, one arrived from my mater in which, full of moral indignation, she addresses me in the most insolent terms, declaring positivement that she will protest any bill I draw on her.

So when 21 April comes round I shall have to expect the very worst from a thoroughly incensed old Simon Bamberger.

At the same time my wife was brought to bed on 28 March. [Jenny Marx gave birth to a daughter Franziska on that day] Though the confinement was an easy one, she is now very ill in bed, the causes being domestic rather than physical. And thereby I have verbalement not a farthing in the house, so that tradesmen’s bills — butcher’s, baker’s and so forth — keep mounting up.

In 7 or 8 days’ time, I shall have a copy of the will from Scotland. If anything’s to be made of it, little [Louis] Bamberger is the one to do so, if only in his own interest. But I can’t rely on it.

You will admit that this is a pretty kettle of fish and that I am up to my neck in petty-bourgeois muck. And at the same time one is also said to have exploited the workers! and to aspire to dictatorship! Quelle horreur!

Mais ce n'est pas tout. [but that’s not all] The manufacturer who, in Brussels, loaned me money from Trier, is dunning me for it because his iron-works are doing badly. Tant pis pour lui. [so much the worse for him] I can’t do as he asks.

But finally, to give the matter a tragicomic turn, there is in addition a mystère which I will now reveal to you en très peu de mots [in a very few word]. However, I've just been interrupted and must go and help nurse my wife. The rest, then, in which you also figure, in my next.

Your

K. M.

Apropos, how do merchants, manufacturers, etc., account for the portion of their income which they themselves consume? Is this money too fetched from the banker or how is it arranged? I'd be glad to have your answer to this.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 325;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 2 April 1851

Dear Engels,

I return herewith the cover of the letter I received from you today. Might it have been opened by Pitt Ermen? You must éclaircir this matter.

Your post office order arrived most opportunely. And this time celerity has increased the capital tenfold, like Signore Proudhon’s railway revenues. [alluding to Proudhon’s assertion in La Philosophie de la misère, that ‘since in society time is value in itself, the railway would, prices being equal, present an advantage of 400 per cent over road transport’]

As you can imagine, I'm not being idle. And with the avances you are making, I hope to collect what is wanting from various parts of the world.

I'm not writing to you about the mystère since, coûte que coûte [cost what it may], I shall be coming in any case to see you at the end of April. I must get away from here for a week.

The worst of it is that I now suddenly find myself hampered in my work at the library. I am so far advanced that I will have finished with the whole economic stuff in 5 weeks’ time. Et cela fait [and having done that] I shall complete the political economy at home and apply myself to another branch of learning at the Museum. Ça commence de m'ennuyer [it’s beginning to bore me]. Au fond [basically], this science has made no progress since A. Smith and D. Ricardo, however much has been done in the way of individual research, often extremely discerning.

Send me an answer to the question I put to you in my last letter.

As you are now devoting yourself to military science, couldn’t you embark on a fresh study of the Hungarian campaigns with the help of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Palmerston’s Blue Book, etc.? Ça serait très utile [it would be most useful]. Sooner or later I shall be bringing out 2 volumes of 60 sheets, and that would fit in splendidly. If you wish to find out any details about intrigues, battles, personalities, all you have to do is send me the inquiries in unsealed letters addressed to Baroness von Beck. I have established contact with her. She was a spy for Kossuth. And she’s a veritable chronicler of the Hungarian muck. Il faut l'exploiter [she must be exploited]. She’s too stupid to be able to conceal the truth. I have done some experiments to find out.

My wife, alas, has been delivered of a girl [Franziska], and not a garçon. And, what is worse, she’s very poorly.

Enclosed a letter from Daniels, to whom I wrote at length about his Physiologie. What little sense there is in his letter is a reflection of my own to him. At any rate let me have the scrawl back and tell me what you think of it.

Your

K. M.

You would, by the way, oblige me if, dans les circonstances actuelles you wrote to me as often as possible. As you know, my acquaintanceship here is confined plus ou moins to stupid youngsters.

Engels to Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 326;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[Manchester,] 3 April [1851]

Dear Marx,

The business of my opened letter is strange indeed. It could only have been opened by our clerk in the office and I doubt whether he possesses the nerve; besides, he could only have done it in old Hill’s absence and I don’t believe the latter left the office for as much as a second. None of the Ermens was in town. It is, of course, impossible to get to the bottom of the matter as there would seem to be a strong possibility — vu [in view of] questions in Parliament concerning refugees — that it actually happened at the post office. I had already noticed that the clerk, who is more a servant of Ermen Brothers than of Ermen and Engels, had been regarding me with some suspicion of late, but from there to tampering with letters il y a loin encore [it’s still a far cry]. In any case I shall know how to forestall that sort of thing in future. Even if the fool actually read the letter, it would be of no great moment; for if the fellow ever tried to make use of the information, e.g. if my old man were to come here, it would so compromise him that he would at once get the sack. Anyhow, as I have said, I doubt whether he possesses the nerve.

As to the question raised in your last letter but one, it is not entirely clear. However, I think the following might suffice.

In commerce the merchant as a firm, as a producer of profits, and the same merchant as a consumer are two entirely different people who confront one another as antagonists. The merchant as a firm means capital account and/or profit and loss account. The merchant as a guzzler, toper, householder and procreator means household expense account. Hence the capital account debits the household expense account with every centime that makes its way from the commercial to the private purse and, since the household expense account shows only a debit but no credit and is thus one of the firm’s worst debtors, the total debit standing to the household expense account at the end of the year is pure loss and is written off the profit. In the balance sheet, however, and in calculating the percentage of profit, the sum expended for housekeeping is usually regarded as being still in hand, as part of the profit; e.g. if, on a capital of 100,000 talers, 10,000 talers are earned but 5,000 frittered away, it is calculated that a profit of 10 per cent has been made and, when everything has been correctly entered, the capital account in the following year figures with a debit of 105,000 talers. The actual procedure is rather more complicated than I have described here, in that the capital account and the household expense account seldom come in contact save at the end of the year, and the household expense account generally figures as a debtor to the cash account, which serves as broker; but in the end this is what it amounts to.

Where there are several partners, the matter is very simple. E.g. A has 50,000 talers in the business and B likewise 50,000; they make a profit of 10,000 talers and each spends 2,500 talers. So at the end of the year the accounts appear as follows — in single entry book-keeping and omitting the imaginary accounts:

A Credit with A & B —

capital invested

50,000 talers

A   "   "   " —

share of profit

5,000   "   "

55,000 talers

Debit with A & B —

for cash

2,500   "   "

A Credit for the following year

52,500 talers

Similarly B. Yet the firm continues to calculate that it has made 10 per cent profit. In a word: the merchants, when calculating the percentage of profit, ignore the partners’ living expenses, whereas they allow for them in calculating the increase in capital resulting from the profit.

I'd be happy enough to write about the Hungarian campaign — or better still, if that were possible, about the campaigns of 1848/50 as a whole — if only all the sources were available. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung could only serve for comparison with the Austrian bulletins, and you know how much these leave to be desired. I should require at least 10-12 works on this campaign alone, and even then wouldn’t have what I needed most — Kossuth’s Közlöny (Moniteur). There’s no easier way to make an ass of oneself than by trying to argue about military history without having at one’s finger-tips all the facts concerning strength, provisioning, munitions, etc. That may be alright for a newspaper when all journals are equally ill-informed and reduced to drawing correct inferences from the few data at their disposal. But I don’t believe that as yet sufficient material on the Hungarian war is available to the public to enable one to say post festum of every crucial occasion: ‘Here such and such ought to have been done, and here what was done was right, even though the outcome might seem to belie it.’ Who, for instance, will provide me with data on the establishment of the Austrian and Hungarian armies and of the various corps on the eve of every battle and of every important movement? For that Kossuth’s and Görgey’s memoirs would have to be published first, and an authentic version of the battle and campaign plans submitted by Dembinski be available. However, even with the existing material, much could be elucidated and perhaps quite an interesting article produced. What is already clear is that, at the beginning of 1849, it was the winter alone which saved the Hungarian insurrection, as it did the Polish in 1830, and the Russian Empire in 1812. [during Napoleon’s invasion] Hungary, Poland and Russia are the only countries in Europe where invasion is impossible in winter. But it’s always fatal when an insurrection is saved merely by the bottomless mud which surrounds it. If the business between Austria and Hungary had come to a head in May instead of in December, a Hungarian army would never have been organised and the whole mess would have ended up like Baden, ni plus ni moins. [neither more nor less] The more I mug up on war, the greater my contempt for heroism — a fatuous expression, heroism, and never heard on the lips of a proper soldier. When Napoleon was not haranguing or making proclamations but speaking coolly he never spoke of glorieux courage indomptable [glorious and undaunted courage] etc., but would say at most, ‘il s'est bien battu’ [he fought well]

Incidentally, should a revolution break out in France next year, there can be no doubt that the Holy Alliance will advance at least as far as the gates of Paris. And, despite the remarkable attainments and rare energy of our French revolutionaries, it still remains highly questionable whether the forts and the enceinte of Paris are so much as armed and provisioned. But even if 2 forts are taken, e.g. St Denis and the next one to the east, it will be all to hell with Paris and the Revolution, jusqu'à nouvel ordre. [until further orders] Soon I shall explain this to you exactly in military terms, together with the only countermeasure that might at least temper the invasion: the occupation of the Belgian fortresses by the French, and of those on the Rhine by means of a highly problematic insurrectional coup de main.

I think you'll enjoy the following joke about the nature of your Prussian foot-sloggers which throws light on the later defeat at Jena, etc. So inspired was Prussian General Bülow, of the same school as old Fritz, father or uncle to the later Bülow of 1813, by the apparently reckless but au fond exceedingly sure blows struck by Napoleon at Marengo, that he arrived at the following insight: 1) To lay down a system of warfare based on the absurd for the purpose of ‘confounding’ the enemy with one folly after another and, 2) to provide the infantry, not with bayonets, but with lances as in the Thirty Years’ War! In order to beat Napoleon, one does away with gun-powder, qu'en dis-tu?

I'm delighted that, despite everything, you should be coming here at the end of the month. But you must make use of the opportunity to bring me the complete run of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, from which I shall compile dossiers on all the German democratic jackasses and the French ones likewise — a task that must in any case be done before we again find ourselves precipitated into some kind of mess. It would be good if for this purpose the worthy Liebknecht, qui est assez bon pour cela [who is good enough for that] could go to the Museum and look up details of the voting in the Berlin, Frankfurt and Vienna assemblies, which must be there (in stenographic records), and make extracts for the whole of the Left.

You know, I haven’t read Daniels’ conclusions. That the fellow should insist on ‘concepts’ as mediating between human beings, etc., is explicable; nor will you ever persuade one who writes about physiology that it is not. In the final count he can always argue that, every time an actual fact affects men, it provokes concepts in them, and hence that the reaction to this fact, though in the second instance a consequence of the fact, is, in the first instance, a consequence of the concept. Of course there is no objection to this formal logic, and it all really depends on the manner, which I do not know, of its presentation in the manuscript. I think it would be best to write and tell him that, knowing now to what misinterpretations certain sections are open, he should so alter them that his ‘true’ opinion plainly emerges. That is all you can do, unless you yourself rewrite the more questionable passages of the manuscript, which is not feasible either.

Let me know how your wife is, and give her my warm regards.

I'm glad that you've at long last finished with political economy. The thing has really been dragging on far too long, and so long as you have in front of you an unread book which you believe to be important, you won’t be able to settle down to writing.

What are the prospects of finding a publisher for the two volumes of 60 sheets you have in mind? If that turns out all right, we might be able to inveigle the fellow into getting the necessary material for the Hungarian article — I'd let him know about it — the cost to be deducted later, au besoin [if need be], from the fee. In that case I should also need a very good special map of Hungary and Transylvania, if possible battle-plans which, to the best of my knowledge, are not contained in existing works — and the map alone could cost some 15-20 talers. I would arrange for Weydemeyer to look for one. Apropos, do you know his address? I'd like to ask him about the military ABC books on organisation and tactics, since I can’t get that sort of stuff here. You might also see if you can get any books on Hungary out of the Beck woman, or else through her. I shall also need the Decker, which you still have.

Your

F. E.

Engels to Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 361;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Manchester, 23 May 1851

Dear Marx,

I saw with pleasure in the papers that the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was represented by you in person also at Soyer’s universal press symposium. I hope you enjoyed the homards [lobster] à la Washington and the champagne frappé. But I am still in the dark about how M. Soyer found your address.

Do you know what has become of that drunkard Laroche of Great Windmill Street. He has, according to German newspaper reports, been caught and sentenced in Berlin to death by hanging. It transpires that this self-styled former Prussian lieutenant of hussars is none other than the shoemaker August Friedrich Gottlieb Lehmann of Triebel near Sorau in Upper Silesian Wasserpolackei, militiaman of the 1st levy, who, on 23 March 1842, had been sentenced to be stripped of military honours and to 16 months’ service in a penal detachment for desertion in peacetime, forgery and unauthorised contraction of debts. Yet another ray of light shed on our German revolutionary heroes.

That those great warriors, Willich, Schimmelpfennig and Sigel, should be increasingly consorting with each other is all to the good. This pack of soldiery has an unbelievably sordid esprit de corps. They hate each other à mort and, like schoolboys, begrudge each other the most paltry marks of distinction, but they are all united against the ‘civilians’. Punctilious, as in the first French armies of 1792/93, but scaled down to a dwarfish caricature. They all regard the Windmill Street Society as a battalion, ready, willing and eager to march over here; it’s the only one left, since the ones in Switzerland were broken up and deported. Small wonder that they all cleave to this noble corps. It’s a very good thing that word of this officers’ corps spirit should already have reached us from the old barracks and the officers’ mess and that we should already see how this cliquishness prevails as much among the émigré officer material as in the ‘glorious army’. In due course we shall show these gentry what ‘civilian’ really signifies. All of this goes to show that the very best thing for me to do is to go on with my military studies so that at least one of the ‘civilians’ is a match for them in theoretical matters. At any rate I want to reach a point where jackasses such as these can’t talk me down. I'm delighted, by the way, to hear that they were cheated of 2,000 talers. The news from Cologne is very pleasing, but the people there should be on their guard.

Where begging is concerned that precious Johanna [Kinkel] really surpasses anything that has ever been known before. Heinzen is quite eclipsed; he has never attained to the same degree of effrontery as this woman who, moreover, is said to be as ugly as sin.

It is clear even from the English press that Girardin doesn’t support Cavaignac. But the very fact that he remarked on the brightness of Cavaignac’s prospects is enough to characterise the situation. You mentioned the possibility that the majority [in the Legislative Assembly] might conclude an agreement with Bonaparte and endeavour to carry out an illegal revision; if they do so, I think it will go awry. They'll never succeed so long as it’s opposed by Thiers, Changarnier and the Débats and their respective adherents. It would be too fine an opportunity for Cavaignac; and in that case he could, I believe, count on the army.

If there’s a fracas next year, Germany will be in the devil of a position. France, Italy and Poland all have an interest in her dismemberment. As you'll have seen, Mazzini has even promised the Czechs rehabilitation. Apart from Hungary, Germany would have only one possible ally, Russia — provided that a peasants’ revolution had taken place there. Otherwise we shall have a guerre à mort with our noble friends from all points of the compass, and it’s very questionable how the business will end.

The more I think about it, the more obvious it becomes to me that the Poles are une nation foutue [a finished nation] who can only continue to serve a purpose until such time as Russia herself becomes caught up into the agrarian revolution. From that moment Poland will have absolutely no raison d'étre any more. The Poles’ sole contribution to history has been to indulge in foolish pranks at once valiant and provocative. Nor can a single moment be cited when Poland, even if only by comparison with Russia, has successfully represented progress or done anything of historical significance. Russia, on the other hand, is truly progressive by comparison with the East. Russian rule, for all its infamy, all its Slavic dirtiness, is civilising for the Black and Caspian Seas and Central Asia, for the Bashkirs and Tatars; and Russia has absorbed far more cultural elements, and especially industrial elements than Poland, which by nature is chivalrously indolent. The very fact that the Russian aristocracy, from the Tsar and Prince Demidov down to the most louse-ridden Boyar, 14th class, who’s merely blagorodno, well-born, manufactures, haggles, cheats, lays itself open to corruption, engages in all manner of business, Christian and Jewish, — that is in itself an advantage. Poland has never been able to naturalise foreign elements — the Germans in the cities are and will remain Germans. In Russia, every second-generation Russo-German is a living example of that country’s ability to Russify Germans and Jews. There, even the Jews acquire Slav cheekbones.

Napoleon’s wars of 1807 and 1812 provide striking examples of Poland’s ‘immortality’. The only immortal thing about the Poles was their aimless quarrelling. Moreover, the greater part of Poland, what is known as West Russia, i.e. Byelostok, Grodno, Vilna, Smolensk, Minsk, Mogilev, Volhynia and Podolia, has, with minor exceptions, quietly allowed itself to be ruled by Russia since 1772; save for a few scattered members of the bourgeoisie and the nobility, ils n'ont pas bougé [they didn’t stir]. A quarter of all Poles speak Lithuanian, one quarter Ruthenian, a small portion semi-Russian, while a good third of the Polish element proper is Germanised.

Fortunately, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, we assumed no positive obligations towards the Poles, save the unavoidable one of restoration combined with a suitable frontier — and even that only on the condition of there being an agrarian revolution. I'm convinced that such a revolution will sooner be fully effected in Russia than in Poland, because of the national character and because of Russia’s more developed bourgeois elements. What are Warsaw and Cracow as compared with Petersburg, Moscow, Odessa, etc., etc.!

Conclusion: To take as much as possible away from the Poles in the West, to man their fortresses, especially Posen, with Germans on the pretext of defence, to let them stew in their own juice, send them into battle, gobble bare their land, fob them off with promises of Riga and Odessa and, should it be possible to get the Russians moving, to ally oneself with the latter and compel the Poles to give way. Every inch of the frontier between Memel and Cracow we cede to the Poles will, militarily speaking, be utterly ruinous to this already wretchedly weak frontier, and will leave exposed the whole of the Baltic coast as far as Stettin.

Besides, I am convinced that, come the next fracas, the entire Polish insurrection will be confined to Poseners and Galician nobility together with a few who have come over from the Kingdom, this having been bled so white that it’s capable of nothing more, and that the pretensions of these knights, unless supported by French, Italians and Scandinavians, etc., and bolstered up by rumpuses on the part of the Czechs, will founder on the wretchedness of their performance. A nation which can muster 20,000 to 30,000 men at most, is not entitled to a voice. And Poland certainly could not muster very much more.

Give my regards to Freiligrath when you see him, and also to your family, not forgetting Citizen Musch. [Edgar Marx], I shall be coming to London about a week later than I thought, the thing being dependent on a host of trifling matters.

Apropos, not a word yet from Cologne. Have you written? Unless I get the letter soon, it will be no good to me. I don’t know why Daniels shouldn’t oblige me. Couldn’t you write again? Daniels could dash off a line or two and let me have it by return. Otherwise I might find myself in the deuce of a predicament.

Your

F. E.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volum e8, p. 369;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913;

[London,] 16 June 1851, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

Daniels’ house has been searched and he himself arrested. I don’t think anything was found there.

This morning I received a letter, obviously in Daniels’ handwriting but unsigned, informing me of the above and asking me to remove all letters since it had been learnt from a ‘reliable’ (thus in the original) source that house searches would also be taking place here in England.

Whether that is legally possible I don’t know. At any rate, I shall remove everything. You, too, would be well-advised to burn all — irrelevant — letters and to deposit the rest, those containing any data and the like, under seal with Mary [Burns] or your clerk.

It seems probable that an introduction from Daniels was found on Jacobi.

This morning at the same time I received, through a merchant, a letter from Weydemeyer, who is in hiding near Frankfurt. I enclose that letter. Do you happen to know the exact ratio, home to foreign, of Britain’s trade, a figure which Weydemeyer wishes to know? The thing has changed significantly of late.

Salut!

Your

K. Marx

Engels To Joseph Weyedemeyer

In Frankfurt Am Main

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 370;

First published: slightly abridged in Die Neue Zeit, 1906-07 and in full in: MEW, Moscow, 1934.

Manchester, 19 June 1851

Dear Hans,

Marx has just communicated to me a letter of yours from which I at last find a definite address for you, which I have been seeking for some time past. For I wish to consult you about the following matter:

Since arriving in Manchester [in Nov 1850], I have been swotting up military affairs, on which — at least to start off with — I found fairly adequate material here. I was prompted to do this by the immense importance which must attach to the partie militaire in the next movement, combined with a long-standing inclination on my part, my articles on the Hungarian campaign in the days of the newspapers and finally my glorious exploits in Baden, and I would like to take it at least far enough to be able to join in theoretical discussion without making too much of a fool of myself. Now the material available to me here — on the Napoleonic and, to some extent, revolutionary campaigns — presupposes a mass of detail, my knowledge of which is non-existent or very superficial, and about which only superficial, if any, information can be obtained by dint of laborious research. Autodidacticism, however, is sheer foolishness and, unless one devotes oneself systematically to the thing, one achieves nothing worthwhile. What I now actually need, you will better understand if I remind you that — disregarding, of course, my promotion in Baden — I never rose higher than a Royal Prussian Bombardier in the Landwehr and consequently my comprehension of the details of the campaigns — and indeed as regards the various arms of the service — is hampered by the absence of the middle link which, in Prussia, is provided by the subalterns’ examination. I am not concerned, of course, with the tedious, minutiae of military drill, etc., which would be of little use to me since my eye trouble, as I have now found out once and for all, renders me completely unfit for active service of any sort; rather, I am concerned with an overall survey of the elementary knowledge needed in the various branches, going into detail only in so far as is necessary to enable me to understand and correctly evaluate historical facts of a military nature. Hence, e.g. elementary tactics, the theory of fortification, from a more or less historical point of view, comprising the various systems from Vauban up to the modern forts détachés, along with an investigation into field works and other matters associated with the engineering branch, e.g. the various types of bridge, etc.; further, a general history of military science and the changes brought about by the development and perfection both of weapons and of the ways in which they are employed. Then something really sound on artillery, since I have forgotten a great deal and there is much I simply don’t know; also other requirements which I can’t think of just now, but which will certainly occur to you.

I would ask you to indicate sources on all these elementary matters and this in such a way that I can immediately get hold of the things. Indeed, what I would like best of all would be things from which I could see, on the one hand, the present general average state of individual. branches and, on the other, the differences existing between the various modern armies. For instance, the different construction of field-piece carriages, etc., the different methods of sub-dividing and organising divisions, army corps, etc. Again I should be particularly interested in learning about the organisation of armies, commissariat, hospitals, about every aspect of the matériel necessary to any given army.

From this you will be able to gauge approximately what I need and which books you should recommend to me. I would suppose that as regards such manuals German military literature contains more useful matter than does the French or the English. I need hardly say that I am concerned with the knowledge of what is practical and really exists rather than with the systems or quirks of some unrecognised genius. As regards artillery Bem’s manual would no doubt be the best.

Anything I am able to find here on more recent military history — earlier periods are of relatively little interest to me and I've got old Montecucculi for those — is naturally in French and English. Among the latter more especially Lieutenant-General William Napier’s history of the Peninsular War — by far the best work of military history I have seen up till now. If you don’t know it and are able to get hold of it there, it would be worth your while reading it (History of the War in the Peninsula and the South of France, 6 volumes). I have no German stuff and must certainly obtain some; Willisen and Clausewitz immediately spring to mind. What do you think of these two, and what is and what is not worth reading? Theoretical as well as historical. As soon as I have made some progress, I shall mug up properly on the campaigns of 1848/49, especially the Italian and Hungarian. Do you happen to know of a more or less official or otherwise reasonably sober account of the Baden affair from the Prussian side?

In addition can you recommend some good, specialised maps of Germany, not too expensive but adequate for the study of the campaigns since 1792 (in particular maps of Württemberg, Bavaria, Austria for 1801-1809, Saxony, Thuringia, Prussia for 1806/7 and 1813, North-East France for 1814, Lombardy, Hungary, Schleswig-Holstein, Belgium). I have the large Stieler here, which, however, is far from adequate. Though I have here battle-plans for the period 1792-1814 in the atlas to Alison’s History of Europe since the French Revolution, I have discovered that several of them are inaccurate. Are there similar collections in Germany which, without being too dear, are nevertheless reliable?

Do you know Monsieur Jomini, of whom the French make such a fuss? I know of him only through Mr Thiers who, as everyone is aware, plagiarised him outrageously. This little Thiers is one of the most bare-faced liars in existence; there is not one battle in which the relative strengths are correctly given. Since, however, Mr Jomini later made off to Russia, it may be supposed that he must have had motives for cutting down the exploits de la bravoure française to something less than the super-human dimensions vouchsafed them by Mr Thiers, according to whom 1 Frenchman always whacks 2 foes.

Voilà a whole heap of questions. I hope, by the way, that the present persecution of Jews in Germany will spread no further. However, I find Daniels’ arrest disquieting. It would seem that they want to make searches here in order to implicate us; that would be no easy matter, however, and would fail dismally since they would find nothing.

Marx will no doubt be writing to you about the scheme for organising from London a lithographic bureau for America. But if this sort of thing is done properly, it rapidly runs into great expense here, and most of the American papers are by no means sound financially. Lupus is in London and Freiligrath likewise; at the beginning of this month I, too, was there for a fortnight.

Since, by all accounts, you will also be arriving here soon, it would be best for you to come to some arrangement with one or more papers or periodicals to act as correspondent, etc. That sort of thing is very profitable in London, though admittedly most of the best-paying newspapers are already provided for. Another question is what the press is like in Germany just now.

Capitano Willich continues to live in, on, and with his barracks. What do you say to our erecting a magnificent counterpart to it?

Write soon to your

F. E.

Address:

Ermen & Engels,

Manchester

Marx To Joseph Weydemeyer

In Frankfurt Am Main

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 375;

First published: in MEW, 1934.

[London,] 27 June 1851

Dear Hans,

I am not at all sure whether I am doing the right thing in sending you a letter with Fabricius. What assurance have I that this man won’t be nabbed at the border, since he is letting people here burden him with a veritable valiseful of letters?

As your proposed American plan — Engels may have already written to you about this — has come to nothing, you will have no alternative but to come and reinforce us here. Something might even turn up that would enable us to collaborate — for payment, of course, car il faut vivre [for one has to live].

I have now heard from a reliable source that betrayal and denunciation are playing a part in the arrests of our friends. I am morally convinced that Messrs Willich and Schapper and their good-for-nothing pack of rascally curs are directly taking part in this infamy. You will appreciate how important it is to these ‘great men’ in partibus to remove such people in Germany as they believe to be directly in the way of their accession to the throne. The jackasses fail to comprehend that we regard them as jackasses and accord them at best our disdain.

Despite his respectably high-minded, broth-without-bread, non-commissioned officer’s moral hypocrisy, Willich is a thoroughly common, mark well, thoroughly common chevalier d'industrie. pillier d'estaminet [adventurer, pillar of the taproom] and — or so I am told by a respectable philistine, though I cannot myself vouch for it — also cardsharper. The lad loafs around all day at the pub, a democratic pub, naturally, where he drinks gratis, bringing customers in lieu of payment and entertaining them with his stereotyped phrases about a future revolution in which the chevalier himself no longer believes, so often has he reiterated them under such widely disparate circumstances, and always with the same result. The fellow is a parasite of the basest kind — invariably, of course, under patriotic pretences.

All this individual’s communism amounts to is a determination to tread the primrose path, always at the public expense, in communion with other footloose chevaliers. This man’s activities consist solely in gossiping and lying about us in pubs, and boasting of connections in Germany which, though non-existent, are nevertheless taken for gospel by the Central clown A. Ruge, the ideological boor Heinzen and by the stagey, coquettish, theologising belletrist Kinkel, connections of which he also boasts to the French.

Apropos, while this last-named sanctimonious Adonis runs off his legs in bourgeois cercles, permitting himself to be fed, cosseted, etc., etc., by them, he associates secretly and illicitly with Schapper and Willich in order to keep in touch with the ‘Workers’ Party’ as well. This lad would greatly like to be all things to all men. In every respect he bears a most striking resemblance to Frederick William IV who is nothing more than a Kinkel enthroned and is afflicted with the same rhetorical leucorrhoea.

Were you to ask me how you are to subsist here, my answer would be: follow in the footsteps of the doughty Willich. He sows not neither does he reap, and yet the heavenly Father feeds him.

But now au sérieux! If living in Germany is becoming too dangerous for you, it might be good for you to come here. If you could remain in Germany unmolested, that would, of course, be preferable, since it’s more useful to have people there than here.

Your

K. M.

Apropos, Britain’s overseas trade amounts to at least 1/3 of its entire trade — more, since the repeal of the corn duties. There is, by the by, no sense at all in Mr Christ’s arguments. Pinto has already pointed out that, if 10/10 are necessary to something, the final 1/10 is as important as the previous 9/10. Granted that Britain’s overseas trade amounts to only 1/4 (which is wrong), there can be no doubt that without that, the other 3 /4 would not exist, and still less the 4/4, which alone can produce the numeral 1.

The democrats have long been accustomed to miss no opportunity of compromising themselves, making themselves ridicules, and risking their own skins. But never has the impotence of the infiniment petits succeeded in demonstrating itself so strikingly as in the paper which the local Central democrats — Ruge, Hang, Ronge, etc. — are bringing out. Under the presumptuous title Der Kosmos (or Das Kosmos as Freiligrath aptly calls it) there appears a weekly scrawl the like of which, in its brazen and insipid insignificance, the German language — and that is saying a great deal-has never, perhaps, produced before. Not even one of little-German democratic parish magazines has ever brought forth such evil-smelling wind as this.

It would perhaps be as well if things were to remain quiet for a few years yet, so that all this 1848 democracy has time to moulder away. Untalented as our governments may be, they are veritable lumina mundi as compared with these bumptious mediocre jackasses.

Adieu!

I am usually at the British Museum from 9 in the morning until 7 in the evening. The material I am working on is so damnably involved that, no matter how I exert myself, I shall not finish for another 6-8 weeks. There are, moreover, constant interruptions of a practical kind, inevitable in the wretched circumstances in which we are vegetating here. But for all that, for all that, the thing is rapidly approaching completion. There comes a time when one has forcibly to break off. The democratic ‘simpletons’ to whom inspiration comes ‘from above’ need not, of course, exert themselves thus. Why should these people, born under a lucky star, bother their heads with economic and historical material? It’s really all so simple, as the doughty Willich used to tell me. All so simple to these addled brains! — Ultra-simple fellows!

Engels to Ernst Dronke

In Geneva

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 380;

First published: in MEW, 1934.

Manchester, 9 July 1851

Dear Dronke,

You have heard nothing from us for some considerable time — firstly because, since Galeer’s death, we haven’t had any address, and then because, after you had given us Schuster’s address, news reached us that you yourself would soon be coming to England. But, since Lupus has now been in London for almost a month and we have heard nothing from you, we can only suppose that you will be remaining where you are for the time being.

You will have been informed of the happenings in London last autumn [i.e., the split in the Communist League]. What you did not hear from this quarter you will have seen in the documents published since then. So to put you au fait I need only tell you about a few of the things that have happened in the meantime.

As I have been stuck here in Manchester since Nov. ’50 and as Marx speaks little English, our connection with Harney and the Chartists was making little or no headway. This was exploited by Schapper, Willich, L. Blanc, Barthélemy, etc.,— in short, the whole Franco-German caboodle, displeased on the one hand with us and on the other with the Ledru-Mazzini Committee to get Harney involved in a banquet planned for 24 February;— in this they succeeded. During that banquet the following curious things happened:

1. Two of our people who were present, one of them Schramm, were thrown out by the German refugee rabble — the thing took a serious turn and legal proceedings might have ensued had we not been able to settle it well enough to satisfy the injured parties; on the other hand it led — momentarily — to somewhat strained relations with Harney, who showed weakness on that occasion. Jones, however, a fellow quite unlike Harney, is wholly on our side and is at present expounding the Manifesto to the English.

2. Mr Willich, for want of an address from Germany, read out one from Switzerland, beneath which was your signature among others. By what deception or forgery your name found its way onto such a document we here cannot of course know; at all events, you must duly investigate the matter, and let us have the necessary information. The address, by the way, is printed in the compte rendu [account] of the banquet with your name under it, and you can imagine the glee occasioned by the name of someone from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung appearing at its foot.

3. The business of Blanqui’s toast.[note] As a professed Blanquist, Barthélemy transmitted a request to Blanqui for a toast and Blanqui obliged with a splendid attack on the entire prov. government, Blanc and Co. included. Thunderstruck, Barthélemy laid it before the Committee, who resolved to suppress it. Blanqui, however, knew his men, the toast was published in the Paris papers to coincide with the banquet and quite spoiled the dramatic effect. That pious little swindler, L. Blanc, now asserted in The Times, as did the Committee — Willich, Schapper, L. Blanc, Barthélemy, Vidil, etc., — in the Patrie, that they knew nothing whatever about the toast. The Patrie, however, added the comment that, in reply to their inquiries, Blanqui’s brother-in-law, Antoine, had told them he had sent the toast to Mr Barthélemy and was in possession of an acknowledgment from the latter — one of the cosignatories of the statement. Barthélemy thereupon declared that this was so, that he accepted full responsibility, had lied, had received the toast but, in the interests of concord, had suppressed it. Unfortunately, however, the ex-capitaine de dragons Vidil simultaneously declared that he wished to confess everything: the toast had been submitted by Barthélemy to the Committee and suppressed by a resolution of the latter. Can one imagine a more horrid fiasco for the whole band? We translated the toast into German and had 30,000 copies distributed in Germany and England.

During the November mobilisation Willich, transported to the height of ecstasy by bogus letters, wanted to revolutionise the world with the Prussian Landwehr. We have in our hands some exceedingly comical documents and revolutionary plans relating to this. They will be put to use in due course. First and foremost, all ‘quill-pushing elements’ were to be extirpated, root and branch, and the dictatorship of the mobilised Eifel peasants proclaimed. Malheureusement il n'en fut rien [unfortunately, nothing came of it].

Since then the associated great men, amidst mutual assurances of power and immortality, have been fruitlessly attempting to gain a footing somewhere. All in vain. And they have the gratification of knowing that, of all the house searches and arrests that have taken place in Germany, not one has been due to connections with themselves.

We, on the other hand, have the satisfaction of being rid of the entire loud-mouthed, muddle-headed, impotent émigré rabble in London, and of being at long last able to work again undisturbed. The innumerable private iniquities of that gang need not concern us. We have always been superior to the riff-raff and, in any serious movement, have dominated them; but we have, meanwhile, learnt an enormous amount from our experiences since 1848, and have made good use of the lull since 1850 to resume our swotting. If anything should blow up again, the advantage we shall have over them will this time be of quite a different order, and in fields, furthermore, of which they have small inkling. Apart from all that, we have the enormous advantage that, unlike us, they are place-seekers to a man. It is beyond comprehension that there should still be jackasses whose supreme ambition, after the experiences they have been through, is to join some government or other, le lendemain même de la première insurrection victorieuse [on the very morrow of the first victorious revolution] — as they call revolution — only to be spurned or thrown out in disgrace 4 weeks later, as were Blanc and Flocon in 1848! And a Schapper-Gebert-Meyen-Haude-Willich government to boot! Alas, the poor devils will never achieve this satisfaction; they will, alas, revert to being mere appendages and, as such, may continue to sow confusion in the small towns and among the peasantry.

What are you actually doing in Geneva? They say you are a husband and a father, and that you are also on very friendly terms with Moses [Hess] — with an eye to Mrs Moses. Others have it that all this is sheer calumny but — at a distance of 10 degrees of latitude — that would be difficult to judge. Freiligrath, too, is in London and is bringing out a new volume of poetry. Weerth is in Hamburg and, like myself, is writing business letters pending the next set-to. He brought nothing back from his travels in Spain, not even the clap. He is, by the way, coming to London this month. Red [Ferdinand] Wolff has gone through various phases of being an Irishman, a worthy bourgeois, a madman and other interesting states, and has completely abandoned Schnaps in favour of half and half. Père Marx goes daily to the library and is adding amazingly to his knowledge — but also to his family. Finally, as to myself, I drink rum and water, swot and spend my time ‘twixt twist and tedium. So much for the Personal Column.

Since we over here have been compelled by the arrests in Germany to provide in many respects for the re-establishment of contacts, and to resume responsibility for much of the work we had delegated, it is essential that you write and tell us as soon as possible how things are in Switzerland. Reply at once, therefore, and should you want further elucidation, let us know upon what points. Write to me — care of Messrs Ermen & Engels, Manchester — via Calais.

Your

F. Engels

Note: Early in March 1851, Engels went to London for a few days to improve relations with the Chartists, which deteriorated after Conrad Schramm and Wilhelm Pieper had been manhandled at the ‘banquet of equals’ held on 24 February 1851 to mark the anniversary of the February 1848 revolution. Simultaneously, Marx and Engels took steps to expose Louis Blanc, Willich, Schapper and other organisers of the banquet. By that time, it had transpired that the latter had deliberately kept secret the text of the toast sent by Auguste Blanqui from the Belle-Isle prison, in which he exposed Louis Blanc, Ledru-Rollin and other members of the Provisional Government of the French Republic as traitors of the revolution. However, the text of the toast was published in La Patrie on 27 February 1851 and other newspapers. Marx and Engels translated it into German and English. The German version with a short preface written by them was sent to Cologne and printed in leaflet form, giving Berne as the place of publication.

During his stay in London, on 5 March, Engels apparently wrote a letter to the editor of The Times refuting a false declaration of Louis Blanc, published in that day’s issue of the paper, that Blanqui’s toast was never received by the organisers of the ‘banquet of the equals’. Engels enclosed the English translation of Blanqui’s toast for publication in The Times. But neither the letter nor the translation was published.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 383;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 13 July 1851 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

I have put off writing from day to day so as to send you complete the documents communicated below. But as they won’t be complete for several days, I am writing today so as not to keep you waiting any longer for an answer.

D'abord. From your letter it would seem that, during your old man’s visit to Manchester, you did not hear that a second document had appeared in the Kölnische Zeitung under the heading ‘Der Bund der Kommunisten’. This was the piece we wrote jointly, ‘Ansprache an den Bund’ — au fond, nothing less than a plan of campaign against democracy. From one point of view its publication was desirable, unlike Bürgers’ document, of which the form was absurd, plus ou moin, and the content not very reassuring. On the other hand, certain passages will make the present prisoners’ position more difficult.

From Louis Schulz in Cologne I have heard that Bürgers writes most dolefully from Dresden. On the other hand it is generally believed in Cologne that Daniels will be released, since there is nothing against him, and all the wailers in the Holy City have reacted in his favour. Naturally they consider him to be incapable of such ‘foolery’.

Miquel has written from Göttingen. Has been subjected to several house searches. Nothing was found. Wasn’t locked up. Five new emissaries — gentlemen — have left Göttingen for Berlin, etc. The persecution of the Jews has, of course, stimulated both zeal and interest.

The funniest thing is that that fatuous sheet, the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, attributes paternity of our document to Messrs Mazzini and Ruge, beats its breast over and over again and can find no better way of expressing its shock at the enormity than by crying at intervals, ‘Madness! Madness! Madness!'

The Trier’sche Zeitung — i.e. K. Grün — has, of course, climbed onto its high horse and used the first document to prove the material, and the second, the ‘intellectual’ impotence of the party. Needless to say, neither the stock phrases of the friends of light nor the most extreme ‘anarchist’ catch-words are wanting. Everything to be done from above! Police state! All dissenters literally to be proscribed and expelled. Mon Dieu! That really is the limit.

Now for the local storms — which customarily take place in a tea-cup.

First. Father Willich has bolted from the barracks — the demise of which, it seems, has been decided — and has become deeply involved in squabbles with most of his bodyguard.

Second. The great Fickler has arrived here. A few days before he came to England he was in Strassburg with Lupus. Liebknecht has long been an intimate of his. Both, therefore, went to see him on 5 July. He chatted away most affably, spoke of the need for reconciling the parties, etc. Then they were joined by the great A. Goegg. He called Willich a ‘mere fantasist’, Schapper a ‘disgusting character’ — having several times heard the fellows blustering in the Windmill, he had disassociated himself from them and hadn’t darkened their door again. Fickler and Goegg inveighed with exceptional vigour against the great Kinkel, who here plays the role of happy parvenu, thus bringing down on his head the ire of the other great men. Ruge, on the other hand, was regarded as a kind of lumen.

Fickler asked for my address and Lupus and Liebknecht departed, duped by the worthies and their striving for ‘concord’.

A few days later Freiligrath sent me the following letter which he had received:

4 Brunswick Place, North Brighton,

4 July 1851

Dear Freiligrath,

We are planning a kind of club or society which does away with the privacy of such organisations and excludes no-one from the revolutionary social democratic party save him who desires to be exclusive or is debarred by his own character and antecedents.

Fickler, Goegg, Sigel, Ronge and Ruge are promoting the affair and I have undertaken to inform you, and to invite you if, as I suppose, you are interested, to a meeting to be held for this purpose on 14 July (Monday week) at 11 in the morning at Fickler’s lodgings, 26 York Buildings, which form part of New Road at the lower end of Baker Street. We have invited about 24 people whom we know to be reliable and to have remained true. At present we know of no more.

I would have liked to talk to you. If the plan comes off, this will be possible in any case. Even if you are not going to remain in London, you still ought to come.

With regards and a handshake.

Your

A. Ruge

Qu'en dis-tu?

Freiligrath has made the great mistake of not sending off his answer until yesterday, 12 July, so that Ruge won’t even get it before leaving Brighton for London. Freiligrath was altogether too lackadaisical over the matter. Mais enfin chacun a sa manière d'agir [but after all, everyone has their own way of doing things]. Lupus, to whom I communicated the letter, immediately wrote to Fickler:

10 July 1851

Citizen Fickler,

On the 5th of this month Liebknecht and I came to visit you. From the manner in which you addressed us, I could not possibly have inferred that only the previous day the following letter had been sent to Freiligrath. (The above letter follows.)

If, on the 5th of this month, I had so much as remotely suspected that such a connection existed between yourself and A. Ruge, that fatuous, insolent, rapscallion, I would certainly not have set foot inside your lodgings.

Since I perceive from the above, however, that you consort with a person ‘who is debarred by his own character and antecedents’ (e.g. by his own cowardly flight from Berlin, etc.) from any truly revolutionary party, and who has already been sent to Coventry by the whole communist party in Germany, I would hereby inform you that I neither will nor can have anything to do with people who move so intimately within the orbit of an individual such as Ruge.

W. Wolff

3 Broad Street, Golden Square

P.S. You can make whatever use you like of this note. I for my part shall bring it to the notice of my comrades in the party.

To this Lupus received the following answer:

London, 11 July 1851

Dear Citizen Wolff,

So feeble indeed are my powers of prescience that they never remotely led me to fear the loss of your goodwill and of your company, should I associate with that ‘rapscallion’ Ruge. — More, I was not even aware of being subject in this respect to the tutelage of one section of the party and to police rule by the men of the future. It is to this want of percipience as also to what I have learned in twenty years of political activity, namely that there is not one political party able to avoid co-operating with rapscallions — that I owe my resolve to offer my hand to any qualified man desirous of treading the same revolutionary path as myself; — whether he goes no more than half way to the goal I have set myself; — whether he accompanies me all the way there, or whether he continues beyond it.

Anathemas, whether political or religious, are anachronisms, even if emanating from Emperor or Pope; — how infinitely more ridiculous do they appear when hurled by the kinglets and popelets of a party which, to judge by public avowals, is as inconsistent as your own, and which today transforms into ‘rapscallions’ those in its own midst to whom only yesterday it accorded almost divine honours!

In the course of my life I have encountered disproportionately more ‘rapscallions’ than upright people, and have been disproportionately less deceived by the former than by the latter. I therefore waste no time in drawing distinctions of this kind, but rather look for those qualities which may he put to use in the most diverse ways.

Should you desire, therefore, together with Marx and Liebknecht — whom I would beg you to inform — to take part in the said ‘meeting’, I hereby invite you to it, only pointing out that it will be no more than a preliminary discussion and that the chief disadvantage for you, as for half the company in general, will probably be the absence of accommodation for the grosser portions of the anatomy — a fact which, however, should contribute materially to expediting the proceedings.

With warm regards

Yours

Fickler, etc.

The most comical thing about the whole business is and will remain the unending efforts of Ruge and his clique to thrust themselves on the public by constantly changing the combination. If it doesn’t work as ABCDEF, it will assuredly do so as FEDCBA. Just try calculating how many variations and permutations of this kind are possible. Has there ever been a more impotent, ludicrously pretentious clique of barren jackasses?

Your

K. M.

Apropos, have received the 5 pounds. They arrived like a deus ex machina [a crane from which gods were suspended in ancient theatres, meaning an event which arrives in the nick of time to resolve difficulties], for circumstances are “‘orrible”, and it’s hard to see how to extricate oneself. Write direct to Klose (6 Upper Rupert Street, near Princes Street, Soho), since the jackass will otherwise think that the letter he addressed to you, the one about the £10, remember? hasn’t reached you.

Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx in London, 17 July 1851

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... At last the newspaper subscriptions are again in order here and I have at last seen our old document [1] in the Kölnische Zeitung. By the way the Augsburger Zeitung [2] reports in an article entitled ‘Dresden’ by an author who seems to be usually well informed that Nothjung [3] as a result of unfair practices during the judicial examination finally knuckled under and made very comprehensive confessions. I consider it at any rate quite possible that adroit investigators were able to corner him quickly and get him all tangled up in the craziest contradictions. A Prussian official is said to have gone there to squeeze still more out of him. The King of Hanover [4] is said to have refused to institute prosecutions in his domains, at least in the crude manner practised in Prussia, Hamburg, etc. Miquel’s [5] letter seems to corroborate this. As you know Martens [6] has been arrested in Hamburg. Nothing, by the way, could show up better the stupidity of the Prussians than the domiciliary search of the house of ‘Karl on the Rhine’, who was also suspected of belonging to the Communist League and in whose possession only letters from Raveaux [7] were found!

The old document can harm those under arrest only by the one passage about ‘excesses'; all other passages are levelled at the democrats and would aggravate the prisoners’ position only if they had to face a halfway democratic jury. But judging by appearances they will be brought before an exquisite special or confederate jury if they are brought before a jury at all. And even these things were to a large extent already used in the Burgers document [8] that was seized at the very beginning. On the other hand it is in every other respect of enormous advantage that the thing has been published and has gone the round of the papers. The isolated groups of budding Communists, which have kept silent and are not known at all but which, in line with past experience, must have established themselves in all parts of Germany, will find it to be an excellent prop; and it can be seen even from the article in the Augsburger Zeitung that the thing has affected it in quite a different way from the first discoveries. Its summary of the contents shows that it understood that ‘piece of insanity’ only too well – in fact it could not be misunderstood.

Besides, the feudal reaction advances so recklessly and blindly that the whole scare campaign does not create the slightest impression on the bourgeoisie. It is just too funny for anything to watch the Kölnische Zeitung now preach daily that ‘the Red Sea must be crossed’ and admit all the mistakes of the Constitutionalists of 1848. And indeed, if a Kleist-Retzow is appointed Oberpräsident of Coblenz and that shameless Kreuzzeitung [9] is becoming more and more abusive with its flat jokes and doggerel rhymes, what is the educated and sedate constitutional opposition to do? What a pity that we don’t have the Kreuzzeitung here. I manage to see various excerpts from it. The utterly vulgar, gutter-snipe, disgustingly stupid Prussian manner in which that puny sheet is now assailing the decent, well-to-do and respectable constitutional bigwigs is beyond all imagination. If fellows like Beckerath [10] and his associates could still be credited with one ounce of self-respect and capacity for resistance they would prefer the ill-treatment and abuse of a Père Duchesne [11] in the manner of a Rhenish dock labourer and the whole red terror to the treatment they have daily to endure now at the hands of the Junkers and the Kreuzzeitung...

But it serves those dogs right, who decried the best articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as ‘vulgar abuse’, that the difference is now drummed into their cringing backs. They will long for the – in contrast to this – extremely Attic derision of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung...

Notes

1. Engels refers to the First ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League’, which was written by Marx and Engels in March 1850. It was confiscated by the Prussian police and published in the bourgeois press in connection with the arrest of Central Committee members of the Communist League and the preparation of the Communist trial at Cologne – Progress Publishers.

2. Reference is to the Allgemeine Zeitung (General Newspaper) – German conservative daily paper founded in 1798; published in Augsburg from 1810 to 1882 – Progress Publishers.

3. Peter Nothjung (1823-1866) – German tailor, member of Cologne workers’ union and of Communist League, a defendant at Cologne Communist Trial (1852), sentenced to six years’ imprisonment.

4. Ernest Augustus (1771-1851) – King of Hanover (1837-1851) – Progress Publishers.

5. Johannes Miquel (1828-1901) – German politician, member of Communist League in 1840s, subsequently National Liberal, Prussian Minister of Finance (1890-1901) – Progress Publishers.

6. Joachim Friedrich Martens (1804-1877) – German joiner, member of League of the Just, a leader of Workers Educational Society and of Communist League community in Hamburg – Progress Publishers.

7. Franz Raveaux (1810-1851) – German politician, petty-bourgeois democrat, in 1848-49 deputy to Frankfurt National Assembly from Cologne, belonged to its Left Centre, member of Baden provisional government, emigrated from Germany after defeat of Baden-Palatinate insurrection – Progress Publishers.

8. This refers to the Address of the Central Committee in Cologne to the Communist League dated 1 December 1850 ('Die Zentralbehörde an den Bund’), which was drawn up by supporters of Marx and Engels, mainly by Bürgers. The document, which fell into the hands of the police during the arrest of members of the Communist League, was in June 1851 published in the Dresdner Journal und Anzeiger (Dresden Journal and Advertiser) and the Kölnische Zeitung (Cologne Newspaper). Heinrich Bürgers (1820-1878) – German radical publicist, after 1850 member of Central Committee of Communist League, at Cologne Communist Trial (1852), sentenced to six years’ imprisonment, in 1860s and 1870s Progressist – Progress Publishers.

9. Kreuzzeitung (Cross Newspaper) – a name given to the Neue Preußische Zeitung (New Prussian Newspaper) because the sign of the cross was used in its heading. The paper which had appeared in Berlin since June 1848, was the organ of the counter-revolutionary court camarilla and the Prussian Junkers – Progress Publishers.

10. Hermann Beckerath (1801-1870) – German banker, one of the leaders of Rhine bourgeoisie, member of Frankfurt National Assembly, belonged to Right Centre, Minister of Finance in imperial government (August-September 1848) – Progress Publishers.

11. Le Père Duchesne – a newspaper published by Hébert in Paris from 1790 to 1794; it expressed the sentiments of the urban semi-proletarian masses during the French bourgeois revolution – Progress Publishers.

Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx in London, circa 20 July 1851

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Marx

I herewith return the documents. I like Miquel’s [1] letter. At least the fellow thinks, and he would no doubt turn out very well if he spent some time abroad. His fears about the unfavourable effect our document [2] now published will have on the democrats are no doubt quite justified in his district; but these primitive middle-peasant democrats of Lower Saxony, whose boots the Kölnische Zeitung has lately been licking, offering them an alliance, are just that kind and stand far below the philistine democrats of the big towns, by whom they are, after all, dominated. And these ordinary petty-bourgeois democrats, although obviously greatly piqued by this document, are themselves far too much squeezed and oppressed not to be much more ready, together with the big bourgeoisie, to understand the necessity of crossing the Red Sea. The fellows will resign themselves more and more to the necessity of a short reign of terror by the proletariat – after all it cannot last long, for the positive contents of the document are really so senseless that there can be no question of the permanent rule of such people or of the ultimate carrying out of such principles! The big and middle peasant of Hanover, on the other hand, who has nothing but his land, whose house, farm, barns, etc, are exposed to every danger by the prospective ruin of all the insurance companies, and who, moreover, since Ernest Augustus’ [3] time has already had a good taste of all the delights of lawful resistance – this German sturdy yeoman will take very good care not to go into the Red Sea before he has to.

According to Bermbach’s [4] letter Haupt [5] is the traitor, but I cannot believe it. At any rate this business must be investigated. Of course it does seem suspicious that, as far as I know, Haupt is still at large. The idea of a trip from Göttingen or Cologne to Hamburg will have to be dropped. What the records of the trial or the court transactions will reveal about this and when is impossible to say. If there is treason it should not be forgotten and it would be a very good thing to set an example on a suitable occasion.

I hope Daniels [6] will soon be set free; after all he is the only politically minded man in Cologne and in spite of all police surveillance he would be able to keep things moving along the right track.

To return again to the effect of our document upon the democrats. Miquel should however consider that we continuously and uninterruptedly harassed these gentlemen in writings which were after all more or less Party manifestoes. Why all this outcry then about a programme which only summarises in a very calm and, especially, a quite impersonal way what was published long ago? Did our Continental disciples deny us, and did their involvement with the democrats go further than Party policy and Party honour allowed? If the democrats raised a revolutionary clamour from sheer lack of oppositional opinion, who is responsible for the lack of oppositional opinion? Surely not we, but – and this is the most that can be said – the German Communists in Germany. And indeed that seems to be the snag. Every democrat with any intelligence must have known from the beginning what he had to expect from our Party – the document could not have contained much that was new to him. If they made a temporary alliance with the Communists they were perfectly well aware of the conditions and duration of the alliance, and it would never have occurred to anybody but Hanoverian middle peasants and lawyers to suppose that since 1850 the Communists had turned away from the principles and policy of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Waldeck [7] and Jacobi [8] would surely never have dreamt of such a thing. In any case, publications of this kind cannot do anything in the long run against ‘the nature of things’ or against ‘the conception of relation’, as Stirner [9] would say, and the shouting and agitation-mongering of the democrats will soon be in full swing again and they will proceed hand in hand with the Communists. And we have known all along that those fellows will be playing us dirty tricks on the day after the movement is over – no diplomacy can stop that.

On the other hand the fact that, as I assumed, small communist groups are being formed everywhere on the basis of the Manifesto [10] has given me great joy. This is just what we lacked, considering the weakness of our general staff up till now. Soldiers can always be found without trouble if the situation is ripe enough for that, but the prospect of having a general staff not consisting of Straubinger elements and allowing of a larger selection than the existing one of only twenty-five men with any kind of education is very pleasant indeed. It would be well to make a general recommendation that propaganda should be carried on everywhere among office workers. If one had to form an administration these chaps would be indispensable: they are used to hard work and intelligible book-keeping, and commerce is the only practical school for competent office clerks. Our lawyers, etc, are quite unfit for such work. What we need are clerks to keep the books and accounts, and talented, well-educated men able to draw up despatches, letters and documents. With six clerks I could organise an infinitely more simple, better arranged and more practical branch of administration than I could with sixty government councillors and financial experts. The latter cannot even write legibly and would muck up all the books so that not a soul could make head or tail of them. Seeing that one is more and more obliged to prepare for this eventuality the matter is not unimportant. Besides, office workers are used to continuous mechanical activity, they are less pretentious, less given to dawdling and it is easier to get rid of them if they are unsuitable.

The letter to Cologne has been despatched – very nicely attended to. If it does not arrive intact I don’t know what to do. As a rule it is not advisable to use Schulz’s [11] address – he is an ex-co-manager!

Notes

1. Johannes Miquel (1828-1901) – German politician, member of Communist League in 1840s, subsequently National Liberal, Prussian Minister of Finance (1890-1901) – Progress Publishers.

2. Engels refers to the First ‘Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League’, which was written by Marx and Engels in March 1850. It was confiscated by the Prussian police and published in the bourgeois press in connection with the arrest of Central Committee members of the Communist League and the preparation of the Communist trial at Cologne – Progress Publishers.

3. Ernest Augustus (1771-1851) – King of Hanover (1837-1851) – Progress Publishers.

4. Adolph Bermbach (1821-1875) – Cologne lawyer, member of Frankfurt National Assembly, witness for defence at Cologne Communist Trial (1852), later Liberal – Progress Publishers.

5. Hermann Wilhelm Haupt (1831-?) – German clerk, member of Communist League, one of the defendants at Cologne Communist Trial, betrayed Central Committee and was released by police before trial, fled to Brazil – Progress Publishers.

6. Roland Daniels (1819-1855) – German physician, member of Communist League, one of its leaders, defendant at Cologne Communist Trial, acquitted by jury, died of tuberculosis which he developed whilst in prison, friend of Marx and Engels – Progress Publishers.

7. Benedict Franz Leo Waldeck (1802-1870) – German political figure, bourgeois radical, lawyer, in 1848 one of leaders of left wing and Vice-President of Prussian National Diet, later Progressist – Progress Publishers.

8. Abraham Jacobi (1830-1919) – German physician, member of Communist League, teacher, one of the defendants at Cologne Communist Trial, was acquitted by jury but remained in prison on the charge of insulting ‘his majesty’, in 1853 fled to England, then to USA where he carried on Marxist propaganda in the press – Progress Publishers.

9. Max Stirner (Johann Caspar Schmidt, 1806-1856) – German philosopher, Young Hegelian, an ideologist of bourgeois individualism and anarchism – Progress Publishers.

10. Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (Manifesto of the Communist Party) – Progress Publishers.

11. Louis Schulz – Cologne merchant, bourgeois democrat, publisher of Rheinische Zeitung – Progress Publishers.

Marx To Engels

Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 408;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 8 August 1851 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

You'll excuse me for not having written sooner, and at the same time acknowledging receipt of the £5. So great was the pressure from without this week that I didn’t get round to writing. For the time being I've saved myself from being thrown out of the house by signing a bill on the landlord.

I enclose herewith a copy of the Schnellpost in which you'll be able to see how infamously inane are the doings and chatterings of that bunch of old women, Ruge & Co. As soon as you've read the muck, send it back. About the letter from which the boorish Heinzen cites extracts — and which in any case, originates from Fickler — a word of explanation: for some 2-3 weeks the jackasses — the émigrés — have been holding meetings in order to ‘settle their differences’, constitute themselves a round ‘dozen’ and mutually ‘set each other up’ as the great men of the future. Today they held their definitive sitting. I shall be hearing the result and shall inform you of it. But already the seed of dissension has grown so prolific that Mr Sigel has sent me a message through Schabelitz, who is here for the Exhibition, saying he would call on me.

The New York Tribune has invited me and Freiligrath to work as paid collaborators. It’s the most widely disseminated journal in North America. If you could possibly let me have an article in English on conditions in Germany by Friday morning (15 August), that would make a splendid beginning.

As to Schramm, we know that he corresponds regularly with his brother. He wrote and told Bamberger not to give us his address. Fresh reports come in daily of his infamous doings here.

Red Wolff has once again become an ‘Irishman’.

Now for the Idée générale de la Révolution au XIX siécle par P. J. Proudhon. The first time I wrote to you about this book, I had read no more than extracts from it — often misquoted, to boot. Now I can send you the skeleton. First of all, the book contains well-written attacks on Rousseau, Robespierre, the Montagne, etc. The force of the true sequence, to use the words of the immortal Ruge, is generated as follows:

I. Étude. It was reaction that first brought about the development of the revolution.

II. Étude. Y a-t-il raison suffisante de la Révolution au XIX siècle?

The revolution of 1789 overthrew the ancien régime. But it omitted to create a new society or to create society anew. It was concerned only with politique instead of with économie politique. At present ‘anarchie des forces économiques’ prevails, hence ‘tendance de la société à la misère'! This manifests itself in the division of labour, machinery, competition, the credit system. Increase in pauperism and crime. Again, the State (l'état) becomes ever greater, endowed with all the attributes of absolutism, acquires ever more independence and power. Increase in the national debt. The State sides with wealth against poverty. Corruption. The State subjugates society. There is a need for the new revolution. The task of the revolution consists à changer, à redresser la mauvaise tendance de la société. Society itself must not be touched. In its case there can be no question of reconstruction arbitraire.

III. Étude. Du Principe d'Association.

Association is a dogma, but not a force économique. Association is in no way organic or productive, as are the division of labour, commerce, exchange, etc. Association should not be confused with force collective.

Collective force is an impersonal act, association is voluntary commitment. Association is by its nature sterile, even harmful, since it impedes the freedom of the worker.

The force that has been ascribed to the contrat de société [social contract] belongs solely to the division of labour, to exchange, to the force collective. When an association is founded for the purpose of carrying out great works, these must be ascribed to its means rather than to the principle of association. A man submits to an association only if it offers him une indemnité suffisante. Only to the associé faible or paresseux [the associate who is weak or lazy] is the association productive d'utilité. It is solidarity, responsabilité commune vis-à-vis third parties. As a rule an association is only feasible dans des conditions spéciales, dépendantes de ses moyens [in special conditions, depending on the means employed]

Association established with a view to the family tie and the law of dedication, and apart from any external economic consideration — association for its own sake, is purely an act of religion, a supernatural bond, devoid of positive value, a myth.

Association should not be confused with the

new relations which are intended to evolve from reciprocity between producers and consumers. Association puts the contracting parties on an equal footing, subordinates their freedom to social duty, depersonalises them.

IV. Étude. Du Principe d'autorité.

The idea of government was born of family custom and domestic experience. The final stage of governmental evolution is democracy.

The idea of government is in opposition to that of contract. The true revolutionary motto is: Plus de Gouvernement! The autorité absolue is soon compelled to negate itself and to circumscribe itself with lois [laws] and institutions. The laws enacted are as innumerable as the interests which they outwardly determine. They have an ominous tendency to multiply. The law is a fetter forced on me from without. Constitutional monarchy. A contradiction in terms. Suffrage universel. The intuition divinatoire de la multitude [the prophetic intuition of the masses] is nonsense. Quai-je besoin de mandataires, pas plus que de représentants! [what need have I of mandatories, any more than of representatives] Votes, even though unanimous, decide nothing. According to suffrage universel, Bonaparte would be the right man, etc. La démocratie pure on le gouvernement direct — figments in the minds of Rittinghausen, Considérant, Ledru-Rollin — aboutit a 1'impossible et a l'absurde [leads to impossibility or absurdity]. In being carried to extremes this idea of the State is revealed for the nonsense it is.

V. Étude. Liquidation sociale.

1. Banque nationale. The liquidation of the Bank of France is decreed. It is not declared a national bank, but rather an ‘établissement d'utlité publique’. Interest is reduced to 1/2 or 1/4 per cent.

2. The. national debt. The capitaux particuliers [private capital], having been deprived of the industrie de 1'escompte [discount industry], flows into the Bourse, the State no longer pays more than 1/2 or 1/4 per cent, and thus interest ceases to be of interest. Instead of interest, the State pays annuities, i.e. it repays in yearly quotas the capital it has been loaned. Or in other words, a decree to the effect that the interest on the debt paid by the State be deemed annuities and deducted from the principal.

3. Mortgage Debts. Simple Bonds.

Interest on all debts, mortgages, simple contract debts, joint-stock shares, is fixed at 1/4 or 1/2 per cent. Repayment claims can be met only by annual instalments. The annual instalment for all sums below 2,000 fr. will be 10 per cent, for sums above 2,000 fr. 5 per cent. In order to facilitate the repayment and replace the function of the former money-lenders a section of the offices of the National Discount Bank will become a mortgage bank; the maximum of its advances will be 500 million per annum.

4. Real estate: Buildings. Decree:

Every payment made in respect of rent shall be entered to the account of the property reckoned as twenty times the rent. With every instalment of rent the tenant will acquire a proportional and joint share in the house he occupies and in the totality of all buildings let for rent and serving as dwellings for the citizens. Property thus paid for will pass by degrees into the hands of the communal administration, which by the fact of the payment will take over the mortgages and prerogatives in the name of the mass of tenants, and will guarantee their domicile to all of them in perpetuity at the cost price of the building. The communes will be able to negotiate separate agreements with the owners for the immediate liquidation and repayment of the leased properties. In this case, and in order that the present generations shall enjoy reduced rents, the said communes will be able immediately to reduce the rent of houses for which they have concluded agreements, in such a way that amortisation be completed only in thirty years. For repairs, fittings and upkeep of the buildings, as in the case of new constructions, the communes will negotiate with the companies of masons or associations of building workers according to the principles and rules of the new social contract. The owners, sole occupiers of their own houses, will retain the property as long as they judge this advantageous to their interests.

5. Landed property.

Every payment of rent for the use of a piece of real estate will make the farmer part-proprietor of it and will count as a mortgage payment by him. When the property has been entirely paid for it will be immediately taken over by the commune, which will take the place of the former owner and will share with the farmer the ownership and the net product. The communes will be able to negotiate separate agreements with the owners who desire it for the redemption of the rents and the immediate repayment of the properties. In that case at the request of the communes steps shall be taken to install the cultivators, and to delimit their properties, taking care that as far as possible the size of the area shall make up for the quality of the land, and that the rent shall be proportional to the product. As soon as the property has been entirely paid for, all the communes of the Republic will have to reach agreement among themselves to equalise the differences in the quality of the strips of land, and also the contingencies of farming. The part of the rent due to them from the plots in their particular area will be used for this compensation and general insurance. Dating from the same period the old owners who worked themselves on their properties, will retain their title, and will be treated in the same way as the new owners, will have to pay the same rent and will he granted the same rights in such a way that no one is favoured by the chance of location and inheritance and that the conditions of cultivation are equal for all. The land tax will be abolished. The functions of the rural police will devolve on the municipal councils.

VI. Étude. Organisation des forces economiques.

1. Crédit. The above-mentioned banque nationals, together with its branches. Gradual withdrawal of gold and silver from circulation. Substitution of paper. As for personal credit, it should be operated in the workers’ companies and the agricultural and industrial societies.

2. Propriété. See Propriété foncière cited above. Under the above conditions it is possible

Without the slightest misgiving, to permit the owner to sell, transfer, alienate or otherwise dispose of his property as he pleases... Given the facility of repayment by annual instalments, the value of a piece of real estate can be indefinitely divided, exchanged, and undergo any conceivable change, without the real estate being in the least affected. Agricultural labour rejects associatory forms.

3. Division du travail, forces collectives, machines. Compagnies ouvrières.

Hence no associations in small workshops, among artisans, shoemakers, tailors, etc., marchands, etc. Association in big industry. Here, then, companies of workers.

Every industry, enterprise or undertaking which by its nature requires the combined employment of a large number of workers with different skills is bound to become the basis for an association or company of workers. But where a product may be obtained without a combination of special skills, through the activity of an individual or family, there is no need for association. — shopkeepers — Every person working in the association possesses an indivisible right in the property of the company; he has the right to perform successively all duties. His education, training and apprenticeship ought therefore to be conducted in such a way that, while he is made to take his share of disagreeable and arduous tasks, he will acquire experience in various sorts of work and fields of knowledge, so that when he reaches mature age he will have a wide range of qualifications and a sufficient income. Posts are subject to election and the rules are adopted by the members of the association. The size of the recompense depends on the nature of the work, the degree of the proficiency, and the amount of responsibility. Every member of the association shares both in the profits and in the expenses of the company in proportion to his services. Everyone is free to resign from the association whenever he wishes, and therefore to settle his accounts and renounce his rights; conversely the company is entitled to recruit new members at any time.

This is the solution to the two problems: that of collective force, and that of the division of labour. In the transitional period these workshops will be managed by the manufacturers, etc.

4. The Determination of Value; the Establishment of a Cheap Market. To combat the “high price of goods” and the “arbitrariness of prices” “The fair price accurately reflects: a) a total production cost according to the official average for free producers, b) the merchant’s salary or the compensation for the advantages which the seller forgoes by parting with the article.” To induce the merchant so to do, he must be given a guarantee. This may be

of several kinds: either the consumers, who wish to have the benefit of a fair price and who are at the same time producers themselves, undertake in their ruin to supply the merchant with their own products on equal terms, as is done by the various workers’ associations in Paris; or else the said consumers confine themselves to guaranteeing the dealer either a premium or a sale large enough to guarantee him an income.

E.g., the State

on behalf of the interests which it temporarily represents, and the departments and communes on behalf of their respective inhabitants, being desirous of ensuring a fair price and a high standard of goods and services for all, propose to guarantee that the entrepreneurs who offer the most advantageous conditions will receive either interest on the capital and material invested in their enterprises, or a fixed salary, or in appropriate cases a sufficient quantity of orders. In return, the tendering parties will pledge themselves to meet all consumers’ requests for the goods and services they have undertaken to supply. Apart from that, full scope is left for competition. They must state the component parts of their prices, the method of delivery, the duration of their commitments, and their means of fulfilment. The tenders submitted under seal within the periods prescribed will subsequently be opened and made public 8 days, 15 days, 1 month or 3 months before the contracts are allocated depending on the importance of the contracts, At the expiry of each contract, new tenders will be invited.

5. Commerce extérieur. As soon as the interest falls, it is necessary “to lower the tariffs” and, if it be depressed or standing between 1/4 and 1/2 per cent, the Customs must be abolished.

VII. Étude. The Merging of Government in the Economic Organism.

“Society without authority. Elimination of cults, Justice, Administration, police, Public Education, War, the Navy” etc. the whole with appropriate Stirnerian stock phrases.

Write and tell me in detail what you think of this formula. Salut.

Your

K. Marx

Engels to Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 419;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[Manchester, about 11 August 1851]

Dear Marx,

Today I shall continue the glosses on Proudhon which were interrupted yesterday. For the time being I shall disregard the many gaps in the formula, e.g. the fact that one cannot see how the factories are to be transferred from the hands of the manufacturers to the compagnies ouvrières since interest and land rent are to be abolished, but not profit (for there will still be competition); further, what is to become of the big landowners who exploit their land by means of hired labour, and other such deficiencies. In order to assess the thing as a theoretical whole, I should have to have the actual book in front of me. Hence I can give an opinion only in so far as I consider the feasibility, le cas échéant, [should the occasion arise] of the individual measures and at the same time examine the extent to which they lend themselves to the centralisation of all the productive forces. And even then, I really ought to have the book in order to see all the développements.

The fact that Mr Proudhon has at last come to realise the need for more or less covert confiscation is, as I have already said, a step forward. The question is, however, whether his pretext for confiscation will serve, for, as always with these blinkered fellows who persuade themselves that compulsory measures of this kind are not confiscation, the whole thing hinges on that pretext. ‘Interest is reduced to 1/2 or 1/4 per cent. But your extracts say nothing of how this is done, save that the State, or the Bank which secretly and under another name is part and parcel of the State, must make an annual loan on mortgage of 500 mill. fr. at that rate of interest. From this I conclude that the reduction is intended to take place gradually. Once interest was as low as that, the annual liquidation of all debts etc., etc., at a rate of 5 to 10 per cent per annum would, of course, be easy. But Mr Proudhon fails to indicate by what means this is to be attained. In this connection I recall our recent discussion about your scheme for reducing the interest rate by setting up a national bank with exclusive privileges and a monopoly of paper currency, gold and silver being excluded from circulation. I believe that any attempt to lower the interest rate rapidly and steadily would inevitably fail because of the growing need, at a time of revolution and stagnating business, for usury, for the granting of credit to people who are momentarily in a tight corner, at a loss what to do, in other words, momentarily unsound financially. Even if that portion of the interest rate intended for the actual repayment of the loan can be depressed by weight of capital, there still remains the portion representing the guarantee of repayment, which, at times of crisis, rises enormously. In any revolution merchants are grateful to a government which lends to them, not at 1/4 or 1/2 per cent, but at 5 per cent. Cf. 1848, loan offices, etc., etc. The State, and any large, centralised state bank, unless it operates branches in the most out-of-the-way places and has given its officials a long training in commercial practice, can lend to large businesses only, otherwise it would be lending at random. And small businesses cannot pledge their goods like large ones. Donc, 1. the consequence of any reduction in interest rate for government loans = increased profits for big businessmen and a general advancement of that class.

Small businesses would, as before, be compelled to have recourse to middlemen to whom the government had advanced money, at 1/2 per cent so that they could lend it again at 5-10 per cent. That is inevitable. Small businesses furnish no guarantees, and can offer no pledges. Hence in this respect, too, advancement of the big bourgeoisie — indirect creation of a large usurer class, bankers at a lower level.

The constant harping by the socialists and Proudhon on the reduction of interest is, in my opinion, no more than a glorified pious wish of the bourgeoisie and petty bourgeoisie. So long as interest and profit remain in inverse proportion, a reduction of interest can only lead to an increase in profit. And so long as there are people who are financially unsound, unable to provide a guarantee and for that very reason truly in need of money, state lending cannot supersede private lending, i.e. cannot bring down interest rates in respect of all transactions. The State, which lends at 1/2 per cent, would be in precisely the same position vis-à-vis the usurer whom it provides with money as was the French Government of 1795 vis-à-vis the property speculators and stock jobbers of that time when it collected taxes to the tune of 500 mill. in assignats [paper money issued at the time of the French Revolution] and re-issued them for 3 mill. and, simply to maintain its ‘credit’ which had already collapsed, accepted the assignats used for tax payments at their face value, or 200 times their real value.

Proudhon is altogether too naïve: “Personal credit finds or should find its application in the workers’ associations”. Hence the dilemma: either management and finally administration and regulation of these companies by the State, which Proudhon doesn’t want, or the organisation of the most splendid association fraud, the fraud of 1825 and 1845, reproduced at the level of the proletariat, Lumpenproletariat and petty bourgeoisie.

To seek to place the main emphasis on the gradual reduction of the interest rate by commercial and compulsory measures so that all debts etc., etc., are liquidated by converting interest payments into repayments, all real wealth being concentrated in the hands of the State or the communes, seems to me utterly impracticable, 1) on the grounds already cited; 2) because it takes far too long; 3) because the only consequences, if state paper maintained its credit, would necessarily be the country’s indebtedness to foreigners, since all money repaid would find its way abroad; 4) because, even if the feasibility of the thing were accepted in principle, it would be nonsense to believe that France, la République, could carry this out in the teeth of England and America; 5) because war abroad and the pressure of the moment generally, make sheer nonsense of such systematically protracted measures, extending over 20 or 30 years and more especially of money payments.

The only practical significance of the thing would seem to be that it is indeed possible, at a certain point of revolutionary development, and with the help of a monopolist state bank, to decree: Art. 1: interest is abolished or limited to 1/4 per cent; Art. 2: interest will continue to be paid as hitherto, being regarded as repayment; Art. 3: the State is empowered to purchase all real estate, etc., at current tax value and pay for it over 20 years at 5 per cent. Such might perhaps one day serve as the final and immediate precursor of undisguised confiscation; but it would be pure speculation to ponder on the when, where and how.

In any case it would seem that this book of Proudhon’s is much more down-to-earth than his earlier ones — even the constitution de la valeur assumed a more fleshly aspect: that of the juste prix des boutiquiers. Quatre francs, Monsieur, c'est le plus juste prix! What there is in common between the abolition of customs and that of interest is not clear. The fact that, since 1847, Proudhon should have made so complete a transition from Hegel to Stirner is another step forward. Be it said, however, that he won’t understand German philosophy even should he persist with it until his corpse is in the final stage of decomposition.

Write soon and tell me what you think of the foregoing.

Your

F. E.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 422;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 14 August 1851, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

In a day or two I shall be sending you the Proudhon itself, but send it back as soon as you've read it. For I intend — for the money — to publish 2-3 sheets about the book. So let me have your views in greater detail than your hasty letter-writing generally allows.

The Proudhon business — and the whole is first and foremost a polemic against communism, however much he may filch from it and however much it may appear to him in the light of the Cabet-Blanc transfiguration — boils down, in my opinion, to the following line of reasoning:

The real enemy to be combatted is capital. The pure economic affirmation of capital is interest. So-called profit is nothing but a particular form of wage. We abolish interest by transforming it into an annuity, i.e. repayment of capital by annual instalments. Thus the working class — read industrial class — will be assured precedence for ever, while the actual capitalist class will be condemned to an ever-diminishing existence. The various forms of interest are money interest, rent interest and lease interest. In this way bourgeois society is retained, justified, and divested only of its mauvaise tendance [evil tendency].

Liquidation sociale is simply a means of building anew a ‘healthy’ bourgeois society. Quick or slow, peu nous imports [it matters little to us]. I want first to hear your views on the contradictions, uncertainties and obscurities of this liquidation as such. The truly healing balm of the newly built society, however, consists in the abolition of interest, i.e. in the yearly transformation of interest into an annuité. This, introduced not as a means but as an economic law of the reformed bourgeois society, has, of course, a twofold result:

1. The transformation of small, non-industrial capitalists into industrial capitalists. 2. The perpetuation of the big capitalist class, for au fond if one takes an overall view of the thing, it becomes apparent that, by and large, — and aside from industrial profits — society never pays anything except the annuité. Were the converse true, Dr Price’s compound interest calculations would become a reality and the entire globe would not suffice to pay interest on a capital, however tiny, invested at the time of Christ. In fact, however, it may be confidently said that the capital invested, whether in land or otherwise, over the past 50 or 100 years e.g. in England — the most tranquil and bourgeois of countries, that is — has never as yet paid interest, at least in terms of price, which is what we are concerned with here. Let us assume, e.g., that at the highest estimate, England’s national wealth amounts to e.g. 5 thousand million. Suppose England produces 500 millions each year. Hence England’s entire wealth merely = England’s annual labour x 10. Hence, not only is this capital not paying interest, it is not even reproducing itself in terms of value. And this by reason of the simple law. Value originally determined by the original production costs, in terms of the working time originally needed to manufacture the object. But once the product is produced, its price is determined by the costs necessarily incurred in reproducing it. And reproduction costs fall steadily and at a speed proportionate to the current state of industrialisation. Hence the law of the continuous depreciation of capital value itself, through which the law des rentes and of interest, which would otherwise lead to absurdity, is nullified. This also explains the thesis you yourself put forward that no factory covers its production costs. Thus Proudhon cannot refashion society by introducing a law which, au fond, is already being observed without his counsel.

The means by which Proudhon proposes to achieve all this is the bank. Il y a ici un qui pro quo. The bank’s business is divisible into two parts: 1. The conversion of capital into cash. Here money is simply substituted for capital, which can, of course, be done simply at production cost, i.e. at 1/2 to 1/4 per cent. 2. Advances of capital in the form of money, and here the interest rate will adjust itself in accordance with the amount of capital. All that credit can do here is to convert by means of concentration, etc., etc., existing but unproductive wealth into truly active capital. Proudhon considers No. 2 to be as easy as No. 1, and au bout du compte he will find that by making over an illusory mass of capital in the form of money he will at best reduce the interest on the capital, only to increase its price in like proportion. Whereby nothing is gained but the discrediting of his paper.

I shall allow you to savour in the original the correlation between customs and interest. The thing’s too delicious to spoil it by mutilation. Mr Proudhon entirely fails to elucidate either the commune’s share in the houses and land — something he certainly should have done as regards the communists — or how the workers come into possession of the factories. At any rate, while anxious to have ‘des compagnies ouvrières puissantes’, he is so afraid of these industrial ‘guilds’ that he reserves the right, if not for the State, then for société, to dissolve them. As a true Frenchman who knows neither a Moses & Son nor a Midlothian farmer, he confines association to the factory. To him, the French peasant and the French shoemaker, tailor, merchant appear as des données éternelles et qu'il faut accepter [eternal data which must be accepted]. But the more I go into the stuff, the more I become convinced that the reform of agriculture, and hence the question of property based on it, is the alpha and omega of the coming upheaval. Without that, Father Malthus will turn out to be right.

So far as Louis Blanc, etc., are concerned the piece is capital, notably because of its cheeky outpourings about Rousseau, Robespierre, God, fraternité and similar twaddle.

As to the New York Tribune, you've got to help me, now that I'm so busy with political economy. Write a series of articles on Germany, from 1848 onwards. Witty and uninhibited. The gentlemen of the foreign department are exceedingly uppish.

In a few days’ time I'll send you 2 volumes of Roman stuff. To wit économie politique des Romains. Par Dureau de la Malle. I sent to Paris for the book (very erudite). It will open your eyes to, amongst other things, the economic backing of the Roman way of waging war, which was nothing else than the — cadastre. What’s the cheapest way of sending the thing to you? There are 2 fat volumes.

You must pinch the Lithographische Correspondenz article or try to get hold of a copy. As soon as Weydemeyer gets there, he must make the jackasses in New York run the gauntlet. For that all the documents are needed. Faucher is correspondent of the Neue Preussische Zeitung. Sigel has not yet turned up. Willich, of course, is a unifying member of the Emigré Fraternity. They held their first general meeting on Friday. We had a spy there. The proceedings opened with a reading (by General Hang) of the Lithographische Correspondenz article in which we are attacked. For because of us they live and move and have their being. Next, a resolution in favour of all manner of undesirable and contentious lectures. Mr. Meyen undertook to do Prussia; Oppenheim, England; Ruge, France; and Kinkel, America — and the future. I very much look forward, by the way, to hearing, what you think about all this.

Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels in Manchester, 13 September 1851

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

In the Italian Committee too a split [1] has occurred. A considerable minority has withdrawn from it. Mazzini sorrowfully describes this event in the Voix du Peuple. [2] The main reasons are said to be: In the first place God. They don’t want God. Next, and this is more serious, they accuse Master Mazzini of working in the interests of Austria by preaching insurrection, that is, by precipitating it. Lastly they insist on a direct appeal to the material interests of the Italian peasants, this cannot be done without on the other hand attacking the material interests of the bourgeoisie and liberal nobility, who form the great Mazzinist phalanx. This last point is certainly important. If Mazzini or anyone else who heads the Italian agitation does not this time openly and immediately transform the peasants from métayers [3] into free landowners (the position of the Italian peasants is appalling; I have now swotted up the whole filthy story) the Austrian government will, in case of a revolution, take refuge in Galician methods. [4] It has already threatened in Lloyd [5] ‘a complete change in the forms of ownership’ and ‘destruction of the turbulent nobility’. If Mazzini’s eyes have still not been opened he is an ox. True, the interests of the agitation are here involved. Where is he to get his ten million francs from if he antagonises the bourgeoisie? How is it possible to retain the services of the nobility, when should the nobility be informed that it is first of all a question of its expropriation? These are difficulties for such a demagogue of the old school...

Notes

1. After the fall of the Roman republic in July 1849 many deputies of the Constituent Assembly emigrated to Britain, where they formed a provisional Italian National Committee, in which Mazzini and his followers were included. The Committee was empowered by those who had elected it to raise loans in the interest of Italy’s liberation and to deal with all questions relating to Italian citizens – Progress Publishers.

2. This is probably a slip of the pen, for it seems that Marx is referring to the Voix du Proscrit – Progress Publishers.

3. Tenant farmers – Progress Publishers.

4. Marx here has in mind the policy of the Austrian government designed to suppress the Polish national liberation movement by exploiting the class and national antagonisms between the Ukrainian peasantry in Galicia and the Polish nobility. During the revolutionary events of 1848 the Austrian government abolished statute-labour and a few other feudal services of the peasants in Galicia, in an effort to win the support of the Galician peasantry in the fight against the Polish national liberation movement. But the reform was quite inadequate since it left untouched the lands of the landowners and placed the terrific burden of redemption payments on the shoulders of the peasants, which it took them several decades to pay off – Progress Publishers.

5. That is, Journal des Österreichischen Lloyd, a semi-official daily newspaper published in Vienna – Progress Publishers.

Engels To Marx

In London

Manchester, 23 September 1851

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 458-462.

Dear Marx,

At last I think I've reached the point at which, after so many deplorable interruptions, I can settle down to regular work again. Article No. 3 for America will be finished by this evening and dispatched to you forthwith, and then I will at once get down to the Proudhon.

I have heard nothing more about Kinkel’s tour. The split among the Italians is wonderful. It’s excellent that that astute visionary, Mazzini, should at last find himself thwarted by material interests, and in his own country to boot. One advantage of the Italian revolution has been that there, too, it has swept the most isolated classes into the movement, and that a new party, more radical than the old Mazzinian emigration, is now being formed, and is gradually displacing Mr Mazzini . Newspaper reports would also seem to indicate that il Mazzinismo is failing into disrepute even among people who are neither constitutionally nor reactionarily minded, and that what remains of the freedom of the press in Piedmont is being used by them for attacks on Mazzini, the portée of which the government fails to grasp. In other respects the Italian revolution far outdoes the German in poverty of ideas and wealth of hot air. It is fortunate that a country which, instead of proletarians, has virtually nothing but lazzaroni, should at least possess métayers. The other reasons given by the Italian dissidents are delightful too, and, finally, it is really splendid that the only, émigrés to have remained united, at least in public, should now be at each other’s throats.

The little man’s [Ernst Dronke] report pleased me greatly. Pompous tittle-tattle, a duel, a bit of money to be collected in Hamburg, Piedmontese plans – dodge, dodge and dodge again. There are two things one can never understand about the little fellow, firstly what he’s up to, and secondly what he lives on. I return the letter herewith, send me the answer and I shall forward it to him post free. I have noted his own address – much good Schuster’s would be, now that his house has been searched.

It was only to be expected that the precious Schramm ‘ should be one of the first to fall into the clutches of the Parisian police. He must have been vociferating in cafes and been nabbed for it. But since he has no connection with the Willich-Schapper conspiracy, you'll no doubt have him back in London again by now."’ The excerpts from the Willich document... in the Kölnische Zeitung are much nicer than lit the French papers, the original German text being given, and the great all – rounder’s vigorous arguments emerge here quite unadulterated. E. g. where he says that, in the next revolution, ‘the League’ and the ‘fourth estate’ (not, of course, to be confused with the bogus article from the Marx – Engels factory, placed on the market under the label ‘proletariat’) ‘are to bring the historical developments of the economic question to a conclusive conclusion'!! The poor translation by the French police has altogether spoilt this incomparable document. The age-old idées fixes of this crazy martial clod, the hoary fatuities about social revolution stemming from the village commune, the cunningly calculated little schemes, which, as long ago as last November, were to have stood the world on its head through the agency of the Rhenish Landwehr, none of this really comes through. But the most infuriating thing about it is that this poor translation almost completely spoils one’s pleasure in observing how the ideas We instilled have gradually, after 12 months of independent cerebration within this misshapen skull, been finally converted into pompous nonsense. In the translation the provenance is everywhere discernible, but precisely, the accretion of underived craziness, the distortion, is not in evidence. And are we to be deprived of the pleasure of at last being able to read in the vernacular a piece of unalloyed Willich which has assuredly been long chewed over by the noble man? One sees nothing but the most appalling dearth of ideas and the attempt to conceal the same beneath an immense heap of revolutionary admonition as brought forth of a gloomy evening in the inglenook by Mr Willich and Mr Barthelemy. Unsurpassed, too, the financial measures: first you make paper money, n'importe combien [no matter how much] second you confiscate, third you requisition. Then the social ones, which are equally simple: 1) you organise, tellement quellement,[clean sweep] 2) you guzzle, guzzle a great deal, until you get to 3) when there’s nothing left to guzzle, which is fortunate, for you then reach the point at which, 4) you start all over again, since the most radical tabula rasa consists in leaving not a crumb on the table, by which time the hour will have come for the Word of the prophet Willich to be fulfilled: ‘We must march into Germany, as into a waste land that we are to colonise and render fertile’. From the beginning the fellow’s one idea has been to conquer the communist Canaan from without, exterminating the original inhabitants, with the help of ‘5,000 men’, hand-picked from the ‘people of the Lord’. Moses and Joshua rolled into one; alas, during their exile in Egypt the Children of Israel had already dispersed in all directions.

One must hope the Australian gold business won’t interfere with the trade crisis. At any rate it has momentarily created a new, largely fictitious market, sending wool sky-high, since the flocks are being neglected. Otherwise it’s a splendid thing. In six months’ time the circumnavigation of the world by steam will be fully under way and our predictions concerning the supremacy of the Pacific Ocean will be fulfilled even more quickly than we could have anticipated. When this happens the British will be thrown out and the united states of deported murderers, burglars, rapists and pickpockets will startle the world by demonstrating what wonders can be performed by a state consisting of undisguised rascals. They will beat California hollow. But whereas in California rascals are still lynched, in Australia they'll lynch the honnêtes gens [honest folk], and Carlyle will see his aristocracy of rogues established in all its glory.

The numerous asseverations in the press to the effect that, notwithstanding the recent bankruptcies and the depression prevailing in Liverpool and elsewhere, the country’s trade has never been healthier, are most suspect. What is certain is that East India is overstocked and that for months past sales there have been made at a loss. 1 am not clear about where the mass of stuff manufactured in Manchester and district is going; a great deal, a very, great deal, of speculation must be involved, for as soon as cotton had reached its lowest point in July, and the spinners began to lay in a stock of raw material, all the spinners and weavers were immediately given long-term contracts by the local commission houses, which were very, far from having orders for all the goods they were ordering from manufacturers. In the case of the East Indian houses, the old cash advance system is obviously in full swing again; this has already come to light In a few cases, and in others there will sooner or later be a fine old crash. As the manufacturers here are working at full stretch, and productive power, particularly within a 5-20 mile radius of Manchester, has increased by at least 30 per cent since 1847 (in Lancashire it was 30,000 in 1842, 40,000 in 1845; now certainly 55,000-60,000 horsepower), this brisk activity has only to continue until March or April and we shall have such overproduction as will warm the cockles of your heart.

The following information, prepared by the Liverpool Cotton Brokers Corporation, may not have come to your notice in so detailed a form. First 1 should explain that delivery to the ports of each year’s cotton crop is completed by 1 September of the following year, so that the cotton year runs from one 1 September to the next. Hence it follows that what is here described e. g. as the 1851 crop was grown in the summer of 1850, harvested in the autumn of 1850 and conveyed to the ports between September ‘50 and September ‘5 1. The crop now ripening which, by the way, will be poorer as the result of drought and storms, and will amount to about 21/2 millions, would thus figure as that of 1852.

Cotton crop

in the year:

American

domestic consumption:

1846

2,110,537

bales

not given

1847

1,778,651

"

427,967

bales

1848

2,347,634

"

531,772

"

1849

2,728,596

"

518,039

"

1850

2,096,706

"

487,769

"

1851

2,355,257

"

404,108

"

The Americans, therefore, have consumed between 1/5 and 1/4 of their entire crop themselves. I have not yet any information concerning exports and imports of other types of cotton besides those from the United States. Exports from the US to Britain amounted to about 55-60 per cent of the crop, to France, 1/8. But both countries in their turn export fairly heavily, Britain to France, Germany and Russia, France to Switzerland.

At the present moment the Russians are no longer taking so much as a pound of twist from Britain, very few finished cotton goods, a great deal of raw cotton – 2,000 – 3,000 bales per week and, despite the reduction in duty on yarn from 7d to 5d a pound, new spinning mills are going up daily. Nicholas seems at last to be growing apprehensive about this industry and wants to reduce the duty even further. But since all his rich nobility and all the bourgeoisie have an interest in this business, the affair might become serious should he insist on it.

Your

F. E.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 463;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 23 September 1851, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

This business of the Paris document is quite stupid. The German papers, the Kölnische and the Augsburg as might be expected of such undiscerning curs, attribute it to us. On the other hand, the wretched Willich & Co. are putting it about that we had had the rubbish denounced by acquaintances of ours in Paris. Qu'en dis-tu?

C. Schramm is also in jug. Habeat sibi [serves him right]. Next time — when I've gleaned some further news — I'll write and tell you more about the dirty business here. Today I shall regale you with the following résumé of Citizen Techow’s manifesto which occupies several columns in the New-Yorker Staatszeitung and is entitled: ‘Umrisse des kommenden Kriegs. London, 7. August.’ (Ill-written, doctrinaire, sundry echoes of our Revue, seemingly intelligently developed, but insipid in content, undynamic in form, nothing striking.) I shall spare you Techow’s initial narrative of the revolution of 1849. These, for a start, are the general lessons he draws from it:

1. Force can be resisted only by force.

2. A revolution can only be victorious if it becomes general, i.e., if it is kindled in the larger centres of the movement (Bavaria-Palatinate, Baden) and if, furthermore, it is not the expression of one single oppositional faction. (Example: the June insurrection of 1848.)

3. National struggles cannot be decisive because they are divisive.

4. Fighting on the barricades has no significance other than to signal a population’s resistance and to put the power of governments, i.e., the troops’ frame of mind, to the test by confronting them with that resistance. Whatever the outcome of this test, the first and most important step in revolution always remains organisation for war, the raising of disciplined armies. For this alone makes an offensive possible and it is only in the offensive that victory lies.

5. National constituent assemblies are not capable of organising for war. They invariably waste time on questions of internal politics, the time for whose solution does not come till after victory has been won.

6. In order to be able to organise for war, a revolution must gain time and space. Hence it must attack politically, i.e. bring into its domain as many stretches of country as possible, since militarily it is at first always restricted to the defensive.

7. In the republican, no less than in the royalist, camp organisation for war can only be based on compulsion. No pitched battle has ever been won by political enthusiasm or fantastically bedizened volunteers against disciplined and well-led soldiers. Military enthusiasm only sets in after a series of successes. — Initially there can be no better basis for such successes than the iron rigour of discipline. In armies, even more so than in the internal organisation of a country, democratic principles can only apply after the victory of the revolution.

8. By its nature the coming war will be a war of extermination of peoples or princes. From this follows the recognition of the political and military solidarity of all peoples, i.e. of intervention.

9. Spatially the area of the coming revolution falls within the boundaries of that of the defeated ones: France, Germany, Italy, Hungary, Poland.

From all this it follows that the question of the coming revolution is equally as important as that of a European war. Object of the war: a Cossack or republican Europe a Theatre of the war — as before: Northern Italy and Germany.

Mr Techow now enumerates: 1. the armed forces of the counter-revolution; 2. the armed forces of revolution.

I. Armed Forces of the Counter-Revolution

1. Russia. Suppose that it could bring its armed forces up to 300,000. That would be a great deal. How quickly and at what strength could it then appear on the Rhine or in Italy? At the best, in 2 months. Deduct at least 1/3 for sickness and for manning the lines of communication. That leaves 200,000 men who, 2 months after the action has begun, will make their appearance at the crucial points in the theatre of war.

2. Austria. Estimates the strength of its army at 600,000 men. In 1848 and ’49 employed 150,000 men in Italy. Radetzky is demanding that number even now, in time of peace. In Hungary he now requires, in peacetime, 90,000 men. During the last war, 200,060 were not enough. 1/3 of this army consists of Hungarians and Italians, who will defect. At best, if the uprising does not take place simultaneously in Hungary and Italy, she will be able to reach the Rhine in 6 weeks with 50,000 men, having been delayed by sundry battles at the barricades.

3. Prussia. Numbers 500,000 men, incl. of the replacement battalions and the Landwehr of the First Levy, which do not accompany the army into the field. For operations in the field, 300,000 men, 1/2 line, 1/2 Landwehr. Mobilisation: 2 to 3 weeks. The officers’ corps in the Prussian army aristocratic, the non-commissioned officers bureaucratic, the masses’ democratic through and through. The revolution has further opportunities in the mobilisation of the Landwehr. Disorganisation of the Prussian army by the revolution which will be mastered by the King only under the protection of the Russian army and in order to lead the remnants of his army, in company with the Russians, against the rebels. Rhine Province, Westphalia, Saxony lost to him, thus the most important fortified lines and at least 1/3 of his army. He will need 1/3 against the uprisings in Berlin, Breslau, the province of Posen and West Prussia. This leaves at most 100,000 who will be unable to appear on the battlefield any earlier than the Russians themselves.

4. The German Federal Army. The regiments of Baden, Schleswig-Holstein, the Electorate of Hesse, and the Palatinate belong to the revolution. Only the remnants of the German Federal Army, following the fleeing princes, will reinforce the armies of reaction. Of no military significance.

5. Italy. Italy’s only military force, the Sardinian army, belongs to the revolution.

To sum up, then:

Theatre of war in Germany

150,000 Russians

100,000 Prussians

50,000 Austrians

300,000 men

Theatre of war in Italy

150,000 Austrians

50,000 Russians

200,000 men

Total: 500,000 men

II. Armed Forces of the Revolution

1. France. 500,000 men at the disposal of the revolution from the very start. Of these, 200,000 on the Rhine, 100,000 in Italy (North) ensure that the revolution in Italy and Germany has time and space to organise itself.

2. Prussia.   50,000

3. Austria. 100,000

i.e. half the defecting armies organised.

4. Small German armies:

100,000.

This adds up as follows:

Active French Army

300,000 men

German revolutionary army

150,000   "

Italy and Hungary

200,000   "

650,000   "

Thus the revolution will lead 650,000 men against absolutism’s 500,000.

He concludes:

‘Whatever differences of nationality or principle may, after all, split the great party of the revolution-we have all of us learnt that the time to combat these different views amongst ourselves will only come after victory has been won’, etc., etc.

What do you make of these calculations? Techow presupposes that there will be disorganisation on the part of the regular armies and organisation on the part of the revolutionary armed forces. That forms the basis of his calculation. However, you'll be better able than I to judge these statistics.

But the essay’s actual political tendency, which emerges even more clearly in the exposition, is as follows: No revolution ever breaks out, i. e. there is no party struggle, no civil war, no class dissension, until after the ending of the war and the collapse of Russia. But in order to organise these armies for this war, force is needed. And where is the force to come from? From General Cavaignac, or some similar military dictator in France, who has his generals in Germany and Northern Italy. Voilà la solution, which is not very far removed from Willich’s ideas. World war, i.e. as understood by your revolutionary Prussian lieutenant, domination, at least temporarily, of civilians by the military. But how any general, even were the old Napoleon himself to rise up out of his grave, is to get, not only the means, but also so much influence without preliminary and simultaneous internal struggles, without those damned ‘internal politics’, is not vouchsafed by the oracle. At least this future world-warrior’s ‘pious wish’, which finds its due political expression precisely in the classless politicians and democrats as such, has been clearly and frankly stated.

Farewell.

Your

K. M.

I have just received your letter which I acknowledge herewith.

NB. You know, of course, that Stechahn or Stechahn [Stechan] has been arrested in Hanover and, before he joined our association, was corresponding with the Schapper committee, etc. Well, 2 letters which he wrote to the secretary of this committee — Dietz, the cockroach — and which the latter received, are at present in the police inspector’s office in Hanover. We then entrusted Ulmer with the task of questioning Messrs Dietz & Co. on the subject at next Friday’s public sitting of the ‘refugee or émigré society’. This we countermanded again. Stechan has done a bunk and is, therefore, either on his way to London or already here. And who’s to say that Stechan won’t go to our enemies rather than to us?

The Straubingers are capables de tout. Further proof: Mr Paul Stumpf who, during his short visit to London, did not come to see either myself or Lupus but consorted exclusively with the blackguards.

I found your trade news exceedingly interesting.

As for C. Schramm, he was carrying in his pocket-book a brief note from me establishing his bona fides. Those lines could have been as fatal Uriah’s letter. They were originally given to him to make him think he was trusted and to disarm him, since the fellow could do us considerable damage. But at the same time a letter went off to Reinhardt warning him to be on his guard should he (Schramm) present himself with the note, which was couched in general terms. The worst of it is that my name is at the bottom. It could earn Schramm 6 months.

Addio!

Engels to Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 469;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[Manchester, 26 September 1851]

Dear Marx,

As regards Techow’s war story, from a military standpoint too, it is tremendously superficial and in parts downright wrong. Apart from the profound verities that only force avails against force and from the absurd discovery that revolution can only be victorious if it is general (i.e. literally if it meets no resistance and, by inference, if it is a bourgeois revolution), apart from the well-meaning intention to suppress those awkward ‘internal politics’, that is, the revolution itself through the agency of a military dictator as yet to be discovered, pace Cavaignac and Willich, and apart from this very significant political formulation of the views on revolution held by these gentlemen, it should, militarily speaking, be noted that:

1. The iron discipline which alone can procure victory is the exact obverse of the ‘postponement of internal politics’ and of military dictatorship. Whence is that discipline to come? The gentlemen really should have gleaned some experience in Baden and the Palatinate. It is a manifest fact that the disorganisation of armies and a total relaxation of discipline have been both precondition and consequence of all successful revolutions hitherto. It took France from 1789 to 1792 to reorganise an army — Dumouriez’s — of only about 60,000-80,000 men, and even that disintegrated again and there was no organised army to speak of in France until the end of 1793. It took Hungary from March 1848 to the middle of 1849 to create a properly organised army. And who brought discipline to the army in the first French Revolution? Not the generals who, at a time of revolution, do not acquire influence and authority in improvised armies until a few victories have been won, but rather the terreur of internal politics, of the civil power.

Armed forces of the Coalition:

1. Russia. The estimate of an effective force of 300,000 men, 200,000 of them under arms in the theatre of war, is on the high side. Passe encore. But they could not be on the Rhine (at most an advance guard on the Lower Rhine, at Cologne), or in Northern Italy in 2 months. In order to act in concert, to co-ordinate their movements adequately with those of Prussia, Austria, etc., etc., they would require 3 months — a Russian army does not cover more than 2-2 1/2 German miles a day, and rests every third. It took them almost 2 months to reach the theatre of war in Hungary.

2. Prussia. Mobilisation: at least 4-6 weeks. The speculation regarding defections, uprisings, etc., etc., very uncertain. At best can make 150,000 men available, at worst maybe less than 50,000. This being so, to count on 1/3 or 1/4 is sheer humbug, since everything depends on chance.

3. Austria. Equally chanceux and even more complex. No possibility here of estimating probabilities a la Techow. At best it could, as Techow supposes, put some 200,000 men into the field against France, at worst it would not succeed in detaching one man, and might at the very outside pit 100,000 men against the French at Trieste.

4. Federal army — of the Bavarian, 1/3 would certainly march against the revolution, and here and there even a bit more. At all events a corps 30,000-50,000 strong could be raised within 3 months, and against revolutionary soldiers this is enough to start off with.

5. Denmark would immediately put 40,000-50,000 good troops into the field and, as in 1813, the Swedes and also the Norwegians would have to accompany it on the great crusade. Techow has overlooked this, as he has overlooked Belgium and Holland.

Armed forces of the revolution:

1. France. Has 430,000 men under arms. Of these, 100,000 in Algiers. 90,000 not présent sous les armes — 1/4 of the remainder. This leaves 240,000 — of whom not more than 100,000 could reach the Belgo-German and 80,000 the Savoyard-Piedmontese frontier in 4-6 weeks, despite the now largely completed railways. This time Sardinia will try, like Belgium in 1848, to be the firm rock in the turbulent sea; hence whether the Piedmontese army, crammed as it is with bigoted Sardinian peasant lads, is — at least in its present form, officered by aristocrats — as committed to the revolution as Techow imagines is highly questionable. Victor Emmanuel has taken Leopold for his model, c'est dangereux.

2. Prussia — ? 3. Austria — ?; i.e. so far as regular organised soldiers are concerned. As regards volunteers, they will turn up in their thousands, useless, of course. If in the first months 50,000-60,000 useful soldiers can be made out of troops who have defected, that’s a great deal. Where are the officers to come from in so short a time?

Judging by all this, it is more likely that since any revolution (even in France) is bound to lack the very thing which enabled Napoleon to muster vast armies rapidly, to wit, good cadres, the revolution, if it takes place next year, will first either have to remain on the defensive or else confine itself to empty proclamations from Paris and highly inadequate, reprehensible and damaging Risquons-Tout expeditions on a larger scale. Unless, of course, the Rhine fortresses come over during the first attack and the Piedmontese army responds to Citizen Techow’s call; or unless the disorganisation of the Prussian and Austrian troops immediately centres on Berlin and Vienna, thus placing Russia on the defensive; or unless something else happens which cannot be foreseen. And to speculate on this and to calculate probabilities à la Techow is both otiose and arbitrary, as I know well enough from my own experience. All that can be said in this connection is that a very great deal depends on the Rhine Province.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 472;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 13 October 1851, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

You'll have seen in the Kölnische Zeitung that I've made a statement refuting the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung’s nonsense [linking the arrests of the Communist League members in Cologne with information allegedly received by Baroness von Beck from Marx]. The gossip was becoming altogether too wild. The ruffians’ intention, in launching the recent series of prolonged attacks in all the German newspapers, was, I am quite sure, to place me on the horns of a dilemma. Either I must publicly disown the conspiracy and hence our party friends, or I must publicly acknowledge it, thus committing an act of treason ‘in law’. However, these gentlemen are too clumsy to catch us out.

On 29 September Weydemeyer sailed for New York from Le Havre. There he met Reich, who was also crossing the ocean to the Atlantic regions. Reich had been arrested with Schramm and reports that the police found Schramm in possession of a copy of the minutes containing the transaction which caused his duel with Willich, the minutes, that is, of that same evening when he insulted Willich and walked out of the meeting. The thing was written in his own hand and was unsigned. In this way the police found out that his name was Schramm and not ‘Bamberger’ on whose passport he was staying in Paris. On the other hand the minutes have added to the confusion of Messrs Chief of the City Police Weiss & Co. in that our names thus became mixed up in the dirty business. Since it was Schramm who committed this blunder, it is at least gratifying that this man of honour is himself being punished for it.

So the £160 sent from America has been used by Kinkel to go collecting in America in person, accompanied by his saviour, Schurz. Whether he’s going at the right time, in view of the present pressure on the American money market, would seem doubtful.

He chose the moment so as to arrive before Kossuth, and likes to imagine that he will have some opportunity of publicly embracing the latter in the land of the future and of seeing the legend ‘Kossuth and Kinkel!’ in all the newspapers.

On the strength of his clamour over the emancipation of slaves, Mr Heinzen succeeded in forming a new joint-stock company in New York and is continuing to run his paper [Deutsche Schnellpost] under a somewhat modified title.

Stechan — never trust a Straubinger — has been here for several weeks in Willich-Schapper’s retinue. While the fact remains that the letters he wrote to the cockroach Dietz are now in the possession of the Hanover police, Stechan has written an article for the Norddeutsche Zeitung in which he reports that Mr Dietz’s desk was broken into (quelle bêtise! [what stupidity]) and that was how the letters were purloined. The spy, as has now been established, was Haupt of Hamburg, who had long been in the service of the police. How fortunate that a few weeks ago I forestalled any overt moves in the Dietz-Stechan affair. As for Haupt, I've heard nothing more of him, and am vainly racking my brains to find some way of having a letter conveyed to him in person, for Haupt has got to declare himself. I've already tried to do so through Weerth but Haupt’s fellow lodgers always turned him away on the pretext that he wasn’t in. Que penses-tu de Haupt? [what do you think of Haupt?] I'm convinced that he isn’t a spy and never has been.

Edgar Bauer is also said to be here. I have not yet seen him. A week ago Blind and his wife (Madame Cohen) arrived to visit the exhibition and left again on Sunday last. I didn’t see him again after the Monday, and this because of the following absurd incident, which will show you how very much henpecked the wretched man is. Today I received a locally posted letter in which he announces his departure. Now, the previous Monday he had come to see me with his wife. Others present were Freiligrath, red [Ferdinand] Wolff who, be it said in passing, has crept back again all unobtrusively and has, moreover, married an English bluestocking, Liebknecht, and the luckless Pieper. The wife is a vivacious Jewess and we were laughing and chatting quite merrily when the father of all lies [i.e., the Devil — Dante] brought the conversation round to religion. She was showing off on atheism, Feuerbach, etc. I attacked Feuerbachus, but very civilly, of course, and in a most affable way. At first it seemed to me that the Jewess was enjoying the discussion which, of course, was the only reason why I had engaged in this boring topic. In between whiles my dogmatically obtrusive echo, Mr Pieper, held forth — but not exactly in a tactful manner. Suddenly I noticed that the woman was in floods of tears. Blind was casting sorrowfully expressive glances in my direction, she decamped — and was not seen again, ni lui non plus [and neither was he]. It was something the like of which I had never seen before in all my long experience.

Pieper has set sail for Frankfurt am Main with the house of Rothschild. He has acquired a most disagreeable habit of butting in on my conversations with other people in a very fatuous, pedantic tone.

What they have just learnt, they must needs teach others forthwith.

Ah me, what a short gut these gentry have!

[Schiller]

The honourable Göhringer has sent me a summons for the 22nd of this month because of the old demand. At the same time the great man set off for Southampton to welcome Kossuth. It would seem that I am to pay for the reception ceremonies.

I have had 2 letters from Paris, one from Ewerbeck and one from Sasonow. Mr Ewerbeck is publishing an immortal work: L'Allemagne et les Allemands. Ranging from Arminius the Cheruscan (his actual words) to the year of Our Lord 1850. He asks me for biographical-literary-historical notes on 3 men: F. Engels, K. Marx and B. Bauer. The muck’s already printing. Que faire? I fear that if we don’t send the fellow any answer at all, he will spread the most arrant nonsense about us. Write and tell me what you think about this.

The most interesting thing about Sasonow’s letter at any rate is the postmark, ‘Paris’. How does Sasonow come to be in Paris just when things are so difficult? I shall ask him to explain this mystère. He, for his part, goes into long complaints about Dronke’s being a fainéant [lazybones] and allowing himself to be enjôler [cajoled] by a few bourgeois. He says he has translated half the Manifesto. Dronke had apparently undertaken to translate the other half but, because of his customary negligence and idleness, the whole thing had come to naught. This last is, indeed, just like our Dronke.

After the rejection by Mr Campe of my offer regarding the anti-Proudhon pamphlet, and by Mr Cotta and, later, Löwenthal of the one (transmitted through Ebner in Frankfurt) concerning my Economy, there would at last appear to be some prospect for the latter. I shall know in a week whether anything will come of it. It’s a publisher in Dessauf and through Ebner too. This man Ebner is a friend of Freiligrath’s.

I haven’t yet had a letter from the Tribune, which I have not so much as seen, but I don’t doubt that the thing is going ahead [publication of Engels’ Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany]. At any rate it’s bound to resolve itself in a few days’ time.

By the way, you must at long last let me have your vues on Proudhon, however brief. They are of particular interest to me since I am now in the throes of working out the Economy. Incidentally, during my recent visits to the library, which I continue to frequent, I have been delving mainly into technology, the history thereof, and agronomy, so that I can form at least some sort of an opinion of the stuff.

Qu'est ce que fait la crime commerciale? [How is the commercial crisis going?] The Economist is full of the anodynes, assurances and appeals which regularly precede a crisis. However, one senses its fear as it seeks to dispel the fears of others. If you happen to come upon the following book: Johnston, Notes on North America, 2 vols., 1851, you will find all manner of interesting information in it. For this Johnston is the English Liebig. An atlas of physical geography by ‘Johnston’, not to be confused with the above, may perhaps be had from one of Manchester’s lending libraries. It is a compilation of all the most recent as well as earlier research in this field. Costs 10 guineas. Thus not meant for private individuals. Not a word from our dear Harney. He would seem to be still living in Scotland.

The English admit that, at the industrial exhibition, the Americans carried off the prize and beat them at everything. 1. Gutta-percha. New materials and new industries. 2. Weapons. Revolvers. 3. Machines. Reapers, seed drills and sewing-machines. 4. Daguerreotypes, used for the first time on a large scale. 5. Shipping, with their yacht. Finally, to show that they are also capable of producing luxury articles, they exhibited an enormous lump of Californian gold ore and beside it a golden service of virgin gold.

Salut!

Your

K. Marx

Marx To Joseph Weydemeyer

In New York

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 480;

First published: (without Jenny Marx’s postscript) in: Marx and Engels Works, 1934 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1962;

London, 16 October 1851, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Weydemeyer,

Not only have I myself written to A. Charles Dana, one of the editors of the New York Tribune, but I have sent him a letter of introduction for you from Freiligrath. So all you have to do is to call on him and mention our names.

You ask about a statistical manual. I would recommend — since it also contains economic expositions — the Commercial Dictionary by MacCulloch, 1845. There are more recent things, e.g., by MacGregor, whose works on statistics are, generally speaking, probably the best so far as Europe as a whole is concerned. But they are very dear. However, you will certainly find them in one of the New York libraries. MacCulloch, on the other hand, is a manual which every journalist ought to possess.

On England, specially to be recommended: Porter, The Progress of the Notion. New edition, 1851.

On the history of commerce generally:

Tooke. History of Prices, three vols. Up to 1848. On North America, especially MacGregor, who has written a statistical study of the United States.

On Germany: Freiherr von Reden: Vergleichende Kulturstatistik. On France: Moreau.

Now I have another commission for you. At the request of Koch, a former German Catholic priest, whom you may inquire after at the Staatszeitung, for which he writes front time to time, I sent him 20 Manifestos (in German) and one English translation of the same, instructing him to have it — the English translation — printed in pamphlet form, along with Harney’s introductory note. Since that time there hasn’t been a word from Mr Koch. Please ask him, 1) for an explanation of this most suspect silence, after he had written to me so urgently, and 2) get him to give you the English translation and see if you can dispose of it in pamphlet form, i.e. if you can publish, distribute and sell it. Needless to say, any proceeds there may be will go to you, but we should like to have 20-50 copies for ourselves.

Dronke is coming here on the 23rd inst.

Write soon. Regards to you and your wife from my wife, myself and all friends.

I hope that you have weathered the voyage successfully and that things will go well with you in the United States.

Your

K. Marx

[From Mrs Jenny Marx]

Tell your dear wife that, during this time, I have been thinking of her with heartfelt sympathy and concern. What must she have endured on the long sea voyage with two small children! I hope these lines will not reach New York too long before yourselves. I feel sure that you will manage to make a provisional home for yourselves there.

We have had no news of Edgar [von Westphalen] since his departure in April. He left Bremen on the sailing vessel Reform, Captain Ammerman, intending to disembark at Galveston and stay, to begin with, in New Braunfels. Perhaps, dear Mr Weydemeyer, it might he possible for you to track him down somewhere from New York. His silence is all the more incomprehensible as he knows that, because of the paralysis of her right hand, our poor, lonely little mama [Caroline von Westphalen] has been deprived of the last solace fate has left her — to communicate in writing with those she loves most.

Farewell, and warm regards from

Jenny Marx

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 490;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 24 November 1851

Dear Frederick,

You must understand that, if I have not written to you before, it is because my household is all at sixes and sevens.

You will remember that in his last letter Pieper wrote that the contract for my anti-Proudhon was about to be concluded. From his letter, enclosed herewith, you will see that there is no further mention of this manuscript. This is typical of the way in which I have been kept on tenterhooks by our dear henchmen these six months past. On the other hand, Ebner has written to say that Löwenthal is willing to try out one volume but didn’t mention whether I am to start with the ‘history of economy’. If so, it would mean upsetting my whole scheme. Ebner further said that Löwenthal could only pay ‘a little’. This I am prepared to accept, provided he publishes what I want published first. But if he forces me to ruin my whole scheme, he will have to pay me as though I were directly commissioned by him. However, I shall for the time being let Ebner do as he thinks fit. He has informed me that he won’t conclude anything without my consent. Qu'en penses-tu?

I am glad that our people in Cologne [Communist League members under arrest and investigation] are at last to appear before the assizes and indeed, or so I was assured yesterday by Schüller, the Düsseldorf publisher, will do so this very December when there are to be extraordinary assizes.

Apropos, don’t forget to let me have the New York Schnellpost back by return. Bamberger is pressing me, and it’s the only way of extracting from him the subsequent numbers which are said to contain all manner of curious things.

I know that you yourself are now feeling the pinch and that my sudden descent, my razzia, on Manchester has made things even tighter for you, at least so far as this month is concerned. Nevertheless, I must ask you whether, in an emergency, you could lay your hands on another £2. For before leaving London I borrowed £2 and at the same time stated in writing that I'd repay it before December. At all events I would ask you to write by return to let me know whether or not this is possible.

Eccarius’ brother [Johann Friedrich] has arrived here. He and all the other Straubingers arrested in Hamburg have been set free and given their marching orders. That Haupt originally had no treacherous intentions is apparent from the following: Bürgers’ letter to him fell into the hands of his old man, who taxed him with it and proposed to hand it over to the police. This he prevented, tore the thing up and later took the pieces to Eccarius, etc., first to reassemble and read them, and then to burn them in their presence. This fact is important. It is pressure from his family that has ruined the unfortunate fellow.

A few days ago at the library I read Mr Proudhon’s lucubrations on Gratuité du crédit against Bastiat. In terms of charlatanism, poltroonery, bluster and ineffectuality it exceeds anything this man has done before. Exempli gratia, the French believe that on average they are paying 5-6 per cent interest. They are paying 160 per cent. Comment donc? Well, like this. Interest on mortgage, unsecured, state, etc., debts amounts to 1,600 millions. Now in France there is only 1 thousand million of capital in existence, i.e. gold and silver. Hence, q.e.d. A further example: When the Banque de France was set up, its capital amounted to 90 millions. At that time it was legally empowered to take 5 per cent on this sum. It is now operating (deposits, etc., included) on a capital of 450-460 millions, of which 3/4 belong not to it, but to the public. If the bank, therefore, (90:450 = 1:5) takes only 1 per cent instead of 5, it will be making a legitimate profit. And because the Banque de France could, in an emergency (2), content itself (i.e. the stockholders) with 1 per cent, the interest rate for France can therefore be reduced to 1 per cent. And 1 per cent, c'est la presque gratuité du crédit [it’s almost free credit].

And you should see how the fellow flaunts his dialectique hégelienne vis-à-vis Bastiat.

I have been through your critique again here. It’s a pity qu'il ny a pas moyen [that there’s no way] of getting it printed. If my own twaddle were added to it, we could bring it out under both our names, provided this didn’t upset your firm in any way.

As you know, Kossuth left on the 20th, but what you don’t know is that he was accompanied by Lola Montez and caballero Göhringer. I

Schramm, with an officious obstinacy wholly sans pareil [without parallel] is endeavouring to attach himself to me again. Il n'y parviendra pas [he won’t succeed].

How goes it with K. Schnapper’s ‘tippling jaunts'?

Your

K. M.

Engels to Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 38, p. 503;

First published: in MEGA2, Berlin, 1975.

[Manchester,] 3 December 1851

‘Représentants de la France, délibérez en paix!’ ['Representatives of France, hold your deliberations in peace!' — from Changarnier’s speech in the Legislative Assembly on 3 June 1851 in reply to speech by President Louis Bonaparte in Dijon containing concealed threats to the Assembly] And where can the gentlemen deliberate more peacefully than in the Caserne d'Orsay, guarded by a battalion of chasseurs de Vincennes!

The history of France has entered a stage of utmost comicality. Can one imagine anything funnier than this travesty of the 18th Brumaire, effected in peacetime with the help of discontented soldiers by the most insignificant man in the world without, so far as it has hitherto been possible to judge, any opposition whatsoever? And how beautifully have all the old jackasses been caught! The slyest fox in the whole of France, old Thiers, the astutest advocate of the barreau [the Bar], Mr Dupin, caught in the trap set for them by the most notorious blockhead of the century; caught as easily as Mr Cavaignac’s inflexible republican virtue and as that braggart of a Changarnier! And to complete the tableau, a rump parliament with Odilon Barrot as ‘Löwe of Calbe’; and, in view of this violation of the Constitution, the said Odilon demands to be arrested and cannot contrive to get himself battled off to Vincennes! The whole thing is as if expressly invented for the benefit of red Wolff; henceforward he alone will be capable of writing the history of France. Has ever a coup been effected with more fatuous proclamations than this one? And the ludicrous Napoleonic apparatus, the anniversary of the coronation and of Austerlitz, the provocation against the consular Constitution and so on — the fact that anything of this kind could succeed even for a day — does indeed lower Messieurs les Français to a level of puerility that is without parallel.

Wonderful, the arrest of those great, loud-mouthed advocates of order, of little Thiers first and foremost, and of the bold Changarnier. Wonderful, the sitting of the rump parliament in the 10th Arrondissement, with Mr Berryer yelling ‘Vive la République’, out of the window, until finally the whole lot were apprehended and shut up in a barrack square among the soldiers. And then the stupid Napoleon, who at once packed his bags to move into the Tuileries. Even though one racked one’s brains for a whole year, one couldn’t think up a prettier comedy.

And that evening, when the stupid Napoleon at last flung himself down on the long coveted bed in the Tuileries, the numskull must really have been at a loss to know what he was about. Le consular sans premier consul! Internal difficulties no greater than they had been, generally speaking, for the past three years, no exceptional financial straits, not even as regards his private purse, no coalition on the borders, no St Bernard to be crossed, no Marengo to be won. It’s enough to make one despair. And now there’s no longer even a National Assembly to foil the great schemes of this unappreciated man; nay, for the time being at least the jackass is as free, as untrammelled, as absolute as the old man on the night of the 18th Brumaire, so completely unrestrained that he can’t help coming the jackass on each and every occasion. Appalling, a prospect devoid of conflict!

Mais le peuple, le peuple! — Le peuple se fiche pas mal de toute cette boutique [But the people, the people! The people don’t care a damn for all this business], are happy as children over the franchise accorded to them and which, indeed, they will probably make use of like children. What can result from these ridiculous elections a week on Sunday, if in fact it ever comes to that? No press, no meetings, martial law enough and to spare and, on top of it all, the order to produce a deputy within 14 days.

What is to come of the whole business? ‘If we adopt the standpoint of world history’ [Wilhelm Jordan] we are presented with a splendid subject for declamation. Thus, e.g.: it remains to be seen whether the Praetorian regime of the time of the Roman Empire, for which the prerequisite was an extensive state organised on strictly military lines, a depopulated Italy and the absence of a modern proletariat, is possible in a geographically compact, densely populated country such as France, which has a large industrial proletariat. Either: Louis Napoleon has no party of his own; having spurned the Orleanists and Legitimists, he must now turn towards the left. Turning towards the left implies an amnesty, an amnesty implies a collision, etc. Or else: Universal suffrage is the basis of Louis Napoleon’s power, he cannot attack it, and universal suffrage is now incompatible with a Louis Napoleon. And other suchlike conjectural theses which would lend themselves splendidly to prolixity. But, after what we saw yesterday, there can be no counting on the peuple, and it really seems as though old Hegel, in the guise of the World Spirit, were directing history from the grave and, with the greatest conscientiousness, causing everything to be re-enacted twice over, once as grand tragedy and the second time as rotten farce [note], Caussidière for Danton, L. Blanc for Robespierre, Barthélemy for Saint-Just, Flocon for Carnot, and the moon-calf together with the first available dozen debt-encumbered lieutenants for the little corporal and his band of marshals. Thus the 18th Brumaire would already be upon us.

The people of Paris have behaved with childish stupidity. Cela ne nous regards pas; que le président et 1'assemblée s'entre-tuent, peu nous importe! [That is no concern of ours; that the President and the Assembly should massacre each other is of small moment to us!] But that the army should presume to foist a government — and what a government! — on France, that undoubtedly does concern them, and the mob will wonder what kind of a ‘free’ universal suffrage it is they are now to exercise ‘for the first time since 1804’!

How much longer the World Spirit, clearly much incensed at mankind, is going to continue this farce, whether within the year we shall see Consulate, Empire, Restoration and all pass by before our eyes, whether, too, the Napoleonic dynasty must first be thrashed in the streets of Paris before it is deemed impossible in France, the devil only knows. But it strikes me that things are taking a remarkably lunatic turn and that the crapauds [philistines] are heading for an astonishing humiliation.

Even assuming that Louis Napoleon momentarily consolidates his position, such stuff and nonsense can hardly endure, despite the fathomless depths to which the French have sunk. But what then? There’s damned little red in prospect, that much is clear, and if Mr Blanc and Ledru packed their bags at midday yesterday, they may as well begin unpacking them again. La voix tonnante du peuple ne les rappelle pas encore [The thunderous voice of the people is not recalling them yet].

Here and in Liverpool the affair suddenly brought business to a standstill, but today in Liverpool they are already briskly speculating again. And French funds have only fallen by 2 per cent.

In the circumstances any attempt to intercede for the Cologne people in the British press must, of course, be postponed.

With regard to the articles for the Tribune, which have obviously already appeared in it, write to the editor of the Tribune in English. Dana may well be away, and a business letter will certainly be answered. *Tell him that he must distinctly state per next returning steamer what has become of these papers, and in case they have been made use of, he is requested to send by the same opportunity copies of the Tribune containing them, as no copy has been kept here and without having the articles already sent, again before our eyes, we cannot, after such a lapse of time, undertake to go on with the following numbers of the series.*

The news from France must have had a jolly effect on the European émigré rabble. I'd like to have witnessed it.

En attendant tes nouvelles.

Your

F. E.

Note: Referring to Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, part 3, in 2:. ‘Rom vom zweiten punischen Krieg bis zum Kaiserthum, in which Hegel wrote: “a coup d'état is sanctioned as it were in the opinion of the people if it is repeated. Thus Napoleon was defeated twice and twice the Bourbons were driven out. Through repetition, what at the beginning seemed to be merely accidental and possible, becomes real and established”.

Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx in London, 11 December 1851

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Marx

Herewith I am returning to you Reinhardt’s [1] letter as well as Pieper’s, [2] which I had held back for a while on account of the Cologne happenings.

It seems that the grand expedition of the 700 vagabonds to Paris which was announced with so much noise by the newspapers has not materialised. Furthermore little Louis Blanc, [3] according to his renewed groans of pain voiced in today’s Daily News, is for the time being in safety, even if allegedly not in London. The first jeremiad was divine in comparison with today’s. The French people – noble pride – indomitable courage – eternal love of liberty – honour to the courage of the unfortunate – thereupon the little fellow executes a half-turn to the right and preaches trust and union of the people and the bourgeoisie. See Proudhon, Appeal to the Bourgeoisie, page 2. [4] And the arguments he advances! If the insurgents were beaten it was because they were not the ‘true people'; the ‘true people’ cannot be beaten; and if the ‘true people’ did not fight it was because it did not want to fight for the National Assembly. One could of course reply that the ‘true people’, once victorious, would itself have been dictator, but having been taken by surprise it did not think of that, and after all, it has been fooled so often!

This is the old vulgar logic of the democrats, which gains ground every time the revolutionary party suffers defeat. The fact of the matter is, in my opinion, that the proletariat did not fight this time in a mass because it was fully aware of its own debility and impotence and it acquiesced with fatalistic resignation in a new cycle of republic, empire, restoration and a new revolution until it is able to gather new strength during a few years of wretchedness under a rule of maximum order. I do not say that this is how things will shape themselves, but this seems to me to have been the instinctive basic outlook that prevailed among the people of Paris on Tuesday [5] and Wednesday and after the restoration of the secret ballot and the subsequent retreat of the bourgeoisie on Friday. It is nonsense to say that this was no opportunity for the people. If the proletariat wants to wait until its own question is posed by the government, until a collision occurs in which the conflict will assume sharper and more definite forms than in June 1848, it will have to wait a long while. The last time the issue between proletariat and bourgeoisie was fairly plainly raised, was in connection with the 1850 election law, and the people preferred not to fight then. This and the perpetual pointing to 1852 in itself was proof of indolence, proof which, except in the case of a commercial crisis, was sufficient for us to make a pretty bad forecast also for 1852. Since the abolition of universal suffrage and since the ousting of the proletariat from the official stage it is really a bit too much to expect the official parties to put the issue in a way that will suit the proletariat. And how did the matter stand in February? [6] The people at that time kept just as much aloof from events as now. And it cannot be denied in the least that when the revolutionary party in a revolutionary development allows affairs to take decisive turns without any say of its own or, if it does take part, without however emerging victorious, one may be fairly certain that for some time it is to be considered as done for. Witness the insurrections after Thermidor and after 1830, [7] and the gentlemen who now so loudly proclaim that the ‘true people’ is biding its time run the risk of gradually landing in the same boat as the powerless Jacobins of 1795-99 and the Republicans of 1831-39 and of making themselves utterly ridiculous.

Nor can it be denied that the effect of the restoration of the secret ballot on the bourgeoisie, petty bourgeoisie and, finally, also on many proletarians (all the reports suggest that) has cast a peculiar light on the courage and insight of the Parisians. To many it obviously never occurred to think how silly the question posed by Louis Napoleon was and what guarantees there were that the vote would be recorded correctly; but most of them must have seen through this humbug and nevertheless persuaded themselves that everything was now all right merely in order to have a pretext for not fighting.

According to Reinhardt’s letter and the new revelations coming in daily about the infamies perpetrated by the soldiers and particularly about their excesses on the boulevards against any and all civilians, no matter who they were: workers or bourgeois, reds or Bonapartists; according to the accumulating reports about local insurrections even in the most remote corners where no one suspected resistance; and according to the letter of a French ex-deputy and merchant in yesterday’s Daily News, the Appeal to the People seems to be taking a turn that must be unpleasant to Bonaparte. The mass of the bourgeoisie in Paris really does not seem to relish this new regime with its imposition of transportation laws. Military terror is developing too rapidly and is too brazen. Two-thirds of France is in a state of siege. I believe that after all this the mass of the bourgeoisie will not vote at all, that this whole farce of a vote will end in nothing, because in all localities where the outcome is doubtful, where Louis Napoleon’s opponents will go to the polls in masses the gendarmes will start brawls with the voters so that the whole election there will be quashed. Then Louis Napoleon will declare France to be non compos mentis [8] and proclaim the army the only saviour of society. Then this whole dirty business will become perfectly clear, with Louis Napoleon stuck in the midst of it. But it is precisely during this election that the matter could take a very ugly turn if at that time serious resistance against an established government were still to be expected. That fellow is sure to receive a million votes from the officials and soldiers. Half a million Bonapartists, if not more, are also in the country. Half a million timid townsmen, if not more, will also cast their ballots for him. Add half a million stupid peasants and allow a million for mistakes in the count and you already have three and a half million. Even the old Napoleon did not receive more than that in an empire that embraced the whole left bank of the Rhine and Belgium, that is, a population of thirty-two million for certain. Why should he not be satisfied with that as a start? And if he got that many, with perhaps one million against him, he would soon capture the bourgeoisie. But perhaps he will not get the two and a half million and perhaps he cannot wangle it to be credited with an extra million votes by way of mistakes in addition, although this would be expecting too much of the honesty of the French officials. At any rate, a great deal depends on the measures he will be compelled to take meanwhile. Incidentally, who can prevent the officials from stuffing the ballot-boxes with several hundred yes-votes before the registration of the votes begins? There is no press any more – nobody to check up.

At any rate it is bad for Krapülinski [9] that the stocks are falling again, and for Louis Blanc that he must now recognise England as a free country.

In a few months the Reds must get another opportunity to prove their mettle, perhaps already during the voting. But if then they temporise again, I give them up; even the nicest commercial crisis will then get them nothing but a good beating that will definitely remove them from the scene for a couple of years. What good is this rabble if it has forgotten how to fight?

Is Pieper in London again? I wanted to give him a commission regarding books to be executed in Frankfurt and I do not know whether he still is in Brighton.

The worst thing is that you will now encounter difficulties with Löwenthal. [10] It would have been good if the contract had already been concluded.

Liverpool Market – quiet at yesterday’s prices; Manchester Market – firm. Some overtrading going on to the Levant. German buyers continue keeping out of the Market.

Yours

FE

Notes

1. Richard Reinhardt (1826-1898) – German poet, emigrant in Paris, secretary to Heinrich Heine, friend of Marx’s family, subsequently engaged in commerce – Progress Publishers.

2. Wilhelm Pieper (1826-?) – German philologist and journalist, member of Communist League, London emigrant, in 1850s closely associated with Marx and Engels – Progress Publishers.

3. Louis Blanc (1811-1882) – French petty-bourgeois socialist, historian, member of Provisional Government and Chairman of Luxemburg Committee (1848), advocated conciliation with bourgeoisie, in August 1848 emigrated to England, a leader of petty-bourgeois émigrés in London – Progress Publishers.

4. This refers to Proudhon’s introduction, entitled ‘À la Bourgeoisie’ (’to the Bourgeoisie’), to his work Idée générale de la révolution au XIX siècle (The General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century) – Progress Publishers.

5. That is, 2 December 1851 – Progress Publishers.

6. That is, February 1848 – Progress Publishers.

7. Engels is referring to the uprisings of the workers in Paris on 1 April (12 Germinal according to the republican calendar) and 20-23 May 1795 (1-4 Prairial) against the reactionary regime of the Thermidorians set up in 1794, and the proletarian risings in Lyons in 1831 and 1834 after the July revolution in France in 1830 – Progress Publishers.

8. Non compos mentis – not in control of the mind; insane – MIA.

9. Krapülinski – hero of Heine’s poem ‘Zwei Ritter’ (Two Knights), a Polish nobleman who squandered his fortune; the name Krapülinski is derived from the French word crapule – intemperance, gluttony, and also loafer, riff-raff. Engels applies the name here to Louis Bonaparte.

10. Löwenthal – German publisher during 1840s and 1850s – Progress Publishers.

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

December 27, 1851

Moorish Prince,

Enclosed is a letter from Ebner.

Today I also received another letter from Weydemeyer. Among other things he writes:

“A few days ago a delegate arrived from the London Agitation Union to oppose the Kinkel loans. These people probably imagine that here in America, everybody is split into pro-Kinkel and anti-Kinkel factions, because a handful of fugitives have made much ado about nothing. The Kossuth sensation long ago made Kinkel a forgotten man and the few thousand dollars which he collects are not in fact worth all the fuss.

“I can in any case look after the sale of the Revue for you here. A few more of Freiligrath’s new poems could also be accommodated here.”

After W[eydemeyer] has given us another push he writes:

“But first and foremost a Freiligrath poem: that is the greatest attraction.”

Take this to heart and concoct a New Year song to the New World. Under the present circumstances I believe it is really easier to write in verse than in prose, be it heavy or light-hearted. Incidentally, if you ever attempt to turn the humour that is peculiar to your African majesty in private life into artistic form, I am certain you would play a role in this genre too, for, as your wife has rightly noted, you are a sly one underneath.

1852

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 1 January

Engels to Marx. 6 January

Engels to Jenny Marx. 14 January

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 16 January

Marx to Engels. 20 January

Engels to Marx. 22 January

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 23 January

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 23 January

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 23 Jan/2 Feb

Marx to Engels. 24 January

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 26 January

Engels to Marx. 28 January

Engels to Marx. 29 January

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 30 January

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 30 January

Engels to Marx. 2 February

Marx to Engels. 4 February

Marx to Engels. 6 February

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 13 February

Engels to Marx. 17 February

Marx to Engels. 18 February

Engels to Marx. 19 February

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 19 February

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 20 February

Marx to Engels. 23 February

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 23 February

Marx to Engels. 27 February

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 27 February

Engels to Marx. 2 March

Marx to Engels. 5 March

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 5 March

Engels to Marx. 18 March

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 25 March

Marx to Engels. 30 March

Engels to Marx. 1 April

Marx to Engels. 5 April

Marx to Engels. 14 April

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 16 April

Engels to Marx. 20 April

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 22 April

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 23 April

Marx to Engels. 24 April

Engels to Marx. 25 April

Engels to Marx. 27 April

Engels to Marx. 29 April

Marx to Engels. 30 April

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 30 April

Engels to Marx. 1 May

Engels to Marx. 4 May

Marx to Engels. 6 May

Engels to Marx. 7 May

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 7-15 May

Marx to Engels. 13 May

Engels to Marx. 19 May

Engels to Marx. 21 May

Engels to Marx. 22 May

Marx to Engels. 22 May

Engels to Marx. 24 May

Marx and Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 28 May

Marx to Jenny Marx. 11 June

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 11 June

Marx to Adolf Cluss. Before 26 June

Engels to Marx. 30 June

Marx to Engels. 3 July

Engels to Marx. 6 July

Marx to Engels. 13 July

Engels to Marx. 15 July

Marx to Engels. 20 July

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 20 July

Engels to Marx. 22 July

Marx to Gottfried Kinkel. 22 June

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 30 July

Marx to Adolf Cluss. Early August

Marx to Engels. 2 August

Marx to Engels. 5 August

Engels to Marx. 6 August

Marx to Engels. 6 August

Engels to Marx. 9 August

Marx to Engels. 10 August

Engels to Marx. 16 August

Marx to Engels. 19 August

Marx to Heinrich Brockhaus. 19 August

Engels to Marx. 24 August

Marx to Engels. 27 August

Marx to Peter Imandt. 27 August

Marx to Engels. 30 August

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 30 August

Marx to Engels. 2 September

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 3 September

Marx to Adolf Cluss. After 5 Sept.

Engels to Marx. 7 September

Marx lo Engels. 8 September

Marx to Engels. 9 September

Engels to Marx. 14 September

Marx to Engels. 18 September

Engels to Marx. 20 September

Engels to Marx. 23 September

Marx to Engels. 23 September

Engels to Marx. 24 September

Marx to Engels. 28 September

Engels to Marx. After 28 Sept.

Engels to Marx. 4 October

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 5 October

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 8 October

Engels to Marx. 10 October

Marx to Engels. 12 October

Engels to Marx. 14 October

Engels to Marx. 18 October

Marx to A von Bruning. 18 October

Marx to Engels. 20 October

Engels to Marx. 22 October

Marx to Engels. 25 October

Marx to Engels. 26 October

Engels to Marx. 27 October

Marx to Engels. 27 October

Marx to Engels. 28 October

Engels to Marx. 28 October

Engels to Marx. 28 October

Engels to Marx. 31 October

Marx to Engels. 2 November

Marx to Engels. 4 November

Engels to Marx. 5-6 November

Marx to Engels. 10 November

Marx to Engels. 16 November

Marx to Engels. 19 November

Engels to Marie Blank. 22 November

Engels to Marx. 27 November

Engels to Marx. 29 November

Marx to Karl Eduard Vehse. End November

Marx to Engels. 3 December

Marx to Janos Bangya. 3 December

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 7 December

Marx to Engels. 14 December

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 14 December

Marx to Gustav Zerffi. 28 December

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

January 16, 1852

On the other hand, I enclose a poem and a private letter from Freiligrath. I now request you to do the following: 1. Have the poem printed properly with reasonable spacing between the stanzas. Do not try to save space. Poems lose a great deal if they are printed in a cramped and conglomerate fashion. 2. Write Freiligrath a friendly letter. You do not have to be too sparing with compliments, for all poets, even the best ones, are plus au moins [more or less] courtisanes and il faut les cajoler, pour les faire chanter. [one must cajole them to make them sing] Our F[reiligrath] is the most amiable, unassuming man in private life, who beneath his real bonhomie conceals un esprit tres fin et tres railleur; [an extremely keen and scornful mind] his emotion is “truthful” and does not make him “uncritical” and “superstitious.” He is a genuine revolutionary and an honest man through and through — and this can be said of few men. Nevertheless, whatever kind of homme he is, the poet needs praise and admiration. I believe that the genre itself requires this. I am telling you all this simply to point out that in your correspondence with Freiligrath, you should not forget the difference between the “poet” and the “critic.”

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 20;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels and K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 24 January 1852, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Frederic,

No more than a few lines, since a letter has just arrived from Bermbach in Cologne which I would like to be in your hands tomorrow. It is essential that you 1. send me a letter To the Editor of The Times on the Cologne affair, together with a few lines which I shall send in advance of the corpus delicti; 2. that you do the same in your own name to The Daily News although, of course, the actual corpus delicti, i.e. the insertion itself, will be signed ‘A Prussian’ or some such. I think that for The Times ‘Doctor’ and for The Daily News ‘Manchester Merchant’ would do better, i.e. have more chance of being accepted. Refer to people by their titles. Dr Becker, Dr (!) Bürgers, Dr Daniels, Dr Klein, Dr Jacobi, Otto (a chemist well known in German scientific circles), Röser and Nothjung. The Board of indicting magistrates at Cologne is the nec plus ultra of cowardice. By the way, under the terms of the new disciplinary law, judges are, at least nominally, no longer ‘irremovable’.

Your article for Dana is splendid.

Of course I have only been able to send poor Weydemeyer one more article since you were here. This time my piles have afflicted me more grievously than the French Revolution. I shall see what I can do next week. The state of my posterior does not permit me to go to the Library yet.

Confiscation of the estates begged or stolen by the Orléans! Resignation of Fould! Persigny! Bravo! Ça marche!

It is strange how Army, Navy, colonies, Fortifications and the whole Administration have gone rotten under the rule of this curious regime of an aristocratic clique which the English bourgeois have by tradition lugged along with them at the head of the Executive power ever since 1688. After all that English presumption and liberal outcry inspired by Kossuth, after the cosmopolitan-philanthropic-commercial hymns of peace during the Exhibition, in short, after this period of bourgeois megalomania, it is refreshing when the canaille now come to discover that not something, but everything, is rotten in the State of Denmark. And then, too, these gents take an altogether too complacent view of the struggles on the Continent.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Send back the two enclosed letters by return, Cluss, at any rate.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 24;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels and K. Marx, 1913.

Manchester, 28 January 1852

Dear Marx,

Enclosed the thing for The Times. All you have to write is:* Sir, I believe the publication of the scandalous facts contained in the annexed letter will contribute to throw some light upon the state of things on the Continent. The correctness of these facts I guarantee,* etc. Name and address.

Mine to The Daily News will be going off this evening by the second post; if you arrange matters similarly, both letters will arrive at the respective offices at almost the same time and thus may appear in Friday’s issue. But post the letter in Charing Cross; there is too much delay at the branch offices.

I return herewith the two letters from Cluss and Bermbach. The seal on your Saturday’s letter was once again in a sorry state; I enclose it herewith. What can be afoot?

In The Daily News I shall simply sign myself A German Merchant.

Write soon.

Your

F. E.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 25;

First published: in full in MEGA, Berlin 1929.

Manchester, 29 January 1852

Dear Marx,

How annoying that one cannot rely on anything being done unless one does it oneself. Owing to our messenger’s stupidity, my letter to The Daily News did not go off yesterday; now it’s too late. So all I can do is to keep it in abeyance until I see whether yours is in tomorrow’s or Saturday’s Times. If not, it will go off at once. In the meantime there’s one thing to consider: whether Freiligrath is not the right man for The D. News. Were he to write to them, I could try The Weekly Press and The Sun. We have been cold-shouldered by The D. N. once already.

Enclosed another article for Dana. It might, perhaps, be divided into two at the point where the Polish business ends — though it would be better to keep it entire. If you split it up, you can send both halves by the same steamer, since there is not another sailing before tomorrow week. I will now see that I get on fairly quickly, say, 2 articles a week, so as to have done with the subject. There will be 15-16 articles in all.

No copies received from Weydemeyer. No letter either. This surprises me. I shall finish another article for him this evening.

The French are real jackasses. Madier approached me about an industrial matter and, since my brother-in-law [Emil Blank] who knows the dodge, happened to be here, I gave him some very useful hints and advice. Now the dolt writes to say that, as a result of silly chatter by some crapaud [toad] who knows nothing of this matter, he intends to go about it in a different and most businesslike way, and I am to obtain, not for him, but for his associate, a man whom I have never seen, letters of introduction from my brother-in-law (who, fortunately, is on the Continent)! You will recall that Madier introduced us to a calico printer who was bound for Manchester. The fellow calls on me, I go to immense pains to be helpful, do what I can, treat him with the utmost consideration, and in return for all this the dolt suddenly vanishes without my being able to learn what has become of him. A fine race!

Your

F. E.

Marx To Joseph Weydemeyer

In New York

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 26;

First published: in Marx Engels Works, Moscow, 1934.

[London,] 30 January 1852, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Weydemeyer,

Enclosed you will find:

1. A further instalment of my article.

2. A piece by Eccarius whose grammatical mistakes, punctuation and so forth you yourself will have to correct, since he brought me the thing too late for me to attend to this myself.

3. Translation of an interesting article in The Times by Lupus who, however, does not wish his name to appear, the thing being merely a translation.

How goes, it with the German book-trade in America? Might I find a publisher there for my Economy now that things have miscarried in Germany?

Salut.

Your

K. Marx

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer

In New York

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 27;

First published: in Marx Engels Works, Moscow, 1934.

[Manchester,] Friday, 30 January 1852

Dear Weydemeyer,

I sent you by last Saturday’s steamer (the Europa, I think) an article together with a letter. Herewith a few more lines. The issues of the Revolution you promised have not yet turned up, although your last letter of 5 Jan. gave good reason to believe that they would come by the next steamer, and since then 1 Southampton and 3 Liverpool steamers have arrived here with mails from New York dated up to 17 Jan. I hope no snags have arisen to prevent publication. At all events, I expect to hear from you by the next steamer, the Cambria (out of Boston 21 Jan.), which is due here on Monday 2 Feb.

My anticipations regarding the confiscation of Louis Philippe’s fortune and a Persigny Ministry have been confirmed sooner than I could have hoped; given a reasonably well-organised service, news of it must have arrived in New York by way of the Liverpool newspapers at the same time as my letter; hardly was my letter in the post when the telegraphic dispatch about it likewise arrived here. So much the better. The thing’s going splendidly and there’s better still to come.

Weerth is on his travels again, will be visiting Holland, France, Switzerland, etc., and must at this moment be in London. I have written and told Marx that he should again chivvy him a little about sending you a few things, although he will hardly have the peace and quiet to do so. When one has spent the whole day tramping round calling on Dutch Jews with samples of wool and linen yarn, one feels small inclination to spend the evening at the hotel in writing that sort of thing. However, if anything is to be extracted from him, Marx is the man to do it.

The sudden lull in the émigrés’ gossip brought about by the new turn of events in France is truly comical. Not a whisper do I hear about the whole caboodle.

The prisoners in Cologne are in a serious position. Since there is no charge whatever against them, the Board of indicting magistrates has neither released them nor brought them before the Court of Assizes but has referred the matter back to the first examining magistrate for a fresh investigation! In other words, they will remain provisionally in clink without books, without letters, without being able to communicate either with one another or with the outside world, until the new state tribunal is ready. Just now we are trying to denounce this outrage in the English bourgeois press.

Many regards.

Your

F. E.

[On the back of the letter]

Per Liverpool Steamer Mr. J. Weydemeyer, 7 Chambers Street, New York (City)

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 37;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels and K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 18 February [1852], 28 Dean Street, Soho

I shall write to you at length on Saturday. Only a few lines today.

I have not yet received the money that was promised me from home and so have not yet been able to hand over your £2 to Pieper, but have told him I have had a few lines from you in which you informed me that I should be receiving money for him from you. I hope I shall be able to pay him before the week is out.

If your time is very much taken up, you would certainly do better to write for Dana than for Jones. The enclosed letter from Weydemeyer will show you even more plainly how essential it is not to interrupt these articles [Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany]. What must be done now is to redouble our attacks in the Tribune on the Frankfurt Left, especially when you come to the ‘March Association’. To help you, I am today sending you Bauer’s book in which at least a few facts are to be found.

I again pray you to send me the issues of the ‘Tribune’ by return, since Johnson is the only Englishman to whom I can turn when in extremis — and I hover constantly on the brink. Don’t forget it this time!

How is it that Weydemeyer has not received a single one of your articles [England]? You must set an inquiry on foot.

Your

K. M.

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer

In New York

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 58;

First published: in full in Jungsozialistische Blätter, 1930.

London, 5 March 1852, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Weywy,

I am afraid there has been a bit of a muddle because, having misunderstood thy last letter, I addressed the last 2 packages to: Office of the Revolution 7 Chambers Street, Box 1817. What caused the confusion was that damned ‘Box 1817’, since you had written telling me to append this to the ‘old address’ without drawing any distinction between the first address and the second. But I hope the matter will have resolved itself before this letter arrives, the more so since last Friday’s letter contained the very detailed fifth instalment of my article. This week I was prevented from finishing the sixth, which is also the last one. If your paper is appearing again, this delay will not prove an obstacle since you have an ample supply of material.

Your article against Heinzen, unfortunately sent to me too late by Engels, is very good, at once coarse and fine, and this is the right combination for any polemic worthy of the name. I have shown this article to Ernest Jones and enclosed you will find a letter from him addressed to you, intended for publication. Since Jones writes very illegibly and with abbreviations, and since I assume that you are not yet an out-and-out Englishman, I am sending you, along with the original, a copy made by my wife, together with the German translation; you should print them both, the original and the translation, side by side. Below Jones’ letter you might add the following comment: As to George Julian Harney, likewise one of Mr Heinzen’s authorities, he published our Communist Manifesto in English in his Red Republican with a marginal note describing it as ‘The most revolutionary document ever given to the world’, and in his Democratic Review he translated the words of ‘wisdom brushed aside’ by Heinzen, namely my articles on the French Revolution from the Revue der N. Rh. Z [The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850], and in a paper on Louis Blanc he refers his readers to these articles as being the ‘true critical examination’ of the French affair. By the way, in England there is no need to have recourse only to ‘extremists’. If, in England, a Member of Parliament becomes a minister, he must have himself re-elected. Thus Disraeli, the new Chancellor, Lord of the Exchequer, writes to his constituents on 1 March:

* ‘We shall endeavour to terminate that strife of classes which, of late years, has exercised so pernicious an influence over the welfare of this kingdom.*’

Whereupon The Times of 2 March comments:

* ‘If anything would ever divide classes in this country beyond reconciliation, and leave no chance of a just and honourable peace, it would be a tax on foreign corn.’*

And lest some ignorant ‘man of character’ like Heinzen should suppose that the aristocrats are for and the bourgeois against the Corn Laws because the former want ‘monopoly’ and the latter ‘freedom’ — your worthy citizen sees opposites only in this ideological form — we shall content ourselves with saying that, in England, in the eighteenth century, the aristocrats were for ‘freedom’ (of trade) and the bourgeois for ‘monopoly’, — precisely the same attitude as is adopted by the two classes in present-day ‘Prussia’ towards the ‘Corn Laws’. There is no more rabid free trader than the Neue Pr. Z.

Finally, if I were you, I should tell the democratic gents en général that they would do better to acquaint themselves with bourgeois literature before they venture to yap at its opponents. For instance they should study the historical works of Thierry, Guizot, John Wade and so forth, in order to enlighten themselves as to the past ‘history of the classes’. They should acquaint themselves with the fundamentals of political economy before attempting to criticise the critique of political economy. For example, one need only open Ricardo’s magnum opus to find, on the first page, the words with which he begins his preface:

* ‘The produce of the earth — all that is derived from its surface by the united application of labour, machinery, and capital, is divided among three classes of the community; namely the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital necessary for its cultivation, and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated.’*

Now, in the United States bourgeois society is still far too immature for the class struggle to be made perceptible and comprehensible; striking proof of this is provided by C. H. Carey (of Philadelphia), the only North American economist of any note. He attacks Ricardo, the most classic representative of the bourgeoisie and the most stoical opponent of the proletariat, as a man whose works are an arsenal for anarchists and socialists, for all enemies of the bourgeois order. He accuses not only him, but also Malthus, Mill, Say, Torrens, Wakefield, MacCulloch, Senior, Whately, R. Jones, etc. — those who lead the economic dance in Europe — of tearing society apart, and of paving the way for civil war by showing that the economic bases of the various classes are such that they will inevitably give rise to a necessary and ever-growing antagonism between the latter. He tries to refute them, not, it is true, like the fatuous Heinzen, by relating the existence of classes to the existence of political privileges and monopolies but by seeking to demonstrate that economic conditions: rent (landed property), profit (capital) and wages (wage labour), rather than being conditions of struggle and antagonism, are conditions of association and harmony. All he proves, of course, is that the ‘undeveloped’ relations in the United States are, to him, ‘normal relations.’

Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribution was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the proletariat;[1] 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. Ignorant louts such as Heinzen, who deny not only the struggle but the very existence of classes, only demonstrate that, for all their bloodthirsty, mock-humanist yelping, they regard the social conditions in which the bourgeoisie is dominant as the final product, the non plus ultra [highest point] of history, and that they themselves are simply the servants of the bourgeoisie, a servitude which is the more revolting, the less capable are the louts of grasping the very greatness and transient necessity of the bourgeois regime itself.

Select from the above notes whatever you think fit. By the way, Heinzen has adopted our ‘centralisation’ in place of his ‘federative republic’, etc. When the views on classes we are now disseminating have become familiar objects of ‘sound common sense’ then the scoundrel will proclaim them aloud as the latest product of his ‘own sagacity’ and yap his opposition to our onward progress. Thus, in the light of his ‘own sagacity’, he yapped at Hegelian philosophy so long as it was progressive. Now he feeds on its stale scraps, spat out undigested by Ruge.

Herewith also the end of the Hungarian article. It is all the more essential that you should try to make some use of this — assuming your paper exists — because Szemere, the erstwhile prime minister of Hungary, now in Paris, has promised me to write a long article for you, signed with his own name.

If your paper has come into being, send more copies so that it can he distributed more widely.

Your

K. Marx

Kind regards to you and your wife from all your friends here, especially my wife.

Apropos. I am sending you the Notes [to the People] and a few copies of my Assizes speech (this last for Cluss, to whom I promised it) by the hand of the ex-Montagnard Hochstuhl (an Alsatian). There’s nothing to the fellow.

Herewith the Rules. I would advise you to arrange them in more logical order. London is designated as the district responsible for the United States. Hitherto we have been able to exercise our authority only in partibus.

If you have not already done so, do not accept ‘Hirsch’s’ statement. He’s an unsavoury individual, although in the right where Schapper and Willich are concerned.

1.: On January 1, 1852, Weydemeyer had published an article in The New York Turn-Zeitung entitled “Dictatorship of the Proletariat.”

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 66;

First published: in full in MEGA, 1929.

[Manchester,] 18 March 1852

Dear Marx,

I return herewith Pixie’s [Ernst Dronke’s] letter. I am pour le moment entièrement dépourvu [at the moment completely penniless] and would not be able to raise the £2 — at least this month; moreover, his letter is dated the 5th and there is absolutely no knowing whether the money would still reach him. And then it’s always a ticklish business sending money to Ewerbeck; the fellow is capable of making superannuated claims for God only knows what old postal expenses, and of pocketing the whole amount or the best part of it. For all these reasons I am unable just now to help the little sprite, doubtful though I am that he will be able to extract more than five sous at one go from Monsieur Ewerbeck. Meanwhile, the piccolo has left Geneva for Paris and thus will no doubt also come to London, if at the cost of some ‘toil and trouble’; and then we shall know just how much his dunning letters mean.

If the little man does come, you will have some difficulty in restraining his pugnacious temperament, surely much exacerbated by prolonged ‘toil and trouble’; in this country fisticuffs and brawls cost too much money for him to be permitted to indulge in them. It would be best if you entrusted him to Pieper so that the latter could instruct him in political economy. What you told me about Massol is very interesting, and if he stays over there I should very much like to meet him.

I am delighted by what you tell me about Jones — just now I have damnably little time, otherwise I would send him more articles. But Charles [Roesgen] is not yet back from Germany and then, after toiling all day in the office, it would really be too much to write a regular weekly article for him and/or Weydemeyer on top of the article for the Tribune and the weekly report for my old man. Moreover, I must at long last get to grips with the Slav business. In my previous dilettante fashion, I achieved nothing for a whole year and, having at least made a start and got too far to abandon the thing, I must now regularly devote some time to it. For the past fortnight I have been swotting hard at Russian and have now got the grammar pretty well licked; in another 2-3 months I shall have acquired the necessary vocabulary, and then I shall be able to tackle something else. I must be done with the Slavonic languages this year and au fond they are not so very difficult. Apart from the linguistic interest I derive from the thing, there is the further consideration that, come the next big political drama, at least one of us should be familiar with the languages, history, literature and the minutiae of the social institutions of those particular nations with which we shall immediately find ourselves in conflict. In effect, Bakunin only came to anything because no one knew Russian. And a great deal is going to be made of the old pan-Slavic dodge of transmogrifying the old Slav system of communal property into communism and depicting the Russian peasants as born communists.

Now that old O'Connor has definitely gone mad, Jones is perfectly right to crowd on all sail. This is his chance and if, in addition, Citizen Hip-hip-hurrah [Harney] gives up, his cause is won. From all that I see, the Chartists are in such a state of complete dissolution and disintegration, and at the same time are so lacking in able people, that either they must disband altogether and break up into cliques, i.e. in effect become a mere appendage of the financials, or else be reconstructed on a new basis by some competent fellow. Jones is moving in quite the right direction and we may well say that, without our doctrine, he would not have taken the right path and would never have discovered how, on the one hand, one can not only maintain the only possible basis for the reconstruction of the Chartist party — the instinctive class hatred of the workers for the industrial bourgeoisie — but also enlarge and develop it, so laying the foundations for enlightening propaganda, and how, on the other, one can still be progressive and resist the workers’ reactionary appetites and their prejudices. Master Harney, by the way, is in for a surprise if he continues as he is; the group of enthusiasts which supports him will very soon kick him out, and not even the portraits of Kosciuszko and other ‘patriots’ that adorn his bumf will save him.

Quoad Napoleonem, did the man not tell L. Blanc when he went to France: ‘Quand je serai président, je mettrai en pratique vos idées?’ [when I am president I shall put your ideas into practice] And now we see how a financial predicament may drive even a true socialist like L. N. to financial measures of an impeccably bourgeois kind, such as the conversion of bonds. Your shopkeeper and small industrialist is prepared to overlook twenty socialist capers in return for this one saving of 18 millions, and The Daily News admires the measure. Anything more stupid or more abject than the Débats’ comments on this topic would be hard to imagine. The same old story: postal reform = socialism! Conversion of bonds = socialism! free trade = socialism! My only fear is that Mynheer Napoleon who, for all that he proceeds very diffidently when it comes to his genuinely socialist undertakings and goes no further in the matter of mortgages than the bourgeois Prussian credit institutions, may, in the end, be compelled, by force of circumstances, to transform all his socialist inclinations into simple bourgeois reforms, and then nothing can deliver us but the inevitable financial predicament. The Daily News is right, conversion of bonds is a mesure éminemment pacifique [eminently peaceful measure] as well as being a most ominous indication that L. N. is tending to fall into the ways of bourgeois common sense. But when, I ask you, has it ever been possible to rule France with common sense, and what a hotchpotch of circumstances would be required to bring together a L. N. and common sense! At all events the climate on the Continent does not seem very revolutionary to me, although the little sprite will bring quite different news.

I do not think that Derby will obtain a majority although this place, where unanimity reigns when it comes to the Corn Laws, is a poor point d'observation. However, I should like him to obtain one, for then things must come about as you say. He is, by the way, a fool for not dissolving Parliament at once. The longer he procrastinates, the greater the risk of the election coinciding with a commercial crisis, and then he'll get fanatical Tories in Parliament who are too rabid even for him, and determined, rapacious Manchester men under threat of bankruptcy, these latter probably in the majority and hence the determining element.

Our concern here seems likely to collapse within the year. In which case, while the liquidation is under way, I shall at first enjoy far more liberty and be less tied down by the regular routine of the office. Later, my old man writes, he might be able to find me a better position — I suspect that he will fall in with my old plan to remove to Liverpool and buy cotton for him there. That would be splendid and, if it comes off and you have completed your preliminary work on economics, you and your whole family must come up for 6 months — we would live by the sea at New Brighton, and you would, besides, save money. At all events, I shall get myself a rise — there’s no doubt about that.

Today, unfortunately, I shall not have a quiet moment in which to do the Tribune article, but an American steamer sails next Wednesday, so you shall have it by Monday or Tuesday, and then I'll do another one for Friday’s steamer.

Many regards.

Your

F. E.

This is the first time the seal on your letter has been intact and undamaged.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 90;

First published: in full in MEGA, 1929.

Manchester, 29 April 1852

D. M.,

Herewith another letter from Weydemeyer. I have not received the newspapers; but the Atlantic was reported by telegraph this morning, and they will probably arrive tomorrow morning. Weydemeyer appears to have misunderstood one or two practical hints I gave him on how to pack and dispatch his things in such a way as not to pay unnecessarily high postal charges; however, I have already pointed out his mistake.

So the Coblenz story about the piccolo [Ernst Dronke] was a pure fabrication and, if the Kölner Zeitung is to be believed, Father Dronke must already be in London, his adventures have achieved a purpose. Tant mieux pour lui. But this makes the business of Moses’ warrant even more inexplicable. Anyhow, it would seem to imply further vexations for the Cologne people. God knows what sort of scrawl the police have picked up this time. Pauvre Moses, fancy becoming so egregiously and post festum a martyr in partibus infidelium!

Next week I shall write several articles in succession for Dana, and make sure that I take the thing up to the end of the Imperial Constitutional campaign. In order that we may be able to conclude directly, it would be a good idea if you could provide me with a short memorandum for the final articles — the revolutionary prospects of Germany, and our party’s situation during and after the revolution. It is precisely these concluding pieces which are important, and moreover a memorandum of this kind would enable me to write these articles not only better but far more quickly. In this way I could, if I tried hard enough, finish all the 5-6 outstanding articles within a fortnight and meanwhile you could get in touch with Dana about a new series on a subject of greater actualité, soit la France, soit l'Angleterre. Since Weydemeyer’s pamphlet will probably be coming out soon, it will no longer be possible to sell Dana the 18th Brumaire, even in a different guise; for he will then be able to have it for nothing and translate it himself. But you could still ask Dana whether he would like to have a modified version in translation, one suitable for the Anglo-American public. In this case the events leading up to 2 December ’51 would for the most part be excised and the thing finally brought right up to date, so that successive weekly or fortnightly reports on France would follow straight on.

Your

F. E.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 102;

First published: in full in MEGA, 1929.

Manchester, 7 May 1852

Dear Marx,

I return Cluss’ letter herewith. In this connection it has occurred to me that now that Mr Dana is in touch with B. Bauer and Simon of Trier and is, at the same time, restricting your space on account of the presidential election, it would certainly not be out of place to give Mr Dana a taste of Yankee medicine. Cluss and a number of others should write to Mr Dana from various quarters inquiring why it is that these incomparable articles should appear so rarely and irregularly and expressing the hope that the fault does not lie with the editorial board which, rather, might be expected to correct this situation and find it possible to publish articles by K. M. more frequently, etc., etc. Weydemeyer could very easily organise this; the only reason we need to give him is that Dana wants to restrict your space and hence a demonstration of this kind is called for if we are to continue to have access to this organ. A Barnum, Barnum et demi. If you agree, I can put this to Weydemeyer per the next steamer.

The circular sent out by the convention to the sections is exquisite. I'll be hanged if the St Petersburg, Warsaw, Berlin, Rome, etc., sections are situated more than 4 miles from Charing Cross. This carbonari-like, self-important, bustling, order-of-the-dayish attitude again betrays how mistaken these gentlemen are as to their ostensibly organised forces. To propose a coup just now is a bêtise [stupidity] and a dirty trick. But truly, ‘something has got to happen, something has got to be done’. It would be desirable for the supposed leaders of the thing to be all of them captured and shot; but needless to say the great men will make sure this doesn’t happen and the heroic Willich will stay quietly in London so long as there is still money in the cash-box, credit at Schärttner’s and free coats and boots ad libitum at the ‘tailor’s and shoemaker’s’. That is what Mr Willich means by supplies for the army!

As for the matter of the character-sketches [The Great Men of the Exile], so far so good. The thing can be ready in a month’s time. But mind you find someone reliable to make a fair copy, so that it goes out in a completely unknown hand. When you come up, bring the Americana, the complete run of the N. Rh. Z. and the necessary manuscript documents. My old man arrives tomorrow and is unlikely to be able to stay here for longer than 8-10 days.

I've at last received my stuff on military science from Germany. So far I have been able to read only little of it. At this stage, I should say that Mr Gustav von Hoffstetter, of wide renown, is not exactly a Napoleon but rather a thoroughly reliable commander of a battalion or so in a minor engagement. But I haven’t yet finished reading his thing. Not unpleasing, on the other hand, is a booklet on new fortifications in general by Küntzel, a Prussian captain of engineers — both better history and more materialist than anything I have so far read in militaribus.

Now as for Mr Willisen, be it said here that the victory at Idstedt was won, not by the Danes over the Schleswig-Holsteiners, but rather by the usual tactics of common sense over Hegelian speculation. Willisen’s book should really be called the philosophy of great wars. This in itself would indicate that it contains more philosophising than military science, that the most self-evident things are construed a priori with the most profound and exhaustive thoroughness and that, sandwiched between these, are the most methodical discourses on simplicity and multiplicity and such-like opposites. What can one say about military science which begins with the concept of art en général then goes on to demonstrate that the art of cookery is also an art, expatiates on the relationship of art to science and finally subsumes all the rules, relationships, potentialities, etc., etc., of the art of war under the one, absolute axiom: the stronger always overcomes the weaker. Every now and again there are some nice aperçus [insights] and some useful reductions to basic principles; it would indeed be bad if there were not. As to its practical application, I haven’t yet got to that, but it doesn’t say much for Willisen that every one of Napoleon’s greatest victories was achieved in defiance of Willisen’s elementary rules, a result that your orthodox Hegelian can, of course, readily explain away without the least violence being done to those rules.

I see that Görgey’s memoirs have just come out — but since they cost 6 talers, I doubt that I can buy them just now. With these, the material on the military aspect of the Hungarian war may be regarded as complete for the time being. At any rate, I shall do something on the Hungarian war, and possibly on all the wars of 1848/49. As soon as I am clear in my mind about earlier military history, I shall look round for a publisher onto whom I can then shift most of the expenditure on sources.

You will have received the 30/- sent you last Saturday.

Your

F. E.

Marx to Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 105;

Text: according to letter from Cluss to Weydemeyer May 1852;

First published: in MEGA 2, 1962.

[London, 7 and about 15 May 1852]

... Herewith you will find a wrapper, in which the contemptible, craven, half-crazed Tellering mailed his defamatory opus. (Address:) Charles Marx, The Future Dictator of Germany. Now I ask you, what is to be done with the cur? To start a public row with a lunatic of this sort would be doing him too much honour and is the whole object of his manoeuvre. Could you not send the maniac’s wrapper to the New York postal service in my name? Or might not a sound thrashing be the simplest course? I leave the whole thing to you. Naturally any packages of the kind will in future be returned. But by indulging in this sort of gutter-snipe’s trick, the cur also brings me to the notice of the English police, which, under the Tories, is far from pleasant...

Ad vocem Szemere: I am not by nature inclined to be unduly trusting, least of all when it comes to the official great men of 1848/49. But in Szemere’s case, it’s quite a different matter. I am correcting the German translation — for he originally wrote in Hungarian — of his ‘character-sketches’. Every line betrays a superior intellect and the rage of the democrats may be attributed to the contempt and mockery system which he employs with supreme skill. Although, of course, in accordance with the Hungarian line, he places, as in Antiquity, ‘the fatherland and the citizen’ above all else, his writing is imbued with a fundamentally critical spirit. A man who thinks and writes in this way is no Austrian agent. As for the ‘Dear Colonel Webb’, he was negotiating with him without knowing who he was, but broke off as soon as he was informed what was afoot. The story of his fortune is very simple. Szemere himself does not possess a centime. But his wife is the daughter of a (now deceased) Austrian ‘Hof-agent’ (as the Austrian Procureurs du roi are called in Hungary); her old man possessed a fortune of a million. Throughout the 1848/49 revolution Mrs Szemere lived in Vienna with her mother. He had even ordered her to refrain from writing to him and to sever all ties with him until the old woman’s death, when she could collect her fortune. His old mother-in-law died at the end of 1849 and Mrs Szemere, who was, of course, in no way suspect, surreptitiously sold all her worldly goods and turned them into cash. In this she was aided by the minister, Bach, her father’s lawyer, who seized on this opportunity and surreptitiously took his cut. Once her fortune was liquid, Mrs Szemere converted it into bills on London and English stocks, obtained a passport authorising her to visit the water-cure doctor, Priessnitz, in Prussia, but instead travelled to London and thence to her husband in Paris. Those Austrians, however, could lay their hands on nothing with which to gladden their Exchequer. Well, what does all this prove? That Szemere is much too astute to make his enemies a present of a million. I have written to Sz. himself, telling him that, without mentioning Kossuth, he should make a statement about his personal circumstances which I shall get into the New York Tribune for him.

The Austrian spies are in Kossuth’s immediate entourage, notably Madame Pulszky. This Count Pulszky is a Galician Jew by origin. Madame Pulszky, daughter of an ultra-reactionary Jewish banker in Vienna, writes to her mater each week, and from this source the Austrian government finds out anything it wants. It may even be asked whether Count and Countess Pulszky (The Times regularly derided both these individuals for the assumption of their title) have not promised to lure Mr Kossuth into the snare in the hope that they may thereby retrieve their confiscated land. It is known for a fact that as a student, Pulszky denounced his comrades’ demagogic activities to the Austrian government...

Enclosed you will find General Klapka’s declaration of principles, from which you will see that he, too, is starting to rebel against Kossuth. The last part of the document means nothing more than that Klapka is going to participate in Mazzini’s projected coup. I have, if I am not mistaken, already written to you about the plans for a coup hatched by Messrs Mazzini, Kossuth, etc. Nothing could be more welcome to the great powers, especially Bonaparte, and nothing more damaging to ourselves.

I have just received a letter from Cologne, dated 3 May. They are asking for 200 or 250 copies of the Brumaire. So pray ask Weydemeyer to send me forthwith 300 copies via Engels. At the same time, he should advise me of the selling price. I take it that he has already dispatched the 50 copies as promised...

To return to Klapka’s document. I would beg you to keep it secret for the time being. It was given me in confidence, but with permission to publish it. I shall send it to the New York Tribune, and I do not want it to come into circulation before then...

Jones’ stamped paper has come out and the first number has sold surprisingly well. I enclose a cutting from the Notes from which you will see that he has knocked Harney out completely. Mr Harney is proceeding down the primrose path. One article in his paper, signed Spartacus, attacks Chartism for being only a class movement which ought to be replaced by a general and national movement, genuine Mazzinian hot air, etc., etc., etc....

Extracts from the Cologne letter:

‘Recently Mrs Daniels was favoured yet again with a domiciliary visit in the certain expectation that it would yield a letter from you. The Prussian police seem to be as putty in the hands of the first jackass to come along. The prisoners’ case seems to be approaching its conclusion. The examination has been concluded and, for over two months, the files have been back in the possession of the local public prosecutor at the Court of Appeal where, however, they seem incapable of deciding upon the wording of a petition to the Board of indicting magistrates. It is generally rumoured that the thing will he dealt with before a special Court of Assizes in June.’

[Bermbach to Marx 3 May 1852]

Apropos. Ask Weydemeyer if he has yet been to see Dana, who is waiting for him to pass on the information I sent him about the situation of the Cologne prisoners and the conduct of the Prussian government, before writing a leader on the subject. He mustn’t for God’s sake fail to do this, if it can possibly be helped.

If you manage to bring out Freiligrath’s poem against Kinkel et Compe as a broadsheet, you will have an assured sale of 500 copies in the Rhineland alone. But the thing must be done quickly. Otherwise it will be trop tard.

Do not allow the articles, etc., in your possession to age so much that they lose their bouquet. If you can’t get them printed (Eccarius, Engels, etc.), give them to some paper or other, e.g. the Turn-Zeitung, as you think fit. In any case, it is better they should be read than left unread.

If you can’t get Freiligrath’s poem printed, give it to whatever newspaper you think best. If, as a party, we make no effort to be quick off the mark, we shall always arrive post festum...

Few mortals, other than yourself, can boast of having received letters from me on 4 successive mail days; but I was anxious to show Papa Lupus which of us two is the more punctilious...

Marx to Jenny Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 118;

First published: in MEGA, 1929.

Manchester, 11 June 1852, 70 Great Ducie Street

Dear Heart,

I was very pleased to get your letter. By the way, you must never have any qualms about telling me all. If you, my poor little wretch, have to endure bitter reality, it is only fair that I should share that torment, at least in my thoughts. In any case, I know how unendingly resilient you are and how the slightest encouragement is enough to revive your spirits. I hope that the other £5 will reach you this week or on Monday at the latest.

I did of course pack the Schnellpost. But I haven’t got the back numbers in which Ruge deposited the better part of his ordure. The process of curing these stock-fish makes us laugh till we cry.

Though Oswald’s package won’t yield very much, something may be made of it. Our dear A. Ruge is incapable of writing 3 lines without compromising himself. ‘Moute’ [referring to a misprint in Brumaire], has already been corrected by me, unless I am mistaken.

The printer in the City seems to be a lesser lumen who, not having a superfluity of underlings, will certainly require an unconscionable time to do one sheet. His paper is 3 × worse than the American, and his type likewise, this being clearly quite worn out. But you have managed the business splendidly.

Harro’s pamphlet is truly touching in the naivety of its stupidity! Be so kind as to cut Engels’ article on Heinzen out of the Brüsseler-Zeitung and send it to us, — and that very soon. If the Kosmos doesn’t arrive, no matter. We have a letter of mine up here which contains the gist of the thing.

Love and kisses to my manikins.

Your

K. M.

Engels has further pointed out that whereas, throughout the pamphlet, I always deliberately write ‘Louis Bonaparte’, Mr Weydemeyer has entitled it ‘Louis Napoleon’.

P.S.

Dear Jenny, be so kind as to tell Eccarius that he should write a short postscript to his ‘Mechanics’ Strike’ since Weydemeyer is considering publishing it. We should agree to this, if only on Cluss’ account.

Dear Heart, send Jones the 2 enclosed pieces, ‘Chevalier Hillsemann’s Farewell’ and ‘John Barney and the French Minister’, together with the short cutting about ‘Cayenne’ — preferably by post, unless he comes to see you. I beg you not to bother Mr Pieper with such errands. To him, everything provides occasion for rodomontade and I don’t want Jones — who, by the way, was responsible for making him so uppish — to regard him as my alter ego. Since Pieper believes the letters are written for ‘the party’, he must not henceforward set eyes on any more of them.

[From Engels in Italian:]

Will Colonel Musch please accept my best and most cordial felicitations

F. Engels

Marx to Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 134;

Text: according copy by Cluss in letter to Weydemeyer 1852;

First published: in full in Marx and Engels, Works, 2nd Russian Edition, 1962.

[London, 20 July 1852]

... With a difference of at most 10 votes in favour of either Whigs or Tories, the elections here will produce the same old Parliament. The cercle vicieux is complete. The same old constituents produce the same old Parliament. In that Parliament what have hitherto been the ruling parties are rotting from within, mutually offsetting and paralysing each other, so that they are compelled to appeal yet again to their constituents and so on, ad infinitum, until the circle is broken from without by the pressure of the masses, and that may soon be the case. At no previous election has the conflict between the real majority and the official majority of voters created by the electoral privileges been so glaringly in evidence. You should know that at every English election voting is done 1. by a show of hands when the whole population votes, and 2. by a poll, the decisive one, in which only the enfranchised vote. Those nominated by the show of hands do not include a single Member of Parliament, while those returned by the poll (i.e. really elected), do not include anyone nominated by the show of hands. Take Halifax, for example, where Wood, the Whig Minister (Finance) was opposing E. Jones. At the show of hands, Wood was hissed. Jones received 14,000 votes and was carried in triumph through the town. At the poll, Wood was elected while Jones received only 36 votes.

There is little new to report about émigré affairs. But for a few louts, Willich stands more and more isolated, no one believing in his probity any longer. As I have told you, Reichenbach, though he resigned from the committee long ago, refuses to hand out a penny from the loan until a definitive committee has been formed. In his eyes, Willich and Kinkel are as unacceptable as the handful of blackguards who elected them. Reichenbach est un honnête bourgeois, qui prend sa responsabilité au sirieux.

The French emigration has split into 3 camps: 1. Revolution (Ledru). 2. Delegation (the more progressive). 3. 1,500 opponents of both, the plebs or, as the aristocrats used to call them, the ‘populean’. A certain Coeurderoy (d'ailleurs très bon républicain) has published a pamphlet against Mazzini-Ledru and Cabet-Blanc and is shortly to bring out something else. You will receive both when they appear.

Yesterday a letter from Cologne, from which the following:

‘Latterly they have been visiting various places in an attempt to find correspondence from you which, they are convinced, was to be conveyed through the agency of these persons to democrats in the Rhineland. Your friends are at last to be brought before the Court of Assizes. The bill of indictment, a most compendious work, has been drawn up, the date for the public hearing has been fixed for the 28th of this month, and the usual preliminaries are under way. As I understand the case they are, legally speaking, in an exceptionally good position but, as you will know, before a jury the moral standpoint is all important, and in this respect there can be no denying the danger for some of the accused. For the principal defendants, Röser, Bürgers, Nothjung and Reiff, have given away far too much: they have admitted a connection with specific tendencies over a definite period; have talked of the enrolment of new members attended by certain formalities and pledges, and other such things, which in themselves, however, do not constitute a crime, but may, depending on circumstances, have an adverse effect on the jurymen, most of whom belong to the peasantry, particularly when there is such evident lack of respect for God and landed property. Grave difficulties will also arise in connection with the defence; the advocates know nothing about such matters, most are hostile on principle and dread the thought of the ten-day sitting fixed for the case. It should not be forgotten that, on the occasion of the Assizes, proceedings will be taken in contumaciam against F. Freiligrath, at present in London. So Freiligrath will shortly be able to parade round London as a German poet who has been beheaded in effigy.-

‘P.S. I have just read the bill of indictment which contains no less than 65-70 pages. If they're convicted, these people have only their own statements to blame. I doubt there can be any more consummate jackasses than these working men: Reiff made statements that were almost regular denunciations, and various others behaved no less ineptly. Small wonder that the fellows were so much harassed; the longer they have been held in solitary confinement, the more satisfactory statements they made. That aside, facts don’t come into it.'

Voilà our Straubingers, it’s tough that world history should have to be made with people such as these...

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 164;

First published: in full in MEGA, Berlin 1929.

[Manchester, 24 August 1852]

Dear Marx,

This evening I shall translate the final part of your article and shall do the article on ‘Germany’ tomorrow or Thursday. Charles has gone away for a few days and I have a great deal to do in the office so that by evening my mind is often in a whirl.

Thanks for the suggestions on military history. Could you sometime have a look in the British Museum to see if they have

1. The Oesterreichische Militiärische Zeitschrift from 1848 onwards, 2. the Prussian Militär-Wochenblatt the Berlin Wehr-Zeitung, 3. any other military periodicals, especially reviews, including French ones — from 1848 onwards? Also a set of the Augsburg Allg. Ztg., particularly from 1850. I need these things very badly and, if it could somehow be arranged, would find time to work through them there, when I have got to that stage.

The excerpt from Cluss’ letter shows up père Weydemeyer in an even more Westphalian light than we had ever expected. Bielefeld tout pur. It beats everything.

Johann Gottfried [Kinkel]’s end is pleasing indeed. All that is left to the noble fellow is the cold comfort of knowing that he has done his duty and swollen the stock of bullion in the Bank of England. Furthermore, in fixing a new date for the liberation of the world, he had based himself, not on vague trade crises, but on hard, ineluctable fact, namely a spurious document in The Morning Chronicle!

The Willich-Schily farce must have been a hilarious performance. Pauvre Willich, how often during his harassment by the philistines must he have wished himself back in red Wolff’s company!

So Harney’s Star of Freedom has faded away?

There seems little doubt about the advent of the crisis, even if the recent bankruptcies were no more than precursors. Unfortunately the harvests in north-cast Germany, Poland and Russia show signs of being passable, and in places even good. Here the recent good weather has likewise borne fruit. But France is still in the soup, and that’s enough to be going on with.

The minor panic in the money market appears to be over, consols and railway shares are again rising merrily, money is easier, speculation is still pretty evenly distributed over corn, cotton, steam boats, mining operations, etc., etc. But cotton has already become a very risky proposition; despite what is so far a very promising crop, prices are rising continuously, merely as a result of high consumption and the possibility of a brief cotton shortage before fresh imports can arrive. Anyway I don’t believe that the crisis will this time be preceded by a regular rage for speculation; if circumstances are favourable in other respects, a few mails bringing bad news from India, a panic in New York, etc., will very soon prove that many a virtuous citizen has been up to all kinds of sharp practice on the quiet. And these crucial ill-tidings from overstocked markets must surely come soon. Massive shipments continue to leave for China and India, and yet the advices are nothing out of the ordinary; indeed, Calcutta is decidedly overstocked, and here and there native dealers are going bankrupt. I don’t believe that prosperity will continue beyond October or November — even Peter Ermen is becoming worried.

At all events, whether a revolution is immediately produced — immediately, i.e. in 6-8 months — very largely depends on the intensity of the crisis. The poor harvest in France makes it look as though something is going to happen there; but if the crisis becomes chronic and the harvest turns out after all a little better than expected, we might even have to wait until 1854. I admit that I should like another year in which to swot, having still a good deal of stuff to get through.

Australia also does some harm. First, directly through her gold and the stoppage of all her other exports, as also through the correspondingly heavier imports of all commodities and the fact that she is draining off the surplus population here at the rate of 5,000 a week. California and Australia are two cases which were not foreseen in the Manifesto: creation of large new markets out of nothing. They will have to be included.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 175;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels and K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 2 September 1852, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

From the enclosed pissabed letter from the great Weydemeyer, you will see how matters stand. With it the brute sent 10 copies [of the 18th Brumaire].

I have not yet had an answer from Mr F. Streit ce qui est de très mauvais augure. There is now some, if little, prospect of its being published in English by a London bookseller. For the time being I am to give him the first chapter by way of a sample. I have therefore had it translated by Pieper. The translation is swarming with mistakes and omissions. However, its correction will not be such an imposition on you as the boring task of translation. I would like you to write an English preface of not more than 10 lines, saying that this paper originally appeared in the form of newspaper articles between the end of December and the beginning of February, that it was published as a pamphlet in New York on 1 May, that a 2nd edition is now to appear in Germany, and that it was the first anti-Bonaparte paper to appear; the few details no longer of relevance may be accounted for by its date of origin.

E. Jones is a thoroughly egotistical rascal. For 2 months he has been dangling before me the promise that he will do a translation (for his Journal). For my part, I have done him nothing but favours. In spite of my own money bothers I have spent days with him traipsing all over the place in connection with his paper’s financial affairs. All the foreign intelligence exclusive to his pauvre little paper came from me. Whenever he got into a scrape with his committees, opponents, etc., he came running to me, and my advice invariably got him out of it. Finally, when his journal became altogether too deplorable, I gave him my editorial support for several weeks, and indeed the wretched thing gained some 100 additional subscribers in London.

He, for his part, does not even observe the common civilities. Help him concoct his journal today and he'll forget to send you a copy tomorrow, but this forgetfulness recurs every seven days since his paper does not come out twice a week.

I have told him it’s all very well to be an egotist but he should be so in a civilised way and not so inanely. Since, however, the paper is the only Chartist organ, I shall not break with him but let him shift for himself for a few weeks.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 20;

First published: in full in Marx and Engels, Works, 2d Russian Edition, 1962.

[Manchester, 23 September 1852]

Dear Marx,

The day before yesterday I sent you the translation [of the first chapter of Marx's 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte] and a post office order for a pound. A few more pounds will follow at the beginning of October — i.e. in 9-10 days. I should like to send you more at a time because, then even though the total amount is the same in the end, it has the advantage of enabling you to plan your expenditure more methodically, but my own pecuniary circumstances are in such a muddle just now that I never know exactly how much I shall need for the month, and hence pounds only become available singly, so it seems best to send them to you straight away. Next month I shall put things on a business-like footing, after which I shall soon be able to make some rough estimates.

From the enclosed memorandum you will see that Pieper has made a number of fairly bad howlers — I haven’t, of course, enumerated his transgressions against grammar and Donatus, cela n'aurait jamais fini. You may give it to him if you think it would do any good; otherwise, if it might lead him to abandon the translation, you had better keep it. Should he grumble over this or that correction, you can always use it as an opportunity to point out his imperfections.

Individual bits are, by the way, almost untranslatable.

Incidentally, it might also be advisable for the bookseller to see the last chapter in particular; he would then be vastly more impressed; I suggest that Pieper might translate it and you send it straight on to me; having already looked at it with this in mind, I am not wholly unprepared and progress would therefore be rapid. Even if it can’t be published now, the translation must be completed; the chap will soon become Emperor, and that would provide another splendid opportunity for adding a postscript.

I am going straight home to finish the article for the Tribune so that it catches the 2nd post and you can send it off by tomorrow’s steamer. What prospect is there of a new English article for Dana?

I trust the brandy has set your wife on her feet again — warm regards to her and your children, also Dronke and Lupus.

Your

F. E.

Massol’s letter with the article for Dana by the 2nd post — I haven’t got it here.

Did you see the statistics from Horner, the factory inspector, on the growth of the cotton industry in yesterday’s Times and day-before-yesterday’s Daily News?

Oct. 1850-Oct. 1851 —

2,300 horsepower in newly built factories

1,400 horsepower in extensions to existing factories

3,700 horsepower increase in the Manchester district

and the cotton industry alone. The following particulars reveal that during that period there were factories still under construction which would require some 4,000 horsepower and which will now have been completed. Since that time, work has undoubtedly begun on factories of 3,000-4,000 horsepower, more than half of which might be completed by the end of the year; if we assume that the increase between Jan. 1848 and Oct. 1850, i.e. 2 3/4 years, is no more than 4,000 horsepower, the steam-power of the Lancashire cotton industry will have risen between 1848 and the end of 1852 by 3,700+4,000+1,500+4,000=13,200 horsepower.

In 1842 the total steam-power of the cotton industry in Lancashire amounted to 30,000 and in 1845 (end) to 40,000 horsepower; in 1846/47 there was little installed, hence almost 55,000 horsepower, nearly twice that of 1842, will now be in use.

On top of that there is hydraulic power — about 10,000 horsepower (1842) which has barely increased, hydraulic energy having been fairly well exploited for some time past. From this it may be seen where prosperity’s additional capital has gone. For that matter the crisis cannot be very far off, although here excess over-speculation is almost entirely confined to omnibuses.

Memorandum on the Translation of the 1st Chapter

Ad generalia:

1. Pieper is evidently more used to writing English spontaneously than to translating. Hence, if he wants for a word, he should guard all the more against having recourse to that worst of all known aids, the dictionary, which, in 99 cases out of 100, will regularly provide him with the most inappropriate word and invariably gives rise to a disastrous jumbling of synonyms, examples of which follow.

2. Pieper should study elementary English grammar, in which he makes a number of mistakes — especially as regards the use of the article. There are also spelling mistakes.

3. Above all Pieper must guard against falling into the Cockney’s petit-bourgeois floridity of style, of which there are some irritating examples.

4. Pieper uses too many words of French derivation, which are, it is true, sometimes convenient because their vaguer, more abstract meaning is often of help in a quandary. But this emasculates the choicest turns of speech and often renders them completely incomprehensible to an Englishman. In almost every case, where vivid, sensuous images occur in the original, there is a no less sensuous, vivid expression of Saxon derivation, which at once makes the thing plain to an Englishman.

5. Where there are difficult bits, it would be better to leave blanks to be filled in, rather than — on the plea of literal translation — put in things which Pieper himself knows full well to be sheer nonsense.

6. The main criticism of the translation, and which sums up 1-5, is gross carelessness. There are passages enough to prove that, if he really tries, Pieper is reasonably capable, but such superficiality, in the first place, makes more work for himself and secondly twice as much for me. Some passages are quite admirable, or could be so, had he tried a little harder.

Ad specialia:

schuldenbeladene Lieutnants: here the word lieutenant can only mean ‘representative’. In English and French a lieutenant is not, as in German, primarily a figure of fun;

unmittelbar gegebne, vorhandene und überlieferte Umstände: circumstances immediately given and delivered. Pieper himself was very well aware that this translation made nonsense. ‘delivered’ can here only mean ‘delivered of a child’;

sich und die Dinge umzuwälzen: the revolution of their own persons.

This revolution can be nothing other than a somersault;

a new language (eine neue Sprache) means a newly invented language. At most, a language new to them.

Middle class society for bürgerliche Gesellschaft is not strictly grammatical or logically correct; it is as if one were to translate feudale Gesellschaft as nobility society. An educated Englishman would not say this. One would have to say bourgeois society or, depending on circumstances, commercial and industrial society, to which one might append the following note: *By Bourgeois Society, we understand that phase of social development in which the Bourgeoisie, the Middle Class, the class of industrial and commercial Capitalists, is, socially and politically, the ruling class; which is now the case more or less in all the civilized countries of Europe and America. By the expressions: Bourgeois society, and industrial and commercial society, we therefore propose to designate the same stage of social development; the first expression referring, however, more to the fact of the middle class being the ruling class, in opposition either to the class whose rule it superseded (the feudal nobility), or to those classes which it succeeds in keeping under its social and political dominion (the proletariat or industrial working class, the rural population, etc., etc.) — while the designation of commercial and industrial society more particularly bears upon the mode of production and distribution characteristic of this phase of social history.*

To arrive at its own concepts (bei ihrem eignen Inhalt anzukommen) can only mean: to arrive at the contents of its own stomach.

Old society (alte Gesellschaft) won’t do in English and at most means feudal rather than bourgeois society. Owen’s writings have been forgotten; and whenever he mentions old society, it is always accompanied by a plan and elevation (if possible in colour) of the new society, so that there can be no mistake; which is not to be expected now-a-days.

Set in fiery diamonds (in Feuerbrillanten gefasst) is nonsensical in English, since in English usage it is diamonds themselves that are set, and fiery diamonds is in any case something of a hyperbole.

Storm and pressure period does not translate Sturm- und Drangperiode but Sturm- und Drückperiode.

A future that was to come (die Zukunft, die ihnen bevorsteht) is nonsense, as Pieper himself knows (every future being to come), and altogether in the style of Moses & Son, as in an earlier bit where ‘die Geister der Vergangenheit’ is rendered as the spirits of those that have been.

The circle should be increased (erweitert werden p. 4, bottom). Un cercle est élargi, il n'est pas agrandi.

The general index (der allgemeine Inhalt der modernen Revolution) means the general list of contents of modern revolution! Le citoyen Pieper le savait, du reste, aussi bien que moi.

As it could but be, wie es nicht anders sein konnte — lapsus pennae; should read ‘as it could not but be'; otherwise it would mean: wie es kaum sein konnte.

Unwieldiness (p. 5, top in the orig.) is Unbehülflichkeit in the passive sense, ‘inertia’ in physics but, applied to persons, can only mean that they cannot move for fat. Unbeholfenheit used of persons, in the active sense, means clumsiness. This mistake was suggested to Pieper by his dictionary.

Constitutional standard (die Nationalversammlung sollte die Resultate der Revolution auf den bürgerlichen Massstab reduzieren). C'est un peu fort that, in order to evade the difficulty of translating ‘bürgerlich’, Citoyen Pieper should everywhere render it as ‘constitutional’ because ‘konstitutionelle Republik’ and ‘bürgerliche Republik’ are used synonymously. Je demande un peu what does constitutional mean in this context? It becomes even more delectable later on, when bürgerliche Gesellschaft figures sans façon as constitutional society. C'est assommant.

For ever and the duration (für die ganze Dauer des Zyklus). Why not rather for ever and a day, as the saying goes?

Utopian Juggles (utopische Flausen). Juggles means legerdemain, not flights of fancy.

Transported without Judgment means déporté contre le sens commun, transported in defiance of common sense and should read without trial.

To pass as a real event doesn’t mean ‘um überhaupt als ein Ereignis passieren zu können’, but to pass for something that has really happened.

Founded doesn’t mean fondu but fondé. It has nothing to do with the illogical but accepted term confounded for confondu.

All these are things which Pieper, if only he paid a little attention, would know as well as I do but, as already mentioned, it is easier to translate difficult things oneself than to correct a translation that is carelessly thrown together and dodges the difficulties. If he tried a little harder, he could translate quite well.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 193;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels and K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 23 September 1852, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

Received the £1 and the corrected translation. You went to too much trouble over the latter. If the thing is passable (success will depend on this No. 1), you must take it easier: I mean, forget about figures of speech or other inessentials, if difficult to translate.

Weerth has been here since Sunday. On Saturday he leaves for Manchester where he will spend 3 or 4 weeks before disappearing to the West Indies, etc.

Enclosed:

1. A letter in Schurz’s handwriting, found in the pocket of a waistcoat which Kinkel gave to a refugee of our acquaintance.

2. Letter from Cluss.

3. Two excerpts from the revelations about the émigrés, first published in the Karlsruher Zeitung and then reprinted by the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, etc., in case you haven’t seen the things yourself.

Dr Piali (in Paris) writes inter alia:

‘Kossuth intends to go into action in October. From here, Kiss has been giving Kossuth all manner of assurances which probably belong to the realm of fable yet could, given the fabulous nature of circumstances here, actually be possible. Kossuth is said to have received a note from Bonaparte in his own hand summoning him to Paris A word-for-word copy of this note is believed to be circulating throughout the counties of Hungary. Everything in Hungary is in readiness for an all-out blow by Kossuth. Even Royal and Imperial officials are involved in the great conspiracy ... .

‘Countess Kinski, née Zichy, has been arrested for infanticide. The child was fathered by Dr Chaises,’ (our well-known shit), ‘a Polish Jew, etc. Madame Beckmann (wife of the police spy and newspaper correspondent) will figure as dame de compagnie at the hearing before the Assizes.'

As for the Kossuth affair, it is quite possible that Bonaparte is setting snares for him in order to curry favour with Austria.

Piali has got Häfner to enter into correspondence with Ruge-Tausenau, so that now it is just as if we were corresponding with Mr Arnold direct. In this way we shall learn at first hand about the mystères des grands hommes.

The Volksverein, man strong, (out of which, according to W’s letter to you, Ruge, with well-known virtuosity, formed 3 committees) is now (Ronge and Dralle included) trailing round the City on the pretext of simultaneously founding a ‘free community’. What the devil has that German-Catholic, Ronge, to do with ‘free communities'? A few German-Catholic and, in particular, Jewish merchants have put their names on the list, if only in the form of initial letters, and contributed a few pounds, as was actually envisaged.

Willich, for his part, now makes a public collection every Saturday at the Great Windmill Street Society, ostensibly towards the cost of correspondence.

What do you say to the ovations accorded Bonaparte in the provinces? The French are indeed making ignominious fools of themselves.

The Customs Union seems to me to be on the brink of certain collapse. Austrian bankruptcy shows itself still capable of dealing with Prussian prosperity.

I see that Dana has accepted the article. The Staatszeitung (New York) has already published an excerpt in German.

Old Wellington’s death came at the right time. At a moment of crisis the old bull would still have commanded an authority grown legendary. With him and Peel the common sense of Old England has been duly buried.

So our ‘people’ are to appear on 4 October. Bürgers admits everything, at least so far as he himself is concerned. In keeping with his profession, he will defend himself ‘on principle’. During the examination he placed on record a 30-sheet memorandum on the ‘essence of communism’. Honi soit qui mal y pense. Daniels is said to be fairly well. The prosecutor will begin by reverting to the St.-Simonists; attorney Schneider will attempt to beat him by beginning with Babeuf. We can consider ourselves lucky if neither of them harks back as far as the Incas or Lycurgus.

Pindar, whose mystères I found most entertaining, did not come to see me. Your adventures with old Schily were exquisite.

Ad vocem Jones. Though I personally have little to say in his favour, I and the whole lot of us stood by him last week — he came pestering me again because il y avait crise. The other fellows had summoned two or three meetings for the purpose of tabling a motion, namely ‘That this meeting is of opinion, that no confidence can be placed in the success of the democratic movement while Mr Ernest Jones is connected therewith’. They have been beaten, and that right thoroughly. The jackasses first tried to throw financial dirt at him. In this they failed. Then they attacked him for the same reason that we support him, because he stirs up ‘unfriendly feelings amongst the different classes’. For Harney-Holyoake, Hunt of the Leader, Newton (Co-operative) et tutti quanti have united to found a National Party. This National Party wants general suffrage, but not Chartism. The same old story. But before they launched their campaign Jones was to be crushed. They have rather miscalculated. He has raised the price of his paper by a penny without losing a single subscriber.

Your

K. M.

Engels to Marx

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

October 4, 1852

What can one say about a little man who, when he reads a novel by Balzac for the first time (and the Cabinet des antiques or Père Goriot at that), is infinitely superior and speaks of it with the greatest contempt as something commonplace that has been known for a long time.

Marx To Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 204;

First published: in full in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

London, 5 October 1852, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Cluss,

Your letter of 16 September arrived very late today. I am therefore sending only a few lines in reply, since you ask for an answer by return. Next Friday a rather more substantial report will be going off to you. My information about the Brüningk woman (she’s not a spy but corresponds with her aunt, the Princess Lieven, in Paris, who is notoriously one) came from Bangya. The latter, however, has very important reasons for not being named. If he were, he would forfeit many ‘sources of information’ which, being important to us, must be preserved.

You can write and tell Schnauffer that he merely has to answer that no further authorities need be cited since his (Brüningk’s) two friends, Kinkel and Willich, have themselves been spreading it about in London that Mrs von Brüningk has suspect political connections.

That Willich has been saying things of this kind is so well known that Schimmelpfennig has taken him to task about it. If necessary, witnesses can be cited to support this.

Kinkel voiced this suspicion outright, e.g. to his friend Kamm, the brushmaker (from Bonn), when the latter passed through here on his way to America. Kamm helped to spread it further.

(Willich, of course, did not discover that the woman was suspect until after she had dropped him.)

Your

K. M.

Marx To Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 205;

First published: in full in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

[London,] 8 October 1852, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Cluss,

So necessary have your weekly letters become to me that I am far from satisfied with your change of method and, out of vexation at your silence, have likewise remained silent.

You'll have had my letter about Brüningk. We must — et nous sommes dans le vrai — repay the shameless Gottfried in kind. According to Imandt’s last report of the London guarantors’ meeting, extracts of which appeared in the Wecker, Techow (now departed for Australia) rose and said: ‘...those in particular who had enjoyed Brüningk’s hospitality should be ashamed of themselves for spreading calumnies about Mrs von Brüningk.’ Kinkel, of the unashamedly unruffled brow, protested his innocence, although Imandt could have proved that he was lying. Willich sat as though nailed to his seat.

As regards the second matter, that of remuneration, I can do nothing further since my informant, Biskamp (whom I would beg you not to name) has settled in France and I have no correspondence with him. However, salary or no salary, this much is certain:

1. that Kinkel and Willich spent £200 and failed adequately to account for it to the London guarantors’ congress;

2. Willich, on the pretext of meeting the cost of correspondence, remunerated himself for as long as he could;

3. that when Kinkel — proof of his purity in money matters — arrived in Paris after his escape he immediately approached one of the leaders of the Slav-German etc. revolutionary committee there and informed him in confidence that it would be desirable if the German democrats in Paris were to give him a welcoming supper which he would then get the press to trumpet abroad. (As in fact later happened.) To the remark: where is the money coming from? Gottfried replied that it could be taken out of the revolutionary committee funds. To the further remark that there was no money in the exchequer but rather a considerable deficit, Gottfried opined that the member (Bangya) to whom he was speaking could advance it, he himself being so frightfully popular in Germany that money would come flowing in. Subsequently this same Kinkel got Bangya to advance him 500 fr. for his personal use on the account of the revolutionary committee. His reçu is still in existence. He has not repaid it to this very day.

I have seen the reçu. But Bangya insists on not being named, likewise Häfner, who was also present. These people are right. The object of Kinkel’s policy is by means of bare-faced denials (that the man is lying is proved by the business with me and with Dr Wiss, whom he forced to make a public statement by asserting that he had no connection with the ‘loan in his name’. See New-Yorker Deutsche Zeitung and Wiss’ own statement therein. Cite this last fact), his object, I say, is to compel me to show my hand and by and by to discover whence I draw the information with which to catch him out. This, he thinks, would draw my sting. Ça ne va pas.

You'll be able to follow in the Kölnische Zeitung the proceedings against our friends that opened on the 4th of this month in the Court of Assizes. The jury is damn bad. It consists of big landowners and big capitalists, viz: Regierungsrat von Münch-Bellinghausen, Häbling von Lanzenauer, Frelherr von Fürstenberg, von Bianca, von Tesseler, vom Rath; Joest (the biggest manufacturer — sugar — in Cologne); Herstadt (one of the leading bankers in Cologne), D. Leiden (big capitalist). Finally Leven (wine merchant) and Professor Kräusler.

Have my last two articles on the general election appeared in the Tribune? The first two caused a great stir here in England. Jones reproduced them.

Enclosed you will find:

1. Letter from Imandt.

2. Copy of an article from The Morning Advertiser of 6 October, in which the luckless Ruge-Ronge endeavour to assert themselves. The League here would now ask you to write by return a letter to The Morning Advertiser (signed Dr Smyth or something like that) in which you make fun of the German lone star which has neither lone nor star, and reassure The Morning Advertiser about the threat to America presented by this soap-bubble that has long since burst there. (Copy to be sent to us.)

3. A letter from Massol in Paris, which please return. Massol is one of the cleverest of the older Frenchmen (those of the forties), former St Simonist, Proudhonist, etc. The man and the book he alludes to are Proudhon and his book on Bonaparte.

It seems to me that you people should now go for Heinzen in such a way as to torture him by pointing out how, since ’47, this oaf has systematically ignored every attack relating to matters of principle (as, of late, that of Weydemeyer and subsequently your own), only to reappear a few months later as much of a charlatan as ever, quasi re bene gesta.

Your

K. M.

N. B. The morsel of erudition (striking in view of Heinzen’s well-known ignorance) which he reveals in treating of the historical development of marriage, was borrowed by the unhappy man from G. Jung, Geschichte der Frauen, Part 1, Frankfurt am Main 1850. Jung himself drew his material from: C. Meiners, Geschichte des weiblichen Geschlechts, 4 vols. Hanover 1788-1800, and from: J. A. de Ségur, Les femmes etc., 3 vols. Paris 1803, and sprinkled it with Hegelian-Young German sauce.

Meiners and Ségur drew on:

Alexander (W.), History of Women etc., 2 vols. London 1782, 3rd ed.

Thomas (de l'Ac. franç.), Essai sur le caractère etc. des femmes etc., Paris 1773.

For the manner in which the Hegelian school finally sums the thing up — that old buffoon Ruge, now apparently in his dotage, is too stupid to count — see:

Unger (J.), Die Ehe in ihrer welthistorischen Entwicklung. Vienna 1850.

This ‘bibliography’ will enable you not only to deprive the unhappy Heinzen of all desire to pass off as new discoveries a few platitudes filched from the socialists but also to provide the German-American public, if interested in the subject, with the sources where the material may be found.

Marx To Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 20;

First published: in full in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

[London,] 7 December 1852

... Enclosed you will find: 1. A manuscript of mine: Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne. This manuscript went off to Switzerland yesterday to be printed there and thence pitched into Germany as étrennes for the Prussian gentlemen. You should have it printed locally if you believe that sales in America will enable you to recoup at least the production costs, if more, tant mieux. In which case, advance notices should appear in the Press to whet people’s curiosity. If the pamphlet does come out in America, it should be published anonymously, as in Switzerland. To appreciate to the full the humour of the thing, you must know that its author, for want of anything decent to wear on his backside and feet, is as good as interned and, moreover, is and continues to be threatened with truly ghastly misère engulfing his family at any moment. The trial dragged me even deeper into the mire, since for 5 weeks, instead of working for my livelihood, I had to work for the party against the government’s machinations. On top of that, it has completely alienated the German booksellers with whom I had hoped to conclude a contract for my Economy. Finally, Bermbach’s arrest has deprived me of the prospect of making anything out of the Brumaires sent through you — 300 had been ordered through him as long ago as May. So it’s a pretty kettle of fish.

Here in London I have made it generally known that the pamphlet is to be printed in North America, if only so that we can make an incursion from Switzerland behind the Prussians’ backs. They suspect that something is afoot and by now will have ordered the douaniers and police in Hamburg, Bremen and Lübeck to be on the qui-vive.

2. Herewith also an appeal for money for the Cologne prisoners and their families. See that it appears in various papers. It might also be a good idea for you to form committees over there. Here it is a matter of a party demonstration. You will observe that Ernest Jones actually appears as a party member. In an introductory note, signed by you both, you might specially emphasise that this is not a case of begging for the revolution Kinkel-fashion, etc., but rather of a definite party aim whose fulfilment is demanded by the honour of the workers’ party.

A longish statement (signed by me, Lupus, Freiligrath and Engels) about the government’s infamies at the Cologne trial has appeared in various London papers. What especially riles the Prussian Embassy is the fact that the most distinguished and respectable London weeklies, the Spectator and the Examiner, have accepted this unvarnished denunciation of the Prussian government.

The Morning Advertiser did not print your letter; can it have smelt a rat?

The item from the Abendzeitung received from you today, according to which I, etc., the police, etc., is a scurrility on the part of Mr M. Gross, who has been put up to it by some Willichian or other in New York. You will see from my manuscript what kind of role this ‘honourable’ Willich plays in the Cologne trial. I have kept a good deal back, partly so as not to impair the literary scheme of the whole, and partly for use as fresh ammunition should the fellow — which I hardly dare hope — have the courage to reply.

I am tickled by Fickler’s letters. Blind, who is now living here with his wife, tells me that, during the industrial exhibition, Fickler, good, honest Fickler, rented a large house and furnished it sumptuously for the purpose of reletting. The speculation misfired. Not only did Fickler make off to America to escape his creditors. He also made off without breathing a word of his plans to his marriageable daughter who lived with him, and without leaving her a single centime. She, of course, was thrown out of the house. What became of her after that, no one knows. Good, honest Fickler!

As regards Proudhon, you are both right. Massol’s delusions were due to the fact that Proudhon, with his usual industrial quackery, adopted as his ‘latest discoveries’ some of my ideas, e.g., that there is no such thing as absolute knowledge, that everything is explicable in terms of material conditions, etc., etc. In his book on Louis Bonaparte he openly admits what I had to deduce for myself first from his Philosophie de la Misère, namely, that his ideal is the petit bourgeois France, he says, consists of 3 classes: 1. Bourgeoisie; 2. Middle class (petit bourgeois); 3. Proletariat. Now the purpose of history, and of revolution in particular, is to dissolve classes 1 and 3, the extremes, in class 2, the happy mean, this being effected by Proudhonian credit transactions, the final result of which is the abolition of interest in its various forms.

General Vetter will be looking up Weydemeyer in New York and yourself in Washington.

Ad vocem Kossuth. When I learnt through what you sent about the initial scandal in the German-American Press over my ‘private correspondence’ in the Tribune I sent a statement to the Tribune, signed ‘your private correspondent’ of which herewith a summary:

But to continue. On receiving from you the cutting in which one of Kossuth’s secretaries describes me as an infamous calumniator, etc., and at the same time works for Pierre, etc., I informed Mr Kossuth of the contents of my first statement to the Tribune and asked the gentleman for a definitive explanation. Whereupon Kossuth replied 1. on his word of honour, that he has no secretary; that possibly Benningsen in America, his one-time clerk of chancery, had arrogated this office to himself; and 2. that the first he had heard of the alleged statement had been through me (I having sent him the corpus delicti the slip of paper contained in your letter); 3. that he was grateful for my warning and would again invite me to meet him somewhere on neutral ground.

Next Friday I shall convey points 1 and 2 to the Tribune again. Keep me au fait with this affair.

Ad vocem Kinkel. Well, Kinkel has been roving around lecturing on modern poetry, etc., in Bradford and Manchester where, like the clerical, aesthetic, liberal parasite he is, he paid court to the German Jews. People who attended his lectures have informed me on his aesthetic derring-do as follows: he announces that he will be giving a lecture on Goethe’s Faust in Bradford, admittance 3/- per head. Hall packed. Great expectations. And what does Gottfried do? Reads them Faust from cover to cover, and calls this a lecture on ‘Faust’! Needless to say, Gottfried was wily enough to save up this piece of cheating for the very last lecture. In Manchester Gottfried declared:

‘Goethe is no poet, he rhymes “erbötig” with “Venedig'; but Immermann is the greatest of all German poets.’

And again:

‘I would venture to say that, of the more recent German poets, 3 in particular have enjoyed the favour of the public — Herwegh, Freiligrath and — if I would venture to say — Gottfried Kinkel.’

But easy-going Gottfried also lectured on politics, e.g. on the parties in North America. Here is what he said in Manchester and Bradford:

‘True, I announced that I was going to speak about the American parties, e.g. Democrats, Whigs, Free Soilers, etc. But in fact there are no more parties left in America, than there are in Europe. There remains only the one great party of the liberals, as would also become apparent in Germany, if only the defeated party were allowed to resume its former position.'

Finally Gottfried spoke about the Mormons of whom, among other things, he declared:

‘He who wishes to be rid of all earthly cares should betake himself to the Mormons’, etc.

His pronouncements even led people in Bradford to believe that he was a Mormon agent. Be that as it may, Gottfried Kinkel left the two manufacturing towns profoundly convinced that he must never show his face there again.

At the Assizes in Cologne Becker has discredited both himself and the party. It had been mutually agreed from the outset that he would come forward as a non-League member, so as not to lose the good-will of the democratic petty bourgeoisie. But being very weak in theory and pretty strong in the matter of petty ambition, he was all of a sudden overcome by vertigo. He wanted to play the great man of democracy at the communists’ expense. Not only did he want to get off scot-free, but also carry off in person what laurels were to be won at the trial. He is not only as shameless as ever, he is growing despicable.

In conclusion, a few words on France. Bonaparte, who has always lived on tick, believes that there is no better way of bringing about the golden age in France than by making loan institutions universal, and as accessible as possible to all classes. His transactions have a twofold advantage: They pave the way for an atrocious financial crisis, and demonstrate what results from Proudhon’s credit manoeuvres when they are put into practice and not confined to theoretical day-dreams, namely a stock-jobbing swindle unparalleled since the days of John Law.

The Orleanists — I know one of their agents very well — are tremendously active. Thiers is here at the moment. They have many allies in the army and in Bonaparte’s immediate entourage. They intend to murder him (in January) in his bed. Nous verrons. At all events, I shall be notified a fortnight before the attempt, and shall in turn notify the revolutionary proletarian party in Paris through the secret society of ‘frères et amis’, to which I belong. If the Orleanists pull the chestnuts out of the fire, they must in no case be allowed to eat them.

Should Heinzen, etc., brag about Becker’s performance in Cologne, thereby compromising us all, you must publish a statement signed with your name, to the effect that Becker was a member of the communist society and that shortly before his arrest, he invited me to write a paper against the democrats, but asked me not to reply to the attacks of Heinzen and Ruge, those wretched allies of Müller-Tellering. Of course, you should only make use of this weapon if absolutely necessary. In which case you declare outright that Becker took the stage as arranged, but grossly over-acted, did not play his part skilfully enough — which is all that he can be reproached with.

K. M.

Marx To Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 265;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

[London,] 14 December 1852

... No more than a few lines today. Brüningk has written to me. I replied in writing, telling him that Kinkel and Willich were the instigators of the rumour and that I had alluded to, but not named them, in my letter to you.

Should Kinkel issue a public denial in the American Press, I shall publish the whole correspondence and/or the record of what happened between him, myself and J. Huzel, as proof of his veracity and his courageous vindication of the imputations he had made.

Should Brüningk demand that you recant or publicly attack you for ‘deliberate distortion of the material with which I provided you’, confine yourself to the following points: 1. You could perfectly well have concluded that Mrs von Brüningk was an agent whom even her friends suspected her of being one, the more so since she was an agent for the notorious Russian agent, Princess von Lieven.

2. You had all the less reason to stand on ceremony since Schimmelpfennig — Mrs von Brüningk’s crony — had established the principle that Marx and Co. were to be calumniated.

3. You might have issued a statement yourself had Brüningk approached the Wecher direct, and then yourself instead of dragging in the miserable Ruge-Ronges. Ça suffira.

Ad vocem E. Jones. Jones is now rising rapidly. Harney’s paper — and J.’s rival — The Star of Freedom, set some 3 weeks ago.

Ad vocem Kinkel-Willich, The effrontery of these two fellows’ anti-Reichenbach statement surpasses all bounds.

1. Reichenbach acted too leniently in respect of these fellows in concealing the real reason which above all motivated his action. For in America Loan Notes bearing Reichenbach’s signature still continue to circulate. Kinkel and Willich got their agents in America to convert them into silver, even at a discount, and send the proceeds direct to them, long after they had been disowned qua financial committee by the London guarantors; similarly, they hawked these notes round London. At no time have they accounted for the sums thus received. It was downright escroquerie and Reichenbach deemed a statement necessary in order to clear himself of all responsibility for it.

2. The German papers applauded the resolution to return the money to America, Kinkel coming in for especial praise. The rascal received these bourgeois plaudits in silence — nor, in Bradford and Manchester, did he show any inclination whatever to confess his opposition to the said resolution. He seeks to appear respectable to bourgeoisie in Germany in order to make money, and poses as a believer in revolution before the revolutionary philistines in America in order to wrest from the clutches of the Cerberus Reichenbach the money he has swindled from them.

3. Willich pins his faith to the distance between America and London. Over here the fellow is regarded by all the refugees as a proven spy and a rogue unmasked. He believes that in America he will still be able to play the treasurer of the revolution.

Hirsch has told a working men’s club in Blamich Street that Willich is his accomplice. He himself, the sly Hirsch (!!!) says, is a spy in the interests of democracy, but Willich in the interests of the police, no less. Willich’s society heard about this. Questions were asked, etc. (you may have read about it already in my Revelations). He could think of nothing better than to remove with a minute nucleus of his society to another establishment where visitors were not admitted, and to shift his own domicile to a remote corner of London. These two blackguards must now be unmasked in America as well. Here they are completely done for.

Ad vocem.Goegg. Goegg, who for months was telling everyone that he attended the Wheeling Congress, was in Strassburg at the time, getting together what remained of his fortune, £300.

Now, in company with Ronge, he is setting up kindergartens and similar German-Catholic educational establishments.

Your

K. M.

Engels to Marx

Written: [Manchester], 24 September, 1852;

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan.

The crapauds* are doing well. With the temporary prosperity, and prospects of the glory of an empire, the workers seem to have become completely bourgeois after all. It will take a severe chastisement by crises if they are to become good for anything again soon. If the next crisis is a mild one Bonaparte may be able to steer through it. But it looks as if it was going to be damned serious. No crisis is worse than one in which over-speculation in production is slowly developing, for it requires as many years to develop its results as a crisis in the trade in products and stocks and shares requires months. And with old Wellington has been buried not only the common sense of old England but old England itself, in the person of its sole surviving representative. What remains are inconsequent sporting characters like Derby and Jewish swindlers like Disraeli – who are as much caricatures of the old Tories as Monsieur Bonaparte is of his uncle.

* Literally toads, but used as a slang nickname by Marx and Engels for the French bourgeois.

1853

Engels to Marx. 11 January

Marx to Engels. 21 January

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 21 January

Marx to Engels. 29 January

Marx to J C Mayer. After 3 Feb.

Engels to Marx. 11 February

Marx to Engels. 23 February

Engels to Marx. 10 March

Marx to Engels. 10 March

Marx to Bertalan Szemere. 10 March

Engels to Marx. 11 March

Marx to Engels. 22-23 March

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 25 March

Engels to Marx. 10 April

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 12 April

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 17 April

Marx to Engels. 23 April

Marx to Engels. 26 April

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 26 April

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 26 April

Engels to Marx. 26 April

Marx to Engels. 27 April

Engels to Marx. 27 April

Marx to Engels. 28 April

Engels to Marx. 20 May

Marx to Engels. 21 May

Engels to Marx. Before 28 May

Engels to Marx. 31 May

Engels to Marx. 1 June

Marx to Engels. 2 June

Engels to Marx. 6 June

Engels to Marx. 9 June

Marx to Engels. 14 June

Marx to Adolf Cluss. c. 14 June

Marx to Engels. 29 June

Marx to Engels. 8 July

Engels to Marx. 9 July

Marx to Engels . 18 July

Marx to Engels. 18 August

Engels to Marx. 24 August

Marx to James Grant, Editor of The Morning Advertiser. 31 August

Marx to Engels. 3 September

Marx to Engels. 7 September

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 15 September

Marx to Engels. 17 September

Engels to Marx. 19 September

Marx to Karl Blind. 26 September

Marx to Engels. 28 September

Engels to Marx. 29 September

Marx to Engels. 30 September

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. Early October

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 5 October

Marx to Engels. 8 October

Marx to Engels. 12 October

Marx to Karl Blind. 13 October

Marx to Adolf Cluss. 18 October

Marx to Engels. 28 October

Marx to Engels. 2 November

Marx to Engels. 6 November

Marx to Adolf Cluss. Mid-November

Marx to Engels. 21 November

Marx to Engels. 23 November

Marx to Engels. 2 December

Marx to Engels. c. 12 December

Marx to Engels. 14 December

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 278;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[Manchester,] 11 February 1853

Dear Marx,

Well, here it is, the grande affaire of Messrs Kossuth and Mazzini. Our news up here is very incomplete but my own view is that tomorrow or on Monday we shall certainly hear that all is over. Milan is first-rate terrain for street-fighting, few straight streets, none connecting with the other, almost everywhere narrow, crooked alleys with tall, massive stone houses, each a fortress in itself, their walls often 3-5 feet or more thick and virtually impossible to breach, the rez-de-chaussée [ground floor] windows provided with iron grills (almost invariably) as here and there in Cologne. But much good will all this do — they don’t stand a chance. After 1849 Radetzky ordered the restoration of the old citadel’s fortifications and, if the work is complete — and there has been time enough for this — Milan will belong to the Austrians so long as they occupy the citadel which is impregnable to insurgents unless abetted by a military insurrection. The fact that no further news is forthcoming from Bellinzona whence, from time immemorial, the Tessinese have inundated the world with lies in support of every Italian movement, argues strongly against the spread of the insurrection in the surrounding region.

I regard the whole business as very mal a propos since its only point d'appui, apart from Austrian tyranny in general, is the commotion in Montenegro where also, aprés tout, Turkish ‘order’ is bound to prevail over Homeric Czernogorzan barbarism. Thus these great dictators, having allowed themselves to be bamboozled, altogether à la Seiler, by the usual diplomatic melodramas, invoke the world-historical importance of the ‘oriental question’! They are obviously counting on some sort of windfall from Louis Napoleon but, unless everything turns out otherwise than expected, he will leave them to stew in their own juice and treat them as anarchists. It would further seem probable that, as with all insurrections organised in advance, the moment of outbreak is liable to be determined far more by the pettiest of local incidents than by crucial events.

Mazzini does at least seem to be on the spot; it could hardly be otherwise. However stupid his bombastic proclamation, it may well prove something of a hit with the grandiloquent Italians. On the other hand we have Kossuth, that man of boundless activity! Celui-là est absolument mort, après cela [after this, he will be completely done for]. Such absurd pretensions cannot be trumpeted with impunity in the year of our Lord 1853. However preposterous Mazzini’s abstract passion for insurrection may appear on this occasion, the man comes off splendidly when compared with the worthy Kossuth, who reassumes the role he played at Vidin and, from the safety of the rear, decrees the liberation of the fatherland from nothing, with nothing, for nothing. The fellow really is a lâche and a misérable.

Now we shall see what the Italian peasants will do; even if, by some unheard of and incredible stroke of luck, père Mazzini, his bourgeois and his aristocrats, should succeed, they might still be in for something very unpleasant at their hands; and should the Austrians find an opportunity to unleash these same peasants against the aristocracy they will not hesitate to do so.

The Austrians must still have 120,000 men in Italy; how, in the face of this, a rebellion can be staged unless there are mutinies among the troops, I cannot conceive. And I refuse to believe that there could be Honved mutinies in Italy, even on Kossuth’s orders, this would demand events of greater magnitude, while 3 years of discipline and peace have enabled the Austrians to flog many an unyielding Honved posterior into tractability.

The whole business is of importance, I think, only as a symptom; a reaction has set in against the state of oppression obtaining since ’49 and, naturally, at the most sensitive spot. The thing has made a great impact here, and the philistines are beginning to agree that this year will not elapse without trouble.

Now for a poor corn and cotton harvest, financial difficulties and all that goes with them, and nous verrons! [we'll see]

Have you had the £3 I sent you last week — on Thursday or Friday?

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 280;

First published: in MEGA, Berlin, 1929.

[London,] 23 February 1853

Dear Engels,

I have been sérieuement indisposed; for the ‘perfidious Prussians’ have not permitted me either to stand, sit or lie down. Hence my long silence and my failure so much as to acknowledge the money.

You will have seen that Kossuth, through an American filibuster, Captain Mayne Reid, has disavowed his alleged Milan proclamations. Well, yesterday Szemer wrote to me from Paris, saying he knew for certain that the proclamation was authentic, as was evident in any case from its contents. The Leader (pro-Mazzini)

*‘deems it his duty to caution his readers, that this affair lies entirely between Mr Kossuth and Mr Mazzini and that the latter is absent from England’.*

You will yourself have seen, in The Daily News, Della Rocco’s statement aimed directly at Agostini, but also indirectly at Kossuth. The par nubile fratrum [noble brothers] seem to have fallen out. Kossuth is as false as he is cowardly.

You have rated Mazzini too high if you imagine he was present in person at Milan. At critical moments like these he absents himself from England so that he may be suspected of being in the theatre of war.

Pitiable finale though the Milan business is to Mazzini’s eternal plotting, and despite my conviction that he has done himself personal injury, I am sure that the revolutionary movement as a whole will benefit by what is happening. I.e., by the brutal manner in which the Austrians are exploiting [...]. Had Radetzky followed Strassoldo’s example, had he praised the Milanese citizenry for their ‘orderly conduct’, had he described the whole thing as the wretched uprising of a few ‘miscreants’ and, as a token of his confidence, appeared to loosen the reins a little, the revolutionary party would have been discredited in the eyes of the whole world. But as it is, by introducing a system of wholesale plunder, he is turning Italy into the ‘revolutionary crater’ which Mazzini, for all his declaiming, was unable to conjure into existence.

And another thing. Could any one of us have believed that, after its 4 years of victory, military preparations and rodomontade, reaction should feel itself so infinitely weak that, at the first sign of a riot, it lets out a scream of genuine terror? The fellows’ belief in revolution is unshakable. Once again they have testified to the whole world how insecure they feel. Whereas realiter the ‘émigration’ is totally bankrupt and impotent, they loudly proclaim its power through all government papers and encourage the belief that a net of conspiracy is closing in from all sides on the worthy citizens.

Ad vocem Bangya. Is presently in Paris. I now possess actual proof that the gallant fellow is an agent of the Austrian government. He bought his way back to France by accepting a clandestine post in the French Police Ministry. At the same time he is in Paris as official agent for Kossuth, who wants money from Bonaparte. In Paris, by the by, the fellow has woven a net in which he himself will become ensnared. As to our manuscript [Great Men of the Exile], he sold it to Greif, who was travelling under the name of ‘Schulz’. Incidentally, both of them misled the government into believing that they had ‘managed to procure’ — note the professional term — this ‘document’ from the archives of a ‘secret society’.

Still no news from Schabelitz, save that the thing [Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne] is circulating in Germany. He still doesn’t dare send anything here, for fear that the French police will open the parcel and denounce the business to the Prussian police.

I have heard from a reliable source, mais c'est un secret (which Napoleon doubtless knows as well as I do), that Ledru intends to go into action in Paris in 3-4 weeks. I have been told by an eye-witness that the first news of the rising in Milan created a great sensation in Paris. Gatherings in the streets, etc., not to rebel but to confer. On the whole the Frenchmen here are well content that Mr Mazzini should have discredited himself by his ‘action’. They see themselves avenged.

Thanks to Cluss our appeal on behalf of the Cologne people — 6 lines long — has appeared in all the American papers, in each case under the auspices of the local gymnastic club. Nous [verrons]. Our dear acquaintances in Cologne itself have as yet given no sign of life. That’s caution for you! One of them, ex-lieutenant Steffen, who figured as a defence witness at the Cologne trial, is here and promptly found himself a teaching post in Friedländer’s establishment. Blind is dunning me daily for the Herzen, as is Dronke for Reichenbach’s circular. This is essential to Dronke since he wants to become a correspondent of the Volkshalle in Cologne under another name.

What do you think of the lively sympathy shown by the clerics of the Established Church towards the unfortunate Ten Hours Movement? Always the same old game. On Saturday I'll send you a parcel containing all the remaining newspapers, and letters from Cluss.

Of all little finality John’s performances, the last was probably the most classical. Even The Times was forced to admit that Johnny excites ‘mightily little enthusiasm’.

Mrs Harney is dead. Likewise Mrs von Brüningk. A short while ago there was an exchange of letters between myself and Brüningk, in which everything hinged on Kinkel and Willich. As I have already told you, Willich sailed for America 4 weeks ago.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 292;

First published: in MEGA, Berlin, 1929.

[Manchester, 11 March 1853]

Dear Marx,

You shall have the articles within a few days; I see that my consideration of Urquhart was opportune. Unfortunately it’s too late for tomorrow’s steamer, since I can hardly have finished at the office before 8 o'clock and some preparation is, of course, still necessary. It’s grand that père Dana is now paying £2 and promptly honouring bills; avec ça, we shall at last be out of the wood. Incidentally, I would never have believed that you had sent off seven English articles in such a short space of time. When you come up here, which I much look forward to, you will learn more English in a week than in 6 weeks with Mr Pieper.

As for Monsieur Jacques, it is more than likely that the little man wants to imitate the trick played on the Baden government by Mr Jenni (whom he greatly resembles), namely sell part of the edition to the German governments, and afterwards do business so much the better with what is left. I don’t believe he is so bad as to have sold the whole lot outright. Booksellers established in Basle may be justified in feeling nervous; the Basle government won’t stand any nonsense and is on neighbourly terms with Baden. But mind you insist on his sending you forthwith per menagerie, i. e. by train, a packet of at least a few copies addressed direct to London or, if you like, to me, care of Ermen & Engels, Manchester. Nobody would think of opening such a packet, and even were this to happen, the cat is in any case already out of the bag. It’s fishy that he should so far have refused to let a single copy out of his hands. Surely he must know some manufacturer in Basle who sends ribbons, etc., etc., to London, and could include some in a consignment.

There’s nothing more to the Lancashire story in The Morning Post than what I told you in my yesterday’s letter. In answer to an inquiry of ours about prices, Houldsworth and Murray, the two leading fine spinners in England, told us yesterday that it was useless to quote any prices since they were booked up a long way ahead and could not accept a single new order. Between them these two have about 150,000-200,000 mule spindles in operation. In coarse water twist, on the other hand, No. 6/16, business is very slack precisely because of conditions in domestics which are sticking not only here but also in America and Germany.

We must destroy the competing Yankee [Pulszky] with a great show of omniscience. I shall take a look at a few more books on Turkey of which there are quite a lot in the Athenaeum.

It is not very pleasant to hear about the decline of our friends. Nor will it be pleasant if these citoyens go into the next affair as wise as, but no wiser than, they emerged from the last one, though when it comes to the point, the ‘best’ of them will no doubt pull themselves together. After Cluss, Lassalle is by far the most useful of the lot, and will be all the more so from the moment où les biens du comte Hatzfeldt seront irrévocablement réunis au domaine public [when Count Hatzfeldt’s property reverts irrevocably to public ownership]. He may have his foibles, but he also has esprit de parti et ambition, and we are already aware that he will always make official business a pretext for indulging his lesser appetites and pursuing his own little private affairs. As for recruiting, that’s the way it is; once we are back in Germany we shall, I think, find plenty of talented young fellows who have, in the meantime, and not without result, tasted the forbidden fruit. If we had had the means to conduct propaganda scientifically and steadily for the space of 2 or 3 years, writing books about n'importe quoi, as we did before 1848, we should have been appreciably better off. But that was impossible, and now the storm is already brewing. You ought to finish your Economy; later on, as soon as we have a newspaper, we could bring it out in weekly numbers, and what the populus could not understand, the discipuli would expound tant bien que mal, mais cependant non sans effet [disciples would expound after a fashion but not, however, without profit]. This would provide all our by then restored associations with a basis for debate.

That Dana is paying £2 per article without demur is the best proof of how firmly ensconced you are at the Tribune. Anyway, there is a certain advantage in our being the only one of all the parties of European revolution to have expounded its ideas before the English-American public. The Yankees know absolutely nothing about the rest, for all Kossuth’s twaddle amounted to was money for, and intervention on behalf of, the great man Kossuth. Doubtless Monsieur Bamberger will advance more against the next bill, the first having been paid so promptly.

Your

F. E.

Marx to Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 298;

First published: in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1934.

London, 25 March 1853, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Cluss,

Your complaints about our (or at least my) laziness in the matter of writing are not wholly justified. I used to write — save when ill — once a week. It was you who first replaced this with a different system, and often just sent newspapers in the interval instead of letters. There are all in all 3 letters from you that have remained unanswered. Of those 3, two came on the same day, one enclosed with the money sent to Freiligrath, one direct to myself. Hence, only 2 unanswered letters. If you go back to writing once every week, whether at length or briefly, I too will again adopt this regular manner. Or rather, I shall do so without waiting. But then I shall expect the same of you.

Schabelitz has now written to me at length. He had printed the Revelations pamphlet 2 months ago and, for the space of 5 weeks, left it lying at Weil, a Baden village on the other side of the border. Instead of posting a reliable man there, the jackass went and left everything to the smuggler who, having gradually extracted from him a substantial sum of money, ended up by giving himself away to the Baden government. The rest you will have seen in the last issue of the Tribune. But you will be even more convinced of the interest taken by the Prussian government in this pamphlet, and hence of its importance to the ‘Fatherland’, when I tell you that the heroic Stieber has not only become police superintendent in Berlin but is co-opted onto every ministerial council concerned with precautionary measures against revolutionaries and revolutionary activities. I am almost beside myself with anger at the pamphlet’s temporary suppression. You for your part would not appear to have handled matters on this occasion with your usual felicity. The Neu-England-Zeitung may take a year to get it out by thus printing it in dribs and drabs, whereas it devotes whole columns to the ‘figure de fouine [weasel-like features]’ of the wretched Ruge who, over here, has still not succeeded in acquiring more than a ‘strictly circumscribed train’ of 5 persons. Why didn’t you put the thing into the Demokrat, a much more widely read organ, to which you yourself contribute? Next time you write you must tell me frankly whether or not the thing can be produced as a pamphlet in America. It would be for European consumption and would be tossed into Prussia via Hamburg. If I were not utterly devoid of means I would arrange for it to be printed in Altona forthwith. It is not partiality to the little lampoon, but my perfect knowledge of conditions in Prussia which prompts me to say that, at the present moment, we could deal our beloved Prussians no more telling blow.

Don’t lose sight of that blackguard Willich. He is the most rabid of enemies and an idiot into the bargain.

Pulszky has not come among you simply to engage in high politics. He has also been sent across the ocean for the purpose of appeasing General Vetter who, having become disaffected, is intriguing from America against the ‘great Kossuth’. To my amazement I see in the Daily Tribune, received from you today, that it has accepted my attacks upon Kossuth-Mazzini. I had thought this highly improbable, the more so since Greeley’s white-red-black friend, the Jew Pulszky, is over there.

Szemere wrote to me from Paris giving me the news I published in the Tribune, namely that there had been a lengthy conference between Kossuth and his Parisian partisans about his now ‘disowned proclamation’ and that they forced the miserable little man to make a disavowal.

Barthélemy, Willich’s friend, whom you will remember from his duel with Schramm (the latter, by the by, lives in Cincinnati whence he has written once), has received a 2 months’ sentence for fighting a duel on English soil in the course of which he killed Cournet. He got off so lightly, despite the sordid disclosures which were made during the trial, because according to English law, seconds are punished as severely as duellists and also because they didn’t want to make the poor devil pay the full penalty for what he had done. The fellow had the effrontery when in prison to have a message sent to Ledru saying that as soon as he came out he would shoot him down like a dog. Ledru replied that he would not exchange shots with such a scoundrel. Barthélemy: He was very well able to induce a man to exchange shots with him by boxing his ears in the open street, and other such tested methods. Ledru (riposte): That being so, he would regale him with his stick.

The winsome warrior, Schimmelpfennig, has inherited £1,000 sterling from the Brüningk woman. Indeed, Monsieur le Lieutenant had appointed himself to the post of sycophant, nursery-maid, fan-bearer, political oracle, companion, admirer, boots, and any other agreeable function you may care to name.

Reichenbach wants to go to America, as does — up to a point — Kalb of Löwe, the first as a farmer, the second as a doctor.

In the West, the most important, if least conspicuous event, has been the burial of Madame Raspail in Paris. The unexpected turn-out of 20,000 proletarians in full dress utterly dumbfounded the Bonapartists. So you can see that the proletarian lion isn’t dead. For Ledru, too, the event was a most bitter pill. Raspail is his arch-enemy.

One more fact. Don’t blame me if it is unaesthetic. The ‘blonde souveraine’, Montijo-Lola, is subject to a most repellent constitutional complaint — incessant farting. It is known as tympoptanomania. Formerly she used to combat the ‘accident’ with energetic horse-riding which Bonaparte has now forbidden her on the grounds that it is beneath her station. Thus at several ‘réunions’ her ‘detonations fortes’ have even brought blushes to the cheeks of braided Décembraillards. And that is saying a great deal. Ce n'est qu'un petit bruit, un murmure, un rieng; mais enfin, vous savez que les Français ont le nez au plus petit vent. [It’s only a small noise, a murmur, a nothing; but then, you know, the French are sensitive to the slightest puff of wind]

In a year at the most you will, I think, be with us. Les choses marchent. [Things are moving]

Your

K. M.

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer

In New York

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 303;

First published: in full in Marx and Engels, Works, 1934.

Manchester, 12 April 1853

Dear Weydemeyer,

Herewith Marx’s statement on Hirsch’s Confessions which you should immediately get into as many papers as you can. If you send Cluss a copy at once, he will undoubtedly be able to take over a large part of the task. It would, I think, do no harm if you were to append the words, ‘The undersigned express their full agreement with the above, E. Dronke, F. Engels’. As far as the business of the manuscript [The Great Men of the Exile] is concerned, and relations with Bangya generally, we are just as responsible as Marx and it would not be right if we were to let him bear the responsibility alone. The copy that was handed over is partly in Dronke’s hand, the original almost entirely in mine. There is now a prospect of the thing being published in Switzerland.

This statement was composed solely on the strength of the excerpts made by you and sent to us by Cluss. Whether the remainder contains anything that will necessitate a further statement, we cannot, of course, yet say, but doubtless you'll have extracted everything relating to ourselves. In a few days’ time you will, I trust, send us the whole thing in print.

As for Bangya, we have him completely in our power. The fellow’s so deeply implicated that he is utterly done for. Fresh grounds for suspicion kept cropping up and, in order to cover himself he was compelled to show Marx little by little his entire hoard of documents from Kossuth, Szemere, etc. This is how I come to possess the original manuscript of Szemere’s pamphlet on Kossuth and Görgey. Mr Kossuth, then, has been badly compromised through Mr Bangya. This magyarised Slav’s petty cunning was foiled by Marx’s tenacity and the skill with which he implicated him. We, and no one else (save perhaps Szemere, up to a point), now possess complete documentary evidence as to Bangya’s character, but what purpose would be served by raising the alarm just now? The fellow is said to be returning to London in May, and then we can press him hard and possibly extract a great deal more useful information. All manner of things have been going on between Willich and Hirsch which are still very far from clear and if, as you maintain, it was through Kinkel’s agency that Hirsch’s manuscript found its way over there, this again conjures up the most bizarre speculations. Il faut tâcher d'y voir clair [we must try to clarify this], and Bangya can be useful there. So don’t say anything about it for the moment; that apart, let the Hungarian gentlemen themselves come forward for once and speak their minds, Kossuth in particular. Why should we give them a helping hand? If they make fools of themselves in a public statement, tant mieux, then it will be our turn.

The émigrés are carrying on as disreputably as ever, though with less public offence than hitherto. When I was in London at Christmas-time we used to mingle sans façon with the crowd in the Kinkel-Willich-Ruge pubs, something we could scarcely have done 6 months earlier without risking a brawl. Often the small fry would come up to us quite amiably and patiently allow us to twit them, particularly the gallant Meyen-Julius Vindex. Amongst our own people, everything is still much the same. Lupus is said to be keeping himself very much to himself. Dronke has been angling for a clerk’s post these past six months and now there’s a scheme afoot to get him one in Bradford, 2½ hours by railway from here. Weerth, when I last heard from him, was in St Thomas in the West Indies, where he had survived the yellow fever season. Red Wolf who, as you know, is a husband and father, takes his wife and child out on jaunts and seldom puts in an appearance. Freiligrath is still living in Hackney and engages in commerce under the auspices of Mr Oxenford. As for myself, I have made substantial progress this past winter in Slavonic languages and military affairs and, by the end of the year, shall have a passable knowledge of Russian and South Slav. In Cologne I accoutred myself at little expense with the library of a retired Prussian artillery officer and for a time felt myself quite the bombardier again, what with the old Plümicke, the Brigade Training Manual and other well-thumbed volumes which you will remember. However, Prussian military literature is positively the worst there is, the only tolerable stuff being what was written with the campaigns of 1813/15 still fresh in mind. But after 1822 this gives way to a repulsively pretentious pedantry, to a bogus omniscience, which is the very devil. Quite recently a number of passable things have again appeared in Prussia, but not many. Unfortunately the French stuff is completely inaccessible to me owing to my unfamiliarity with specialised literature.

I have swotted up pretty well on the old campaigns (i.e. after 1792); the Napoleonic ones are so simple that it would be difficult to go wrong on them. However, au bout du compte Jomini gives the best account of them; despite many fine things, I can’t really bring myself to like that natural genius, Clausewitz. For the immediate future, i.e. for us, the Russian campaign of 1812 is the most important, the only one where important strategic problems still remain to be solved; Germany and Italy do not admit of any lines of action other than those laid down by Napoleon, whereas in Russia everything is still very confused. The question whether, originally, Napoleon’s plan of operations in 1812 was to march directly on Moscow or, during the first campaign, simply advance as far as the Dnieper and Dvina, repeats itself for us with the question as to what a revolutionary army should do in the event of a successful offensive against Russia. This question — accidents apart, of course, and assuming no more than an approximately equal balance of forces — can be solved, or so it has seemed to me up till now, only by water — in the Sound and in the Dardanelles, at Petersburg, Riga and Odessa. Apart also, of course, from internal movements in Russia — and an aristocratic-bourgeois revolution in Petersburg with a resulting civil war in the interior is a possibility. Mr Herzen has made things much easier for himself (Du progrès des idées révolutionnaires en Russie) by positing, Hegel-fashion, a democratic-social-communist-Proudhonist Republic of Russia under the triumvirate Bakunin-Herzen-Golovin, so that it cannot possibly fail. Meanwhile it is by no means certain that Bakunin is still alive and in any case Russia, with its huge expanses and sparse population, is a country that is very difficult to conquer. As to the former Polish provinces on this side of the Dvina and Dnieper, I want to hear nothing more of them, knowing as I do that the peasants there are all Ukrainians, only the aristocracy and some of the people in the towns being Polish, and that to the peasant there, as in Ukrainian Galicia in 1846, the restoration of Poland is synonymous with the restoration of the old ruling aristocracy, its powers unimpaired. In all these countries, outside the kingdom of Poland proper, there are barely 500,000 Poles!

It is a good thing, by the way, that this time the revolution should have found a respectable antagonist in Russia and not such spineless scarecrows of opponents as in the year 1848.

In the meantime all sorts of symptoms keep appearing. Prosperity in cotton has reached such heights as to become vertiginous, whereas certain branches of the cotton industry (coarse qualities, domestics) are completely stagnant. Speculators hope to escape this vertigo by promoting it en gros solely in America and France (railways with English money), but over here piecemeal in penny packets, thus by degrees spreading the condition to all articles. The quite abnormal weather we've had here during the winter and spring must have damaged the corn and if, as usually happens, the summer is also abnormal, it will spell ruin to the harvest. To my mind the present prosperity cannot last beyond the autumn. In the meantime the 3rd English ministry in 12 months — and, indeed, the last one that will be possible without the direct intervention of the radical bourgeoisie — is falling into disrepute. One after another Whigs, Tories and Coalitionists come to grief as a result, not of a tax deficit, but of a surplus. That typifies the whole policy of the old parties and also their extreme impotence. If the present ministers tumble, it will no longer be possible to govern England without considerably extending the pays légal [franchise]; hence, this is likely to come about at the beginning of the crisis.

The protracted tedium of prosperity has made it almost impossible for the unhappy Bonaparte to maintain his dignity; the world is bored and he bores the world. Unfortunately he cannot remarry every 4 weeks. This trickster, drunkard and cheat will come to grief through having to make a pretence of putting Engel’s Fürstenspiegel into practice. The vagabond as ‘father of the fatherland'! He is aux abois [at bay]. Yet he can’t even start a war: everywhere serried ranks bristling with bayonets as soon as he makes the slightest move. And then this period of tranquillity affords the peasants most desirable time in which to reflect upon how the man who promised to subdue Paris for the peasants’ benefit is now using the peasants’ money to embellish Paris and how, despite everything, mortgages and taxes are going up rather than down. In short, this time the thing is being methodically prepared, and that’s very promising.

In Prussia the government has raised a veritable hornet’s nest among the bourgeoisie with its income tax. The bureaucrats have increased the rates of tax in the most barefaced manner, and you can imagine the glee with which those egregious quillpushers are now poking their noses into the trade secrets and ledgers of all the merchants. Even my old man, a dyed-in-the-wool Prussian, is fuming with rage. These fellows must now endure to the bitter end the blessings of a constitutional, fatherly, Prussian gouvernement a bon marché [bargain government]. Prussia’s national debt, — some 67 mill. talers before 1848, — must since have swollen to four times that amount, and already they are wanting to borrow again! One can only assume that the portly monarch would cheerfully sweat now, as once he sweated during the March days, if only he were to be guaranteed this credit for the rest of his mortal life. Yet Louis Napoleon has helped him set the Customs Union on its feet again, Austria, fearing war, has drawn in her horns, and now, Lord, lettest thou thy servant depart in peace into the grave!

The Austrians are doing everything in their power to set things in motion again in Italy, a country which, before the Milan uprising was completely given over to commerce and prosperity in so far as this was compatible with taxation; and if everything goes on like this for another few months, Europe will be in a splendid state of readiness, needing only the jog of a crisis. On top of this, one must consider that prosperity, unprecedented in its scope and duration — having begun early in 1849 — has restored the strength of the exhausted parties (in so far as these were not beyond repair, like the monarchist party in France) much more quickly than was the case after 1830, for example, when trading conditions long remained unsettled and, on the whole, indifferent. In 1848, too, only the Paris proletariat, and later Hungary and Italy, were exhausted by severe struggles; after June 1848, the insurrections that took place in France were hardly worth speaking of and, in the final count, ruined only the old monarchist parties. Add to this the curious result produced by the movement in all countries, a result in no way serious or significant save for the colossal historical irony and the concentration of Russian military resources; and in view of all this, it seems to me that, even taking the most sober view, the present state of affairs cannot possibly continue beyond the spring of 1854.

How splendid it is that on this occasion our party is taking the stage under wholly different auspices. All the socialist stupidities which one still had to advocate in 1848 vis-a-vis the pure democrats and the South German republicans, the vapourings of L. Blanc, etc., and, indeed, even the things we were compelled to propound if only to find points d'appui for our views in the confused state of affairs in Germany — all this is already being advocated by our respected opponents, by Ruge, Heinzen, Kinkel and so forth. The preliminaries to proletarian revolution, the measures by which the field of battle is being made ready and the way cleared for us — a single and indivisible republic, etc., things which originally we had to advocate in the teeth of those whose natural, normal calling it should have been to implement, or at least demand them, — all this is now convenu, has been learnt by the gentlemen. This time we shall start off straight away with the Manifesto thanks largely to the Cologne trial in which German communism (most notably through Röser) has passed its matriculation.

All this, of course, relates merely to theory; in practice we shall, as always, be reduced to insisting above all on resolute measures and absolute ruthlessness. And that’s the pity of it. I have a feeling that one fine day, thanks to the helplessness and spinelessness of all the others, our party will find itself forced into power, whereupon it will have to enact things that are not immediately in our own, but rather in the general, revolutionary and specifically petty-bourgeois interest; in which event, spurred on by the proletarian populus and bound by our own published statements and plans — more or less wrongly interpreted and more or less impulsively pushed through in the midst of party strife — we shall find ourselves compelled to make communist experiments and leaps which no-one knows better than ourselves to be untimely. One then proceeds to lose one’s head — only physique parlant I hope — , a reaction sets in and, until such time as the world is capable of passing historical judgment of this kind of thing, one will be regarded, not only as a brute beast, which wouldn’t matter a rap, but, also as bête, and that’s far worse. I don’t very well see how it could happen otherwise. In a backward country such as Germany which possesses an advanced party and which, together with an advanced country such as France, becomes involved in an advanced revolution, at the first serious conflict, and as soon as there is real danger, the turn of the advanced party will inevitably come, and this in any case will be before its normal time. However, none of this matters a rap; the main thing is that, should this happen, our party’s rehabilitation in history will already have been substantiated in advance in its literature.

We shall, by the way, cut a far more respectable figure on the stage than last time. In the first place we are happily rid of all the old idlers in the persons of Schapper, Willich and Co., secondly, we have grown somewhat stronger, thirdly, we can count on the rising generation in Germany (if nothing else, the Cologne trial is enough to guarantee us this), and finally we have all of us benefited substantially in exile. There are, of course, some amongst us who proceed on the principle: ‘What need is there for us to swot? That’s what père Marx is there for, it’s his business to know everything.’ But in general the Marx party does do a good deal of swotting, and one only has to look at the way the other émigré jackasses snap up this or that new catchword, thereby becoming more bemused than ever, to realise that our party’s superiority has increased both absolutely and relatively. As indeed it must, for la besogne sera rude [it will be a tough business].

I should like to have time before the next revolution to study and describe thoroughly at least the campaigns of 1848 and 1849 in Italy and Hungary. Generally speaking, I have a pretty clear notion of the business, despite imperfect maps, etc. But the very accuracy of detail required to depict it calls for a great deal of trouble and expense. On both occasions the Italians behaved like nincompoops. Willisen’s account and analysis, while accurate on the whole, is often silly, and the total superiority of Austrian strategy, which he stresses as early as 1848, only becomes apparent in the Novara campaign, without doubt the most brilliantly fought affair in Europe since Napoleon’s day (outside Europe, however, the feats performed by old General Napier in India in 1842 are of quite another order and, indeed, reminiscent of Alexander the Great; on the whole I regard Charles Napier as the foremost living general). Strange in Italy, just as in Baden in 1849, is the traditional superstitious belief in positions occupied during the campaigns of the 1790s. Nothing would have induced Mr Sigel to fight anywhere save in the position made classical by Moreau, and Charles Albert’s belief in the Virgin Mary’s virginity was no more steadfast than his belief in the miraculous powers of the plateau of Rivoli. So immutable was this conviction in Italy that the Austrians commenced every important manoeuvre with a feint attack on Rivoli and every time the Piedmontese fell into the trap. The joke is, of course, that the relative positions and lines of communication were quite different.

Despite everything, Monsieur Görgey remains the only fellow in Hungary who was superior to everyone else and to whom everyone else was hostile out of sheer envy; I think it probable that had not Görgey, despite his great military talents, been a very vain, petty chap, this for the most part stupid hostility would have finally turned him into a traitor. Ever since the Világos affair — entirely justified in military (but not revolutionary) terms — the fellows have subjected Görgey to such a plethora of insane accusations that the chap almost compels one’s interest. The actual ‘betrayal’ took place after the relief of Komarom, before the Russians got there, and for this Kossuth is just as much to blame as Görgey. A cloud of uncertainty still envelops Bayer, Görgey’s Chief of the General Staff, who is now in London. From the memoirs of Görgey and other sources, it would seem that it was he who inspired Görgey’s strategic plans. From what Pleyel told me, Bayer is the principal author of the official Austrian book on the campaign. (Bayer was captured in Pest and escaped); it is said to be excellent, but I haven’t yet been able to get hold of it. Görgey speaks of Klapka with great respect, but everyone admits that he was very weak. Perczel is regarded as a jackass, the ‘democratic’ Hungarian general. Old Bem always thought of himself only as a good partisan and commander of a detached corps intended for a definite purpose; so far as I can judge, this is all he was, but to a superlative degree. He did two stupid things, once with his fruitless expedition into the blue after Banat; next, during the great Russian invasion when he repeated, literally, the highly professional manoeuvre he had successfully executed before Hermannstadt and was trounced in consequence. Père Dembinski however, was an incorrigible visionary and braggart, a partisan who believed himself born to conduct great campaigns and embarked on the maddest enterprises. Smitt’s Polish Campaign of 1831 contains some good stories about him.

Apropos. Could you give me a short description of Cologne’s fortifications with a few drawings — rough sketches — done from memory? If I remember rightly, the main wall is bastioned and the forts are said to be of the Montalembert type; is that so, and how many of them are there? You can use any military engineering terms, since I have some quite passable manuals and drawings here. Do you know details of any other Prussian fortresses? I am fairly familiar with Coblenz (Ehrenbreitstein, at least), and have seen a plan of Mainz. What interests me particularly is the manner in which the new Montalembert structures are built in Germany; it’s impossible to find out anything about this owing to Prussian secretiveness.

Write soon. Warmest regards to your wife and to Cluss from

Your

F. Engels.

Marx To Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 312;

First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1962.

Text according to: letter from Cluss to Weydemeyer of 3 May 1853.

[London, 17 April 1853]

... Today I have received the first 5 numbers from New York, whether from Weydemeyer or from Kellner I do not know. With most of them I was already familiar through you. This is at least a decent paper — a rare thing in America — and a working man’s paper. However, I cannot say I very much care for the chief editor’s affected effusions concerning ‘questions personnelles’ which are at one and the same time party questions, or for his pseudo-naive gentility and biblical portentousness. But you have to take this newspaper as it comes. What I liked best of all was Weydemeyer’s introduction to his ökonomische Skizzen. Good stuff that. I have approached our people here; Dronke and Pieper have, I think, already sent something. I shall speak to Jones. On the whole it is difficult to get contributions. I myself have too much to do. The others unfortunately are still somewhat put off by their earlier experiences. Lupus is in a wretched state. Eccarius has to work away at his tailoring from 5 in the morning until 8 at night and is in a dangerously hectic condition. Engels, when not stuck in the office, is completely taken up with his studies, and probably he too has not yet got over the wrongs he thinks he has suffered at the hands of the American Press. Our party is, alas, very pauvre. I shall also approach ex-lieutenant Steffen, ex-witness for the defence at the Cologne trial, presently a schoolmaster in the vicinity of London. He has more spare time than anyone else and is very capable.

Pieper has still not finished the articles you want, which explains why you haven’t yet had them.

As for the Hirsch affair, a statement immediately went off to Engels via Engels, which, etc., etc. I've known for 6 months or more that there was something fishy about Bangya. I didn’t break with the fellow until, like the jackass he is, he had let me find out all about his connections, handed over all documents that put me in the right and him in the wrong, and generally placed himself at my mercy. I threw him out months ago at Szemere’s.

My suspicions of Willich have only been confirmed by his latest step. D'abord, I know that he and Kinkel paid and continue to pay Hirsch out of revolutionary funds! Then, at the Cologne trial, soon after it began, he boasted to Fleury (who in turn passed it on to Imandt) that he had in his possession a letter of mine to Bangya dated Manchester. I challenged Bangya about this at the time. He said he was willing to be confronted with Fleury. On being informed of this by Imandt at my behest, Fleury retracted. Thus at that time Willich was illicitly consorting with Hirsch. He knew that Hirsch was illicitly consorting with Greif and that his friend Fleury was a spy. It was through these fellows that he got hold of my letter. The ‘gallant worthy’ — for whom, en passant free meat and drink is le dernier but [the ultimate aim] — wanted to set a trap for me, and to that end became embroiled in intrigues with mouchards [police spies].

True, he sent Hirsch to Cologne. True, I heard later that Hirsch was in Cologne. But why did he send Hirsch to Cologne, and when did he send him there? Firstly, when it was already too late. 2. When the police in Cologne had themselves denounced his friend Fleury. 3. When he himself, having become suspect, wished to rehabilitate himself as a ‘magnanimous worthy’ by means of this theatrical coup. This was Hirsch’s own account of the affair on his return...

Reichenbach and family, ‘clever’ Lieutenant Schimmelpfennig complete with wife and Brüningk legacy of £1,000, and lastly, the artist Schmolze, set sail today for America. Bon voyage! But Reichenbach’s flight has deprived poor Lupus of the last of his lessons. It’s most unfortunate for him. He’s no Kinkel. Nor does he know how to lick the boots of the bourgeois like the future ‘President of the German Republic’ and his ‘consort’, both of them consummate sycophants, humbugs and parasites. The amiable Gottfried has so far succeeded in ingratiating himself that he has been accorded the use of one of London University’s lecture rooms to repeat before a London audience his old series of lectures on Christian art in the Middle Ages. He is giving them free and gratis in the hope that he will be able to worm his way into the post of Professor of Aesthetics at London University. He delivers them in abominable English, reading from a manuscript. Though welcomed with applause at the beginning of the series, he subsequently proved such a complete failure that not even the organised claque of Jewish aesthetics-mongers could save him. Edgar Bauer, who was present — Kinkel gave his first lecture last Tuesday — told me all about it. It seems to have been a truly nauseating and wretched performance.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 325;

First published: in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1929.

[Manchester, before 28 May 1853]

Dear Marx,

So the bomb is at long last about to go off, as you will see from the enclosed scrappy proof and Weydemeyer’s letter. Willich’s manner of extricating himself is strange, at any rate; you will undoubtedly be much amused by these lame circumlocutions and the awkward and embarrassed style. The fellow’s been hard hit. But papa Schramm would seem to have gravely insulted him in Cincinnati; all grist to the mill. One thing we may be sure of is that the only effect of this statement will be to compromise the chivalrous one even more.

So just because the New-Yorker-Criminal Zeitung!!!!! has published attacks upon him, the gallant Willich feels compelled to break his heroic silence.

‘Putting the case at its highest!’ In Willich’s case bodies do not fall downwards but upwards! Good-bye to gravity! The fellow’s quite mad. The same old tale of assassination too! We shall now see the aforesaid Schramm leap promptly into the lists, statement in hand.

To put your mind at rest, I can inform you that the Neu-England-Ztg. today advised me of the dispatch of 420 copies of Revelations to my address, so they may be here tomorrow or, if the parcel didn’t go off by the last steamer, in a week at the most.

The fellows have the effrontery to send me a letter signed semi-anonymously ‘Office of the N.-E.-Z.’ inviting me to contribute. That’s the last straw!

At all events, it’s a good thing that we now possess in the Reform an organ in which, if the worst comes to the worst, we can still make ourselves heard in the polemic against Willich and Co. As a result of the rumpus, Kellner is becoming more and more embroiled.

Weydemeyer’s misprint shouldn’t surprise you. After all, you must know that when Weydemeyer does something, it is always ‘similar’ rather than ‘glorious’.

The little fellow is coming here next Sunday. I am curious to see how he is shaping as a clerk in Bradford. At all events the good Buckup seems to be working him very hard.

Yesterday I read the book on Arabian inscriptions which I told you about. The thing is not without interest, repulsive though it is to find the parson and biblical apologist forever peeping through. His greatest triumph is to show that Gibbon made some mistakes in the field of ancient geography, from which he also concludes that Gibbon’s theology was deplorable. The thing is called The Historical Geography of Arabia, by the Reverend Charles Forster. The best things to emerge from it are:

1. The supposed genealogy of Noah, Abraham, etc., to be found in Genesis is a fairly accurate enumeration of the Bedouin tribes of the time, according to the degree of their dialectal relationships, etc. As we all know, Bedouin tribes continue to this day to call themselves Beni Saled, Beni Yusuf, etc., i.e. sons of so and so. This nomenclature, which owes its origins to the early patriarchal mode of existence, ultimately leads up to this type of genealogy. The enumeration in Genesis is plus ou moins confirmed by ancient geographers, while more recent travellers have shown that most of the old names still exist, though in dialectally altered form. But from this it emerges that the Jews themselves were no more than a small Bedouin tribe like the others, which was brought into conflict with the other Bedouins by local conditions, agriculture, etc.

2. As for the great Arab invasion, you will remember our discussion when we concluded that, like the Mongols, the Bedouins carried out periodic invasions and that the Assyrian and Babylonian Empires were founded by Bedouin tribes on the very same spot as, later, the Caliphate of Baghdad. The founders of the Babylonian Empire, the Chaldeans, still exist under the same name, Beni Chaled, and in the same locality. The rapid construction of large cities, such as Nineveh and Babylon, happened in just the same way as the creation in India only 300 years ago of similar giant cities, Agra, Delhi, Lahore, Muttan, by the Afghan and/or Tartar invasions. In this way the Mohammedan invasion loses much of its distinctive character.

3. In the South-West, where the Arabs settled, they appear to have been a civilised people like the Egyptians, Assyrians, etc., as is evident from their buildings. This also explains many things about the Mohammedan invasion. So far as the religious fraud is concerned, the ancient inscriptions in the South, in which the ancient Arab national tradition of monotheism (as with the American Indians) still predominates, a tradition of which the Hebrew is only a small part would seem to indicate that Mohammed’s religious revolution, like every religious movement, was formally a reaction, a would-be return to what was old and simple.

It is now quite clear to me that the Jews’ so-called Holy Writ is nothing more than a record of ancient Arab religious and tribal traditions, modified by the Jews’ early separation from their tribally related but nomadic neighbours. The circumstance of Palestine’s being surrounded on the Arabian side by nothing but desert, i.e. the land of the Bedouins, explains its separate development. But the ancient Arabian inscriptions and traditions and the Koran, as well as the ease with which all genealogies, etc., can now be unravelled, show that the main content was Arab, or rather, generally Semitic, as in our case the Edda and the German heroic saga.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 330;

First published: in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1929.

[London,] 2 June 1853, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Frederic,

The first half of the £20 note has turned up. I am writing this before going to the Museum, i.e. at a very early hour.

I would have sent you long ago the enclosed great Willich’s statement to the Neu-England-Zeitung had I not assumed that you'd had the thing from Weydemeyer. In conception this second statement is pure, genuine Willich. Others write ‘essays’, he writes ‘facts’, and only if one has been on a ‘personal footing’ with him does the calumny lose its sting. It is the manoeuvre of your petty partisan. He does not answer for his own Hirsch. Rather, he explains to the public Marx’s ‘motives’ for not refuting his Hirsch. And now he has discovered a terrain where he can operate with a measure of virtuosity. And it is with ‘reluctance’ that the noble man reveals the facts to the ‘public’. Needless to say, he has preferred to whisper them to the philistines in the privacy of the beer-parlour and, for the past three years, to peddle them ‘contraband-wise’ throughout two hemispheres, juvante Kinkelio. Then his manoeuvring to keep the public on tenterhooks. They forget the facts among which he twists and turns and eagerly await the facts which are to demolish the ‘critical authors’. And the noble man is ‘distinguished’ withal, as befits a ‘public figure’. When he does reply, it will not be to Marx’s uncouth ‘agents’ but to the ‘ingenious’ quill-pushers themselves. Finally, he gives the public to understand that what makes his opponents so cocksure is their belief in his ‘decision’ to retire and, with a roll of drums, this important personage proceeds to announce that he has ‘changed’ his mind.

Tout ça n’est pas trop mal pour un vieux sous-lieutenant. But as for the style of statement No. 2 — bad as it is, it is nevertheless apocryphal. Other hands have been at work on it, probably those of Madame Anneke. At all events, the necessary supplement to Tellering’s pamphlet will now be published by Mr Willich and, the dirty business having been once placed before the public, il faut aller jusqu'au bout. If Weydemeyer, Cluss and Co. operate with skill, they should now be able to put a spoke in Willich’s wheel and ruin the impact and novelty of the surprises he is holding in store for the public. Nous verrons.

The praise you accord to my ‘budding’ English, I find most encouraging. What I chiefly lack is first, assurance as to grammar and secondly, skill in using various secondary idioms which alone enable one to write with any pungency. Mr Tribune has given special prominence to a note about my 2nd article on Gladstone’s Budget, drawing the attention of readers to my ‘masterly exposition’ and going on to say that nowhere have they seen ‘a more able criticism’, and do ‘not expect to see one’. Well, that is all right. But in the following article it proceeds to make an ass of me by printing under my name a heading of mine which is quite trifling and intentionally so, whereas it appropriates your ‘Swiss’ thing. I shall write and tell Dana that, ‘flattering’ though it may be if they occasionally use my things for a leader, they would oblige me by not putting my name to trifles. I have now sent the jackasses, amongst other things, 2 articles on ‘China’ with reference to England. If you have the time and happen to feel like writing about something — Switzerland, the East, France, England or cotton, or Denmark, say — you should do so on occasion, for I am now slogging away with an eye to the fellow’s money-bags in order to make good the 3 weeks I have lost. If you send me something from time to time — de omnibus rebus — I shall always be able to place it, for as you know, I am the fellows’ ‘maid of all work’, and it’s always easy to relate one thing to another and to every day. Panta en panta.

As regards the Hebrews and Arabs, I found your letter most interesting. It can, by the by, be shown that 1. in the case of all eastern tribes there has been, since the dawn of history, a general relationship between the settlement of one section and the continued nomadism of the others. 2. In Mohammed’s time the trade route from Europe to Asia underwent considerable modification, and the cities of Arabia, which had had a large share of the trade with India, etc., suffered a commercial decline — a fact which at all events contributed to the process. 3. So far as religion is concerned, the question may be reduced to a general and hence easily answerable one: Why does the history of the East appear as a history of religions?

On the subject of the growth of eastern cities one could hardly find anything more brilliant, comprehensive or striking than Voyages contenant la description des états du Grand Mogol, etc. by old Franoçois Bernier (for 9 years Aurangzeb’s physician). He provides in addition a very nice account of military organisation and the manner in which these large armies fed themselves, etc. Concerning both these he remarks inter alia:

‘The main body consists of cavalry, the infantry not being so numerous as is commonly supposed unless all those serving-people and bazaar or market folk who follow the army are taken for true warriors; for, if such were the case, there would, I think, be good reason to put at 2 to 300,000 men the strength of that army alone that is with the king, and sometimes even more, as, for example, when it is known that he will be long absent from the capital city; which would not, indeed, seem so very surprising to anyone familiar with all the strange impedimenta of tents, kitchen, clothing, furniture, and even women quite often, and, consequently, elephants, camels, oxen, horses, porters, foragers, sutlers, merchants of all kinds and servants who follow in the wake of these armies, nor to anyone familiar with the conditions and government peculiar to the country, namely that the king is the sole and unique proprietor of all the lands in the kingdom, whence it necessarily follows that every capital city, such as Delhi or Agra, fixes almost wholly on the militia and is therefore obliged to follow the king whenever he goes campaigning for a time, these cities neither being, nor indeed able to be, in any respect a Paris, but being really nothing but an army encampment rather better and more commodiously situated than if it were in the open country.’ [in French, with Marx’s italics]

In reference to the Grand Mogul’s march on Kashmir, with an army 400,000 strong, he writes:

How and upon what so great an army can subsist in the field, or so large a concourse of men and animals, is difficult to conceive. To that end one can only surmise, and such is indeed the case, that the Indians are very sober and very simple in what they eat and that, of this great number of horsemen, not one tenth, nay, not even one twentieth, eats meat during the march; provided they have their khichri, or mess of rice and other vegetables, whereon they pour brown butter when cooked, they are content. It should also be known that camels are extremely resistant to work, hunger and thirst, live on very little and eat anything and that, as soon as the army reaches camp, the camel-drivers lead them out to graze in the countryside, where they eat everything that comes their way; further, that the same merchants that keep the bazaars in Delhi are obliged to keep them in the field also, likewise the lesser merchants, etc. ... finally, concerning forage, all these poor people go roving in every direction to the villages to buy the same and to earn something there, and that their chief and habitual recourse is to scratch up whole stretches of country with a kind of trowel, pounding and washing the little herbs thus scratched up, and taking them to the army for sale...

Bernier rightly sees all the manifestations of the East — he mentions Turkey, Persia and Hindustan — as having a common basis, namely the absence of private landed property. This is the real clef, even to the eastern heaven.

It would seem to be no go with Borchardt; nevertheless I think the fellow might be prepared to try and obtain recommendations for Lupus from Steinthal, etc., to London merchants. So much, at least, you could compel him to do, and it would mean a great deal to Lupus.

What do you think about the failure of the hudibrastic Rodolpho Gladstone’s ‘Financial Scheme for reducing the national Debt'?

The day before yesterday the Journal des Débats revealed the true secret of Russia’s impudence. The Continent, it says, must either expose its independence to danger from Russia, or it must expose itself to war, and that is ‘la revolution sociale’. What the wretched Débats forgets, however, is that Russia is no less afraid of revolution than Mr Bertin, and that the whole question now is who can most convincingly simulate ‘non-fear’. But England and France — the official ones — are so abject that Nicholas, if he sticks to his guns, will be able to do what he likes.

Vale faveque.

C. M.

Have written to Lassalle, who will probably be ready to take receipt of a few 100 copies of the pamphlet and distribute them in Germany. The question now is how are we to get them across? When I was in Manchester Charles suggested it might be done by including them in a consignment of merchandise. You might ask him about this again.

P.S. There’s been a delay over the posting of this letter and so I can include an acknowledgment of the parcel of books and the other half of the note.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 335;

First published: in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1929.

Manchester, 6 June [1853,] evening

Dear Marx,

I had intended to write to you by the first post today, but was detained at the office until 8 o'clock. You will have received both Weydemeyer’s and Cluss’ anti-Willich statements in the Criminal Zeitung, i.e. direct from America. If not, write to me at once. As usual, papa Weydemeyer is too long-winded, very seldom makes a point, then promptly blunts it with his style, and unfolds his well-known lack of verve with rare composure. Nevertheless, the man has done his best, the story about Hentze, the ‘comrade-in-arms’, and the influence of others on Hirsch’s pen is nicely fashioned; his incredible style and his composure, regarded over there as impassibility, will appeal to the philistines, and his performance can, on the whole, be regarded as satisfactory. Cluss’ statement, on the other hand, pleases me enormously. In every line we hear the chuckle of l'homme supérieur who, through ‘personal contact’ with Willich, has, as it were, become physically conscious of his superiority. For lightness of style, this surpasses everything that Cluss has ever written. Never a clumsy turn of phrase, not a trace of gêne or embarrassment. How well it becomes him thus to ape the worthy citizen of benevolent mien who nevertheless betrays the cloven hoof at every turn. How splendid, the sentence about ‘revolutionary agencies’ being ‘a swindle’ off which, according to Willich, he lives. The chivalrous one will have been surprised to find among the uncouth agents, a fellow who is so dashing, so adroit, so aggressive by nature and yet so unassumingly noble in his bearing, and who returns thrust for thrust a tempo. So subtly — far more subtly and deftly than himself. If only Willich had the discernment to discover this! But irritation and due reflection will, I trust, give him a little more insight.

It is obvious that we shall have to see this dirty business through to the bitter end. The more resolutely we tackle it the better. You'll find, by the way, that it won’t be so bad after all. The chivalrous one has promised vastly more than he can fulfil. We shall hear of assassination attempts, etc., the Schramm affair will be glamorously tricked out, and such chimeras will be evoked as will cause us to stare at one another in amazement, not having the faintest idea what the man is actually talking about; at worst he will tell the story about Marx and Engels arriving drunk one evening at Great Windmill Street (vide Kinkel in Cincinnati, coram Huzelio). If he goes as far as that, I shall tell the scandal-loving American public what the Besançon Company used to talk about when Willich and the formosus pastor Corydon Rauf were not present. Au bout du compte, what can a brute of this kind find to tax us with? Mark my word, it will be just as pauvre as Tellering’s smear.

I shall be seeing Borchardt within the next few days. If any recommendations are to be had, you can trust me to get them. But I hardly imagine that Steinthal, etc., have connections of the sort in London. It’s almost wholly outside their line of business. Besides, if only for fear of making a fool of himself, the fellow will attempt to put off doing anything about it up here. If it were not for Lupus, I'd consign the chap, etc. I can’t abide him, with his smooth, self-important, vainglorious, deceitful charlatan’s physiognomy.

If Lassalle has given you a good, neutral address in Düsseldorf, you can send me 100 copies. We shall arrange for them to be packed in bales of twist by firms up here; but they should not be addressed to Lassalle himself, since the packages will go to Gladbach, Elberfeld and so on, where they will have to be stamped and sent by post to Düsseldorf. However, we cannot entrust a package for Lassalle or the Hatzfeldt woman to any local firm, because, 1. they all employ at least one Rhinelander who knows all the gossip, or 2. if that goes off all right, the recipients of the bales will get to know about it, or 3. at the very best the postal authorities will take a look at the things before delivering them. We have a good address in Cologne, but are not, alas, very well acquainted with the people who are the principal buyers here for the firm in Cologne, and hence cannot expect them to do any smuggling. Indeed, what we shall tell the people here is that the packages contain presents for the fair sex.

From all this you will gather that I am once again on passable terms with Charles. The affair was settled with great dispatch at the first suitable opportunity. Nevertheless you will realise that the fool derives a certain pleasure from having been given preference over myself in one rotten respect at least, because of Mr Gottfried Ermen’s envy of my old man. Habeat sibi. He at any rate realises that, if I so choose, I can become maître de la situation within 48 hours, and that’s sufficient.

The absence of landed property is indeed the key to the whole of the East. Therein lies its political and religious history. But how to explain the fact that orientals never reached the stage of landed property, not even the feudal kind? This is, I think, largely due to the climate, combined with the nature of the land, more especially the great stretches of desert extending from the Sahara right across Arabia, Persia, India and Tartary to the highest of the Asiatic uplands. Here artificial irrigation is the first prerequisite for agriculture, and this is the responsibility either of the communes, the provinces or the central government. In the East, the government has always consisted of 3 departments only: Finance (pillage at home), War (pillage at home and abroad), and travaux publics, provision for reproduction. The British government in India has put a somewhat narrower interpretation on nos. 1 and 2 while completely neglecting no. 3, so that Indian agriculture is going to wrack and ruin. Free competition is proving an absolute fiasco there. The fact that the land was made fertile by artificial means and immediately ceased to be so when the conduits fell into disrepair, explains the otherwise curious circumstance that vast expanses are now and wastes which once were magnificently cultivated (Palmyra, Petra, the ruins in the Yemen, any number of localities in Egypt, Persia, Hindustan); it explains the fact that one single war of devastation could depopulate and entirely strip a country of its civilisation for centuries to come. This, I believe, also accounts for the destruction of southern Arabian trade before Mohammed’s time, a circumstance very rightly regarded by you as one of the mainsprings of the Mohammedan revolution. I am not sufficiently well acquainted with the history of trade during the first six centuries A.D. to be able to judge to what extent general material conditions in the world made the trade route via Persia to the Black Sea and to Syria and Asia Minor via the Persian Gulf preferable to the Red Sea route. But one significant factor, at any rate, must have been the relative safety of the caravans in the well-ordered Persian Empire under the Sassanids, whereas between 200 and 600 A.D. the Yemen was almost continuously being subjugated, overrun and pillaged by the Abyssinians. By the seventh century the cities of southern Arabia, still flourishing in Roman times, had become a veritable wilderness of ruins; in the course of 500 years what were purely mythical, legendary traditions regarding their origin had been appropriated by the neighbouring Bedouins, (cf. the Koran and the Arab historian Novaïri), and the alphabet in which the local inscriptions had been written was almost wholly unknown although there was no other, so that de facto writing had fallen into oblivion. Things of this kind presuppose, not only a superseding, probably due to general trading conditions, but outright violent destruction such as could only be explained by the Ethiopian invasion. The expulsion of the Abyssinians did not take place until about 40 years before Mohammed, and was plainly the first act of the Arabs’ awakening national consciousness, which was further aroused by Persian invasions from the North penetrating almost as far as Mecca. I shall not be tackling the history of Mohammed himself for a few days yet; so far it seems to me to have the character of a Bedouin reaction against the settled, albeit decadent urban fellaheen whose religion by then was also much debased, combining as it did a degenerate form of nature worship with a degenerate form of Judaism and Christianity.

Old Bernier’s stuff is really very fine. It’s a real pleasure to get back to something written by a sensible, lucid old Frenchman who constantly hits the nail on the head sans avoir l'air de s'en apercevoir [without appearing to be aware of it].

Since I am in any case tied up with the eastern mummery for some weeks, I have made use of the opportunity to learn Persian. I am put off Arabic, partly by my inborn hatred of Semitic languages, partly by the impossibility of getting anywhere, without considerable expenditure of time, in so extensive a language — one which has 4,000 roots and goes back over 2,000-3,000 years. By comparison, Persian is absolute child’s play. Were it not for that damned Arabic alphabet in which every half dozen letters looks like every other half dozen and the vowels are not written, I would undertake to learn the entire grammar within 48 hours. This for the better encouragement of Pieper should he feel the urge to imitate me in this poor joke. I have set myself a maximum of three weeks for Persian, so if he stakes two months on it he'll best me anyway. What a pity Weitling can’t speak Persian; he would then have his langue universelle toute trouvie [universal language ready-made] since it is, to my knowledge, the only language where ‘me’ and ‘to me’ are never at odds, the dative and accusative always being the same.

It is, by the way, rather pleasing to read dissolute old Hafiz in the original language, which sounds quite passable and, in his grammar, old Sir William Jones likes to cite as examples dubious Persian jokes, subsequently translated into Greek verse in his Commentariis poeseos asiaticae, because even in Latin they seem to him too obscene. These commentaries, Jones’ Works, Vol. II, De Poesi erotica, will amuse you. Persian prose, on the other hand, is deadly dull. E.g. the Rauzât-us-safâ by the noble Mirkhond, who recounts the Persian epic in very flowery but vacuous language. Of Alexander the Great, he says that the name Iskander, in the Ionian language, is Akshid Rus (like Iskander, a corrupt version of Alexandros); it means much the same as filusuf, which derives from fila, love, and sufa, wisdom, ‘Iskander’ thus being synonymous with ‘friend of wisdom’.

Of a retired king he says: ‘He beat the drum of abdication with the drumsticks of retirement’, as will père Willich, should he involve himself any more deeply in the literary fray. Willich will also suffer the same fate as King Afrasiab of Turan when deserted by his troops and of whom Mirkhond says: ‘He gnawed the nails of horror with the teeth of desperation until the blood of vanquished consciousness welled forth from the finger-tips of shame.'

More tomorrow.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 344;

First published: in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1929.

London, 14 June 1853, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Frederic,

Having been prevented by all sorts of business and domestic affairs, I have only today got round to replying to your two letters and acknowledging receipt of the American money (handed over to Freiligrath), likewise the balance of the American Tribune money. If that’s the sort of business relationship you and Charles had with your ‘intermediary’, then you've been up to some trick for my sake. For since it was not that fellow, but you, who advanced the money against the bill, you and Charles could just as well have sent the bill to America without the fellow. At least, that’s how it seems to me.

I did not inform Pieper of your news for the following reasons: Pieper was becoming more and more of a wreck and some 8 or 10 days ago I took him to task about the state of his health. It then transpired that his illness was going de pis en pis [from bad to worse] at the hands of his English quack. I therefore suggested I should take him straight to Bartholomew’s Hospital — the London hospital at which the foremost and most renowned doctors treat the public for nothing. He came with me. An ancient Hippocrates, after examining the corpus delicti and questioning him about his former treatment, told him: ‘You have been a fool’, explaining at the same time that he would be ‘down’ within three months if he did not follow his instructions to the letter. The efficacy of the new treatment was immediately apparent and in 2 weeks the man will be sain et sauf. The case was too serious for the treatment to be interrupted, and anyhow Freiligrath has a post in view for Pieper. If nothing comes of it, I shall let you know.

Rumpf, our jolly tailor, is now shut up in a lunatic asylum. Some 5 months ago, in order to extricate himself from a social quandary, le malheureux married an elderly woman, became excessively respectable, foreswore all spirits and worked like a carthorse. About a week since he took to drinking again, sent for me a couple of days ago, revealed that he had discovered the means of making the whole world happy, that I was to be his minister, etc., etc. He has been in the asylum since yesterday. It’s a pity about the fellow.

In The Leader — which, by the by, has become a purely bourgeois sheet — Ruge has announced that he will be giving lectures on German philosophy in London. Needless to say he takes this opportunity to give himself a puff. E.g. ‘Where style is concerned, there is only one man whom the German people set alongside him — Lessing. In the same issue of The Leader, the Russian Herzen advertises his collected works adding that, together with the Polish Committee, he is to set up a Russo-Polish propaganda press here in London.

One of the enclosed letters from Cluss will reveal to you the nature of the main blow with which Willich is threatening me. He refers to the £20 borrowed by me from the Refugee Committee at a time when I myself was distrained because my Chelsea landlady, although I had paid her, had not paid her landlord, — a debt which I repaid down to the last farthing by the necessary instalments. You must now advise me what tactics to adopt. If that’s how the good Willich thinks he’s going to do me in, he must be a regular ‘bonhomme’.[simpleton]

Carey, the American political economist, has brought out a new book, Slavery at Home and Abroad Here ‘slavery’ covers all forms of servitude, wage-slavery , etc. He has sent me his book in which he quotes me repeatedly (from the Tribune) now as ‘a recent English writer’, now as ‘Correspondence of The New York Tribune’. As I have told you before, this man, in his earlier works, propounds the ‘harmony’ of the bourgeoisie’s economic foundations and attributes all mischief to unnecessary interference by the State. The State was his bête noire. He is now playing a different tune. All ills are blamed on the centralising effect of big industry. But this centralising effect is in turn blamed on England, who has made herself the workshop of the world and has forced all other countries to revert to brutish agriculture divorced from manufacturing. In its turn, responsibility for England’s sins is laid on the theory of Ricardo-Malthus, and specially Ricardo’s theory of rent. The necessary consequence both of Ricardo’s theory and of industrial centralisation would be communism. And to obviate all this, to counter centralisation with localisation and the union, — a union scattered throughout the land — of factory and farm, our ultra-free-trader finally recommends — protective tariffs. To obviate the effects of bourgeois industry, responsibility for which he lays on England, his recourse, as a genuine Yankee, is to speed up this process in America itself by artificial means. For the rest, his opposition to England drives him into Sismondian praise of the petty bourgeoisie in Switzerland, Germany, China, etc. And this is the chap who used to deride France for her resemblance to China. The only thing of definite interest in the book is the comparison between Negro slavery as formerly practised by the English in Jamaica and elsewhere, and Negro slavery in the United States. He demonstrates how the main stock of Negroes in Jamaica always consisted of freshly imported barbarians, since their treatment by the English meant not only that the Negro population was not maintained, but also that 2/3 of the yearly imports always went to waste, whereas the present generation of Negroes in America is a native product, more or less Yankeefied, English speaking, etc., and hence capable of being emancipated.

The Tribune, needless to say, is puffing Carey’s book for all it’s worth. Both, indeed, have this in common, that, in the guise of Sismondian-philanthropic-socialist anti-industrialism, they represent the protectionist, i.e. industrial, bourgeoisie of America. That is also the key to the mystery why the Tribune, despite all its ‘isms’ and socialist flourishes, manages to be the ‘leading journal’ in the United States.

Your article on Switzerland was, of course, a direct swipe at the Tribune’s ‘leaders’ (anti-centralisation, etc.) and their man Carey continued this clandestine campaign in my first article on India, in which England’s destruction of native industries is described as revolutionary. This they will find very shocking. Incidentally the whole administration of India by the British was detestable and still remains so today.

The stationary nature of this part of Asia, despite all the aimless activity on the political surface, can be completely explained by two mutually supporting circumstances: 1. The public works system of the central government and, 2. Alongside this, the entire Empire which, apart from a few large cities, is an agglomeration of villages, each with its own distinct organisation and each forming its own small world. A parliamentary report described these villages as follows:

* ‘A village, geographically considered, is a tract of country comprising some 100 or 1000 acres of arable and waste lands: politically viewed, it resembles a corporation or township. Every village is, and appears always to have been, in fact, a separate community or republic. Officials: 1. the Potail, Goud, Mundil etc. as he is termed in different languages, is the head inhabitant, who has generally the superintendence of the affairs of the village, settles the disputes of the inhabitants, attends to the police, and performs the duty of collecting the revenue within the village... 2. The Curnum Shanboag, or Putwaree, is the register. 3. The Taliary or Sthulwar and. 4. the Totie, are severally the watchmen of the village and of the crops. 5. the Neerguntee distributes the water of the streams or reservoirs in just proportion to the several fields. 6. The Joshee, or astrologer, announces the operation of farming. 7. The smith and 8. the carpenter frame the rude instruments seed-times and harvests, and the lucky or unlucky days or hours for all the of husbandry, and the ruder dwellings of the farmer. 9. The potter fabricates the only utensils of the village. 10. The waterman keeps clean the few garments... 11. The barber, 12. the silversmith, who often combines the function of village poet and schoolmaster. Then the Brahmin for worship. Under this simple form of municipal government the inhabitants of the country have lived from time immemorial. The boundaries of the villages have been but seldom altered; and although the villages themselves have been sometimes injured, and even desolated by war, famine and disease; the same name, the same limits, the same interests, and even the same families, have continued for ages. The inhabitants give themselves no trouble about the breaking up and division of kingdoms, while the village remains entire, they care not to what power it is transferred, or to what sovereign it devolves. Its internal economy remains unchanged.'*

The post of Potail is mostly hereditary. In some of these communities the lands of the village cultivated in common, in most of them each occupant tills his own field. Within the same, slavery and the caste system. Waste lands for common pasture. Home-weaving and spinning by wives and daughters. These idyllic republics, of which only the village boundaries are jealously guarded against neighbouring villages, continue to exist in well-nigh perfect form in the North Western parts of India only recently occupied by the English. No more solid basis for Asiatic despotism and stagnation is, I think, conceivable. And however much the English may have Irelandised the country, the breaking up of the archetypal forms was the conditio sine qua non for Europeanisation. The Tax-gatherer alone could not have brought this about. Another essential factor was the destruction of the ancient industries, which robbed these villages of their self-supporting character.

In Bali, an island off the east coast of Java, this Hindu organisation still intact, alongside Hindu religion, its traces, like those of Hindu influence, discernible all over Java. So far as the property question is concerned, this is a great bone of contention among English writers on India. In the broken mountainous terrain south of the Kistna, however, there appears to have been property in land. In Java, on the other hand, as noted in the History of Java by a former English governor, Sir Stamford Raffles, the sovereign [was] absolute landlord throughout the country ‘Where rent to any considerable amount was attainable’. At all events, the Mohammedans seem to have been the first in the whole of Asia to have established the principle of ‘no property in land’.

Regarding the above-mentioned villages, I should note that they already feature in the Manu according to which the whole organisation rests on them. 10 are administered by a senior collector, then 100, then 1,000.

Write soon.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 348;

First published: in full in Marx and Engels, Works, 1962;

Printed according to: letter from Cluss to Weydemeyer of 28 June 1853.

[London, about 14 June 1853]

... On the other hand, a reply must be given, and that can best be done by third parties. In which case you need feel no compunction about entering into personal matters and regaling the brutal democratic ‘temperament’ with a few pungent ‘anecdotes’...

In dealings with the Reform I would recommend, besides shrewdness, une moderation extréme. This clever-clever philistine who, in Hesse — and Hesse was his world — represented nothing except the demiurge of this, his world: the petty bourgeois, and who now assumes the air of one who, from the very start, has represented the proletariat on a ‘materialist basis’ — this smiling nonentity who, with Solomon-like dicta, ‘stresses’ his shrewdness and remarkable composure vis-à-vis rebellious parties — this incarnation of a marginal gloss to Hesse’s articles; this fellow, then, does not, of course, interest me — he repels me. But you people helped to make the paper. It appears in New York.

Half Germany will come to New York for the Exhibition. You have no other paper in New York. Might it not, then, be impolitic to throw over Kellner and the paper? It would in the end be doing the fellows another favour. Pretend to be naive. Go on writing; you couldn’t do him a worse turn. Do not emancipate him from influences which, as everything goes to show, have been damnably irksome to him. Do as the Prussian bourgeois do. The government and its Manteuffel twist and turn in vain to rid themselves of the friendship of those bourgeois. The latter, for their part, pretend to believe in the constitutionality of their government, and le gouvernement est constituonnel malgré lui-même: that’s worldly wisdom for you.

The Neu-England-Zeitung is equally unreliable and likely to remain so. Mr Schläger, a pedant replete with platitudes, a presumptuous bore who always knows better (à la Kellner, ‘le mieux est le plus grand ennemi du bien [the better is the greatest enemy of the good]), has written to Pieper suggesting I write for the N.-E.-Z. about the necessary transition from the bourgeois to the communist mode of production.

Citizen Marx with his ‘schematising and organising’ intellect would, it seems, be well suited to this task set him by Citizen Schläger, but Citizen Marx must ‘forego his abstract language’ and write in the same manner as all, etc. Worthy Citizen Schläger! In the same letter he enjoins Pieper on no account to attack Citizens Ruge and Heinzen (he regularly deletes such passages) since the ‘élite of his readers’ (just think what the others must be like!) are Heinzenites, and the N.-E.-Z. is destined (literally) to inherit the readers of the Janus Mighty Citizen Schläger! Almighty Pompey! Nevertheless, I have advised Pieper to go on writing for Schläger.

Le motif est très simple. We are not doing our enemies a favour by writing for them. Tout au contraire. We could hardly play them a worse trick...

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 363;

First published: in full in MEGA, 1929.

[London,] 7 September 1853, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Frederic,

Your letter did, indeed, arrive too late. I condensed the stuff by cutting out unnecessary pathos, tidied it up a bit, and sent it to the amiable organ of the united ‘licensed victuallers’ on Monday. Not inserted. At the same time, however, this highly consistent paper published a short letter ‘From a Native Correspondent’ (presumably D. Urquhart) in its Monday issue, in which its own ‘Foreign Correspondent’ was quite plainly unmasked as a ‘Russian Agent’, while Bakunin himself was not exactly made out to be a saint. Probably The Morning Advertiser rejected my riposte because less confused than that of the ‘Native’. Now the thing is to come out in The People’s Paper.

It was through a mere lapsus linguae — out of long habit — that I mentioned Mr Dronke in my letter to you. I don’t believe that ‘little’ Blanqui’s words are of any consequence, or that we shall gain anything by an appendix.

The worthy little man has stirred up such a mighty pother that 1. Lupus has never said a word to me about his departure, although I had long since learnt of it through you; 2. that this same Lupus is always very guarded in his references to you; 3. that last night I was treated to a scene which was hardly creditable.

I was busy at work. Wife and children in the room. In comes Lupus with portentous tread — to take his leave at last, I supposed, for not once in my house had he let fall a word about his impending departure.

A year earlier I had borrowed a little Spanish grammar from him, by Franceson, maybe 120 pages. So far as I could recall, I had returned the trashy object 5 months before. Or else, Dronke had pinched it.

The old gentleman had already asked my wife and Lenchen about the thing on two previous occasions and had been told that they would look for it.

Last night, then — the fellow was snappish from the moment he came in — I told him in as soothing tones as possible that I couldn’t find the damned thing, that I had looked for it everywhere and believed I had returned it to him, etc., etc. ‘You've sold it!’ came the boorish, uncouth, insolent reply. (I'd wager a sovereign that nowhere in London could anyone get 2 farthings for the rubbish.) I, of course, jump to my feet, an altercation ensues, stubborn as a mule he persists in his nonsense, insults me ‘au sein de ma famille’. As you know, I'm willing to put up with a great deal from an old man in his dotage who has become venerable as a party tradition. However, there are limits. I believe the old fool was taken aback when at last I bared my teeth at him.

All this is the result of Dronke’s intrigues, too constant an indulgence in gin, and the evaporation of the cerebral juices. Perhaps the sea air will have a beneficial effect on his thinking organ. One may, perhaps, lay claim to the privilege of being an old blusterer, but one should not abuse it. My own lot is no bed of roses, nor can I in consequence regard his worldly worries as an excuse.

The hobby-horse presently being ridden by those wretched Russians, in both the Tribune and the London Advertiser (though differing in person and form), is that the Russian people is democratic through and through, whilst official Russia (Csar and bureaucracy) is exclusively German, likewise the aristocracy. So Germany must be fought in Russia, not Russia in Germany.

You know more about Russia than I do, — and if you can find time to challenge this nonsense (it’s just the same as when the Teutonic jackasses blamed the French for the despotism of Frederick II, etc., as if backward thralls haven’t always needed civilised thralls to train them) you would greatly oblige me. In the Tribune, of course.

Your

K. M.

Write to me at greater length about the state of commerce — in English at once.

I have made a diplomatic reply to the enclosed letter from Klein, which I send to you for safe keeping. It is impossible to correspond from London. The factory workers should keep themselves entirely to themselves and not make contact with philistines or other handicraftsmen in Cologne, Düsseldorf, etc. If they wish to send someone over here once a year to get good advice, we should have no objection.

Marx to Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 366;

First published: in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1962;

Printed according to: letter from Cluss to Weydemeyer of 3 October 1853.

[London,] 15 September 1853

I have today received the latest number of the Reform containing your piece from Quebec, and Kellner’s apology of the self-same Poesche whose insipid would-be jokes about the ‘cranky’ proponents of the ‘class struggle’ appeared in the Neu-England-Zeitung of 3 September, which reached me at the same time. You started sending me extra copies of the Reform at the very time I began to get them again regularly; on the other hand, I haven’t been receiving the Tribune regularly and it is important that I should. For example, I haven’t got the article in which I refer to the exchange of diplomatic notes on Denmark or the article in which I characterise the relationships of landed property....

I think it is time you made a fresh start in the polemic and picked a few holes in the jejune arguments of Goepp-Poesche, discoverers of the material view though their materialism is that of the man-in-the-street. Our opponents are becoming uppish, something which could not have happened at least in the days of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. That pedant Schläger, who more or [less] took to his heels at the time of the ’48 revolution and hawked his genius in America, still regularly sends me his N.-E.-Z, no doubt in order to demonstrate ad oculos [unmistakably] what fine fellows they are. Has there ever before been a rag in which stupidity and vanity were so nicely coupled with presumption?

Kellner is too much of a slow-coach, he seems unable to understand that polemics are essential to any journal as long as it has to struggle. On top of that he has an unfortunate proclivity always to praise his enemies 2 days before they regale him with kicks. Thus Heinzen and Poesche; the latter, by the by, used his sorry article on the circulation of money to convey the sort of information one gets from encyclopedias...

At any rate I find that things have begun to move sooner than I should have liked (I think the commercial downfall will begin in the spring as in 1847). I had always hoped that, before that happened, I might somehow contrive to withdraw into solitude for a few months and work at my Economy. It seems that this isn’t to be. I find perpetual hackwork for the newspapers tiresome. It is time-consuming, distracting and, in the end, amounts to very little. However independent one may think oneself, one is tied to the newspaper and its readers, especially when, like myself, one is paid in cash. Purely learned work is something totally different, and the honour of figuring beside an A.P.C., a lady correspondent and an archbishop is certainly not to be envied.

Carl Wilh. Klein (of Solingen, a working man) has asked me to put you in touch with him. His address is — - — He’s a capable chap. He set up a Working Men’s Association and, from what he tells me in his letter, the Gradaus has come under its influence. Pieper writes to him from here and, if you can possibly find the time, you must give him support from Washington.

Papa Blind is continuing his ...[Insertion by Cluss: illegible] articles with much fervour in the N.-E.-Z. and congratulates himself and his editor and vice versa on the unexampled achievements which cannot fail to inspire respect in Brüggemann of the Kölnische Zeitung.

Only a few lines today. Events there have been none, if you except the onset of cholera morbus in London.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 375;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 30 September 1853, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Frederic,

Your piece on the war [The Russians in Turkey] is capital. I myself had serious misgivings about the westward advance of the Russian forces but did not, of course, dare trust to my judgment in such matters. I have already written a whole series of strike articles, produced at intervals throughout the 6 months during which the thing has been going on. Now, however, the affair has taken a new turn. In the article where I used your strike-generalities, I have mentioned a host of strike-localities by name, also the Preston and Wigan affairs. I couldn’t get hold of any particulars about Manchester. I have depicted the manoeuvring in Preston (very briefly, mind you) 1. as an attempt by the manufacturers to use the operatives, whose demands are forcing the closure of the mills, to cover their retreat from over-production; 2. as an attempt to starve the operatives into submission.

As you can see, my history of strikes goes no further than last Tuesday and doesn’t touch on Manchester.

You might, perhaps, expand somewhat the notes on yarn and cotton prices and, if possible, the price of goods, so that they amount to at least one paragraph of an article.

In each article, besides the subject proper, I naturally have to follow step by step the Russian Notes and England’s foreign policy (and right brave it is!), since the jackasses in New York consider this to be of prime importance and, after all., nothing is easier to write about than this business of high politics.

Next Tuesday week I shall have finished an article on the ‘Oriental Church’, and next Friday week the first of three articles on Denmark where next month the various assemblies of estates will be again taking the stage.

Should there be any military movement, I shall count on receiving immediate information from the Ministry of War in Manchester, and the same applies to cottons and yarns which are wretchedly covered by the papers down here.

Above all I want to slay the fellows with my pen, the moment being propitious, and if at the same time you keep me supplied with material, I can spin out the various themes over longer periods. What is more, without my secretary [Pieper] I feel a little nervous about my English.

No regards to Lupus.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 378;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, 1981.

[London,] 5 October 1853, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Cluss,

That I have writer’s itch, and this in the ‘loftier sense of the term’, you must needs conclude from the fact that I am writing to you today although — as so often nowadays — I have been working without a break for thirty hours on end.

D'abord, I want you, if it is at all possible, to get the German press to publish my Palmerston article.

On the 17th Jones will be setting forth on another tour of the manufacturing districts and tomorrow evening will call in here to get material for a campaign against that great humbug. It is comic that we are forced to teach the English their own history.

Willich’s journeymen’s association (the London one), already demoralised since our resignation, has now become too much of a good thing even for that hippopotamus Schapper, who has also withdrawn.

Quant à Carey and Ricardo’s theory of rent:

1) If we assume — as Carey would have it — that rent is simply another form of profit on capital or, still more precisely, of interest, this does not disprove but merely simplifies Ricardo’s theory. The economic antithesis, in the most general sense, would simply coincide with the antithesis of capital and wage labour, profit (and interest) on one side and wages on the other. The antithesis to capital within property would be eliminated (in so far as we disregard, d'abord, the antithesis between individual kinds of capital determined by the division of labour, and then, the antithesis between individual capitalists), but the antithesis to property would be all the more comprehensive.

2) I am of course aware that, in an attempt to complete his theory, the worthy Carey also reduces profit (interest included) to wages in a different form. D'abord, is not Protestantism, for example, merely a different form of religion from Catholicism? Does the antithesis, the contradiction, the struggle between them cease — and that is what you are dealing with — because they are both religions? Thus, even assuming that profit and wages are simply 2 different forms of the return on labour, the result is not to reconcile them but merely to reduce their difference to a simplified expression.

But how does he define their otherness? Profit is the wages for past labour. Wages are the profit on immediate present labour. Eh bien!’ How does this avail him? For it is precisely from its thraldom, from its slavery to past, materialised labour that present, i.e. actual labour seeks to emerge, and from its thraldom to the product of labour that labour seeks to be emancipated. The old feudal laws were also at one time the present expression of popular activity. Is that any reason why we should be subjugated by them now?

At best, therefore, he is merely changing the phrase ‘oppression of labour by capital’, into the phrase ‘oppression of present labour by past labour’.

There still remains the question, ‘How do I gain possession of past labour?’ By labour? No. By inheritance on the one hand and, on the other, by the fraudulent exchange of past for present labour. If past labour were exchanged for an equal quantity of present labour, the owner of past labour could continue to consume only so long as he had aliquot portions to exchange and, at a given moment, would himself have to start working again.

3) Carey has himself wholly failed to understand Ricardo’s theory of rent when he maintains that it is based on the successive deterioration of land. Ricardo — as I have proved in my book against Proudhon — falls into the common error of all other bourgeois economists, when he passes off the form of landed property as an ‘eternal natural law’ of history in general, whereas it is the product of purely industrial circumstances. His theory is true only of bourgeois society in a condition of full development. Rent, in its commercial form — the only one he mentions — does not otherwise exist at all. It therefore leaves him unaffected to maintain that at various historical epochs it was not the worse, but rather the better, lands that were successively cultivated. The historically better land of one period does not count as land at all for the other[s]. Moreover, Ricardo does not speak only of the natural properties of the soil, but also of its situation, a social product, a social attribute.

The fertility of the soil, as I have likewise already said in the Anti-Proudhon, is something purely relative. Changes in the soil’s fertility and its degree in relation to society, and that is the only aspect of fertility with which we are concerned, depend on changes in the science of chemistry and its application to agronomy.

4) Assuming a given condition of society, not any society, but one of full bourgeois development, with a populous countryside [... ] etc., even this part of Ricardo’s theory — unessential to his system — is correct.

Firstly. Types of land, with an equal infusion of capital and equally well situated for markets; how can their rents be differentiated? Merely by their natural fertility. This constitutes the level of rent.

On this assumption, when will a corn field of inferior quality be cultivated or a less productive coal-mine be exploited? When the price of corn or coal has risen so high as to enable the less productive ones to be cultivated or exploited. Hence the cost of production of the poorer land determines the rent of the richer. (This is Ricardo’s Law.)

Secondly. Does this exclude a constant increase in fertility? Hence, does it include Malthus? By no means.

If 1 is the best land, followed by 2, 3, 4, etc., and fertility is increased tenfold, the relation between 1, 2, 3, 4, etc., remains as before. Were fertility to become so great as a result of chemical discoveries that 1, 2 and 3 sufficed, land 4 would no longer be cultivated. The cost of production of land 3 (let it = 3) would then determine the rent. When land 4 (let its production costs = 4) still had to be brought under cultivation, the rent of land 1 (let its production costs =1) = 4-1 = 3. The rent of land 3 = 3-1 = 2. The rent of land 2 = 2-1 = 1. Now, however, the rent of 1 would =2, that of 2 would = 1 and that of 3 would =0. Should the fertility of the land so increase that only 1, the best land, had to be cultivated, rent would disappear completely.

5) Ricardo’s theory is based not on the doctrine of rent, but on the law that the price of a commodity is determined by its cost of production. That law, however, should not be understood as meaning that the price of individual commodities is determined by their cost of production. Rather, the commodity produced under the most unfavourable circumstances, and made necessary because of the demand for it, determines the price of all other commodities of the same kind. E.g. if demand is so great that flour, the production price of which is 20/- a quarter, can he placed on the market, then a qr. of flour costing 19, 18, 17, 15, etc., to produce is also sold at 20/-. The amount by which the market price, regulated by the cost of production of the dearest quarter to be placed on the market, exceeds the production costs of the less expensively produced flour, regulates the rent. What, then, gives rise to rent? Not the land, as supposed by Ricardo, but the market price and the laws by which it is regulated. If the quarter, which costs only 15/- (profit included) were sold, not at 20/-, but at 15, it could not carry a rent of 5. Why, then, does it do so? Because the market price is regulated by the flour the cost of production of which =20. In order that this may be placed on the market, 20 must be the general market price. Hence, if rent is to be overthrown, it must not be interpreted philanthropically; rather the laws of market price and thus of prices generally and thus the whole framework of the bourgeois economy must be overthrown.

So much for today on this subject.

Your

K. M.

On types of land having the same properties and an equally favourable situation, the rent will, however, be determined merely by the proportion of capital wedded to the land. Nor does Ricardo deny this. Rent is then merely interest on capital fixe. To say that, in cases in which rent does not exist in an actual, specific sense, its specific antithesis to capital and labour does not exist either, is no less true than to say that, where there is neither labour nor investment of capital, no antithesis between capital and wage labour exists. Instead there is, in the case under consideration, an antithesis between profit and interest, between rentiers (in the ordinary sense) and industrial capitalists. The less the tenant pays the man whose capital is wedded to the land, the greater will be his profit and vice versa. The tenant and his landlord (even though the latter simply draws interest on the capital employed on the land) would thus be as much at loggerheads as before.

The case most favourable to Carey is as follows:

Let the product of labour, the profit and interest = 2, rent =1, wages = 2. Now if, as a result of a rise in the productivity of labour, the product doubles and = 10, the rent might = 2, profit and interest =4, wages =4. To that extent it could be said that every kind of revenue may increase at no expense to labour and without landowner, capitalist and worker being mutually at loggerheads. But:

1) Assuming this most favourable instance to be real, all it means is that the antitheses — rent, profit, wages — all three, become more marked without losing any of their qualitative position relative to one another;

2) Relatively they can only rise or fall at each other’s expense. In the foregoing example, the proportion =1:2:2. Does not the ratio remain the same if it =2:4:4? A change in this relative income would occur if, for example, wages were to =5, profit =3, and rent =2. The profit would then have fallen relatively, although in absolute terms it would have risen.

3) It is par trop naive to suggest that, if the total product of labour rises, the three classes among whom it is to be shared will share equally in that growth. If profit were to rise by 20%, the workers would have to strike to obtain a 2% rise in wages.

4) The conditions that govern an increase in the total product preclude such relatively equal increase from the outset. If the increase is due to a better division of labour, or to a greater employment of machinery, the worker is, from the outset, placed at a disadvantage vis-à-vis the capitalist. If it be due to increased fertility of the soil, the landowner is worse off vis-à-vis the capitalist.

Marx To Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 390;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, 1981.

London, 18 October 1853, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Cluss,

You really did too much in going to the trouble of copying out the Chinese thing. At those expenses I would certainly not have had the impertinence to ask you for the article. Dana copied my stuff almost word for word, watering down this and that and, with rare tact, deleting anything of an audacious nature. Never mind. It is a business of his. Not of mine. In one of my Indian articles he also amended the bit where I speak of cholera as ‘The Indian’s Revenge upon the Western world’ to ‘India’s Ravages’ which is nonsense. En passant Freiligrath solicited that ‘revenge’ for a poem about cholera upon which he is still at work.

Again, in another of my articles on India, dealing with the princes there, he transmogrified ‘The skeleton of etiquette’ into ‘The seclusion (pitiful!) of etiquette’. Never mind! Provided he pays.

My wife has also compromised me by putting Rinaldo for Ruggiero and Alcide for Alcine in the first article on Palmerston. These are ‘les petites misères’ of an écrivain whose own handwriting is illegible. But it’s a bitter pill for a man who knows his Ariosto from A to Z in the original. Divino Ariosto!

It’s a big jump from Ariosto to Klein, or rather a long fall, and a casus obliquus at that. Papa Klein wrote to me — not a word, of course, about his upsets and rows — asking for recommendations to you and Weydemeyer. In my reply (Pieper has not written him a single line quant à vous) I did not, of course, in any way suggest that Weydemeyer was unfriendly to me. How could anyone suppose me capable of such stupidity and baseness? Mr Klein would have had to conclude from my harmless remark about Cluss being ‘our party’s most talented and energetic representative in America’, that I was denying all talent and energy to Weydemeyer. However, such sophisticated word-juggling is beyond the reach of Klein’s intellect. Hence all his remark amounts to is a piece of nonsense invented in order to give vent to his annoyance. Notwithstanding all this, you are right, Sir, in having written to Mr Snug.

Klein really does wield some influence over the Solingen workers, and they are the best in the Rhine province. I, pour ma part, have never, either drunk or sober, expressed the view that the workers are fit only for cannon-fodder, although the louts, among whom little Klein is evidently coming to rank himself, are, to my mind, barely fit even for that. It would be as well to treat little Klein with your accustomed discretion as a tool that may perhaps (?), in time of action, be of use to us.

Have forwarded the letter to Pieper. There’s nothing doing with the Gradaus for it doesn’t pay, and Pieper is too badly off to write gratis.

As regards the Reform, I shall see what I can get the others to do. The only one from whom any real support can be expected is Engels. Red Wolff is married and a retailer of household words for Prutz, Gutzkow and Cotta, not worth a farthing to us just now. Lupus no longer writes; he’s so obstinate that he cannot be made to forget the unfortunate business of Weydemeyer’s Revolution. Dronke, presently a clerk in Bradford, idle as a grisette. Weerth, travelling about South and North America on business for nearly a year now. Engels really has too much work, but being a veritable walking encyclopaedia, he’s capable, drunk or sober, of working at any hour of the day or night, is a fast writer and devilish quick in the uptake, so he at least can be expected to do something in this respect.

I was greatly tickled by Heinzen’s heroic deed. Should you people give the fellow another dressing down, concentrate on his crass ignorance, and the pains the wretched man is at to appropriate his opponents’ catch-words when they're already stale and fit for nothing. Delectable, the chap’s aspirations to dignity, and then his scraps! Serves him right!

Rent, In the Misère I cite an example of how in England, land which, at a certain stage of science, was regarded as barren, is, at a more advanced stage, considered fertile. I can adduce as a general fact that, throughout the middle ages, esp. in Germany, heavy clay soil was cultivated by preference as being naturally more fertile. In the past 4-5 decades, however, owing to the introduction of potatoes, sheep-farming and the resulting manuring, etc., light sandy soil has taken pride of place, esp. since it involves no expenses of drainage, etc., and on the other hand its deficiencies can easily be made good by means of chemical fertilisers. From this, then, it may be seen how relative ‘fertility’ is, even ‘natural’ fertility, and at the same time how ill-informed Mr Carey is, even from the point of view of history, when he expresses the opinion that the most barren land is always the first to be brought under cultivation. What leads him to that conclusion? The fact that tropical swamps are damned fertile but reclaimable only by civilisation. A tropical swamp, however, is productive not so much of herbs as of weeds. Civilisation clearly originates in those regions where wheat grows wild, as was the case in part of Asia Minor, etc. Such land is rightly described as naturally fertile by historians — and not land yielding poisonous vegetation and requiring more strenuous cultivation if it is to become fertile for human beings. Fertility is not, after all, absolute but merely a relation of the land to human requirements.

Ricardo’s law only holds good within bourgeois society. Hence it is where the relationship of the bourgeois to the land is purely that of a bourgeois, and every peasant, — or feudal — or patriarchal, relationship is cast aside that the law applies in its purest form, hence above all in the mining of precious metals, and in colonies where commercial crops, e.g. sugar, coffee, etc., are grown. More about this another time. In both instances the exploitation of the land is regarded and pursued by the bourgeois de prime a'bord as a purely commercial concern.

Though I'm not afraid of those curs of Russians in so far as Europe is concerned — they are going to put us Germans in queer street. Between the Kaimuks and the crapauds [i.e., French philistines] we are in a cleft stick.

Herewith copy of The People’s Paper.

Vale faveque,

Your

K. M.

Marx To Adolf Cluss

In Washington

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 397;

First published: in Voprosy istorii KPSS, 1962;

According to: Text of letter from Cluss to Weydemeyer of 7 December 1853.

[London, mid-November 1853]

... As regards the Reform, I shall see what can be done in Germany and Paris. Pieper is now in business and spends from 9 in the morning until 8 at night in the City. So what with his work as correspondent for the Union, has little time. He'll do something. If any money is forthcoming, I would suggest that Eccarius get some first so that he doesn’t have to spend all day tailoring. In accordance with an agreement made with me, he will now be sending articles regularly. Do try and see that he gets something, if at all possible. With regard to his French articles, Jones is no longer printing them, nor has he returned me the manuscript, which isn’t therefore available dans ce moment. Jones being away on an agitation tour. I have written to him about it, however. I have also asked Heise. Diversity is desirable and, by consorting with us Heise will, I believe, change for the better. I have asked Lupus and Dronke through Engels. Probably little will come of it. In Lupus’ case, age and bachelorhood combine to lead him into mischief during this sorry interregnum.

Not yet seen Willich’s damp squib. The war news takes up almost my whole attention and there’s no time left to think about the great Willich. Despite the electric telegraph, the news arrives late, is very confused and fragmentary and has, moreover, all passed through the hands of the Vienna police — i.e. been censored. The news from Constantinople is of course much delayed. The heroes of democracy are preparing to march. An evil omen for the Turks.

Quant à Willich, I should much prefer it if I could be spared personal statements and my contribution be confined to producing, for the feuilleton of the Reform, a psychological — or rather, phenomenological — genre picture of this shabby philistine’s ‘form of consciousness’.

Last Tuesday, at the same time as your letter, I received one from Klein which was, I must say, most delightfully written, witty and considered. He tells me that he, too, will make a statement against Willich, since he can prove that the man was a fraud all the time he was in London. Klein is obsessed with the idea that you people are treating him very much de haut en bas. I shall try and smooth out this difference.

As regards the Tribune, the most ingenious way of handling the thing might have been to make people believe they ‘recognised my style’. I have become very thick with Urquhart as a result of the Palmerston article. To help me, he has sent me several books — with which, however, I was already familiar...

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 399.

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1929.

[London,] 23 November 1853, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

The People’s Paper had been overlooked. Enclosed herewith. The five articles that have so far appeared in Jones’ paper have been compressed in the Tribune into three.

Whatever calls there may be on your time, I must ask you to let me have for Friday at least 2 of (your usual) pages — more is unnecessary — written in English so that I waste no time over translation. It seems to me that the campaign is now over for the winter; and in any case the first phase has been concluded, and hence can be disposed of with a few general remarks. So I count on at least 2 pages.

The Willich mess calls for speed — in direct contrast to his six months of shillyshallying.

Your

K. M.

Did the ‘old man’ get the postal order for £2?

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 403.

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1929.

[London,] 14 December 1853

Dear Frederic,

As you know, everyone gets an occasional bee in his bonnet, and nihil humani etc [I am a man ... and nothing human is alien to me]. Needless to say, there was never any question of conspiring and suchlike nonsense. You are accustomed to some jealousy and, au fond the only thing that vexes me is our not being able to be together now, to work and have fun together, whereas your ‘protégés’ have you conveniently to hand.

Enclosed one copy of the Knight. The other arrived in Washington either today or yesterday. I sent the thing to Cluss so that the 2 statements should not conflict, and so that he can delete anything that has already been said. A few small stylistic changes were made in the copy I sent. The last page is missing from the one I sent you; it got mislaid and contains only a few concluding remarks in a humorous vein.

Although we have heard nothing of him, Willich must be back in London again. Did you see in the Reform the splendid minutes of the meeting presided over by Anneke, in which not a single person declares himself willing to return to Germany as ‘a revolutionary fighter under Willich’s military leadership’?

Quant à Palmerston, I could agree to a ‘German’ version only if I could be sure that the work would subsequently be accepted by a publisher. For I haven’t a German MS, since I myself had to write the thing in English, i.e. Anglo-Saxonise the original from the word go. As regards the Tribune I intend to conclude with the Treaties of 1840 and ‘41, and for this I have at my disposal some very bulky Blue Books, besides Hansard and the Moniteur. Have left out Palmerston’s machinations in Greece, Afghanistan, Persia and Serbia, as being of lesser importance. That would still leave the revolutionary period for which the Blue Books again provide important (if considerably curtailed) material, as well as for our ‘patriotic’ war, etc., in Schleswig-Holstein.

Concerning your Bonaparte as a captain of artillery, or writer thereon, I think you would do best to send a paper of this sort under your own name either to 1. The Daily News, 2. The Examiner, or 3. The Westminster Review. The first would probably be best. An article of this kind would at one fell swoop — par coup d'état’ — put you in such a position vis-à-vis the London Press that you could ‘press’ it and at the same time, perhaps, get a chance to have your book on the Hungarian campaign published in English in London, which would in any case be more profitable and effective than in poor old Leipzig.

Needless to say, the Tribune is making a great splash with your articles, poor Dana, no doubt, being regarded as their author. At the same time they have appropriated ‘Palmerston’, which means that, for 8 weeks past, Marx-Engels have virtually constituted the Editorial staff of the Tribune.

In addition to your lengthier expositions which are appropriated by them for leaders and are feasible only in the case of certain important events or periods, e.g. the initial phase, then the battle of Oltenitza, etc., I should be grateful if (time permitting) you could — during the less important interludes — let me have a brief summary of the facts — 1-2 pages, say — in English. I have greater difficulties — even from the language standpoint — with the lesser stuff than with profound(!) expositions, especially with material I have long been familiar with by reading in an English context, i.e. English works. I only require this, of course, when there is a dearth of ‘great’ événements. The main difficulty is the uneasiness of my critical conscience in regard to matters with which I feel I am not à la hauteur. My competitor [Pulszky] quite simply copies out the facts (or rather what are given out as such by the London Press).

What do you think of my brother-in-law Juta’s proposal, enclosed herewith, that we should write a monthly article for the Zuid-Afrikaan (Cape Town)? Rotten though Juta’s French may be, he’s a good, sensible chap. If only you and I had set up an English correspondence business at the right moment in London, you wouldn’t be stuck in Manchester tormented by the office, nor tormented by debts. Incidentally, I believe that if you were to send military articles to the London papers now, you would, within a few weeks, be able to secure a permanent post which would pay as well as the Manchester business and leave you more spare time. At present the demand for military writers exceeds the supply.

It might even be asked whether The Times itself might not be very glad to hook a military collaborator since it is wretchedly served in this respect. It would be worth trying. For we have, of course, now reached the stage at which we regard any English newspaper merely as an emporium and it matters not a rap in which of these emporia we display our ‘articles’, supposé they are not tampered with.

Your

K. M.

1854

Marx to Engels. 5 January

Marx to Engels. 10 January

Marx to Engels. 18 January

Marx to Engels. 25 January

Marx to Engels. 9 February

Marx to Engels. 15 February

Marx to Engels. 9 March

Marx to Engels. c. 11 March

Marx to Engels. 17 March

Engels to Marx. 23 March

Marx to Engels. 29 March

Engels to H J Lincoln, Editor of The Daily News. 30 March

Engels to Marx. 3 April

Marx to Engels. 4 April

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 6 April

Marx to Engels. 19 April

Engels to Marx. 20 April

Engels to Marx. 21 April

Marx to Engels. 22 April

Engels to Marx. c. 24 April

Marx to Engels. 29 April

Engels to Marx. 1 May

Marx to Engels. 3 May

Marx to Engels. 6 May

Engels to Marx. 9 May

Marx to Engels. 22 May

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 1 June

Marx to Engels. 3 June

Engels to Marx. 10 June

Marx to Engels. 13 June

Engels to Marx. 15 June

Marx to Engels. 21 June

Marx to Engels. 27 June

Engels to Marx. 6 July

Marx to Engels. 7 July

Engels to Marx. 20 July

Marx to Engels. 22 July

Marx to Engels. 27 July

Marx to Engels. 8 August

Marx to Engels. 26 August

Marx to Engels. 2 September

Marx to Engels. 13 September

Marx to Engels. 22 September

Marx to Engels. 29 September

Marx to Engels. 10 October

Marx to Engels. 17 October

Marx to Engels. 25 October

Marx to Engels. 26 October

Marx to Engels. 10 November

Marx to Engels. 22 November

Marx to Engels. 30 November

Marx to Engels. 2 December

Marx to Engels. 8 December

Marx to Engels. 15 December

Marx to Moritz Elsner. 20 December

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 39, p. 410;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[London,] 25 January 1854 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Frederic,

Enclosed note for Lupus, who has written to me. Absolution. As to the war, there will now be some snags, unless ‘misunderstandings’ occur that have nothing to do with, or run counter to, diplomacy. Reshid Pasha’s Note spells total surrender to Russia. It even contains more concessions than the original Vienna Note as a result of which Turkey declared war. Palmerston has not returned to office in vain. On the other hand, the demonstration in the Black Sea would seem to be a dodge, specially contrived for the meeting of Parliament: if Russia accepts her own conditions incorporated in Reshid’s Note and obtains everything she has demanded, she will appear to have bowed to force supérieure. That, in any case, is the plan. Otherwise, would it not be absurd to inform Nicholas of the entry of the united fleets before he had, or could have, pronounced upon the last Vienna Note? Now only an accident of war could bring about a warlike solution. By prior agreement the Czar, far from objecting to the entrance of the united squadron, showed considerable ‘temper’. However, there’s no vouching for ‘misunderstandings’. They are ever probable.

Today’s Times contains a further report from the Wanderer on The Battle of Citatea . I expect your observations. The advance the Russians are said to have made simultaneously at Matchin, Giurgevo and Kalafat and, indeed, the capture of Silistria, would seem mere humbug. Apropos, one more thing: your opinion, written in English. According to the French newspapers, the Turks intend to fortify Constantinople on the landward side. Would this not be a major blow for Russia? The more so as Constantinople will always be able to communicate by sea with the Asiatic and European coasts of its empire and thus cannot be cut off from its supplies of men and materials? Large-scale fortifications would now seem to be the antidote to large-scale warfare à la Napoleon. May this not bring about a reversion to small-scale warfare?

It is scandalous that Berlin is not being fortified.

My brother-in-law, le ministre, has written to my mother-in-law warning her that now, in her ripe old age, she is about to go through the same experience as in the days of Napoleon I. He believes, then, that there'll be war.

Cobden, the ‘'umble’, and ‘homely man’ made a considerable ass of himself in his last speech. He demonstrates that neither he nor the ‘'umble men’ who applaud him, are competent to govern England. The Quaker Bright will hear of nothing but the war within. Cobden’s discovery that the social structure of England and Russia are analogous because there are Demidovs there and Derbys here, is worthy of a Palatinate revolutionary philistine from Neustadt.

On Saturday Mr Pieper went to visit Meyer in Brighton. Unwelcome though he is to the latter, he is overstaying the time allotted him by Troupeau, because the ‘sea air’ suits him, and has, it seems, written the bourgeois a fatuous letter. The silly lad mistakes his lack of principles for genial high spirits. From Cluss’ letter you will see that this same ‘genial’ youth wanted to obtain an American passport to Constantinople, probably in the hope of becoming a kennelboy there. It’s triste [sad] that the lad should be so thoroughly pleased with himself as to do one silly thing after another and make a laughing-stock of himself.

On Tuesday Bischoffsheim will be paying me another bill through Freiligrath. In the meantime I can’t raise a penny, having exhausted the possibilities of the pawnbrokers, as is regularly the case. So if you could lay your hands on £1, it would be highly desirable. Moreover, 100 copies of the ‘[The Knight of] noble consciousness’ will be arriving on Friday and I haven’t the means to pay the postage, since I shan’t be getting any money until Tuesday.

Apropos. I am negotiating with Tucker. The next pamphlet is to be about Unkiar-Skelessi. So correct the stuff you've got (Nos. IV and V). I shall then make sundry additions and send back the alterations for you to look through.

I have received through Dana an offer from a magazine in New York, £12 per sheet, for articles on the history of German philosophy from Kant till now. But they must: 1. be sarcastic and amusing; 2. contain nothing against the religious feelings of the country. How to set about it? Now, if we 2 were together — books would be needed besides — we could quickly earn £50-£60. I wouldn’t dare attempt the work on my own.

Your

K. M.

Engels To H. J. Lincoln,

Editor of The Daily News

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 39, p. 423;

First published: in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[Rough copy] 7 South Gate, St. Mary’s, Manchester,

30 March 1854.

Sir,

Perhaps I am not mistaken in supposing that at the present moment an offer to contribute to the military department of your paper may meet with some favour, even if the party offering his services be not, for the moment, an active member of the military profession, and though he be a foreigner to boot.

I suppose the actual qualifications of the party will be the main thing. As to these, nothing can show them better than half-a-dozen articles upon various military subjects, which you might submit to any military authority, if you should choose to do so. The higher the authority the better. I would ten times sooner be judged by Sir William Napier than by a subaltern martinet.

But I cannot expect you to give me even a trial, unless you know something more about me. I beg to state, therefore, that my military school has been the Prussian Artillery, a service which, if it is not what it might be, yet has produced the men who ‘made the Turkish Artillery one of the best in Europe’ as our friend Nicholas has laid it down. Later on, I had an occasion of seeing some active service during the insurrectionary war in South Germany, 1849. For many years the study of military science in all its branches has been one of my chief occupations, and the success, which my articles on the Hungarian Campaign, published at the time in the German Press, were fortunate enough to obtain, encourages me in the belief that I have not studied in vain. An acquaintance, more or less familiar, with most European languages, including Russian, Serbian, and a little Wallachian, opens to me the best sources of information and may, perhaps, prove useful to you in other respects. How far I am able to write correct and fluent English, my articles, of course, themselves must show. Any other information respecting myself I shall be happy to give, or else you may obtain it from your educational contributor Dr Watts whom I have been acquainted with for more than ten years.

I have for some time past thought of making you an offer of this kind, but, considered the matter hardly worth your while as long as war was not actually declared and the whole critique of Danubian strategy was confined to profound disquisitions as to what share of the blame attaching to the inconceivable proceedings in Bulgaria was due to Lord Aberdeen, and what to Omer Pasha. Now the matter is different. A local war may be a mere simulacrum of a war; a European war must be a reality. Besides this, I avow, another reason restrained me. I was not then prepared, as I am now, with the necessary maps, plans, and special information respecting the theatre of war and the belligerent parties, and I should have been sorry to send you a single line based upon other than the very best information obtainable.

My absence, not only from the seat of war, but also (for the moment, at least) from your own headquarters circumscribes pretty nearly the sort of contributions I could offer you. They would confine themselves to descriptions of those portions of the theatre of war, where actual hostilities are going on; statements of, and observations on, the military organisation, strength, chances, and possible operations of the belligerent armies; critical remarks on actual engagements, and, from time to time, resumés (to use the French word) of the operations, say of a month or six weeks, according to events. As the fullest information of what has actually happened is necessary to form a correct judgment, I should very seldom have to write on the strength of mere telegraphic dispatches, but have to wait, generally, for the arrival of more detailed news; thus the loss of a day or two would be less important for my contributions, if that would make them better; and therefore my presence in London might, for a time at least, be dispensed with. In case you should wish me to extend my contributions to a wider circle, I should have no objection and await your proposals.

Should you, however, receive my offer favourably, it may be that in a couple of months I should be enabled to come to London altogether; in the meantime, I might slip over, if desired, to confer with you.

As to politics, I should mix them up as little as possible with military criticism. There is but one good line of policy in war: to go at it with the greatest rapidity and energy, to beat your opponent, and force him to submit to your terms. If the allied governments do this, I should acknowledge it; if they should cripple or tie the hands of their commanders, I should speak out against it. I do wish the Russians may get a good beating, but if they fight well, I am that much of a soldier, that I should give the devil his due. For the remainder, I should stick to the principle, that military science, like mathematics or geography, has no particular political opinion.

Now for positive proposals. I do not expect that the description of Kronstadt sent herewith will enable you to form any idea of what you may expect from me. But if it should appear to you that I may be of some service to your paper, a provisional arrangement might be come to, by which you would retain your entire liberty to refuse my further collaboration, if found unsuitable, while a fair remuneration was guaranteed to me for my labour and expenses. For you cannot but know that to write on military operations, requires the possession of numerous and expensive maps and books, for which due allowance should be made as entering into the cost of production.

Supposing, then, I sent you a series of papers giving a full account of the military and naval force of Russia, its organisation, actual strength and efficiency (as far as can be ascertained), together with a military account of the theatre of war, the lines of operation and defence on the Baltic, the Black Sea, Danubian and Polish frontiers, including the system of fortresses. The enclosed Kronstadt article would form one of the series and might be postponed till its place arrived. My information upon these subjects is, I believe, first-rate, derived exclusively from printed (and not from any mysterious) sources. I could furnish an article per week, say one or two columns, and more, if required.

Should you deem this proceeding too systematical, the account of Kronstadt might be followed up by a similar one of the permanent fortifications of Sevastopol and the other Russian fortified harbours (wherever obtainable), to be concluded by some observations on the chances of naval attacks against land batteries, drawn from history and from the best theoretical sources such as Sir Howard Douglas.

If you require reviews of military works, I could also undertake them. For instance Col. Chesney’s Russo-Turkish Campaigns, for this book I am, I may say, admirably provided with materials.

I conclude this lengthy epistle in offering you, also, a few remarks on the importance or rather non-importance of the Russian passage across the Danube: these are at your service at a moment’s notice.

If you take my offer into consideration, I shall be glad to receive a few lines as soon as possible so as to be enabled to set to work at once. In the meantime, etc.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 39, p. 434;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

Manchester, 20 April 1854

Dear Marx,

It’s all off with The Daily News and, in fact, I have grounds for assuming that, by his indiscretion, Monsieur Pieper has played me a dirty trick which I shall not forget in a hurry. Everything was all right, only the fee to be settled, my article already set up in print — I have the proof copy in my pocket. As long ago as a week last Wednesday, I wrote to the fellows saying I would accept their usual terms, and today the answer finally arrives saying that the articles are too professional, that, much as they would like to, they cannot use them and concluding very politely with an offer of two guineas for my trouble and the good advice that I should approach a military paper. Needless to say, I shall accept neither. I can think of only one explanation for this strange behaviour: Pieper who, to judge by a foolish letter he wrote me a week ago, knew about the thing, must have been talking big about it and thus, by the well-known telegraphic medium of emigre gossip, the story came to the ears of Kinkel or some other wretched German blighter acquainted with The Daily News and then, of course, nothing was easier than to represent Engels, the military man, as no more than a former one-year volunteer, a communist and a clerk by trade, thus putting a stop to everything. The politeness of the refusal was not for my benefit, of course, but Watts’s. The way the letter is written does not preclude my applying again, but only to be relegated to the penny-a-liners.

I should be greatly obliged if you could find out who let the cat out of the bag; needless to say, Mr Schimmelpfennig’s eulogies are a poor set-off for this échec [failure].

On top of that, the shillyshallying of the Daily News chaps has meant that in the meantime some of my sources here have become known through the German press — the Moltke, which I have found enormously helpful, is now scarcely any good to me at all and in a fortnight all the rest will have gone the same way, and I wouldn’t dream of risking another £5 on the thing on speculation.

I feel very much inclined to finish the articles on Russian military power and send them to The Times. If they published them, what an ass The Daily News would look! But a second échec would have its drawbacks, for then I should look a complete ass. That’s why it’s so damnable my not being in London, when everything would be perfectly simple. What do you think? Write at once and let me know.

About the other things in a day or two. I can’t let you have the article on the Russian bulletin before the next sailing; it needs to be closely studied and compared with the map, otherwise one risks making an ass of oneself here as well.

If only you could screw more money out of the Tribune, I'd turn my back on the whole, rotten English press, where blackguardly German interlopers persuade stupid editors to reject the best articles, and I'd send you one or two Tribune articles every week.

But to wear our fingers to the bone writing for £200, c'est trop fort.

Write at once and tell me what you think of this rotten business; the whole affair has put me terribly out of temper. Of all the band there’s nobody we can rely on except each other.

Steffen and Dronke were here at Easter; I didn’t at all care for Dronke who has acquired a revolting habit of bragging like a commis-voyageur. The fellow’s becoming a regular loafer.

Your

F. E.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 39, p. 436;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[Manchester, 21 April 1854]

Dear Marx,

I have just bought Monsieur Schimmelpfennig’s pamphlets here. If you would like me to review them for the Tribune, let me know soon. You shall have the article on the Danube crossing on Monday, unless something of greater importance crops up.

Do you think Blind capable of playing a trick on me with The Daily News? The fellow has his contacts with the paper, if I'm not mistaken. Monsieur Herzen’s nonsense in today’s issue of the same paper proves that he, too, has connections. Is there any other German officer in London who might be in collusion with the paper?

Before approaching another newspaper I shall get some more material together, which will mean a delay of perhaps 3 weeks. N'importe, the better the stuff I have, the better my chances and, after all, the material will still be there for the Tribune.

If I weren’t so damnably stuck for cash, I'd invite you up here. But just now it’s not possible and I must first move into private lodgings again. Had there been a prospect of clinching matters with The Daily News, I had intended to come to London for Whitsuntide but now the journey would have little point. N'importe, perhaps I shall come all the same.

What with the war, innumerable military works to be studied, sundry drinking bouts, etc., etc., I have of late fallen very much behind with my work at the office and, precisely because my mind was full of other things, have perpetrated a mass of blunders, all of which end up in goods being refused and other disasters. I shall now have to make up for this, for the very good reason that my old man is coming over in 3 months time; moreover I have been very remiss about corresponding with him; he’s still waiting for things he should have had six months ago. I am now having to make up for all this, which means a great deal of effort. However I believe that a fortnight’s hard-labour in the office will see me through.

Let me have the newspaper cuttings; without them, Cluss’ letter is incomprehensible.

Bangya will be sending the Russians some fine reports from Erzerum. I wish the Prussians would finally go ahead and declare war on England, in which case the farce would be in full swing and my old man would not come over. I have neglected him horribly and in any case the financial aspect has all the makings of a row.

Enclosed the proof of the Daily News article. Let me have it back soon. I'm very glad I've got the thing; the fellows won’t be able to make a splash with it now.

Apropos. Is ‘Bericht über die Kriegs-Operationen der Russischen Truppen gegen die Ungarischen Rebellen im jahre 1849’ (published 1851) available in London? And if so, who has it? I have ordered the book but won’t get it in under three weeks. If I had it I could at once enter into relations with The Times. It costs 1 1/2 talers, so nothing would really be lost by buying two.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 39, p. 438;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[London,] 22 April 1854 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Frederic,

Pieper, at any rate, is not to blame for the business with The Daily News, because he has had absolutely nothing to do with the émigrés for the past six months. Blind is connected with the Advertiser, not The Daily News. Herzen’s crew — Krapülinski, Worcell, and the blackguardly Golovin — have been positivement connected with the D. N. ever since Urquhart’s influence got them thrown out of the Advertiser. Mr O. von Wenckstern has transferred from The Times to the D.N., but is no longer in London, that judicious paper having sent him as military commissioner to Omer Pasha. The belletristic blighter! It’s more than likely that the fellow has introduced other German blackguards out there. However it is the Russians I chiefly suspect. So wisely managed is The Daily News that, as is shown by the last return of newspaper stamps, its sales have plummeted since 1851 and it now ranks after the Herald in the newspaper hierarchy.

I consider that you should immediately send the article to The Times as it stands and without waiting for one scrap of additional material (I shall see if the ‘Bericht über die Kriegs-operationen’ is available here). The Times will still be short of material next week since the parliamentary recess, though supposed to end on 27 April, will not be over until 1 May. Hence it will be glad of anything it can get and, since the people there possess far more literary and political tact than the bunglers on the D.N. and would be prepared to accept an article from the devil himself if it were interesting enough, ‘fermement’ believe that they would publish it at once. At the same time it would be your revenge on the other rag. But should your approach to The Times misfire — which I doubt— you may be sure that 1. nobody will hear of it, since I shan’t tell a soul; 2. the reviews will be sure to take it. Finally, I would again advise you not to wait, but to send this first article quite unchanged to The Times.

As for Schimmelpfennig, I think it would be doing the chap too great an honour to deal with him in the Tribune. I suggest that, in one of your private letters to me, you let me have sufficient to pass on to Cluss for an article in the Reform.

Of late the Tribune has again been appropriating all my articles as leaders and putting my name to nothing but rubbish. It has appropriated, for example, a detailed account of Austrian finances, an article on the Greek insurrection, etc. On top of that their now ‘congenital’ habit of making a splash with your military stuff. I positivement intend — as soon as Dana has replied to my last admonition — to ask for a higher fee, citing in particular the expenses incurred in respect of the military articles. Don’t you agree? The fellows ought to pay at least £3 per article. They lay out £500 on sending Taylor to India, and the chap’s reports from there are worse and shorter— what could he get to know about a country like that on a quick trip?— than my own sent them from here on the same subject. £3 per article would enable me to get out of the mire at last.

There’s been an odd business with Urquhart — whom, by the by, I have never once met in London since our first entrevue [interview]. The ministerial Globe published on Saturday [a] furious onslaught on him, saying amongst other things that, while he might pick up converts here and there, this wouldn’t go on for long.

* ‘Where is Mr Anstey? Where Mr Monteith etc. and where that Goliath of the new revolution, Mr Marx?’ ‘All these gentlemen have seen the folly of their ways, and returned to the habits of good society.’*

Then, in Thursday’s issue of The Morning Advertiser, ‘an Urquhartite’ declares that:

* ‘If continuing to pose implicit confidence in Mr Urquhart’s views be proof of folly these individuals have certainly not recovered their reason, and also must still be without the pale of good society.’*

And then proceeds to specify:

* ‘Mr Marx, however, I am happy to say, is as energetic and valuable [a] supporter as ever of Mr Urquhart’s.’*

So far I've done nothing about this, but am biding my time. An opportunity will present itself for disowning Mr Urquhart. I find it all the more outrageous as he knows, since I have told him so, that I agree with him in nothing save the matter of Palmerston, and on that point it wasn’t he who showed me the way. Mais il faut attendre [but we must wait] But there is one difficulty. There is a very stupid Urquhartite by the name of Marx, not the one meant by the Globe. If I publicly disown Urquhart, he'll say he didn’t mean me, but the other Marx. Incidentally, it is evident from the Globe that Mr Palmerston has been paying me the greatest attention.

Pieper grows more vapidly complacent every day. Such is his mopping and mowing that his face is more crisscrossed with lines than a map of both the Indies. Old Malvolio! Little Jenny always refers to him now as Prince Charming, the son of Wunderhorn. In my next I shall tell you some comical tales about ‘Prince Charming’ who, as his sister’s letters reveal, regards himself as Byron and Leibniz rolled into one.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 39, p. 445;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[London,] 3 May 1854 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Frederic,

My use of the term ‘letter of Uriah’ has caused a misunderstanding. I gave Heise no letter — he didn’t even take his leave of me and was, incidentally, in far too tipsy a condition to do so. He wrote to me from the hole where he was lodging near Manchester, asking for my help up there. It was in this sense that I would have regarded sending you a report on him as a ‘letter of Uriah’, if in a somewhat ‘bolder’ meaning of the term. Maybe Manchester has deprived him of the main incitement of making himself out to be a ‘great man’, an ‘independent’ and a ‘malcontent’ in the eyes of Imandt and Schily. However, all you can do now is to act diplomatically and urge the man gradually to find himself an occupation. The whole time he has been in England he has been living at other people’s expense and, whenever he got a chance of earning his keep, soon gave it up. Since he now has a superfluity of time on his hands he might at least write regularly for the Reform which, by the by, has as yet failed to pay even Eccarius so much as a farthing. However, if given enough support, it should soon be in a position to pay.

Your military things — ‘retreat of the Russians from Kalafat’ and the situation in the Dobrudja have, I think, been proved splendidly right. The bombardment of Odessa was, it seems, provoked by the Russians. Unless the English land troops there, little would appear to have been achieved — save to placate the bourgeois here who, inasmuch as the war is manifesting itself in the form of taxes and loans, are becoming wild about the inactivity of the Allied fleets, — perhaps, too, Nicholas needed a demonstration of the kind to give spice to his appeal ‘to his people’. There can no longer be any doubt about collusion between the Ministry here and Petersburg, now that the suppression of a document in the ‘Secret Correspondence’ — in which Aberdeen (1844) accepted the Russian proposals — has become common knowledge. I already had an inkling that something of the sort was going on behind the scenes because of the falsification of the dates and endorsements in the ‘memorandum’ alluded to in the House of Lords by the Tories’ Ex-foreign Minister. Although the Journal de Saint-Pétersbourg itself censures these fellows for their fausse position it is clear from the ‘declarations in Council’ concerning neutral, and especially Russian, shipping, that they are still agreeing their moves with Russia. Similar Declarations, appeared at the same time in St Petersburg, almost couched in the same terms. Such a thing can’t be a coincidence. The element they overlooked in their calculations is Bonaparte. No matter what sort of a chap he may be, the question is one of life and death for him and, being a rogue by profession, he won’t allow himself to be duped as was poor Louis Philippe in 1839 and 1840. When one reads the secret documents of 1830-48, one is left in no doubt that England deposed Louis Philippe and that the worthy National, despite and because of its blind Anglophobia, was unwittingly the principal tool of precisely English policy.

As you know, the Tribune prides itself on being Christian. I was all the more tickled when the fellows used for a leader an article of mine in which one of the chief things I held against the Turks was the fact of their having preserved Christianity, although I did not of course say so quite so bluntly. Indeed, one reason why the Turks are bound to come to grief is that they have allowed Byzantine theocracy to develop in a way that not even the Greek emperors would have dreamed of. There are, in effect, only 2 religious peoples left, the Turks and the Greco-Slav population of Turkey. Both are doomed, or at least the latter, along with the clerically ordered society which has been consolidated under Turkish rule.

I have, besides, sent the Tribune a scandalous story about the ‘Holy Sepulchre’ and the ‘Protectorate’ in Turkey, in which the historical matter will blind the fellows to the prank I play on Christianity.

I should be very glad if you could supply me with something for the Tribune, since I am very busy studying the history of the New Greek Empire including King Otto, but it will be a couple of weeks, perhaps, before I can present the result in a series of articles. Metaxas, who was Greek ambassador in Constantinople where he engaged in plotting – the Paris Presse published a pretty account of this Russo-Greek Bangyanade-was the principal tool of the infamous Capodistria.

At odd moments I am going in for Spanish. Have begun with Calderón from whose Magico prodigioso — the Catholic Faustus — Goethe drew not just a passage here or there but whole settings for some of scenes in his Faust. Then — horribile dictu — I am reading in Spanish what I'd found impossible in French, Chateaubriand’s Atala and Reni, and some stuff by Bernardin de St-Pierre. Am now in the middle of Don Quixote. I find that a dictionary is more necessary in Spanish than in Italian at the start.

By chance I have got hold of the Archivio triennale delle cose d'Italia dall'avvenimento di Pio IX all'abbandono di Venezia etc. It’s the best thing about the Italian revolutionary party that I have read. Consists of a collection of secret and public documents, intercepted letters, etc. Nicely put together. Palmistone (as Thiers pronounces Palmerston) plays a leading role here as well. The fellow’s machinations have been ubiquitous, and at all events his existence has been a very amusing one.

You still owe me a letter about Mr Urquhart’s military stuff. The man can be caught out only in the ‘Positive’ sciences. I.e. here and in his economics, the superficiality of which can likewise be tangibly demonstrated.

Vale faveque.

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 39, p. 464;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx.

London, 21 June 1854, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

Your letter arrived early enough, between 2 and 3. But since I had only waited until 2, and since I had to go out of town on domestic business and my wife saw from the accompanying letter that the article couldn’t be sent off as it stood, it is still here. I shall use it for my Friday’s article, but would ask you to write to me before then —quite briefly if you are short of time — about the following points:

1. Is there anything new in the Turkish bulletins which appeared in yesterday’s Daily News? Have you any more details about the events of 28 [May]-13 [June] (which is as far, I believe, as the latest, albeit fragmentary, reports go)?

2. Is there anything of military significance about the operations on the Circassian coast? No doubt the news about Shamyl needs further confirmation.

3. The entry of the Austrians into Wallachia; what can be said about it from the military point de vue?

From the enclosed letter you will see that I'm over head and ears in bad luck. When my wife’s illness was at its worst, the good Dr Freund kept away and sent me a bill for £26 with the request that a ‘clear understanding’ be reached regarding his ‘professional relations’ to myself. Since my wife was in a critical — and is still in a serious — condition, I was of course compelled to capitulate to the dear ‘friend’ and promise him in writing that I would pay £8 down at the end of this month and the rest by six weekly instalments. Had the fellow not attacked me so much à l'imprévu he wouldn’t have caught me napping like that. But what was I to do? I should have had to pay any other respectable doctor by the visit and anyhow, even were this possible, one can’t change doctors like shirts in the middle of an illness, without first inquiring into their competence, etc.

So I find myself in a fix. I know that things are tight with you as well. Do you think Dronke might be able to advance me a few pounds for the instalment due at the end of this month? When he was here last, he gave me to understand that he could be approached at a time of real crisis. However, I'd like to have your opinion first. I must in any case pay the fellow the first instalment on the agreed date, and my bill in respect of the past months has already been drawn — all of it spent needless to say, since I had £12 to pay out for the household, and the total received was considerably reduced because of unwritten articles, besides which the chemist’s bills alone swallowed up a large part of the budget.

At the end of this week, if my wife feels strong enough, she, the children and Lenchen are going to spend a fortnight at Mr Seiler’s villa at Edmonton. She might then be so far restored by the country air as to manage the journey to Trier.

I can assure you that these last petites misères have turned me into a very dull dog.

Beatus ille that hath no family.

Vale faveque.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 39, p. 472;

First published: slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[London,] 27 July 1854, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

Je vous attends for Tuesday. How very boastful Mr Herbert was. This same Herbert was Vorontsov’s brother-in-law and at the same time English Secretary at war. The way the English brag as though Nasmyth and Butler had held Silistria ‘single-handed’ is grotesque. Have you read about Monday evening’s session, when Disraeli so neatly punctured little John’s [Lord John Russell] and the Times’ ‘Sevastopol’ bubble with one prick of the needle?

I am, hélas [alas] once again saddled with Pieper who looks like a half-starved sucking pig seethed in milk, after having lived for a fortnight with a whore he describes as un bijou. He has frittered away some £20 in a fortnight and now both his purses are equally depleted. In this heat it is a bore to have the fellow hanging around one du matin jusqu'au soir et du soir jusqu'au matin [from morning to night ...]. And it disrupts one’s work.

On Saturday I got the following note from Papa Tucker:

* ‘Dear Sir, There is a pretty brisk demand for the “Fly-Sheets” just now. Could you send me some articles from the Tribune that could suit the taste of the public? The third on Palmerston would move the other two. Faithfully Yours E. Tucker.'*

Incidentally I have also heard from Freiligrath that that rogue Trübner is advertising these ‘Fly-Sheets’ under his imprint. You will note that he asks for ‘Articles from The Tribune’, in order once again to evade the question of money. Now, 1. So far as he is concerned, not one copy of the Tribune is to be had anywhere in London, since it is sent only to subscribers and back numbers cannot even be ordered from New York; 2. Without substantial additions, none of the articles would now suit. Now I must clear up the matter with the fellow and this ‘easy-going’ relationship must end. If he is agreeable, and you for your part approve, would suggest the following:

1. Of the Tribune articles, I shall give him (for publication) the critique of the ‘Secret correspondence’. For this Dronke would only have to send me the 2nd article on this, which was detained by the Post Office here. The latter gratis, 2 and 3 to be paid for in cash and on delivery of the MSS, namely.

2. A general pamphlet on Palmerston, beginning with my introduction in the Tribune to which I should, however, add a new middle and ending.

3. A pamphlet that I would have to write in collaboration with you, i.e. on England’s diplomacy and military action since war was declared. The articles which have appeared in the Tribune will provide us with material for both these aspects. If you agree to 3, the question arises:

How much do we ask?

After all, my articles do seem to sell better than Urquhart’s who is ‘happy’ if his stuff in the Advertiser is accepted by Tucker for the ‘Fly-Sheets’.

If you agree with all this — (Nos. 2 and 3 would, of course, have to be pungent enough to produce a real sensation in London; moreover, such is the footing we are on with Tucker that we can write anything we choose without worrying about English prejudices) — then compose a letter for me putting these proposals to Mr Tucker. Not being sufficiently adept in business matters, I have deliberately avoided answering him either orally or in writing. But no time is to be lost.

A book that has interested me greatly is Thierry’s Histoire de la formation et du progrès du Tiers État, 1893. It is strange how this gentleman, le père of the ‘class struggle’ in French historiography, inveighs in his Preface against the ‘moderns’ who, while also perceiving the antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat, purport to discover traces of such opposition as far back as the history of the tiers-état [third estate] prior to 1789. He is at great pains to show that the tiers-état comprises all social ranks and estates save the noblesse and clergé and that the bourgeoisie plays the role of representative of all these other elements. Quotes, for example, from Venetian embassy reports:

‘These that call themselves the Estates of the realm are of three orders of persons, that of the clergy, of the nobility, and of the rest of those persons who, in common parlance, may be called the people.’ [Thierry, Histoire... Vol. I, p. III].

Had Mr Thierry read our stuff, he would know that the decisive opposition between bourgeoisie and peuple does not, of course, crystallise until the former ceases, as tiers-état, to oppose the clergé and the noblesse. But as for the ‘racines dans 1'histoire ... d'un antagonisme né d'hier’ [roots in history ... of an antagonism born yesterday], his book provides the best proof that the origin of the ‘racines’ coincided with the origin of the tiers-état. By the same token, this otherwise intelligent critic would have to conclude from the ‘Senatus populusque Romanus’ that in Rome there was never any opposition save that between the senatus and the populus. I was interested to discover from the documents he quotes that the term ‘catalla, capitalia’, capital, came into being with the rise of the communes. He has, by the by, unwittingly demonstrated that the victory of the French bourgeoisie was delayed by nothing so much as the fact that it did not decide until 1789 to make common cause with the peasants. Although he does not generalise, he depicts very nicely, 1. how from the beginning, or at least since the rise of the towns, the French bourgeoisie has gained undue influence by constituting itself a parliament, bureaucracy, etc., and not, as in England, by commerce and industry alone. This undoubtedly holds true even of present-day France. 2. From his account it may be readily shown how the class rises as the various forms in which its centre of gravity has lain at different times are ruined and with them the different sections whose influence derives from these forms. In my view, this sequence of metamorphoses leading up to the domination of the class has never before been thus presented — at least so far as the material is concerned. In regard to the maîtrises, jurandes [guilds, corporations] etc., in short, the forms, in which the industrial bourgeoisie develops, he has, alas, restricted himself almost wholly to general, and generally known, phrases, despite the fact that here too he alone is familiar with the material. What he successfully elaborates and underlines is the conspiratorial and revolutionary nature of the municipal movement in the twelfth century. The German Emperors, e.g. Frederick I and Frederick II, issued edicts against these ‘communiones’, ‘conspirationes’ ‘conjurationes’ [communes, secret associations, sworn confederacies] in very much the same spirit as the German Federal Diet. E.g. in 1226 Frederick II takes it upon himself to declare null and void all ‘consulats’ [municipal councils] and other free municipal bodies in the towns of Provence:

‘It has recently been brought to our notice that the guilds of certain cities, market towns and other places have, of their own accord, constituted tribunals, authorities (the Podesta), consulates, administrations and certain other institutions of this kind ... and because, among certain of them ... such things have already developed into abuses and malpractices ... we hereby, in virtue of our imperial power, and by our sure knowledge, revoke these tribunals, etc., and also the concessions in regard to them obtained through the Counts of Provence and Forcalquier and declare them null and void.'

Further:

‘We likewise prohibit conventions and sworn confederacies of whatever kind within the cities and without ... between city and city or between person and person or between city and person.’ (Peace Charter of Frederick I.)

‘That no city and no market town may organise communes, constitutions, unions, leagues or sworn confederacies of any kind, by whatever name they may be referred to, and that, without the assent of their lord, we neither can nor should allow the cities and market towns in our Empire the right to establish communes, constitutions ... sworn confederacies of any kind, whatever names may be conferred on them.’ (Decree of King Henry against city communes.)

Is that not the raide [stiff] German professorial style to the life — the very same which later, graced the fulminations of the ‘Central Commission of the Confederation’? In Germany, the ‘commune jurée’ [sworn commune] penetrated no further than Trier where, in 1161, the Emperor Frederick I put a stop to it:

‘The commune of the citizens of Trier, which is also called sworn confederacy and which we have abolished in the city ... and which as we have heard was later set up anew, shall also be dissolved and declared null and void’.

The policy pursued by the German emperors was exploited by the French rois who secretly supported ‘conjurationes’ and ‘communiones’ in Lorraine, Alsace, the Dauphiné, Franche-Comté, the Lyonnais, etc., thus alienating them from the German Empire:

‘According to the information which has reached our Highness, the King of France ... is seeking to corrupt the sincerity of your loyalty.’ (Rudolph I, Letter to the citizens of Besançon.)

The very same policy was used by the fellows to make Italian cities Guelphic.

It’s funny how the word ‘communio’ is often reviled in just the same way as communism nowadays. Thus, for example, the priest Guibert of Nogent writes:

‘Commune, a new and thoroughly bad appellation’.

There’s often something rather pathetic about the way in which the twelfth-century philistines invite the peasants to take refuge in the towns, the communio jurata. As, for instance, in the Charter of St Quentin:

‘They’ (the burghers of St Quentin) ‘have jointly sworn each to give common aid to his confederate and to share with him common counsel and common responsibility and common defence. We have jointly determined that whoever shall enter our commune and give us his aid, either by reason of flight or for fear of his enemies or for some other offence ... shall be allowed into the commune, for the gate is open to all; and if his lord had unjustly withheld his chattels and does not wish to detain him lawfully, we shall see that justice is done’. [II, 135]

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 39, p. 479;

First published: slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[London,] 2 September 1854, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Frederic,

So now you're a member of the Exchange, and altogether respectable. My gratulations. Some time I should like to hear you howling amidst that pack of wolves.

Heise has written to Imandt, telling him that factory people — where I don’t know (nor does he say whether they're workers or manufacturers) — have banded together to appoint him their common instructor, and that he can count on getting £2 a week. Tant mieux pour lui [so much the better for him].

My wife — as I had good reason to fear before she left — is rather in too interesting circumstances, otherwise well.

Cluss has written again at last. I enclose his letter.

Has your old man arrived yet?

It is probably time we said something in the Tribune about military events in Asia. I have made a bit of a howler. In one of my recent letters I declared the news of the total defeat of the Turks at Kars to be a Vienna invention. True, the telegraphic dispatch was wrong, but it was nevertheless based on fact.

My principal study is now Spain. So far I have swotted up, mainly from Spanish sources, the 1808-14 and the 1820-23 periods. Am now coming to the years 1834-43. The thing is not without complexity. It is rather more difficult to discover exactly the springs behind developments. At any rate I made a timely start with Don Quixote. The whole thing will amount to about 6 articles for the Tribune, if much condensed. At least it may be counted a step forward that at this moment one’s studies are paid for.

Unfortunately the Library is closed from 1-7 September. Apart from other advantages, it’s the only cool place in London.

Entre nous, Dronke, for want of other ‘intellectual’ stimulus, is busily engaged in investigating ‘Steffen’ and, in his letters to Imandt, tears him to pieces in an attempt to render him politically ‘suspect’. I had no difficulty in convincing Imandt of the total absurdity of Dronke’s mischievous cavilling. C'est absurde. I consider that in Steffen our [party] has made a very good acquisition. He has character and education. His views on comparative geography, in which he has specialised, are quite original. Unfortunately a manuscript in which he elaborated his ideas on the subject was left behind in Cologne.

What is Lupus doing? Miquel didn’t come over from Paris as intended because, having had 2 attacks of cholera followed by a haemorrhage, he was finally ordered by the doctors to make his way back to Germany overland with all dispatch.

Vale faveque.

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 39, p. 481;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

London, 13 September 1854, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

Once again I must come knocking at your door, much though I detest doing so, but compelled by pressure from without. I cannot draw my bills for a few weeks yet, since in consequence of some unpleasantness he has had with Bischoffsheim in this connection, Freiligrath is no longer drawing bills of less than £25. On the whole, too, this is preferable, for while the constant drawing of small sums may cover the dette flottante, the fixed debt increases. On top of that, I shall have to deduct £8 for Freund from the next bill since, under the present circumstances, my wife will need rather more care. The extraordinary means to which the family is wont to resort at times of crisis are again exhausted and, just as in the case of the Spanish Budget everything is in pawn.

By the by, as regards the ‘budget’ en général, I have reduced total indebtedness to under £50, i.e. about £30 less than it was at the beginning of the year. From this you can see that there have been some great financial sleights of hand. If a negotiation I have initiated with Lassalle succeeds, and he lends me £30, and you lend me the remainder, I would at last be independent again and reorganise all my domestic arrangements, whereas at present I have to pay out 25 per cent to the pawnshop alone, and in general am never able to get things in order because of arrears. As has once again been demonstrated in Trier, nothing will be achieved with my mater until I can go and importune her in person.

Dam ce moment the total absence of money is the more horrible — quite apart from the fact that family wants do not cease for an instant — as Soho is a choice district for cholera, the mob is croaking right and left (e.g. an average of 3 per house in Broad Street), and ‘victuals’ are the best defence against the beastly thing.

So much for that. I am sending this letter to your private address because some strange combination of circumstances could cause precisely this by no means edifying epistle to fall into the wrong hands at your office.

As regards the Asiatic business, a considerable stir has been made here by the dispatches from that theatre of operations in The Morning Chronicle, which have also been reproduced in The Observer and other weeklies.

I don’t know whether the news about the Zouaves’ cry ‘A bas les singes! Il nous faut Lamoricière!’ [Down with the monkeys! We want Lamoricière! ‘Singes’ also means ‘bosses’] has penetrated as far as Manchester. Espinasse, the first victim of this agitation, has been recalled to France.

The party has been having a run of bad luck. Steffen has lost his post in Brighton through the bankruptcy of the schoolmaster in whose establishment he was employed. It is questionable whether he will manage to get the salary already due to him. Pieper has lost his post as correspondent to the Union, since Mr Pierce has likewise gone bankrupt, and his papers get no more money for foreign correspondents. MacGowan, Jones’ printer and source of credit, has died of cholera. A blow for Jones. All this is not very pleasant.

I don’t remember muck about Imandt. To inquire into it further would only make matters worse. But henceforward I shall break off the moment the gentleman makes any ‘reference’ to Dronke. Dronke ne vaut pas la peine d'en parler [isn’t worth discussing].

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 39, p. 487;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

London, 17 October 1854, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

Your enumeration of the Russian armed forces made today is formidable. But there remains this one question to be answered, whether, even by exerting themselves to the utmost, they were capable of sending more than 200,000 men outside their own country. I am aware of no such instance.

From the standpoint of the old policy, — and what else do England and France advocate, even though the English Ministry is not in earnest and Napoleon III a caricature — , a distinction must be drawn between the interests of England and those of France. With the destruction of the Russian fleet in the Black Sea and the Baltic and the Russians driven out of the Crimea, the Caucasus and the provinces they had filched from Persia and Turkey, England would have ensured her supremacy at sea and her hegemony over the most cultivated part of Asia for another 50 years. It would then be just like her old self to let the continentals exhaust themselves in a seven years’ and other wars — whose main theatre would be Germany and, to some extent, Italy — and, at the end of the struggle, see neither Russia nor Austria nor France supreme on the Continent. For France, on the other hand, the real struggle would only begin with the destruction of Russia’s sea-power and her influence in South Asia. She would be under all the greater compulsion to break Russia’s power on land in order to extend her own power on the Continent, and thus be able to cast a corresponding weight onto the scales against England. Is there any guarantee that, once England has destroyed the Russians in the Baltic and the Black Sea and rendered them innocuous to herself, revolutions won’t break out on the Continent and be used by England as a pretext for another official alliance with Russia against the Continent?

However, the real joke is that none of the Englishmen now in power — neither Chathams nor Pitts Jun., and not even Wellingtons — seriously pursue even the destruction of Russian sea-power and Russian influence in Turkey-Persia-Caucasus. If their half and half measures compel them to do so, they may consider going so far; but their half-measures and villainy will probably land them in trouble, which will provoke movements here at home.

The following passages, quoted from the Archives des Affaires Etrangères in Paris — relating to the Seven Years’ War — show how English Ministers colluded with the enemy actually during the campaign and in matters relating to it. On 24 June 1762 the French Pompadour marshal Soubise, when encamped at Wilhelmstal, had allowed himself to be surprised by the English, Prussian, Hanoverian, etc., allies and driven back across the Fulda. For parliamentary and dynastic reasons, Lord Bute, George III’s Prime Minister, desired peace, but, in view of the nation’s bellicose mood and its bias in favour of Frederick II, could not propose peace so long as the French persisted in letting themselves be beaten and in retreating instead of advancing. Choiseul, as you know, was then Minister of Foreign Affairs in France. In authentic publications from the French archives, which I quote verbatim, we find:

‘After the affair of 24 June, the English Ministers wrote to M. de Choiseul: You are permitting yourselves to be beaten and we can no longer make peace; we would not dare propose it to Parliament. M. de Choiseul, distressed at seeing negotiations broken off, urged the King to write to M. de Soubise: “Dear Cousin, I am writing to you so that, immediately on receipt of this letter, you should cross the River Fulda and attack the enemy without heed for such dispositions as you might think fit and, whatever the result, you will not be held responsible. As to which, I pray God, etc.” M. de Choiseul wrote: “The King’s letter, M. le Maroéchal, is too explicit for me to have to add anything. But I can tell you that, should the King’s Army be destroyed down to the last man and His Majesty be obliged to raise a new one, he would not be dismayed at it”.'

Here, then, we have the English Ministry demanding outright that an allied army, subsidised by them and consisting partly of Englishmen, should be buffeted by the French. They had earlier meddled in French military operations in the opposite direction because George wanted his Hanover to be spared. For in the same extraits we read:

In 1762 Messieurs d'Estrées and de Soubise were in command of the Army of the Upper Rhine numbering 150,000 men, stationed in Hesse, at Göttingen, Mülhausen and Eisenach; M. de Condé commanded that of the Lower Rhine, numbering 30,000 men. All that the Court asked of them was to hold Cassel and Göttingen until the end of November, to evacuate those two places at that time and withdraw to the Ohm, having Ziegenhayn before their front line. Even assuming equal strengths, let alone 180,000 against 80,000, this plan of campaign would have been extraordinary had it not been based on a promise made to us by the English Ministry to conclude peace before the month of July, provided that we made no incursions into Hanover.

This latter piece of meddling by London might, at most, be regarded as normal, had the warring powers been on the point of entering into peace negotiations; the first case, on the other hand, would have cost Lord Bute his head and George, such was the mood at the time (Think only of Wilkes’ and Juniusic Letters), his throne but, comme toujours, it was almost a century before the matter came to light. We encounter another such example just before the outbreak of the anti-Jacobin War when the ‘liberal’ Fox sent a secret emissary’ to Catherine II telling her not to be misled by Pitt’s threats, but to gobble up Poland at her leisure for, should Pitt try to go to war against Russia, he would be brought down. True, Fox was then in the ‘opposition’ and not the Ministry, and I adduce this example simply as evidence that the ‘outs’ are no less honourable than the ‘ins’.

Hence I believe that, in assessing the allies’ conduct of the war — as indeed you infer from time to time in your articles — the exchanges between Downing Street (especially as long as Palmerston is there) and Petersburg must always be considered. I am sure that, as soon as the armies find themselves in a critical position, the generals will sh... on the Cabinet and do their best, since Messrs the generals are seldom or never let into secrets and even risk their necks — witness the example of Admiral Byng, whose instructions from the Admiralty of the day were no less deplorable than those of e.g. Dundas now.

I shall try to get hold of Bauer’s latest production and send it to you.

I don’t know whether Napier and other historians of the Franco-Spanish war have presented in its true light a fact for which there is ample proof in Spanish works, namely that, right up to the end of the war, apart from a brief spell when Napoleon himself was in command in Spain, a fully organised republican conspiracy existed in the French army, aimed at overthrowing Napoleon and restoring the republic. Apropos. Authentic sources suggest that the great ‘Mina y Espoz’ was an egregious rogue, inferior to job. Becker, no military talent at all, but cunning, worldly-wise and avant tout voleur [above all a thief]. A careful study of Spanish revolutionary history reveals that it has taken the fellows some 40 years to subvert the material basis of the priesthood and the aristocracy, but that during this time they have also succeeded in completely revolutionising the old social order. Incidentally, the provisional governments, etc., there show about as much sense as in France, etc. Considering the hot-bloodedness of the whole race and their indifference to bloodshed, it is typical that, up to the time of the civil war of 1834-40, it was precisely the revolutionary party which claimed to have a monopoly of philanthropic gentleness, and for this it was punished again and again.

Tomorrow Pieper will probably become a resident master 30 miles from London. Having lost his post as correspondent to the Union, he is forced to accept this appointment. In view of my wife’s ‘condition’ she will be able to do little as a secretary.

This is deplorable.

I have had another dunning letter from the ‘friendly’ Freund, but no reply as yet from Lassalle.

When your old man leaves again, or if he decides not to come, I should, circumstances permitting, like to come to Manchester for a time.

Still no answer from Lassalle — nine weeks now. Nothing from Cluss.

Schnauffer has died.

Your

K. M.

Marx to Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

October 26, 1854

Dear Frederick!

In studying the Spanish rubbish I have also worked out the tricks of the worthy Chateaubriand, that fine writer who combines the aristocratic scepticism and Voltairianism of the 18th century with the aristocratic sentimentalism and romanticism of the 19th in the most repellent fashion. Naturally, this combination was bound, in terms of style, to be epoch-making in France, although even in the style the falsity often hits one in the eye, despite all the artistic tricks. As for his political views, this fellow has completely revealed himself in his Congrès de Verone and the only question is whether he received hard cash from Alexander Pavlovich or was bought simply with flatteries, to which this vain fop is more susceptible than anyone.

1855

Marx to Engels. 12 January

Marx to Engels. 17 January

Marx to Engels. 19 January

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 23 January

Marx to Engels. 24 January

Marx to Engels. 30 January

Marx to Engels. 31 January

Marx to Engels. 2 February

Marx to Engels. 13 February

Marx to Engels. 3 March

Marx to Engels. 8 March

Marx to Engels. 16 March

Marx to Engels. 27 March

Marx to Engels. 30 March

Marx to Engels. 6 April

Marx to Engels. 12 April

Marx to Engels. 16 April

Marx to Moritz Elsner. 17 April

Marx to Engels. 16 May

Marx to Engels. 18 May

Marx lo Engels. 15 June

Marx to Engels. 26 June

Marx to Engels. 29 June

Marx to Engels. 3 July

Marx to Engels. 17 July

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 28 July

Marx to Engels. 7 August

Marx to Engels. l September

Marx to Engels. 6 September

Marx to Amalie Daniels. 6 September

Marx to Engels. 11 September

Marx to Moritz Elsner. 11 September

Marx to Moritz Elsner. 8 November

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 8 November

Marx to Engels. 7 December

Marx to Engels. 11 December

Engels to Marx. 12 December

Marx to Engels. 14 December

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Düsseldorf

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 511;

First published: F. Lassalle, Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, 1922.

[London,] 23 January 1855, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Lassalle,

This letter would have been written a week ago had not my wife been delivered of a world citizen (female) [Eleanor] and the consequent trouble left me little spare time, as you can readily imagine. However, both mother and daughter are doing well.

It is not very pleasant, mon cher to write in such a small [...] au fond, all one can do is produce miniature dunghills. Mais [n'importe] that the [...] should consider [...] and make no literary pretensions, while also hoping that none will be made.

As regards the various economic questions you put to me, so far as I know there are as yet no compilations, whether official or scientific. Official figures for corn imports are, of course, to be found in the board of trade tables. But nothing else. Undoubtedly there will now be a plethora of works on these matters. A period of crisis in England is also one of theoretical research. I shall at the earliest opportunity compile something for you from my note-books, in which I have collected all sorts of statistical information from various sources. For the present, merely the following, of a quite general nature:

Imports of Wheat and Flour

Wheat as wheat

(quarters)

Flour

(reduced to quarters)

1847

2,650,000

1,808,000

1848

1,865,000

351,000

1849

4,569,000

1,129,000

1850

3,778,000

1,102,000

Thus 8,285,000 [qrs] of wheat imported during the first 2 years of free trade, and 2,226,000 in the form of flour, in all 10,511,000, or an average of more than 5 million quarters over the 2 years. This amounts to far more than 1/6 of total consumption, reckoned at 1 quarter per person per year.

Now, can it be said that annual consumption increased to that extent? This clearly depends on the answer to another question: whether the same amount of wheat was produced in England as heretofore? This again can only be answered when we are in possession of the agricultural statistics, upon which work has only just begun. As regards Ireland and Scotland, we know that considerable amounts [of the land] have been turned over to pasture, etc., since the abolition of the corn tariffs. As regards England, no conclusion can be reached at present save by induction. If in England, a considerable area of land had not been withdrawn from cultivation, how came it that e.g. this year, despite a very good harvest, corn prices are higher than in the protectionist year, 1839, for instance, although the loss of imports from abroad in no way compensates for the difference between a good and a bad harvest, between, say, that of 1854 and that of 1853? How the tendency to withdraw land from cultivation has spread under free trade — mainly, no doubt, by turning it over to pasture — is evident from the following table, an official one (for Ireland):

1854 (up till November)

Acres

Decrease in Cereals

91,233

Green Crops (Potatoes, roots etc.)

710

Flax

23,607

Clover

13,025

Total decrease in cultivated land

128,575

Last year (1853), on the other hand, the total decrease was only 43,867 acres. Making, for both years taken together, 172,442. This is all the more striking as the demand for all agricultural produce has risen in the past 2 years.

Now as regards the ‘hands’ employed in agriculture, we know that, of the 300,000 people who have emigrated every year from Great Britain since 1852, the great majority consisted of agricultural workers. We know that in 1853 the population decreased for the first time instead of increasing. Finally, the best proof that the number of agricultural hands has greatly decreased is that in 1853 wages in rural areas rose for the first time since 1815 and that mechanical reapers were more or less generally introduced in order to depress them again.

(Incidentally, I would point out that the free import of foreign corn has given England’s agronomy a tremendous impetus.)

What [influence] free trade has had on the price of industrial [products] is absolutely impossible to assess from the material so far available. In the woollen and linen industry, for example, the fluctuations dependent on raw material can hardly have been affected in any way by the repeal of the corn-laws. On the whole I believe that the history of prices from 1849 to 1854 will show that the price-relations between all manufactured products and grain, as well as between individual branches of industry and the corresponding raw materials remained the same before and after the repeal of the Corn Laws (likewise the variations within each group).

As for wages in the factories (figures another time), it can be proved beyond doubt that the repeal of the Corn Laws, 1. has had no influence whatever on absolute wages, 2. has contributed to depress relative wages. In the year of crisis wages [had] been depressed. They were not raised in the relatively good years 1849-52 (the latter included, at least up to the last 1/3 of the year). Why weren’t they raised? Because the price of foodstuffs had fallen. In the course of 1852 the great emigration began, while on the other hand demand rose appreciably in the United States, Australia, India, etc. The workers then demanded a 10 per cent rise in wages and for a short time, while prosperity was at its height (until about August 1853), were able to achieve it in almost the majority of branches of industry. However, as you know, they were soon deprived of this 10 per cent rise — remember, e.g., the Preston strike although corn prices were on average higher in 1853 and 1854 than in the protectionist years 1843-45 and 1830-37. Hence the rise in wages — a very temporary rise, for already short time is being worked again and, generally speaking, the crisis has begun — is in no way attributable to free trade, but corresponds wholly to the rise that takes place in all years of prosperity. In fact free trade simply meant that from 1849 to 1852 wages did not rise. Since it was possible to buy more food with the same wages, these were not increased. What did show a relative increase, therefore, was profits. Hence relative wages, i.e. wages in relation to profits, have in fact fallen — a result which I showed to be inevitable in a pamphlet [Speech on the Question of Free Trade] (French) written as long ago as 1847.

Of course, one cannot deny that the repeal of the Corn Laws may have in some degree contributed (together with the adjustment of the sugar tax, the raising of restrictions on shipping and the repeal of the protective tariffs on British North American timber) to creating new, or enlarging existing, markets for British manufactures abroad. For instance, in the United States the tendency to legislate in favour of free trade was certainly due partly to the repeal in England. However, too much importance should not be attached to this, since there was a decrease in English exports e.g. to Russia, whose exports to England increased enormously as a result of the repeal. In general, it would appear that, relatively speaking, Europe’s importance as a market for English goods is steadily diminishing; since in 1854, 60 per cent of total exports (I mean total exports of British products, disregarding re-exports) were absorbed by the United States, Australia and India alone, a figure which does not include Britain’s colonies outside Europe (excepting India).

I have jotted down the above information to provide a very general answer to your questions. I shall see what I can find in the way of definite statistical material in my note-books. As already mentioned, books will no doubt only begin coming out now...

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 520;

First published: abridged in Der Wechsel zwischen F. Engels, und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[London,] 2 February 1855

Dear Frederic,

Many thanks for the article. Russell has been horribly discredited by Newcastle, though that ass waxed altogether too touching at the end of his speech.

My wife is getting on satisfactorily. But all is by no means well with the child, I fear.

Enclosed 1. Letter from Lassalle; 2. from Daniels; 3. the cuttings to which Lassalle refers; Goldheim has been prowling about among the workers in Solingen etc. under the name of ‘Lassalle’. 4. Letter from Steffen who, however, has omitted to give his Brighton address and will begin to grumble again if, in the circumstances, I don’t reply.

As a result of the Barbès business Jones, of course, got mixed up with the crapauds [philisitines] and with the crapule [dregs] among them at that. So another big banquet of all nations was arranged for the February celebrations. He came to see me, too, and I laughed in his face. Meanwhile his Frenchmen (a quite unknown mob) had dug up the ex-Schapper Association which did not, of course, reject such good graces. Moreover the malcontents among the Polish and Italian émigrés — who are not accounted ‘superior refugees’ — are said to have organised themselves for the purpose of sending delegates to the Committee. For the fun of it, Götz and I let Jones take us to their meeting yesterday, we being designated ‘observers’. He introduced us as ‘old friends of the Chartist Party’ who, doubtless, were entitled to satisfy their curiosity. Who was there? Various crapauds of the basest sort. A Spanish tailor or tobacco manufacturer who had ‘convened himself’. Stechan (half crazed) and behind him three notorious German louts. Schapper himself being no longer available, Stechan, tried to ape the former’s physiognomy, his morose gravity, his gesticulations, as once the butcher Legendre those of Danton. But that was not all. Herzen the Russian went uninvited to the previous meeting, and (himself) moved that he be nominated a member of the Committee. At the meeting we attended, an obsequious letter from him was read out and, because the politically wise Frenchmen thought him ‘un garçon charmant,’ he was admitted without further ado. The meeting, the chattering of the Frenchmen, the glazed expressions of the Germans, the gesticulations of the Spanish tailor were so awful that Jones (Chairman) 1. proposed that everyone should speak only once and for not more than ten minutes; 2. upon its being remarked that the Spaniard was not an émigré because democracy had triumphed there, he came out with an ambiguous compliment that ‘he wished every émigré community in London’ a similar lot so that thus ‘no international committees need be maintained’ here.

Götz and I were treated to a free comedy and we smoked furiously in our role of mute onlookers. Here one could see with one’s own eyes the pass to which ‘la vraie démocratie’ has come.

Your

K. Marx

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 522;

First published: abridged in Der Wechsel zwischen F. Engels, und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[London,] 13 February 1855, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

Firstly an acknowledgment of receipt of the ‘bullion’, and secondly of today’s splendid article. For the past 4 -5 days I have been prevented from writing, hence also to you, by a severe inflammation of the eyes which is not yet fully cleared up: also, as a result of the cold weather my usual secretary [Jenny] has not risen from her bed again as quickly as is her wont. However I think that she will shortly be able to return to her post. My eye trouble was brought on by reading through my own note-books on economics, the intention being, not so much to elaborate the thing, as at any rate to master the material and get it ready to work on.

I have told you how Herzen elbowed his way on to the ‘International Committee’. Enclosed is a letter from him in which he proffers thanks for the ‘invitation’ which ‘was never made’. The letter was intended for publication in The People’s Paper in order to assert his importance coram publico. This miscarried, for I immediately wheedled the scrawl out of Jones. However Herzen has had himself nominated a steward.

Also enclosed a 2nd letter, in which this committee invites me to the banquet and ‘to take part in the meeting’. I do not want to offend the crapauds, still less the Chartists. So the question is: in what form I should couch my refusal. Tell me your view by return. The thing must be declined, 1. because such meetings are, on the whole, humbug; 2. because at this moment it would be to expose oneself uselessly to governmental persecution, and Palmerston has his eye on me; 3. because at no time and in no place do I wish to appear alongside Herzen, not being of the view that Old Europe should be rejuvenated with Russian blood. Should one’s reply, perhaps, include some reference to Herzen’s presence?

Jones has done something infinitely ‘stupid’, indeed gone completely off the rails, in leaving the management of the affair to the crapauds and the German louts. He sacrificed everything to the desire to show, at a big public meeting, that the foreign emigrations were in the tow of the Chartists. The meeting will be a large one and create an uproar, but as a result: 1. Urquhart and Co. (likewise The Times if the thing creates a sensation) will denounce the Chartists as being led by Russian agents. This is unavoidable. 2. It will provide the Ministry with a pretext for reviving the Aliens Bill. Discord within the Chartist Party has already broken out. A section of the London Chartists maintains that Jones has arbitrarily departed from the Charter and compromised their whole cause by adopting the slogan ‘social and democratic republic’ when forming the branch committee which is to be the connecting link between the Chartists and the foreign emigration. There is no denying the extent of Jones’ energy, persistence and activity, yet he goes and spoils everything by the way he cries his wares, by his tactless striving after pretexts for agitation and his anxiety to be ahead of the time. If he can’t agitate in reality, he seeks an appearance of agitation, improvises movements after movements (so that, of course, everything remains at a standstill) and periodically works himself up into a state of fictitious exaltation. I have warned him, but in vain.

Mr Golovin — Herzen’s fidus Achates — has inserted in today’s Morning Advertiser, under the heading ‘February Revolution’, a small notice to the effect that

‘he has heard that Herzen is to represent Russia, or rather liberal Russia, at the banquet. His name alone betrays that he is a German, or rather a German Jew. In Russia the Czar is criticised for making especial use of these people. The emigration should take care not to fall into the same error’.

If, as the Paris correspondent writes in the 2nd Edition of today’s Morning Chronicle, Bonaparte minor assumes personally the supreme command of the Army of the Rhine against Prussia, the ‘campagne’ might end badly for the French.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 526;

First published: abridged in Der Wechsel zwischen F. Engels, und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[London,] 8 March 1855, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

Received the £5.

I cannot get away until Colonel Musch is visibly recovered. However, this week he has made rapid strides towards convalescence, today the doctor was exceedingly pleased, and next week everything may be all right. As soon as I can depart with a good conscience, I shall write to you. Next week, I imagine.

Yesterday we were informed of a very happy event, the death of my wife’s uncle, aged 90. As a result, my mother-in-law will save an annual impost of 200 talers and my wife will get almost £100; more if the old dog hasn’t made over to his housekeeper such of his money as is not entailed. Another question which will be settled is that of the Duke of Brunswick’s manuscript on the Seven Years’ War, for which old Scharnhorst has already offered large sums. My wife immediately registered a protest against any attempts by her brother to make a present of it to ‘His Most Gracious Highness’. Let the Prussian state acquire it for cash but not otherwise.

There is a prospect of another possible source of money. My wife had deposited 1,300 talers with one Grach, a banker in Trier. The fellow went bankrupt and, in her case, had acted fraudulently, since he was already insolvent (although unbeknown to the public) when he accepted her deposit. On the urgent plea of the wife of this Grach, my wife ‘relented’ and refrained from pursuing the matter in the courts. The Chief Public Prosecutor had stated that Grach would otherwise be brought before the Assizes. This Grach’s wife has now inherited a large fortune and, if she keeps her promise, we can count on the recovery of at least part of the loss. In any case this will mean that the ‘past’ has been discharged once and for all and a weight lifted from our shoulders.

Napoleon Bonaparte’s pamphlet — (Girardin denies in La Presse that he is the faiseur) — amused me very much. Despite the attempt to present ‘le prince’ in an imposing attitude, despite the French braggadocio, superficiality, and blunders in things military, the pamphlet is worth its weight in gold as a memorial to our Leroy, alias St-Arnaud, and generally as typical of the ‘imperial barnum’ and his round table.

There is one point you might clear up for me about the Crimean business, namely: General Evans declared before the committee that the main reason for the melting of the army before Sevastopol was the absence of a road from the harbour of Balaklava; 1,000 men would have sufficed to build one in 10 days, but — et c'est la question — all men who could have been spared were employed in the trenches, and from the start the extent of the lines to be captured by the English was grossly disproportionate to their numerical strength. The question is: Could the French be regarded as the contrivers of this mischief?

A short while ago I took another look at Roman history (ancient) up to the time of Augustus. Internal history resolves itself plainly into the struggle between small and large landed property, specifically modified, of course, by slavery relations. Debtor-creditor relations, which play so large a part from the origines of Roman history, figure merely as an inherent consequence of small landed property.

Today I saw an advertisement for 3 works by Forster, a parson, all having in common the title Original Language.

As you will have seen, Mr Herzen is now having himself puffed in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung also. At the same time his speech (at Jones’ meeting) is appearing in The People’s Paper as a fly-sheet and in père Ribeyrolles’ estimable L'Homme.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 528;

First published: in Der Wechsel zwischen F. Engels, und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 16 March 1855 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

I do not believe that the good Musch is going to get over his illness. You will understand how this prospect affects all of us here. My wife once again altogether down. However, the issue will soon be known.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 528;

First published: abridged in Der Wechsel zwischen F. Engels, und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[London,] 27 March 1855, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

Musch has been improving visibly for the past few days and the doctor sees every reason for hope. If all goes well, Musch must go into the country straight away. He is, of course, terribly weak and wasted. The fever is got rid of and the constipation considerably abated. The real question now is whether his constitution is strong enough to undergo the whole treatment. However, I think it is. As soon as the doctor says he is out of danger, I shall come and visit you.

Dronke has arrived here and is applying for Freiligrath’s post, Freiligrath having definitely broken with his principal.

You must forgive me for not writing more than these few lines. I am dog-tired from the long night vigils, since I am Musch’s nurse.

Warmest regards from the whole family, Musch included.

Tell Lupus that Furrer, the Swiss with whom he used to be in touch, has gone bankrupt and actually done his resident tutor out of £14.

Vale faveque.

Tous tuus,

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 529;

First published: in Der Wechsel zwischen F. Engels, und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 30 March 1855, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

From day to day I have put off sending you a bulletin because the ups and downs of the illness were such that I changed my opinion almost hourly. Latterly, however, the illness has assumed the character, hereditary in my family, of an abdominal consumption, and even the doctor seems to have given up hope. For the past week emotional stress has made my wife iller than ever before. As for myself, though my heart is bleeding and my head afire, I must, of course, maintain my composure. Never for one moment throughout his illness has the child been untrue to his own good-natured, and at the same time independent, self.

As for you, I cannot thank you enough for the kindness with which you have worked in my stead, and for the sympathy you have shown towards the child.

Should there be any change for the better, I shall write to you at once.

Tous tuus,

K. M.

Notabene. There’s no sailing for America next Tuesday and it doesn’t do to send the chaps two articles at once every time. So give this Tuesday a miss.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 530;

First published: in Der Wechsel zwischen F. Engels, und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 6 April 1855, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

Poor Musch is no more. Between 5 and 6 o'clock today he fell asleep (in the literal sense) in my arms. I shall never forget how much your friendship has helped to make this ghastly time easier for us. You will understand how I grieve over the child. My wife sends her warmest regards. I might, if I come to Manchester, bring her with me for a week, in which case we should, of course, stay at an inn (or perhaps take private lodgings). At any rate I must find some means of helping her over the first days.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 533;

First published: in Der Wechsel zwischen F. Engels, und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 12 April 1855, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

I am thinking of coming up to Manchester with my wife on Wednesday; she must have a change of scene for a few days. Unless I let you know to the contrary, Wednesday will be the day. I shall at any rate be writing again on Monday.

Needless to say, the house has been very desolate and bereft since the death of the dear child who was its life and soul. I cannot tell you how we miss the child at every turn. I've already had my share of bad luck but only now do I know what real unhappiness is. I feel broken down. Since the funeral I have been fortunate enough to have such splitting headaches that I can neither think nor hear nor see.

Amid all the fearful torments I have recently had to endure, the thought of you and your friendship has always sustained me, as has the hope that there is still something sensible for us to do together in the world.

Your

K. M.

My wife has just brought me a line or two for you, which I enclose.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 536;

First published: in Der Wechsel zwischen F. Engels, und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 18 May 1855, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Engels,

My wife has been confined to bed since yesterday evening. As I cannot draw a bill before a week on Tuesday (next), I should be much obliged if you could send me some money (however little).

The devil take the Tribune! Certainly it is now absolutely essential that it should adopt an anti-pan-Slav line. If it doesn’t, one might be compelled to break with the rag, which would be disastrous.

As you will have seen in an earlier no. of the Augsburg Allgemeine, as from next August, the great Herzen will be bringing out a Russian periodical here, the Polar Star.

My warm regards to Lupus.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 547;

First published: abridged in Der Wechsel zwischen F. Engels, und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

6 September 1855

3 York Place, Denmark Street

(not Hill, which is merely the general name for the whole place)

Camberwell

Dear Engels,

You may already have read about the death of our friend Daniels in the Kölnische Zeitung. He is no more nor less than a victim of the infamies of the Prussian Police. I shall be writing a few lines to his wife, and you must do the same. Address: Frau Doktorin Amalie Daniels, Schildergasse, Köln. It would be desirable if Lupus did likewise. I know by experience how welcome letters from friends are at such a time. I shall write a short obituary of our poor friend for the Tribune. So far as the German-American Press is concerned, I think the best plan would be to insert in the New York Neue Zeit (nominally edited by Bernhardt, in fact by Löwe of Calbe) a brief obituary notice signed by you, Freiligrath, Lupus and myself. Also to denounce the proceedings against Bürgers.

You will have heard that O'Connor died a few days ago.

Jones’ wife is mortally ill. The poor devil is at this moment in desperate circumstances.

A steamer is leaving on Tuesday. It is essential in the case of Putnam’s that the thing should be in New York by 10th October at the latest. Have you received the copy that was sent you? Those inane bits of hair-splitting did not appear in the Tribune but in The New-York Times, the rival paper. As for Aldershot, the business was simply as follows: About a fortnight ago 2 privates were sentenced, one to 50 lashes, the other to 30, for ‘disrespectful’ behaviour towards their superiors. As is often the case, the cat-o'-nine-tails was steeped in urine. The first man had to be sent to hospital after receiving 40 lashes, and the second died shortly after receiving 30. There would appear to be no further question of an inquiry.

In The Morning Advertiser, Blind continues ‘to shake the despotic powers of Europe to their very foundations’.

A German rag has reappeared in London, the actual rédacteur en chef being the ill-famed Sigmund Engländer, of Paris police memory. Chief contributors: Ronge, the Russian Herzen and a drunkard by the name of Korn, allegedly an ex-captain.

Vale.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Amalie Daniels

In Cologne

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 548;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, 1934.

London, 6 September 1855, 28 Dean Street, Soho

My Dear Mrs Daniels,

It is impossible to describe the grief I felt on hearing that dear, unforgettable Roland had passed away. Although the latest news reaching me through Steffen had been far from reassuring, I did not for all that ever abandon hope of your excellent husband’s recovery. His was a sensitive, finely-tuned and altogether noble nature-character, talents and physical appearance in rare harmony. Seen amongst the others in Cologne, Daniels always seemed to me like the statue of a Greek god deposited by some freak of fate in the midst of a crowd of Hottentots. His premature decease is an irreparable loss not only to his family and friends but also to science, in which he gave promise of the finest achievements, and to the great, suffering mass of humanity, who possessed in him a loyal champion.

I am sufficiently acquainted with your heroic nature to be convinced that imperishable grief will not prevent you from remaining the loyal guardian of the beloved pledges left you by Roland. In his sons you will compensate the world twice over for the loss of the father.

The news of this new loss has revived in my wife such vivid memories of the death of our only little son that her state of mind does not permit of her writing to you just now. She is weeping and lamenting like a child.

Consolation I will not venture to offer you since I myself am and shall remain inconsolable for [the] loss of a friend who was more dear to me personally than any other. Grief such as this cannot be alleviated, but only shared. As soon as I get over my first stormy emotions, I shall send an obituary to the New-York Tribune for the many friends of the departed in America. It is to be hoped that circumstances will some day permit us to wreak upon those guilty of cutting short his career vengeance of a kind sterner than that of an obituary.

You will need no assurance on my part that you can always count on me as a loyal and devoted friend.

With my heartfelt sympathy,

Yours

K. Marx

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Düsseldorf

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 556;

First published: F. Lassalle, Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, 1922.

Manchester, 8th November 1855

34 Butler Street, Green Keys

Dear Lassalle,

Herewith a very belated answer. In the first place, I did not get your letters until later because I was in Manchester whereas the letters were in London and my wife did not know for certain whether I hadn’t already left Manchester. For another thing, I was plagued by the most atrocious toothache, so much so that I experienced what Hegel demands of sensual consciousness at the stage at which it is said to override consciousness of self — viz. the inability to hear, see, and therefore also to write.

As regards your query about the book entitled: Les mystères de la Bourse by Coffinières, I believe that this miserable concoction is still among the books I left behind in the fatherland. During my first stay in Paris the title misled me first into buying the thing and then into reading it. Mr Coffinières is a lawyer who, au fond, a knows nothing about the Bourse and merely warns against the ‘legal’ swindles perpetrated by the ‘agents de change’. So there’s nothing to be got out of the book — neither fact, nor theory, nor yet even entertaining anecdotes. Moreover, it is now completely out-of-date. ‘Sweet Donna, let him go’ — i.e. Coffinières. ‘He is not worthy of thy wrath’.

Weerth is now back in Manchester after a lengthy journey via the Continent (he returned from the West Indies at the end of July). In a week’s time he will be off to the tropics again. It’s very amusing to hear him talk. He has seen, experienced and observed much. Ranged over the better part of South, West and Central America. Crossed the Pampas on horseback. Climbed Chimborazo. Likewise stayed in California. If he no longer writes feuilletons, he makes up for it by recounting them, and his audience has the benefit of vivacious gesture, mime and waggish laughter. He is, by the by, full of enthusiasm for life in the West Indies and hasn’t a good word to say for the human riff-raff and the weather of this northern clime. And, indeed, things are bad here, very bad.

You will have read in the papers about the Jersey affair and the general to-do over the refugee question in England. I don’t believe that this affair will take a serious turn. Nor, for that matter, do I believe that the government here had a serious end in view. Otherwise the row would have been saved up until just before the opening of Parliament. As it is, public opinion has been given time to swing back and, in many respects, has already done so.

Send your next letter to my old address in London as I'm not sure how long I shall stay up here with friend Engels. He and Lupus send you their warm regards.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 39, p. 562;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[London,] 14 December 1855, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Frederic,

This confinement to my room is beginning to weigh on me. Not one breath of fresh air yet. Meanwhile, another 1,000 Germans sent off yesterday. Jones supposed to be coming today, at last.

The day before yesterday evening I had a visit, you'll never guess from whom. Edgar Bauer — whom I hadn’t seen for about a year — came to see me, and with him — Bruno. He’s already been here a fortnight and intends to remain about 6 months ‘in order to prove his assumptions’ which he can hardly fail to do, considering the way he’s begun. The man has aged visibly, his forehead has broadened and the impression he now gives is more or less that of a pedantic old professor. For the present he is lodging with Edgar in a hovel somewhere about the far end of Highgate and there he squats, amidst the most profound petty-bourgeois misère, seeing and hearing nothing. This he takes to be London and believes that, apart from the privileged 30,000, all the English live like Edgar Bauer. Hence his hatred and ‘contempt’ for the country is enormous. In his view, it’s like living in ‘Treuenbrietzen’. To anyone coming from ‘Berlin’, London is a veritable ‘prison’. On the same occasion it also transpired that his present ideal is the ‘East Frisian’, ‘Altenburgian’ and partly ‘Westphalian peasant,’ those true noblemen. He is, moreover, convinced that these clodhoppers cannot be wished away and will be the rocks upon which the modern, egalitarian fiddle-faddle, bemoaned by this man of the ‘dissolution’, will come to grief. It was most curious to hear the ‘Criticism’, make the confession that, in the final analysis, Berthold Auerbach is its true cornerstone. He holds that, save for a few ‘purely commercial towns’, the towns of Germany are in decline, but that ‘the country’ is prospering fabulously. He knew not a thing about the rise of industry, but quietly bemoaned the fact that nothing is now being done in Germany save ‘improvements’.

The ‘English language’ is ‘wretched’, completely romanicised. For his consolation I proceeded to tell him that the Dutch and the Danes say the same of the German language and claim that the only fellows to have remained truly untainted by Romance are the ‘Icelanders’.

The old boy has devoted much time to languages. He speaks Polish and declares in consequence the Polish language to be ‘the most beautiful of all’. His linguistic studies seem to have been highly uncritical. He considers Dobrovský, for instance, to be a far more important man than Grimm, and calls him the father of comparative linguistics. Moreover, he has let the Poles in Berlin persuade him that old Lelewel has refuted Grimm’s Geschichte der deutschen Sprache in a recent paper.

Apropos. He also told me that a fat volume (of German provenance) had appeared in Germany attacking Grimm’s dictionary. The whole volume consists of howlers G[rimm] is shown to have perpetrated.

Despite all his efforts to adopt a humorous attitude, his gloom and despondency over the ‘present’ kept obtruding. In Germany — horrible indeed! — nothing is now read or bought save miserable compilations in the field of the natural sciences. When you come, we shall have great fun with the old boy.

Köppen has been working for years on a book on Buddhism. Rutenberg is the publisher of the Staats-Anzeiger. Mr Bergenroth, who used to drift about America (North and South) as commissioner (trade), has returned sans argent but with an illness.

I am still waiting for the 2nd edition of The Times or Morning Post. The news may make it necessary to couch the thing on Kars in somewhat more hypothetical terms. However, this would only require quite minor alterations (a few words in the conditional). I, for my part, believe that Kars has fallen.

Today there is a not uninteresting article in the Herald — or so my wife tells me — about Bonaparte’s misgivings as to the true intentions of Viscount Palmerston. That Pam is in very bad odour at court you may see from the Times article against Prince Albert. At the same time, again the old manoeuvre of presenting Prince Albert as an encumbrance to the ‘Ministry’.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

1856

Marx to Engels. 18 January

Engels to Marx. 7 February

Marx to Engels. 12 February

Marx to Engels. 13 February

Marx to Engels. 29 February

Marx to Engels. 5 March

Engels to Marx. 7 March

Marx to Engels. 25 March

Marx to Engels. 10 April

Engels to Marx. 14 April

Engels to Wilhelm Steffen.. 15 April

Marx to Engels. 16 April

Marx to Engels. 26 April

Marx to Engels. 7 May

Marx to Engels. 8 May

Marx to Engels. 23 May

Engels to Marx. 23 May

Engels to Marx. 26 May

Marx to Engels. 29 May

Marx to Engels. 5 June

Marx to Engels. 6 June

Marx to Jenny Marx. 21 June

Marx to Isaac Ironside. 21 June

Marx to William Cyples. 22 July

Marx to Engels. 28 July

Marx to Engels. 1 August

Engels to Marx. 4 August

Marx to Jenny Marx. 8 August

Marx to Collet Dobson Collet.. 11 August

Marx to Engels. 22 September

Marx to Engels. 26 September

Engels to Marx. After 26 Sept.

Marx to Engels. 16 October

Marx to Collet Dobson Collet. 23 October

Marx to Engels. 30 October

Marx to Engels. 30 October

Engels to Marx. 17 November

Marx to Engels. 2 December

Marx to Engels. 22 December

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 5;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

Manchester, 7 February 1856

Dear Marx,

You will be most annoyed with me for not having written for so long. But until I've coped with a number of jobs at the office which will keep me busy for the next fortnight or so, I shall hardly be in a position to turn my mind to anything else. On top of that my old man keeps pestering me frightfully over purchases of yarn, etc., on his behalf, and I have to send him a confidential report at least twice a week.

Enclosed Pan-Slavism No. II, in which want of substance is at least partially offset by verbosity. With No. III I shall at last get in medias res [really into the thing].

You should now read the Guardian’s Paris correspondent regularly; very odd things are happening there. Over the past few days the correspondent of the Examiner & Times has provided even fuller and better particulars. I have just tried to buy the latest issues for you but they had all been sold out. Perhaps I can get them from Belfield.

Bonaparte is very fast on the decline. That Drouyn de Lhuys is missing from the official list of senators for this year you will have seen, but not, I imagine, that recently, apropos a sensational act of opposition, he left his card on an Orleanist (Rémusat, if I'm not mistaken) with a bold line drawn through the title: vice-président du Sénat. Recently, the infantry were called out against the students escorting Monsieur Nisard home. At the cry: Vive la ligne! the troops ordered arms and had to be speedily withdrawn lest fraternisation should become a fait accompli. The recent conspiracy in the south-west, on account of which 5,000 arrests (according to a Bonapartist statement) were made, had wide ramifications in the army; the NCO school at La Flèche was completely disbanded. Almost all the students were implicated and had to be returned to their regiments; in fact, it is said to have been very difficult to find reliable regiments to which they could be posted. When Bonaparte was at the Odéon recently with his spouse, the university students who filled the pit sang the Sire de Franc Boissy throughout the evening, carefully intoning some of the more embarrassing bits. In Paris the workers are singing a little ditty, having the refrain:

He is leaving, he is leaving,

The little mustard-vendor.

He is leaving for his country

With all his belongings

In order that there should be no doubt about the identity of the petit marchand de moutarde, the police have banned the song. All these impudent manifestations of appositional and positively anti-Bonapartist impulses, and Mr. Bonaparte’s corresponding feebleness are proof that a great change is under way. The measures adopted during the coup d'état will no longer do, and the courage to apply them is no longer there. You will have seen that even The Times, on two successive days, first described Napoleon personally as a mere stopgap so far as France was concerned — because not one single man was to be found in which the nation could place its confidence and esteem — and then characterised his entire general staff of ministers, etc., as swindlers and scoundrels. In today’s Guardian there is another nice story about that rascal Fiorentino, Bonapartist court feuilletonist and Knight of the Legion of Honour. Mr Espinasse, too, had to decamp from Paris; he has been involved in scandals, concerning which I shall probably hear more in a day or two. Something is also afoot with de Morny; the fellow has more or less fallen out with his worthy brother and is once more intriguing on his own account.

This Bonaparte, for whom in the past everything, however stupid, craven and infamous, turned out so well, will now discover that henceforward everything will go badly for him. This he is already discovering in the war and peace question; everyone blamed him for the war, no one thanks him for the peaceful turn of events. Incidentally, the matter of the peace is far from being settled. The preliminaries to the preliminaries contain, au fond, nothing but the Bessarabian clause, and that is offset by a total disregard for Kars. All the rest consists of nothing but bogus concessions. Moreover Bonaparte no longer cares a rap about the conditions upon which he makes peace. For him it is now his bread and butter that is at stake, as once with old Dolleschall, and I'm convinced that the Russians know this better than he does himself. Never before have the French been so wholly indifferent to their gloire; since 1848 the fellows have been concerned with other things than the traditional gloire and parliamentary swindling.

So it seems as though we have safely weathered the Aliens Bill — au train que les chases vont en France, there will soon be no further need to worry one’s head about the aspirations of Palmerston and Co. The Bonapartist house of cards will most likely collapse this summer just as did Louis Philippe’s in the year of scandal 1847, and exactly when the gust of wind comes that completely demolishes the walls is a matter of mere chance. I now lead a very sober life, but on that day I shall get drunk in Manchester, probably for the last time.

Don’t be long in telling me something more about old Bruno [Bauer]; the fellow’s new romantic turn is too amusing. Kindest regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 19;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

[London 5 March 1856, 28 Dean Street, Soho]

Dear Frederic,

Next week I shall take a closer look at the Heffter. If there’s anything to it, I shall order it. Eichhoff’s Histoire de ta langue et de la littérature des Slaves, Paris 1839, is very poor indeed. Apart from the grammatical section, which I'm unable to assess (but I notice that the Lithuanians and Letts are said to be Slavs. Isn’t that nonsense?), the rest is mostly plagiarisms from Schaffarik. The fellow also gives samples of the Slavs’ vernacular poetry in the original, together with a French translation. Indeed, it was amongst these that I found Igor’s expedition. In essence, the poem is a call for unity on the part of the Russian princes just before the invasion by the Mongol hordes proper. The poem contains a curious passage, ‘Void les jolies filles des Gothes entonnent leurs chants au bord de la Mer noire’. [Here are the pretty daughters of the Goths singing their songs on the shore of the Black Sea] From this it would seem that the Getae or Goths celebrated the victory of the Turkish Polovtsians over the Russians. The whole poem is epic-Christian, although heathen elements are still strongly in evidence. The Bohemian epic Zaboi (Samo?), in the anthology of Bohemian epic poetry in a German translation published by Hanka and Swoboda is, on the other hand, fairly polemical and fanatically anti-German. Appears to be directed against a German capitano of Dagobert’s who was beaten by the Bohemians. But it is a call for vengeance as much upon Christianity as upon the Germans, who are reproached in the most naively poetical terms with having, amongst other things, sought to compel the worthy Bohemians to be satisfied with only one wife. Other folk poetry I discovered (the Poles have none save for Adalbert’s Prayer to the Mother of God) are:

Götze, Fürst Vladimir und seine Tafelrunde, 1819. Stimmen des russischen Volkes, 1828.

Kapper (Siegfried), Slavische Melodien, Leipzig 1844. By the same, Die Gesänge der Serben, 1852. (More comprehensive than [those] of Jakob. Lastly, by Vuk Stephanovitsch, Serbische Hochzeitslieder. German by E. Wesely. Pest 1826.

Works which I have noted and shall be looking through for you next week are, besides the Cyprien and the Desprez: Südslavische Wanderungen im Sommer 1850, 2 vols, Leipzig 1851. (Has also been translated into English.) Betrachtungen über das Fürstenthum Serbien, Vienna 1851. Die serbische Bewegung in Südungarn, 1851 Berlin. Slawismus und Pseudomagyarismus. Von aller Menschen Freunde, nur der Pseudomagyaren Feinde, Leipzig 1842. Die Beschwerden und Klagen der Slaven in Ungarn, Leipzig 1843.

I don’t remember whether the Neue Preussische Zeitung is to be had in Manchester. At present it is very interesting. The Prussian government has now, as once Louis XVIII, got its chambre introuvable, and the bureaucratic government is beginning to be afraid of the backwoods squires, who are taking their victory au sérieux. During debates on rural parish, rural court, and land tenure relations, when, as old Dolleschall said, ‘it’s his bread and butter that is at stake’ — the clashes in the Prussian Chamber are becoming serious. You will have seen, among other things, that Count Pfeil claimed for landowners the privilege of flogging their people, and boasted of having himself performed heroic deeds in this line. Now the Left has dug up posters of 1848, signed by this same Pfeil in 1848, and altogether in the style of the ‘crazy year’. There have even been duels between the two sides, and today the Neue Preussische Zeitung carries a leader roundly declaring that there are ‘depraved scoundrels’ in its party just as there are very ‘noble’ people in the Liberal Party. It preaches ‘moderation’, conciliation’, ‘a battle of principles, but no personalities’. The Left is adjured to reflect that ‘the Mountain will always swallow the Gironde’ and to consider that ‘peace or no peace, for Prussia there lies ahead a time of very great confusion, at home or abroad’ and that at this moment a ‘party split’ means ‘suicide’. Capital, is it not? And withal no one in Prussia cares a rap about the Chamber and its splits. All the more significant, then, this admission of fear. Father Leo delivered a lecture before the King on Münzer (part of which was printed in the Neuen Prussische). One might almost think it was a direct riposte to your essay in the Revue der Neue Rheinischen Zeitung. Essential, of course, that the Reformation be absolved of the responsibility of having given birth to the Revolution. Münzer was a ‘fanatic’ who said: ‘intelligo ut credam’ [I understand in order to believe]. Luther said: ‘credo ut intelligam’ [I believe in order to understand]. The Spenersche’s reply was that in his later years Luther repented, etc., of the abject role he had played in politics. As you see, the ferment is at work even in official circles.

Apropos the Reformation, it was Austria who, from the start, laid the foundations of the Slav peril at a time when all races save the Russian were inclined to support the Reformation. With the Reformation came the translation of the Bible into all the popular Slav dialects. And thereby of course awakening national consciousness. On the other hand, deep-rooted alliance with the German Protestant North. Had Austria not suppressed this movement, Protestantism would have provided not only the foundations for the dominance of the German spirit, but also and equally, bulwarks against Greek-Orthodox Russia. Not a pitfall but Austria has driven the Germans into it and, in Germany as in the East, she paved the way for the Russians.

Did you read about last Friday’s parliamentary sitting, at which Evans reproached Palmerston for feigning incredulity when, 3 1/2 months ago, he warned him about Kars; at which he said that Panmure in the despatch informing Simpson, ‘You are nominated successor of Raglan’, added ‘take care of Dowb’. The unfortunate Simpson replied: ‘Repeat your despatch’, whereat Panmure (Lord Carnot as Evans calls him), ‘Take care of Dowbiggin’, a cousin of his; at which, finally, Lord Hamilton slated Evans for having, after the battle of Inkerman, advised Raglan to abandon cannon and trenches and to embark the British army. The day before yesterday, poor Evans made amende honorable. That there was a betrayal at Kars would seem to be pretty clear from the written account of a certain Swan, recently returned from the East — a betrayal which took place not during the last few days but earlier, in order to bring the situation about.

Now for Seiler. Threatened with prosecution by the sheriff, he set off for America some 3 weeks ago by the Southampton steamer, fully intending on arrival in Halifax to telegraph the New-York Staats-Zeitung (for which he once wrote) as follows: ‘Sebastian Seiler, the famous author of Kaspar Hauser, has landed safely on the west coast of the Atlantic Ocean. The great man left behind his Alexander II, 55 pages, mostly extracts from the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, one copy of which was to be sent on immediately in his wake. For it is to appear on both sides of the Atlantic. This gossipy rubbish he surrounded with a great deal of humbug, having parts of it copied out by his wife, sister-in-law, etc., so that one and all they were astounded by poor Sebastian’s untiring industry. Negotiations with the London booksellers over this Alexander II served to give a veneer of erudition to his ‘business errands’ to town where every day he carefully investigated the quality of the lobster and suchlike, not forgetting the French ‘omelette’. Besides this Alexander, he has left other unpleasant surprises behind. You will remember that Liebknecht signed a bill for him, lured on by the foolish hope that Seiler would deduct a few pounds in his favour from the amount discounted. The bill fell due but was not presented. Seiler made out that he had paid it. He had only renewed it. Two days after he left, Liebknecht got a letter from a lawyer in the City requiring him to pay the bill. Pieper, whom Seiler’s green-bespectacled sister-in-law loves for the sake of his glassy eyes, was despatched to the greengrocer. Consternation in the family. For Sebastian had already received the money to pay the bill, but had poured it down his gullet. Love, however, overcomes all obstacles, and his wife is convinced that she can lay claim to love only once, and then only from Sebastian. Hence she is trying to arrange matters. But the greengrocer is grave and glum, becoming daily more enlightened as to the whereabouts of his dear son-in-law. The thing is still pending. Meanwhile fresh bills, allegedly honoured, keep arriving every day.

Levy. Sent here by the Düsseldorf workers with a twofold mission.

1. Denunciation of Lassalle. And, having considered the matter very carefully, I think they are right. Since the countess got her 300,000 talers, [from 1846-50, Lassalle handled Countess Sophie von Hatzfeldt’s divorce, concluded in 1851 with a financial settlement] Lassalle has changed completely; deliberately repulsing the workers, a sybarite, coquetting with the Blues. He is further accused of having constantly exploited the party for his filthy personal ends and wanting to make use of the workers themselves for personal crimes in the interests of the law-suit. The law-suit ended as follows: Count Hatzfeldt’s head clerk, Stockum who, as you know, was subsequently sentenced at the Assizes to 5 years’ penal servitude, had quarrelled with the count. He gave Lassalle to understand that he had in his possession documents which could have the count put in chains for perjury, forgery, etc. Lassalle promises him 10,000 talers. On the other hand, Lassalle persuades Kösteritz, the Chief Public Prosecutor (who has been compelled to resign as a result of this affair), to let Count Hatzfeldt know that there’s a bill of indictment hanging over his head. Hatzfeldt is making a bolt for Paris when Lassalle hands him the incriminating documents in return for his signing the settlement with the countess, and withdraws the bill of indictment. (Kösteritz, of course, was acting purely as his instrument.) Hence it was not his legal acumen that brought the law-suit to a sudden close, but a quite vulgar intrigue. Lassalle did not pay Stockum the 10,000 talers, and the workers are right in saying that such a breach of faith would be excusable only if he had handed over the money to the party instead of fraudulently keeping it for the countess. They report a host of personal dirty tricks which I cannot repeat because too many to remember. For instance, Lassalle gambled in foreign government paper with Scheuer of Düsseldorf, who advanced him the money for the purpose. They lost. Meanwhile Scheuer went bankrupt. Lassalle wins the law-suit. Scheuer demands the money he advanced Lassalle. The latter contemptuously draws his attention to §6 of the Code, which forbids gambling on foreign Exchanges. The workers say they turned a blind eye to everything done by Lassalle because of his plea that he was involved in the law-suit for reasons of honour. Now, having won, instead of getting the countess to pay him for his work and achieving independence, he is, they say, living shamefully under her thumb as homme entretentu [kept man] without any pretext whatever. He had always boasted about what he would do as soon as the law-suit had been won and now he was casting them aside, deliberately and defiantly, as redundant instruments of no further use. He had attended one more (private) meeting on New Year’s Day because a French colonel was present. To everyone’s astonishment, he addressed 60 working-men exclusively on the subject of ‘the struggle of civilisation against barbarism’, the Western Powers versus Russia. Apparently he had planned to go to Berlin, play the grand gentleman there and open a salon. On his return, he promised the countess in Levy’s presence to set up ‘a court of literati’ for her. likewise in Levy’s presence, he was constantly reiterating his ‘dictatorial aspirations’, etc., etc. (he seems to see himself quite differently from the way we see him, regarding himself as able to subdue the world because of his ruthlessness in a private intrigue, as though a man of real worth would sacrifice 10 years to such a bagatelle). An instance, by the by, of how dangerous he can be: in order to smuggle a labour party man into the police, ostensibly as a spy, he gave him one of my letters with instructions to say he had stolen it from Lassalle to establish his credibility. The workers further say that, being the diplomat he is, he would not have behaved so brusquely towards them had it not been his direct intention to go over to the bourgeois party. At the same time, he believes his influence is such that if he climbed onto a table at a moment of insurrection and harangued the masses, etc., he could talk them round. According to Levy, he is so much hated that, whatever we might decide, the workers would massacre him should he be in Düsseldorf at the moment of action. They are, by the by, convinced that he would lose no time in placing himself at the disposal of the other side should he hear of anything suspicious.

These are nothing but isolated points, deduced from what I heard, and only partially retained. The whole thing made a distinct impression on myself and Freiligrath, however prejudiced in Lassalle’s favour and mistrustful of workers’ tittle-tattle I may have been. I told Levy that it was, of course, impossible to reach any conclusion on the strength of a report from one side only; suspicion was in place whatever the circumstances; they should continue to keep an eye on the man but for the time being avoid any public row; we might perhaps find some opportunity of forcing Lassalle to make his position clear, etc., etc.

Qu'en Pensez-vous? I should like to have Lupus’ opinion too.

2. The second purpose of Levy’s mission was to give me information on how things stand with the workers in the Rhine Province. The Düsseldorf workers are still in contact with the Cologne people, amongst whom there are no longer any gentlemen. But those chiefly concerned with propaganda are now the factory workers in Solingen, Iserlohn and district, Elberfeld and the ducal-Westphalia area. In the iron districts the fellows are all for force, and are held back only by the prospect of a French revolution and the fact that ‘the Londoners think the time is not yet ripe’. If the thing drags on much longer Levy believes that a rising will be difficult to prevent. But whatever the circumstances, an insurrection in Paris would be the signal. These people seem to be firmly convinced that we and our friends would instantly hasten to join them They naturally feel the need for political and military leaders. Not that one can in any way blame the chaps for that. But I fear that, with their exceedingly artless plans, they would be smashed to smithereens before we had so much as a chance of leaving England. At all events, we owe it them to point out exactly what is and what isn’t feasible from the military point of view. I have, of course, declared that, circumstances permitting, we would range ourselves with the Rhenish workers; that any uprising, undertaken off their own bat, without prior initiatives in Paris or Vienna or Berlin, would be idiotic; that, should Paris give the signal, it would be advisable, whatever the circumstances, to risk all, since then even the ill-effects of a momentary defeat could themselves be no more than momentary; that I and my friends would seriously consider what direct action might be taken by the working population of the Rhine Province, and that in due course they should again send someone to London, but do nothing without prior agreement.

The tanners of Elberfeld (or Barmen?) who were pretty reactionary in 1848 and 1849, are now particularly eager for revolution. Levy assures me that the workers in the Wupper valley regard you, personally, as ‘their’ man. It would seem, by the way, that on the Rhine the belief in a revolution in France is fairly widespread, and even the philistines are saying: ‘This time it will be different from 1848. This time there'll be people like Robespierre, etc., instead of the chatter-boxes of 1848.’ On the Rhine at least, democracy’s reputation has sunk very low.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 37;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, 1929.

London, 16 April 1856

Dear Frederic,

A packet went off to you today through the usual parcels company. It contains: 1. Kars papers. 2. Igor. 3. Destrilhes, Confidences sur La Turquie. 4. 2 issues of L'Homme; in one, the letter from Cayenne, in the other, Pyat’s litany to Marianne, which he read aloud on 25 February of this year at a Chartist meeting in honour of the French Revolution. The good fellow was, of course, hoping to see a repetition of the row caused by his ‘lettre à la reine’. Was disappointed, however. From this you will also gather how subordinate is the attitude adopted by the French would-be revolutionaries here vis-à-vis ‘Marianne’. 5. 2 cuttings from The People’s Paper, my first 2 articles on the Kars papers. Shall also send you third and final instalments. Since the original of Article 1 had gone astray, and time, not to mention Ernest Jones, was pressing, I had to do a hasty rehash of the Tribune article out of my head, so that sundry bits of nonsense have crept in which will certainly not elude your keen nose. But never mind that! I mention it simply to let you know why I didn’t send you the thing straight away.

The day before yesterday a little banquet took place to celebrate the anniversary of The People’s Paper. On this occasion, the times seeming to require it, I accepted the invitation, the more so since (as announced in the paper) I alone of the whole emigration was invited, and the first toast also fell to me, i.e. I was asked to propose one to the souveraineté du prolétariat dans tous les pays. So I made a short speech in English, which, however, I shall not allow to appear in print. The end I sought has been achieved. Mr Talandier — who had to pay 2/6d for his ticket — is now convinced, like the rest of the French and other émigré crews, that we are the Chartists’ only ‘intimate’ allies and that, though we may hold aloof from public demonstrations and leave it to the Frenchmen to flirt openly with Chartism, it is always in our power to resume the position already allotted to us by history. This had become all the more necessary because, at the above-mentioned meeting of 25 February presided over by Pyat, the German lout Scherzer (Old Boy) spoke and, in truly dreadful Straubingerian Style, denounced the German ‘scholars’, the ‘intellectual workers’, for having left them (the louts) in the lurch, thus forcing them to make fools of themselves in the eyes of the other nationalities. You will remember Scherzer from Paris days. I have met friend Schapper again several times and have found him very much the repentant sinner. The retirement in which he has been living for the past 2 years would seem rather to have sharpened his wits than otherwise. As you will realise, there are all sorts of contingencies in which it might be advantageous to have the man to hand and, still more, to have him out of the hands of Willich. Schapper is now furiously angry with the Windmill louts.

I shall forward your letter to Steffen. You ought to have kept Levy’s letter there. Do so in general with all letters I don’t ask you to return. The less they go through the post the better. I fully agree with you about the Rhine Province. As for us, the worst of it is that, looming in the future, I see something that looks like ‘high treason’. Whether we are forced into the same kind of position as the Mainz Clubbists in the old revolution will largely depend on the tournure things take in Berlin. Ça sera dur. We, who are so enlightened about our good frères from across the Rhine! The whole thing in Germany will depend on whether it is possible to back the Proletarian revolution by some second edition of the Peasants war. In which case the affair should go swimmingly.

I have heard nothing whatever about Stieber II. Write and tell me what you know on this score.

Now for the chronique scandaleuse.

The Pieper comedy came to an end as abrupt as it was bitter. On the one hand, he got a letter in which the old greengrocer turned him down out of hand and forbade him the house. On the other, the green-bespectacled screech-owl — an indescribably hideous piece of baggage — turned up at our house in search of ‘her’ Pieper. She proposed that they should elope together. With great tact he refused quite unequivocally. So the comedy is over. It is to be hoped that this bitter experience, the result of his irresistibleness, will have some salutary effect upon Prince Charming.

Enclosed a letter from Seiler. As soon as this Falstaff arrived in New York he caught Edgar [von Westphalen] just as the latter was about to set out for Texas. Edgar has in the meantime come into some money from the inheritance. The nasty consequences of this meeting with Seiler will be apparent to you from the letter.

A fine pair, Seiler and Conrad Schramm!

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 49;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 23 May 1856

Dear Marx,

During our trip to Ireland we travelled from Dublin to Galway on the West Coast, then 20 miles north and inland, on to Limerick, down the Shannon to Tarbert, Traice and Killarney, and back to Dublin. In all approx. 450-500 English miles within the country itself, so we have seen approx. 2/3 of the entire country. With the exception of Dublin, which is to London what Düsseldorf is to Berlin, bears altogether the stamp of having been a small royal seat and is, moreover, built entirely in the English style, the whole country and particularly the towns give one the .impression of being in France or Northern Italy. Gendarmes, priests, lawyers, bureaucrats, lords of the manor in cheerful profusion and a total absence of any and every industry, so that one could barely conceive what all these parasitic plants live on, were there no counterpart in the wretchedness of the peasants. The ‘iron hand’ is visible in every nook and cranny; the government meddles in everything, not a trace of so-called self-government. Ireland may he regarded as the earliest English colony and one which, by reason of her proximity, is still governed in exactly the same old way; here one cannot fail to notice that the English citizen’s so-called freedom is based on the oppression of the colonies. In no other country have I seen so many gendarmes, and it is in the constabulary, which is armed with carbine, bayonet and handcuffs, that the bibulous expression of your Prussian gendarme reaches its ultimate state of perfection.

Peculiar to the country are its ruins, the oldest 5th and 6th century, the most recent 19th, and every stage in between. The earliest, all churches; from 1100, churches and castles; from 1800, farmhouses. Throughout the west, but particularly the Galway region, the countryside is strewn with these derelict farmhouses, most of which have only been abandoned since 1846. I had never imagined that famine could be so tangibly real. Whole villages are deserted; in between the splendid parks of the smaller landlords, virtually the only people still living there, lawyers mostly.

Famine, emigration and clearances between them have brought this about. The fields are empty even of cattle; the countryside is a complete wilderness unwanted by anybody. In County Clare, south of Galway, things improve a bit, for there’s some cattle at least and, towards Limerick, the hills are excellently cultivated, mostly by Scottish farmers, the ruins have been cleared away, and the country has a domesticated air. In the south-west, numerous mountains and bogs but also marvellously luxuriant woodland; further on, fine pastures again, especially in Tipperary and, approaching Dublin, increasing signs that the land is occupied by big farmers.

The English wars of conquest from 1100 to 1850 (au fond they lasted as long as this, as did also martial law) utterly ruined the country. With regard to most of the ruins, it has been established that the destruction took place during these wars. Thus the very people have acquired their unusual character and, for all their fanatical Irish nationalism, the fellows no longer feel at home in their own country. Ireland for the Saxon! That is now becoming a reality. The Irishman knows that he cannot compete with the Englishman, who comes armed with resources in every respect superior to his own; emigration will continue until the predominantly, indeed almost exclusively, Celtic nature of the population has gone to pot. How often have the Irish set out to achieve something and each time been crushed, politically and industrially! In this artificial manner, through systematic oppression, they have come to be a completely wretched nation and now, as everyone knows, they have the job of providing England, America, Australia, etc., with whores, day labourers, maquereaux, pickpockets, swindlers, beggars and other wretches. Even the aristocracy are infected by this wretchedness. The landowners, wholly bourgeoisified everywhere else, are here completely down-at-heel. Their country seats are surrounded by huge and lovely parks but all around there is desolation and where the money is supposed to come from heaven only knows. These fellows are too funny for words: of mixed blood, for the most part tall, strong, handsome types, all with enormous moustaches under a vast Roman nose, they give themselves the bogus martial airs of a colonel en retraite, travel the country in search of every imaginable diversion and, on inquiry, prove to be as poor as church mice, up to their eyes in debt, and living in constant fear of the Encumbered Estates Court.

About England’s method of governing this country — repression and corruption (long before Bonaparte tried them) — more very shortly if you don’t come up soon. What are the prospects?

Your

F. E.

Marx To Jenny Marx

In Trier

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 54;

First published: in Annali, an. 1, Milano, 1958.

Manchester, 21 June 1856

34 Butler Street, Greenheys

My darling Sweetheart,

I am writing to you again because I am alone and because it is irksome to converse with you all the time in my head without you knowing or hearing or being able to answer me. Bad as your portrait is, it serves its end well enough, and I now understand how it is that even the least flattering portraits of the mother of God, the ‘Black Madonnas’ could have their inveterate admirers — more admirers, indeed, than the good portraits. At any rate, none of these ‘Black Madonna’ portraits has ever been so much kissed and ogled and adored as your photograph which, while admittedly not black, has a crabbed expression and in no way reflects your dear, lovely, kissable, dolce countenance. But I put right what the sun’s rays have wrongly depicted, discovering that my eyes, spoiled though they are by lamplight and tobacco smoke, can nevertheless paint not only in the dreaming but also in the waking state. There you are before me, large as life, and I lift you up in my arms and I kiss you all over from top to toe, and I fall on my knees before you and cry: ‘Madame, I love you’, and love you I do, with a love greater than was ever felt by the Moor of Venice. Falsely and foully doth the false and foul world all characters construe. Who of my many calumniators and venomous-tongued enemies has ever reproached me with being called upon to play the romantic lead in a second-rate theatre? And yet it is true. Had the scoundrels possessed the wit, they would have depicted ‘the productive and social relations’ on one side and, on the other, myself at your feet. Beneath it they would have written: Look to this picture and to that. But stupid the scoundrels are and stupid they will remain, in seculum seculorum [for ever and ever].

Temporary absence is good, for in a person’s presence things look too much alike for them to be distinguished. At close quarters even towers appear dwarfed, whereas what is petty and commonplace, seen close at hand, assumes undue proportions. So, too, with the passions. Little habits which, by their very proximity, obtrude upon one, and thus assume the form of passions, vanish as soon as their immediate object is out of sight. Great passions which, by the proximity of their object, take on the form of little habits, wax large and resume their natural proportions under the magical effect of distance. So it is with my love. Mere spatial separation from you suffices to make me instantly aware that time has done for my love just what the sun and the rain do for plants — made it grow. My love for you, as soon as you are away from me, appears for what it is, a giant, and into it all the vigour of my mind and all the ardour of my heart are compressed. I feel myself once more a man because I feel intense passion, and the multifariousness in which we are involved by study and modern education, no less than the scepticism which inevitably leads us to cavil at every subjective and objective impression, is calculated to render each one of us petty and weak and fretful and vacillating. But love, not for Feuerbachian Man, not for Moleschottian metabolism, not for the proletariat, but love for a sweetheart and notably for yourself, turns a man back into a man again.

You will smile, my dear heart, and wonder ‘why this rhetoric all of a sudden?’ But if I could press your sweet white bosom to mine, I would be silent and say not a word. Since I cannot kiss with my lips I must kiss with my tongue and frame words. I could, indeed, even frame verse, German Books of Sorrow after the manner of Ovid’s Libri Tristium. He, however, had merely been banished by the Emperor Augustus; I have been banished from you, and that is something Ovid could not understand.

There are, indeed, many women in the world, and a few of them are beautiful. But where else shall I find a face of which every lineament, every line even, reawakens the greatest and sweetest memories of my life? In your sweet countenance I can read even my infinite sorrows, my irreplaceable losses, and when I kiss your sweet face I kiss away my sorrow. ‘Buried in her arms, revived by her kisses’ — in your arms, that is, and by your kisses — and let the Brahmins and Pythagoras keep their doctrine of re-birth, and Christianity its doctrine of resurrection.

To conclude with some facts. I have today sent Isaac Ironside the first paper of the series and have, in addition, made notes (i.e. on the text of the despatches) in my own hand and in my own English. I must say I felt a bit anxious when Frederic with that little quizzical look he has, calmly read through the stuff before it was sent off. Mais pour la première fois *he was quite astonished and exclaimed that this important work ought to be published in another form and, above all things, to be published in German.* I shall send the first issue to you and to old Schlosser, the historian, in Germany.

Apropos. I see from the Augsburger, which refers directly to our circular letters discussed at the communist trial in Cologne, that another circular letter, ‘reputedly’ from the same source, has been sent out from London. It is a forgery, a miserable gallimaufry of our things, put together by Mr Stieber who, not having been accorded due honour in Prussia of late, now seeks to set himself up as a great man in Hanover. Engels and I intend to publish a counter-statement in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung.

Farewell my dear heart. A thousand kisses to you, and the children too, from

Your

Karl

Marx To Jenny Marx

In Trier

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 66;

First published: in Annali, an. 1, Milano, 1958.

[London,] 8 August 1856, 28 Dean Street, Soho

My one and only Sweetheart,

This morning, at the same time as your letter, I received a note from Frederic containing 15 talers for Lenchen. Acknowledge it, as he is most meticulous in such matters. More tomorrow; today I have the ‘Immortal Collet’, here in the room with me and am keeping him in check by saying *‘I am obliged to write some lines to Mrs Marx’*.

Lily-white, sandy is settled in reality, not in fancy.

Much though I hanker after you and the children — and this quite indescribably — I should like you to stay on in Trier for another week. It would do you and the children no end of good. More tomorrow.

Your

K. M.

P.S. The Urquhartites are being damned importunate. A good thing financially. But I don’t know whether, politically, I ought to get too involved with the fellows. A thousand kisses, my beloved sweetheart.

P.S.II. Lina as got the famous post. Won’t be taking it up for weeks yet.

It’s ghastly for me, having to play the man of fashion chez Liebknecht now. Hang it! On top of that, I have Pieper sleeping with me in your stead. Horrible. In the same room, at any rate. Engels is coming next week. That’s a relief. For 3 weeks I've been as hypochondriacal as the devil.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 70;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 26 September 1856, 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Frederick,

First, I must acknowledge with thanks receipt of the money. I would have done so yesterday had we not been in a veritable hurly-burly with our removal. It remains doubtful, moreover, whether we shall be out of here before Monday since, even with your money and what the pawnshop has yielded, we still haven’t quite got the requisite amount. The present crisis on the European stock exchanges has come at an awkward time for us personally.

No news apart from what you may already know, namely that Stirner has died. A letter has also reached London, or so Freiligrath tells me, from his ‘ex-sweetheart’ in Australia, in which she says that she has married again but has at the same time turned religious and, by harping on the ‘better life to come’, has contrived to drive her novum hominem into the ‘madhouse’. This last is meant verbatim.

Well, I went to souper with the Putnam’s man. Besides myself, the only people present were Freiligrath and an old Yankee. The Putnam’s man was a quiet, genial soul, the other Yankee a jaunty, witty chap. Putnam wants us if possible, after the Bazancourt to revert to the ‘ships against walls’ question, as being of special interest to Americans in connection with the recent war. Then again, something on floating batteries and gunboats; light or heavy guns, etc. All this seems to be with an eye to an American war, at a closer or more distant time, against England. Besides these militaribus I am then to write on Heine. In short, we can now engage in regular intercourse with this very ‘good’ house.

Considering the rent, the house I have taken is very nice and could hardly have been let so cheaply were not the immediate neighbourhood, roads, etc., somewhat unfinished. When you come up to London you'll find a complete home.

What do you think of the aspect of the money market? There is no doubt that the increases in the discount rate on the Continent are partly associated with the appreciation of silver against gold due to the Californian and Australian gold (the Belgian Bank is now giving only 19 frs. 40 c. — silver — for one napoléon d'or) and hence bullion dealers everywhere where gold and silver are the legal standard are withdrawing the latter from the banks. But whatever the reason for the increases in the discount rate, these are at least precipitating the downfall of the vast speculative transactions and, more specifically, of the grand pawningshop at Paris. I don’t believe that the great monetary crisis will outlast the winter of 1857. Those stupid asses, the Britishers, imagine that this time all ‘is sound’ over here, as opposed to the Continent. Apart from the intimate connection between the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street and the Paris concern, the asses overlook the fact that a large part of English capital is tied up in continental credits and that their ‘sound’ overtrading (exports this year are expected to reach £110 million) is based on the Continent’s ‘unsound’ speculation, just as their civilisational propaganda of 1854-56 was on the coup d'état of 1851. This time, however, as opposed to earlier crises, France has discovered the form in which speculation could be and has been propagated throughout the whole of Europe. In contrast to the Gallic raffinement of St. Simonism, stockjobbery and imperialism, your English speculator at home appears to have reverted to the primitive form of simple and unmitigated fraud. Witness Strahan, Paul and Bates, the Tipperary Bank of Sadleir memory, the great City frauds of Davidson, Cole and Co., now the Royal British Bank and, finally, the Crystal Palace affairs (4,000 bogus shares put into circulation). The Britishers abroad speculate under continental colours, those at home revert to fraude simple, and that’s what the chaps call a ‘sound state of commerce’.

This time, by the by, the thing has assumed European dimensions such as have never been seen before, and I don’t suppose we'll be able to spend much longer here merely as spectators. The very fact that I've at last got round to setting up house again and sending for my books — seems to me to prove that the ‘mobilisation’ of our persons is at hand.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 72;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[Manchester, not before 27 September 1856]

[...] As regards Weerth I shall write to [...] in Berlin, who might perhaps get something into a paper, n'importe which, so long as it appears. For 10 days and more after my return from London Lupus did not breathe a word of the news and not until quite late, just before 11 o'clock on the eve of my old man’s arrival, did he come out with it. You can imagine how staggered and annoyed I was at this idiotic conduct. For the next 8-14 days I hardly had a moment to myself and couldn’t even go and see Steinthal to find out more, let alone turn my thoughts to an obituary or the like. He has probably left some written work and I shall make sure I get a sight of it.

You might send me the Pan-Slavism when you have an opportunity. As soon as I have the time I shall revise the thing and knock it into reasonable shape — for Putnam’s (?) or anything else that might turn up in the meantime. Now, while the mischief is still in progress, I would offer the ‘Principalities’ to an English paper or monthly. How are things going on with Urquhart [ ...] very doubtful about it [...] I can see no possibility so far. In any case, we shall not be affected by the amnesty.

The stories about Moses and the Moses woman made us laugh a great deal. So, just like Ewerbeck, il s'est acheté une place au Père-Lachaise de la littérature française. [he has bought himself a place in the Père-Lachaise of French literature]

Have not seen Golovin’s Russia. You might send one or 2 issues so that I can see what it’s like; it’s quite unknown up here.

Bazancourt still on the stocks. I think I shall finish it in about 10 days or a fortnight. It’s not going so quickly after all, you see, I had no time to do any preparatory work. If only I had my Tribune articles on the war! Now all the material has to be got together again. After this, we can offer them ships against walls and then we should manage to keep the ball rolling all right.

That gold has depreciated against silver is no longer in any doubt. However it is also a fact that silver has vanished, but where to, I cannot quite make out. Such is the state of confusion that a great deal must have been buried or tucked away in China. Again, the balance of trade has recently been extremely favourable to India and China vis-à-vis England, the Continent and America taken together. At all events it must be highly gratifying for John Bull to find that he is already worth 6d in the pound less.

The clouds gathering over the money market are sombre indeed, and the Constitutionnel’s old ‘horizon politique’ may well come into its own again. Last Tuesday’s affair at the Bank, when 1 million in gold was withdrawn, is significant. It almost looks as though the storm is about to break, but this might, of course, be no more than a prelude. In theory, the crash cannot come until Russia is right up to the neck in speculation, but this is hardly to be expected and perhaps it is better so. Another thing which considerably restrains speculators over here is the high price of all raw materials, particularly silk, cotton and wool, where it is far from safe to do anything at all. When the crash comes, however, there'll be a rude awakening for the English. I should like to know how many of the Continent’s speculative shares have found their way to England — vast numbers, I imagine. This time there'll be a dies irae [day of wrath] such as has never been seen before; the whole of Europe’s industry in ruins, all markets over-stocked (already nothing more is being shipped to India), all the propertied classes in the soup, complete bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie, war and profligacy to the nth degree. I, too, believe that it will all come to pass in 1857, and when I heard that you were again buying furniture, I promptly declared the thing to be a dead certainty and offered to take bets on it.

Adieu for today; cordial regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels in Manchester, 30 October 1856

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... In Mieroslawski [1] you will notice yourself: 1) that the same person who considers ‘a diplomatic kingdom’ in Poland impossible wanted to make there ‘a diplomatic revolution’, that is, under the auspices of Louis Bonaparte and Palmerston; 2) that the fate of the ‘democratic’ Lechitic community was inevitable. The dominium proper is usurped by the crown, the aristocracy, etc; the patriarchal relations between the dominium and the peasant communities lead to serfdom; optional parcellation creates a sort of peasant middle class, the Equestrian Order, [2] to which the peasant can rise only so long as war of conquest and colonisation continue, both of which, however, are also conditions which accelerate his downfall. As soon as the limit has been reached this Equestrian Order, incapable of playing the role of a real middle class, is transformed into the lumpen-proletariat of the aristocracy. The dominium and the peasants among the Latin population of Moldavia, Walachia, etc, have a similar fate. This kind of development is interesting because here serfdom can be shown to have arisen in a purely economic way, without the intermediate link of conquest and racial dualism...

Notes

1. Ludwig Mieroslawski, De la nationalité polonaise dans l'équilibre européen (The Polish Nation Within the European Balance of Power). Ludwik Adam Mieroslawski (1814-1878) – Polish politician and military figure, took part in Polish uprising of 1830-31, headed uprising in Poznan (1848), during Baden-Palatinate insurrection was in command of revolutionary army (1849), in 1850s sought support in Bonapartist circles, at beginning of Polish uprising of 1863 was in command of insurgent detachment, later emigrated to France – Progress Publishers.

2. Rich citizens who formed a special, privileged group of the population and whose duty it was to serve in the cavalry were called equites in the early stages of Ancient Roman history. Members of the trading and moneylending strata of Roman slave-holders who belonged to the Equestrian Order subsequently adopted this name – Progress Publishers.

Karl Marx to Johann Philipp Becker in Geneva, 26 February 1862 [1]

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... As for subscriptions to your essay, [2] I shall do all I possibly can, but expect little success. The ragtag and bobtail that make up the various societies – with the exception of the Workers Educational Association which has no funds whatever – are all constitutionally disposed, and even favour the Prussian National Association. [3] Those fellows would rather give money to suppress an essay like yours. I must tell you, these Germans, young and old, are all very clever, robust, prudent and practical men; they consider people like you and me immature fools who have still not been cured of their revolutionary fantasies. And that riff-raff is as bad at home as it is here abroad. During my stay in Berlin and elsewhere I convinced myself that any attempt to influence that mob by means of literature was absolutely futile. The self-complacent stupidity of those fellows, who regard their press, that woebegone press, as an admirable elixir of life, is simply incredible. Add to this that mental lassitude: caning is the only means to resurrect the ordinary German who, ever since he lost his philosophical illusions and took to moneymaking, and moreover to the idea of ‘Little Germany’ and ‘practical constitutionalism’, has become a superficial impulsive clown...

Notes

1. Johann Philipp Becker (1809-1886) – prominent figure in German and international working-class movement, brush-maker, in 1830s and 1840s took part in democratic movement in Germany and Switzerland, was active in 1848-49 revolution, after defeat of Baden-Palatinate insurrection fled from Germany, in 1860s one of outstanding figures in First International, attended all its congresses, editor of Vorbote, friend and close associate of Marx and Engels – Progress Publishers.

2. This refers to a work on the unification of Germany which Becker was writing at that time. It was published in 1862 entitled Wie und Wann? Ein ernstes Word über die Fragen und Aufgaben der Zeit (How and When? Serious Remarks About the Problems and Tasks of Our Time) – Progress Publishers.

3. The National Union was set up on 15-16 September 1859, at a conference held in Frankfurt on the Main of bourgeois liberals from the German states. Its purpose was the unification of all German states except Austria under Prussian hegemony. After the Austro-Prussian war and the creation of the North German Confederation on 11 November 1867, it disbanded itself – Progress Publishers.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 82;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

Manchester, 17 November 1856

Dear Marx,

Day after day this accursed commerce has prevented me from writing. I now have three lads to keep in control and am forever checking, correcting, telling off and giving orders. Add to this the running battle with manufacturers over bad yarn or late delivery, and my own work. I wish it might occur to Mr Bonaparte to rid France of his own person and me of all this turmoil.

Come to that, the said Bonaparte is in damned hot water. The spate of stories about placards and the unrest among the workers sent in by the Times correspondent, after the Moniteur article had led to his being ordered de parler plus haut [to talk louder] have made an enormous impression on the English philistines here. Everyone believes in his speedy downfall. The explanation for the sudden discovery that, au fond the fellow is after all an ass and indeed of a very ordinary kind, is as follows: he used to be a genius but has now so ruined himself by his profligate way of life that it has affected his brain. While there may, of course, be something in this, the fellow’s behaviour has on the whole been quite consistent, and only the English philistines can see any qualitative difference between the man he used to be and the man he is now.

Today’s Guardian contains some interesting statistics about bankruptcies in France; I am sending it to you.

It looks as though the financial crisis will linger on through the winter, becoming gradually more acute though with occasional ups and downs. This means that in the spring it will be considerably worse than if it had broken out in acute form now. The greater the capital paid in to companies hitherto existing largely on paper and the greater the extent to which floating capital becomes fixed, the better. So long as the discount rate doesn’t fall below 7 per cent — and the recent rise shows that it will have to be raised yet further — there is no prospect that even half the speculative companies will be able to obtain payment for their third or fourth calls. The Austrian Crédit mobilier can’t even collect the money for its second call, and yet the government enters into agreements in Austria, by which the Bank is compelled to resume cash payments! — I'd like to have the money Bonaparte has probably spent over the past 6 weeks to keep government stocks above 66 per cent; precisely because of the great efforts made towards that end, I shall account the day a turning-point when government stocks first drop below 66.

The longer this chronic pressure goes on, the more numerous will be the revelations concerning the dirty work of the Bonapartist clique and the greater the rage of the working-men who could not previously have been aware of the details. This chap Morny is really a prime example of a suitier [wastrel], nor would he seem to have any wish to return to Paris; for him certainly, there could be no more appropriate way to invest his money than in Russian railways and government paper.

Never again, perhaps, will the revolution find such a fine tabula rasa as now. All socialist dodges exhausted, the compulsory employment of labour anticipated and exploded 6 years since, no opportunity for new experiments or slogans. On the other hand, however, the difficulties will be starkly in evidence; the bull will have to be taken literally by the horns, and I'd dearly like to see how the next French provisional government will set about cutting its teeth. Nothing, luckily, can be done this time except by dint of the most reckless courage, for we no longer have any reason to fear as swift an ebb as in 1848.

Strohn has been here recently; had heard sundry things about the little man [Ernst Dronke]; entre nous, the fellow is thinking seriously about setting up in business on his own! He imagines his patter will serve to entice customers away from his present principal.

I have in front of me at this moment James’ Naval History of England, 1792-1820, mainly for the sake of ships against walls. It shows that the English had to fight very hard to gain naval superiority over the French and, more especially, the Spanish. Given parity of strength, the French and Spanish, during the early years of the war, were a match for the English on almost every occasion, and a mass of vessels was captured from the latter. Though I haven’t yet got beyond 1796, I can already see that under Napoleon the French fleet reached an absolute nadir, for which he was probably partly to blame. — The superiority of the English at sea lies chiefly in their better gunnery; the French always fired too high, though the Spanish were much better. The story about the Vengeur, said to have gone down on 1 June 1794 au cri de vive la république is, by the way, a myth. The Vengeur surrendered to the English but, before she was actually seized, several French vessels again began to close; she rehoisted the French flag, the rescuers were beaten off and the English approached, but the ship went down, most of her crew being saved. She sank 4-6 hours after the end of the battle.

Kindest regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 85;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 2 December 1856

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Frederic,

My wife is still dosing herself continually and hence the house is always in such a disarray that it is difficult for me to settle down and write.

As regards the Mieroslawski, a providential ‘apportionment’ would appear to have taken place, most of the excerpts intended for you (there were about two sheets) having been torn out of the middle of the manuscript, probably for spills. However, you haven’t lost much. I afterwards read Lelewel’s Considérations — not to be confused with his popular history. He, together with Maciejowski (?) (I cite the name from memory), provides most of the material upon which Mieroslawski exercises his mind. By the by, in my recent studies of Polish history, what led me décidément to plump for Poland was the historical fact that the intensity and the viability of all revolutions since 1789 may be gauged with fair accuracy by their attitude towards Poland. Poland is their ‘external’ thermometer. This is demonstrable en détail from French history. It is conspicuous in our brief German revolutionary period, likewise in the Hungarian. Of all the revolutionary governments, including that of Napoleon I, the Comité du salut public is an exception only in as much as it refused to intervene, not out of weakness, but out of ‘mistrust’. In 1794 it sent for the employé of the Polish insurgents and asked this citoyen the following questions:

‘How is it that your Kosciusko, a popular dictator, tolerates the existence alongside himself of a king of whom, moreover, he cannot but know that he was put on the throne by Russia? How is it that your dictator does not dare effect the levée en masse of the peasants for fear of the aristocrats, who do not wish to be deprived of any of their “hands"? How is it that the revolutionary complexion of his proclamations pales in proportion to the distance his march removes him from Cracow? How is it that he immediately punished with the gallows the popular insurgents in Warsaw, whereas the aristocratic “traîtres de la patrie” are allowed to remain at large, or are given refuge in the lengthy formalities of a trial? Answer!’

Whereat the Polish ‘citoyen’ could only remain silent.

Que dites-vous de Neuchâtel et Valangin? This case has led me to try and remedy my highly inadequate knowledge of Prussian history. Indeed and indeed, never has the history of the world produced anything so sordid. How the nominal kings of France came to be real kings is also one long recital of petty struggle, betrayal and intrigue, but it is the history of the birth of a nation. Austrian history — the founding of a dynasty by a vassal of the German Empire — acquires interest from the circumstance that the vassal defrauds himself in his capacity as Emperor, from involvement in the East, Bohemia, Italy, Hungary, etc., and finally, too, from the circumstance that dynasty assumes such dimensions as to arouse fears in Europe of its becoming a universal monarchy. Nothing of all this in Prussia. She failed to subdue so much as one powerful Slav nation, and took 500 years to acquire Pomerania, and then only by ‘barter’. Come to that, the Margraviate of Brandenburg — as it was when taken over by the Hohenzollerns — hasn’t been able to boast a single conquest with the exception of Silesia. Perhaps it is because this was her one and only conquest that Frederick II’s sobriquet is ‘the One and Only’. Petty theft, bribery, outright purchase, succession intrigue, and such like shabby dealings is all that Prussian history really boils down to. What is interesting in feudal history elsewhere — the struggle of the monarch against his vassals, double-dealing with the towns, etc. — is all of it here dwarfed to a caricature because the towns are boringly small-minded, the feudal lords boorishly insignificant and the monarch himself a nonentity. During the Reformation, as during the French Revolution, she oscillated between perfidy, neutrality, separate peace treaties and snatching at scraps tossed to her by Russia in the course of partitions organised by the latter — vide Sweden, Poland, Saxony. Withal, a dramatis personae of rulers with only 3 masks — the Pietist, the non-commissioned officer, the clown — succeeding one another as surely as night follows day, the only irregularity consisting not in the introduction of fresh characters but in the varying order of their appearance.

What has kept the State on its legs nonetheless is mediocrity — aurea mediocritas — meticulous book-keeping, an avoidance of extremes, the preciseness of the drill book, a kind of homespun vulgarity and ‘ecclesial institutionalism’. C'est déigoûtant!

How is trade in Manchester just now? Can you let me have some particulars about the state of business in the manufacturing districts?

I haven’t yet informed you that papa Heise passed through on his way from Utrecht. Has now rejoined Imandt. He has filled out and looks better than ever.

Götz, too, suddenly turned up here again. Disappeared with equal suddenness. Freiligrath very satisfied with his business and with himself. Valdenaire — the ‘agreer’ — manqué — is over here on a visit from Trier. For what purpose, more in my next.

Finally, I have a ticklish matter to put to you. At the end of December. I have some fairly substantial sums to pay out. Could you possibly let me have something before then? My wife’s money has largely gone on setting up house and making up for very substantial losses in income.

When are you coming down here? What is Lupus doing?

Your

K. M.

1857

Marx to Engels. 10 January

Marx to Engels. 14 January

Marx to Engels. 20 January

Engels to Marx. c. 22 January

Marx to Engels. 23 January

Marx to Engels. 6 February

Marx to Engels. 16 February

Marx to Engels. 24 February

Engels to Ferdinand Freiligrath.. before 25 Feb.

Engels to Marx. 11 March

Marx to Engels. 18 March

Engels to Marx. 20 March

Marx to Engels. 24 March

Marx to Collet Dobson Collet.. 25 March

Marx to Engels. 31 March

Engels to Marx. 31 March

Engels to Marx. 2 April

Marx to Engels. 9 April

Engels to Jenny Marx. c. 16 April

Marx to Engels. 21 April

Engels to Marx. 22 April

Marx to Engels. 23 April

Marx to Engels. 8 May

Engels to Marx. 11 May

Engels to Marx. 20 May

Marx to Engels. 22 May

Marx to Engels. 23 May

Engels to Marx. 28 May

Engels lo Marx. 5 June

Marx to Collet Dobson Collet.. c. 10 June

Marx to Collet Dobson Collet.. After 10 June

Marx to Engels. 15 June

Marx to Engels. 29 June

Marx to Engels. 3 July

Marx to Engels. 3 July

Marx to Engels. 6 July

Marx to Engels. 8 July

Engels to Marx. 11 July

Marx to Engels. 11 July

Marx to Engels. 14 July

Marx to Engels. 16 July

Marx to Engels. 24 July

Engels to Marx. 29 July

Marx to Engels. 9 August

Marx to Engels. 15 August

Engels to Marx. 21 August

Engels to Marx. 25 August

Marx to Engels. 26 August

Engels to Marx. 8 September

Engels to Marx. 10 September

Engels to Marx. 11 or 12 Sept.

Marx to Engels. 15 September

Marx to Engels. 17 September

Engels to Marx. 18 September

Marx to Engels. 21 September

Engels to Marx. 21 September

Engels to Marx. 22 September

Marx to Engels. 23 September

Engels to Marx. 24 September

Marx to Engels. 25 September

Engels to Marx. 6 October

Engels to Marx. 19 October

Marx to Engels. 20 October

Engels to Marx. 29 October

Marx to Engels. 31 October

Marx to Engels. 13 November

Engels to Marx. 15 November

Engels to Marx. 16 November

Engels to Marx. 17 November

Marx to Engels. 24 November

Engels to Marx. 7 December

Marx to Engels. 8 December

Marx to Conrad Schramm. 8 December

Engels to Marx. 9 December

Engels to Marx. 11 December

Engels to Marx. 17 December

Marx to Engels. 18 December

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 21 December

Marx to Engels. 22 December

Marx to Engels. 25 December

Marx to Engels. 30 December

Engels to Marx. 31 December

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 110;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 24 March 1857

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Engels,

Herewith some anti-Palmerstoniana, viz.: 1. Betrayal of England, 2 copies. (NB. The self-same Coningham who here reproduces excerpts from Anstey’s speech is now an ultra-Palmerstonian candidate in Brighton.) 2. Tucker-pamphlets, 8 copies. 3. Anstey’s speech. 4. Palmerston for Premier. 5. Palmerston in Three Epochs. (With the exception of the Hungarian affair, cribbed from Urquhart, the remainder has been lifted by Mr Wilks — just like him, of course — from my articles in the Tribune.) No need for you to preserve numbers 1 and 2; but possibly numbers 3, 4 and 5. Tomorrow, if I can find them, I shall send a few other pamphlets. As to the Nord, note that the Post itself (in one of the numbers appearing between 4 and 9 March) carried the article I have mentioned. Later, however, it changed its tune.

Now for private affairs. D'abord a letter has arrived from the Tribune, which I shall send you as soon as I have answered it. My threat to write to another paper has worked after all, at least up to a point. Despite its very friendly tone, the letter shows that I was not mistaken about these gentlemen. For what they propose is to pay for one article a week, whether or not they print it; the second I send at my own risk, and draw on it if printed. Thus they are au fait cutting me down by one half. However I shall agree to it and must agree to it. Also, if things in England take the course I think they will, it won’t be long before my income reaches its former level again.

I'm very sorry that, in the meantime, I must continue to depend on you, having so greatly fallen into arrears that everything that could be pawned has been pawned and the drop in income cannot be made up until I have found some new resource. On top of that, and since I cannot after all withhold the fact from you, my wife is in highly interesting circumstances. However, all I intended in my last was to explain why I hadn’t answered for so long — certainly not anything else. You will understand that even the most equable of men — and in a mess such as this I do indeed possess a great deal of equanimity — will sometimes lose patience and let himself go, especially vis à vis his friends.

I should be most grateful if you could let me have a few ‘humorous’ lines, say 50 or 100 ones, on the Orlandian bravery evinced by the English in Persia and before Canton. The Bushire expedition, as you will have seen, pivoted mainly on the espionage of one Captain Jones, who was sent to Bushire under false pretences as political agent. Probably more tomorrow, as I want to send you the pamphlets today.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

NB. It does after all make a difference whether one stages a coup d'état first and elections afterwards, or elections first with a subsequent coup d'état in view. Without doubt Palmerston, or at least his papers, have overdone their part. Take the Advertiser, for instance, wallowing in filth up to its eyebrows. This has, of course, evoked a measure of reaction.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 113;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

London, 31 March 1857

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Engels,

Received the £5.

I should like you to send me some Manchester Examiner if convenient. The Bright Party’s explanations are of interest to me just now. It is only through their defeat that the election has acquired any historical point. Palmerston’s position will become dangerous only now, when he has a commanding majority inside Parliament, whereas outside Parliament there is a recrudescence — for the first time since the Anti-Corn Law League — of serious anti-ministerial agitation. England is entering upon a sérieuse crisis — as The Times already intimates, with its reference to the cloud which it sees gathering — and if the move is resumed on the Continent, John Bull will not maintain the stance of supercilious detachment he adopted in 1848. Pam’s victory marks the culmination of events which began in June 1848. Amongst the more intelligent members of the London public the news from Manchester, accompanied as it was by a commentary in the shape of Pam’s brazen address and speech, was greeted with a kind of stupefaction. Seen from here — and all are unanimous on this point — Manchester has brought disgrace, serious disgrace, upon itself. Had Punch not been bought by Pam — Taylor, a chief editor thereof, has been given a post at the General Board of Health at a salary of £1,000 — Potter, Turner, and Garnett, at any rate, would have figured in it next Wednesday. Send me some particulars about these laddies and their whereabouts.

Mr Dronke has written to Freiligrath telling him that he ‘will break with his Jew and set up as an independent agent’.

I have provided Urquhart with some notes on Bangya — in view of the latter’s connections with Constantinople and Circassia.

Enclosed a cutting from Reynolds about the editor of The Morning Advertiser — Mr Grant. Every word of it true.

Also Dana’s letter. Let me have it back. In his enumeration of the articles published he mentions only the last ones, and even some of these he didn’t publish until 5 or 6 weeks after their arrival in New York when he saw that things were taking a new turn. His proposal re money is the best possible indication that I was not mistaken about the gentleman’s intentions. His remark about the length of the articles suits me well. I shall have all the less to send. What strikes me, though, is that for months past he has been able to find 2 or 3 columns for the most insipid London gossip.

In Prussia too there is a minor parliamentary crisis. Once again the dictum ‘Geniality leaves off where money matters begin’ would seem to be proving true there.

It seems highly probable that the Swiss will agree to expel all the refugees.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Did you take note of the bubbles that burst last week — the Australian Agricultural Company, the London and Eastern Bank, and the North of Europe Steam Company, one of the directors being Mr Peto?

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 122;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[Manchester, 22 April 1857]

Dear Moor,

This business of the Cyclopaedia has come as a real boon to me, and to you too, no doubt. Voilà enfin a prospect of making good your loss of earnings and, for me, a prospect, of a regular occupation in the evenings. La paix allait me démoraliser [I was becoming demoralised by inactivity]; ever since there have been no more articles to write for the Tribune I have been doing far too much loafing, for which there is every inducement up here. As to the militaria, Dana must provide an immediate answer to the following questions:

1. How many volumes, roughly, will the whole amount to and how far does he propose to get in Vol. 1 or Vols. 1 and 2?

2. Are the military articles to be confined primarily to defining technical terms, e.g. Artillery, castrametation, column, with historical notes and a brief synopsis of the individual branches of military science — thus e.g. artillery: 1. Definition. 2. History and present state. 3. Résumé of the branches of the modern science of artillery (gunnery, personnel, transport, use in the field and before fortresses, etc., etc.)?

3. Or is the intention to have additional articles on military history, e.g. under the head Austerlitz, Arbela, etc., etc., brief comptes rendus of the actual battles, and under Alexander, Caesar, Carnot, etc., etc., military biographies together with particulars in each case of any epoch-making progress?

Next, you must write to Steffen at once and ask him for the title or author of an encyclopaedia of military science, as short and complete as possible; one that has the most but also the shortest articles would be best, since all I want is to know at once what articles to do and to have the alphabetical material as complete and handy as possible. As soon as I have this I can start work on Letters A and B — perhaps even sooner, since I can do a lot of articles from Brockhaus alone and a few more without it.

The pay is quite profitable, even at $2 per large page; a lot of the stuff will only have to be copied or translated and the longer articles won’t involve a great deal of work. I shall take a look at one or two English encyclopaedias straight away to see what military articles they contain, but then concentrate on Brockhaus which, after all, not only provides a better basis but is also more complete and is evidently looked upon by Dana as a model.

Should there be any philological sections for the taking, e.g. the Germanic languages, Middle High German, Old High German, etc., etc., literature (likewise in the Romance languages, especially no harm would be done. Either the Jakob woman or Mr Gurowski will have taken on the Slav things; the former knows more about those languages than I do.

Which articles shall you be taking on? German philosophy, at any rate — biographies of modern English and French statesmen? Some financial pieces? Chartism? Communism? Socialism? Aristotle — Epicurus — Code Napoléon — and the like. Themes certainly harder to handle without any party tendency whatever than the good old military stuff, where needless to say one always sides with the victor.

Take as many articles as you can and set up an office by degrees. Mr Pieper can toil away, too; he will do well enough for biographical pieces and will, at the same time, get some plain wholesome information into his genius’ noodle. Lupus might also be prepared to do something in the early classical field; je verrai!

Even though the work won’t be very interesting (most of it, at any rate), I'm immensely tickled by the whole thing since it will mean an enormous lift for you. I was really hellish anxious this time about how the Tribune business would turn out, particularly when Dana tried to put you on half-pay. But now everything is going to be all right again and even though there’s no immediate prospect of payment, it’s still a very secure berth and one need have no qualms about doing one or two letters of the alphabet in advance; the money will arrive in its own good time.

Haven’t you heard anything from Olmsted about Putnam’s? I should very much like to have the article on Bazancourt; maybe I can do something with it here through Acton. Apart from that there may he a possibility of doing something further with Putnam’s — progress in the art of war, improvements in artillery, small arms, etc., etc., ships against stone walls; I'm willing to do anything so long as the fellows undertake to publish it. Dana would certainly arrange it to make you less dependent on the Tribune. By the way, get the editor of Putnam’s to write in person, cela vaut mieux.

You must also find out from Dana whether the articles should in general take up more or less space than e.g. in Brockhaus, and whether the whole is intended to be bigger or smaller than Brockhaus. Then we shall know what we are about. Also when they will pay and by when the job must be completed. It’s as well to know all this.

In your place I should offer to do the whole encyclopaedia alone; we could manage it all right. At all events, take whatever you can get. If we have 100 to 200 pages in each volume it won’t be too much. We can easily supply that amount of ‘unalloyed’ erudition so long as unalloyed Californian gold is substituted for it.

But now, warm regards to your wife and children; let me hear from you again soon.

Your

F. Engels

Most obliged for the eye lotion. I'm still having some trouble but think it’s because I've recently been drinking more port than usual — drop that!

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 132;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 22 May 1857

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Engels,

It may be some consolation to you to learn that for the past 3 weeks right up to this very day, I have been submerged in pills and potions as a result of my old and, as I believe, hereditary liver complaints. Only by dint of the utmost exertions have I been able to supply the ‘goods’ — for the Tribune I mean — being otherwise quite disabled. In order that my time should not be entirely wasted I have, faute de mieux, been mastering the dansk Sprog and am presently applying myself to Af mit Livs og min Tids Historie, a colossal state haemorrhoid, of (ex-minister) Orsted. Opening oysters would be an altogether more amusing proposition. However, if the doctor’s promises are anything to go by, I have prospects of becoming a human being again next week. Meanwhile I'm still as yellow as a quince, and vastly more crabbed.

As regards your own tribulations, I am firmly convinced that they all stem from a hollow tooth which ought to come out and which, by a series of concatenations, underlies all the other unpleasant symptoms. Heckscher will deny this, of course. However, when you come down here — which I greatly look forward to — it can do you no harm at least to accompany me to a really first-rate dentist and get him to examine your teeth. My view is based on the fact that two years ago, when I was suffering from very much the same trouble, Dr Freund also declared I had been eating too much meat, yet a few months ago a courageous visit to the dentist at last uncovered the source of the trouble. Your intermittent toothache is, of course, the main factor in my argument.

My wife expects to be confined at the end of the month, this time in not altogether agreeable circumstances. It will be a long time now — another 3 weeks at very best — before I have accumulated enough to be able to draw on the Tribune. I tried to draw a bill on myself to cover the interim period, but failed with éclat. The actual household debts I can put off paying, but in the case of the rates this is possible only up to a certain point, and besides, the afore-mentioned circumstances call for certain preparations which have to be paid for on the nail.

As you will have seen in the papers, a second director of the Crédit mobilier. — the first was Place — viz. the banker Thurneyssen, has decamped leaving massive debts of about 30-40 million frs. This splendid institution’s latest report — that of 28 April ultimo — reveals that, although the net profit still amounts to 23%, it has nevertheless fallen by about a half compared with 1855. According to Mr Péreire, the fall is due 1. to the ordre in the Moniteur of March 1856 by which Bonaparte forbade the Crédit to skim the cream off the excessive speculation then going on in France; 2. to the fact that, by an oversight, this ‘ordre de la sagesse suprême’ extended only to sociétés anonymes, thus laying the Crédit open to highly improper competition in the shape of sociétés de commandite; 3. to the crisis during the last 3 months of 1856. True, the Crédit sought to exploit that crisis to bring off a few financial coups de main, but was obstructed in this ‘patriotic’ work by the narrow selfishness of the Banque de France and the syndicate of Paris bankers headed by Rothschild; 4. Bonaparte has still not permitted them to make the statutory issue of 600 millions in paper money of their own devising. *That issue is still looming in the future.* Péreire seems to be exerting severe pressure on Bonaparte. Should the latter shrink from giving his authorisation, a middle course would seem to be envisaged, namely to turn the Banque de France into the instrument of the Crédit by loftier means, i. e. new draft legislation. From this report it further transpires that the Crédit’s business is still vastly disproportionate to its capital and that it has used the capital loaned by the public exclusively to further its gambles on the Bourse. As a quasi-state institution of Bonaparte’s on the one hand, the Crédit mobilier declares that it is called upon to maintain the prices of funds, shares, bonds, in short, of all securities on the national Bourse, by advancing the money borrowed from the public to companies or individual stock-jobbers for their operations on the Bourse. As a ‘private institution’, on the other hand, its main business consists in speculating on the rises and falls in the stock-market. Péreire reconciles this contradiction by something Moses Hess might well call ‘social philosophy’.

I have omitted only one or two small items from your China-Persia article and altered an expression here and there. I agree with the whole thing, only I don’t think that the troops stationed in Persia will be sent to China so soon. The treaty expressly stipulates that they will not leave Persia until the Persians evacuate Herat. Pam won’t spare them the hot season. That his instructions in this respect were again highly ‘incomprehensible’ would seem to follow from the fact that the Governor-General of India — Canning — tendered his resignation at the same time as the British general and the British admiral committed suicide. Meanwhile, as announced in the Vienna newspapers, the main object has been attained. Persia has ceded two strips of land to Russia.

I have heard from Mickel and shall send you his letter one of these days. Trusting I shall soon hear that you are fit and well again.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 141;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 6 July 1857

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Engels,

Rüstow is not to be had at Williams. And I wouldn’t care to write to Steffen on this score for, being himself engaged on an English rendering of the book, he tends to be mistrustful. So far as the ancient world is concerned, I believe you could restrict yourself to a few generalities and simply say — in the article itself — that these themes are to be discussed under the headings ‘Greek Army’ and ‘Roman Army’. This will save time, during which it will be possible not only to procure Rüstow but also to send you a mass of other data, for I have now discovered at the Museum, after prolonged searching, a complete list of sources on the military history of Antiquity. But at the moment speed is the main consideration. As you know, I took your advice and sent Dana a second list. So what excuse can I offer the man? I cannot plead illness, for if I do I shall have to interrupt my writing for the Tribune altogether and so reduce to nothing my already exiguous income. At a pinch Dana could have recourse to the man who already provides him with some of the military articles. In which case I would be elbowed out. To obviate this I shall have to write on Friday. But the difficulty is, what?

As you will understand, nothing could be more distasteful to me than to press upon you while you are ill; nor, indeed, when you left here did I have any inkling that, in the state you are in, you would at once resume — and so seriously at that — your work in the office.

My own situation is such that everything depends on whether I can persuade little Bamberger to discount a bill on myself this week. The end of the quarter has come, and all hell will now be let loose.

Freiligrath has written me a note from which I can see the Crédit mobilier’s scare. The constant fall in securities on the Paris Bourse, despite the prospect of a good harvest, has given rise to a veritable panic amongst the financiers.

The Indian affair is delicious. Mazzini’s putsch quite in the old official style. The ass might at least have avoided dragging in Genoa!

Salut.

K. M.

There is a cheap Dictionary of Military Science by Campbell.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 145;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 14 July 1857

Dear Engels,

You may be certain that despite all mishaps I and my wife (who, by the by, is well on the way to recovery) found our own affairs less disquieting than your latest report on the state of your health. While delighted beyond measure that you should be improving, I am thoroughly alarmed to learn that you intend to return to the office — and to do so this very week. If nothing else, the whole course of your illness should have shown you that what you needed physically was to rest, recuperate and temporarily shake off the dust of the office. You must go to the seaside as soon as possible. If, at this crucial moment, you should be so childish (pardon the expression) as to shut yourself up in the office again, you will suffer further relapses, and your resistance to the disease will at the same time be progressively impaired. Such relapses might ultimately lead to an infection of the lungs, in which case all attempts at a cure would be fruitless. Surely it is not your ambition to go down to posterity as one who sacrificed himself on the altar of Ermen & Engels’ office? One would feel sorry for a person with your complaint if he were compelled by circumstances to chain himself anew to his business rather than restore his health. In your case, however, all that is needed is a vigorous decision to do what is medically necessary. Only consider how long the trouble has been dragging on already, and how many relapses you've had, and you will see how necessary it is for some time to let Mr Ermen shift for himself and to restore your health by breathing the sea air and enjoying relative leisure. I hope you will take the thing seriously and abandon your former mistaken system of alternating between medicine bottle and office. It would be unpardonable for you to persist in it.

I can only relate verbally the circumstances that attended my wife’s confinement and unnerved me for some days. I cannot write about such things.

I have received your articles [for The New American Cyclopedia]. My best thanks for them.

The Indian revolt has placed me in something of a quandary. As far as the Tribune is concerned, I am expected to have some superior view of military affairs. If you can supply me with a few general axioms, I can easily combine them with the stuff I've already got together to make a readable article. The situation of the insurgents in Delhi and the moves of the British army are the only points on which a few military generalities are needed. All the rest is matter of fact.

Mr Bamberger has kept me dangling for the past fortnight by making bogus rendezvous at which he never appears. I shall now give the laddie up, of course.

Jones’ wife died last April; he seems to be keeping relatively well.

A letter received from Imandt today. He has the expectation of a post which he puts at £300 a year. Regarding Dronke he tells me that he is said to be living en famine with a woman who is pregnant by him. It isn’t Miss Smith, however.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Waterloo near Liverpool

Source: MECW Volume 40, pp. 152-4.

[London,] 15 August 1857

Dear Frederick,

I am delighted to hear that the sea is doing you good, as was to be expected. As soon as you are fit enough to bathe, It will take effect even more quickly.

The sea itself is, of course, the principal remedy. However, some medicaments ought to be taken internally, partly preventive, partly curative, so as to introduce into the blood those substances it lacks. As opposed to your assumptions in your letter to my wife and basing myself on the most recent French, English and German literature, which 1 have been reading on the subject of your illness, I put forward the following, which you may submit to the scrutiny of any college of physicians or pharmacists:

1. Whereas cod-liver oil requires 3 months to take effect, iron does so in 3 weeks.

2. Cod-liver oil and iron are not mutually exclusive but complement each other during treatment.

3. A temporary iron shortage in the blood is the primary characteristic of your disease. Besides bathing in the sea, you must take iron, even should there no longer be any outward sign of the disease.

4. In your case the therapeutic element in cod – liver oil is iodine, since the oil’s fattening properties are of no moment to you. Hence iodide of iron combines both the elements you need, one of which you would obtain from cod-liver oil. At the same time, it would spare your stomach the extra ballast inevitable in the case of cod-liver oil.

Voilà mes theses, and I hope you will give them your serious consideration so that, once cured, you do not suffer subsequent relapses which are said to be exceedingly disagreeable.

As to the Delhi affair, it seems to me that the English ought to begin their retreat as soon as the rainy season has set in in real earnest. Being obliged for the present to hold the fort for you as the Tribune’s military correspondent I have taken it upon myself to put this forward. NB, on the supposition that the reports to date have been true. It’s possible that I shall make an ass of myself. But in that case one can always get out of it with a little dialectic. I have, of course, so worded my proposition as to be right either way. The persistent rumours about the fall of Delhi are being circulated throughout India by the government in Calcutta, no less, and are intended, as I see from the Indian papers, as the chief means of preventing unrest in the Madras and Bombay presidencies. For your diversion I enclose herewith a plan of Delhi which, however, you must let me have back.

From most of the reports of the Banque de France’ it is already apparent that, in place of d'Argout, there is a Bonapartist at the helm who makes little difficulty about discounting operations and note issues. The financial debacle in France must inevitably assume vast proportions, since a frenzied activity is contributing to it on every hand.

Imandt’s presence has seriously disrupted my work. The pot is in effect the only medium through which one can establish any rapport with these spirit-rappers.

With best wishes for your health from myself and wife.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Ryde

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 173;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 21 September 1857

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Engels,

Nothing could please me more than to hear that your health is progressing.

Last Friday, a letter arrived from Dana, cool and curt. I replied that I would complain to the Post Office at once. Further, having ‘Algeria’ and ‘Ammunition’ to hand, I sent them off with the comment that I had copies of them; also that I had ‘Army’ in the original, and would send it off immediately a fresh copy had been made (I did this because in recent letters you have several times mentioned that ‘Army’ was almost finished); also, that ‘Artillery’ would for the most part come under the History of Cannon and that I no longer had the manuscript. The only A’s now remaining — and these I would send on the off-chance, although it is probably by now too late — were, all told, ‘Army’, ‘Armada’ and ‘Ayacucho’. I mentioned the last 2 because you can keep them quite short, while the material I have sent you will provide some original stuff on the Armada and Ayacucho (about Espartero). That’s how matters stand.

Tomorrow I shall send off 3 more biographies.

My circumstances won’t permit me to come to Brighton, still less accompany you to Jersey.

On closer examination I find that all I want from you on the generals under B is an answer to my question about Bernadotte together with the essentials concerning Blücher, Bugeaud, Bosquet (in the Crimean War). I have enough on the other Frenchmen. Finally, Sir G. Brown, about whom I know nothing. Not much needed on the man.

I have sent Dana your B and C lists.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Ryde

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 181;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 23 September [1857]

Dear Engels,

Very many thanks for the letter and enclosure.

I would, of course, very much like to see you before you leave. If at all feasible I shall come down to Brighton. The trouble is that the end of the quarter brings an accumulation of all the difficulties one has been staving off throughout the summer. The main thing — and the only way out of my quandary — is to get on quickly with the Cyclopedia. The coming of autumn also means redeeming this and that from the pawnshops.

I hope to have done with the biographies (all of them) by next week. (Is there anything to be said about that jackass, Sir G. Brown?)

I have begun a series in the Tribune on the Bonaparte régime’s deeds of financial derring-do. To this I devote the days when there is no Indian news. I should like also to have a personal discussion with you about India, map in hand. Up till now I have always managed instinctively to hit the nail on the head. But soon it will be time for me to provide a kind of general military summary of the affair.

A few days ago, on my way to the Museum, I came such a purler that my forehead is still complaining.

I trust you are taking iron. A day or two ago I was talking to Dr Lichtenberg at the German hospital, a very knowledgeable little chap. He said that it was indispensable in after-treatment.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 182;

First published: slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

Ryde, 24 September 1857

Dear Marx,

Depicted above is the castle where Cromwell incarcerated Charles I for a while. I shall inspect it more closely on Sunday.

Your wishes concerning India coincided with an idea I had that you might perhaps like to have my views on the business. At the same time I took the opportunity of going over the contents of the latest mail map in hand and voici ce qui en resulte.

The situation of the English in the middle and upper reaches of the Ganges is so incongruous that militarily speaking the only right course would be to effect a junction between Havelock’s column and the one from Delhi, if possible at Agra, after each had done everything possible to evacuate the detached or invested garrisons in the area; to man, besides Agra, only the neighbouring stations south of the Ganges, especially Gwalior (on account of the Central Indian princes) and to hold the stations lower down the Ganges — Allahabad, Benares, Dinapur — with the existing garrisons and reinforcements from Calcutta; meanwhile to escort women and non-combatants down river, so that the troops again become mobile; and to employ mobile columns to instill respect in the region and to obtain supplies. If Agra cannot be held, there must be a withdrawal to Cawnpore or Allahabad; the latter to be held at all costs since it is the key to the territory between the Ganges and the Jumna.

If Agra can be held and the Bombay army remains available, the armies of Bombay and Madras must hold the peninsula proper up to the latitude of Ahmedabad and Calcutta and send out columns to establish communications with the north — the Bombay army via Indor and Gwalior to Agra, the Madras army via Saugor and Gwalior to Agra, and via Jubbulpore to Allahabad. The other lines of communication would then run to Agra from the Punjab, assuming it is held, and from Calcutta via Dinapur and Allahabad, so that there would be 4 lines of communication and, excluding the Punjab, 3 lines of withdrawal, to Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. Concentrating the troops arriving from the south at Agra would, therefore, serve the dual purpose of keeping the Central Indian princes in check and subduing the insurgent districts astride the line of march.

If Agra cannot he held, the Madras army must first establish communications with Allahabad and then make for Agra with the Allahabad troops, while the Bombay army makes for Gwalior.

The Madras army would seem to have been recruited exclusively from the rag-tag and bobtail and to that extent is reliable. In Bombay they have 150 or more Hindus to a battalion and these are dangerous in that they may disaffect the rest. If the Bombay army revolts, all military calculations will temporarily cease to apply, and then nothing is more certain than that there'll be one colossal massacre from Kashmir to Cape Comorin. If the situation in Bombay is such that in future also the army cannot be used against the insurgents, then at least the Madras columns, which will by now have pushed on beyond Nagpur, will have to be reinforced and communications established as speedily as possible with Allahabad or Benares.

The absurdity of the position in which the English have now been placed by the total absence of any real supreme command is demonstrated mainly by 2 complementary circumstances, namely, 1. that they permit themselves to be invested when dispersed over a host of small, far flung stations while 2. they tie down their one and only mobile column in front of Delhi where not only can it do nothing but is actually going to pot. The English general who ordered the march on Delhi deserves to be cashiered and hanged, for he must have known what we have only just learned, viz. that the British had strengthened the old fortifications to the point where the place could only be taken by a systematic siege, for which a minimum of 15-20,000 men would be required, and far more if it was well defended. Now that they are there they will have to stick it out for political reasons; a withdrawal would be a defeat and will nevertheless be difficult to avoid.

Havelock’s troops have worked wonders. 126 miles in 8 days including 6 to 8 engagements in that climate and at this time of year is truly superhuman. But they're also quite played out; he, too, will probably have to let himself be invested after exhausting himself still further by excursions over a narrow radius round Cawnpore. Or he will have to return to Allahabad.

The actual route of reconquest will run up the valley of the Ganges. Bengal proper will be easier to hold since the population has so greatly degenerated; the really dangerous region begins at Dinapur. Hence the positions at Dinapur, Benares, Mirzapur and particularly Allahabad are of the utmost importance; from Allahabad, it would first be necessary to take the Doab (between the Ganges. and the Jumna) and the cities on these two rivers, then Oudh, then the rest. The lines from Madras and Bombay to Agra and Allahabad can only be secondary lines of operations.

The main thing, as always, is concentration. The reinforcements sent up the Ganges are scattered all over the place and so far not one man has reached Allahabad. Unavoidable, perhaps, if these stations were to be made secure and then again, perhaps not. At all events, the number of stations to be held must he reduced to a minimum and forces must be concentrated for the field. If C. Campbell, about whom we know nothing save that he is a brave man, wants to distinguish himself as a general, he must create a mobile army, coûte que coûte [cost what it may], whether or not Delhi is abandoned.

And where, summa summarum, there are 25-30,000 European soldiers, no situation is so desperate that 5,000 at least cannot be mustered for a campaign, their losses being made good by the garrisons withdrawn from the stations. Only then will Campbell be able to see how he stands and what kind of enemy is actually confronting him. The odds are, however, that like a fool he will se blottir devant [squat down before] Delhi and watch his men go to pot at the rate of 100 a day, in which case it will be all the more ‘brave’ simply to stay there until everyone has cheerfully met his doom. Now as in the past brave stupidity is the order of the day.

Concentration of forces for the fighting in the north, vigorous support from Madras and, if possible, from Bombay, that’s all. Even if the Mahratta princes on the Nerbudda defect it can do little harm save by way of an example, for their troops are already with the insurgents. Certainly the very most that can be done is to hold out until the first reinforcements arrive from Europe at the end of October. But if a few more Bombay regiments revolt, that will be the end of strategy and tactics; it’s there that the decision lies.

I leave for Brighton on Tuesday at the latest and set out from there for Jersey at 10 o'clock on Wednesday night, but will let you have further details, and hope that you will come. Tomorrow shall start on ‘Battery’, etc. Today I drove round the island and, as I again slogged away until 3 o'clock yesterday, now propose to have a good long sleep.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Ryde

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 186;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 25 September 1857

Dear Engels,

I presume you will have received today my letter of the day before yesterday acknowledging the £5. I cannot understand the delay, having myself taken it to the post on time.

Your ‘Army’ is capital; except that I was thunderstruck by the sheer bulk of it — so much work can’t possibly be good for you. And if I'd known that you would work late into the night I would rather have let the whole thing go to the devil.

More graphically than anything else the history of the army demonstrates the rightness of our views as to the connection between the productive forces and social relations. Altogether, the army is of importance in economic development. E.g. it was in the army of Antiquity that the salaire [wages] was first fully developed. Likewise the peculium castrense in Rome, the first legal form according recognition to the movable property of others than fathers of families. Likewise the guild system in the corporation of the fabri. Here too the first use of machinery on a large scale. Even the special value of metals and their use as money would seem to have been based originally — as soon as Grimm’s Stone Age was over — on their significance in war. Again, the division of labour within a branch was first put into practice by armies. All this, moreover, a very striking epitome of the whole history of civil societies. If you ever have the time, you might work the thing out from that point of view.

The only points I think you have overlooked in your account are: 1. the earliest manifestation of a ready-made mercenary system on a large scale and at once among the Carthaginians (for our own private use I shall take a look at a work — previously unknown to me — by a Berlin man on the Carthaginian armies); 2. the development of the army system in the 15th and early 16th centuries in Italy, where tactical ruses, at any rate, were perfected. Likewise an extremely humorous description of Machiavelli’s (which I shall extract for you) in his History of Florence of how the condottieri fought. (But if I come and meet you in Brighton (when?), perhaps I had better bring you the Machiavelli. The History of Florence is a masterpiece.) Lastly, 3. the Asiatic military system as it first appeared in Persia and subsequently in various much modified forms among, inter alia, the Mongols and Turks.

In writing my biographies, etc., I naturally had to consult all sorts of encyclopaedias, including German ones. In so doing I discovered that, under the headings ‘Labour’, ‘Classes’, ‘Production’, etc., much had been systematically if stupidly cribbed from us. On the other hand, everyone had eschewed all mention of ourselves, even when devoting whole columns to Mr Edgar Bauer and other such panjandrums. Tant mieux pour nous. The biographies in the German encyclopaedias are written for children under 8 years of age. The French, if biased, are at least urbane. The English encyclopaedias crib systematically from the French and German. In the latter, the same fellows appear to unload the same twaddle onto different publishers. Ersch and Gruber not much good except in the later volumes, wherein many learned articles.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Pauly’s Realencyclopädie des Alterthums is reliable.

Engels To Marx,

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 195;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[St. Hélier,] Jersey, 29 October 1857

3 Edward Place

Dear Marx,

I shall be returning to Manchester a week from today, but don’t yet know what route I shall take. Your letter induced me to question Heckscher again (I had, of course, already consulted him concerning my return) about the possibility of a fatal relapse. From his reply I can only conclude that he believes a relapse might be fatal only if the lungs were affected, and is willing to guarantee that this will not be so in my case. At all events, he doesn’t think Jersey is of much benefit to me any more; either the thing’s over, or I must go much further south, and should anyhow return to Manchester, if only as an experiment, since I can always go away again. Now I'm simply waiting for some money and then I'll be off. By that time the History of Cannon will be finished and I'd rather do the other things — with possibly a few small exceptions — in Manchester where my books are. I should like to have the D list soon, otherwise Mr Dana will steal a march on us. What else does the noble fellow have to say, or haven’t you heard from him?

So drastically has the iron acted on my blood that my pulse has begun racing madly and the blood is always rising to my head; it’s as though I'd been drinking — I feel quite fuddled and my excitation is such that I can’t sleep at night. So for the time being I've had to stop taking it again. When I go back onto it in Manchester I shall have to reduce the dose considerably.

The advancing season is having a most debilitating effect on Schramm. Needless to say, he can only go out very little now and seldom comes into the town and only at the cost of considerable effort. The old philistine sent to him by his brother is a very bawdy fellow, who knows all the Berlin gossip, but in other ways stupid and boring. However, he'll be able to pester Konrad’s worthy brother on Konrad’s behalf and this he has promised me to do. Schramm has had a door made in the wall between his bedroom and living-room which enables him to heat the former a bit and avoid going out into the hall in winter. This has put an end to the house-hunting. He'll hardly outlast the spring, poor devil.

Harney grows more stupid every day. Considering the nature of the feudal arrangements here, he should be able to make a deal of political capital out of them, but he doesn’t even begin to understand them and, moreover, ruins all the best points made by the little lawyer who supplies him with material and even complete articles. There is, by the way, much that is funny about this dead-and-alive feudal set-up, and the whole business is preposterous to a degree. A modern lawyer for Seigneur and St. Hélier shopkeepers for vassals — the masquerade is altogether grotesque. Just now the fellows are holding feudal courts of justice; the prévôt du Seigneur is a carver and gilder who doesn’t know a word of French and, although he’s the second personage here, hasn’t an inkling of what’s going on. The Seigneur threatens to confiscate the houses of his unruly vassals, who make up some 60-70 per cent of the total number, while the vassals — drapers and tallow-chandlers — threaten to meet force with force. Voilà the present state of affairs.

If you write to me on Monday, but in time for the mail, your letter will still find me here; whether I shall still be here on Thursday, I am not quite sure.

Warmest regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

The Sepoys must have defended the enceinte of Delhi very badly; the real joke was the house-to-house fighting when, presumably, the native troops were sent in first. So the actual siege — what came afterwards could hardly be described as such — lasted from the 5th to the 14th, long enough for breaches to be made in the unprotected wall by heavy naval guns firing at a range of 300-400 yards. These were already in position by the 5th or 6th. The cannon on the walls do not appear to have been effectively manned, otherwise the English wouldn’t have been able to make so swift an approach.

The American crash is superb and not yet over by a long chalk. We still have to see the collapse of the better part of the import houses; so far only one here and there would appear to have crashed. The repercussion in England would seem to have begun with the Liverpool Borough Bank. Tant mieux. That means that, for the next 3 or 4 years, commerce will again be in a bad way. Nous avons maintenant de la chance.

I haven’t got a stamp in the house and it is now midnight.

Marx To Engels

In St Hélier in Jersey

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 197;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 31 October 1857

Dear Frederic,

Have received two letters from Dana. Says first, that ‘Army’ arrived in good time. Secondly, that, because of the commercial crisis, notice has been given to all European correspondents except for myself and Bayard Taylor; 1, however, am to confine myself strictly to 1 article per week — lately I had been trying to break through this limitation — and for the time being write exclusively about the Indian war and the financial crisis.

If you could let me have the History of Cannon by Friday, it would be a great boon. As soon as the next mail arrives from India, you must write to me at some length about the Delhi affair or rather, if possible, do the whole article since this time it has to be purely technical.

I sent the chaps about 8 sheets under the heading ‘Blücher’, the same being sub-titled ‘The Silesian army in the campaigns etc.’ As I had to spend so much time reading Clausewitz, Müffling, etc., some degree of compensation was called for.

So far as your resolution as to Manchester is concerned, it seems to me quite rational, within Heckscher’s limitations. Allen, too, says that fatal consequences are likely to result only if the lung is affected but that, in the early days after such a business, it behoves anyone to take care of himself.

The doses of iron may have been somewhat too strong. At all events it should have an excellent effect on your body. The weather here has improved during the past few days.

I should much like, old boy, to see you before your return to Manchester. There is a certain irony of fate in my being personally embroiled in these damned crises. What satisfaction it would give Heinzen s'il le savait [if he knew]!

The news as to Schramm is no less saddening for being predictable. What do you say to Cavaignac’s death and the idiocy of our liege-lord?

With warm regards from the whole family.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 199;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 13 November 1857

Dear Engels,

A week ago on Thursday I waited at both the appointed places — which, however, was one too many — from 11 o'clock to 3. Then I gave the whole thing up in despair.

I can write no more than a line or two, the article having left me only a few minutes until posting time. Let me know definitely when I can have ‘Cannon’. It’s a matter of getting the goods off to America at what is (for me) a crucial moment.

Meanwhile I haven’t written a word about India. I have got to have some accurate military stuff on the subject, events having to some extent discredited myself and the Tribune. [referring to Marx’s estimation that a British storming of Delhi could not succeed]

Though my own financial distress may be dire indeed, never, since 1849, have I felt so cosy as during this outbreak. Furthermore you can set Lupus’ mind at rest by telling him that, now that the whole statement is before us, I have written an exhaustive article for the Tribune in which I show, if only on the basis of the table of discount-rates for 1848-54, that the crisis ought by rights to have set in 2 years earlier. Moreover the delays are now explicable in such rational terms that even Hegel might, to his great satisfaction, have rediscovered the ‘concept’ in the ‘empirical diversity of the world of finite interests’.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Go on sending me, as you started to do, as many Manchester papers as possible. Not only for the Tribune. I am thinking of writing about the crisis for the benefit of the fatherland.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 208;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 24 November 1857

Dear Frederick,

You must excuse me for not having acknowledged receipt either of the money, or of the article or of various letters. The comings and goings connected with domestic affairs have made such demands on my time that little was left for work.

The monetary panic in London has subsided to some extent during the past few days but will soon begin afresh with the assistance of, among others, Fould, who has come over here with a French bank director in order to regulate the export of gold from England to France. The actual suspension of the Bank Act could, of course, only be effective in so far as it did away with the panic surplus artificially created by the Bank Act. The banking department should have had to declare itself insolvent the following day since the reserve fund amounted to no more than four or five hundred thousand pounds, whereas deposit — public and private — exceeded 17 millions. On the other hand this danger was created solely by the Act itself in that the metal reserve in the issuing department was not much below one-third of the issued notes. The Act precipitated the outbreak of the money panic, thereby perhaps reducing its intensity. However, lendings by the Bank up to a maximum of 10% (on first-rate papers) will keep a mass of transactions going which must ultimately lead to another crash. If, for instance, the price of corn, sugar, etc., is currently being maintained it is because their owners are discounting the bills drawn on them for the same instead of selling the commodities. A fall in the price of these commodities seems to me inevitable and hence I believe that these chaps are simply heading straight for serious bankruptcies. That was exactly the case in May 1847. As distinct from earlier crises, what is still to some extent supporting the so-called money-market in London is the existence of joint-stock banks which didn’t really begin to expand until the last ten years. The interest they pay the philistines, small rentiers, etc., is 1% less than the Bank of England’s official rate. The lure of 9% is too great to meet with any serious resistance. So the City mob has the philistines’ small capital at its disposal to a greater degree than ever before. If just one of these banks were now to collapse, there would be a general uproar. Hence it is greatly to be regretted that the Royal British Bank should have crashed prematurely.

As for America, it seems almost certain that the protectionism will prevail as a result of the crisis. This will have lasting and disagreeable repercussions so far as the worthy English are concerned.

I don’t know whether Steffen has already told you that he is leaving England. This is because the crisis has caused his sister (how, I don’t know) to lose what little money she had. He is going to Germany to join forces with her, so that they can scrape along together. I think he’s doing quite the wrong thing. I have it from a reliable source that Mrs Ruge (all she speaks is a kind of Saxon patois) is the only teacher of German in Brighton and, so greatly does demand exceed supply, that she is now launching her daughter in the same trade. So Steffen’s sister would find good employment in Brighton were Steffen himself able to get on better with people. Apropos Ruge. Some months ago the old jackass sent out a prospectus for the resuscitation of the ci-devant [former] Deutsche Jahrbücher, the main object of which is to combat materialism in the natural sciences and in industry; idem the proliferation of comparative linguistics, etc. — everything, in short, that calls for exact knowledge. To carry out his scheme he requires 1,000 subscribers à 10 talers. Over a period of 2 months summa summarum 40, I repeat 40, enthusiasts for ‘Intellectual freedom’ have come forward. The muster-roll of his adherents in Germany is, consequently, far from creditable.

I know nothing about Mr Dronke save that some months ago he urged Freiligrath to play the middleman (viz. the discounter) in a kite-flying operation upon which he thought to embark with old Naut. Freiligrath, of course, sent him away with a flea in his ear. Shortly afterwards he wrote saying that, though his circumstances were ‘quite good’, he was prepared to work anywhere as a clerk at a salary of £200-250, and asked Freiligrath to look out for a post of this kind. All this would seem to indicate that he is about to make his exit from the world of commerce.

Becker has been released from prison; Bürgers, on the other hand, has been subjected to additional restrictions.

In one of your letters you say that the manufacturers will be able to make headway only when cotton is at 6d. But won’t the substantial curtailment of production soon bring cotton prices down to that point anyway?

Jones is playing a very inane role. As you know, long before the crisis and with no particular end in view unless to provide a pretext for agitation during the lull, he proposed to hold a Chartist conference to which bourgeois radicals (not just Bright, but even men like Cunningham) were also to be invited. The general idea was to come to a compromise with the bourgeois whereby they were to be given the ballot and, in return, accord manhood-suffrage to the workers. This proposal gave rise to splits in the Chartist Party and these in turn involved Jones even more deeply in his project. Now, instead of making use of the crisis and substituting genuine agitation for an ill-chosen pretext for agitation, he clings to his nonsense; he shocks the working-men by preaching co-operation with the bourgeois while in no way inspiring in the latter the slightest degree of confidence. To complete his ruin he is being cajoled by some of the radical papers. In his own sheet [The People’s Paper] that old ass Frost, whom he himself proclaimed a hero and appointed chairman of his conference, has attacked him in a brutally outspoken letter in which inter alia he tells him that if he considers that the co-operation of the middle class is necessary — and nothing can be done without it — he should speak out bona fide. Who, Frost goes on to ask, gave him the right to draw up the programme for the conference without consulting his allies, and who empowered him to appoint Frost chairman and himself to play the dictator, etc.? So now he’s in hot water and, for the first time, is playing a role that is not merely inane but also ambiguous. I haven’t seen him for some while but now intend to call on him. I believe him to be an honest man and, since in England it is impossible for a public character to render himself ‘impossible’ by his stupidities, all he has to do is extricate himself as soon as he can from his self-laid snare. The ass should begin by forming a party, for which purpose he must go to the manufacturing districts. Then the radical bourgeois will come to him in search of compromise.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 214;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 8 December 1857

Dear Frederick,

While I was upstairs busy writing my last letter to you, my wife down below was besieged by hungry wolves all of whom used the pretext of the ‘heavy times’ to dun her for money which she had not got. (Luckily £15 arrived from Germany a few days afterwards, thus enabling us to shift off the evil day for a week or a fortnight.) Well, in the above-mentioned circumstances I may have been a rather confused correspondent, but not too confused to recall my confusion that self-same evening, after posting the letter, and remark to my wife what a wry face you would pull at my bit about debtors receiving money on bills payable by themselves, etc. Ever since I have been keeping up her spirits, which have been much depressed by this petite guerre, with sundry scoundrels, by reflecting on how you would break it to me in the most gracious possible way. But I could hardly go so far as to expect that you would tone down the ridiculous blunder to a ‘slight mistake’. My best thanks for this grace, Sir.

But to return to the matter in hand. According to The Economist it is true that the chaps in Mincing Lane and Mark Lane had again been receiving loans on their produce, but this move ceased last Wednesday or thereabouts. Corn, in particular, even showed an upward tendency for a day or two, but (flour actually) then dropped 3/- per 280 lbs as a result of the French decrees permitting the free export of corn and flour, and significantly so yesterday as a result of the downbreak of corn prices in the Baltic. (Nota bene: In France, Bonaparte’s measure had no more than a transient effect; though prices rose a little there, the rise immediately resulted in increased supplies, which have still to find their way on to the French market.) A few corn merchants have failed here, but as yet only insignificant houses and then only operators upon grain for distant delivery. The big American shipments arrive in the spring; the French will bombard England with corn at any price as soon as pressure over there grows more serious. In my opinion — and always supposing that, in accordance with the old adage, there are several good autumns in succession — only now will the effects of the repeal of the Corn Laws begin to tell on landlords and farmers in England and the antiquated agricultural distress recur in no mean fashion. The satisfactory state of the home trade resulting from industrial prosperity, and the succession of bad autumns have combined to make the experiment of 1847-57 inoperative and turn repeal to a dead letter.

I've had a gratifying experience with the Tribune. On 6 November I wrote an exposé for them of the 1844 Bank Act, in which I said that the next few days would see the farce of suspension, but that not too much should be made of this monetary panic, the real affaire being the impending industrial crash. The Tribune published this as a leader 3 days later. The New-York Times (which has entered into a feudal relationship with the London Times) replied to the Tribune to the effect that, firstly, the Bank Act would not be suspended, extolled the Act after the manner of the money-article writers of Printing House Square, and declared the talk of an ‘industrial crash’ in England to be ‘simply absurd’. This was on the 24th. The following day the N.Y.T. received a telegram from the Atlantic with the news that the Bank Act had been suspended, and likewise news of ‘industrial distress’. It’s nice, by the by, to see Loyd-Overstone coming out with the true reason for his fanatical advocacy of the 1844 legislation — because it permitted the ‘hard calculators’ to squeeze 20-30% out of the commercial world.

Nice, too, that the capitalists, who so vociferously opposed the ‘droit au travail’ [right to work], are now everywhere demanding ‘public support’ from their governments and hence advocating the ‘droit au profit’ at public expense in Hamburg, Berlin, Stockholm, Copenhagen and even England (in the form of suspension of the Acts). Also, that the philistines of Hamburg should have refused to hand out any more alms to the capitalists.

The astonishing thing about the whole business is the affaire in France and the attitude adopted towards it by most of the English press. Just as, after the American collapse, John Bull was represented as the calm, self-possessed merchant vis-à-vis his brother Jonathan, so now Jacques Bonhomme vis-à-vis John Bull. The Paris correspondent of the London Economist comments most ingenuously:

*’there has been not the slightest disposition to have a panic, though circumstances certainly appeared to justify one, and though the French have heretofore been extremely ready to rush into panics on the smallest pretexts.'*

The panic now felt by the French bourgeoisie, despite their sanguine temperament, at the very notion of panic, is surely the best indication of what panic means in France on this occasion. The virtuous disposition of the Parisian bourgeois will, however, prove no more effective than the Hamburg association for discounting the panic. Last Sunday’s Observer relates how the dissemination of horrible rumours about the Crédit mobilier sent everyone rushing to the Bourse to rid themselves à tout prix of their shares. French capital, despite, the cosmopolitan nature therein descried by Mr Péreire, is still timid, niggardly and cautious in actual commerce as it has always been. Crooked dealing (which, to be sure, has in its turn become the sine qua non of respectable trade and industry) actually exists only in branches in which the State is the real employer, whether directly or indirectly. But there is no doubt that even an inherently — or, as Hegel would say, ‘in himself’ — bankrupt capitalist of the magnitude of the French government can make shift for rather longer than a private capitalist. The police measures against bullion exports, now pretty well in full vigor in France, and to an even greater extent the export, at which prices whatever, of the products of the corn, silk and wine harvests, etc., have put off for a week or two the drain of bullion from the Bank of France. Nevertheless, the drain will set in and even if, as in 1856 (October), it gets no further than the gutter, the catastrophe will be complete. Meanwhile French manufacturers are treating their workers as ruthlessly as though there had never been a revolution. This will do good. On the other hand Mr Bonaparte is using the bank as an entrepreneur for the construction of railways, now at a standstill. Doubtless the next step will be the issue of assignats as soon as the drain begins. If the fellow has the courage, and always providing he can pay the army properly, we may yet witness a pretty prologue.

Your information about conditions in Manchester is of the greatest interest to me, the newspapers having chosen to draw a veil over them.

I am working like mad all night and every night collating my economic studies so that I at least get the outlines clear before the déluge.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

How is your health? It’s a long time since you supplied a bulletin.

Since Lupus keeps a regular record of our crisis forecasts, tell him that last Saturday’s Economist maintains that, during the final months of 1853, throughout 1854, the autumn of 1855 and ‘The sudden changes of 1856’, Europe has never had more than a hair-breadth escape from the impending crash.

Marx To Conrad Schramm

In St Hélier in Jersey

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 217;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.

London, 8 December 1857

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Hampstead

Dear Schramm,

Write soon and tell us how Jersey suits you. I did not see Engels when he passed through London on his return journey because he gave me the wrong time for our meeting at the railway station. Did that ass Reventlow reply? Not that I suppose there’s anything at all to the whole affair, since in any case these Americans are incapable of paying just now; I only ask because of the behaviour of this mighty hero. And how about Mr Faucher? Has he paid up yet? That crazy Berlinois grows from day to day stupider. Witness the foreign news of The Morning Star, a name that bears a certain analogy with lucus a non lucendo. In fact the entire English press gets worse every day, even without German assistance. Quite apart from the seismic effects of the general crisis which must delight every connoisseur, it is truly a relief when one is no longer forced to listen every day to the English self-laudations as to the ‘bravery’ of ‘their English in India’. It was really getting on one’s nerves, * this overtrading in other people’s courage on the part of the English paterfamilias and penny-a-liner who lives quietly at home and is uncommonly averse to anything threatening him with the remotest chance of obtaining military glory *.

Apart from the family circle, I am now pretty well cut off here. I seldom see my few acquaintances nor, on the whole, is this any great loss. The life you lead in Jersey can hardly be much quieter. I fear that as time goes on you will weary of your stay, or have you struck up acquaintanceships of any kind? True, Harney is so far quite a companionable fellow, but toujours perdrix is, of course, apt to pall. I hope to see you again in the spring, provided you don’t move further south. In any case drop one or two lines.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 224;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 18 December 1857

Dear Frederick,

Just a few lines written in great haste. I've just received a 3rd and final warning from the rotten rate collector to the effect that, if I haven’t paid by Monday, they'll put a broker in the house on Monday afternoon. If possible, therefore, send me a few pounds before Monday. Financial pressure is now even greater than is usually the case with me because, for about 3 weeks, I have had to pay for everything in cash and anything like credit has ceased, while at the same time 2/3 of all the money I receive immediately goes to meet floating debts. Moreover, there is only a very little coming in, since I have hitherto been unable to send the Tribune more than one article. So far as to private matters.

I am working enormously, as a rule until 4 o'clock in the morning. I am engaged on a twofold task: 1. Elaborating the outlines of political economy [Marx had begun work on The Grundrisse — “Outline” — in October 1857 and completed it in May 1858]. (For the benefit of the public it is absolutely essential to go into the matter au fond [thoroughly], as it is for my own, individually, to get rid of this nightmare.)

2. The present crisis. Apart from the articles for the Tribune, all I do is keep records of it, which, however, takes up a considerable amount of time. I think that, somewhere about the spring, we ought to do a pamphlet together about the affair as a reminder to the German public that we are still there as always, and always the same. I have started 3 large record books — England, Germany, France. All the material on the American affair is available in the Tribune, and can be collated subsequently. By the by, I should be glad if you would send me the Guardian if possible, every day. It not only doubles the work but also disrupts it if I have to deal with a week or so’s arrears all at once.

In France, and specially at Havre, the fun (commercial) will probably be started by the ‘Germans’, whom one cannot altogether help taking into account now. Moreover — apart from the general round of the bankrupt State — trade itself would seem to be exceptionally rotten in Marseilles and Bordeaux, everywhere, that is, where infiltration and intervention by foreign elements has stung the beastly crapauds out of their lousy, mean penny-pinching and timidity. Au fond, only in such an immobile country was a Crédit mobilier both possible and inevitable. The more you become acquainted with the Messiahs of nations, the less you like him.

Write to me whenever you have the time, for later on you're sure to forget all the ‘chronique scandaleuse’ of the crisis which is so invaluable to us. I make excerpts from your letters and enter them in the principal record books.

Salut. Kind regards to Lupus. Pieper has the satisfaction of knowing that his ex-principal Saalfeld, with whose wife he had such a tremendous row, has gone to the wall.

Your

K. M.

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle

In Düsseldorf

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 225;

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Berlin, 1922.

London, 21 December 1857

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

Of the various letters you mention I have received only one, that sent via Freiligrath. I didn’t answer, or rather was awaiting a private occasion for answering which, for reasons that cannot very well be committed to paper, did not present itself. I would point out, by the by, that it was you who first broke off the correspondence by failing for such a long time to answer a letter dated Manchester [8 Nov 1855].

My thanks for Heraclitus. I have always felt a great tenderness for this philosopher, whom I prefer above all the Ancients save Aristotle. [Later] philosophy — Epicurus (him in particular), Stoa and Scepticism — [I] had made the object of special study, but for [political] rather than philosophical [...] reasons. While [tendering] my thanks, [I] must at the same time [say] that the work has not yet reached me.

Doubtless [Nutt’s] will send it as soon as it comes into their [...] to write [... Mi]nistry. My views on Palmerston you know, and these have not changed. Besides, I know nothing whatever about the paper since Austrian journals are nowhere on display here, and am thus quite ignorant of its general line. Whatever the case, I should be interested to see one or two numbers.

I live in great isolation here, all my friends except Freiligrath having left London. Anyway, I have no desire for intercourse. Relativement parlant, Freiligrath is doing quite well as manager of the Swiss Bank and is still the same good-natured, sterling fellow he has always been. Lupus and Engels are in Manchester as before. We still lament the loss of Weerth.

The present commercial crisis has impelled me to set to work seriously on my outlines [Grundrisse] of political economy, and also to prepare something on the present crisis. I am forced to fritter away [...] my days earning a living. [Only] the nights remain free for real work and that is disrupted by ill-health. I [have] not yet looked round for a publisher as I know from experience the [...] come of it [...] when I cannot send you any news, living as I do like a hermit. Throughout last winter and summer my wife was very unwell, but has now recovered in some measure.

If you know Dr Elsner’s address please send him my regards.

That old ass Ruge has, I am told, made an attempt to resuscitate his Deutsche Jahrbücher. History will not put the clock back far enough to make this feasible.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 227;

First published: slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 22 December 1857

Dear Frederick,

Thou hast triumphantly snatched me out of the clutches of the Exchequer, praised be thy name — halleluiah!

Herewith a letter (with enclosure) from the great Lassalle who now positively assures me that he is seriously beginning to be known in Berlin by reason of his fame. These effusions of a beautiful soul will amuse you and Lupus. The worthy Lassalle took up philosophy and Heraclitus as he took up the Hatzfeldt case and, if he is to be believed, eventually won his ‘case’. It would, indeed, seem that the old school — both philologists and Hegelians — were surprised to see such a posthumous blossoming of a by-gone epoch. But we shall be seeing the thing for ourselves and, gift-horse or no, shall look it long and searchingly in the mouth — on the express condition, of course, that Heraclitus doesn’t reek of garlic. *Fancy only this fellow going up and down the streets of Berlin and ‘asking for himself’ strutting like a peacock, a stride and a stand: biting his lips, with ‘a political regard’ as who should say: ‘This is the man who has written Heraclit.'* The laddie might be of some service to us in finding a publisher, unless, perhaps, he’s afraid that competition might endanger the reputation to which he also aspires in the field of economics, thereby losing him his ‘case’. I have replied to Friedländer through Mr Lassalle saying that, while I, too, am ‘anti-French’, I am no less ‘anti-English’, and that the last thing I could do would be to write in favour of ‘Lord Pam’. So I have turned the thing down. Should Friedländer send me the Presse so that I can see beforehand whose spiritual offspring it is, and if the fellows want no more than one money article a week — for which they would, of course, have to shell out — I might perhaps agree. There can be no question of politics in this case.

I have written to Lassalle, brief and cool, to say that, while I had received the letter sent through Freiligrath, I hadn’t answered it for reasons that could hardly be committed to paper. For the rest a few words, no more.

Schramm has written to my wife from Jersey; an extremely witty letter. For his sins, Kosmos Leiden has lost 3 of his children; 2 daughters (including Mrs Mevissen) died of consumption and one of his sons went down with the Pacific.

In last Sunday’s issue of Reynold’s there is a significant attack upon those apostates who advocate union with the middle class. Meaning Jones. I haven’t seen the laddie for a long time. He seems to be avoiding me, for which he must have his ‘raysons’. However, I shall probably surprise him — one fine morning.

Regards to Lupus.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 228;

First published: slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 25 December 1857

Dear Frederick,

Since our first task now is to get a clear idea of conditions in France, I have been re-examining all my extracts on French commerce, industry and crises and reached certain conclusions which I shall briefly outline for you:

1. English, North European and American crises have never directly given rise in France to a ‘French crisis'; rather the effects have been entirely passive — chronic distress, limitation of production, stagnation of trade, and general uneasiness. The reason: France has a favourable balance of trade with the United States, the Hanseatic towns, England, Denmark. With Sweden and Norway the balance is unfavourable, but this is more than offset by Hamburg. Consequently these crises can never generate a drain of bullion from France and hence will not create a properly so-called monetary panic there. If the Bank, notwithstanding, increases the bank rate, as has happened this time, it does so merely to prevent the capitalists from placing their money more advantageously in those countries. But so long as the export of bullion is the inevitable consequence, not of the balance of trade but simply of the avarice of the profitmongers, it can, as Bonaparte has now once more demonstrated, be stopped by the gendarmerie. If the country with the favourable balance of trade has not granted long-term credits or accumulated produce for the export to the centres of the crises — and both are repugnant to the pedlar — like nature of your French manufacturer and merchant — it will have to endure losses, etc., but not an acute crisis. Louis Philippe, too, was misled by the apparent good fortune with which France emerges from the first phase of a general crisis. In his inaugural address before the Chambers on the eve of the February revolution, he congratulated ‘la belle France’ upon this privilege.

2. Admitting all this, the first phase of the crisis has already affected French industry and commerce more seriously than on any similar occasion in the past.

3. In France the first effect of the crisis — agreeable to the nature of the crapaud — is the timorous curtailment of expenditure and business. Hence an accumulation of money in the Bank of France coinciding with a huge drop in the circulation of bank discounts. Hence — owing to the circumstance that crises always happen in the autumn and that every French government fears political disturbances at the year’s end should the bank rate be high at the settlement of accounts — reduction of the bank rate in December. In December 1847 Louis Philippe ordered the Bank to reduce the bank rate to 4%.

4. The greater availability of capital in commerce and industry simultaneously gives rise to greater buoyancy on the Bourse. This has been the case under Boustrapa to an even greater extent than under Louis Philippe because he compelled the Bank by the Decree of 1852 to make advances on railway securities and fonds and Crédit foncier papiers, to rediscount the speculative bills discounted by the Comptoir National d'escompte, and likewise to make him a further advance on the securities on which that institution had made advances already. Hence, e.g. the high price of French railway shares and bonds although the receipts of the French railways since the outbreak of the crises in England have fallen disproportionately more than those over here. E.g. Orleans Railway receipts dropped by 24% between 29 October and 26 November and subsequently even further. Nevertheless on 22 December Orleans Railway was quoted at 1,355 whereas on 29 October it was at 2,985. It also emerges from the monthly report of the Bank Of France for December that, while Discounts in December have dropped by 94,236,520 frs compared with October and 49,955,500 compared with November, advances on railway securities have risen.

5. The French crisis proper does not break out until the general crisis has attained a certain level in Holland, Belgium, the Zollverein, Italy (including Trieste), the Levant and Russia (Odessa), because in these countries the balance of trade is distinctly unfavourable to France; hence the direct effect of pressure is monetary panic in France. Once it has hit France, it recoils on those countries d'une manure vraiment admirable. With Switzerland, France is on the same footing as the United States with England. The short-term balance of trade is consistently in France’s favour. But since France is substantially in debt to Switzerland, the latter is always apt heavily to draw upon it in times of crisis.

6. When the French crisis proper breaks out, it will play the very devil both with the security market and the security of that market, the State. (This will also tell upon England, which at the present moment is again gambling in foreign securities in a manner splendid to behold.) The swindling, which in Hamburg, England, the United States has been the province of private capitalists, is practised in France by the State itself, and the French pedlars in trade were all of them gamblers on the Bourse. The recoil from the Anglo-American crisis sufficed to bring the railways to a deadlock. What does Mr Bonaparte do? Compels the Bank to become in fact a railway contractor and to make advances to the fellows on the bonds they were authorised to issue by the settlement of 30 November 1856. In 1858 these bonds will run to about £9 million. Thus the Crédit mobilier, which on 3 December was up to its ears in trouble, is preparing to amalgamate with the Crédit foncier and the Comptoir National d'escompte. Why? Because both the latter are legally entitled to receive advances from the Bank on their securities and to have. their discounts rediscounted. So Boustrapa’s plan is clear, namely to make the Bank Of France the entrepreneur for all his fraudulent schemes with the help, not of its own capital, but of the capital which it has merely on deposit and which will drain away on the first signal given in the neighbouring countries, in fact, this is also an admirable way of ruining the Bank. However it would hardly occur even to Mr Bona to have the calls of the shareholders paid by the Bank Of France. In 1858 these calls will amount to over £10 million for French railways alone under the settlement of 30 November 1856. They will run to at least £30 million for the host of speculative concerns such as the Merchantile and Industrial Co of Madrid (Rothschilds), the French-American Shipping Company, the Victor Emmanuel Railway, Herserange Ironworks Co., Austrian Railways, Saragossa Co., French-Swiss Railway, Lausanne.-Fribiurg Railway, Nassau Company, Société Générale des Tanneries, Compagnic de la Carbonisation des Houilles, Chimay to Marienbourg Railway, Lombard-Venetian Railway, South American Steam Navigation Co., etc. The French haven’t an earthly hope of paying these calls. Moreover the Germans, Hollanders, Swiss, the large holders of French securities, will sell them at any price on the Paris Bourse at the first sign of serious alarm, be it in France or due to pressure at home. So it seems that Boustrapa will hardly be able to extricate himself in 1858 unless he holds out for a bit longer with the help of martial law and assignats. The whole rotten old structure is falling to pieces and the ludicrously rash surge hitherto manifested by the security market in England, etc., will likewise end in disaster.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Pieper arrived today on a visit.

As regards the Comptoir National d'escompte de Paris be it also noted that this institution, which was set up by the provisional government for the purpose of making bills discountable on the basis of only two signatures and similar less stringent requirements, was empowered by Boustrapa in 1851, only a day or two after the coup d'état, to make advances on Rentes Françaises, les actions et obligations industrielles ou de crédit constitutes en sociétés anonymes. Advances on these securities amounted to £940,000 in 1854/55 and nearly £1,500,000 in 1855/56. Moreover, in 1851 it was given the right to establish un ‘Sous Comptoir des Chemins de Fer’, whose sole business was to make advances on railway shares and bonds. At the end of June 1852 its advances were £520,000, at the end of 1852 £1,240,000, 1852/53 — £3,600,000; at the end of 1854: £4,560,000, i.e. about 9 x the advances in 1851. It’s the same delectable business that broke the neck of the Scotch Exchange Banks in 1846/47.

*Has Dr Borchardt not yet suspended his payments?*

I trust you won’t go out tippling too much during the holiday and these exciting times in Manchester and that you'll pay due attention to your health. Warmest regards to Lupus.

What is ‘Friend Charley’ about? and Old Hill?

1858

Marx to Engels. 1 January

Marx to Engels. 5 January

Engels to Marx. 6 January

Engels to Marx. 7 January

Marx to Engels. 11 January

Engels to Marx. 14 January

Engels to Marx. 15 January

Marx to Engels. 16 January

Marx to Engels. 23 January

Engels to Marx. 25 January

Engels to Marx. 28 January

Marx to Engels. 28 January

Marx to Engels. 29 January

Engels to Marx. 30 January

Marx to Engels. 1 February

Engels to Marx. 8 February

Marx to Engels. 10 February

Engels to Marx. 11 February

Marx to Engels. 14 February

Engels to Marx. 18 February

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 22 February

Marx to Engels. 22 February

Engels to Marx. 24 February

Engels to Marx. 1 March

Marx to Engels. 2 March

Engels to Marx. 4 March

Marx to Engels. 5 March

Engels to Marx. 11 March

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle.. 11 March

Marx to Engels. 15 March

Engels to Marx. 16 March

Engels to Marx. 17 March

Marx to Engels. 19 March

Engels to Marx. 26 March

Marx to Engels. 29 March

Marx to Engels. 2 April

Engels to Marx. 9 April

Engels to Jenny Marx. 14 April

Engels to Marx. 22 April

Marx to Engels. 29 April

Engels to Marx. 30 April

Marx to Engels. 1 May

Engels to Rudolf Schramm.. 6 May

Engels to Jenny Marx. 11 May

Engels to Jenny and Laura Marx. 11 May

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 31 May

Marx to Engels. 31 May

Marx to Engels. 7 June

Engels to Marx. 9 June

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 10 June

Marx to Engels. 2 July

Engels to Marx. 14 July

Marx to Engels. 15 July

Engels to Marx. 16 July

Marx to Engels. 20 July

Marx to Engels. 25 July

Marx to Engels. 8 August

Engels to Marx. 10 August

Marx to Engels. 13 August

Marx to Engels. 18 August

Marx to Engels. 21 September

Engels to Marx. 7 October

Marx to Engels. 8 October

Engels to Marx. 21 October

Marx to Engels. 22 October

Marx to Engels. 2 November

Marx to Engels. 10 November

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 12 November

Marx to Engels. 24 November

Marx to Engels. 29 November

Marx to Engels. 11 December

Marx to Engels. 16 December

Marx to Engels. 17 December

Marx to Engels. 22 December

Marx to Engels. 25 December

Marx to Engels. 30 December

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 241;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

Manchester, 7 January 1858

Dear Moor,

Herewith the beginning of C [for the American Cyclopedia]. I shall try and do a few more articles tomorrow evening. It seems to me that there are only 2 articles for which material will be difficult to obtain — perhaps impossible in sufficient quantity — namely, caps (percussion) and ‘camp’ (Roman, Hebrew, Greek). The excerpts I made from Rüstow about Caesar’s camp amount to very little for, though I had ordered my own copy of Rüstow, the bookseller supplied an altogether different book. In the case of percussion caps, what I chiefly need is the story of the discovery of potassium tetrachlorate and its explosive qualities, likewise the dates when percussion firearms were introduced into the various armies. These two things would be useful to have. If you could manage to go to the British Museum and rout out something on this for me I could soon have these articles ready also, otherwise they'll hang fire since the libraries I use up here have no information on the subject.

If, by the way, Monsieur Dana can’t be bothered to reply when we send him our lists, he has only himself to blame. He could have sent a list for D long ago. Now I shall make one out myself. At all events the chap seems to be taking the whole business very lightly; I only hope he’s sent you some money for it, otherwise it’s high time to start kicking up a fuss.

Charley is in Holland and will be going to Switzerland. Luckily the shortage of orders makes it possible for me to leave most of the tasks connected with the year’s end to the office boys, so that I'm not unduly burdened with work. That’s one good job.

I enclose today’s Guardian from which you will see that there is still a lot of short time here. Next week it may ease again somewhat. At present I am sending you only those Guardians in which there’s something of commercial interest.

I am reading, inter alia, Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege. An odd way of philosophising, but per se very good. On the question as to whether one should speak of the art or the science of war, he says that, more than anything else, war resembles commerce. Combat is to war what cash payment is to commerce; however seldom it need happen in reality, everything is directed towards it and ultimately it is bound to occur and proves decisive.

Many regards to your wife and little ones.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 244;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 11 January [1858]

Dear Frederick,

‘Campaign’, etc. received. In the next day or so I shall go to the Museum to look up the matters in question.

Affairs in India — with Windham for hero — are again taking an interesting turn. If we have fuller particulars this week, by Wednesday or thereabouts, I shall have to send off something on the subject to the Tribune.

In elaborating the principles of economics I have been so damnably held up by errors in calculation that in despair I have applied myself to a rapid revision of algebra., I have never felt at home with arithmetic. But by making a detour via algebra, I shall quickly get back into the way of things.

Your health bulletins are too cursory. I'd like you to go into more detail, for instance, have all your sores healed up?

More in my, next.

Your

K. M.

I hunted through Clausewitz, more or less, when doing Blücher. The fellow possesses a common sense bordering on the ingenious.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 247;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 14 January 1858

7 Southgate

Dear Marx,

Herewith the article, though it has just occurred to me that by a ludicrous slip I have written Wilson throughout instead of Inglis; perhaps you would alter this as there’s no time to do so now.

I shall do a few more C’s for Tuesday, and finish ‘Cavalry’, which should make a good article and also be somewhat longer.

Apropos, have you done ‘Coehoorn’ (Baron)? If not I have some excellent material.

NB. I've no material whatever on ‘Catapults’ — there should be something in Ersch and Gruber.

The Lucknow garrison’s greatest act of heroism consisted in the fact that they had to face every day the ‘coarse beef’ cooked by the ladies, ‘entirely unaided’. Must have been damned badly cooked. The Daily News has something on Windham, but not enough.

Kindest regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

My health is good. The sores have all been healed for the last 6 weeks. Heckscher is very satisfied with the way the thing is progressing, but he’s still limiting what I eat and drink — not so much in quantity as in kind.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 248;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 16 January 1858

Dear Frederick,

You, too, will have had a letter from Harney about friend [Conrad] Schramm. There was no prospect of recovery. A pity, though, that money worries — for which the fat London philistine [Rudolf Schramm] is to blame — should have clouded his last days.

Your article 3 is splendid and in style and manner altogether reminiscent of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in its heyday. As for Windham, he may be a very bad general, but on this occasion the man was undone by what was the making of him at the Redan — unseasoned troops. I am generally of the opinion that in terms of bravery, self-reliance and steadiness this, the second army England has committed to India (and of which not a man will return), will not be able to hold a candle to the first, which seems to have dwindled away almost entirely. As regards the effect of the climate on the troops, while temporarily in charge of the military department I showed in various articles by exact calculations that mortality was disproportionately higher than stated in the official English despatches. In view of the drain of men and bullion which she will cost the English, India is now our best ally.

On Monday I shall again visit the Museum, after which I shall send you ‘Catapult’ — along with the other stuff you ask for — drawn from the best sources. I have not done ‘Coehoorn’, as it would have taken me too much time to unearth the correct sources.

I am exceedingly glad to learn that your health is progressing well. For the past 3 weeks I, too, have again been dosing myself and only stopped doing so today. I had been overdoing very much my nocturnal labours, accompanied, it is true, by mere lemonade on the one hand, but an immense deal of tobacco on the other. I am, by the way, discovering some nice arguments. E.g. I have completely demolished the theory of profit as hitherto propounded. What was of great use to me as regards method of treatment was Hegel’s Logic at which I had taken another look by mere accident, Freiligrath having found and made me a present of several volumes of Hegel, originally the property of Bakunin. If ever the time comes when such work is again possible, I should very much like to write 2 or 3 sheets making accessible to the common reader the rational aspect of the method which Hegel not only discovered but also mystified.

Of all recent economists, Monsieur Bastiat with his Harmonies économiques represents the very dregs of fatuity at their most concentrated. Only a crapaud could have concocted an harmonious pot-au-feu of this kind.

What do you think of our friend Jones? I still refuse to believe that the chap has sold himself. Perhaps his experience of 1848 lies heavy on his stomach. So great is his faith in himself that he may think himself capable of exploiting the middle class or imagine that if only, one way or the other, Ernest Jones could be got into Parliament, world history could not fail to take a new turn. The best of it all is that — out of spite against Jones, of course — Reynolds is now posing in his paper as the most rabid opponent of the middle class and of all compromise. Mr B. O'Brien has likewise become an irrepressible Chartist at any price. Jones’ only excuse is the enervation now rampant among the working class in England. However that may be, if he goes on as at present he will become either dupe of the middle class or renegade. The fact that he should now seek to avoid me as anxiously as he once used to consult me over the merest trifle is evidence of anything but a good conscience.

Herewith a letter for Lupus from Laura and Jenny. The two girls naturally imagine that you might take umbrage at Lupus appearing to be preferred as a correspondent. Hence they have earnestly admonished me not to forget to tell you that yours shall be the next turn.

I shall wait another 3 weeks until the situation has pretty well come to a head and then write to Mr Dana saying that I cannot go on working for the Tribune if I'm restricted to 4 articles a month, and that 6 is the minimum. In fact I am now invariably obliged to compress into 1 article sufficient material for 2, and hence am doing double the work for half the price. This will never do.

Did you enclose Lassalle’s and Friedländer’s letters’ in the one about Lassalle which went astray? For political reasons, it would be desirable to preserve them.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 258;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 1 February 1858

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Frederick,

£5 arrived. The simultaneous arrival of two letters, of which I sent off one on Thursday, the other on Friday, would seem to indicate that refugees’ letters are being held back, examined, etc., by the Post Office.

New B’s are: ‘Bidassoa’ (Battle of), ‘Blenheim’ (ditto), ‘Burmah’ (War in), ‘Bomarsund’ (Siege), ‘Borodino’ (Battle), ‘Brescia’ (Assault), ‘Bridge-head’, ‘Bülow, ‘Buda’ (Siege of), ‘Beresford’, ‘Berme’. When Dana says, ‘Most of them I asked you before’, he is mistaken, and is confusing your list of B’s with his own. All he himself ordered was: ‘Barbette’, ‘Bastion’, ‘Bayonet’, ‘Barclay de Tolly’, ‘Battery’, ‘Battle’, ‘Bem’, ‘Bennigsen’, ‘Berthier’, ‘Bernadotte’, ‘Bessières’, ‘Bivouac’, ‘Blindage’, ‘Bliicher’, ‘Bium’, ‘Bolivar’, ‘Bomb’, ‘Bombardier’, ‘Bombardment’, ‘Bomb (Ketch, Proof, Vessel)’, ‘Bonnet’, ‘Bosquet’, ‘Bourrienne’, ‘Bridge’ (pontoon), Brown (Sir George), ‘Brune’, ‘Bugeaud’.’ (The ass has received the lot.)

I have done ‘Catapult’ for you (not very much). Likewise the better part of ‘Castrum’ (but I still have to look up Greek camps in Wachsmuth, Hellenische Alterthumskunde, and Jewish in de Wette). It’s a lengthy business where Percussion Caps are concerned because there are so many different types of gun-locks, etc., to be listed. I'd have already finished the job if it hadn’t been for the new order from Dana. I'll send you all the rubbish at the same time. Besides, whenever I'm at the Museum, there’s such a lot of stuff to look up that it’s closing-time (now 4 o'clock) before I've so much as looked round. Then there’s the journey there. So much time lost.

Heraclitus, the Dark Philosopher by Lassalle the Luminous One is, au fond a very silly concoction. Every time Heraclitus uses an image to demonstrate the unity of affirmation and negation — and this is often — in steps Lassalle and makes the most of the occasion by treating us to some passage from Hegel’s Logic which is hardly improved in the process; always at great length too, like a schoolboy who must show in his essay that he has thoroughly understood his ‘essence’ and ‘appearance’ as well as the ‘dialectical process’. Once he has got this into his speculative noodle, one may be sure that the schoolboy will nevertheless be able to carry out the process of ratiocination only in strict accord with the prescribed formula and the formes sacramentales [sacred forms]. Just so our Lassalle. The fellow seems to have tried to puzzle out Hegelian logic via Heraclitus, nor ever to have tired of beginning the process all over again. As for learning, there is a tremendous display of it. But, as any well-informed person will know, provided one has the time and the money and, like Mr Lassalle, can have Bonn University Library delivered ad libitum to one’s home, it is easy enough to assemble such an array of quotations. One can see what an amazing swell the fellow himself thinks he is in this philological finery, and how he moves with all the grace of a man wearing fashionable dress for the first time in his life. Since most philologists are not possessed of the speculative thinking dominant in Heraclitus, every Hegelian has the incontestable advantage of understanding what the philologist does not. (It would, by the by, be strange indeed if, by learning Greek, a fellow were to become a philosopher in Greek without being one in German.) Instead of simply taking this for granted, Mr Lassalle proceeds to lecture us in a quasi-Lessingian manner. In longwinded, lawyer’s style he vindicates the Hegelian interpretation as opposed to the erroneous exegeses of the philologists — erroneous for want of specialised knowledge. Thus we are accorded the twofold gratification, first, of having dialectical matters which we had all but forgotten expounded to us at considerable length and, secondly, of seeing this ‘speculative heritage’ vindicated (qua special province of Mr Lassalle’s philological-jurisprudential astuteness and erudition) vis-à-vis the unspeculative philologists. Despite the fellow’s claim, by the way, that hitherto Heraclitus has been a book with 7 seals, he has to all intents and purposes added nothing whatever that is new to what Hegel says in the History of Philosophy. All he does is to enlarge on points of detail which could, of course, have been accomplished quite adequately in two sheets of print. Still less does it occur to the laddie to come out with any critical reflections on dialectics as such. If all the fragments by Heraclitus were put together in print, they would hardly fill half a sheet. Only a chap who brings out his books at the expense of the frightful ‘specimen of humankind’ can presume to launch upon the world 2 volumes of 60 sheets on such a pretext.

Heraclitus, the Dark Philosopher, is quoted as saying in an attempt to elucidate the transformation of all things into their opposite: ‘Thus gold changeth into all things, and all things change into gold.’ Here, Lassalle says, gold means money (c'est juste) and money is value. Thus the Ideal, Universality, the One (value), and things, the Real, Particularity, the Many. He makes use of this surprising insight to give, in a lengthy note, an earnest of this discoveries in the science of political economy. Every other word a howler, but set forth with remarkable pretentiousness. It is plain to me from this one note that, in his second grand opus, the fellow intends to expound political economy in the manner of Hegel. He will discover to his cost that it is one thing for a critique to take a science to the point at which it admits of a dialectical presentation, and quite another to apply an abstract, ready-made system of logic to vague presentiments of just such a system.

But, as I remarked immediately after receipt of his first self-complacent letter, the Old Hegelians and philologists must indeed have been pleased to discover such old-fashioned virtues in a young man who passes for a great revolutionary. On top of that, he bows and scrapes to all and sundry in the hope of assuring himself a favourable reception. As soon as I've skimmed through the stuff, I'll send it too.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

See also

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Düsseldorf

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 268;

First published: abridged in F Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Berlin, 1922.

London, 22 February 1858

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

Nutt has now sent me Heraclitus [The Dark Philosopher, by Lassalle]. As soon as I have read it all I shall let you have my opinion. But you will have to wait a while since I have exceptionally little spare time just now. As regards the Stoics, I did not myself study their relationship to Heraclitus in the matter of natural philosophy, because of the novice-like earnestness of their approach to this discipline. Of Epicurus, on the other hand, it can be shown en détail that, although he bases himself on the natural philosophy of Democritus, he is for ever turning the argument inside out. Cicero and Plutarch can hardly be blamed for not having grasped this since it has eluded even men of intellect such as Bayle, not to speak of Hegel ipsissimus [his very self]. Nor, for that matter, could one expect Hegel, the first to comprehend the entire history of philosophy, not to commit errors of detail. -

From the papers you will have seen that Palmerston has fallen. Those best acquainted with the old rascal are generally inclined to suspect that his last blunders were deliberate, so that he could make his exit pro tempore. They affirm that le dernier but de toute sa vie was to engineer a war between England and France, that he now believes he has managed to do so, that at first other hands are to be concerned with the execution of his plan and that, when the imbroglio has become sufficiently involved and is far enough advanced, the nation will be forced to call again upon him. This latter opinion may be too recherché, but that Pam did not resign in any way against his will seems to me unquestionable.

Now, as to your cousin, there’s one thing I am willing to do, but the Presse, I assume, would not. All I could commit myself to would be one article a week on trade, finance, etc., in any one of the three countries, England, France and the United States of America, depending on which is interesting. This is also the most practicable form in which to attack Bonaparte. It is also a form which would permit me to have absolutely nothing to do with the Presse politically. It seems to me that just now there is widespread ignorance, especially about French financial affairs and French economic conditions in general. The question is whether the subject will be of sufficient interest to the Presse, or rather, to its readers. They, of course, must be the best judges of that. For a weekly article of this kind I would ask £1 sterling. Moreover, it would be necessary for me to have a few copies of the Presse beforehand so that I could see whether my principles would, at all permit me to work for the paper. However that may be, will you thank your cousin on my behalf for having remembered me in this connection.

Now let me tell you how my political economy is getting on. I have in fact been at work on the final stages for some months. But the thing is proceeding very slowly because no sooner does one set about finally disposing of subjects to which one has devoted years of study than they start revealing new aspects and demand to be thought out further. On top of which I am not master of my time but rather its slave. Only the nights are left for my own work, which in turn is often disrupted by bilious attacks or recurrences of liver trouble. All things considered it would be most convenient for me to bring out the whole work in instalments without any rigid datelines. This might also have the advantage of making it easier to find a publisher, since less working capital would be tied up in the venture. You would, of course, oblige me by trying to find someone in Berlin prepared to undertake this. By ‘instalments’, I mean fascicles similar to those in which Vischer’s Aesthetik came out.

The work I am presently concerned with is a Critique of Economic Categories or, if you like, a critical exposé of the system of the bourgeois economy. It is at once an exposé and, by the same token, a critique of the system. I have very little idea how many sheets the whole thing will amount to. Had I the means, the time and the leisure to finish the whole thing off completely prior to placing it before the public, I would condense it a great deal, a method for which I have always had a predilection. But printed thus, in successive instalments — easier for readers to understand perhaps but certainly detrimental to the form — it is bound to be rather more diffuse. Nota bene: As soon as you know definitely whether or not the thing can be done in Berlin, kindly write to me, since if it’s no go there I'll try Hamburg. A further point is that I must be paid by the publisher who takes the thing on — a stipulation over which it might come to grief in Berlin.

The presentation — the manner of it, I mean — is entirely scientific, hence unobjectionable to the police in the ordinary sense. The whole is divided into 6 books: 1. On Capital (contains a few introductory Chapters). 2. On Landed Property. 3. On Wage Labour. 4. On the State. 5. International Trade. 6. World Market. I cannot, of course, avoid all critical consideration of other economists, in particular a polemic against Ricardo in as much as even he, qua bourgeois, cannot but commit blunders even from a strictly economic viewpoint. But generally speaking the critique and history of political economy and socialism would form the subject of another work, and, finally, the short historical outline of the development of economic categories and relations yet a third. Now that I am at last ready to set to work after 15 years of study, I have an uncomfortable feeling that turbulent movements from without will probably interfere after all. Never mind. If I finish too late and thus find the world no longer attentive to such subjects, the fault is clearly my own.

I was greatly amused by your remarks about Rudolf Schramm. Sad to say, a worthier Schramm, Conrad, brother of the above and one of my best friends, died of consumption in Jersey some 4 weeks ago. The death within the past few years of Weerth, Schramm and Dr Daniels has been a blow to their friends, amongst whom I was happy enough to count myself.

There are turbulent times in the offing. If I were merely to consult my own private inclinations, I would wish for another few years of superficial calm. There could, at any rate, be no better time for scholarly undertakings and, after all, what has happened over the last ten years must have increased any rational being’s contempt for the masses as for individuals to such a degree that ‘odi profanum vulgar et arceo’ [I detest and repudiate the common people. Horace] has almost become an inescapable maxim. However all these are themselves philistine ruminations which will be swept away by the first storm.

Your

K. M.

The connection between the latest events in France and the commercial crisis is, perhaps, apparent only to a few. It becomes evident, however, if one considers 1. the real economical state produced in France by the last crisis; 2. asks oneself and consciencieusement answers, why the attempted assassination brought forth the effects it did, effects which apparently stood in no proportion whatever, and even in no necessary relation to the alleged cause.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 272;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 22 February 1858

Dear Engels,

Herewith a letter from Lassalle, interesting on account of the bit about Rudolf Schramm. What the chap says about my ‘logic’ amounts to nothing more than a refusal to understand me. All I did was simplement inform him that I hadn’t written to him because matters had come to a point at which a verbal explanation was necessary if written intercourse were to continue. In fact I had done this ticklish passage in a very diplomatical style.

In my reply I asked him, of course, to look round for a publisher in Berlin. It is my intention to bring the thing out by instalments, having neither the time nor the means to complete the whole of it at leisure. This initial form may be detrimental to the form. Better for distribution, at any rate. Also makes it easier to find a publisher.

As for the lousy Yankees nothing, of course, could have given me greater pleasure than to write and tell Messrs Dana and Appleton to — . But the state of affairs is simply this:

I had overdrawn £20 on Appleton. According to my reckoning, the amount overdrawn was at most £5. However I had no alternative, since some accounts which were due at the end of December had to be paid. Well. For the time being Mr Dana has now credited the à compte of the Tribune with £20 — a sum which I was to draw on the Tribune exactly tomorrow — in this way virtually cutting off all my resources until the manuscript sent to Appleton has paid off the damned thing. So until then I am in a deadlock. As soon as this chap Appleton has been paid in kind, thus enabling me to dip into the Tribune’s treasure-chest again, I am all for dropping him altogether — more especially if the Vienna Presse accedes to my suggestion of a weekly article on finance. At all events I am of the opinion that even the menace to stop supply would bring round Dana and Appleton, and induce them to offer a better payment. But this move can only be made when the present deadlock has been resolved. By my reckoning some 30 or 32 columns will still remain to be sent if the swine have taken ‘Bolivar’. Until then I shall be quite literally in the air. Moreover, the rascals know that they now have me in their power. Hence, none of the stuff that now remains to be done should be condensed more than is absolutely necessary to avoid making it insipid.

As far as ‘Bülow’ and ‘Beresford’ are concerned, I can write the biographies, but the military part should be written entirely by you, in English, in order that these articles should not stand out from the rest. Besides, mere indications are of no use to me in this case since following them up would, after all, involve research — an impossibility just now. As soon as you have finished with B, you must get to work on ‘Cavalry’, since this will pay off the debt.

Such, my boy, is the situation. Fortunately events in the outside world offer a good deal of solace just now. Otherwise, in private I think I lead the most troubled life that can be imagined. Never mind! What could be more asinine for people of wide aspirations than to get married at all, thus letting themselves in for the petites misères de la vie domestique et privée.

What will the good Guardian say now? The revenge of Milner Gibson and Bright is indeed classic. Between ourselves, I think that Pam had his ‘raysons’ for dissolving his own ministry and that all the apparent blunders which led to this result were calculated ones so far as he was concerned.

From a paper which recently appeared in the Moniteur it transpires that, if compared with 1855 and ‘56, the stored up commodities in the French Customs entrepôts are enormous, while the Economist’s correspondent declares outright that Bonaparte caused the Bank to make advances on the same and thus enabled their holders to return them. But with the approach of spring they will inevitably be thrown on the market, and then, there is no doubt, there will be a crash in France, answered by crashes in Belgium, Holland, Rhenish Prussia, etc.

In Italy the economic situation is truly frightful. Side by side with industrial crisis, agricultural distress. (This last, according to the conclusions of an agricultural congress in France, very bad there too. The congress declared that they could not go on with 17 frs. the hectolitre of wheat.)

Taken all in all, the crisis has been burrowing away like the good old mole* it is.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

* In a Shakespearian reference first used in The Eighteenth Brumaire, Marx’s mole is the revolution, which disappears underground for a while, and then re-appears unexpectedly somewhere else.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 277;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 2 March 1858

Dear Frederick,

I sent you by return a note acknowledging receipt of the £5. The scrawl contained nothing else save a few political comments, altogether not 20 lines. But all the same, I find it exceedingly irritating that the post office here should be taking an immediate interest in my correspondence. Not long ago I wrote to Collet, that most respectable of men, and the letter vanished. Complaints availed me nothing. I shall now watch the progress of Post Office interference. If there is a 3rd case of this kind I shall proclaim the fact above my signature in the London press. The canaille are welcome to read what I write about politics. But my private affairs are not such that I would care to have any old German Post Office spy go poking his nose into them; 50 swine of various nationalities are, it seems, regularly employed as interpreters by the London cabinet noir at least, the Urquhartites say so.

The information I sent you recently about the state of trade in Italy, and Milan in particular, was taken from the Turin papers, which are well supplied with correspondents in that region. While it is, of course, in the interests of Turin to paint the situation in Austrian Italy in the blackest possible colours, the reports from Milan went into details which had the real ring of truth. — As regards the state of French trade, you should read the contribution from the Paris correspondent in today’s Times. True, the chap now seems to be blaming the thing on Orsini and the French colonels, mais c'est ridicule.

I enclose a wretched scrawl by Pyat, Talandier and Co., which laddies couldn’t rest for the fame accorded to Ledru-Rollin and Mazzini and Bernard, whereas they themselves had apparently been quite passed over by the French government. They believe that a revolution is in the offing and after all their ‘activity’ in London — Talandier had shouted himself as hoarse as quondam Bornstedt — it was indeed galling for the great men to have the attention of revolutionary Europe diverted from them by other incidents. Therefore, just in the nick of time, they issued the clap-trap enclosed herewith. No style, no sense, not even French, altogether in the style of the Porte St. Martin streetwalker so typical of the former Charivari contributor and compositor of little toasts. In order that this publication should not fail in its purpose they sent the beastly little thing to all the papers. Persigny-Palmerston Jenkins of The Morning Post was instantly caught in the trap. In a leader written by himself he denounced the chaps and their opusculum to the Honourable Mr. Walpole and, as an additional precaution, he did the whole pamphlet into bad English. More than that. In his Inaugural Speech Derby informed the House of Lords that the Crown advocates had been instructed to look into the thing and see if legal proceedings could be taken against it. In this way Citizens Talandier, Pyat and Besson have, with their insane concoction, succeeded in puffing themselves to a degree they could hardly have dared hope for.

As for Bernard, he will presumably have to spend a little longer in jug.

The insolence and impudence with which Pam has placed himself at the head of the liberal opposition and nominated himself an Honourable Gentleman opposite, is truly wonderful, but he can, of course, do exactly what he pleases with a House of Commons of his own creation.

Apropos. Can you tell me how often machinery has to be replaced in, say, your factory? Babbage maintains that in Manchester the bulk of machinery is renovated on average every 5 years. This seems to me somewhat startling and not quite trustworthy. The average period for the replacement of machinery is one important factor in explaining the multi-year cycle which has been a feature of industrial development ever since the consolidation of big industry.

What is Lupus up to? Give him my regards.

Your

K. M.

Another batch of Guardians arrived today. ‘Bidassoa’ also received last week.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 279;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 4 March 1858

Dear Moor,

So once again the cabinet noir has well and truly honoured you with its attentions. I had expected something of the sort but it’s a bit steep to go and intercept letters. I think you would do better to have the address done in another hand, in which case they will only open the letters sent to you. I was expecting an acknowledgment from you and therefore took particular care to ask our messenger daily and in so many words whether there were any letters for me — each time the answer was in the negative. And yet we have the asinine Félix Pyat announcing to the world qu'il ny a pas de police politique properment dite, en Angleterre. Rarely have I come across a more bungled concoction, style and all. Still the same old faith in the Constitution of 1848; one might almost be face to face with our own jackasses of the Imperial Constitution. And what a ghastly style! Après tout, the idiots have achieved their aim and will, perhaps, earn themselves a cheap form of martyrdom. Cette bête de Derby, falling straight into the trap like that, and allowing the riff-raff to have their way.

As to the question of machinery, it’s difficult to say anything positive; at all events Babbage is quite wrong. The most reliable criterion is the percentage by which a manufacturer writes down his machinery each year for wear and tear and repairs, thus recovering the entire cost of his machines within a given period. This percentage is normally 7 1/2, in which case the machinery will be paid for over 13 1/3 years by an annual deduction from profits, i.e. will be replaceable without loss. E.g. I have £10,000 worth of machinery. At the end of the first year, when I draw up my balance-sheet, I enter

from which I deduct 7 1/2% for wear and tear

£10,000

" 750

£9,250

Expenditure on repairs

£100

Cost of machinery

£9,350

At the end of the 2nd year I deduct 7½% [of] £10,000, and 7½% [of] £100

" 757 10

£8,593 10

Expenditure on repairs

" 306 10

Present cost of entire machinery

£8,900

etc. Now, 13 1/3 years is admittedly a long time in the course of which numerous bankruptcies and changes occur; you may enter other branches, sell your old machinery, introduce new improvements, but if this calculation wasn’t more or less right, practice would have changed it long ago. Nor does the old machinery that has been sold promptly become old iron; it finds takers among the small spinners, etc., etc., who continue to use it. We ourselves have machines in operation that are certainly 20 years old and, when one occasionally takes a glance inside some of the more ancient and ramshackle concerns up here, one can see antiquated stuff that must be 30 years old at least. Moreover, in the case of most machines, only a few of the components wear out to the extent that they have to be replaced after 5 or 6 years. And even after 15 years, provided the basic principle of a machine has not been superseded by new inventions, there is relatively little difficulty in replacing worn out parts (I refer here to spinning and flyer frames), so that it is hard to set a definite term on the effective life of such machinery. Again, over the last 20 years improvements in spinning machinery have not been such as to preclude the incorporation of almost all of them in the existing structure of the machines, since nearly all are minor innovations. (Admittedly, in the case of carding, the enlargement of the carding cylinder was a major improvement which supplanted the old machines where good qualities were concerned, but for ordinary qualities the old machinery will be perfectly adequate for a long time yet.)

Babbage’s assertion is so absurd that were it true, England’s industrial capital must continually diminish and money simply be thrown away. A manufacturer who turns over his capital 5 times in 4 years, hence 6 1/4 times in 5 years, would, in addition to his average profit of 10%, have to earn annually a further 20% on approximately 3/4 of his capital (the machinery) if he was to recoup without loss his outlay on the old machinery — i.e. would have to make 25%. This would, of course, vastly increase the cost price of all articles — more, almost, than it would be increased by wages in which case where is the advantage of machinery? Annual wages amount to perhaps 1/3 the cost of the machinery — undoubtedly less in the case of the smaller spinners and weavers, and wear and tear is supposed to amount to 1/5 — the thing is ludicrous. There is certainly not a single establishment in England in the regular line of big industry which replaces its machinery in 5 years. Anyone foolish enough to do so would go to the wall at the first change; the old machines, even though much inferior, would certainly have the advantage over the modern ones and would be able to produce much more cheaply, for the market follows not the people who charge 15% for wear and tear on every pound of twist, but those who charge only 6% (approx. 4/5 of an annual depreciation of 7 1/2%) and hence sell at cheaper prices.

Ten to twelve years are enough to bring about changes in the character of the bulk of machinery, thereby necessitating its replacement to a greater or lesser extent. The period of 13 1/3 years will vary, of course, depending on bankruptcies, breakage of essential parts where a repair would prove too expensive, and similar contingencies, so one could make it a bit shorter. But certainly not less than 10 years.

I had finished ‘Burmah’ when I was compelled to make diverse necessary additions from another source. So I haven’t done with it yet and the thing will have to wait until Tuesday. It will run to nearly 3 pages. There are still a few details to be looked up for ‘Bomarsund’. On top of that I have to snatch whatever opportunity I can, since library hours are so similar to office hours that I can’t always get there. As soon as I've dealt with these wretched things — likewise ‘Bülow’ and ‘Beresford’, which suffer from the same snag — I shall again have a fair galloping country ahead of me and be able to clap on spurs with ‘Cavalry’, etc.

Many regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 325;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 5 March 1858

Dear Frederic,

As regards the enclosed, which has clearly been delayed you might be so good as to discuss with Lupus the kind of answer you think would be suitable. Don’t return the thing (but keep it) because such things are safer with you than with me just now. At present London is a gathering-point for mouchards of all nations. Hardly a day goes by when the curs aren’t plus ou moins lynched.

My best thanks for your éclaircissements about machinery. The figure of 13 years corresponds closely enough to the theory, since it establishes a unit for one epoch of industrial reproduction which plus ou moins coincides with the period in which major crises recur; needless to say their course is also determined by factors of a quite different kind, depending on their period of reproduction. For me the important thing is to discover, in the immediate material postulates of big industry, one factor that determines cycles. In considering the reproduction of machinery, as distinct from capital circulant one is irresistibly reminded of the Moleschotts who also pay insufficient attention to the period of reproduction of the bony skeleton, contenting themselves rather, like the economists, with the average time taken by the human body to replace itself completely. Another question in respect of which I require only one example (approximate), is how, e.g. in your own mill or rather manufacturing business, floating capital is apportioned over raw material and wages, and what portion on average you leave with your banker. Further, how you calculate turnover in your books. Here the theoretical rules are extremely simple and self-evident. But it is nevertheless just as well to have some inkling of how the thing looks in practice. The method of calculation used by businessmen is, of course, partly based on illusions even greater than those of the economists; on the other hand it rectifies the latter’s theoretical illusions by means of practical ones. You speak of 10% profit. I suppose that you do not take into account the interest and that this is doubtless shown along with the profit. In the ‘First Report of the Factory Commissioners’ I have found the following statement, which serves as an average example:

* Capital sunk in building and machinery

£10,000

Floating capital

£7,000

£500

interest on 10,000 fixed capital

£350

interest on floating capital

£150

Rents, taxes, rates

£650

Sinking fund of 6 1/2 p.c. for wear and tear of the fixed capital

£1,650

1,100

contingencies (?), carriage, coal, oil

£2,750

£2,600

wages and salaries

£5,350

£10,000

for about 400,000 lbs raw cotton at 6d

£15,350*

16,000 for 363,000 lbs twist spun. Value 16,000. Profit 650, or about 4.2 p.c. Hence wages of operatives here about 1/6.

It is true that in this case the total profit only amounts to about 10%, including interest. Mr Senior, however, who after all represents the manufacturers’ interests, states that in Manchester the average profit including interest amounts to 15%. It is a great pity that the above statement does not show the number of operatives, or the proportion of actual wages to what appears as salaries.

By the by, the manner in which even the best economists, such as Ricardo ipsissimus descend into sheer juvenile poppycock whenever they find themselves on the treadmill of bourgeois thought, struck me very forcibly in the following passage of Ricardo’s, which I happened to come across yesterday. You will recall that A. Smith, who is still very old-fashioned, declares that by comparison with trade at home, overseas trade only gives one half of the encouragement to the productive labour of a country etc. To this Ricardo replies with the following example:

‘Smith’s argument appears to me to be fallacious; for though two capitals, one Portuguese and one English, be employed, as Smith supposes, still a capital will be employed in the foreign trade, double of what would be employed in the home trade. Suppose that Scotland employs a capital of a thousand pounds in making linen, which she exchanges for the produce of a similar capital employed in making silks in England, two thousand pounds, and a proportional quantity of labour will be employed by the two countries. Suppose now, that England discovers that she can import more linen from Germany, for the silks which she before exported to Scotland, and that Scotland discovers that she can obtain more silks from France in return for her linen, than she before obtained from England,— will not England and Scotland immediately cease trading with each other, and will not the home trade of consumption be changed for a foreign trade of consumption? But although two additional capitals will enter into this trade, the capital of Germany and that of France, will not the same amount of Scotch and of English capital continue to be employed, and will it not give motion to the same quantity of industry as when it was engaged in the home trade?'

The assumption that in such circumstances Germany would buy her silks in England instead of France, and France her linen in Scotland instead of Germany is hardly what one would expect of a fellow like Ricardo.

Friend Thomas Tooke has died, and with him the last English economist of any value.

Did you overlook, in one of the Guardians you sent me, the item in which David Urquhart figures as an infanticide? The fool treated his 13-month-old baby to a Turkish bath which, as chance would have it, contributed to congestion of the brain and hence its subsequent death. The Coroner’s inquest on this case lasted for 3 days and it was only by the skin of his teeth that Urquhart escaped a verdict of manslaughter. Quel triomphe pour Pam.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 289;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[Manchester,] 17 March 1858

Dear Moor,

When you get this letter and today’s Guardian, sent off at the same time, give your wife the Paris report to read. It gives one quite a turn to hear a Bonapartist and official relate how 100,000 ouvriers in the Faubourg St. Antoine responded to Orsini’s execution with the cry ‘Vive la République’. So deportations and arrests à tort et à travers [wholly at random] have borne as little fruit as the cités ouvrières and the national atéliers en gros, and it is gratifying, on the eve of the grand ball, to see such a roll-call take place and hear 100,000 men reply, ‘Present!’ I'm only sorry Orsini couldn’t hear that cry.

A local philistine who was lately in Paris has returned with the news that since Orsini’s attempt on Monsieur Boustrapa’s life two more had been made. The first was also mentioned in the English press; the fellow was arrested in the Bois de Boulogne at the moment he took aim with his pistol; the second was news to me; it appears that the fellow shot at or tried to stab him in the Tuileries gardens and was summarily shot by soldiers of the Guard in the gallery of June 1848 fame beneath the terrasse du bord de l'eau.

It seems that all threadbare patriotic notables want to make fools of themselves: mad old Landor must needs go and write to The Times today. All that remains now is for Venedey to protest against Orsini.

But Boustrapa has indeed come to a pretty pass, and it is a pity that the Constitutionnel should no longer be in a position to declare that l'horizon politique s'obscurcit. What could be funnier than to find in the Moniteur, no less a story about the officers at Châlon who, before risking rank and skin for the empereur, hurried to the sous-préfet to ask whether or not a republic had really been proclaimed in Paris? But one can also see how, even in the army, the only genuine Bonapartists are the men at the top because these are compromised and lured on by the prospect of truly splendid bounties. For, after all, what has Boustrapa to offer the bulk of subalterns? The blackguard doubtless knows as well as we do that, aside from his Guard, there are few troops he can rely on. Unfortunately the Guard is strong and knows that, under any other government, it would either be relegated to the line or disbanded. It consists, as far as infantry is concerned, of 4 regiments of grenadiers, 2 of riflemen, 1 of gendarmes, 1 of Zouaves, 1 battalion of light infantry (17 infantry battalions all told); further, 2 regiments of cuirassiers, 2 of dragoons, 1 of mounted grenadiers, 1 of hussars, 1 of chasseurs — 21 squadrons and a strong force of artillery. In all 18,000-20,000 men with 40-50 cannon, a nucleus solid enough to stiffen a somewhat wavering line. In addition everything has been so organised as to provide for a speedy concentration of troops from the Provinces (you only have to look at a railway map of France) so that a movement, if anticipated, would undoubtedly find itself confronted by 60,000-80,000 men. Victory over such vast numbers is to be achieved in 2 ways only: either by secret societies within the army itself — and these are said to be numerous — or by a determined anti-Bonapartist stand on the part of the bourgeoisie, as in February. I don’t believe that victory is possible in the absence of one, let alone both, of these conditions. There is no doubt that the lower echelons of the army are undermined by reds and the higher by Orleanists and Legitimists, nor that the loi des suspects in conjunction with other repressive measures is making life impossible for the bourgeoisie. Boustrapa’s mounting difficulties are daily forcing him into ever more desperate straits; he dare not risk war with Prussia, he has shut himself out of Italy; no one any longer believes in Boustrapian socialism; Algeria has no more campaigns to offer. All diversions being excluded, reste la répression croiuante, i. e. the virtual driving of the bourgeoisie into revolution. For the Orleanists and Legitimists the restoration of the constitutional republic under their joint rule must already be looming in the distance as the most probable pis aller should circumstances not hold out an immediate prospect of victory for either party. Le cas de soulèvement donné — and it’s bound to come in the course of this year — there is every chance that they will follow the pattern of February 1848, sauf à lancer plus tard les troupes sur les faubourgs. And we know what will happen then. As soon as their fear of Bonaparte has made the troops unsteady enough to render the success of the insurrection inevitable, their fear of the prolétaires will make them induce the troops to put down the insurrection — trop tard! — the flood will surge over them regardless, the troops will stand gaping — and then we shall see how much ground the water has gained since the last springtide of 1848.

Fortunately commerce in France is in such a state that it cannot improve until the chronic crisis has culminated in political revolution. I don’t believe that the state of trade in France can possibly improve so long as Boustrapa remains at the helm. While the crisis lasts all the talk about ‘confidence’ being undermined by Orsini, Espinasse, etc., is mere idle euphemism; but under a régime of this nature it will become sober truth should the conditions responsible for the crisis cease to obtain. By the way, I have quite come round to your opinion that in France the Crédit mobilier was no haphazard swindle but an altogether necessary institution, and that Morny’s pilferings which it spawned were no less inevitable, for it was only the prospect of getting rich quick which made the Crédit mobilier viable in France. Under these circumstances it’s a toss-up which falls first — Boustrapa or the Crédit mobilier. — The prolongation of bills must inevitably give rise to enormous losses. The use of such means to overcome a crisis can be of avail only if the reprise des affaires is a real one in industry too, but the mere fact of an easy money market cannot help anyone who has no credit — and I believe that in France credit is no longer accorded save by prolonging what has already been given.

Things in Prussia look pretty rotten to me. The tin-pot little Chamber has greatly inflamed the parochial Prussian patriotism of the philistines there and even the arch-philistine, I fear, looks forward with assurance to the advent, along with the English marriage, of an English constitution, albeit democratised. If only the corporal were to make a fool of himself, and that right soon! In Prussia, I fear, it won’t be too easy to get rid of the Royal family — unless, that is, the proletariat has made really enormous strides. The bourgeois and philistines have, at any rate, got even worse since 1848. In German Austria, too, nothing much seems to be happening. Plainly your good, honest German has not yet emerged from the hibernation that followed the strenuous exertions of 1848. Slav insurrections and the loss of Hungary and Italy will, by the way, serve their turn in Austria, and on top of that, in the big towns and industrial districts, the crisis will have repercussions which, just now and at this distance, are impossible to gauge. Après tout it’s going to be a hard struggle.

But what if Boustrapa were to subdue the first big attempt at an uprising? I regard this as practically impossible, precisely because the measures he has adopted are such that things would not become serious save on a really major occasion. But supposing Boustrapa were to succeed, he'd be doubly in the soup. Pélissier would be empereur. The troops of the line, who would in any case show signs of weakness and irresolution, would be declared non grate and the Guard alone remain in favour — indeed more so than ever before. A sure means of fostering conspiracy in the army. Next, Boustrapa would have to go directly for the Orleanists and Legitimists, nor would Thiers get away with a couple of days in the Mazas burnishing his Brown Bess. A sure means of utterly ruining commerce. If Boustrapa were ever to triumph, his downfall would be all the more assured.

I only hope the fellow won’t be assassinated. In which case I believe things would turn out in the way Morny once described to him: ‘Nous commencerions par jeter tons Tees Jérôme par la fenêtre et puis nous tacherions de nous arranger tant bien que mal avec les Orléans. Before the faubourgs had had time to collect their wits, Morny would have effected his palace revolution and, although the revolution from below would only be postponed for a short while, its basis would no longer be the same.

To return to our own private affairs, I've been able to find virtually nothing about Bülow in Jomini and Cathcart and must see if I can unearth some other source. I shall try and get ‘Bomarsund’ done tonight. These two articles are preying on my mind.

As soon as the Indian mail brings details about Campbell’s Lucknow expedition (in maybe a week or a fortnight’s time), send me all the material you can lay hands on, so that I can make an immediate start. I shall be able to buy The Times up here, but not the other London papers, i. e. in single numbers.

Warm regards to your wife and children. I'd like to send you some more money but shall have to wait and see what further payments I shall have to make this month; as soon as I get some idea of this I shall do what I can, you may be sure of that.

Your

F. E.

Lupus has the solemn document from New York. Isn’t Kamm that Kinkelian ‘proletarian’ who used to run a brothel? F. Jacobi is a ridiculous little barrister from Münster who was the butt of everyone’s jokes in Switzerland.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 296;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 2 April 1858

Dear Frederick,

The Guardian stories highly amusing. A correspondent of the Daily Telegraph (directly under Pam’s auspices) writes of the great danger of being ‘deaf’ in Paris, and says that all ‘deaf Englishmen’ were being hounded by the police as Allsops. Also that Englishmen were leaving Paris en masse, partly because of police chicanery, partly for fear of an outbreak. For if the latter were to happen and the Bonapartists be victorious, the John Bulls feared they might be massacred by the maddened soldiers, whereat the correspondent himself naively comments that in such a case [he] should like to be anywhere else but in Paris. This desertion by the Bulls at this moment of commercial depression is queering the pitch of the Parisian épicier and householder, whores, etc. Have you seen that 300 million francs have avowedly disappeared from the budget, and nobody knows what has become of them? There will, by and by, be further revelations about Bonapartist finance, and then the asses on the Tribune will realise the wisdom of not having published the very elaborated articles I sent them on the subject six months ago. The fellows are asses and anything which is not, in the crudest sense, a ‘question of the day’ they tend to cast aside as uninteresting, only to go and compile the most egregious rubbish about the selfsame subject as soon as it does become à l'ordre du jour.

Nota bene: in the military dubs here it is being rumoured that evidence has been discovered among the papers left by Raglan that, — 1. at the battle of the Alma he rightly suggested to attack the Russians, not from the direction of the coast, but from the opposite flank, and drive them into the sea; 2. that he proposed to advance on Simferopol after the battle of the Alma; 3. that at Inkerman it was only by dint of the most urgent pleas and menaces that he extorted from Canrobert the order for Bosquet to hasten to his [Raglan’s] assistance. It is further said that, if the boasting on the other side of the Channel were to continue, these papers would be published, providing proof that the French were ever ready to betray their allies. Indeed, a few hints which de Lacy Evans dropped in the House of Commons seem to indicate something of the kind.

I've been so ill with my bilious complaint this week that I am incapable of thinking, reading, writing or, indeed, of anything save the articles for the Tribune. These, of course, cannot be allowed to lapse since I must draw on the curs as soon as possible. But my indisposition is disastrous, for I can’t begin working on the thing for Duncker [Critique of Political Economy] until I'm better and my fingers regain their vigour and grasp.

The following is a short outline of the first part. The whole thing is to be divided into 6 books: 1. On Capital. 2. Landed Property. 3. Wage Labour. 4. State. 5. International Trade. 6. World Market.

1. Capital falls into 4 sections. a) Capital en général (This is the substance of the first instalment) b) Competition or the interaction of many capitals. c) Credit where capital, as against individual capitals, is shown to be a universal element. d) Share capital as the most perfected form (turning into communism) together with all its contradictions. The transition from capital to landed property is also historical, since landed property in its modern form is a product of the action of capital on feudal, etc., landed property. In the same way, the transition of landed property to wage labour is not only dialectical but historical, since the last product of modern landed property is the general introduction of wage labour, which then appears as the basis of the whole business.

Well (It is difficult for me today to write), let us now come to the corpus delicti.

I. Capital. First section: Capital in general (Throughout this section. wages are invariably assumed to be at their minimum. Movements in wages themselves and the rise and fall of that minimum will be considered under wage labour. Further, landed property is assumed to be zero, i. e. landed property, as a special economic relation is of no relevance as yet. Only by this procedure is it possible to discuss one relation without discussing all the rest.)

1. Value. Simply reduced to the quantity of labour; time as a measure of labour. Use-value — whether regarded subjectively as the usefulness of labour, or objectively as the utility of the product — is shown here simply as the material prerequisite of value, and one which for the present is entirely irrelevant to the formal economic definition. Value as such has no ‘substance’ other than actual labour. This definition of value, first outlined by Petty and neatly elaborated by Ricardo, is simply bourgeois wealth in its most abstract form. As such, it already presupposes 1. the transcending of indigenous communism (India, etc.), 2. of all undeveloped, pre-bourgeois modes of production which are not in every respect governed by exchange. Although an abstraction, it is an historical abstraction and hence feasible only when grounded on a specific economic development of society. All objections to this definition of value derive either from less developed relations of production or else are based on confused thinking, whereby the more concrete economic definitions from which value has been abstracted (and which may therefore also be seen, on the other hand, as a further development of the same) are upheld as against value in this its abstract, undeveloped form. In view of the uncertainty of messieurs les économistes themselves about the precise relation of this abstraction to later, more concrete forms of bourgeois wealth, these objections were plus ou moins justified.

The contradiction between the general characteristics of value and its material existence in a particular commodity, etc. — these general characteristics being the same as those later appearing in money — gives rise to the category of money.

2. Money.

Some discussion of precious metals as vehicles of the money relation.

a) Money as a measure. A few comments on the ideal measure in Steuart, Attwood, Urquhart; in more comprehensible form among the advocates of labour money (Gray, Bray, etc. An occasional swipe at the Proudhonists). The value of a commodity translated into money is its price. For the moment price appears only in this purely formal distinction between it and value. Thus, in accordance with the general law of value, a specific amount of money merely expresses a specific amount of objectified labour. In so far as money is a measure, the variability of its own value is of no importance.

b) Money as a means of exchange, or simple circulation.

Here we need only consider the simple form of circulation as such. All the other conditions by which it is determined are external to it, and hence will not be considered till later (presuppose more highly developed relations). If the commodity be C and money M then, although simple circulation evinces the two circuits or final points: C-M-M-C and M-C-C-M (this latter constituting the transition to C), the point of departure and the point of return in no way coincide, save by chance. Most of the so-called laws put forward by economists do not consider money circulation within its own confines, but as subsumed under, and determined by, higher movements. All this must be set aside. (Belongs in part to the theory of credit; but also calls for consideration where money appears again, but further defined.) Here, then, money as means of circulation (coin). But likewise as realisation (not simply evanescent) of price. From the simple statement that a commodity, in terms of price, has already been exchanged for money in theory before it is so exchanged in fact, there naturally follows the important economic law that the volume of the circulating medium is determined by prices, not vice versa. (Here, some historical stuff on the polemic concerning this point.) Again it follows that velocity may be a substitute for volume, but that a certain volume is essential to simultaneous acts of exchange in so far as the relation of these themselves is not that of + and -, an equalisation and consideration which will only be touched on at this juncture by way of anticipation. At this point I shall not go further into the development of this section and would only add that the lack of congruence of C-M and M-C is the most abstract and superficial form in which the possibility of crises is expressed. If the law concerning the determination of circulating volume by prices be developed, it will be found that the assumptions made here are by no means applicable to all states of society; hence the fatuity of comparing e.g. the influx of money from Asia into Rome and its effect on prices there tout bonnement with modern commercial relations. On closer examination, the most abstract definitions invariably point to a broader, definite, concrete, historical basis. (Of course, since to the extent that they are definite they have been abstracted therefrom.)

c) Money qua money. This is a development of the formula M-C-C-M. Money, the independent existence of value as opposed to circulation; material existence of abstract wealth. Already manifested in circulation in so far as it appears, not only as a means of circulation, but as realising price. In this capacity c), in which a) and b) appear to be no more than functions, money is the universal commodity of contracts (here the variability of its value acquires importance: value being determined by labour time); it becomes an object of hoarding. (This would still seem to be an important function in Asia, as formerly in the ancient world and in the Middle Ages generally. Now persists only in a subordinate capacity within the banking system. In times of crisis money in this form again acquires importance. In this form money considered along with the world-historical delusions which it engenders, etc. Destructive properties, etc.) As the realisation of all higher forms in which value will appear; definitive forms in which all relations of value are externally concluded. Money, however, once fixed in this form, ceases to be an economic relation which is lost in its material medium, gold and silver. On the other hand, in so far as money comes into circulation and is again exchanged for C, the final process, the consumption of the commodity, again falls outside the economic relation. The principle of self-reproduction is not intrinsic to simple money circulation, which therefore implies something extrinsic to itself. Implicit in money — as the elaboration of its definitions shows — is the postulate capital, i.e. value entering into and maintaining itself in circulation, of which it is at the same time the prerequisite. This transition also historical. The antediluvian form of capital is commercial capital, which always generates money. At the same time the emergence of real capital, either from money or merchant capital, which gains control of production.

d) This simple circulation, considered as such — and it constitutes the surface of bourgeois society in which the underlying operations which gave rise to it are obliterated — evinces no distinction between the objects of exchange, save formal and evanescent ones. Here we have the realm of liberty, equality and of property based on ‘labour’. Accumulation, as it appears here in the form of hoarding, is merely greater thrift, etc. On the one hand then, the fatuity of the economic harmonises, modern free traders (Bastiat, Carey, etc.), in upholding this most superficial and most abstract relation of production as their truth, as against the more advanced relations and their antagonisms. Fatuity of the Proudhonists and suchlike socialists, in contrasting the ideas of equality, etc., corresponding to this exchange of equivalents (or presumed as such), to the inequalities, etc., to which this exchange reverts and from which it emanates. In this sphere, appropriation by labour, the exchange of equivalents, appears as the law of appropriation so that exchange simply returns the same value in another material form. In short, while everything may be ‘lovely’ here, it will soon come to a sticky end and this as a result of the law of equivalence. For now we come to

3. Capital.

This is really the most important part of the first instalment and one on which I particularly need your opinion. But today I can’t go on writing. My bilious trouble makes it difficult for me to ply my pen, and keeping my head bent over the paper makes me dizzy. So for next time.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 304;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 9 April 1858

Dear Moor,

The study of your abstract of the first half-instalment [Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] has greatly exercised me; it is a very abstract abstract indeed — inevitably so, in view of its brevity, — and I often had to search hard for the dialectical transitions, particularly since all abstract reasoning is now completely foreign to me. The arrangement of the whole into 6 books could hardly be better and seems to me an excellent idea, although the dialectical transition from landed property to wage labour is not yet quite clear to me. The development of the monetary business, too, is really excellent, though again there are individual bits I can’t quite make out, at least until I have looked up the historical background. However, I think that I shall get a better idea of the drift when I've had the last part of capital in general, and shall then write to you at greater length about it. The abstract, dialectical tone of your synopsis will, of course, disappear in the development.

Yesterday I sent you two more Guardians. Now that the price has been reduced to 1d, the chaps are evidently cutting down on all expenses such as foreign correspondents, etc. Their attempt to produce a first-class provincial paper failed completely. Hence the dearth of foreign news and the rarity of contributions from Paris.

The thing about Fould in yesterday’s Guardian isn’t bad. But what’s even better is the Cotton Supply Association’s report. How splendid that, 10 years after its introduction, Free Trade should be repudiated outright by the free traders themselves. For all that this Cotton Supply Association amounts to is an institution set up by these self-same free traders with the object of boosting the cultivation of cotton everywhere in the world where soil and climate are not entirely unsuitable — and this, in direct opposition to Free Trade principles, by means of rewards, advances, gifts of seed, loans of machinery, etc., etc. If the State does something of this sort, it’s all wrong, but if the Manchester Cotton Spinners, who are much further removed from the niggers, Bedouins, etc., in Africa than their own monarch, do the selfsame thing, then it’s all right. This report is as pretty a satire on laissez-faire clap-trap generally as one could hope to find. Very pretty, too, the admission that the import of English goods manufactured from American cotton has disrupted cotton cultivation in almost all other countries and that this last will now have to be restored by artificial means! These wretched English regard their monopoly in cotton spinning and weaving as something fine and natural to which no one could object; whereas the cotton-growing monopoly of the United States, engendered by the selfsame world market, must be smashed, even if this means anti-free trade measures. The thing ought to be called *Association for enabling the single spinners to buy cotton in the dearest market, the collective spinners paying the producer the difference between the market value and his cost of production *. Of course, this is to go on only until subsidised cotton growing can stand on its own legs; but after all that is exactly what Monsieur List is also seeking to do with his protective tariffs! The thing might supply you with material for an article, since the Yankees have a direct interest in it and the Tribune, too, is anti-free trade.

My prognostications that fluctuations in produce would be entirely dependent on the east and west winds and that, with middling Orléans cotton above 6d, there could be no question of trade being either normal or brisk, have proved remarkably accurate. As regards cotton, the fulfilment of my first prognostication will be apparent from the enclosed table which is a continuation of the one I sent you earlier on the price of Middling Orleans, and brings it up to date. Sugar, coffee and tea have gone the same way, save that the existence of considerable stocks inhibited the temporary steep rise which the shortage of stocks made possible in the case of cotton. As for the second prognostication, there’s still quite a lot of short time, strikes, and stoppages due to unprofitable production and, since the crop will provide 3,000 M bales whereas full production would now demand a minimum of 3,500 M (same ratio for other cotton producing countries), any attempt at revival by the cotton industry up to the end of this year will be hampered — quite aside from political convulsions — by the rising price of raw material, as indeed already happened at the end of February and the beginning of March (see table). Prices in general — even though there may be an initial fall — will rise, but at the same time there will be a check to production proportionate to the rise. This, always supposing that there is no row on the Continent, though the latter is a virtual certainty.

In one week, 19-26 February, only 62 bales of cotton of all qualities arrived in Liverpool! Normally they are counted in thousands.

What’s this about the 300 million francs which are admitted to have vanished? All I remember having read is that, instead of a surplus of 40 million, Magne has a deficit — but I don’t know the details. It really is priceless. Now the ‘prince impérial’ is also to be given his own household and a donation — cash must be devillish scarce!

I hope your bilious trouble is better. Obviously all this excitation caused by the crisis is to blame. In the evenings I am sometimes plagued by toothache as a result of the weather; but nothing worse.

Kind regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

Engels To Jenny Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 313;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 11 May 1858

Dear Mrs Marx,

Moor has been out riding for two hours today and feels so well after it that he’s waxing quite enthusiastic about the thing. He has left town and gone home, and has asked me to drop you a line about that fool Cluss. He thinks it might be a good thing for you to go and see Pfänder, who would probably elicit something from him. The main thing is that Monsieur Cluss should come up here, for we have got to know how we stand with him, and either he must declare himself in a satisfactory manner or else we must break with him. What good is the ass to us if he’s so unreliable as first to come to you, his heart brimful and overflowing, stay for 3 hours with no other apparent object than to get back on to the old footing again, and then suddenly write you a letter as confused as it is ill-bred in which he retracts? We're only sorry that, in the midst of what is a far from rosy spell, such dolts should come and add to your troubles.

If at all possible, see that the man comes up here so that we at least have the satisfaction of telling him exactly what we think of him.

I hope that Moor will persevere with his riding, for if he does he'll be able to write again in a week. Lupus’ leg is much better too.

Your devoted

F. Engels

Engels To Jenny and Laura Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 314;

First published: in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

Manchester, 11 May 1858

Dear Jenny and Laura,

I cannot allow this note to go off to your mama without thanking you for the two lovely portraits which you asked Moor to bring me. They have found a temporary home on the chimney-piece in front of the looking-glass, but in a day or two will be given a splendid place of their own on the wall.

I hope Mr Schleiden[’s book] suits you all right; the man’s far more solemn than you are, and I only hope you won’t see fit to imitate him.

I see with pleasure from your portraits that you have both grown a lot and that, although you are now grown-up young girls, your faces are still as frank and artless as of old; and you must believe me still to be your old [in Italian]

Engels

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 321;

First published: abridged in F Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Berlin, 1922.

London, 31 May 1858

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

Post tot discrimina rerum [after so many setbacks] at long last a sign of life. As for me, what’s been happening since my wife wrote to you is simply this:

Having been totally incapable of writing — not only in a literary, but in the literal sense of the word — for several weeks, and striven in vain to rebel against my illness; having, moreover, been pumped full of medicine and all to no use, I was positively assured by my doctor that I must have a change of air, secondly that I must drop all intellectual labour for some time and, finally, engage in riding as the main form of treatment. In itself the illness wasn’t dangerous — enlargement of the liver — but on this occasion the accompanying symptoms were particularly revolting; moreover, in my family it has nasty implications in that it was the starting-point of the illness which led to my father’s death. Well. With the utmost reluctance I eventually gave way to the insistence of doctor and family, joined Engels in Manchester, went in for riding and other physical exercises and, after spending a month up there, finally returned to London fully restored. The illness — altogether a very expensive luxury in my circumstances — was all the more inopportune in that I had already begun to prepare the first instalment [Critique of Political Economy] for publication. I shall now settle down to this with a will. I trust you will be so kind as to tell the publisher all about these adventures. You will readily be able to imagine the state of mind I was in during my illness when I tell you that liver complaints as such tend to make one hypochondriacal and that, in addition, my life was bedevilled by all manner of domestic circumstances, not to speak of the hitch over publication. Now I have recovered my accustomed good humour.

During this time of tribulation I carefully perused your Heraclitus. Your reconstruction of the system from the scattered fragments I regard as brilliant, nor was I any less impressed by the perspicacity of your polemic. In so far as I have any fault to find, it is largely formal. I believe your exposé could have been rather more condensed without in any way jeopardising the import. I should, moreover, have liked to find in the text proper some critical indications as to your attitude to Hegelian dialectic. This dialectic is, to be sure, the ultimate word in philosophy and hence there is all the more need to divest it of the mystical aura given it by Hegel. Finally, there are some details upon which I do not agree with you; e.g. your interpretation of Democritus’ natural philosophy. These, however, are all minor points. I am all the more aware of the difficulties you had to surmount in this work in that about 18 years ago I myself attempted a similar work on a far easier philosopher, Epicurus — namely the portrayal of a complete system from fragments, a system which I am convinced, by the by, was — as with Heraclitus — only implicitly present in his work, not consciously as a system. Even in the case of philosophers who give systematic form to their work, Spinoza for instance, the true inner structure of the system is quite unlike the form in which it was consciously presented by him. It is incomprehensible to me, by the by, how you found the time in the midst of all your other work to acquire so much Greek philology.

On the whole the present moment of time is a pleasing one. History is clearly about to take again a new start, and the signs of dissolution everywhere are delightful for every mind not bent upon the conservation of things as they are.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 317;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 31 May 1858

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Frederick,

It took me a week to acclimatise myself again; moreover, the abrupt discontinuation of riding did me no good to begin with. Not until this very day have I at last begun to feel as fit as I did on the day I left Manchester. I am now in working order and shall at once start getting the stuff ready for publication. All I wrote last week was 2 articles for the Tribune. The rest of the time I kept constantly on the move, since the feeling of heaviness in my head and trouble with my bowels made me fear a relapse.

Ad vocem Cluss. Before leaving, this young man visited Schapper again. When he got back from my house the worthy fellow discovered to his dismay that he had brought something back with him from Paris, viz. a chancre with all sorts of nasty secondary symptoms. He took to his bed and this, he told Schapper, was the reason for his withdrawal from the civilised world.

Ad vocem Pélissier. What we jokingly suggested in Manchester, namely that Pélissier would promptly enter into relations with the Orléans, has now happened in real good earnest, and become the talk of the town here.

What do you think of Bonaparte’s thirst for confiscation?

During my absence a book by Maclaren covering the entire history of currency came out in London; to judge by the excerpts in The Economist it is first-rate. The book isn’t in the library yet — nothing ever turns up there until months after publication. I, of course, am bound to read it before writing my treatise. So I sent my wife to the publisher in the City. To our dismay, however, we discovered that it costs 9/6d — more than the whole of our fighting funds. Hence I should be most grateful if you could send me a Post Office order for that amount. There probably won’t be anything that’s new to me in the book, but after all the fuss The Economist has made about it and the excerpts I myself have read, my theoretical scruples won’t permit me to proceed without having looked at it.

Don’t you think you might have sufficient material to do something general on the state of the British forces in India and also something conjectural for Friday? It would be a great boon for me since reading over my own manuscripts will take me the better part of a week. The damnable part of it is that my manuscript (which in print would amount to a hefty volume) is a real hotchpotch, much of it intended for much later sections. So I shall have to make an index briefly indicating in which notebook and on which page to find the stuff I want to work on first.

I have at long last written to Lassalle you must grant me absolution for the plaudits I was obliged to accord Heraclitus, the Dark Philosopher. In a few unobtrusive asides — for praise is taken seriously only when offset by censure — I have to some extent, if very piano-piano, hinted at the real shortcomings of the entreprise.

Tomorrow or the day after I shall be getting some more Bangya numbers, 2 of which I shall send to Manchester, 1 for you and 1 for Lupus. Apropos, in an issue of the Tribune I see that Pulszky is endeavouring to forestall the nauseous revelations by representing Bangya as Metternick’s spy and as one who betrayed General Stein. So statesman Blind, while giving a testimonium paupertatis to Kossuth, ‘The illustrious Governor of Hungary’, in the Advertiser, nevertheless found himself obliged to invite him in so many words to make a ‘counter-statement’. Kossuth, of course, held his tongue.

How is Gumpert progressing in the noble art of equitation? As for me, the pity of it is that I always have to break off just when I'm again making enough progress to take an interest in the thing.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 321;

First published: abridged in F Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Berlin, 1922.

London, 10 June 1858

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

You would have had an immediate answer to your letter, but it seemed to me advisable — not in order to formulate my own views but because tres faciunt collegium — to put the case to Engels and Lupus in Manchester and obtain their opinion. Since their views and my own coincide at every point, you may regard the following as our unanimous opinion.

1. From the standpoint of the duel. It is as clear as day that by their despicable attack in the street the two gentlemen, the Intendanturrat and the Assessor, have adopted in toto the standpoint of the bludgeon and that the only duel which one might engage in with such laddies has already taken place during the brawl itself. If 2 chaps waylay a third and both of them set on him, we don’t believe that any duelling code in the world would permit a subsequent duel with such riff-raff. If, by flourishing a horse-whip, Mr Fabrice intended forcibly to provoke a duel, either Mr Bormann ought to have looked on purely passively as a witness, or his presence was altogether superfluous. But when two men simultaneously set upon one, and one of them actually operates in the rear of the person attacked, then we are dealing with canaille who have given proof that a fair duel cannot be fought with them.

2. Principle of the duel. We don’t believe that, generally speaking, an affair as relative as a duel can be subsumed under the category good or bad. That duelling as such is not rational there can be no doubt. Nor that it is a relic of a bygone stage of civilisation. However, a concomitant of the one-sidedness of bourgeois society is that, in opposition to the latter, certain feudal forms maintain the rights of the individual. The most striking proof of this is to be found in the United States where duelling is a civil right. Individuals may become locked in a mutual conflict so insupportable that a duel seems to them the only solution. However such deadly tension is not in fact possible vis-à-vis an indifferent person such as an Intendanturrat, an Assessor, or a lieutenant. This would demand a significant personal relationship. Otherwise a duel is an utter farce. It is invariably a farce when performed in deference to so-called ‘public opinion’.

3. We therefore regard duelling as being purely dependent on circumstances; hence recourse may be had to it as an exceptional pis aller [expedient] in exceptional circumstances. In the case under discussion, however, all the circumstances argue quite emphatically against it, even if the attack in the street had not put it altogether out of the question.

4. The really decisive factor is that you are not only opposed to all duelling on principle but have proclaimed this principle, and in Fabrice’s presence at that. So you would discredit yourself were you nevertheless to engage in a duel through fear of ‘public opinion’.

5. In the case under discussion, a duel would have absolutely no meaning save as the observance of a conventional formality recognised by certain privileged classes. Our party must resolutely set its face against these class ceremonies and reject with the most cynical contempt the presumptuous demand that we submit to them. The present state of affairs is far too serious to permit of your consenting to such puerilities and it would be sheer puerility to engage in a duel with Mr Fabrice because he is an ‘Intendanturrat’ and belongs to the clique qualified to fight duels, whereas if e.g. a tailor or cobbler were to set about you in the street, you would simply hand him over to the courts without any infringement of ‘honour’. In the case under consideration you would not be fighting a duel with Fabrice, an individual who is indifferent to you, but with the ‘Intendanturrat’ — which would be an absurd manoeuvre. In general, the fellows’ insistence that differences with them must be settled by a duel as a privilege due to them — and all fashionable duels fall under this head — should be laughed to scorn. To acknowledge this claim would be altogether counter-revolutionary.

I have given you our view in nuce. We shall be interested to hear how the affair progresses.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 325;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

Manchester, 14 July 1858

Dear Moor,

Up here we are now in the middle of the balance-sheet and hence I haven’t had the leisure to write to you at greater length. I hope that your little Tussy [Eleanor] is better. Gumpert tells me that in the English climate whooping-cough is seldom dangerous and, though usually chronic, is benign. All the cases they've had in the hospital so far have ended well. He gave me both the reports (Marei’s) this hospital has so far produced. They are highly scientific and I wish I had had material of this kind when I was writing my book. I also have copies of it for you which I shall be sending; individual bits may come in useful for your chapter on wage labour. No doubt you will derive some amusement from Marei’s grandiose conception and sanguine expectations.

Have neither seen nor heard of the statements by Mr Türr, etc. The Star is not much read up here. So I'd be glad if you would just send The Free Press and also, if possible, a copy for Lupus, who is still in Buxton, whither he was sent by Borchardt, and where, out of boredom, he may well do more walking than is good for his leg.

The two letters from New York which you mention in your last were not enclosed.

Apropos. Kindly let me have Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature as promised. I am presently doing a little physiology which I shall combine with comparative anatomy. Here one comes upon highly speculative things, all of which, however, have only recently been discovered; I am exceedingly curious to see whether the old man may not already have had some inkling of them. This much is certain: were he today to write a Philosophy of Nature, subjects would come flocking in on him from all directions. One has no idea, by the way, of the progress made in the natural sciences during the past 30 years. Two things have been crucial where physiology is concerned: 1. the tremendous development of organic chemistry, 2. the microscope, which has been properly used only during the past 20 years. This last has produced even more important results than chemistry; what has been chiefly responsible for revolutionising the whole of physiology and has alone made comparative physiology possible is the discovery of the cell — in plants by Schleiden and in animals by Schwann (about 1836). Everything consists of cells. The cell is Hegelian ‘being in itself’ and its development follows the Hegelian process step by step right up to the final emergence of the ‘idea’ — i.e. each completed organism.

Another result that would have delighted old Hegel is the correlation of forces in physics, or the law whereby mechanical motion, i.e. mechanical force (e.g. through friction), is, in given conditions, converted into heat, heat into light, light into chemical affinity, chemical affinity (e.g. in the voltaic pile) into electricity, the latter into magnetism. These transitions may also take place differently, backwards or forwards. An Englishman [Joule] whose name I can’t recall has now shown that these forces pass from one to the other in quite specific quantitative proportions so that e.g. a certain quantity of one, e.g. electricity, corresponds to a certain quantity of each of the others, e.g. magnetism, light, heat, chemical affinity (positive or negative — combining or separating) and motion. The idiotic theory of latent heat is thus disposed of. But isn’t this splendid material proof of how the reflex categories dissolve one into the other?

This much is certain — comparative physiology gives one a healthy contempt for man’s idealistic arrogance in regard to other animals. At every step it is forcibly brought home to one how completely his structure corresponds to that of other mammals; he has basic features in common with all vertebrates and even — if less distinctly — with insects, crustaceans, tapeworms, etc. Here too Hegel’s stuff about the qualitative leap in the quantitative sequence fits in very nicely. Finally, with the most primitive infusoria, one reaches the original form, the single cell existing independently, which again is not perceptibly distinguishable from the lowest vegetable life (single-celled fungi such as those causing disease in potatoes, the vine, etc., etc.) or, at a higher stage of development, from the germ right up to and including the human ovum and spermatozoan, and is identical in appearance to the separate cells in the living body (blood corpuscles, the cells of the epidermis and mucous membrane, secreting cells in the glands, kidneys, etc., etc.).

Some time, you might also let me know what sort of a disease dyspepsia crapulosa is. This isn’t, as it happens, a bad joke but a scientifically recognised term.

If The Times has any particulars about India tomorrow, we shall see what can be done for the Tribune, otherwise it will be no go. So you'll see from tomorrow’s Times more or less what can be expected.

Warm regards to the family.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 328;

First published: slightly abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 15 July 1858

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park

Dear Engels,

D'abord. I would beg you not to take fright at the contents of this letter since it is not in any way intended as an appeal to your already unduly overloaded exchequer. On the other hand it behoves us to put our heads together to see if some way cannot be found out of the present situation, for it has become absolutely untenable. It has already resulted in my being completely disabled from doing any work, partly because I have to waste most of my time running round in fruitless attempts to raise money, and partly because my abstract thinking — due rather, perhaps, to my being physically run down — is no longer a match for domestic miseries. The general unpleasantness has made a nervous wreck of my wife, and Dr Allen who, of course, suspects where the shoe pinches but doesn’t know the real state of affairs, has now told me repeatedly and positively that he cannot rule out brain fever or something of the sort unless she is sent to a seaside resort for a longish stay. I for my part know that circumstances being what they are, this course, even if feasible, would do her no good so long as she continues to be the victim of daily pressures and haunted by the spectre of final and unavoidable catastrophe. This last, however, cannot be long postponed and, even if it be staved off for a few weeks, there still remains the unbearable day-to-day struggle for mere necessities and a general situation such as will inevitably bring everything to wrack and ruin.

There are in London so-called loan societies which advertise loans of £5-200, without securities and on the strength of references alone. I therefore attempted an operation of this kind, Freiligrath and an épicier having offered to act as referees. The result was that some £2 went on fees. The final, negative, answer arrived the day before yesterday. I don’t know whether I should make a further attempt of this kind.

To give you an idea of the real state of affairs, I have asked my wife to draw up a statement in respect of the £20 advanced by you and the £24 I drew on the Tribune (of which £2 were overdrawn) on 16 June. From it you will see that, as soon as a fairly substantial sum such as this arrives, not a penny is left over even for the most urgent day-to-day expenses, let alone enjoyment of any kind; that exactly the same sickening struggle recommences the following day, and within a very short time the creditors, having received only the most meagre payments on account, once more begin to exert exactly the same pressure in respect of other bills which have accumulated in the meantime. At the same time you will see that my wife hasn’t spent a farthing on clothes, etc., for herself, while the situation as regards the children’s summer dresses is subproletarian. I think it is essential that you should go through these particulars since it would not otherwise be possible to arrive at a correct opinion of the case.

Statement in respect of £20 received 19 May. Paid out:

Rates (water, gas)

£7 —

Pawnshop, interest

3 —

Redeemed from pawnshop, for

1 10

Wages

2 —

tallyman (who had to be paid weekly for a coat and trousers)

— 18

Shoes and hats for the children

1 10

Baker

1 —

Butcher

1 10

Epicier

1 —

Cheesemonger

— 10

Coal

— 10

Statement in respect of £24 received 16 June from the ‘Tribune’

School for quarter February, March, April

£8

Loaned by Schapper for daily expenses over 4 weeks, repaid

3 —

Linen redeemed from pawnshop

2 —

Wages

1 —

Tallyman

1   4

Butcher

2 —

Epicier

2 —

Greengrocer

1 —

Chemises, drones, etc., for the children

2 —

Baker

2 —

Thus, after 17 June there was again not a single penny in the house and, to cover for four weeks day-to-day expenses which had to be paid in cash, we borrowed £4 from Schapper, about £2 of which, however, went on the abortive loan operation in fees.

The full state of indebtedness, as it now stands in London, is as follows. (It will show you that a large part of the same consists in debts to small épiciers who have stretched their credit as far as it will go.)

Rates, due 25 June

£9 —

School, due 2 August

6 —

Newspaper man (for a year)

6 —

Tallyman

3   9

Butcher

7 14

Baker

6 —

Épicier

4 —

Greengrocer and coal

2 —

Milkman

6 17

Owing to previous milkman and baker in Soho

9 —

Dr Allen (£7 paid out of last but one Tribune money)

10 —

Lina Schöller

9 —

Schapper

4 —

Pawnshop

30 —

Of these debts, the only ones I don’t consider urgent are those owing to Dr Allen, Lina Schöler, the old creditors in Soho and part of what is due to the pawnshop.

Thus the whole business turns on the fact that what little comes in is never earmarked for the coming month, nor is it ever more than just sufficient — after deducting regular outgoings on house, school, rates and pawnshop — to reduce debts to a level that will preclude one’s actually being thrown out into the street. In some 4-5 weeks’ time I shall have about £24 to draw on the Tribune. Of this £15 will immediately go on rates and rent alone. If only a minimum is paid out in respect of other debts — and it is very questionable whether the butcher, etc., will be prepared to wait so long — the predicament will, on the other hand, again be compounded by the 4 weeks which have to be got through d'une manière ou d'une autre. The landlord is himself being harried by creditors and is dunning me for all he’s worth. I fail to see what I am to do, unless it is possible to obtain a loan from a loan-society or life insurance society. Even were I to seek to reduce expenditure to the utmost — e.g. take the children away from school, move into a wholly working-class lodging, get rid of the maids, live on potatoes — not even the auction of my household goods would suffice to satisfy the creditors in the vicinity and ensure an unhampered removal to some hidey-hole. The show of respectability which has so far been kept up has been the only means of avoiding a collapse. I for my part wouldn’t care a damn about living in Whitechapel, provided I could again at last secure an hour’s peace in which to attend to my work. But in view of my wife’s condition just now such a metamorphosis might entail dangerous consequences, and it could hardly be suitable for growing girls.

I have now made a clean breast of it and I assure you that it has cost me no small effort to do so. But enfin, I must speak my mind to somebody. I know that you yourself can do nothing to help. All I ask is your opinion on what to do. I would not wish my worst enemy to have to wade through the quagmire in which I've been trapped for the past two months, fuming the while over the innumerable vexations that are ruining my intellect and destroying my capacity for work.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

I shall send you the things you ask for.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 338;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 13 August 1858

Dear Engels,

I am delighted to hear that my fears about your health were unfounded.

Of the two letters I meant to send you, one was from Weydemeyer (Milwaukee, Wisconsin) and the other from one A. Komp (New York), both of which arrived under the same cover. I had put them down on the table (my writing-table) to enclose them in my letter to you, forgot, and then couldn’t find them; they are probably tucked away in one of the many notebooks that are strewn around, and will reappear when I leaf through them.

I know nothing about the Cyclopaedia save that I've seen an advertisement for the second volume in the Tribune. So it’s still coming out and, if you have the leisure, you might occasionally do something for C. — subject, however, to two reservations: 1. I cannot go to the Museum just now; 2. it would be of more immediate advantage to me to increase my balance at the Tribune. This has already decreased slightly since my wife went away and I cannot in any case write twice for them myself, as it’s impossible for me to deal with subjects such as India, Montenegro, China, Bonaparte’s military railway system and his installations at Cherbourg. Hence, as soon as time permits (and, of course, without physical harm to yourself), I would greatly prefer it if, in the immediate future, you were to write more often for the Tribune, on any subject whatever.

The sea is doing my wife a lot of good; at the beginning of this week she sent for all the children and Lenchen. So far so good; the only snag is that, under the circumstances, I shall hardly be able to let her stay there beyond next week. Mentally she is very much refreshed, but physically (save that her nerves are stronger) she is not yet all that she might be. In Ramsgate she has made the acquaintance of refined and, horribile dictu, clever Englishwomen. After years during which she has enjoyed only inferior company, if any at all, intercourse with people of her own kind seems to agree with her.

Have you read the review in The Times of Gladstone’s book on Homer? There is much that is amusing in it (the review). A work such as this is, by the by, typical of your Englishman’s incompetence in matters of ‘philology’.

I presume that trade in Manchester is again looking up? Indeed, over the past few weeks the world has grown damned optimistic again.

Mr Pyat, still oppressed by the fact that his name was not given due prominence during the recent political prosecutions, has published a fresh ‘lettre’ about his ‘lettre’ to the Parliament, containing a vindication of ‘regicide’. In order to compel the government to prosecute, he has flouted police regulations by letting the scrawl come out without the printer’s name. But the government is inexorable. Pyat is not to be made a martyr, even to the tune of a 2/6d fine with costs in a magistrate’s court. Le pauvre sire!

Warm regards to Lupus.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 343;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

Manchester, 7 October 1858

Dear Moor,

No doubt you will be writing about the Canning despatch tomorrow. The thing is out of my latitude altogether. I have not read the newspapers at all regularly of late and have had a great deal to do, since Ermen has been over there for the past fortnight and I am having to cope with the whole shop on my own. Business here is tremendously good; for the past 6 weeks the spinners have been making 1d à 1 1/4d more per pound on coarse and medium counts than for the past 3 years and — quite unprecedented this — the local market in yarn rose 1d before the Liverpool chaps were able to get another 1/4d for cotton. During the past 10-12 days the rise has slowed down somewhat, but all the spinners are booked up well ahead and demand is still quite strong enough to sustain prices. If it goes on like this much longer there'll be movements for increased wages. In France, too, the cotton spinners have for sometime been earning more than in recent years (this is positive; — I have it from a cotton agent who was over there himself); how things look in other branches of commerce there I can’t say exactly, but the state of the Bourse suggests a considerable improvement. All this looks damned rosy and the devil only knows how long it will last unless there is substantial overproduction with India and China in view. Trade must be absolutely splendid in India just now; the last Bombay mail but one advised sales — over a 14-day period — of 320,000 pieces of cotton cloth, and the last one a further 100,000. The chaps have already sold the whole lot forward, knowing only that it had been purchased in Manchester and not yet even shipped. Judging by the way the local philistines are talking and also by the state of the market, it seems to me that India and China will provide an immediate excuse for overproduction and, if we have a good winter, it may confidently be expected that kite-flying and the unbridled granting of credit will again go ahead merrily in the spring.

The Jones business is most distasteful. He held a meeting here and the speech he made was entirely in the spirit of the new alliance. After that affair one might almost believe that the English proletarian movement in its old traditional Chartist form must perish utterly before it can evolve in a new and viable form. And yet it is not possible to foresee what the new form will look like. It seems to me, by the way, that there is in fact a connection between Jones’ new move, seen in conjunction with previous more or less successful attempts at such an alliance, and the fact that the English proletariat is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, so that the ultimate aim of this most bourgeois of all nations would appear to be the possession, alongside the bourgeoisie, of a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat. In the case of a nation which exploits the entire world this is, of course, justified to some extent. Only a couple of thoroughly bad years might help here, but after the discoveries of gold these are no longer so easy to engineer. For the rest it is a complete mystery to me how the massive overproduction which caused the crisis has been absorbed; never before has such heavy flooding drained away so rapidly.

Reynolds will become a prominent personage thanks to Jones’ manoeuvre; he is the only ‘educated’ man (vulgo ‘scholar') who still poses as the representative of the proletariat — au fond he is as bourgeois as Monsieur Jones has now become, though in a different way. For him this is a Godsend. Be sure to send me the cuttings from his paper you promised me.

There is still something wrong with Lupus’ leg; he still can’t walk fast without suffering for it, though he is walking passably well again.

The little German poetaster whose account of his adventures with Kinkel and Freiligrath appeared last summer in the Augsburger is called Isaak Levi, alias Julius Rodenberg, a schoolfellow of Gumpert’s.

If at all possible I shall come up for Christmas. It’s splendid to hear that you will be arranging money matters with your mater. I hope this has meanwhile been done or is at least cut and dried. I am writing to Freiligrath today about the bill.

Warm regards to your wife and the girls.

Your

F. E.

Has the manuscript gone off?

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 345;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, Friday, [8 October] 1858

Dear Frederick,

You will today be receiving two packages at once since not all the stuff could go into one letter. It consists of:

1. Cuttings from Reynolds’s relating to Jones. You will see for yourself where Reynolds is conveying facts, and opinions based on facts, and where he is venting his spleen. Reynolds is a far greater rogue than Jones, but he is rich and a good speculator. The mere fact that he has turned an out and out Chartist shows that this position must still be a ‘profitable’ one. I have read the speech Jones made in Manchester. Since you did not see his earlier speeches in Greenwich, etc., you couldn’t have detected that he is making another turn and seeking again to bring the ‘alliance’ more into accord with his former attitude.

2. Pyat’s new lettre which contains one or 2 facts that are interesting, otherwise in his former manner. The marks in the margin have been scribbled by my baby [Eleanor] and do not, therefore, have any bearing on the contents.

3. Mazzini’s new manifesto. Still the same old jackass. Save that now he is gracious enough not to consider le salariat [wage labour] any longer as the absolute and final form. There’s nothing funnier than the way he contradicts himself, on the one hand saying that in Italy the revolutionary party is organised according to his views and, on the other, proving after ‘his own’ fashion not only that it has the nation behind it, but also that there is every outward prospect of success — and finally fails to explain why, despite Dio e Popolo and Mazzini into the bargain, all is calm in Italy.

4. A little cutting from the Cincinnati Hochwächter containing a letter from ‘General’ Willich.

Considering the optimistic turn taken by world trade at this moment (although the vast accumulations of money in the banks of London, Paris and New York show that things cannot by any means be all right yet), it is some consolation at least that the revolution has begun in Russia, for I regard the convocation of notables to Petersburg as such a beginning. Similarly in Prussia things are worse than they were in 1847, and the ridiculous delusions as to the middle class propensities of the Prince of Prussia will be exploded in an outburst of rage. It will do the French no harm to see that, even without them, the world ‘mov’t’ (Pennsylvania-fashion). At the same time exceptional movements are on foot amongst the Slavs, notably in Bohemia, which, though counter-revolutionary, yet provide ferment for the movement.. The Russian war of 1854-55, wretched though it was and little though its consequences damaged the Russians (but rather the Turks), nevertheless clearly precipitated the present turn of events in Russia. The only circumstance which turned the Germans into mere satellites of France so far as their revolutionary movement was concerned, was the attitude of Russia. This absurdity will cease with an internal movement in Moscovy. As soon as the thing assumes clearer shape there, we shall have proof of the full extent to which the worthy Regierungsrat Haxthausen has allowed himself to be hoodwinked by the ‘authorities’ and by the peasants those authorities have trained.

There is no denying that bourgeois society has for the second time experienced its 16th century, a 16th century which, I hope, will sound its death knell just as the first ushered it into the world. The proper task of bourgeois society is the creation of the world market, at least in outline, and of the production based on that market. Since the world is round, the colonisation of California and Australia and the opening up of China and Japan would seem to have completed this process. For us, the difficult question is this: on the Continent revolution is imminent and will, moreover, instantly assume a socialist character. Will it not necessarily be crushed in this little corner of the earth, since the movement of bourgeois society is still, in the ascendant over a far greater area?

So far as China in particular is concerned, I have, by carefully analysing the movement of trade since 1836, established first that by 1847 the surge in English and American exports between 1844 and 1846 had proved a complete fraud and that, in the 10 years that followed, the average remained pretty stationary whereas imports from China into England and America rose enormously; secondly, that the only result of the opening up of the 5 ports and the annexation of Hong Kong was a shift of trade from Canton to Shanghai. The other ‘emporiums’ do not count. The main reason for the failure of this market would seem to be the opium trade — to which, indeed, every increase in the export trade to China has invariably been confined; however, another factor is the country’s internal economic organisation, its minute agriculture, etc., to demolish which will take an enormously long time. England’s present treaty with China which, in my view, was worked out by Palmerston jointly with the cabinet in Petersburg and was given to Lord Elgin to take with him on his journey, is a mockery from beginning to end.

Can you give me your sources for the progress of the Russians in Central Asia? I shall use the article for The Free Press, at any rate.

My mother has suddenly and unexpectedly withdrawn into what, to me, is an inexplicable silence. I am inclined to think that third persons have put a spoke in the wheel. But the matter will resolve itself.

Regards to Lupus.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

London, 12 November 1858

Source: MECW. Volume 40, pp. 353-355.

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Bd. III, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

Post tot pericula! [after so many dangers!] My answer to your last letter was held up by an infamous toothache. I didn’t answer your letter from Frankfurt because you gave no address.

Well, d’abord: beatus ille [first: Blessed is he] who is riot seen through Köster’s eyes but who sees with the eyes of Köster. I and Freiligrath had explained at length to Köster himself that throughout the summer the most severe liver trouble had virtually incapacitated me foiwork. And as for my ‘splendid circumstances’, Freiligrath and I had deemed fit to conjure up the brightest of pictures for the benefit of this average German bourgeois, while altogether concealing the darker side, since we both opined that even the best bourgeois of this type could not fail to derive a certain malicious satisfaction from the knowledge of what the fuorusciti’s [refugees’] circumstances were really like. So far Köster.

As regards the delay in sending off the manuscript, I was first prevented from doing so by illness, and subsequently had to catch up on the other ‘bread and butter’ work. But the real reason is this: the material was to hand and all that I was concerned with was the form. But to me the style of everything I wrote seemed tainted with liver trouble. And I have a twofold motive for not allowing this work to be spoiled on medical grounds:

1. It is the product of 15 years of research, i.e. the best years of my life.

2. In it an important view of social relations is scientifically expounded for the first time. Hence I owe it to the Party that the thing shouldn’t be disfigured by the kind of heavy, wooden style proper to a disordered liver.

My aim is not to produce an elegant expose, but only to write as I usually do, which, during these months of sickness, was impossible – at least on this subject, although over the same period I was compelled to write, and hence did write, the equivalent of at least 2 printed volumes of English leading articles de omnibus rebus et quibusdam aliis [about everything under the Sun and more].

I believe that even if someone less intelligent than you were to acquaint Mr Duncker with this state of affairs, he could not but sanction a mode of conduct which, so far as he as a publisher was concerned, merely signified the endeavour to give him the best value for his money.

I shall have finished about 4 weeks from now, having only just begun the actual writing.

There is a further circumstance which, however, you should not put to him until the arrival of the manuscript. The first section, ‘Capital in General’, is likely to run to 2 instalments since I have discovered while elaborating it that here, at the very juncture where the most abstract aspect of political economy is to be discussed, undue brevity would render the thing indigestible to the public. But on the other hand this second instalment must come out at the same time as the first. This is demanded by their intrinsic coherence, and the whole effect depends upon it.

Apropos. In your letter from Frankfurt you said nothing about your economic work. As far as our rivalry is concerned, 1 don’t believe that the German public suffers from an embarras de richesses in this field. In fact economics as a science in the German sense of the word has yet to be tackled and to that end not just the two of us but a dozen will be needed. I hope, at any rate, that my work will result in drawing a number of better brains into the same field of research.

I should be infinitely obliged to you if you could write to me from time to time about conditions in Prussia and send me the relevant newspaper clippings.

My wife sends her regards and says she is afraid Köster is as mistaken about ‘her beauty’ as he is about her husband’s health.

Freiligrath likewise sends his regards. He is completely immersed in his profession of banker. Hence you should not hold his silence against him.

Salut.

Your

K.M.

1859

Marx to Engels. 6 January

Marx to Engels. 8 January

Marx to Engels. 13/15 January

Marx to Engels. 21 January

Engels to Ferdinand Freiligrath.. 25 January

Marx to Engels. 26 January

Engels to Marx. 27 January

Marx to Engels. 28 January

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 1 February

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 2 February

Marx to Engels. 2 February

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 4 February

Marx to Engels. 8 February

Marx to Engels. 9 February

Engels to Marx. 10 February

Engels to Marx. 14 February

Marx to Engels. 15 February

Marx to Engels. c. 22 February

Marx to Engels. 22 February

Marx to Franz Duncker. 23 February

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle.. 23 February

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 25 February

Marx to Engels. 25 February

Marx to Engels. 25 February

Marx to Engels. 3 March

Engels to Marx. 4 March

Marx to Engels. 10 March

Engels to Ferdinand Lassalle.. 14 March

Marx to Engels. 16 March

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle.. 16 March

Marx to Franz Duncker. 17 March

Marx to Engels. 22 March

Marx to Engels. 25 March

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 28 March

Marx to Engels. 1 April

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle.. 4 April

Marx to Engels. 9 April

Engels to Marx. 11 April

Marx to Engels. 12 April

Marx to Engels. 16 April

Marx to Engels. 19 April

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 19 April

Engels to Elisabeth Engels.. 20 April

Marx to Engels. 22 April

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 5 May

Marx to Engels. 6 May

Marx to Max Friedlander. 16 May

Marx to Engels. 16 May

Marx to Engels. 18 May

Engels to Ferdinand Lassalle. 18 May

Marx to Franz Duncker. 21 May

Engels to Marx. 23 May

Marx to Engels. 24 May

Marx to Engels. 25 May

Marx to Engels. 27 May

Marx to Engels. 28 May

Marx to Franz Duncker. 28 May

Marx to Franz Duncker. 30 May

Marx to Engels. 1 June

Marx to Franz Duncker. 2 June

Marx to Engels. 7 June

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 10 June

Marx to Engels. 10 June

Marx to Franz Duncker. 22 June

Marx to Engels. 14 July

Engels to Marx. 15 July

Marx to Engels. 18 July

Engels to Marx. 18 July

Marx to Engels. 19 July

Engels to Marx. 20 or 21 July

Marx to Engels. 22 July

Engels to Marx. 25 July

Marx to Engels. 1 August

Engels to Marx. 3 August

Marx to Engels. 8 August

Engels to Marx. 10 August

Marx to Engels. 13 August

Marx to Engels. 26 August

Marx to Engels. 5 September

Engels to Marx. 8 September

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht.. 17 September

Marx to Engels. 21 September

Engels to Marx. 22 September

Marx to Engels. 23 September

Engels to Marx. 24-26 Sept.

Marx to Bertalan Szemere.. 26 September

Marx to Engels. 27 September

Marx to Engels. 28 September

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. After 1 October

Engels to Marx. 3 October

Marx to Engels. 5 October

Marx to Bertalan Szemere. 8 October

Marx to Engels. 10 October

Marx to Engels. 26 October

Engels to Marx. 28 October

Engels to E J Faulkner. 2 November

Marx to Engels. 3 November

Engels to Marx. 4 November

Engels to Jenny Marx. 5 November

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 6 November

Marx to Engels. 7 November

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 14 November

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 15 November

Marx to Engels. 16 November

Engels to Emil Engels. 16 November

Marx to Engels. 17 November

Engels to Marx. 17 November

Marx to Engels. 19 November

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle.. 22 November

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath.. 23 November

Marx to Engels. 26 November

Engels to Marx. 28 November

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. c. 30 Nov.

Marx to Engels. 10 December

Engels to Marx. 11/12 Dec.

Marx to Engels. 13 December

Engels to Marx. 19 December

Marx to Engels. 20 December

Engels to Jenny Marx. 22 December

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 384;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London, between 13 and 15 January 1859]

Dear Engels,

If possible, let me have an article by Tuesday (I would then do next Friday’s); this is crucial, as I'd like to be able to send Duncker my manuscript [Contribution to Critique of Political Economy] by Wednesday, which would be impossible unless I have Tuesday free.

The manuscript amounts to about 12 sheets of print (3 instalments) and — don’t be bowled over by this — although entitled Capital in General, these instalments contain nothing as yet on the subject of capital, but only the two chapters: 1. The Commodity, 2. Money or Simple Circulation. As you can see, the part that was worked out in detail (in May, when I was staying with you) is not to appear at all yet. This is good on two counts. If the thing is a success, the third chapter on capital can follow very soon. Secondly, since the matter in the published part will, by its very nature, prevent the curs from confining their criticism solely to tendentious vituperation, and since the whole thing has an exceedingly serious and scientific air, the canaille will later on be compelled to take my views on capital rather seriously. Besides, I believe that, all practical considerations apart, the chapter on money will be of interest to experts.

I have had to alter your article on Bonaparte-Italy somewhat, having myself written about the same subject on Tuesday. Among the agencies which are egging Bonaparte on you forget Russia. Pam did not visit Paris for nothing, nor were the Russian moves in Italy without significance, nor yet Russia’s coquetry with Bonaparte since the Peace of Paris. If Russia does no more than compel the Austrians, through Bonaparte, to sack their minister Buol and replace him with a Pan-Slav Russian agent, she will have achieved a great deal.

As Berlin correspondent I have promised an article on the Prussian army which you might do one of these days.

In the American press Ruge is emerging as the fanatical champion of the Prince of Prussia. Schramm has been given permission to return to Prussia (the warrant against him having been withdrawn) and to appear before a new jury without undergoing preventive detention.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Joseph Weydemeyer

In Milwaukee

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 374;

First published abridged in Die Neue Zeit, 1906-07 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.

London, 1 February 1859

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Weiwi,

Your letter is dated 28 February 1858, arrived here (or at any rate reached me) at the end of May and is being answered in February 1859. This is easily explained: During the whole of the spring and summer I suffered from liver trouble and it was only with difficulty that I found time for essential work. Hence such writing as was not absolutely necessary was out of the question. Later in the year, however, I was overwhelmed with work.

Well, to start with, I must convey cordial regards to you and yours from all members of the family, likewise from Engels, Lupus and Freiligrath. In particular I would wish to be most kindly remembered to your dear wife.

Engels is still in Manchester, also Lupus, who is giving lessons and doing moderately well; Freiligrath is manager of a branch of the Swiss Crédit mobilier in London; Dronke is a commission agent in Glasgow; Imandt (I'm not sure if you know him) is a teacher in Dundee; our dear friend Weerth died in Haiti, alas, — an irreplaceable loss.

Things have gone badly rather than well for me during the past 2 years; for on the one side the good old Tribune made the crisis a pretext for halving my income although in times of prosperity they never gave me an extra penny; on the other, the time demanded by my work on political economy (of which more anon) compelled me (if with a heavy heart) to turn down very remunerative offers made me in London and Vienna. But I have got to pursue my object through thick and thin and not allow bourgeois society to turn me into a money-making machine.

Mr Cluss was over here last May. I happened to be staying with Engels in Manchester at the time. Cluss called on my wife and accepted an invitation for the following day; and who failed to put in an appearance? Why, Cluss! He disappeared from London and never showed his face again. Instead he sent my wife a scrawl to which ‘embarrassment’ had given an uncouth tournure. He didn’t turn up in Manchester either. Subsequently we learned that he had allied himself with Mr Willich. This, then, also explains the mysterious discontinuation of his correspondence. If we were conceited we would feel duly chastened by the news that a fool like Willich had been able to oust us from the good graces of a shrewd chap like Cluss. But as it was, the whole story was so funny that it eliminated any bitter feelings.

I have broken with Ernest Jones. Despite my repeated warnings, and although I had predicted exactly what would happen — namely that he would ruin himself and disorganise the Chartist Party — he took the course of trying to come to terms with the bourgeois radicals. He is not a ruined man, but the harm he has done to the English proletariat is incalculable. The fault will, of course, be rectified, but a most favourable moment for action has been missed. Imagine an army whose general goes over to the enemy camp on the eve of battle.

You'll have heard that Mr Kinkel has become a famous man again because Mrs Kinkel fell out of a window and broke her neck. The ‘cheery’ customer — never has he felt so jolly as since the death of the old Mockel woman — promptly decided to tout round his ‘grief’. Freiligrath allowed himself to be misled by Gottfried’s melodramatic scenes into writing a poem about Johanna which he already regrets. For he has come to realise, firstly, that Gottfried is merry as a grig, and secondly that he immediately used the poem to disseminate to all and sundry the lie that Freiligrath had entered into an alliance with him and broken with us. A week later, in an attempt to exploit the Kinkel revival sparked off by his wife’s death, Gottfried published in London a weekly dubbed the Hermann; unless this is the Hermann sung by Schönaich and crowned by Gottsched, the title ought to be Gottfried. In the first place the rag preaches peace with God and the world, and secondly it is nothing more than a puff for Mr Gottfried vis-à-vis German Philistia in the City of London. Nothing more pitiful has ever seen the light of day, and we can thank our stars that the 10 years of exile have so completely laid bare the hollowness of our democratic friends. The Kölnische Zeitung is witty and daring by comparison.

What is really choice about Kinkel’s exploitation of his wife’s death is that the latter creature, who was suffering from heart disease, was outraged because our suave parson had seduced a Jewess by the name of Herz, and generally treated her ‘coldly’. In Manchester the Jewish women swear that this is the reason why Johanna Mockel of blessed memory fell out of the window. Anyhow, this would show that, inane though Gottfried may be in other respects, he is cunning enough to exploit public credulity. But that’s enough about this humbug.

The wind of revolution which is blowing across the Continent of Europe has, of course, awakened all the great men from their winter sleep.

At the same time as this letter, I am sending one — indeed, my first — to Komp. I have given up associations — organised ones. They were, I thought, compromising for our friends in Germany. Over here, on the other hand, after the dirty tricks I have suffered at the hands of the louts who have allowed themselves to be used as mere tools against myself by a Kinkel, a Willich or some other such humbug, and since the Cologne trial, I have withdrawn completely into my study. My time was too precious to be wasted in fruitless endeavour and petty squabbles.

And now for essentials. My Critique of Political Economy is to be published in instalments (the first ones in a week or ten days’ time) by Franz Duncker of Berlin (Bessersche Verlagsbuchhandlung). It was only thanks to Lassalle’s extraordinary zeal and powers of persuasion that Duncker was induced to take this step. He has, however, left himself a loophole. A firm contract depends on the sale of the first instalments.

I divide the whole of political economy into 6 books.

Capital; landed property; wage labour; the State; foreign trade; world market.

Book 1, on capital, comprises 4 sections.

Section I: Capital in general comprises 3 chapters, 1. The Commodity; 2. Money, or simple circulation; 3. Capital. 1 and 2, about 10 sheets, make up the contents of the first instalments to be published. You will understand the political motives that led me to hold back the third chapter on ‘Capital’ until I have again become established.

The contents of the instalments now being published are as follows:

Chapter One: The Commodity

A. Historical notes on the analysis of commodities. William Petty (Englishman, Charles II’s reign); Boisguillebert (Louis XIV); B. Franklin (first of his early works 1729); the Physiocrats; Sir James Steuart; Adam Smith; Ricardo and Sismondi.

Chapter Two: Money or simple circulation

1. Measure of value

B. Theories of the standard of money. (Late 17th century, Locke and Lowndes, Bishop Berkeley (1750)b; Sir James Steuart; Lord Castlereagh., Thomas Attwood; John Gray; Proudhonists.)

2. Medium of circulation

a) The metamorphosis of commodities

b) The circulation of money

c) Coin. Token of value

3. Money

a) Hoarding

b) Means of payment

c) Money of the World

4. The Precious metals

C. Theories of the medium of circulation and of money. (Monetary system; Spectator, Montesquieu, David Hume; Sir James Steuart; A. Smith, J.-B. Say; Bullion Committee, Ricardo, James Mill; Lord Overstone and school; Thomas Tooke (James Wilson, John Fullarton).

In these two chapters the Proudhonist socialism now fashionable in France — which wants to retain private production while organising the exchange of private products, to have commodities but not money — is demolished to its very foundations. Communism must above all rid itself of this ‘false brother’. But apart from all polemical aims, the analysis of simple money forms is, you know, the most difficult because the most abstract part of political economy.

I hope to win a scientific victory for our party. But the latter must itself now show whether its numbers are great enough to buy enough copies to banish the publisher’s ‘moral scruples’. The continuation of the venture depends on the sale of the first instalments. Once I've got a firm contract, everything will be all right.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 378;

First published: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

London, 2 February 1859

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

The manuscript [Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] went off from here on 26 January; by 31 January notification had already got back here from Berlin that the manuscript had arrived. The parcels company received this notification from their correspondent. On the other hand there is your letter dated 31 January in which you say the manuscript hasn’t arrived. So whatever the circumstances the Prussian government — friend Stieber perhaps — has spent 3 days rummaging through [a pun on Stieber’s name] the manuscript. Legally, so far as I am aware, all they were empowered to do was ascertain whether the parcel contained Brussels lace, other parcels being no concern of theirs. Who is going to assure me that some junior official hasn’t amused himself by using a page or 2 for spills?

I presume that, in its own interest, the Prussian government hasn’t taken any false steps with my manuscript. Otherwise I should see to it that all hell was let loose in the London press (Times, etc.).

I shall write you a proper letter tomorrow or the day after. This is simply a business notification, and it’s nearly time for the post.

Your piece, by the by, pleased me enormously.

My wife sends her kindest regards; now that her cher frère has been dismissed, she believes that manuscripts, at any rate, may safely be sent to Berlin.

Salut.

Your

K. Marx

I may bring out an English version of the first instalments straight away. Duncker must put on the title-page: *’the author reserves to himself the right of translation’.*

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 379;

First published: in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 2 February 1859

Dear Frederick,

The Constitutionnel wins since, according to The Times, the author was none other than Mr Boustrapa.

Today came a letter (which I'll send you later) from Lassalle saying that the manuscript has not yet arrived. Now take note: It went off on Tuesday (25); I was notified as early as 30th January by the packet company here that the manuscript had arrived in Berlin. Lassalle’s letter is dated 31 January. Hence the government has been holding back my manuscript for 3 or 4 days at least (if Duncker got the manuscript after Lassalle’s letter went off). Maybe Mr Stieber has been rummaging through it, or Mr von Patow has been endeavouring to make a hasty acquaintance with economics.

Wrote to Lassalle straight off. Your philistines have intercepted the stuff you were sending me (for Tuesday). It didn’t arrive. I waited until 3 in the afternoon. Then I dashed off another article.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 380;

First published: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

London, 4 February 1859

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

I've not yet had an acknowledgment of receipt from Mr Duncker and am therefore still in doubt whether the manuscript [Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] is yet out of the clutches of the authorities. You will see from the enclosed note that it left London on 26 January.

Ad vocem bellum: The general view here is that war in Italy is inevitable. This much is certain: Mr Emmanuel is in earnest and Mr Bonaparte was in earnest. What has swayed the latter is 1. Fear of Italian daggers. Since Orsini’s death, he has been constantly engaged in secret intrigues with the Carbonari, the go-between being Plon-Plon, the husband of ‘Clotilde’. 2. An exceedingly bleak financial situation: it is, in fact, impossible to go on feeding the French army ‘in peacetime'; Lombardy is fat and fertile. Moreover a war would again make ‘war loans’ possible. Any other loan is ‘impossible’. 3. Over the last two years Bonaparte’s repute has dwindled daily amongst all parties in France, and his diplomatic transactions have also been a succession of failures. So something has got to happen if his prestige is to be restored. Even in the rural areas there is a great deal of grumbling about the ruinously low price of grain and Mr Bonaparte has tried in vain to push up the price of wheat artificially by means of his decrees on granaries. 4. The parvenu in the Tuileries is being egged on by Russia. Given the Pan-Slav movement in Bohemia, Moravia, Galicia, southern, northern and eastern Hungary, Illyria, etc., and a war in Italy, Russia would almost certainly break the resistance that Austria continues to offer her. (Russia regards the prospect of an internal agrarian revolution with horror, and war abroad might come as a welcome diversion to the government, quite apart from any diplomatic objectives.) 5. Mr Plon-Plon, son of the ex-King of Westphalia, and his clique (headed by Girardin and a very mixed bag of Hungarian, Polish and Italian pseudo-revolutionaries) are doing all in their power to force the issue. 6. A war against Austria in Italy is the only one in which England, who cannot take a direct stand for the Pope, etc., and against so-called liberty, would remain neutral, at least at the start. Russia, however, would keep Prussia in check should the latter feel inclined, which I doubt, to intervene at the very outset of the campaign.

On the other hand one may be perfectly sure that Mr Louis Bonaparte is devilishly afraid of a really serious war. 1. The man is always full of misgivings and, like all gamblers, is far from resolute. He has always inched his way to the Rubicon, but those standing behind him have invariably had to chuck him in. In every case — Boulogne, Strasbourg, December 1851 — he was, in the end, forced to proceed in earnest with his plans. 2. The exceptionally cool reception accorded his scheme in France is not encouraging, of course. The masses appear to be indifferent. On the other hand there have been outright and earnest remonstrations against it on the part of high finance, trade and industry, the clerical party and, finally, the senior generals (Pélissier, for example, and Canrobert). Indeed, prospects on the military side are far from rosy, even if the braggadocio in the Constitutionnel is taken at its face value. Assuming France can muster all in all 700,000 men, 580,000 of these, at the very highest estimate, will be fit for military service. Deduct 50,000 for Algiers; 49,000 gendarmes, etc.; 100,000 (minimum) for guarding the cities (Paris, etc.) and fortresses of France; 181,000 at least for the army keeping watch on the Swiss, German and Belgian frontiers. This leaves 200,000 which, even if you add the minuscule Piedmontese army, is by no means an overwhelming force to employ against the Austrians in their fortified positions on the Mincio and the Adige.

However that may be, if Mr Bonaparte draws back now, he will be done for so far as the bulk of the French army is concerned; and this might ultimately induce him to go ahead after all.

You apparently believe that in the event of such a war Hungary would rise. I very much doubt it. Austria will, of course, place a corps on the Galician-Hungarian frontier to observe the Russians, and this will simultaneously keep the Hungarians in check. The Hungarian regiments (in so far as they have not — and many of them already have — been dispersed among their enemies, e.g. the Czechs, Serbs, Slovenes, etc.) will be stationed in German provinces.

The war would, of course, have serious, and without doubt ultimately revolutionary consequences. But initially it will maintain Bonapartism in France, set back the internal movement within England and Russia, revive the pettiest nationalist passions in Germany, etc., and hence, in my view, its initial effect will everywhere be counter-revolutionary.

Be that as it may, you should expect nothing of the émigrés here. Apart from Mazzini who, at least, is a fanatic, they're a bunch of confidence tricksters whose one ambition is to extract money from the English. Mr Kossuth has positively sunk to the level of an itinerant lecturer who hawks the same old nonsense round the various provinces of England and Scotland and sells it over and over again to ever new audiences.

The scoundrels here have all become so conservative that they would indeed deserve to be amnestied. Mr Gottfried Kinkel, for example, is publishing a weekly here, Hermann by name, compared with which even the Kölnische Zeitung is a daring and witty paper. (By indulging in sundry flirtations with aesthetic Jewesses, the suave, melodramatic parson is said, amongst other things, to have driven his wife to fall out of the window and break her neck. Freiligrath, being a kind-hearted fellow, was so taken in by the scenes of grief that he wrote a poem about the late Johanna Mockel, only to discover a day or two later that the grief was merely feigned and that never had Mr Gottfried felt so free and easy as since the death of his spouse.) The fellow preaches ‘optimism’ in a namby-pamby, hat-doffing, somewhat breathless manner. The paper should be called Gottfried. For my part I would rather write under Manteuffel’s yoke than under that of the German philistines in the City of London. To Mr Kinkel, however, the yoke is all the sweeter and lighter for the fact of his being not one jot superior to the said philistines where character and insight are concerned. The to-do made by the ‘Lewald’ woman, alias ‘Stahr’, about the late Mockel has compromised the latter person still further.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

It would be a great help to me if you could obtain in Breslau, and let me have as soon as possible particulars about a person of the female sex by the name (allegedly) of von Paula-Kröcher, who used to live there and is now over here.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 393;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 8 February 1859

Dear Engels,

It’s a fortnight ago today since I sent the manuscript [Contribution to Critique of Political Economy] to Berlin; since then 2 letters have gone off to Lassalle; up to this moment I've had no acknowledgment of receipt. Moreover, I had made this ‘acknowledgment of receipt’ a condition for the despatch of the preface. As you can imagine, one begins to lose all patience when everything goes so wrong. I am quite ill with vexation.

Herewith Lassalle’s letter. Let me have it back.

Today I have written about Bonaparte’s rotten speech and his pamphlet.

Salut,

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 384;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 9 February 1859

Dear Engels,

At last a letter from Duncker today. He didn’t receive the manuscript [Contribution to Critique of Political Economy] until 1 February. Not printed this week, because just completing some work or other — I don’t know which — of Lassalle’s.

Enclosed a letter from Eccarius and Pfänder from which you will see that poor Eccarius is down with consumption. This is the most tragic thing I have yet experienced here in London.

Pieper, who had been discharged as cured, is back from Bognor again and in the German hospital. This time starvation treatment. Serves him right.

I meant to send you the enclosed letters from Weydemeyer and Komp long ago. I have at last replied to them.

Dronke has been to Bonn, where one of his brothers was dying. Having obtained Flottwell’s permission, he attended a ball given by his [students'] ‘corps’ in Bonn. The little man [Dronke] has written to Dingelstedt (of Fulda), through whom he hopes to arrange a performance of a play he himself has written. In addition, the little man writes ‘Glasgower Briefe’ for Prutz’s Museum. I had all this news from philistine Freiligrath.

From the latter, who came to see me yesterday (I myself being confined to the house with a bad throat), I also learned that Gottfried’s — or Hermann’s — behaviour towards ladies is invariably so ludicrous (the buffoon now supposes he need only throw down his handkerchief) that he has become an object of general dégoût. Moreover, Freiligrath has now also tumbled to the fact that Gottfried feels exceptionally ‘free and easy’ now that the Mockel woman is dead and — strangest of all — it now transpires that, even before the day of the funeral, philistine Freiligrath and wife had discovered brother Hermann’s ‘lack of concern’.

According to Gottfried, the Hermann, to which the Prussian government has, as the Berlin National-Zeitung announces, granted a licence for postal distribution, is to cover the ‘loss’ to his funds occasioned by his wife’s death.

In due course, no doubt, Mrs Daniels will become Mrs Bürgers. She has written to Lina saying that ‘Bürgers has grown still more energetic and self-confident’. In proof of that ‘self-confidence’ she writes, ‘we are delighted by Freiligrath’s poem about Mrs Kinkel, which was mutilated by the “perfidious” Kölnische Zeitung’.

Steffen has written to Freiligrath asking for your address and mine as he has lost them. Steffen’s address is: W. Steffen, Harrison Square near Boston, Mass. U. St.

Salut.

Your.

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 389;

First published: in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London, about 22 February 1859]

Dear Frederick,

My brother-in-law will be travelling to Manchester on Thursday and will probably come and see you on Friday. But you must let me have your exact address. On closer acquaintance, by the by, Juta proves to be a far from [healthy] chap. He suffers damnably from his liver, and hence must go to Carlsbad. I should be glad if Gumpert would examine him and, since his liver is presently giving him a great deal of pain, do something to alleviate this. But if the thing is really serious, Gumpert must not give any indication of the fact.

Tomorrow I am writing about the Factory Report, and expect an article from you, the more so as I am now working out Capital.

Your

K. M.

Nota bene.

I have written asking Dana whether he can find me a Yankee for the English edition of the Political Economy. In which case, if the thing looks like being lucrative, I should have to spend a few weeks in Manchester, putting it into English with you.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 391;

First published: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

London, 25 February 1859

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

Iterum Crispinus.

It is Engels’ intention to publish — anonymously to begin with — a short pamphlet entitled Po and Rhine.

Main content: Military proof, i.e. based on military science, that all the reasons advanced to the effect that Austria must have the Mincio line in order to protect Germany, correspond precisely to the argument that France must have the Rhine frontier in order to protect herself; further that, whereas Austria’s interest in the Mincio line is considerable, that of Germany, as a single power, is nil, and that Italy will always be dominated militarily by Germany so long as the whole of Switzerland isn’t French. The thing is mainly directed against the strategists of the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, but otherwise against Mr Bonaparte — from a national viewpoint, of course.

I am willing to stake all my ‘powers of discernment’ on the fact that the publication of this pamphlet, which will entail hardly any outlay because consisting of only a few sheets, would, at the present time, actually be a speculation (in the eminent sense of the word) for a bookseller.

Since taking part in the Baden campaign, Engels has made military matters his special study. Added to which his writing, as you know, is exceedingly plausible.

However, the publisher must preserve the secret of the writer’s identity until the author himself chooses to disclose it. You may be sure that the most eminent military writers of Prussia will be suspected of being at the bottom of the thing.

Now here we have something the publication of which is intimately related to the times — a question of the day. Hence it must be pushed through quickly. Do you think that Duncker will agree to do it? It would undoubtedly be in his own interests. One can never know in the case of purely scientific stuff whether and to what extent the philistines will buy it. Where questions of the day such as these are concerned, this can be calculated with almost mathematical exactitude.

Should Duncker agree, Engels authorises you to conclude the transaction in his name and on whatever terms you think fit. Should he refuse, might there not be some other possibility? I know a publisher in Hamburg who would take it. But this fellow was always personally hostile to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, as he plainly told our friend Heine, and hence it would vex me sorely were he to obtain so much as a single line from any of us. Besides, he treated our never-to-be-forgotten and irreplaceable friend Weerth in the most outrageous fashion.

Let me have an answer as soon as possible, and please don’t begrudge the considerable time and effort I cost you. I can only plead the general party interest.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 393;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 25 February 1859

Dear Engels,

Po and Rhine is a first-class idea and must be put in hand straight away. You must set to at once, time being everything in this case. I have written to Lassalle this very day and am sure that little Jew Braun will put the thing through.

The pamphlet (how many sheets? Let me have the answer to this by return) must first appear anonymously so that the public believes the author to be an eminent general. In the second edition, which you may account a certainty provided the thing comes out on time, you will reveal your identity in a 6-line foreword, and then it will be a triumph for our party. In my ‘Preface’ I have done you a few honneurs; and thus it is all to the good if you yourself take the stage immediately afterwards.

Those dogs of democrats and liberal riff-raff will see that we're the only chaps who haven’t been stultified by the ghastly period of peace.

In any case, you'll get the copies of the Tribune. Not one of the military articles has so far been published. Mr Dana didn’t print the first, which you wrote a long time ago, but will probably do so now. I too constantly experience the like. It’s often three months before the asses discover that we've foretold events for them, whereupon they print the relevant articles.

My brother-in-law’s address is correct save that he forgot to add ‘City (near the General Post Office)’. But I imagine he'll be in Manchester by now and able to tell you about himself.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 394;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 25 February 1859

Dear Engels,

I am writing to you again this evening because time presses. I am morally convinced that, in view of what I've written to Lassalle, Duncker will accept the pamphlet. Admittedly, little Jew Braun hasn’t written to me since my manuscript [Contribution to Critique of Political Economy] arrived, and that was over four weeks ago. For one thing, he was busy with the publication of his own immortal, ‘inflammatory’ work. (still, the little Jew, even his Heraclitus although atrociously written, is better than anything the democrats could boast of), and then he will probably have to do the final proof-reading of my scrawl. For another thing, he may be a trifle stunned by the terrible knock on the head dealt him indirectly by my analysis of money. For his Heraclitus contains the following note which I shall now quote verbatim despite its interminable length (you've got to read it, though):

‘If we remarked above that in the said fragment Heraclitus has specified the true nature and function of money in political economy’ (Heraclitus in fact says: ‘pnros teantameibesdai panta kai pur apantwg woper crjsou crhmata, kai crhpatwn crusos’ [all things are exchanged for fire and fire for all things, as wares are exchanged for gold and gold for wares]), ‘this, we need hardly point out, is not to make a political economist of him, and hence it is far from our intention to suggest that he had grasped any of the wider implications of that fragment. But although this science neither existed nor could have existed at that time and therefore was not the object of Heraclitus’ thought, it is correct to say that, precisely because he never goes by reflex categories but only by the speculative concept, Heraclitus has, in that fragment, discerned the nature of money in all its profundity and this more truly than many a modern economist. And it may not be altogether without interest or, indeed, so irrelevant as might at first appear, to observe how what is simply a consequence of that thought automatically gives rise to the modern discoveries in this field’ (Nota bene. Lassalle doesn’t know the first thing about these discoveries.)

‘When Heraclitus suggests that money as a medium of exchange is the antithesis of all real products entering exchange and owes its real existence solely to the same’ (I underline where Lassalle has underlined), ‘this is not to say that money as such is itself a product invested with a material value of its own, one commodity among other commodities, as Say’s school’ (a nice Continental delusion that there is such a thing as Say’s school) ‘persists in regarding coin up to this very day; rather it is but the ideal representative of circulating real products, a symbol of value for the latter, which merely stands for them. And that is only in part a conclusion drawn from the fragment, in part only the concept implicit in it for Heraclitus himself.

‘But if all money is merely the ideal unit or expression of value of all real circulating products and owes its real existence solely to these, which are at one and the same time its antithesis, it follows from the very consequence’ (nice style! It follows from ‘the very consequence') ‘of this concept that a country’s sum of values or its wealth may be increased only by an increase in real products, but never by an increase in money since money, of course, far from being even merely a factor of wealth and value’ (now we have wealth and value; before it was sum of values or wealth), ‘never expresses, as an abstract unit, more than the value which is situated in the products’ (and a nice district, too), ‘and is real only therein. Hence the error of the balance of trade system.’ (This is worthy of Ruge.) ‘It further follows that All money is always equal in value to all circulating products, since it merely reduces the latter to an ideal unit of value, hence merely gives expression to their value; hence that, by an increase or decrease in the amount of money available, the value of this total sum of money will never be affected and will always remain equal only to that of all circulating products; that strictly speaking it is never possible to talk of the value of all money as compared with the value of all circulating products, because such a comparison supposes that the value of money and the value of products are two values in their own right, whereas only one value exists, which is realised in concrete form in the material product, and expressed as an abstract unit of value in money; or rather, value itself is nothing but a unit abstracted from real things, in which it does not exist as such, and finding its special expression in money; not only, then, does the value of all money remain equal to the value of all products but, properly speaking, all money is only the value of all circulating products.’ (This ultra-hold type is the author’s.) ‘Hence it follows that, with an increase in the quantity of coin, since the value of the total remains the same, that of each individual coin can only fall, just as it will rise again with a decrease in the quantity of coin. It further follows that, since money is merely the unreal theoretical abstraction of value and represents the antithesis of real products and materials, money as such does not need to have any intrinsic reality, i.e. need not consist of any truly valuable material, but may equally be paper money, and it is precisely then that it corresponds most closely to its concept. All these and many other conclusions, which have only been reached, and along entirely different lines, since Ricardo’s studies and have by no means found universal acceptance, follow from the mere consequence of that speculative concept discerned by Heraclitus.'

I, of course, paid not the slightest heed to this Talmudic wisdom but roundly slated Ricardo for his theory of money which, by the way, did not originate with him but with Hume and Montesquieu. So Lassalle may feel this to be a personal insult. There was actually no harm in it, for in my anti-Proudhon piece [Poverty of Philosophy] I myself adopted Ricardo’s theory. But I'd had a perfectly ridiculous letter from little Jew Braun in which he said that he had ‘the early publication of my manuscript at heart, although he himself was engaged in writing a major work on political economy for which he had allocated two years’. But if I were to ‘deprive him of too much that was new, he might abandon the whole thing’. Well, to this I replied that there was no fear of rivalry since this ‘new’ science could accommodate himself and me and a dozen more besides. My disquisition on money will now show him, either that I know nothing of the subject — although if I'm wrong, so is the whole history of the monetary theory — or else that he is an ass, since, with a few empty abstract expressions such as ‘abstract unit’, he presumes to lay down the law about empirical matters which, if one wishes to hold forth about them, call for study, and prolonged study into the bargain. For this reason he may, in the innermost recesses of his heart, be nourishing something of a grudge against me just now. But — and this is what I have been leading up to — firstly, Lassalle has really too great a stake ‘in the cause’ and, secondly, he is too much of an ‘Ephraim Artful’ not to keep in with us coûte que coûte which is all the more necessary to him because of his quarrel with the Düsseldorf people. Moreover, living in Berlin has made him see that, for an energetic fellow like himself, the bourgeois party holds out no prospects whatever.

So with clever management the man will be ours, body and soul, no matter how much he indulges in ‘inflammatory’ antics or makes Heraclitus pay for being the most succinct of philosophers by providing him with the most prolix of commentaries. For the same reason I am sure that en cas de besoin he will force Duncker to take your pamphlet. I have, by the by, so framed my letter that he can show the whole of it to Duncker. It was, in fact, written for Duncker rather than Lassalle, though for all his artfulness Ephraim is unlikely to notice the fact.

Hence I consider it certain that Duncker will take the pamphlet, so the main thing now is for you to set to work on it at once, for this is like a newspaper article. There’s no time to be lost. For the same reason — immediacy of impact — I believe you shouldn’t exceed 4 or 5 sheets (if as much is needed). So you may regard yourself as totally absolved from the Tribune work (unless some martial occurrence steals a march on your pamphlet, which is improbable), until you've finished the thing. The most sensible thing to do would be to plead sudden illness and stay away from the office, so as to write the thing all at one go.

Amicus Engels Senior, amicus Ermen (Gotofredus!), sed magis amicum to fronein [Engels Senior is dear to me, Ermen (Gottfried) is dear to me, but knowledge is dearer still].

‘feu, feu, fronein ws deinon, enqa mh telh

luei fronounti,’

[Alas, ‘tis terrible to be wise when it brings the wise man no reward']

as your old man might say to you, like Tiresias did to King Oedipus, to which, however, you would reply that he

‘en tois kerdesi

monom dedorke, thn tecnhn defu tuflos’.

[in usury but sharp-eyed, yet in his sooth-saying blind]

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 407;

First published: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

London, 28 March 1859

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

Ad vocem financial predicament: D'abord many thanks for your offers of help. In the meantime, however, I have tried other means, namely writing to my mother asking her if she will lend me the money for a few weeks. Je verrai. Here in London a bill could have been negotiated only through Gerstenberg. But the latter, a petty pompous gentleman and Kinkel’s patron, shall not have the gratification of being asked to do me a service, even a purely formal one.

Ad vocem Duncker. This Wednesday (day after tomorrow), the man will have had the manuscript [Critique of Political Economy] for almost 9 weeks. So far I've been sent only 3 proof-sheets. Between ourselves I should say quite frankly that Duncker is regretting having undertaken the business and that’s why he is handling it in this dilatory, Wetzlar chancellery fashion. If he goes on like this the thing won’t even be out by Easter. And this puts me in another quandary. I am negotiating with an Englishman over the English rendering of these first instalments. This last depends, of course, on the publication of the work in German, and since everything is done at high pressure in London, the Englishman is growing mistrustful. You absolutely cannot make an Englishman understand the German way of doing business.

You will see that the first section does not comprise the principal chapter, i.e. the 3rd, on capital. I thought this advisable on political grounds, for it’s in III that the battle really begins and it seemed to me better not to frighten people de prime abord. [at the very outset]

Ad vocem telegraphy. I accept the offer. — The matter isn’t as simple as you think. Obtaining the information is nothing, but takes up a great deal of time. I shall set up office near the Exchange (where the telegraphic companies who despatch the things also have their offices). However, your cousin must now let me know: 1. By what route does he want the despatches sent? There are 3 companies, one sends via France, the second via Ostend and the third via Antwerp. The only things which should be sent via France, I think, are those for which no French censorship can present a danger. This is, incidentally, the shortest route. 2. What does he want telegraphed? Different papers base their views of what is important on very different principles. 3. How frequently does he want me to telegraph? 4. Besides news from England, do these people want news from America, in short, from outside Europe? He must give me exact instructions about all this since telegraphy demands first and foremost that all non-essentials should be omitted. 5. Finally, I must know at what hour of the day the Presse prefers to receive its news (in the English provinces, at any rate, this varies with individual newspapers, according to the time they come out). In the case of extraordinary events no time could, of course, be laid down, as it could, presumably, for ordinary despatches. For stock-market news I would, of course, have an exceptional source of information in Freiligrath.

Ad vocem ‘Presse’: I accept this offer, too: Firstly, because, unlike last time, no conditions are imposed on me as regards the treatment of specific political personalities. I make it an absolute principle never to assent to a condition. On the other hand, every newspaper has a right to expect tact of its correspondents. Secondly, because times have changed and I now consider it essential that our party should secure positions wherever possible, even if only for a time, so that others should not gain possession of the terrain. For the time being, of course, it must be used cautiously, but the most important thing is to acquire influence at various points against more crucial contingencies. I never received the copies of the Presse which you say Friedländer sent me, probably because they were wrongly addressed. I ought, by the by, to be sent a few numbers immediately; one has to find out from the actual paper how, not what one should write for the Viennese public.

Ad vocem your writing for the ‘Presse’. I am quite convinced you should write for them. True, it would be ‘improper’ for you, as a Prussian, to write for an Austrian paper just now. But on principle we should, as Luther says of God, ‘use a thief to catch a thief,’ and whenever we get the chance, contribute to the general state of disintegration and confusion. Before the start of the present troubles I would neither have written for the Presse myself, nor have advised you to do so. But the fermentation process has begun and now it’s up to everyone to do what he can. It is now advisable to infiltrate poison, no matter where. Should we confine ourselves to writing for papers which on the whole share our viewpoint, we'd have to postpone all journalistic activity indefinitely. And should one really allow so-called ‘public opinion’ to have nothing but counter-revolutionary stuff pumped into it?

Ad vocem ‘Tribune’ You certainly misunderstood me if you thought I was asking you to take the Tribune’s subscribers into account. The fact of the matter is this: My real business with the Tribune consists in writing leaders about anything I choose. Here, England heads the bill and France comes second. Much is of an economic nature. But since the change of course in Prussia, I have amused myself on the sly by writing an occasional report from ‘Berlin’ and owing to my ‘internal’ ties with the Hohenzollern homeland I have been able to assess conditions there with great assurance. Among the said subscribers to the Tribune there are a great many Germans. Moreover, the German-American newspapers, whose name is legion, reprint stuff from it. This being so, it was important for me to give local colour to the occasional article I wrote from ‘Berlin’ in order that my polemic with the Prussian State might also be pursued in the New World. A little gossip is indispensable to local colour of this kind. Besides, present Prussian history consists largely of chronique scandaleuse. Hinc illae lacrimae [hence these tears]. In this respect your last letter served me to good purpose.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

P.S. Have just received a letter from Nutt, the City booksellers, advising me that your parcel has arrived. I shall collect it without fail today.

What is happening about Engels’ pamphlet? I sent it off on the 10th of March. I'd have thought this kind of thing could have been done in 5 days.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 418;

First published: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

London, 19 April 1859

Dear Lassalle,

I sent no separate acknowledgment of the £14 10/- because the letter was registered. But I should have written earlier had I not been plagued by a damned ‘cousin from Holland’, who laid claim to my surplus working time in the most cruel manner.

He is now gone, and so I can breathe again.

Friedländer has written to me. The terms are not as favourable as those originally communicated to you, but are nonetheless ‘respectable’. Once a few subsidiary points have been settled between us — which will, I think, be done in the course of this week — I shall write to him.

Here in England the class struggle is progressing in a most gratifying way. Unfortunately there is no longer any Chartist paper in existence and hence I had to give up literary collaboration with that movement about two years ago.

Now I come to Franz von Sickingen. D'abord, I must applaud both composition and action, and that’s more than one can say of any other modern German play. In the second instance, and aside from any reactions of a purely critical nature, the work excited me very much at the first reading and hence will induce this reaction to an even greater degree in more emotionally inclined readers. And that is another and very important aspect.

Now for the other side of the medal: Firstly — and this is purely a question of form — since you have chosen to write in verse, you could have put a touch more artistry into the iambics. However, though your neglecting to do so might well shock a professional poet, I regard it by and large as a merit, our breed of poetical epigones having retained nothing but formal polish. Secondly, the implicit conflict is not just tragic; it is the tragic conflict upon which the revolutionary party of 1848-49 justly foundered. Hence making it the fulcrum of a modern tragedy can only meet with my wholehearted approval. But then, I ask myself, is the theme in question suitable for the portrayal of that conflict? Balthasar may indeed imagine that had Sickingen not pretended that his rebellion was a knightly feud, but had instead raised the standard of opposition to the emperor and open war against the princes, he would have won. But are we able to share that illusion? Sickingen (and with him Hutten, more or less) went under, not because of his cunning, but because, as a knight and as representative of a declining class, he rebelled against existing reality, or rather against the new form of existing reality. Strip Sickingen of the appurtenances of the individual and his particular education, natural disposition, etc., and you have — Götz von Berlichingen. In this latter, miserable fellow the tragic opposition between knights on the one hand and emperor and princes on the other is adequately personified and that is why Goethe rightly made him his hero. In so far as Sickingen — and even Hutten up to a point, although in his case, as in that of all ideologists of a class, such assertions call for substantial modification — is fighting the princes (he turns against the emperor only because the emperor of knights has become the emperor of princes), he is, in fact, nothing more than a Don Quixote, if with some historical justification. The fact that he begins his rebellion in the guise of a knightly feud merely means that he begins it in knightly fashion. Were he to begin it in any other way, he would have to appeal directly and at the very outset to the towns and the peasants, i.e. the very classes whose development = the negation of knighthood.

Unless, therefore, you wished to reduce the conflict to no more than what is portrayed in Götz von Berlichingen — and such was not your plan — Sickingen and Hutten were bound to go under because they imagined themselves to be revolutionaries (which cannot be said of Götz) and, just like the cultivated Polish aristocracy of 1830, turned themselves on the one hand into the organs of modern ideas while on the other actually representing a reactionary class interest. The aristocratic representatives of revolution — behind whose catch-words of unity and liberty there still lingers the dream of the imperial past and of club-law — ought not in that case to monopolise the interest as you make them do; rather the representatives of the peasants (of these in particular) and of the revolutionary elements in the towns should provide an altogether significant and dynamic background. This would have enabled you to give expression in far greater measure precisely to the most modern ideas in their most unsophisticated form; whereas, in fact now, the dominant idea, apart from religious freedom, is civic unity. Then you would automatically have had to ‘Shakespearise’ more, whereas your principal failing is, to my mind, ‘Schillering’, i.e. using individuals as mere mouthpieces for the spirit of the times. Have not you yourself — like your Franz von Sickingen — succumbed, to some extent, to the diplomatic error of regarding the Lutheran-knightly opposition as superior to the plebeian-Münzerian?

Again, I miss what is characteristic in the characters. I except Charles V, Balthasar and Richard of Trier. And was there ever a time of more robust character traits than the 16th century? To my mind Hutten is, to far too great a degree, merely a representative of ‘enthusiasm’, which is boring. Wasn’t he also witty, an infernal wit, and hence hasn’t he been done a grave injustice?

The extent to which even your Sickingen — who, by the way, is portrayed much too abstractly — suffers as a result of a conflict that is quite independent of all his personal calculations is evident from the necessity he is in of urging friendship with the towns, etc., upon his knights and, on the other hand, from the satisfaction with which he himself imposes club-law upon those same towns.

To come down to details, I would censure the sometimes excessive preoccupation of individuals with themselves — the result of your predilection for Schiller. E.g. on p. 121, when Hutten is telling Marie the history of his life, it would have been quite natural to make Marie say:

‘The whole gamut of sensations’,

etc., up to the words,

‘And weighs more heavily on me than did the years’.

The preceding verses, from ‘They say’ to ‘grown older’, might follow at this point, but the comment, ‘The virgin in a single night matures into a woman’ (although showing that the love Marie knows is more than a mere abstraction), is completely pointless; still less should Marie have begun by reflecting upon her own ‘ageing’. After recounting all that she had said during the ‘one’ hour, she might have given general expression to her feelings in the phrase about her ‘ageing’. Again, what offends me in the lines that follow is: ‘I thought it was my right’ (i.e. happiness). Why give the lie to the ingenuous view of the world which Marie has hitherto professed to hold, by turning it into a doctrine of rights? Maybe some other time I shall give you my opinion in greater detail.

I consider the scene between Sickingen and Charles V to be particularly felicitous, although the dialogue on both sides is rather too much in the nature of pleading; also the scenes in Trier. Hutten’s lines about the sword I thought very fine.

Well, that’s enough for this time.

You have made my wife into a special admirer of your play. Only Marie doesn’t satisfy her.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Apropos. There are some bad misprints in Engels’ Po and Rhine. I append a list of them on the last page of this letter.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 429;

First published: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

London, 5 May 1859

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

From the enclosed letter dated April 12, which I should like to have back, you will see that there is a very considerable difference between the terms offered me by your cousin Friedländer and the terms you originally communicated to me. Nevertheless I replied by return accepting them. I merely noted:

1. that I could not make disbursements for telegrams, a point, by the by, that hardly needed mentioning and had been anticipated in your letter;

2. that, if we came to an arrangement, I should like (though I did not make it a conditio sine qua) to be able to draw on them with a banker here for articles, etc., sent, as is done in the case of the Tribune.

So far there has been no answer, which I find strange. If the editors have changed their minds, they might have had the decency to inform me. As you are aware, I did not in any way thrust myself forward in this matter. But, having accepted, I made one or two preliminary approaches to English newspapers, etc., and I am specially anxious not to be compromised in the eyes of these people and other acquaintances whom I have informed of the matter for business reasons. That I, for my part, have not yet sent off any article is only natural, since there is still no firm engagement.

The elections here have not, alas, turned out to be sufficiently Tory. Had this been the case there would, by and by, have been the beginnings of a revolutionary movement here. Palmerston’s return to the Foreign Ministry can now, after some shuffling be regarded as certain and hence Russia will again be in direct control of English policy.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 430;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 6 May 1859

Dear Frederick,

Your article received. You will have seen from a telegraphic despatch that Hess has come out against Gyulay’s plan (perhaps one should describe it as absence of plan). Looked at from our — i.e. a revolutionary — point of view, it would be by no means undesirable if Austria were to begin either by suffering a reverse or, which is morally the same thing, by withdrawing into Lombardy again. This will greatly complicate matters and thus allow sufficient time for things to come to a head in Paris. All in all the state of affairs is such that, no matter on what side blunders occur, they will necessarily redound to our advantage. If, at the outset, Austria were to beat the Piedmontese army, take Turin and thrash the French as they debauched from the Alps, Russia might immediately turn against Bonaparte — having in any case not yet actually entered into any obligations against Germany, and our rotten Prussian government would be extricated from the only dilemma that might cost it its neck. Again: Such a devastating defeat at the very beginning could bring about a mutiny in the French army and an anti-Bonaparte revolution in Paris. What then? At this juncture the upshot would be victorious armed intervention by the Holy Alliance against a potential revolutionary government in Paris, something which certainly doesn’t come into our calcul.

Even Radetzky had the revolutionary ardour of 1848 in his veins. On the other hand I believe that on both sides, Austrian and French, the war will now be conducted with reactionary mediocrity.

It was wrong of you not to have sent us at least two more pamphlets — for Pfälder, who sent off your manuscript under his own name, and for Freiligrath. It would also be fitting to send a copy to P. Imandt (Dundee Seminary, Dundee). You must pay some heed to party relations and keep the chaps in good humour.

Apropos, I deleted the whole of the preamble to your last Friday’s article, firstly because I had my misgivings about the Austrians; secondly because it is absolutely essential that we do not identify our cause with that of the present German governments.

In my view, the worthy Palmerston will very shortly be back at the helm as Foreign Minister or War Minister. Those dolts of Tories are indeed making things too easy for him. First they go and spoil the Austrians’ game by their miserable show of mediation. Then, as soon as the Franco-Russian treaty has been made known, they bend every force to deny its existence, so as to prove that they have not been taken by surprise. This in turn gives The Times the opportunity to deride them and adopt a patriotic attitude towards Russia. But the long and short of it is that The Times, like all the rest of Palmerston’s papers (though these, depending on their allotted role, either oppose or support the various powers involved), is hinting at the necessity of reappointing the truly British Minister. (The Morning Advertiser and The Daily Telegraph, which write for the mob, are saying it openly). The wretched Tories ought instead to have ‘lent credence to’ the Russo-French treaty and seized on the chance of going for Pam. They had the best of opportunities. Firstly, Pam was in Compiègne when the whole plan was hatched. Secondly, Mr Whiteside, speaking on behalf of the ministry, had in fact already told silly old John Bull what had long been apparent from the Blue Books, namely that in 1848 Austria approached Palmerston and offered to relinquish the whole of Lombardy but to install an Italian government in Venice under an Austrian Archduke, if he would mediate. Piedmont had approached him at the same time, France ditto. What did Pam do?

He rejected the proposal, on the pretext that Venice, too, must be given up altogether. He gave this answer after a three weeks’ silence. As soon as Radetzky was victorious he called upon the Austrians to carry out the plan they had divulged to him. In the Hungarian affair (with reference this time to the conditions upon which the already desperate Hungarians were willing to submit) he performed the same manoeuvre. The fellow’s return to the ministry constitutes a real danger. In Germany, by the by, the fellows are beginning to see through him. In a book by Prof. Wurm of Hamburg (a history of the war in the East), and a book on Nicholas by another German, whose name I can’t recall, Pam is attacked outright as a Russian agent.

Ad vocem business. That ass Friedländer wrote to me on 12 April but had forgotten the crucial point, i.e. instructions to a banking-house. Instead, he spoke of an ‘advance’. This last is nonsense. £8-10, and often £15, will be needed each week for telegrams. I wrote and told the ass so. Up till now no answer, although he regularly sends me the Vienna Presse (from which I gather that it now has 26,000 subscribers). Yesterday I wrote Lassalle a fulminating letter. I see from the Presse that Lassalle has embarked on his articles and telegraphic despatches for that paper with great zeal albeit small talent. However he did not accept this post until I had ‘given him permission’ in writing, not wanting — or so he says — to take the political risk without my consent. It would be a rum business, would it not, if all the transaction led to was Lassalle’s installing himself in that quarter? It’s possible, however, that the delay is due to Friedländer’s difficulty in arranging the financial side in Vienna during the present troubles. Meanwhile, out of impatience, I am devoting myself to algebra.

Salut.

Is Lupus in Manchester?

Your

K. M.

Marx To Max Friedländer

In Vienna

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 433;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1962.

London, 16 May 1859

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Sir,

I have been receiving the Vienna Presse regularly and my debt to you for sending it is the greater in that it throws light on conditions in Austria at this important juncture.

I have not yet had a reply to the letter I wrote you some weeks ago. If, by chance, the proposed arrangement [Marx writing for the Presse] has come to nothing as a result of the derangement of the Vienna money market, I would beg you to advise me of this by return for I have made certain agreements regarding telegrams with newspapers over here which commit me to financial outlays and which I shall accordingly terminate forthwith.

Yours very truly,

Dr K. Marx

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 434;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 18 May 1859

Dear Engels,

Lassalle’s letter contains several points upon which I shall haul him over the coals. D'abord, the laddie talks about what he ‘is to do for me’. But all I asked of him was that he, who set the whole thing in train and whose articles I was constantly seeing in the Presse, should enlighten me as to the mysterious silence from Vienna. This was his business. Secondly, he makes it look as though he had contributed to the Presse only after a tremendous struggle, on ‘my’ insistence. But at one point in the same letter he admits that he had already begun sending articles to Vienna before I had stated my case. Then, however, he proceeds to reverse the ‘nexus’. When he sent me Friedländer’s offer he drivelled away for two pages about whether or not he should write to Vienna, and made the thing dependent on my decision. D'abord, it went without saying that, if I thought writing for the Presse good enough for me, I wouldn’t think it beneath Lassalle. Moreover, I could see from his letter how anxious he was to obtain my consent. Why then do we now have this self-aggrandizing misrepresentation of the causal nexus? What he says about ‘bias’ and having written to Friedländer ‘telling him off’ about it, is nonsense. As Austrian papers go and considering the circumstances, the Vienna Presse is edited cleverly and fairly, with far greater tact than Lassalle would be able to command. Finally, I did not invite the laddie’s instructions as to what is or is not ‘worthy’ of me. I consider it rather arrogant of him to drop hints to me on the subject. If Friedländer manages to settle the financial side, I shall positivement stand by my decision, which is in no way altered by the fact that Lassalle’s articles don’t seem to suit Friedländer. From recent issues of the Presse I see that the number of its subscribers has risen to 27,000.

Lassalle’s pamphlet is an enormous blunder. The publication of your ‘anonymous’ pamphlet [Po and Rhine] made him envious. Admittedly the position of the revolutionary party in Germany is difficult at present, yet a little critical analysis of the circumstances suffices to make it plain. As regards the ‘governments’, it is clear from all points of view, if only in the interests of Germany’s existence, that they must be urged not to remain neutral but to be, as you rightly say, patriotic. But the affair can be given revolutionary pertinence simply by stressing opposition to Russia more strongly than opposition to Boustrapa. That’s what Lassalle should have done vis-à-vis the Neue Preussische Zeitung’s anti-French clamour. Indeed, it is this point which, as the war goes on, will in practice involve the German governments in high treason and at which it will be possible to seize them by the throat. Incidentally, if Lassalle takes it upon himself to speak in the name of the party, he must in future either resign himself to being publicly disavowed by us, since circumstances are too grave to take account of feelings, or else he must first ascertain the views held by others besides himself before following the joint inspiration of fire and logic. We must now absolutely insist on party discipline, otherwise everything will be in the soup.

The confusion presently reigning in men’s minds has reached a curious peak. D'abord, there is that traitor to the Empire, the ‘imperial regent’, who has received cash payments from Paris. In the Hamburg Freischütz, Mr Meyen praises Vogt’s piece. ‘There is a type of vulgar democrat (some sincere ones among them believe that an Austrian defeat, complemented by revolution in Hungary + Galicia, etc., would bring about revolution in Germany. The dolts forget that revolution in Germany now = disorganisation of her armies and would benefit, not the revolutionaries, but Russia and Boustrapa), a type, I say, of vulgar democrat who delights in being able to pipe the same tune as the Decembristising Hungarians (Bangyas all) and Poles (in the Prussian chamber a few days ago Mr Cieszkowski called Nicholas the Poles’ ‘great Slav ally’) and Italians. Another lot — e.g. Blind who seeks to combine patriotism and democratism — are making asses of themselves (and old Uhland too among their number) by demanding war with Austria against Bonaparte and, at the same time, an imperial parliament. D'abord, the asses fail to see that the conditions for the fulfilment of this repellent wish are entirely wanting. Secondly, however, they pay so little heed to what is really happening as to be wholly unaware that, in the only part of Germany which counts, namely Prussia, the bourgeois are proud of their Chambers, whose power is bound to grow with the growing embarrassment of the government; that these bourgeois are justifiably (as recent transactions in the Chambers go to show) disciplined to be dictated to by Badeners and Württembergers under — the style of ‘parliament’, just as the Prussian government is reluctant to be ruled by Austria under the style of ‘Federal Diet’ that these bourgeois know from the experience of 1848 that a parliament alongside their Chambers destroys the power of the latter while itself remaining nothing more than a phantasm. In fact there is much more revolutionary purchase in the Prussian Chambers, which have to vote budgets and which, in certain eventualities, have part of the army and the Berlin mob behind them, than in a debating club under the style of ‘Imperial Parliament’. That Badeners, Württembergers and other small deer take a different view because of their own importance goes without saying. There is a very real fear among our own party friends and other sincere revolutionaries that war against Boustrapa would mean a reversion to 1813-15. Finally, those who speak for the Crédit mobilier in Germany (Kölnische Zeitung, Fould-Oppenheim, etc.) naturally share the democrats’ apprehensions and pin their hopes on the Prussian dynasty’s traditional short-sighted perfidy (Peace of Basle, etc). On the other hand, a section of the democratic and revolutionary party feels bound for patriotic reasons to adopt a Jahn-Arndtian tone. In view of all these confusions, and since I believe that Germany’s fate is hanging in the balance, I think it behoves the two of us to issue a party manifesto. If the Vienna business is settled, you must come up for the purpose at Whitsun. If not, I shall come to Manchester.

From these general things I now come to the state of parties (German) in London, and here I must recapitulate certain matters which I considered too boring to recount to you so long as they were still in progress.

First, you will recall that Mr Liebknecht introduced the clown E. Bauer into the so-called Communist Society... just when I had publicly broken with Bauer and that the clown took over the Neue Zeit in which the ignorant blockhead, by his exaggeration of the few communist catch-phrases he had picked up from Scherzer, turned our party into a laughing-stock. For me it was a most disagreeable affair — not because of the few louts in London, but because of the malicious glee of the democratic crew, because of the false appearances evoked by smartly sending copies of the filthy rag to Germany and the United States, because of the knowledge the clown gained of the rotten state of the party; finally, because of the contacts he made with the International Committee here. Throughout the time the clown was editing the Neue Zeit and lecturing to the Society, Mr Liebknecht remained in the latter and, moreover, talked a great deal of nonsense about having to defend me against the great odium felt for me by the workers (i.e. louts), etc. Well, after only half a number (I sent it to you) of the Neue Zeit had appeared because of lack of money, Liebknecht acted as Chairman at a meeting to which the various associations had been invited for the purpose of saving the paper. The result, of course, was nil. After this performance, I convened our people (a small gang, Pfänder, Lochner, etc., and a few newcomers, whom Liebknecht had for a long time — ever since my removal out of town — treated as his private club) and took the occasion to pitch into Liebknecht in a manner far from pleasing to him until he declared himself a contrite sinner. He said that an attempt had been made to bring out the Neue Zeit again, but had been frustrated by his vigorous intervention. I was therefore surprised to receive, a day or two later, what appeared to be a successor to the Neue Zeit entitled Das Volk. However, the matter was elucidated in a curious way, as follows (see also enclosed letter):

Mr Clown had finally written to Biskamp (you have a letter to him from Biskamp) saying that Kinkel had ruined the Neue Zeit by his intrigues, appeared to be seething with vindictive feelings, etc. Well. Biskamp comes up to London and is d'abord startled by the fact that one of his own articles intended for the Neue Zeit has appeared in the Hermann somewhat watered down. He hurries to the clown, who seems far from pleased to see him, says he is ill, simulates disillusionment and ends up by telling him that the whole thing is a mess, that he (Biskamp) should not get involved in it, that Kinkel is too strong, etc. But Biskamp, struck by the fact that Kinkel had transferred his Hermann to the Neue Zeit’s press, having given up his former press, and that he was printing his manuscripts, hastily sought out Hirschfeld at the press where he discovered — Edgar Bauer’s manuscript and proof corrections. In one word, Mr Edgar had used the Neue Zeit to sell himself to Kinkel and — evidence of the man’s fecundity — made the most of the occasion by printing Biskamp’s manuscripts as contributions of his own. That oaf Kinkel! He seeks to ruin the Neue Zeit not by giving the clown money and allowing him to continue as editor, but by buying the said clown who, throughout his editorship, had eschewed all polemic! But in this way Gottfried thought to rid himself once and for all of competition, however small. One more word about the activities of this same Gottfried. A third German paper made its appearance here, first under the title Londoner Deutsche Zeitung, then under the title Germania. This paper, edited by a certain Ermani, had Austrian leanings. Gottfried revealed that the editor had committed some felony, got Dr Juch to threaten him, bought up his paper and press for a mere song (whether out of the Revolutionary Fund or with money supplied by the Prussian Embassy isn’t known) and, they say, intends to continue publishing the sheet under Juch’s management and a different title. Kinkel’s paper has 1,700 subscribers, is coming to be a source of income, and the fellow wishes to secure it against any competition or polemics.

After the clown’s betrayal, Biskamp, etc., founded Das Volk, and he and the louts first approached me indirectly through Liebknecht. Then Biskamp came to see me.

I told him that we could not contribute directly to a small paper nor, for that matter, to any party paper which we did not ourselves edit. However, the latter was a move for which every prerequisite was lacking at the moment. On the other hand Mr Liebknecht might give Biskamp the benefit of his collaboration. I appreciated, of course, that Gottfried has not been left in command of the field and that his dirty schemes should be baffled, but all I would undertake to do was to let them have from time to time published Tribune articles which they could use; to urge my acquaintances to take the paper; and, finally, to give them verbally any information that reached me and ‘pointers’ about this and that. On the other hand I stipulated that Biskamp should forthwith publish (he will do so in the very next number) a documented account of Bauer’s and Kinkel’s dirty work. (I shall thus have killed 2 birds with one stone, even if the little paper ceases publication.) Further, that the clown’s objective heights must be abandoned and that the tone adopted must in every respect be aggressive and polemical and, indeed, as amusing as possible.

Consequently, I would ask you, Lupus, Gumpert and anyone else you can get hold of (point out that our only interest in the thing is that it’s anti-Kinkel) to subscribe to Das Volk, office: 3 Litchfield Street, Soho. (Quarterly subscription 3/6d post free.) Gumpert and Biskamp both come from Hesse-Cassel and since the former may have an occasional bon mot up his sleeve, he might send it to his compatriot. Finally, let me have the name of some fellow (a stationer) in Manchester to whom Das Volk could be sent for distribution. (Write to the Bradfordian as well.)

I consider Das Volk to be a dilettante rag like our Brussels and Paris papers. But covertly and without intervening directly, we can use it to worry the life out of Gottfried, etc., etc. Again, the moment may come, and that very soon, when it will be of crucial importance that, not just our enemies, but we ourselves should be able to publish our views in a London paper. Biskamp works for nothing and hence is all the more deserving of support.

What is really choice is that in No. 18 of the Hermann, the clown wrote a highly inane, piddling sort of article in which he ‘proves’ that, because of ‘England’s neutrality’, the present war is condemned to be a ‘hole and corner war’. ‘Conclusive’ deeds are no longer possible on the unhappy Continent, which is the reason why noble England remains ‘neutral’. In No. 19 the clown is given a dressing-down by Blind from the indignant democratic-patriotic standpoint and by Bucher from the Urquhartite and thus, having been stamped upon by all parties, he will doubtless soon get the sack, even from the Hermann.

This has been a very good lesson for the louts. Scherzer, that old-Weitlingian jackass, imagined that he could nominate party representatives. At my meeting with a deputation of the louts (I have refused to visit any association, but Liebknecht is chairman of one and Laplander of another) I told them straight out that we owed our position as representatives of the proletarian party to nobody but ourselves; this, however, had been endorsed by the exclusive and universal hatred accorded us by every faction and party of the old world. You can imagine how taken aback the oafs were.

If you haven’t any Po and Rhine left, you must order some. Copies are also needed for Steffen, Weydemeyer and several reviews here.

Might it be possible to send poor Eccarius, who is again going to pieces in his sweat-shop, a fresh consignment of port?

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Have received a letter from Weydemeyer and Komp. Shall send it you very soon. Thanks to them Duncker has already had orders for about 100 copies of my [Contribution to Critique of Political] Economy from the United States.

Tell Lupus that, from the beginning, Beta (Bettziech), editor of How do you do? was also Gottfried’s real editorial factotum.

Engels To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 441;

First published: in Die Neue Zeit, Nr. 18, 1922.

Manchester, 18 May 1859

6 Thorncliffe Grove

Dear Lassalle,

You will have found it somewhat strange that I haven’t written to you for so long, the more so since I owe you an opinion on your Sickingen [F. Lassalle, Franz von Sickingen]. But that is precisely what has kept me from writing to you for so long. With the current and universal barrenness of fiction I seldom have a chance to read such a work, and for years I have never had a chance to read one of this kind in such a way that the reading of it resulted in a detailed judgment, a precisely stated opinion. The rubbish isn’t worth the trouble. Even the few better English novels I read from time to time, e.g. those of Thackeray, have never been able to elicit this interest in me, despite their undeniable literary and cultural significance. But, having lain fallow for so long, my judgment has lost most of its edge and I need a good deal of time before I can permit myself to express an opinion. Your Sickingen, however, deserves better treatment than that sort of stuff and so I've taken my time. The first and second readings of what is in every sense, both as regards material and treatment, a German national drama, stirred my emotions to the extent that I was compelled to put it aside for a while, the more so as my taste has become so vitiated in these lean times that it has reduced me, I'm ashamed to say, to a state in which sometimes even stuff of inferior quality inevitably has some effect on me at the first reading. So in order to be wholly unbiased, wholly ‘critical’, I put Sickingen away, i. e. allowed a few of my acquaintances to borrow it (there are still a few Germans here who are more or less knowledgeable about literature). Habent sua fata libelli [books have their destinies] — if they're borrowed one rarely sets eyes on them again, and so I actually had to recover my Sickingen by force. I can tell you that, after the third and fourth readings, my impression has remained unaltered and, in the knowledge that your Sickingen can stand up to criticism, I shall now speak my mind.

I know that I am not paying you any particular compliment when I state the fact that not one of Germany’s present official poets would be remotely capable of writing such a play. However, fact it is and one all too characteristic of our literature not to be voiced. Taking the formal aspect first, your skilful manipulation of the plot and the thoroughly dramatic nature of the piece came as a very pleasant surprise. Admittedly you have taken a good many liberties with the versification but this is more bothersome in the reading than it would be on the stage. I should very much like to have read the stage version; as the play stands here it could certainly not be performed; I have had with me here a young German poet (Carl Siebel), a distant relative who hails from my neighbourhood, and has had a good deal to do with the stage. He may be coming to Berlin as a reservist in the Prussian Guard, in which case I may take the liberty of giving him a note for you. He thought highly of your play but considered a performance quite impracticable by reason of the long speeches in which only one actor is occupied while the others may run through their entire miming routine 2 or 3 times so as not to stand there like dummies. The last two acts give adequate proof that you experience no difficulty in making your dialogue brisk and lively and since, with the exception of a few scenes (as happens in any play), the same thing would seem to be feasible in the first 3, I don’t doubt you have taken this circumstance into account in your stage version. The intellectual content must, of course, suffer as a result — but that’s inevitable, and the complete fusion of greater intellectual profundity, of a consciously historical content (both of which you ascribe, not without reason, to the German drama), with Shakespearean vivacity and wealth of action will probably not be achieved — and perhaps not even by the Germans — until some time in the future. Indeed, that, to my mind, is where the future of the drama lies. Your Sickingen is entirely on the right lines; the chief protagonists in the action are representative of certain classes and tendencies, hence of certain ideas of their time, and derive their motives not from the petty appetites of the individual but from the very historical current by which they are borne along. But there is one advance that might yet be made in that these motives should emerge more of themselves, in a live, active, as it were spontaneous manner, more through the development of the action, while on the other hand reasoned debate (in which, by the way, I rediscovered with pleasure your old eloquence before the Assizes and the popular meeting) becomes increasingly superfluous. You yourself seem to recognise this ideal as a goal, since you draw a distinction between stage drama and literary drama; I admit that Sickingen could be turned into a stage drama along the lines indicated, difficult though this would be (for it is truly no mean accomplishment). The characterisation of the protagonists is linked with this. You quite rightly oppose the cheap individualisation now prevalent, which amounts to nothing more than petty intellectual fireworks and is an essential characteristic of ineffectual imitative literature. At the same time it seems to me that a person is not characterised merely by what he does, but also by how he does it; and in this respect it would, I think, have done the intellectual content of the play no harm had clearer distinctions and stronger contrasts been drawn between individual characters. The characterisation of the ancients no longer suffices today, and it is here, I think, that you might to your own advantage have paid rather more attention to the importance of Shakespeare in the historical development of the drama. But these are minor points which I bring up only to show you that I have also concerned myself with the formal aspect of your play.

Now, as regards the historical content, you have presented what to you were the two most important aspects of the movement of that period very vividly and with justifiable reference to subsequent developments: the national aristocratic movement represented by Sickingen, and the humanist-theoretical movement, with its more extensive ramifications in the theological and ecclesiastical field, the Reformation. The scenes I like best are those between Sickingen and the Emperor and between the Legate and the Archbishop of Trier (here, in the contrast between the narrow-minded German prince of the church and the worldly Legate with his aesthetic and classical culture and political and theoretical foresight, you have, too, pulled off a nice piece of individual characterisation which nevertheless stems directly from the representative character of the two protagonists); in the scene between Sickingen and Charles the characterisation is also very striking. However, in making Hutten tell his life-story, the content of which you rightly describe as essential, you have chosen a desperate means of introducing that content into the play. Also of great importance is the conversation in Act V between Balthasar and Franz during which the former remonstrates with his master about the genuinely revolutionary policy he should have followed. It is here that the real tragedy becomes apparent; and, precisely because of this significance, it seems to me that it should have been rather more strongly indicated as early as Act III, in which there are several opportunities for this. But again I digress.

The attitude of the towns and the princes at that time is likewise portrayed more than once with great clarity, thereby pretty well exhausting what might be called the official elements of the movement as it then was. But something upon which I should say you had failed to lay due emphasis are the non-official, plebeian and peasant elements, with their concomitant theoretical representation. In its own way the peasant movement was just as national, just as hostile to the princes, as that of the aristocracy, and the colossal dimensions of the struggle in which it succumbed contrast most significantly with the levity with which the aristocracy, leaving Sickingen in the lurch, gave itself up to its historical calling of sycophancy. Even allowing for your concept of the drama which, as you will have seen, is rather too abstract, not realistic enough, in my opinion, I should say that the peasant movement deserved closer attention; certainly, the peasant scene with joss Fritz is true to type and the individuality of this ‘agitator’ is very accurately portrayed but, relative to the aristocratic movement, it does not represent with sufficient force what was then already a surging torrent of peasant agitation. In accordance with my view of the drama, which consists in not allowing the ideal to oust the real, or Schiller to oust Shakespeare, the introduction of society’s plebeian section, so wonderfully colourful at the time, would have provided material of a quite different kind with which to animate the play, an incomparable backdrop for the national aristocratic movement going on down-stage, which would itself thus appear in its true light for the first time. What bizarre portraits does this period of dissolving feudal ties not bring forth! Vagabond beggar kings, hungry mercenaries and adventurers of all kinds — a Falstaffian backdrop which, in a historical play in this sense, must needs be even more effective than in Shakespeare! But apart from that, I should say more particularly that neglect of the peasant movement is what has led you to give an incorrect idea, or so it seems to me, of one aspect of the national aristocratic movement also, while at the same time allowing the truly tragic element in Sickingen’s fate to escape you. In, my view, it never occurred to the bulk of the nobility then subject directly to the emperor to form an alliance with the peasants; their dependence on the income deriving from oppression of the peasants did not admit of this. An alliance with the towns would have been rather more feasible, but this did not come about either, or only in isolated instances. The national aristocratic revolution could, however, only have been effected by means of an alliance with the towns and the peasants, particularly the latter; and to my mind the tragic element lies precisely in the fact that this essential condition, alliance with the peasants, was impossible; that the policy of the aristocracy was therefore necessarily petty; that at the very moment when the aristocracy sought to take its place at the head of the national movement, the bulk of the nation, the peasants, protested against its leadership and hence ensured its downfall. To what extent there is any historical foundation for your assumption that Sickingen really did have some contact with the peasants, I am not able to judge, nor is it in any way relevant. So far as I can recall, by the way, whenever Hutten’s writings are addressed to the peasants, they skate over the ticklish question of the aristocracy and seek to focus the peasants’ wrath primarily on the clergy. But in no way do I dispute your right to portray Sickingen and Hutten as though it had been their intention to emancipate the peasants. However, this immediately presented you with the tragic contradiction whereby these two found themselves placed between the aristocracy on the one hand, who definitely did not want this, and the peasants on the other. Here, in my view, lay the tragic clash between the historically necessary postulate and the impossibility of its execution in practice. By discarding this element you reduce the tragic conflict to the fact that Sickingen does not join battle straight away with Emperor and Empire, but with one prince only (although here too your tact rightly leads you to introduce the peasants), while his downfall is made to ensue from nothing more than the indifference and pusillanimity of the aristocracy. This would, however, have been quite differently motivated had you laid more stress at an earlier stage on the mounting peasant movement and the mood of the aristocracy, inevitably grown more conservative as a result of the earlier Bundschuh and Poor Konrad movements. All this, incidentally, represents only one way in which the peasant and plebeian movement might be brought into the play; one could think of at least ten others which would be just as good, if not better.

As you can see, I am judging your work by a very high standard, indeed the highest there is, from both the aesthetic and the historical point of view, and the fact that I have to do so in order to raise an objection here and there will provide you with the best proof of my appreciation. Between ourselves criticism has, of course, for years been necessarily as outspoken as possible in the interests of the party itself; but this aside, it is always a great pleasure to me and all of us when we are given fresh proof that our party, irrespective of the field in which it makes an appearance, invariably does so with distinction. And that is what you, too, have done on this occasion.

In other respects it would seem that world events are about to take a truly delectable course. It would be difficult to imagine a better basis for a thorough-going German revolution than that provided by a Franco-Russian alliance. The water has to be right up to our necks before we Germans are gripped en masse by the furor teutonicus; and this time we would seem to be in sufficient danger of drowning. Tant mieux. In such a crisis all existing powers must necessarily be ruined and all the parties crumble one after another, from the Kreuz-Zeitung. to Gottfried Kinkel, and from Count Rechberg to ‘Hecker, Struve, Blenker, Zitz and Blum'; in such a struggle the moment must necessarily come when only the most ruthless and resolute party is in a position to save the nation and, at the same time, the conditions be given which alone make it possible to jettison completely all the old trumpery — internal dissension on the one hand and, on the other, the Polish and Italian appendages which are the legacy of Austria. We must not cede an inch of Prussian Poland and what [...]

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 461;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

London, 10 June 1859

Dear Frederick,

Two manuscripts received today. One of them splendid — yours on ‘fortification’, though I must say I feel some twinges of conscience about having made such demands on the little spare time you have. One grotesque, viz. Lassalle’s reply to myself and you respecting his Sickingen. A whole sheaf of closely written pages. Incredible that at this season and in the present historical circumstances, a man should not only find time to produce stuff of this kind himself, but actually presume that we have time to read it.

Ad vocem Volk. Should your booksellers actually deliver the little paper to you, which I doubt, you and Lupus will be surprised to see in tomorrow’s issue an announcement that there is some ‘prospect’ of our, etc., collaboration. The diplomatic reasons which decided me to take this step will be communicated by word of mouth.

Duncker: Nothing yet received, neither money nor copies. Tell Lupus about this; he'd already have had one otherwise.

Ad vocem Schramm: This great man was a failure in Berlin. His wife’s family council therefore decided that he should take a minor commercial post in Krefeld. Thereupon the ‘failure’ addressed a long scrawl to the Ministers in Berlin saying he had considered it his political duty to join combat with Minister Manteuffel, whom he abhorred, but now, having fulfilled that duty, and finding that Prussia was not à sa hauteur à lui [good enough for him] requested to be released from the commonwealth of subjects. Granted, and Schramm arrived in London along with the other parcels. Now intends, as he warned the Hohenzollern cabinet, to get himself ‘naturalised’ an Englishman. The worst blow that has befallen Prussia since the battle of Jena.

Ad vocem Lassalle In reply to his gigantic manuscript, wherein, by the by, he also mentions the ‘anonymous’ pamphlet he wrote ‘in the name of the party’, I sent him (today) a letter about 1/3 as long as the present one. As regards the pamphlet, all I said was: ‘Not our view at all. No point in writing about it, as we should be expressing our opinion publicly in print.'

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 472;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 22 July 1859

Dear Engels,

£3 received. Immediately paid out £2 to Hollinger and 15/- to Lessner. Out-of-town subscriptions are increasing (there are already 60) but are not payable until the end of the quarter and call for a weekly outlay on stamps. I am now convinced, 1. that there was a debt of about £7 of which I was not told before I left for Manchester; 2. that the advertisements (instead of £5, receipts were about 20/-) and Mr Scherzer’s London subscriptions — I have sacked him — were just a piece of private skulduggery. With proper management, which is now under way but whose results won’t make themselves felt for weeks to come, the advertisements alone will pay for the little sheet. Since more money is needed immediately, write to Dronke. If you tell the little man that for the time being the paper can only exist by party sacrifices and hence we are asking all party members to make such sacrifices, he can, if he wishes, get the letter printed. I am convinced that, within 6 weeks, the thing will be on a solid footing. But there can be no question of giving it up now that Gagern and Co., in short the entire 1848 gang, are again taking the stage. Thimm has asked us to put his name in the paper as our distributor in Manchester. I could not carry out my intention this week, for I was overcome by a kind of cholera as a result of the heat and was vomiting from morning till night. Being able to write again today, I have written for the Tribune, a glorious vindication of your military article, basing it on Francis Joseph’s and Bonaparte’s manifestos. The paper had been so much intimidated that it suppressed all your articles for a time. During my absence Blind was scheming to gain control of the Volk. I wrote him an exceedingly rude letter, which was followed by an interview. After that, however, there'll be no dunning the man for money for a while. Philistine Freiligrath hasn’t even paid his subscription, although pressed twice. Instead, when speaking to Mr Juch, he deprecated the ‘undignified’ tone of the Volk although he tells us that he is ‘delighted’ with it. *By and by we shall take our revenge upon these diplomatical fellows.*

You forgot to let me know whether you wish to do a review of my piece [Contribution to Political Economy]. There is great rejoicing among the fellows here. They imagine the thing’s a failure because they are ignorant of the fact that Duncker hasn’t even advertised it yet. Should you write something, don’t forget, 1. that it extirpates Proudhonism root and branch, 2. that the specifically social, by no means absolute, character of bourgeois production is analysed straight away in its simplest form, that of the commodity. Mr Liebknecht informed Biskamp that ‘never has a book disappointed him so much’, and Biskamp himself told me that he didn’t see ‘à quoi bon’ [what use it was]. Is Lupus back?

In your second article on the war you will not, I am sure, forget to stress the inadequate strength of the pursuit after victory had been won, and the pitiful whining of Bonaparte, who had at last got to the point where Europe did not, as hitherto, out of fear of revolution, permit him to play the old Napoleon within given limits. In this connection it would be pertinent to recall the 1796-97 campaign, when France was not able to take her time preparing all her resources for ‘a localised war’ but, with her finances completely disrupted, had to fight not only beyond the Rhine, but also beyond the Mincio and the Adige. Bonaparte is actually complaining that his ‘succès d'estime’ are now begrudged him.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Can’t anything be got out of Heckscher?

Have you written to Duncker?

Ask Dronke to write for us as well.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 497;

First published: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

London, [not before 2 October 1859]

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

It is very good of you to be the first to take up the pen again, and this in a matter touching my interests, despite the fact that appearances speak against me.

As for my silence, let me say briefly:

First, I didn’t get either of your letters until weeks after their despatch, namely on my return to London from a journey to Scotland via Manchester, made for business reasons. Meanwhile events had moved so fast that they had, as it were, removed the point of our debate. For the point in question did not relate — nor, between you and me, could it have related — to the nationalities issue, but rather to the most suitable policy to be pursued by the German revolutionaries towards their own governments and other countries. Now I would nevertheless have sent a reply, if a belated one, had there not been fresh grounds for delay. In one of your letters you asked for evidence relating to Vogt. That evidence was in the hands of Karl Blind. The ‘worthy democrat’, however, though privately inclined to play at moral indignation as well as stir up scandal, resisted all expostulations to come out. Consequently I broke with him. (He even denied authorship of Zur Warnung, the anonymous pamphlet published in London and reproduced in the Augsburger. However, I have succeeded in obtaining documentary evidence against him (Blind) in this matter, to which I shall revert ‘at the right time and the right place’.) This provided a fresh occasion for prolonging my silence. And, since ‘the evil deed is accursed in that it must constantly engender evil’ my silence itself became an obstacle to my breaking it. On top of that — and I beg you not to regard this simply as a figure of speech — there was a whole series of domestic complications, as yet by no means eliminated, which in fact robbed me of all desire to write. So much for my silence, which, however, and despite all appearances to the contrary, was in no way motivated by ill-will.

Now as to Duncker, on my return to London I found a letter from him which apparently rendered it impossible for me to make any further direct approach to the man regarding the sequel. On the other hand, not having written to you for so long, I couldn’t possibly start off by suddenly writing to you about my own concerns. So I let the matter drop, on the tacit assumption that, if I hadn’t heard from Duncker by a certain date, I should have to approach another publisher.

However, one of your earlier letters led me to suppose that Duncker had undertaken to publish 2 instalments, or rather the first section ('Capital in General') in its entirety. But on the other hand the first instalments was much more compendious than had been originally planned, nor, for that matter, did I want him to be a ‘publisher malgré lui’ [against his will]. However, since the first 2 instalments form a whole, it would be desirable for them at least to appear under the same imprint.

I shall now be obliged to remodel the thing completely, as the manuscript for this second instalment is already a year old ; and, since my circumstances do not permit me to devote much time to the matter just now, I hardly think I shall be able to finish it before the end of December. That, however, would be at the very outside.

I am busy with an English rendering of the first instalment and this, too, has been disrupted by a bad domestic spell. At any rate I am assured of a better reception in England than in Germany where, so far as I am aware, nobody inquires after the thing or gives a straw for it. All I want is to place the whole of this first section, at least, before the German public. Should the latter continue to pay no heed to the work, I intend to put all subsequent sections straight into English and no longer concern myself with the German philistines.

Vale faveque.

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 539;

First published: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

London, 6 November 1859

Dear Lassalle,

You'd have had a reply from me sooner if my spare time hadn’t been entirely taken up with a mass of repulsive domestic business.

1. Thank you for your good offices with Duncker. You're mistaken, by the by, if you think that I expected glowing tributes from the German press, or gave a rap for them. I expected to be attacked or criticised but not to be utterly ignored, which, moreover, is bound to have a serious effect on sales. Considering how vehemently these people have, at various times, railed against my communism, it was to be expected that they would now unleash their wisdom against the theoretical argument in support of the same. For after all, Germany is not without its specialised journals on economics.

In America the first instalment [Contribution to Critique of Political Economy] was discussed at length in the entire German press from New York to New Orleans. I only fear that it is too theoretical in tone for the working-class public there.

2. ad vocem Vogt.

You'll have been surprised by the information in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung concerning Vogt’s law-suit and by the strange company in which I find myself in that journal. Here, in brief, is the story:

Besides the Hermann, there used to, be a so-called working-men’s paper here, Die Neue Zeit, whose last editor was Edgar Bauer. One of his colleagues on that paper was Biskamp, who was a schoolmaster out in the country. The paper was opposed on what is called principle to the Hermann. For Edgar Bauer thought it was time he played at being a communist. I, needless to say, had nothing to do with this. Bauer wrote and told Biskamp that, in order to rid himself of a rival, Kinkel had transferred his sheet to the printer of the Neue Zeit which last, depending as it did on that printer’s credit, was completely in his power. On receipt of this letter, Biskamp rushed up to London to discover, not only that Kinkel had destroyed the Neue Zeit by swapping printers, but also that Edgar Bauer, the editor of the so-called ‘working-men’s paper’, had joined the editorial staff of the Hermann and gone over to Kinkel.

A brief note re Biskamp: He was at one time a co-publisher of the Hornisse. He edited the Bremer Tages-Chronik in company with Dulon and Ruge. In Switzerland he joined the Communist League. His relationship with Ruge meant that we never saw each other while he was in London. I took no notice of him, but he occasionally took notice in a polemical way of me. This man is a strange mixture of noble instincts, innate (and also physical) weakness, asceticism and idleness, Kantian moral consciousness and tactless whimsicality. His nervous irritability makes him liable to surrender any position ‘on principle’, to precipitate himself suddenly into the most hopeless situation, to endure it passively and stoically for a while, and then suddenly perpetrate stupidities bordering on the iniquitous. The man as I paint him here is not, of course, the man I used to know. I am painting a portrait which experience has gradually pieced together for me.

But to return to my story. Biskamp at once gave up his schoolmaster’s post to take up ‘the struggle of labour against capital’ (i.e. Kinkel), started Das Volk without any means whatsoever except subsidies from a workers’ society, etc. So long as the thing lasted he was, of course, on the verge of starvation. He had secured work as correspondent to a couple of papers in Germany, but lost this as soon as his new function became known. A few private lessons barely enabled him to eke out the life of a Bohémien.

Before continuing I should point out that I have had no connection whatever with any of the public workers’ associations (including the so-called communist one) since 1851. The only workers with whom I foregather are 20-30 picked men to whom I give private lectures on political economy. Liebknecht, however, is chairman of the workers’ society which helped Biskamp to start Das Volk.

A few days after the birth of this paper Biskamp and Liebknecht came to see me and invited me to collaborate. At the time I declined outright, partly for want of time and partly because I was about to leave London for a longish spell. All I promised was to obtain a few financial contributions from friends in England, which in fact I did. On that same day I related to both of them what Blind had told me with great moral indignation the day before about Vogt, and also named my source. Biskamp used this for an article, as I later saw. During my absence he reprinted in Das Volk Blind’s anonymous pamphlet, which was printed by the same press as Das Volk At the same time Liebknecht sent a copy of the pamphlet to the Augsburg Allgmeine Zeitung for which he supplies the English article. (As to this last circumstance, I should point out that the refugees here contribute to all papers indiscriminately. I believe myself to be the only exception to this, as I do not contribute to any German paper. Be it noted, by the by, that Palmerston, through the channel of the Prussian embassy, which in turn used Williams — the English bookseller — for its organ, has tried to get Liebknecht removed from the A. A. Z. on account of his anti-governmental tendencies.)

After my return to London, Das Volk received from myself and Engels various contributions wholly unrelated to the affaire Vogt. Apart from a few attacks on Schleinitz’s diplomatic circulars, all I supplied was a humorous comment or two on Kinkel’s aesthetic dissertations in the Hermann viewed from a grammatical standpoint [Quid Pro Quo]. Life here in London is too tough for one not to indulge in distractions of this kind every 8 years or so.

The paper came to a sudden end, mainly for lack of money. Biskamp, besides being wholly without means of subsistence, contracted a painful disease and had to go into the German hospital. When he was discharged he must literally have starved to death if I hadn’t taken care of him. During this period he wrote to several German papers in the hope of becoming their correspondent, but to no effect. Then he got a letter from the editorial board of the A. A. Z., whereupon he wrote them that shockingly discreditable epistle — behind the backs of his friends, of course. Naturally he believed he was writing a private letter. The idiot is now overcome with contrition and for a couple of days has neither eaten nor slept. I don’t know what will become of him. If I have told you all this at some length, it is not in order to justify the man’s behaviour, but to explain it. If he were so venal a fellow as most of the ‘democrats’ here, he wouldn’t have precipitated himself into a situation which he hadn’t the strength to endure.

As to my statement in the A. A. Z., the circumstances are as follows:

As you know, Blind published his denunciation of Vogt. At the same time an anonymous article by him appeared in the London Free Press (Urquhart’s paper), containing much the same information — I enclose the article with this letter — but omitting Vogt’s name and sundry other particulars. Now when Vogt brought his action against the A. A. Z., and the latter appealed to Liebknecht, he, being responsible to the A. A. Z., naturally appealed to me and I to Blind. The latter refused to answer for his statements. It was all due to a misunderstanding, he said. The whole thing had nothing to do with him. He even went so far as to give his word of honour that he had had nothing to do with the anonymous pamphlet. Repeated requests were of no avail. This conduct was all the more infamous in that the worthy fellow knew that Vogt was citing me — privately in London and publicly in Switzerland — as the source of the denunciation so as to represent the whole thing as deriving from the malicious ill-will borne by the communist towards the ‘eminent democrat’ and ‘ex-imperial regent’. I therefore began by turning to Collet, who made no bones about stating that Blind had written the article in The Free Press. Next, I obtained a statement from the typesetter who had set the type for the pamphlet. Blind’s duplicity called for castigation. I had absolutely no intention of pulling this ‘republican’s chestnuts out of the fire for him. Indeed, it is only by forcing him and Vogt to attack one another that the truth will come out. Finally, like any paper which accepts a denunciation of this kind, the A. A. Z. deserves to be supplied with any information that can possibly help to throw light on the facts.

I shall now have the whole of Germany’s vulgar democracy about my ears, and Biskamp’s folly will make this all the easier for them. Needless to say, it would never occur to me to skirmish in insignificant journals with all these insignificant scoundrels. However, I believe it necessary to make an example of one of them, namely Mr Eduard Meyen of the Freischütz, pour encourager les autres. I'm sending one copy to the A. A. Z., one to the Reform in Hamburg and I'd like the copy I sent you to appear in a Berlin paper.

I must save up my exposé of the Italian war, an affair upon which I have in no way changed my views, for my next letter (shortly).

Salut.

Your

K. M.

P.S. Much as I detest alluding to this point, my financial affairs are in a dangerously critical state — so much so that I can hardly find time for my articles for the Tribune, let alone the political economy. Admittedly I shall be receiving over £40 in 8 to 10 weeks’ time. But for me the essential and crucial point is to anticipate its receipt. Can you help me with a bill transaction towards that end? In 8, or at most 10, weeks’ time I shall be good for £50.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 542;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

London, 26 November 1859

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Engels,

On Monday I sent you a long letter about the wrangles down here. On Tuesday I sent you the Gartenlaube and Beta’s article. Well, every day I've been waiting to hear from you since, in affairs of this kind, it is only your letters that revive my wife’s drooping spirits. One can simply laugh off such rubbish if the rest of one’s life is tolerable. But in my circumstances they weigh heavily upon the family.

Well, today I'm sending you:

1. A letter from Lassalle to myself. The ‘statement’ I sent the Volks-Zeitung is the same as appeared in No. 325 of the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung (Another, two columns long, about my attitude to vulgar democracy, etc., appeared in No. 139 of the Hamburg Reform. I took the opportunity of naming you as the author of Po and Rhine, a fact obstinately kept dark by that same vulgar democracy.) From Lassalle’s letter you will see that he, who in point of fact was piping the same tune as Vogt, would much rather the Berlin public did not know about my opposition to Vogt and his propaganda.

From the same letter you will see that he at last intends to set to work on his ‘Political Economy’ but is clever enough to wait another 3 months until he is in possession of my second instalment. The motives for the consistent failure, even on the part of one who is ‘friendly’, to break the conspiration de silence are now plain.

I have taken the opportunity of giving Lassalle a brief outline of my views on the Italian question, at the same time telling him that, should anyone wish at such a critical moment to speak in the name of the party, the following alternatives must hold good. Either he consults the others beforehand, or the others (euphemistic for you and me) have the right to put their own view before the public, without regard for that anyone.

2. A letter from Liebknecht to Freiligrath. You will have seen from the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung that Freiligrath declared, firstly, that he had been made out to be Vogt’s accuser ‘without his knowledge and consent'; secondly, that ‘he had never written a line for the Volk’ (doesn’t write at all).2 Mr Kolb, who had wrongly construed a private letter from Liebknecht to himself and had been told off by Cotta after this statement of Freiligrath’s, naturally sacrificed Liebknecht as a scapegoat. But Freiligrath, who is a subaltern of Fazy’s, was outraged and wrote an exceedingly rude letter to Liebknecht. I enclose Liebknecht’s reply to it.

Now Freiligrath’s letter to Liebknecht contained the following passage:

‘I possess only one letter from Vogt, dated 1 April 1859. This letter, as Marx only last Saturday conceded’ (I underline),'does not contain a single syllable that might be used to substantiate a charge against Vogt. Why on earth, then, should I be trying to prove him guilty of attempted bribery?'

Now although on the one hand Freiligrath is indispensable to me for drawing bills on New York, although on the other I wish for political reasons to avoid a breach with him, and, lastly, am fond of him personally with all his faults, I could not do otherwise — it was absolutely essential — than send him a formal protest about the above lines. For who is to guarantee that he will not write the same thing to Vogt and that the latter will not have it published? The matter he misrepresents was as follows:

During my meeting with him, at which the topic was Blind, not Vogt, I told him (there was no question of a debate, and still less of his calling me to account, as might be inferred from the words ‘Marx conceded') that he himself had considered Blind to be the author of the pamphlet, the latter having told him what he had told me; also that, before my meeting with Blind on 9th May, I had known nothing at all about Vogt’s activities, save his letter to Freiligrath from which — as he, Freiligrath, would recall — I did not infer bribery, but rather found therein the same old, all too familiar, superficially liberal pot-house politics of his. This is, after all, not at all the same thing as ‘conceding that the letter did not contain a single line that might be used to substantiate a charge’. I pointed this out to him, at the same time expressing my astonishment at his failure to call Blind to account for having, in The Free Press, treated similar letters (including Freiligrath’s) as corpora delicti. So far I have had no answer from him, although he usually replies at once. It is possible — and this would be disastrous — that he has taken this opportunity to sever old party ties which, or so it would seem, have long become irksome to him. However that may be, I was bound to protest against his account of the affair.

Enough of this rubbish.

Yesterday a Tory journalist told me it was his intention to provide evidence next week in a Tory Weekly (the Weekly Mail, I think) to the effect that Garibaldi was receiving money from Bonaparte while still a merchant in South America. Nous verrons. Regards to Lupus.

Your

K. M.

Apropos. In my article in the Tribune yesterday I said that I would shortly be writing about the rifle movement over here. So I should be glad if you would write about it.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 544;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

Manchester, 28 November 1859

7 Southgate

Dear Moor,

If I didn’t write last week it was because I had given Lupus all the papers; nor did I recover them for several days having, in the interval, repeatedly failed to get hold of him. Lupus is of the same opinion as myself, namely that Freiligrath’s behaviour hardly admits of further party relations with him, but that on purely party grounds, and aside from your personal position, you are absolutely justified in avoiding any breach for the present s'il y a moyen — it would be a triumph for Kinkel and Co. which they would trumpet abroad and exploit for all they were worth. But it’s something we shan’t forgive the weak-minded ass. If his relationship with Fazy really compelled him to make a statement at all, Freiligrath ought to have consulted you which would at any rate have resulted in something other than the inane affair which he caused to be published in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung. He would seem to be dead keen on an amnesty, to judge by his strenuous denials of all participation in the Volk But his getting on to personal terms with Mr Bettziech, receiving him in his own house, is something which Lupus, who went with Freiligrath to see Bettziech at the time of the How do you do? affair, will never forgive him. And it really is a dirty trick. As things are now, however, it seems questionable whether we can go on much longer without an open breach with Freiligrath; he is increasingly subject to the literary man’s itch, nor will madame fail to point out morning, noon and night that Mr Beta, Kinkel and company do at least praise him publicly, whereas all he gets from us even privately is a modicum of recognition, and we can never be relied on to make him ‘known by reason of his fame’. However, Freiligrath is all too well aware that, while Kinkel and Co. may be of use to him in peacetime, he would be nothing without us at the moment of battle, and that he could never ally himself with our enemies without running all manner of unpleasant risks. He will, I think, take care not to go too far and will finally pin his hopes on our forbearance.

Your ‘Declaration’ in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung will put Blind into a very nasty position. How, without discrediting himself, he will lie his way out of the pass his lies have brought him to, I fail to see.

These shabby goings-on must indeed be a sore trial to your wife. However, this rubbish, too, will pass and, I hope, soon. Within a few weeks it will no doubt be possible to drop Mr Freiligrath and leave him to stew in his own juice. But now I must say goodbye for today; I am about to go home and shall send an article on the rifle movement by the night mail. There will be several of them, at any rate.

Warm regards to your wife and the young ladies.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 547;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

London, 10 December 1859

Dear Engels,

Article received. I trust your health has improved.

As to the Freiligrath business, more in the course of this letter. I presume you saw the Hermann of a week ago today containing ‘Vorletzte Sitzung des Schiller-Comités’, a self-portrait of the scoundrelly bunch of lumpenproletarians which has gathered round Gottfried Kinkel. The article was written by the worthy Beta.

What do you make of Mr Lassalle’s notifying me all at once of his ‘Political Economy’. Does this not explain why my work [Contribution to Political Economy] was, firstly, so much delayed and, secondly, so badly advertised? Lassalle lives in Duncker’s home, or so I am told by Fischel of Berlin (was in England for a few days; editor of the Berlin Portfolio — Urquhartite — of which Nos. 1 and 2 contain excerpts from my anti-Palmerston pamphlets on Poland and Unkiar-Skelessi). In Berlin, it would seem, he (Lassalle) is noted for his vanity. The stick with which he was given a “drubbing” was his own — a memento bought in Paris, Robespierre’s stick bearing the device, liberté, égalité, fraternité!

I wrote and asked Lassalle whether he might not be able to get hold of some money for me (against a bill on myself which I would give him). He replied saying that he himself was living on credit until July, and had appropriated Duncker’s floating surplus. Then he suggested I draw a bill on him (Lassalle), discount it here, and send him the money before it fell due. But over here the name of Lassalle is not, of course, worth 1/100 of a farthing. I have latterly been cited at the County Court — by sundry fellows — quite small ones, such as the milkman, etc., and can, in fact, see no way out of the crisis which has grown steadily worse for the past half year. Extra expenses, e.g. about £5 for the rotten Volk lawsuit, and Mr Biskamp, whom I have fed for three months (and am not yet quit of), have, indeed, contributed their mite to the predicament. But all in all that made little odds. What is really devilish is not having a Bamberger here in London any more, for there are at present considerable possibilities in regard to bill transactions. Had fat philistine Freiligrath so wished, he might even have procured me a loan, for after all the philistine had the security to hand. But the fellow imagined (and no doubt actually boasted) that he was doing a great deal if, a week before I drew a bill on the Tribune, he loaned me £2 for a week. I have, by the by, made various other attempts to find a usurer. But, till now without any results.

I know that you yourself are in a fix as a result of being taken to court recently, and hence am telling you about the state of things only because I feel a need to discuss it with somebody. I hope that our domestic misfortunes won’t deter you from coming up here for a few days. It’s absolutely essential for my girls to have a ‘human being’ in the house again for once. The poor children have been too early tormented by domestic misery.

Now ad vocem Freiligrath.

Having waited a week, the philistine wrote the following letter:

‘Dear Marx,

‘I have received your letter of the 23 inst.’ (November) ‘and Liebknecht’s of the same date and, in order to simplify matters, am replying to both in this letter to you.

‘As far its Liebknecht’s letter is concerned, neither its presumptuous and impertinent tone, nor its content — an unsuccessful attempt to turn the tables could surprise me! Very nice, I must say! The London correspondent of the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung thinks fit to put my name at Mr Kolb’s disposal ad libitum and without previously notifying me; but I, if I protest against that abuse, must first give due notice!! The argument used by Liebknecht in support of this pretty doctrine is so jejune that it calls for no serious refutation on my part. I would simply remark that, in no circumstances and for no personal or party considerations whatsoever, shall I put up with arbitrary actions of this nature.

‘That’s all about find for Liebknecht!

‘And now for your letter.

‘I gladly allow your objection to the word “conceded” used in my letter to Liebknecht (of 21 November). I set no store by that word. Nor did it conceal any implication of any kind, and I might just as well have used “remarked” or “said”. So without further contention I concede your “conceded”. If we were both of the same opinion from the start, so much the better!'

(The slyboots doesn’t tumble to the fact that he is thereby conceding my opinion of Vogt and Blind.)

‘As regards your anti-Beta statement you must, of course, do exactly as you think fit. All the same, I believe that your first impulse to ignore the thing was the better one and more worthy of you! Now that you have had more than twice 24 hours for deliberation, you will have decided one way or the other. Whether this way or that is quite immaterial to me!

‘That you should have wished to inform me beforehand, “as is fitting between friends”, of your anti-Beta statement is most deserving of thanks. For that matter your statement, so far as I can see, was to be directed against Beta not against myself, and hence scarcely called for prior notification of your intention

‘At all events let me not omit to mention, en revanche that I myself shall probably be publishing another statement in which I shall repeat, once and for all, that I object to the use of my name in connection with the Vogt affair.

Your.

F. Freiligrath'

Under the circumstances I could, of course, only reply in a very moderate tone to this letter, malicious in intent and adorned with so many!! I therefore wrote by return:

‘Dear Freiligrath, ‘I am neither Liebknecht’s letter-writer, nor his attorney. I shall, however, send him a copy of that part of your letter which relates to him. ‘I have decided against the statement I had briefly envisaged, bearing in mind that “odi profanum vulgus et arceo” [I loathe the profane rabble and shun it] ‘While the statement was certainly against Beta, it was for that very reason bound to be also about you, as you will have seen from the summary. If only for that reason, I gave you notice of it, quite apart from the intimacy in, which your family and his appear in his opusculum. ‘You find it unpleasant to have your name mixed up in the Vogt affair. I don’t give a damn for Vogt and his infamous lies in the Biel Handels-Courier, but I will not have my name used as a mask by democratic tricksters. As you know, if someone is forced to call upon witnesses, no other person can “object” to being cited as a witness. In accordance with ancient English legal use, restive witnesses may, horribile dictu, actually be crushed to death. ‘Finally, as regards party considerations, I am used to being treated on behalf of the whole party as target for mud-slinging by the press, and to seeing my private interests constantly damaged by party considerations; on the other hand, I am equally used to being unable to reckon on any kind of private consideration towards myself.

‘Salut.

Your

K. M.

To this Freiligrath has not replied, and I don’t know exactly what footing we are on now.

Regards to Lupus.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 550;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[Manchester, 11 or 12 December 1859]

Dear Moor,

Herewith Post Office Order for £5 payable at Camden Town. Beta is the dirtiest dog I have ever come across. The infamous article put me into a real rage. Unfortunately the chap’s such a cripple already that no amount of beating could make him more misshapen than he is. However, sometime we shall have to wreak personal vengeance on the rascal. At any rate, some satisfaction can be derived from the fact that Kinkel’s beautiful soul is forced to seek its mate in a filthy pig of this kind. Just think what it takes to produce one single Bettziech! Whole generations of crippled moles having, by the Darwinian process of Natural Selection, evolved to the highest degree the faculty to live on dung, with shit for their chosen element. Filthy, blatant lies and impotent malice — such are the tools with which that mendacious parson Kinkel’s bad conscience seeks to keep on its legs. Let us get these fellows once face to face again, and you'll see what becomes of the gang of scoundrels.

Darwin, by the way, whom I'm reading just now, is absolutely splendid. There was one aspect of teleology that had yet to be demolished, and that has now been done. Never before has so grandiose an attempt been made to demonstrate historical evolution in Nature, and certainly never to such good effect. One does, of course, have to put up with the crude English method.

Warm regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 40, p. 551;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 13 December 1859

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Engels,

My best thanks for the £5. You can imagine how opportune it was, for in a day or two my wife has to pay an instalment to some fellow at the County Court. Yesterday I attempted one last family coup which may, perhaps, succeed. In which case there would be a chance of our being able to breathe again.

In Russia the movement is progressing better than anywhere else in Europe. On the one hand the constitutionalism of the aristocracy versus the Tsar, on the other of the peasants versus the aristocracy. Moreover, having at long last realised that the Poles have not the least inclination to be dissolved in Slav-Russian nationality, Alexander blustered frightfully. Thus the extraordinary successes of Russian diplomacy during the past 15 years, notably, since 1849, are more than counter-balanced. Come the next revolution and Russia will oblige by joining in.

You have, I imagine, read Bonaparte’s uneasy document addressed to the préfets in which he demands that exact returns be made of, inter alia, all respectable Orleanists, Legitimists, republicans and socialists, but more especially of ‘reliable’ Bonapartists?

From the enclosed note you will see that that louse, Juch — proprietor of the Hermann — feels entitled to approach me about the Stieber affair. The rotten swine had deleted from Eichhoff’s denunciation of Stieber in the Hermann everything relating to our trial, the ‘small, insignificant party’ being alluded to only en passant, I shall give the low scoundrel a proper dressing-down while, of course, doing everything in my power to damage that rascal Stieber. Eichhoff, by the by, was simply a tool where all these Stieber revelations were concerned. The business originated with ex-policeman Duncker in Berlin, whose removal in 1848 was largely brought about by Stieber’s yapping from the democratic camp. From then on Duncker got his private police to watch Stieber’s every step until he finally thought the moment had come for him to be kicked out. Furthermore, that ass Eichhoff was stupid enough to show his ass’s ears in his last article from Berlin in the Hermann in which he wound up his denunciations against Stieber — with what? With the request of the restitutio in integrum of virtuous Police Superintendent Duncker.

Nothing but fools and rapscallions, all these chaps, against whom Freiligrath bears no grudge, even if they do ‘take liberties with his name’.

Under all circumstances I hope to see you here for some days.

Regards to Lupus.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Little Jenny has made a copy of a Raphael Madonna especially for you, and of 2 wounded French soldiers for Lupus.

Engels to Jenny Marx

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

December 22, 1859

I am downright annoyed by this whole Freiligrath business. It is always the same old story with this belletrist rabble: they for ever want to be lauded to the skies by the newspapers and have their names in the public eye. The most wretched verse they turn out is more important to them than the greatest event in history. As this cannot be brought about without a coterie organisation, it is natural that this becomes the principal requirement and, unfortunately, we unlucky Communists are quite unsuited to this. Even worse, we know this whole fraud, scorn this organisation du succès and have an almost criminal aversion to becoming popular figures. If such a poet for this reason feels uneasy in such a party, it is indeed a sign of extreme narrow-mindedness, for he has absolutely none of the competition which he is sure to meet everywhere else; and he shows even greater narrowmindedness, if he throws himself into the arms of a group where, right from the beginning, he has to face the competition of Kinkel. Mais que voules-vous? [but what can you do?] For his very existence the poet needs incense, a great deal of incense....

It must be added that over the years the noble Ferdinand’s flow of poetry has dried up and the little that he still manages to squeeze out of his cranium is ignominiously bad. Hence one has to resort to various dodges, with complete works, etc., which cannot be done every day. So, if one is not to be forgotten, advertising becomes more necessary with every passing day. Who in fact spoke of Freiligrath from 1849 to I 858? No one. Only Bettziech has rediscovered this classic, who had been forgotten to such an extent that he was only used as a Christmas or birthday present, and who already figured in the history of literature, rather than in literature itself. The only one to blame for this was naturally Karl Marx with his “breathing.” But once Freiligrath is warmed through again by the incense of Gartenläube, you will see what sort of poetry he will spout forth!

What a petty, wretched, miserable business with these poets! This is why I praise Siebel. He is a really bad poet, of course, but he knows that he is a humbug through and through and desires only that he be given access to the advertising trade as a necessary procédé [occupation] of the times, for without this he would be nothing.

1860

Marx to Engels. after 11 Jan.

Marx to Bertalan Szemere. 12 January

Marx to Engels. 25 January

Engels to Marx. 26 January

Marx to Engels. 28 January

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 30 January

Engels to Marx. 31 January

Marx to Engels. 31 January

Marx to Bertalan Szemere. 31 January

Engels to Marx. 1 February

Engels to Marx. 2 February

Marx to Engels. 3 February

Marx to Joachim Lelewel. 3 February

Engels to Marx. 4 February

Marx to Engels. 4 February

Marx to Franz Duncker. 6 February

Engels to Marx. 7 February

Marx to Engels. 7 February

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 8 February

Marx to Engels. 9 February

Engels to Marx. 9 February

Engels to Marx. 12 February

Marx to J M Weber. 13 February

Marx to Engels. 13 February

Marx to Engels. 14 February

Marx to Engels. 15 February

Engels to Franz Duncker. 20 February

Engels to Ferdinand Lassalle. 20 February

Marx to J M Weber. 21 February

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 23 February

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 23 February

Marx to J M Weber. 24 February

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 27 February

Marx to Karl Schapper. 27 February

Marx to Muzembini. 27 February

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 29 February

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 3 March

Marx to J M Weber. 3 March

Marx to Collet Dobson Collet. 7 March

Marx to Bertalan Szemere. 13 March

Marx to Lucien Jottrand. 13 March

Engels to Ferdinand Lassalle. 15 March

Marx to J M Weber. 27 March

Marx to Bertalan Szemere. 4 April

Engels to Marx. 8 April

Marx to Engels. 9 April

Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. 9 April

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 9 April

Marx to Georg Lommel. 9 April

Engels to Emil Engels. 11 April

Marx to Engels. 12 April

Marx to J M Weber. 13 April

Marx to Engels. 16 April

Marx to Mor Perczel. 16 April

Marx to Engels. 17 April

Engels to Gottfried Ermen. 19 April

Marx to J M Weber. 21 April

Marx to Engels. 24 April

Marx to Ceorg Rheinlander. 24 April

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 24 April

Marx to J M Weber. 24 April

Marx to Engels. 7 May

Engels to Marx. 7 May

Marx to Engels. 8 May

Marx to Eduard Fischel. 8 May

Engels to Marx. 10 May

Engels to Marx. 11 May

Marx to Carl Siebel. 15 May

Marx to Engels. 28 May

Engels to Marx. 31 May

Marx to Eduard Fischel. 1 June

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. About 2 June

Marx to Engels. 2 June

Marx to Bertalan Szemere. 2 June

Marx to Engels. 14 June

Marx to Engels. 16 June

Engels to Marx. 20 June

Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. 23 June

Engels to Marx. About 25 June

Marx to Engels. 25 June

Marx to Engels. 26 June

Engels to Marx. 26 June

Engels to Marx. 27 June

Marx to Engels. 28 June

Engels to Marx. After 28 June

Marx to Engels. 9 July

Marx to Engels. 17 July

Marx to Engels. 21 July

Engels to Marx. About 23 July

Marx to Engels. 25 July

Marx to Engels. 29 July

Engels to Marx. 1 August

Marx to J M Weber. 2 August

Marx to Engels. 4 August

Engels to Jenny Marx. 15 August

Marx to J M Weber. 20 August

Marx to Bertalan Szemere. 21 August

Marx to Engels. 27 August

Marx to Engels. 29 August

Marx to Engels. 1 September

Marx to Engels. After 2 Sept.

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 7 September

Marx to Engels. 13 September

Marx to Engels. 15 September

Engels to Marx. 15 September

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 15 September

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 15 September

Marx to Engels. 20 September

Marx to Engels. 25 September

Engels to Marx. 1 October

Marx to Engels. 2 October

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 2 October

Engels to Marx. 5 October

Marx to Engels. 11 October

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 23 October

Marx to Engels. 25 October

Marx to Engels. 5 November

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 5 November

Marx to Engels. 13 November

Marx to Engels. 14 November

Marx to Engels. 21 November

Marx to Bertalan Szemere. 22 November

Marx to Bertalan Szemere. 22 November

Marx to Engels. 23 November

Marx to Franz Duncker. 24 November

Marx to Engels. 26 November

Marx to Engels. 28 November

Engels to Marx. 3 December

Engels to Marx. 5 December

Marx to Engels. 5 December

Marx to Engels. 6 December

Marx to Engels. 12 December

Engels to Marx. 18 December

Marx to Engels. 18 December

Engels to Marx. 19 December

Marx to Engels. 19 December

Marx to Engels. 23 December

Marx to Engels. 26 December

Marx to Engels. 27 December

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

[London, after 11 January 1860]

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 3;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels Works, Moscow, 1929.

Dear Marx,

Today I am sending you, under separate cover, a copy of the supplement to No. 349 of last year’s Kölnische Zeitung.

The Wilhelm Joseph Reiff mentioned therein as having a warrant out against him for “immoral conduct” is, so I am told, none other than the Reiff who appeared at the trial of the Communists in Cologne and who is presently over here and living off the party.

Now I have written to Reiff today (care of Liebknecht, not knowing how else to get in touch with him), informing him that I can no longer take any interest in him — that I forbid him to continue to use me as a reference — and that I will not tolerate his visits!

Thus, for my part, I have acted as I thought fit. What attitude the party will wish to adopt towards this dirty business is its own affair. You are now in possession of the facts!

Your

F. Freiligrath

I had never received the said ‘Reiff’ at my house because the fellow was suspect, and more than suspect, on account of his conduct at the communist trial, whereas the ‘fat rhymester’[Freiligrath] had taken him under his protection and saddled Liebknecht with him. Since then, the fellow has been living off Liebknecht, the Laplander [Anders], Lessner, Schröder, etc., and other poor devils, besides having the hat passed round at the Workers’ Society, etc.

The above letter from Freiligrath is all the news of the Teuton that I have had since the great retreat.[i.e. Freiligrath’s refusal to side with Marx against Vogt] And what an absurd letter it is. How grotesque the grandeur behind which there lurks the mentality of a cringing cur. F. seems to think that prose can be put to rights with the help of exclamation marks. ‘The party’ is to ‘adopt an attitude’. Towards what? — Towards Wilhelm Joseph Reiff’s ‘immoral conduct’ — or ‘this dirty business’, as Beta’s friend describes it. What an imposition. By the way, I might mention en passant that the ‘Association of German Men’, founded by an equivocal compositor called Zinn has nominated Prince Albert, Gottfried Kinkel, K. Blind and F. Freiligrath as its ‘honorary freemen’. The Cheruscan has, of course, accepted the charter.

Next Monday I have to pay a £1 instalment at the Marylebone County-Court. At the same time I have received from the Westminster County-Court (on behalf of a baker) the enclosed scrap of paper, which you must return to me. What I foresaw is coming to pass. No sooner has one philistine found his way to the County-Court than he is followed by another. If things go on like this, I really don’t know how I can keep my head above water. What is so disastrous about these constant interruptions is that I simply cannot get on with my work.

The review in the Darmstadt Militär-Zeitung is most welcome. Your recent pamphlet [Po and Rhine] has assured you a position as a military critic in Germany. As soon as you get the opportunity, you must publish something under your own name adding beneath it ‘Author of Po and Rhine’. Our rascally enemies shall see by and by that we're able simply to impress the public without first seeking permission from it or its Betas.

In my view, the most momentous thing happening in the world today is the slave movement — on the one hand, in America, started by the death of Brown*, and in Russia, on the other. You will have read that the aristocracy in Russia literally threw themselves into constitutional agitation and that two or three members of leading families have already found their way to Siberia. At the same time, Alexander has displeased the peasants, for the recent manifesto declares outright that, with emancipation, ‘the Communistic principle’ must be abandoned. Thus, a ‘social’ movement has been started both in the West and in the East. Together with the impending downbreak in Central Europe, this promises great things.

I have just seen in the Tribune that there’s been another slave revolt in Missouri which was put down, needless to say. But the signal has now been given. Should the affair grow serious by and by, what will become of Manchester?

Leonard Horner has resigned his post. His last brief report is replete with bitter irony. Could you possibly find out whether the Manchester mill-owners had a hand in his resignation?

It appears from the ‘Factory Inspectors’ Reports’ (of ‘1855'-'1859 first six months') that, since 1850, industry in England has made miraculous progress. The state of health of the workers (adults) has improved since your Condition of the Working-Class (which I have re-read at the Museum), whereas that of the children (mortality) has deteriorated.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

BROWN, JOHN (1800-59). American revolutionary, opponent of slavery. Leader of partisan troops in the partisan war against the slave owners in Kansas, 1854-55. He tried to form an army of runaway slaves. On October 16, 1859, he took the arsenal at Harper's Ferry by a daring attack and wanted to arm the slaves in the neighbourhood. On October 18, 1859, government troops recaptured the arsenal from him. He was executed on December 2, 1859.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 6;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 25 January 1860

Dear Engels,

Have you already heard about Vogt’s pamphlet, in which there are the most horrible scurrilities concerning me? And, what is more, the thing is being jubilantly acclaimed by the Teutonic bourgeoisie. The first edition has already been sold out. Yesterday, a leader in the National-Zeitung contained a long defamatory passage from it. (Any chance of your laying hands on this particular number of the Nat.-Zeit.? I haven’t been able to get hold of it here.) Now, what ought I to do? Mr Lassalle would seem to have taken such umbrage at my last letter that there hasn’t been a word from him since.

I should be grateful if you could have an article ready for Friday or Saturday (there is a ship sailing via Cork).

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 9;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 28 January [1860]

Dear Engels,

I have ordered Vogt’s pamphlet and shall also have one sent to you. It is the record (or first complete version) of his ineffectual lawsuit in Augsburg, together with an Introduction. The latter is directed especially against myself and would seem to be a second and amended edition of Müller-Tellering. As soon as the stuff arrives, we must see what we can do. Faucher told me with an intense pleasure that Vogt treats me pretty well en canaille and with exquisite contempt. The scoundrel tries to make the German philistine believe I am living here like a Dr Kuhlmann at the workers’ expense, etc. (Needless to say, I have kept the whole squalid business from my wife.)

A new military weekly has come out in Berlin. It seems to me that, on pretext of asking him about this paper’s whereabouts, you should immediately write to Lassalle. It is essential for us to have some sort of connection in Berlin just now. L.’s reply to you will show whether we can carry on with him or not. In the latter case — which, all things considered, would not be pleasant — I should have to have recourse to Dr Fischel (Prussian assessor), about whom more anon. There is no reason why, in your letter to L., you should not let fall the remark that I consider the obstacles (or at least his warnings in that regard) he placed in the way of my publishing a statement on Vogt in the Volks-Zeitung (the same, that is, as appeared in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung), to be a kind of conspiracy with Vogt on his and Duncker’s part. Then, of course, you might drop a word or two to the effect that, in view of the ambiguous attitude of sundry old party friends (a few incidental hits upon Freiligrath), the difficulty of my position and the infamies I have to contend with, my temper is, at times, a trifle frayed; further, that I have mentioned to you a letter I wrote to L. which the latter has apparently taken amiss. You, for your part, will naturally suggest that L. knows me too well not to overlook an occasional brusque remark, etc. Then he will at least cease to beat about the bush. I am altogether of the opinion that a certain amount of diplomacy is now called for — if only to find out just where we stand. After all, compared with the others, L. is still a horse-power.

The fact is the various gangs — first the imperial rascals, secondly the German National Association and, lastly, the liberals, are presently doing everything in their power to destroy us morally in the eyes of the German philistines. There can hardly be any doubt that, despite all the clamour for peace, there will be a new war, probably within the year, very probably before the advent of summer. In any case, the international situation is so complex that it is of the utmost importance to vulgar democracy and liberalism to stop us obtaining a hearing from, or access to, German philistia (i.e. the public). There comes a point when one can no longer turn a blind eye — i.e. show indifference — in personal and party matters. Vogt’s case does not lend itself to exactly the same treatment as that of a Tellering, a Heinzen or tutti quanti [all the rest]. In Germany this same ventriloquist is looked on as a scientific celebrity; he was imperial regent and is financed by Bonaparte. You might also — just, as it were, en passant — ask the noble Lassalle what action he thinks appropriate in the matter of V. In his letters to me, L. has committed himself too deeply to perform a complete volte face. At all events, an attempt must be made to force the fellow to adopt a definite position — aut, aut.

Fischel is a Prussian Urquhartite. In the Berlin Portfolio, of which he is the publisher, he has alluded to my anti-Pam pamphlets and printed some extracts from them. (On Urquhart’s express instructions.) He had been invited by the Urquhartites to come to England where he was paraded before the Foreign Affairs Committees as evidence of the triumphant ‘belief’ (in Urquhart) on the Continent. I met him while he was over here. He offered me his good services, should I require them in the North German press.

Hip-hip-hurray and away to Italy (by that louse Bamberger in Paris) is said to contain attacks on your articles in the Volk.

What did Mr Orges say in his statement? I missed it.

If possible, write something for Tuesday (it doesn’t have to be long) on the military importance of Savoy (and Nice) to France. Cf. Times of today, Normanby in the House of Lords.

Apropos! ‘In recognition of my services to the development of communistic principles’, I have received an invitation to the anniversary celebrations on 6 February of the ‘Workers’ Educational Society’ down here. (For these chaps still regard themselves as heirs to the old Windmill Association.) Similar invitations, if for different reasons, have gone out to Schapper, Pfänder and Eccarius. Circumstances being what they are, I have, of course, accepted the invitation, thus wiping out all traces of the old quarrel with the working men’s bunch. Mr F. Freiligrath has not been invited. Indeed, I must now take care not to run into Potbelly. For in my present state of fury over the filthy Vogt affair — and F. F.’s magna pars therein — fearful eruptions might well ensue. Regards to Lupus.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 11;

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin 1922

London, 30 January 1860

Dear Lassalle,

I was very glad to get your letter. For I had believed — and had written to tell Engels so — that your reason for not writing was pique at my last letter.

I can only spare a minute or two since I have a leader to write today for the New-York Tribune. Quite briefly then:

1. I shall send you the pamphlet on the ‘Communist Trial’ straight away. So far as I am aware, you have already had one from me.

2. Vogt has been careful not to let his Telleringian concoction — i.e. the first version — reach us here. Neither Freiligrath (whom I have just seen) nor Kinkel, nor the Hermann, nor any of the booksellers over here have had it. The imperial rascal wishes, of course, to steal a march on me.

What I know, I have learned from the National-Zeitung. A pack of Stieberian lies. I have written and told my lawyer in Berlin to sue the N-Z. for libel. What do you think of this? Let me know by return.

From your letter I see that Vogt himself admits having been bought indirectly by Bonaparte, for I know about the manoeuvres of your revolutionary Hungarians. I denounced them in London in an English paper and had five copies sent to Mr Kossuth. He kept his trap shut. In New York, and elsewhere, Hungarian refugees have adopted resolutions censuring him.

Your reasoning ad vocem Vogt eludes me. I shall write a pamphlet as soon as I get hold of his rubbish. But I shall begin by saying in the foreword that I don’t give a damn about the opinion of your German public.

Liebknecht is an upright man. The Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung is — to my mind — just as good as the N-Z. and the Volks-Zeitung.

To judge by the excerpts I have seen in the N-Zeitung, Vogt is some kind of Chenu or de la Hodde.

3. About my work on political economy — the second instalment, when it appears, will contain only the conclusion of section 1, Book 1, and there are six books. Hence you cannot wait until it is finished . However, you would, in your own interests, be well-advised to await the next instalment which contains the quintessence. Appalling circumstances are to blame for the fact that it isn’t yet in Berlin.

Salut.

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 13;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 31 January 1860

Dear Moor,

I intend to write to Ephraim Artful [Ferdinand Lassalle] tomorrow; a diplomatic missive such as this ought not to be sent off without due reflection. For a day or two now, I have been mulling over Savoy, Nice and the Rhine, a kind of sequel to Po and Rhine. I have made up my mind to offer the thing to Duncker; it won’t be more than 2 sheets long and might provide a good pretext for getting in touch with Ephraim. At all events, I shall write the thing in the course of next week, after which I shall immediately send the manuscript to Berlin. Apart from one or two matters concerning the French revolutionary campaigns in Nice and Savoy, no preparatory work is called for, so it will be soon done.

Obviously Mr Vogt must be given a thorough lambasting; but it’s difficult to say anything until we know what the fellow has actually published. At all events, you might just as well use Fischel as anyone else, provided he really does have connections. Moreover, little Jew Braun will now see that the significance of your statement and of the whole set-to between Vogt and the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung is of quite a different order to what the Berlin philistine at first imagined. As things stand, we must maintain all these connections, while the conspiration du silence and other intrigues, to which we must meanwhile turn a blind eye, will subsequently release us from all obligations as soon as some crisis necessitates a breach on genuinely political grounds.

As to the chances of a fresh set-to, I am entirely of your opinion. But I believe that if, despite Vogt and Co., we are to keep our end up so far as the public is concerned, we shall have to do it through our scientific work. We haven’t the money to organise the émigré press and several times we have seen that an émigré paper or German pamphlets printed in London never command a public (in Germany) unless the thing can be kept going for a year at least. In Germany itself direct political and polemical action, as our party understands it., is a sheer impossibility. So, what remains? Either we hold our tongues or we make efforts that are known only to the emigration and the American Germans but not to anyone in Germany, or else we go on as we have begun, you in your first instalment [Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] and I in Po and Rhine. That, I think, is the main thing just now and, if we act accordingly, no matter how much Vogt may howl, we shall soon be back on a footing, such as will enable us (whenever required) to publish the necessary personal statements in one German paper or another. The early appearance of your 2nd instalment is obviously of paramount importance in this connection and I hope that you won’t let the Vogt affair stop you from getting on with it. Do try for once to be a little less conscientious with regard to your own stuff; it is, in any case, far too good for the wretched public. The main thing is that it should be written and published; the shortcomings that catch your eye certainly won’t be apparent to the jackasses; and, when times become turbulent, what will it avail you to have broken off the whole thing before you have even finished the section on capital in general? I am very well aware of all the other interruptions that crop up, but I also know that the delay is due mainly to your own scruples. Come to that, it’s surely better that the thing should appear, rather than that doubts like these should prevent its appearing at all.

Mr Orges has issued a pur personal statement which reveals who this queer fish is. Originally a Prussian lieutenant of artillery at the military college in Berlin (1845-48), at the same time, he pursued his studies and obtained his doctorate; he left the service in March 1848 (his application to resign is dated 19 March ’48) and went to Schleswig-Holstein where he joined the artillery; in 1850, he joined the crew of a merchant vessel, in which he ‘served’ and sailed round the world; in 1851, he attended the Exhibition in London, which he reported for the A. A. Z.; he was then consorting with Schimmelpfennig, Willich, Techow, etc., and, subsequently, became the A. A. Z.’s military editor. At all events, there’s more to the man than anyone else on the paper, which he has set on its feet again. The leaders I attributed to Heilbronner are all by him. Nevertheless, I'll still be able to deal with him good and proper.

The invitation from the louts has come at a fairly opportune moment. But I trust that you won’t, of course, allow yourself to be drawn into anything else, for this is ground we know only too well; fortunately you live some distance away.

Many regards,

Your

F. E.

The Prussians have approached my old man with the intention of confiscating my assets to the tune of 1,005 talers, 20 [silver groschen] 6 pfennigs because of my alleged desertion from the Landwehr. My old man told them that he had no access to my assets, whereupon they calmed down. I am to be sentenced on 18 February.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 21;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 3 February 1860

Dear Engels,

After one minor alteration, or rather the deletion of one sentence, C. D. Collet yesterday declared himself willing, but, at same time, said that, as Urquhart was the actual editor, he must first submit the thing [Marx's letter to the editor of The Free Press against Vogt] to him, which means a delay of 24 hrs. Collet admitted that I could, of course, publish the statement malgré eux, but, if it was done the way he suggested, I could subsequently, to a certain degree, fall back on him and Urq. Well. I conceded this and intend to see what Father U. has to say. (For the sequel see immediately below.)

Incidentally, it’s no go either with a pamphlet or a statement in newspapers — just now. The pamphlet would be killed by the self-same press which now trumpets the grandeur of Vogt. The latter’s attack on me — he is obviously seeking to represent me as an insignificant and rascally bourgeois blackguard — (this emerges from everything I've learnt from hearsay up till now) is intended to be the grand coup of bourgeois vulgar democracy — and likewise of the Russo-Bonapartist riff-raff — against the party as a whole. Hence it must likewise be countered with a grand coup. Furthermore, the defensive does not suit our purpose. I shall sue the National-Zeitung. I've now made up my mind to do so. Not a great deal of money will be required for the time being — I am referring to the preliminary deposition in court. But lawyers will be exceptionally keen to make themselves available for, whatever happens, the lawsuit will make a great noise throughout the length and breadth of Germany. As soon as I have Fischel’s letter (it will arrive, I think, tomorrow) I shall issue a brief statement to the various German newspapers announcing that I am instituting an action for libel against the N.-Z. in Berlin. In its second article, which I have got, I have already discovered items so actionable as to bring about its immediate undoing in a legal sense. This lawsuit will be the peg on which we can hang the whole of our riposte to the public at large in court. Later on, we can turn our attention to that bastard Vogt.

When you consider that in a week or two, in connection with Stieber, the Cologne communist trial will be re-enacted all over again, this vile attack could, if skilfully exploited, help rather than hinder us, for this will at once enable us to state our case forcefully to the mass of the workers.

On the other hand, what evidence can Vogt or the National-Zeitung produce against us? At the most, there is Techow’s gossip and, perhaps (in the worst case), some not altogether pleasant reviews by Lüning but, these apart, the fact that Vogt knows nothing of conditions here and makes the most absurd mistakes is apparent if only from his article in the Biel Handels-Courier.

So my plan is this: Next week, as soon as Vogt’s rubbish arrives, I shall come and visit you for a few days in order to talk the whole thing over. As to the costs of the action, Dronke (who, by the by, owes me money) must also bear his share. (Whatever happens you must come here a few days at Easter.)

For the rest (I have already written to everyone imaginable), in addition to procuring the necessary material for the action, I'm working on my Capital. If I set about it with determination, it will be finished in 6 weeks and, after the lawsuit, it will be a success.

A fine thing it would be — with a crisis in the offing, with the King of Prussia at death’s door, etc. — if we were to allow ourselves to be finished off in this way by Imperial Vogt et cie., or even — autore Lassallo to cut our own throats.

The enclosed piece of paper will tell you what Mr Vogt is now about and how, in your pamphlet, you can deal him a contemptuous kick, if only by way of a marginal note.

Your

K. M.

As you will see front the contents of my letter, the anti-Blind operation is proceeding independently of the German operation, but will be used to further the latter.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 32;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929.

[London,] 9 February 1860

Dear Engels,

To have offered your pamphlet [Savoy, Nice and the Rhine] at two louis d'or per sheet is shameful. Pamphlets of this kind ought to be sold, not by the sheet, but as a whole. Even 40 talers per sheet would be too little. Incidentally, Campe is better than Duncker. The publisher who brings out the Darmstadt Militär-Zeitung would gladly take the pamphlet, too. Actually, the main thing is that it should come out quickly and, if I were you, I would settle this matter, at least, by telegraph with that louse, Duncker.

I have been in a secret and confidential correspondence, with The Daily Telegraph since the day the shit appeared. For before making amende honorable, the fellow — I was as rude as hell to him in my letter — wants to await his correspondent’s reply, whereas I demanded the immediate insertion of at least a brief note. Whatever he does or does not insert, I shall now bring down a libel action on his head. The circumstances of the case being what they are, any lawyer would happily undertake the thing on spec., as did, for instance, Edwin James, who volunteered in Ernest Jones’s libel action against Reynolds. I wrote to Ernest Jones about this yesterday. On the same Tuesday as the thing appeared, by the by, I wrote to the editor of Palmerston’s mob-paper 1) saying, inter alia: ‘That letter purporting to have been written from Frankfort-on-the-Main, but which was in fact indited at Berlin, is nothing but a clumsy amplification of two leaders etc etc.’ in the Berlin National-Zeitung. The writer, i.e. The Daily Telegraph’s swine of a Berlin correspondent, is a Jew by the name of Meier, a relative of the City-Proprietor’s who is an English Jew by the name of Levy. Hence, both these fellows rightly accuse Heine — juvante [with the help of ] Vogt of being a baptised Jew. Herewith Izzy’s last letter, which you should retain as a curiosity. Calls himself objective, does he? Inimitable, the plasticity of this most unhellenic of all Wasserpolack Jews! My only reply to the fellow was an immediate announcement in the papers — including the Volks-Zeitung — to the effect that I was bringing a libel action against the N-Z. (In each case I enclosed the circular about Blind, although, according to the great Izzy, I ought ‘not to delude myself as to the force of that argument’.)

All this week, by the by, I've been prevented from writing anything for the Tribune. I have had to send out fifty letters at least, running round to see Collet and God knows who else not considered. And on top of that there was the correspondence with the beastly Telegraph and the correspondence with the Star, to which I sent the whole of my correspondence with the Telegraph. The enclosed letter front the Star is to be put on your files. I have also written to Reynolds. Shall see what he does. Then there was the running in connection with Wiehe and going to the police. The result you will find below. Two replies so far to my letters to the Continent — in so far as they weren’t just to newspapers. One from Schily. Priceless. Contains the whole Brimstone Gang and Bristlers’ story. Another letter from Szemere. Most valuable on account of disclosures about, the revolutionary Hungarians’ ‘own’ (excluding Bonapartist) funds out of which, so Vogt maintains, his money was received. A letter from Imandt, not so bad. One or two points, at any rate. I am still awaiting an answer, notably from Mr Reinach in Neuchâtel, who is said to be a walking chronique scandaleuse on the subject of the imperial bailiff. (Apropos. What address did the spy Häfner give in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung? There’s a point I want to verify with him.) Have also written to Borkheim (whom I have never met personally). Was Chief of the Brimstone Gang in Geneva who hung out at the Café de la Couronne and with whom on your occasional excursions you sometimes used to get tipsy, or so Schily tells me in his letter.

I have drawn up the indictment against the Nat-Zeit. for the public prosecutor’s office at the Berlin municipal court. It will go off before I come up to you. But I must wait until I have Fischel’s answer with regard to the commencement and conclusion, the prescribed form of address, etc. Should I send the package (since it has to include all manner of manuscripts, documents) to Berlin by post or by parcel company? It should at all events be registered.

I have rummaged through everything I have here in London in the way of letters and newspapers for the period 1848-59, and sorted out and put in order what we need. Now you must get things ready so that I find everything that’s available in one ‘great pile’ when I get to Manchester.

Well, on Monday there was the working-men’s banquet, attended by eighty people. An indignant anti-Vogt resolution was unanimously adopted by ‘the proletarians’. The beastly Hermann asked me to report on it. This I refused to do, but told them to obtain a brief account from Papa Liebknecht.

Apropos, to return à nos moutons, i.e. Lassalle. Not knowing, when I got his first letter, whether you had written to him as we had originally agreed (when circumstances were otherwise), I told him in a couple of lines that I had thought the only explanation for his many-month-long silence must be annoyance at my last, somewhat rude (in fact excessively rude), letter. I said that I was glad this was not the case, and also that I had informed you of my misgivings. Well! What a fuss the brute goes and makes about it! How presumptuous the moral attitude adopted by the chap towards Liebknecht ! And this is the fellow who resorted to the most impudent means and consorted with the most impudent individuals au service de la comtesse de Hatzfeldt! Has the brute forgotten that, though I wanted to have him admitted to the League, he was rejected on account of his ill-repute by the unanimous decision of the Central Authority in Cologne? In fact, I believe, delicacy impelled me to keep the fellow in the dark about all this, as also about the working men’s deputation sent over to see me a few years ago from Düsseldorf, which adduced the most scandalous and in part irrefutable allegations against him! And now just look at the pretentious ape! No sooner — looking through his Bonapartist-tinted spectacles — does he think to descry some weak point in us, than he puffs himself up, pontificates, and strikes an — absurd, need one say? — attitude! And contrariwise, how completely do his legal instincts desert him for fear that I should not, to the benefit of my tender friend Lassalle, allow myself without more ado to be pushed into the background by Vogt. How he contradicts himself! How mean he becomes! One shouldn’t ‘stir things up even more’. ‘They’ wouldn’t ‘take it kindly’. Not take it kindly! They! For the sake of his pale-ale Berlin philistines, I am to let myself be browbeaten by schoolmaster Squeers, alias Zabel! Now I know just what to think of Mr Lassalle.

I immediately wrote to Blind — or perhaps, I should say, put into an envelope the circular, which affects him so very closely. He has kept his trap shut, of course. Instead, the brute goes running around town in the hope that things can be sorted out by tittle-tattle (vide below how much good that will do him). For the past few weeks the man’s been indulging in feverish activity, publishing pamphlet after pamphlet, blowing his own trumpet in the Hermann for all he’s worth, sucking up, fore and aft, to the few bourgeois whose acquaintance he made on the Schiller committee, pressing his own candidature as secretary of the recently conceived Schiller Association, now denying his ‘Patriots’, now making himself important in their eyes by means of semi-covert, statesmanlike allusions, etc. Well, all this amounts to, as you will instantly realise, is a drowning man clutching at a straw.

No one has behaved so abjectly as that pot-bellied philistine Freiligrath. I sent him the circular. He didn’t so much as acknowledge its receipt. Does the brute believe that I couldn’t, if so minded, immerse him up to the eyebrows in the lake of brimstone? Has he forgotten that I possess a hundred or more of his letters? Does he imagine that I don’t see him because he shows me his backside? Yesterday, I also sent the philistine the ensuing palliative, on the express condition that he should not say a word about it to anyone, including his friend the crypto-democrat Karl Blind. That will tickle him, and ere long he'll begin to feel uneasy at the undue proximity of the felonious friend in whose company he appeared before the public (as I reminded him quite en passant in my last letter) in the pages of the A.A.Z. Almost everyone, except for Freiligrath, even distant acquaintances, are behaving decently to me at this time of crisis.

But to come to essentials. Firstly, I discovered through Juch that Wiehe once committed a theft in Bremen, which was why he had to come to London. Secondly, I learnt through Schapper that Wiehe introduced himself to him as a compositor on the Volk, and it was he who had obtained the fellow’s present job for him. I briefed Schapper, who quietly intimated to Wiehe that he knew about the Bremen affair, but then proceeded to read my circular aloud in the presence of his employer and to cross-examine him. The fellow admitted everything. What the outcome was, you will see from the following document of which I possess an officially authenticated duplicate. One is going to Berlin. The other I shall keep here and employ in no uncertain manner against the nay-sayer. One further point. This will show you the kind of people these ‘honest fellows’ consort with. I had, of course, let Wiehe know that I would compensate hint for the loss of half a working day, the time he would have to spend with me at the police court. When all had been done, I gave him 2/6d. He remonstrated. Well, how much a day do you earn? I asked. About 3/-, said he, but I want five from you. After all, I ought to get something for telling the truth.

But the best is yet to come. I: *You have declined the money offer made by Blind and Hollinger in order to bribe you? He: Why decline! The rogues promised, but never gave me anything.* That’s compositor Wiehe for you. But Hollinger is a villain of far deeper dye. Vogele, whom I had arranged to see yesterday, did not turn up. Doubtless Blind-Hollinger made it worth his while to keep away. But they'll have thrown their money down the drain. For I know that this chap has still got a conscience, and so I shall work on him. My circular misled them into approaching the wrong man. They believed it meant that I wouldn’t be able to get at Wiehe himself. Well, now ad rem:

‘One of the first days of November last — I do not recollect the exact date — in the evening between 9 and 10 o'clock I was taken out of bed by, Mr F. Hollinger, in whose house I then lived, and by whom I was employed as compositor. He presented to me a paper to the effect that during the preceding 11 months I had been continuously employed by him, and that during all that time a certain German flysheet “Zur Warnung” (A Warning) had not been composed and printed in Mr Hollinger’s Office, 3, Litchfield Street, Soho. In my perplexed state, and riot aware of the importance of the transaction, I complied with his wish, and copied, and signed the document. Mr Hollinger promised me money, but I never received anything. During that transaction Mr. Charles Blind, as my wife informed me at the time, was waiting in Mr Hollinger’s room. A few days later, Mrs Hollinger called me down from dinner and led me into her husband’s room, where I found Mr Charles Blind alone. He presented me the same paper which Mr Hollinger had presented me before, and entreated me to write, and sign a second copy, as he wanted two, the one for himself, and the other for publication in the Press. He added that he would show himself grateful to me. I copied and signed again the paper.

‘I herewith declare — upon my oath — the truth of the above statements and that:

‘1. During the 11 months mentioned in the document I was for six months not employed by Mr Hollinger, but by a Mr Ermani.

‘2. I did not work in Mr Hollinger’s Office just at that time when the flysheet “Zur Warnung” was published.

‘3. I heard at the time from Mr Voegele, who then worked for Mr Hollinger, that he, Voegele, had, together with Mr Hollinger himself, composed the flysheet in question, and that the manuscript was in Mr Blind’s handwriting.

‘4. The types of the pamphlet were still standing when I returned to Mr Hollinger’s service. I myself broke them into columns for the reprint of the flysheet “Zur Warnung” in the German paper “Das Volk'’ published at London, by Mr Fidelio Hollinger, 3, Litchfield Street, Soho. The flysheet appeared in No. 7, d. d. 18th June, 1859, of “Das Volk'’.

‘5. I saw Mr Hollinger give to Mr William Liebknecht, of 14, Church Street, Soho, London, the proofsheet of the pamphlet “Zur Warnung”, on which proofsheet Mr Charles Blind with his own hand had corrected 4 or 5 mistakes. Mr Hollinger hesitated at first giving the proofsheet to Mr Liebknecht, and when Mr Liebknecht had withdrawn, he, F. Hollinger, expressed to me and my fellow Workman Voegele his regret for having given the proofsheet out of his hands.

Johann Friedrich Wiehe

Police Court, Bow Street

‘Declared and signed by the said Johann Friedrich Wiehe at the Police Court, Bow Street, this 8th day of February, 1860, before me Th. Henry, Magistrate of the said court.’

I deliberately brought the matter before Henry, he being the Government’s Magistrate who attends to all the political cases. The brand of English found in the above is not my responsibility, unlike the precise enumeration of the facts. What do you say now, Sir! ‘The argument lacks force’, says Izzy. Vive Izzy! For conspiracy against myself, combined with attempt at bribery of witnesses, so the Magistrate says, I could now get Mr Blind run out of town. So much for petty bourgeois artfulness!

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 58;

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

Manchester, 23 February 1860

6 Thorncliffe Grove, Oxford Road

Dear Lassalle,

I am at present having to conduct two lawsuits, one in Berlin and another in London, while, at the same time, simply working for a living, and am unable to write you more than a few lines. I must say that, having seen the book, I'm astonished at the ‘great deal of truth’ you discovered in Vogt’s romance, no less than at the pusillanimous advice you gave me.

As for the only part that wasn’t pure invention — Techow’s letter, or rather the substance thereof — I refuted this 7 years ago in a pamphlet which appeared in New York under the title The Knight of the Noble Consciousness, and to such good effect that all the yapping curs, who then still all belonged to the same pack, held their tongues and dared not utter a single word in reply.

What I should like you to do and what would be of inestimable use to me, would be to find out who is the Daily Telegraph’s correspondent in Berlin and where the brute lives, the number of the house and the name of the street. I believe he’s a Jew called Meier. It shouldn’t be at all difficult for you, in view of the position you occupy in Berlin, to find this out. Please advise me of it forthwith.

I enclose the pamphlet on the communist trial.

Your

K. M.

P. S. As for my mistrust (you compel me to talk like statesman Blind, vide the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung), that’s something at least you can’t complain of. Take, for instance, the enclosed note from Baltimore (United States). That note was sent to me in confidence. The official allegations against you (among them the assertions of a workers’ deputation from Düsseldorf) are in the League’s files, which are neither in my possession nor am I authorised to use them.

Marx To Ferdinand Freiligrath

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 80;

First published: considerably abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Erganzungshefte, No. 12, Stuttgart, 1911-1912, and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.

Manchester, 29 February 1860

6 Thorncliffe Grove, Oxford Road

Dear Freiligrath,

Your letter really warmed my heart, for there are very few people with whom I strike up a friendship, but when I do I adhere to it. My friends of 1844 continue to be my friends today. As to the strictly official part of your letter, however, this is based on some grave misapprehensions, hence the following by way of clarification:

1. The Eichhoff-Stieber case

The ‘material’ which I passed on to Juch (on which occasion I also pointed out to him that there were two reasons why he and Eichhoff did not deserve my support: firstly, the way in which they had referred to the Cologne trial in the Hermann; secondly, my conviction that Eichhoff is simply a tool of the ex-police official Duncker, who is seeking to avenge himself on Stieber as Vidocq once did on Gisquet in Paris; nevertheless, I would, I said, do all in my power to help overthrow Stieber and bring him to book, if only to avenge the death of my friend, Dr Daniels), this ‘material’, say, amounts to the following:

I gave Juch a copy of the Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne; N. B. this publication of mine, which was printed first in Switzerland and later in Boston, was cited by Vogt as a well-known book, and was in no sense ‘something secret’.

I told Juch that it contained all I knew.

Finally, I pointed out to him that Lewald (Eichhoff’s defence counsel) must examine Hirsch, who was in jail in Hamburg, as a witness. This was done. Hirsch has now admitted on oath that the ‘minute-book’ was a Prussian fabrication and an indictable offence in every other respect.

Hence the ‘revelations’ produced by the trial, thanks to my ‘material’, exonerate the former members of the League from any semblance of legal culpa and ‘expose’ the Prussian police system, which, once installed as a result of the ‘Cologne trial’ and the infamous pusillanimity of the Cologne jury, grew to be such a power in Prussia that it has finally become intolerable to the bourgeois themselves and even to Auerswald’s ministry. Voilà tout.

Besides, I'm astonished that you could even imagine that I might hand the police anything on a platter. I would remind you of letters sent from Cologne (1849-50), which you knew about and in which I was reproached in so many words with having dragged my feet too much (at the time, I did so for very good reasons, certainly not out of concern for myself) in regard to agitation by the League.

2. My lawsuit against the ‘National-Zeitung’

I would point out d'abord that, after the ‘League’ had been disbanded at my behest in November 1852, I never belonged to any society again, whether secret or public; that the party, therefore, in this wholly ephemeral sense, ceased to exist for me 8 years ago. The lectures on political economy I gave, after the appearance of my book (in the autumn of 1859), to a few picked working men, amongst whom were also former members of the League, had nothing in common with an exclusive society — less even than, say, Mr Gerstenberg’s lectures to the Schiller Committee.

You will recall that the leaders of the fairly ramified Communist Club in New York (among them. Albrecht Komp, Manager of the General Bank, 44 Exchange Place, New York) sent me a letter, which passed through your hands, and in which it was tentatively suggested that I should reorganise the old League. A whole year passed before I replied, and then it was to the effect that since 1852 I had not been associated with any association and was firmly convinced that my theoretical studies were of greater use to the working class than my meddling with associations which had now had their day on the Continent. Because of this ‘inactivity’ I was thereupon repeatedly and bitterly attacked, if not by name at least by inference, in Mr Scherzer’s London Neue Zeit.

When Mr Levy came over from Düsseldorf (for the first time), on which occasion he frequently called on you, too, he actually proffered me a factory operatives’ insurrection, no less, in Iserlohn, Solingen, etc. I told him bluntly, that I was against such futile and dangerous folly. I further informed him that I no longer belonged to any ‘league'; nor, in view of the danger presented to the people in Germany by such a connection, could I have anything to do with it, no matter what the circumstances. Levy returned to Düsseldorf, and as I was shortly afterwards informed by letter, spoke very highly of you while denouncing my ‘doctrinaire’ indifference.

Since 1852, then, I have known nothing of ‘party’ in the sense implied in your letter. Whereas you are a poet, I am a critic and for me the experiences of 1849-52 were quite enough. The ‘League’, like the société des saisons in Paris and a hundred other societies, was simply an episode in the history of a party that is everywhere springing up naturally out of the soil of modern society.

There are two things I have to prove in Berlin (I mean with regard to this hoary and outdated business of the League):

First, that since 1852 no such society has existed of which I have been a member,

next, that in as much as he slings Telleringian mud, and worse, at the communist society that existed up till November 1852, Mr Vogt is a scoundrelly and infamous slanderer.

As to the latter point, you, of course, are a witness and your letter to Ruge (summer of 1851) proves that, during the period with which we are solely concerned here, you regarded attacks of this kind as being directed against yourself, too.

You were a co-signatory to the statements in the Morning Advertiser, the Spectator, the Examiner, the Leader, and the People’s Paper. One copy of these is on the court files in Cologne.

Nor did you raise the least objection when I reverted to this matter in my Revelations (p. 47) (Boston edition).

Again, your name appears — as treasurer — in the appeal we published requesting contributions for the convicted men.

But there’s hardly any need to go into all this again.

What is imperative, however, is that my lawyer in Berlin should be sent the following letter from me to Engels, this being a legal document by virtue of the fact that it was sent without an envelope and bears both London and Manchester Postmarks.

‘London, 19 November 1852

28 Dean Street, Soho ‘Dear Engels, ‘Last Wednesday, at my suggestion, the League disbanded; similarly the continued existence of the League on the Continent was declared to be no longer expedient. In any case, since the arrest of Burgers-Roser, it had to all intents and purposes already ceased to exist there. Enclosed a statement for the English papers, etc. In addition I am writing, for the Lithographierte Korrespondenz, an article (instead, I wrote the pamphlet published by Schabelitz “) ‘on the dirty tricks played by the police, etc., and also an appeal to America for money for the prisoners and their families. Treasurer Freiligrath. Signed by all our people.’ (The few remaining lines are irrelevant.) ‘Your K. M.’.

In the case of such a document I cannot, of course, delete any names. This is the only document in which, with a view to substantiating a fact, namely the disbandment of the League, I make use of your name, in as much as it happens to occur in a letter written by me in 1852. I cannot see how that would compromise you.

I should like to use one letter of yours, written in 1851, for the pamphlet which is to appear after the hearing. Nothing in the least compromising about it, legally speaking. But since this will take many weeks, I shall arrange matters with you by word of mouth.

From the above it follows that:

The ‘meetings, resolutions and transactions of the party’ since 1852 belong to the realm of fantasy, as you might have known in any case without my telling you and, judging by a great many of your letters to me, evidently did know.

The only activity in which I persisted after 1852, for as long as it continued necessary — i.e. until the end of 1853 — in company with a few kindred spirits on the other side of the Atlantic, was of the kind described by Mr Ludwig Simon in 1851 in the Tribune as a ‘system of mockery and contempt’, and was directed against the emigration’s democratic humbug and revolution-mongering. Your anti-Kinkel poem, no less than your correspondence with me during that time, prove that you and I were entirely d'accord.

However, this has nothing to do with the lawsuits.

Tellering, Bangya, Fleury, etc., never belonged to the ‘League’. That dirt is thrown up by storms, that no revolutionary period smells of attar of roses, that even, at times, one becomes a target for all manner of garbage, goes without saying. Aut, aut. However, when one considers the tremendous efforts made to combat us by the whole of the official world, who did not so much skim as wade through the depths of the Code pénal in order to ruin us; when one considers the slanderous attacks of the ‘democracy of folly’ which could never forgive our party for having more brains and character than itself; when one knows the parallel history of all the other parties; when one finally asks oneself what can actually be held (other than, say, the infamies refutable in court, of a Vogt or a Tellering) against the party as a whole, one can only conclude that what distinguishes it in this, the nineteenth century, is its purity.

Can one escape the filth in bourgeois intercourse or trade? But in the latter, the filth has its natural habitat. Example: Sir R. Carden, vide the Parliamentary Blue Book on corrupt election practices. Example: Mr Klapka, concerning whose personal details I am now very well informed. Kl. is not one whit better, and possibly worse, than Bangya whom, by the by, he and Kossuth have been sheltering to this day in Constantinople, despite his heroic deeds in Circassia and despite my public denunciation, simply because he knew too much about them. As a person Bangya was more decorous than Kl. He kept a mistress; for years Klapka allowed a mistress to keep him, etc. The filth of a Tellering may well be counterbalanced by the purity of a Beta, and even the dissoluteness of a Reiff finds its equivalent in the chastity of a Paula who, at any rate, was not a member of the party, nor made any pretence so to be.

The honourable meanness or mean honourableness of solvent (and this subject only to highly ambiguous provisos, as every trade crisis goes to show) morality is to my mind not one whit superior to disrespectable meanness, from the taint of which neither the first Christian communities. nor the Jacobin Club, nor our erstwhile ‘League’ could remain entirely free. But bourgeois intercourse accustoms one to the loss of one’s sense of respectable meanness or mean respectability.

3. The special matter of Vogt and Blind.

Following the affidavits made by Vögele and Wiehe (as everyone knows, a false affidavit entails transportation) and following the statements extracted in consequence thereof — from Blind in the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung and from Dr Schaible (Daily Telegraph of 15 February ) — the affair has resolved itself to the extent that your testimony relating to this point has now been rendered quite superfluous. As regards the Blind case, my only problem is an embarras de richesses.

In this matter I approached Ernest Jones, with whom I had not consorted for two years on account of his foolish, but now publicly disavowed, attitude to Bright, Gilpin, etc. I approached him firstly because he, like many others, some of them quite unknown to me, let me know spontaneously, immediately after the Telegraph of 6 February had appeared, how profoundly indignant he was at the infamous conduct of Vogt, who had had the effrontery to assert that the Communist League had been founded and, from 1849 to 1852, had operated, with one end in view, namely to extort money from compromised people in Germany by threatening to denounce them; who traced back my ‘connection’ with the Neue Preussische Zeitung to my ‘relationship by marriage’ to von Westphalen, etc. (For my wife’s sake I was glad of this demonstration, since one can hardly expect ladies to grow a political thick skin; moreover, it is precisely by catastrophes that they are accustomed to gauge whether a friendship is in earnest or in jest); secondly, because I was deterred by consideration, not for Blind, but for his wife and children, from discussing his case, most invidious from a legal point of view, with a true-blue English lawyer. It was this same consideration that deterred me from sending the English circular to the Morning Advertiser or to any English daily other than the Telegraph.

What Jones told me was this:

‘You can go — and I myself will go with you — to the magistrate and at once take out a warrant for Blind’s arrest for conspiracy on the strength of Wiehe’s affidavit. But bear in mind that this is a criminal action and that, once it has been reported, you will have no power to withdraw it.’

I then asked Jones (who can tell you this all over again; he lives at 5 Cambridge Place, Kensington, W.) whether it wasn’t possible for him to warn Blind and thus induce him to make a statement that would include, not only everything he knew about Vogt, but also an admission of the falsity of the depositions adduced by him in the A.A.Z.

Jones replied:

‘In conspiracy, and hence criminal, cases, any attempt by the advocate to compound or bring about a compromise would itself be punishable under criminal law.’

Jones will act as my council in the Telegraph affair.

After Jones’s pronouncements, I found myself in a most awkward and embarrassing situation, for, on the one hand, I owed it to my family to compel the Telegraph to recant; on the other, I did not wish to take any steps that might be legally injurious to Blind’s family. As an expedient I sent to Blind’s friend Louis Blanc a copy of both affidavits and a letter, part of which reads (I quote):

‘Not for Mr Blind who has richly deserved it, but for his family, I should regret being forced to lodge a criminal action against him.’

This last move evoked Schaible’s statement (poor dear), just as the printed circular, which I had sent to Blind immediately after it came out, had evoked his anti-Vogt statement the self-same day in the A. A. Z. Blind may have the hole-and-corner cunning of a man from Baden, but he had forgotten that he was confronting someone who would be ruthless the moment his own honour, or that of his party, was at stake.

This is how matters stand: The action against The Daily Telegraph has been instituted but my solicitor will delay matters until after the case against the National-Zeitung has been decided.

Had Schaible told me frankly what he knew against Vogt (Schaible is Blind’s tame elephant, of course), it would have been wholly unnecessary for me, after his statement had appeared in the Telegraph of 15 February, to lodge the affidavits in London. In Berlin, where it will have no legal repercussions on Blind, this will, of course, be unavoidable. Whether Schaible was the real (literary) author of the ‘flysheet’ or not does nothing to alter the facts established in the affidavits, namely that the depositions adduced by Blind in the A. A. Z. were false, that they were obtained by means of a conspiracy, that the flysheet had been printed in Hollinger’s printshop, written in Blind’s hand and handed over by him to Hollinger to be printed.

Distasteful though these matters certainly are, they are not more distasteful than European history as a whole since 1851, with all its achievements in the diplomatic, military and literary fields.

‘For all that and all that’, the philistine upon me will always be a better device for us than I beneath the philistine.’

I have frankly stated my views, with which I trust you are largely in agreement. Moreover, I have tried to dispel the misunderstanding arising out of the impression that by ‘party’ I meant a ‘League’ that expired eight years ago, or an editorial board that was disbanded twelve years ago. By party, I meant the party in the broad historical sense.

With sincere assurances of my friendship,

Your

K. Marx

P. S. I have just had a letter from my wife, and should accordingly be much obliged if you would draw £16 on the Tribune on Saturday (the day after tomorrow) (not on Friday as I am also including the Tuesday article). As usual, the plenipotentiary-general will pay you a call.

Marx to Johann Philipp Becker

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

April 9, 1860

I was extraordinarily taken with your two short poems on Leibniz and “Alles Wurst”; it would be good if you enclosed them (should you agree to my proposal) in the first letter to Weydemeyer.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 116;

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart -Berlin, 1922.

London, 9 April 1860 (The old address)

Dear Lassalle,

Since your last letter, all manner of things have happened. Engels’ father has died and Engels has spent a fortnight in Prussia by permission of the Prussian Government. I myself, however, have been overwhelmed with business, and even now can only write quite briefly.

1. My lawyer in Berlin has asked me to undertake not to mention his name. If, however, despite the mass of material I have sent him and despite various reminders, these six weeks of silence are prolonged, you will have to prod him, for the case becomes statute-barred on 22 April.

2. Vogt visited Plon-Plon in Paris. He was seen by acquaintances of mine, who spoke to him. Nevertheless, he had the effrontery to state, or cause it to be stated, in the German papers that he had not been to Paris.

3. Have not received the Humboldt.

4. I shall send you the Knight of the Noble Consciousness today.

5. My old friend J. Weydemeyer has given up his post as Deputy-Surveyor in the state of Wisconsin at the request of the American ‘Workers’ League’ (a public society with branches throughout the United States) which has moved its headquarters from New York to Chicago (Illinois). W. will assume the editorship there of a daily paper founded with the help of workers’ shares. Chicago is increasingly becoming the centre in the American North-West where German influence predominates. W. has asked me to enlist correspondents for the paper and this I have done over here, in Paris and in Switzerland. I invite you to undertake the German articles (if possible at least two a week). There is no question of payment. But as party work it is very important. W. is one of our best people. If, as I hope, you agree to this, you should start directly and send your articles to:

‘J. Weydemeyer, care of Chicago Arbeiterverein, BOX 1345, Chicago (Illinois), United States.'

6. While leafing through the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (necessary on Vogt’s account) I was glad to discover a short leader in which we broke a lance with the Vossische for Miss Ludmilla Assing.

7. Would it be possible for you to send me a brief sketch of what the worthy Zabel of the National-Zeitung has been up to, since reaction set in? The sketch could appear in my pamphlet as a letter signed by you. You would, moreover, find yourself in the company of highly honourable refugees who are writing about other people for this work. Some anonymously, others under their own names. Several do not belong to our faction of the party.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 145;

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart -Berlin, 1922.

[London, about 2 June 1860]

Dear Lassalle,

For some three weeks past I've been suffering from a liver complaint, which has prevented me from doing any kind of work, and which I haven’t completely shaken off yet. This state of affairs makes me a very poor letter-writer.

Well, before I reply to your letter, just one or two preliminaries. The Daily Telegraph’s Berlin correspondent is called Abel. Can you provide me with any particulars about this individual?

Schwarck, the Chief Public Prosecutor, has in turn dismissed the criminal action against the National-Zeitung on Appeal on the grounds that no ‘public interest’ would be served thereby. It won’t be long now before the civil action is preferred.

Now for your letter.

I shall not come to Berlin. I did not go to Cologne and all I knew of the sworn evidence given there by Stieber was derived from the reports in the Kölnische Zeitung. It is upon those reports that my critique in the Revelations is based. Hence I could be of no use as a witness in this case. If they want to have me testify about one point or another, I am prepared to make a deposition (as apparently has often been done by other refugees) at the Prussian Embassy in London.

During the early stages of the Eichhoff case Juch, the editor of the Hermann, appealed to me for help in this respect. I gave him the Revelations, recommended that Schneider II be summoned as witness from Cologne, and pointed out the necessity of questioning Hirsch, who was in gaol in Hamburg. The latter interrogation would seem to have been conducted most ineptly. Indeed, it would be absolutely essential to convey Hirsch bodily to Berlin to act as a witness. Only in this event could there be a proper cross-examination that would publicly lay bare the whole disgraceful operation, since Hirsch was fully initiated into these mysteries of Stieber-Goldheim-Greif-Fleury.

Another essential witness would be Cherval (Joseph Crämer), at present in Paris. As he did a bolt from Aachen after forging some bills, Prussia could undoubtedly demand his extradition. But the government will take good care not to do so. Apart from that, he’s a French mouchard and therefore under Bonaparte’s protection.

Most of the other people whom it might be important to examine are in America. Only one is still over here, a certain de L'Aspée from Wiesbaden, who is employed as an interpreter by the English police. I have taken the necessary steps to arrange a meeting [with him] and shall see whether he is willing either to travel to Berlin or to submit to questioning at the Prussian Embassy. In 1853, he sent The Times an article denouncing Stieber. The article was suppressed owing to Bunsen’s intervention and did not appear.

I shall now adduce a few points, which you may, perhaps, be able to put to use. I wrote the Revelations immediately after the Cologne trial was over. However, I subsequently made further investigations into this casus, which is of special interest to me. But first let me say what a capital idea it was of Eichhoff’s to cite the chief fellow culprits, Goldheim and Greif, as witnesses for the defence. As things stand, the only way to get at Stieber et cie. would be for the government to institute an inquiry into the Cologne trial. But it'll take good care not to.

Stieber (see page 10 of my Revelations) is said to have testified on oath in Cologne that ‘his attention had been drawn’ to ‘the conspiracy’s archives’ in the keeping of Oswald Dietz in London by the copy of the papers found on Nothjung which were sent to him in London from police headquarters in Berlin. A mere examination of the Cologne records, which must necessarily contain the papers found on Nothjung, should be enough to refute this perjured evidence.

The actual state of affairs was as follows: Cherval (Joseph Crämer) was the Paris correspondent of the Willich-Schapper League and, as such, corresponded with Oswald Dietz. At the same time, Cherval was an agent of the Prussian ambassador in Paris, Prince Hatzfeldt. Not only did he denounce Dietz, as secretary of his London committee, to Hatzfeldt, he also wrote Dietz letters that were intended for use as evidence later on. Stieber and Greif (as Greif himself told Hirsch in Fleury’s presence) acted on Hatzfeldt’s information. What they found out through Reuter was where Dietz lived, after which Fleury, on Stieber’s orders, burgled Dietz’s lodgings accompanied by Reuter. This, too, is known to Hirsch.

En passant, the following circumstance may be relevant, with which Mr Hirsch is familiar. Fleury had made exact copies of the letters stolen at Reuter’s and given them to Hirsch to read. Among those letters was one from Hanover written by Stechan in which he mentioned a remittance of 30 talers for the refugees. Stieber (together with his friend Wermuth in Hanover) altered this to 530 talers for the leaders. Stechan, who, so far as I know, is now in Edinburgh, could perhaps swear an affidavit to this effect. Stieber (according to the Koln. Zeit, see p. 11 of the Revelations) further stated on oath that the Dietz archives had arrived in Berlin on 5 August 1851, having been sent to him from London. The fact is that Stieber took those ‘archives’ with him from London to Paris on 20 July 1851. This is a point which the above-mentioned L'Aspée could, if he so wished, corroborate on oath.

Mr Greif testified on oath in Berlin that he did not know Hirsch, or knew him only very slightly. The fact is that Hirsch was introduced to Fleury by Greif at 39 Brewer Street, Golden Square, the private residence of Alberts (then, as now, secretary to the Prussian Embassy in London) at that time, after Greif had first got Hirsch to give him a report on the activities of the revolutionary emigration. From that time on, Greif, Fleury, and Hirsch worked together (under the direction of Greif), and were, in particular, jointly responsible for composing the forged minute-book.

The month of April 1853 found Goldheim and Stieber back in London where they were intent on engineering a link between Kossuth’s mysterious gunpowder plot and the Berlin conspiracy (Ladendorf’s). At that time (i.e. many months after the Cologne trial), Hirsch constantly accompanied them in London and worked together with them.

Considering that the police have acknowledged their Fleury in court, let me provide a character sketch of these Prussian agents in London: The said Fleury is called Krause, and is the son of Krause the cobbler, who was executed in Dresden some 22 to 25 years ago for the murder of Countess Schonberg and her maid. Some time after the Cologne trial, this same Fleury-Krause was convicted of forgery in London and sentenced to two or three years in the hulks. Having now served his sentence, he is once again up to his old activities.

The French plot (complot allemand-français) was engineered under Stieber’s direction by Cherval in company with Greif, Fleury, Beckmann, Sommer and the French spy, Lucien de la Hodde (under the name of Duprez). At Cherval’s instigation, Greif (who, like Stieber, swears he does not know the Franco-Prussian spies Cherval and Gipperich) went to North Germany where he was to find out the abode of a certain tailor named Tietz and obtain possession of the letters Cherval had written him on police instructions. He went to the home of Tietz’s betrothed in Hamburg, saying he had come ‘as a friend’ of Tietz’s and would take into safe keeping any potentially dangerous correspondence. However, the coup misfired.

Greif also corresponded with Maupas, through de la Hodde-Duprez, about the release of Cherval and Gipperich. No sooner had Cherval arrived in London than he was taken on by Greif at a regular salary of £1 10s a week. In particular, Greif sent him to Jersey to prepare a major political conspiracy there. Subsequently, the association between Greif and Cherval came to an end. If Mr Hirsch so wishes, he can affirm all these matters on oath. They are important, not only, because Greif has again perjured himself, but also because they concern the relationship between Cherval and Stieber and the ‘veracity’ of the statements made at Cologne by Stieber in respect of Cherval. At the very time when Stieber swore in Cologne that he knew nothing of the whereabouts, etc, of Cherval (see p. 27 of the Revelations), Cherval was cooperating with Greif, who himself was acting on Stieber’s orders. But the case could be legally proven only, of course, by obtaining depositions front Hirsch (who might perhaps talk in open court) and from Cherval (who cannot be got hold of). Needless to say, Alberts, secretary to the Embassy, won’t speak; nor will de la Hodde, Beckmann, Maupas, etc.

Hirsch and Fleury (the latter had rented a lithographic press at Stanbury’s Printing Works, Fetter Lane, Fleet Street, London, to that end) had been instructed by Greif to produce leaflets, such as ‘To the Rural Proletariat’, ‘To the Children of the People’, etc., which Greif sent to the Prussian government as emanating from the Marx party.

After the sudden ‘disappearance’ of the witness Haupt of Hamburg in the course of the communist trial at Cologne, Hinckeldey sent a courier to the Prussian Embassy in London with the request that someone be found to take over Haupt’s role, and to ‘swear’ Haupt’s denunciations before the Assizes. The Police Presidium, he said, would give a reward of a thousand talers. In his letter, Hinckeldey wrote that the very existence of the political police depended upon the outcome of this trial. Hirsch, having first consulted Fleury (out of the ‘noblest’ motives, as he himself subsequently said), declared himself willing. Everything was well in train when Fleury returned with tidings of the Prussian Embassy’s refusal. A further communication from Hinckeldey read:

‘The State Prosecutor hopes that thanks to the happy constitution of the jury it will be possible to get a verdict of guilty even without extraordinary measures, and he’ (Hinck.) ‘therefore asks you not to trouble yourselves further.'

For the same reason, the order previously sent to Beckmann, the Prussian spy in Paris, bidding him come to Cologne and corroborate Stieber’s statements regarding the complot allemand-français was countermanded.

But now we come to the most curious part of the story, which is also perfectly known to Mr Hirsch and is typical of Stieber no less than of Goldheim.

Fleury had learned that I intended to have the actual handwriting of the alleged signatories of the minutes (W. Liebknecht, Rings, and Ulmer) officially authenticated in London. He knew that a refugee called Becker lived in the same house as Willich. He therefore wrote the following letter in Becker’s name:

‘To the Royal Presidium in Berlin;

dated from London

‘It is the intention of Marx and his friends here to discredit the signatures on the League Minutes by having handwriting specimens legally authenticated. These specimens are to be produced in the Court of Assizes as the really authentic ones. ‘Everyone familiar with English laws knows that on this point they can be manipulated and that a person who vouches for the authenticity of a thing does not actually give any true guarantee.

‘The person who gives you this information does not recoil from giving you his name in a matter like this where the truth is at stake. Becker 4 Litchfield Street.’

Stieber had declared before the Assizes at Cologne that he had had the minute-book for a fortnight (before producing it in court), and had duly deliberated before putting it to use; he further declared that it had reached him through a courier, Greif. Mr Goldheim, on the other hand, in a letter to the Prussian Embassy in London, said:

‘The minute-book was produced so late only in order to avoid scrutiny as to its authenticity.

The letter signed ‘Becker’ was addressed to the Police Presidium in Berlin. Had it really emanated from Becker, therefore, it must have gone to Berlin. Instead, the letter went to Goldheim, the police official, at the Frankfurter Hof in Cologne, and a cover to that letter to the Police Presidium in Berlin containing a note: ‘Herr Stieber in Cologne will give a complete explanation as to its use.’ Thus, Stieber knew to what end the letter had been forged. Moreover, Fleury had written expressly to Goldheim on the subject.

Thus, between Fleury, Goldheim, Stieber and Prussian Police Presidium there was tacit collusion over the forgery.

(Stieber did not make use of the letter, having already been compelled to drop the minute-book since, independently of the authentications provided by me, Schneider II had not only discovered other signatures of Liebknecht’s and Rings’ in Cologne, but had also concluded from a much earlier letter of mine that the forger was Hirsch. Stieber got wind of the fact that Schneider had compared Liebknecht’s, etc., signatures at the Record Office, and that other counsel had done the same. It was then that, at the following session, he came out with the imaginary H. Liebknecht (see pp. 38-40 of Revelations).)

Stieber knew the minute-book to be a fake. Why otherwise should he fear authentication of the genuine signatures?

On 29 October, Goldheim arrived in London. Stieber had sent him there to confer on the spot with Fleury and Greif and devise some coup that might save the minute-book. He had to return empty-handed, having told Fleury that, rather than compromise the chiefs of police, Stieber was resolved, if needs be, to expose him, Fleury.

As a last recourse, Fleury now brought Hirsch a specimen of handwriting for him to use to copy out a statement, sign the latter with Liebknecht’s name, and then attest it before the Lord Mayor while falsely declaring himself (Hirsch) to be Liebknecht. On handing Hirsch the said specimen to be copied, Fleury told him that the handwriting was that of the person who had written the minute-book, and that Goldheim had brought it (the specimen) back from Cologne with him.

(Hence it follows that the minute-book produced in Cologne was not the same as had been written by Hirsch and Fleury. Stieber himself had had it copied. The chief difference between it and the one fabricated by Fleury and H Hirsch — a few insignificant alterations apart — lay in the fact that, whereas the minutes provided by Fleury had been unsigned, signatures had been appended to those submitted by Stieber.)

Hirsch copied out the statement in handwriting as similar as possible to that of the specimen. (This last was still in his possession when he left London.) The statement was to the effect that the undersigned, i.e. Liebknecht, declared the authentication of his signature obtained by Marx and Co. to be false, and this, his signature, to be the only genuine one. While en route to the Lord Mayor, Hirsch declared that he would not take an oath before him, whereupon Fleury said he would do so himself. First he called in at the Prussian consulate (where, of course, he was well known) and got the Prussian consul to endorse his handwriting (as that of Liebknecht). There, together with Hirsch, he betook himself to the Lord Mayor for the purpose of attestation. The Lord Mayor, however, asked for guarantees, which Fleury was unable to provide, and thus no oath was taken. (One day later — but trop tard — Fleury obtained credentials from a lawyer.)

All this dirty business came to light in an affidavit Hirsch swore before Jardine, the Bow Street magistrate. The affidavit was sent to Gobel, the president of the Appellate Court, and two copies went off simultaneously to Schneider II and the lawyer Esser.

Whether Hirsch can be conveyed bodily from Hamburg to Berlin to testify in open session and confront Stieber-Goldheim-Greif, I cannot say. The present regime being what it is, there can be no question of getting hold of Cherval, — now, what is more, an avowed ‘civiliser’ and ‘liberator’.

In the case of my own testimony, I could not, of course, without being guilty of all manner of indiscretions, in any way show how one fact or another had come to my knowledge. Moreover, such evidence would not constitute proof.

The trial would be altogether straightforward were the government de bonne foi. As things are, it is most difficult to conduct.

Now I come to Fischel.

My relations with David Urquhart and his followers (I won’t say party because, apart from the sect which holds him to be a prophet in all disciplines, Urquhart can, in his own proper domain of foreign policy, boast supporters among all English parties, from the Tories to the Chartists) have been amicable since the appearance, in 1853, of my first anti-Palmerston pamphlet. Ever since, there has been a constant interchange, they providing me with information, I making unpaid contributions to their Free Press (e.g. my Revelations of the diplomatic history of the 18th century, or again, the Progress of Russia in Central Asia, etc.), and placing at their disposal my personal knowledge of Russian agents such as Bangya, etc. Now, Fischel is the Urquhartites’ recognised and, as it were, official agent in Berlin and my knowledge of his activities there is confined to what I have heard about the Portfolio. This was how I came into contact with Fischel (it was only by chance that I ran into him at a London newspaper office, on which occasion I asked him to convey my regards to you). He has carried out various commissions for myself and Engels in Berlin. We have never exchanged so much as a word, either verbally or in writing, on the subject of internal policy, nor for that matter have I done so with Urquhart since the time when I told him once and for all that I was a revolutionist, and he retorted no less frankly that all revolutionists were agents or dupes of the Petersburg cabinet.

In the letters we have exchanged with Fischel he has always observed the utmost discretion and confined himself solely to the one field of foreign policy in which we are in accord with the Urquhartites.

You will have read Urquhart’s writings, and hence it would be otiose for me (aside from the strain already involved in writing so long a letter in my present state of health) to embark on an analysis of this highly complex figure here. He is, I grant you, subjectively reactionary (romantic) (though not, indeed, in the sense of any real reactionary party but, as it were, metaphysically so); this in no way precludes the movement in foreign policy, of which he is the head, from being objectively revolutionary.

The fact that some of his German followers such as Bucher, Fischel, etc. (I don’t know the latter’s Moskowitertum, but I know what’s in it without reading it), have chosen to adopt some of his ‘Anglo-Saxon’ fads — which, by the by, are not without a kind of perverse critical sense —, is to me a matter of complete indifference, just as in a war against Russia, say, it would be a matter of indifference to you whether, in firing on the Russians, the motives of your neighbour in the firing-line were black, red and gold or revolutionary. Urquhart is a power, of which Russia is afraid. He is the only official personage in England who has the courage and honesty to affront public opinion. He’s the only one of them who is incorruptible (whether by money or ambition). Finally, and strange to say, I have so far encountered none but honest men among his followers, and hence feel bound to regard Fischel as such until I have proof of the contrary.

As for F.’s relations with the Duke of Gotha, I have very good reason to believe that they are not venal. Seeing that this Gotha chap belongs to the English dynasty, which Urquhart is using against Palmerston and ministerial usurpation generally (‘Why doesn’t anyone ever shoot at cabinet ministers?’ Humboldt asks, presaging such usurpation), what could suit him better than to promote anti-Russian and anti-Palmerston sentiment in Germany in his (Gotha’s) name? This is why Fischel’s pamphlet, Despoten und Revolutionare, was translated into English as The Duke of Coburg’s Pamphlet, and was thought important enough by Palmerston to warrant a personal reply in the form of a pamphlet (anonymous), which has greatly compromised him. For Palmerston had hitherto made the unfortunate House of Coburg the scapegoat for his Russophilia, and the pamphlet compelled him to abandon this false pretext.

It is very possible, indeed probable, that Fischel’s anti-Palmerstonian is of little significance in Berlin. On the other hand so far as England (and thus par ricochet Germany) is concerned, it is important in that this controversy is being skilfully, exploited by the Urquhartites and magnified into the German view of Palmerston, for the furtherance of the English controversy.

Hence, in the war that we, together with the Urquhartites, are conducting against Russia, Palmerston and Bonaparte, and in which people of all parties and classes in every capital of Europe as far as Constantinople are playing their part, Fischel, too, is a component. On the other hand, I have never exchanged so much as a syllable with Bucher, because to do so would have been pointless. Were he living in Berlin instead of London, it would be quite a different matter.

Should we enter into a revolutionary phase in Germany, this will, of course, put an end to diplomacy — of a kind, by the by, that entails not the least concession on either side nor even a shadow of pretence. And even then this English connection will be useful to us.

Come to that, it goes without saying that, in foreign policy, there’s little to be gained by using such catchwords as ‘reactionary’ and ‘revolutionary’. In Germany now there is no such thing as a revolutionary party, and to me the most loathsome form of reaction is Royal Prussian court democracy as practised, say, by the National-Zeitung and also, to some extent (their acclaim of that scoundrel Vincke, the Regent, etc.) by the Volks-Zeitung.

At all events, the Urquhartites have the advantage of being ‘educated’ in foreign policy, so that the ignorant members obtain their inspiration from the educated ones; the advantage, too, of pursuing a definite goal, the fight against Russia, and being engaged in a life and death struggle with that mainstay of Russian diplomacy, Downing Street at London. Let them imagine, if they wish, that this struggle will result in the establishment of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ conditions. It is up to us revolutionaries to go on using them so long as we have need of them. This does not prevent us from actually knocking them on the head wherever they threaten to frustrate our internal policy. The Urquhartites have never reproached me for also writing under my own name in the Chartist newspaper that was their bugbear until its demise — Ernest Jones’s People’s Paper. E. Jones laughed at Urquhart’s oddities, ridiculed them in his paper and yet, in that same paper, acknowledged his outstanding worth in the matter of foreign policy.

Finally, despite his fanatical hatred of the French Revolution and everything ‘universal’, Urquhart’s romanticism is exceedingly liberal. The freedom of the individual, if in a very topsy-turvy way, is to him the be-all and end-all. It is true that, in order to achieve it, he dresses up the ‘individual’ in all manner of ancient garb.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels to Marx

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow 1976;

Written in German and Danish;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

June 20, 1860

By pure chance, the old Danish Kjämpe-Viser fell into my hands. Some very nice things here and there among a lot of rubbish. Here is one, translated by Uhland.

Her Oluf hand rider saa vide,

Alt til sit brøllup at byde,

Men dandsen den gaar saa let gennem lunden.

Der dandse fire, og der dandse fem:

Elle kongens daater rekker haanden frem.

“Velkommen, Her Oluf, lad fare din fig:

Bi lidet, og træd her i dandsen med mig.”

“leg ikke tør, jeg ikke maa: I morgen skal mit brøllup staa.”

“Hør du, Her Oluf, træd dandsen med mig:

To bukkeskinds støvle saa giver jeg dig.

To bukkeskinds støvle, sider vel om been:

ForgyIdene spore derom spend.

Hør du, Her Ole, træd dandsen med mig:

En silke-skiorte giver jeg dig.

En silke-skiorte saa hivid og fiin:

Den blegte min moder veg maane skin.”

“Jeg ikke tør, jeg ikke maa etc.”

“Hør du, Her Oluf, træd dandsen med mig:

Et hoved af guld saa giver jeg dig.”

“Et hoved af guld kand jeg vel faa:

Men dandse med dig tør jeg ej saa.”

“Og vil du ikke dandse med mig,

Sot og sygdom skal følge dig.”

Hun slog hannem mellem sine hærde:

Aldrig var hand slagen verre.

Hun løfte, Her Oluf paa ganger rød:

“Og rid nu hiem til din festemø.”

Der hand kom til borgeled:

Der staar hands moder og hviler ved.

“Hør du, Her Oluf, kier sønnen min:

Hvi baer du nu saa bleg en kind?”

Og jeg maa vel bære kinden bleg,

For jeg bar været i Ellekonens leg.”

“Hør du, Her Ole, min søn saa prud:

Hvad skal jeg svare din unge brud?”

‘I skal sige, jeg er udi lunde,

At prøve min hest og saa mine hunde.”

Aarle om morgen, dag det var:

Da kom den brud med brudeskar.

De skenkte miød, de skenkte viin:

“Hvor er, Her Ole, brudgom min?”

“Her Oluf hand reed sig hen i lunde:

Hand prøved sin hest og saa sine hunde.”

Hun tog op det skarlagen rød:

Der laa Her Oluf og var død.

I like this much better than the very smooth Uhland version. Another, “Her Jon,” is even nicer.

Herr Oluf fares both far and wide,

To fetch the wedding-guests he doth ride.

The elves dance on the green land,

The Elf King’s daughter gives him her hand.

“Welcome, Herr Oluf, why wouldst thou flee?

Step into the ring and dance with me.”

But dance I neither will nor may,

Tomorrow dawns my wedding day.’

“oh list, Herr Oluf, come dance with me,

Two golden spurs I'll give to thee.

“A shirt all shining white so fine:

My mother shall bleach it with pale moonshine.”

“But dance I neither will nor may,

Tomorrow dawns my wedding day.”

“Oh list, Herr Oluf, come dance with me,

A pile of gold I'll give to thee.”

“Gladly I'd take your gold away,

But dance I neither dare nor may.”

“An thou, Herr Oluf, dance not with me,

Sickness and plague shall follow thee.”

And then she touched him on the chest.

Never such pain had clutched his breast.

She helps him, half-swooning, his mount to bestride:

“Now get thee hence to thy fair bride.”

As to his own door he drew near,

His mother was trembling there with fear.

“Tell me quickly, oh quickly, my son,

Why are thy looks so pale and wan?”

“How should they not be pale and wan?

’tis from the Elf King’s realm I come!’

“Oh list, dear son I love so well,

What to your bride am I to tell?”

“Say to the forest I am bound,

To exercise my horse and hound!’

Next morning, when it was scarcely day,

There came the bride with her company.

They poured the mead, they poured the wine.

“Where is Herr Oluf, bridegroom of mine?”

“He’s ridden hence, for the forest bound,

To exercise his horse and hound!’

The bride uplifted the scarlet red.

There lay Herr Oluf, and he was dead.

(Translated by Alex Miller)

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Aachen

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 192;

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

[London,] 15 September 1860

Dear Lassalle,

I am writing very briefly to make sure this note still finds you.

1. I wrote to Freiligrath (day before yesterday) about an answer to your question. None arrived. Answering such questions conflicts, of course, with his duty to his office.

2. As regards the book on Vogt: After trying this, that and the other, I have come to the conclusion that printing in London is the only possibility. By the by, deliberately written so as not to be confiscable. Although not printable in Berlin, it would, like any other book, be distributed in Germany from Leipzig; in Switzerland, Belgium, America direct from here. Engels is paying for one share, I for another. But the thing’s expensive since a sheet costs 4 1/2 pounds sterling over here. You must contribute a share if you can. I have optimistically arranged for printing to begin not later than next week. If the money has not been collected, nothing will be lost, save the sum to be paid for what has already been printed.

3. Garibaldi shared my opinion of Bonaparte’s mission, just as Mazzini did. I have actually seen letters of Garibaldi’s on this score. However, the past is no longer of any concern. As soon as Garibaldi has divested the Italian cause of Bonaparte (and such is his object, expressly stated in a letter he wrote to an English acquaintance of mine, Green), all disputes within the revolutionary party will cease. But what is important now is that we should come to an agreement on a programme. If you would care to make a brouillon, Engels, Wolff and I will agree possible modifications with you. The time is approaching when our ‘small’ if, in a certain sense, ‘powerful party’ (inasmuch as the others do not know what they want, or do not want what they know) must devise its plan of campaign. That we in particular (here in England) should adopt a national stance seems to me tactically correct — quite apart from any inherent justification.

4. As for our attitude towards Russia, I think you are mistaken. The view that I and Engels have formed is a quite independent one, having, I may say, been laboriously evolved over many years from the study of Russian diplomacy. True, Russia is hated in Germany and, in the very first issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, we presented an anti-Russian war as the revolutionary mission of Germany. But hating and understanding are two altogether different things.

5. Your praise of my book [A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] gave me great pleasure, coming as it did from a competent judge. I think that Part II may very likely come out before Easter. It will take a somewhat different form, more popular to some degree. Not, of course, as a result of any impulse from within myself, but, first, because Part II has an expressly revolutionary function, and, second, because the conditions I describe are more concrete.

In Russia my book has caused a considerable stir, and a professor in Moscow has given a lecture on it. Moreover, many Russians, in particular, have written to me very kindly about it. Ditto German-speaking Frenchmen.

6. Ad vocem H. Bürgers. How like the gentle Heinrich. He was, it is true, nominally co-editor of the N. Rh. Z., but never wrote for it, except for one article, of which I deleted one half and rewrote the other. So enraged was he about this (it happened during the early days of the paper) that he asked for a general vote. This I conceded as an exception, at the same time explaining that a newspaper office should be ruled dictatorially and not by general vote. Universal suffrage went universally against him. After that, he wrote nothing more. Prison, by the by, is said to have had a very moderating effect on him. Give me Casemate Wolff any day. Admittedly, his temperament is diametrically the opposite of Bürgers.

What has vexed me more than Bürgers is that Miquel, a Göttingen lawyer and a very gifted and energetic member of our party, has joined Bennigsen.

7. Polizei-Silhouetten by Dr Eichhoff published in Berlin. Badly written, but contains some delectable things. Throws a fine light on the liberal ‘police’ and the ‘law-courts’ in Berlin. Was instantly confiscated. One copy arrived here safely.

8. I must confess my complete ignorance of Prussian legal procedure. I never imagined I should get material justice. But I did think the procedure was such that I would at least succeed in getting as far as a public hearing. That was all I wanted.

Under (old) Rhenish procedure, did a private action for injuria or libel also depend on prior permission being obtained from officers of the judiciary, i.e. the government?

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 204;

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922;

[London,] 2 October 1860

Dear Lassalle,

Forwarded your letter to Freiligrath forthwith.

When I wrote saying you should ‘muster’ a quota, I was, of course, deliberately using an ambiguous term. Only do not enlist the help of anyone who is not a personal friend of mine. I should be glad, by the by, to receive the contribution at an early date. Come to that, I don’t believe it will be à fonds perdu [money down the drain], for we shall at least recoup the cost of production.

Engels wrote an essay on the English rifles for the Darmstadt Militär-Zeitung, which he subsequently translated for the Manchester Volunteer Journal. It has been reproduced and discussed by the entire London Press.

From letters that have come to me straight from Garibaldi’s camp, things would seem to be in rather parlous state. Cavour is actually Bonaparte’s tool and controls Victor Emmanuel. Garibaldi is in a difficult position vis-à-vis Bonaparte and the Piedmontese army, the more so in that all the bourgeois and aristocratic riff-raff in Italy are on the side of Cavour. Somewhat to the detriment of his own army, G. has been compelled to disperse his best troops amongst Neapolitan riff-raff and Piedmontese troupiers.

You will forgive me, if I do not reply to your letter this time, nor, indeed, write more than a few lines. Besides being taken up (agreeably) with proof-correcting and my habitual tasks, I have the added blessing of a most frightful catarrh, affecting the whole of the left side of my head.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

The Supreme Tribunal has not yet reached a decision. As soon as the case is disposed of and I am debarred from public proceedings, I shall publish a sheet (pamphlet), Prussian Justice over here.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 204;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1929

Manchester, 5 October 1860

Dear Moor,

Enclosed £5 note E/L 33688 Manchester, 12 Jan. 60.

I would have sent it sooner, but Gumpert touched me for ten pounds, after which I had to wait a day or two so as not to make myself conspicuous by drawing a lot of money all at once.

As to printing in London, the chief consideration, of course, is that the thing should appear and appear quickly; but printing in Germany was preferable and could undoubtedly have been arranged. However sharp Petsch may be, a German publisher, e.g. Meissner (who is far from being the philistine you imagine him to be — just take a look at his list) is in a much stronger position to break the conspiration du silence. Nor do I account it in any way a blessing that the party is thus also compelled to invest capital, for we've little enough as it is.

Title — I would repeat, and this is quite definitely Lupus’s opinion also, that at any rate, a title that requires one to read half the book before one finds out what it means could not be more unhappy. Your philistine has long since ceased to take such an interest in Vogt as to puzzle over why you should call him Dâ-Dâ. The only thing that can make Vogt interesting is his connection with Bonaparte and Plon-Plon, and this you must emphasise in the title, if you are to arouse the philistine’s curiosity. So far as the title is concerned, your system of mockery and contempt is unlikely to produce anything but a title that is affected or contrived. A simple title is surely the best; mockery and contempt comes in the book soon enough.

So, père Garibaldi has drubbed the Neapolitans again after all, and taken 2,000 prisoners. The impression the chap makes on the troops must be tremendous. It’s an excellent thing that Türr should have been discredited along with Rustow’s theory. Otherwise, the latter would undoubtedly have taken it into his head to become the German Garibaldi; among the bourgeois republicans, the chap could come to be dangerous. It will probably be all up with Bombalino before long; the troops will soon have nothing left to eat and will disperse, for the area is not large enough to support them. Apart from that, there’s nothing to be said about the affair for the time being. By the way, there’s no denying that the rè galantuomo is playing his hand with a great deal of pluck if he should now go to Naples.

The success of my rifle article was not altogether fortuitous. I sent the little sheet, boldly marked in red, to the main London papers and the press up here and wrote to them more or less as follows: *The Correspondent, for England, of the Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung presents his compliments to the Editor of the ... and begs to call his attention to an article of his in the Volunteer Journal (a copy of which is sent by post) on the Newton review. As this is the first professional opinion of a foreign military paper on the voluntary movement, it may be of interest.* — Quite anonymously, of course. I didn’t write to The Times but they published an excerpt, nevertheless.

Siebel has sent me a Portrait of his betrothed, very pretty. Marie Antoinette with just a tiny soupçon of the virtuous Eugénie, but exceedingly mannish, notwithstanding — she will wear the breeches. His ‘sensible creature’ will surprise him yet. Madame la baronne, her mother, was a milliner-cum-shop assistant in Düsseldorf and is still said to frequent Küpper’s beer garden, where she puts away her 3 or 4 pints in an afternoon. Or so the philistines say.

According to the latest reports, Garibaldi is the grandson or great-grandson of the Dr Jos. Bapt. Maria Garibaldi of Ajaccio who was sent to Germany by King Theodore Neuhof, married Miss Katharina von Neuhof in Westphalia and, after the overthrow of his brother-in-law, settled in Nice. His face certainly has a Westphalian cast to it. Ewerbeck and Willich are both caricatures of G. in their own way.

In number one, volume three, of Kolatschek’s German monthly there is said to be a very pointed article against Vogt.

Kind regards to the family.

Your

F. E.

1861

Marx to Engels. 3 January

Marx to Carl Siebel. 3 January

Marx to Carl Siebel. 3 January

Engels to Marx. 7 January

Marx to Engels. 8 January

Marx to Engels. 10 January

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle, [Abstract]. 16 January

Marx to Engels. 18 January

Marx to Engels. 22 January

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 28 January

Marx to Engels. 29 January

Marx to Engels. 31 January

Engels to Marx. 31 January

Marx to Engels. 2 February

Engels to Marx. 4 February

Engels to Marx. 6 February

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 7 February

Engels to Elisabeth Engels. 13 February

Marx to Engels. 14 February

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 15 February

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 27 February

Engels to Elisabeth Engels. 27 February

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 7 March

Marx to Antoinette Philips. 24 March

Marx to Carl Siebel. 28 March

Marx to Carl Siebel. 2 April

Marx to Antoinette Philips. 13 April

Marx to Lion Philips. 6 May

Marx to Engels. 7 May

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 8 May

Marx to Engels. 10 May

Marx to Engels. 16 May

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 29 May

Marx to Engels. 10 June

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 11 June

Engels to Marx. 12 June

Marx to Engels. 19 June

Marx to Engels. 1 July

Engels to Marx. 3 July

Marx to Engels. 5 July

Marx to Engels. 12 July

Marx to Antoinette Philips. 17 July

Marx to Engels. 20 July

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 22 July

Marx to Engels. 3 August

Marx to Antoinette Philips. 24 September

Marx to Engels. 28 September

Marx to Engels. 30 October

Marx to Engels. 6 November

Marx to Watteau. 10 November

Marx to Engels. 18 November

Marx to Engels. 20 November

Engels to Marx. 27 November

Engels to Marx. 2 December

Marx to Engels. 5 December

Marx to Engels. 9 December

Marx to Engels. 13 December

Marx to Engels. 19 December

Marx to Engels. 27 December

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 241;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 7 January 1861

Dear Moor,

The Revelations will be despatched from here today or tomorrow post-paid to Petsch. The fellow had best stick a small label on the title page — London, A. Petsch & Co., 1861 — so that people know where it is to be had.

Can’t you get me Toby’s cry of pain?

Shall write to Siebel.

In none of the German papers save the Kölnische have I found so much as an advertisement — which is surely odd.

Our old enemies are not escaping the fate they deserve. The editor en chef of the late lamented Strassburger Correspondent was, according to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, “a certain Mr Wolfers of Cologne” — the worthy Wolfers of Dumont’s paper couldn’t you somehow convey this to Biscamp for transmission to the Augsburg A. Z.? Also, that the chap is not a Rhinelander but a beastly Belgian. Schwanbeck dead of delirium tremens, the worthy Brüggemann disappeared and consigned to oblivion, and Wolfers openly in the pay of Bonaparte — what more can you ask?

Doubtless King William I will now make a real ass of himself as well. When he tells the Berliners that much has happened that was unjust, perhaps he is referring to the enforced dismissal of Stieber. Apropos. Another friend, griffin Greif, would appear from a report in the Neue Preussische Zeitung to be gravely ill as the result of an apoplectic fit. It’s a good sign, these chaps being bowled over like ninepins. That the change of monarch should go so nicely hand in hand with the Austrian revolution of all things, is capital. Even the Wochenschrift des Nationalvereins now declares that, unless Prussia moves fairly quickly, Austria will inevitably gain ascendancy in Germany. Things are going famously in Austria. Nothing could be more favourable than that stubbornly irresolute jackass Francis Joseph. Things are going famously and will be getting too much for Mr Bonaparte as well as for Franzl.

In North America things are also hotting up. With the slaves the situation must be pretty awful if the Southerners are playing such a risky game. The least irruption of irregulars from the North might result in a general conflagration. At all events, one way or another, slavery would appear to be rapidly nearing its end and hence also cotton production. What repercussions this will have on England we shall soon see. And with such powerful movements under way, a jackass like Bonaparte thinks he can go on fishing in troubled waters indefinitely.

Many regards,

Your

F. E.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 245;

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart, 1922.

London, 16 January 1861

9 Grafton Terrace,

Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

D'abord, my best if belated wishes for a Happy New Year.

My wife is now convalescing. Her illness resulted in my falling seriously ill myself; and, at present, I am suffering from inflammation of the liver. And a very nice New Year’s gift too! Hitherto, the complaint has merely been chronic. Now it is becoming acute.

This is the explanation for my silence, despite the very close sympathy felt both by my wife and myself for your sufferings. I hope that when you next write you'll have a better account to give me of yourself. If you would care to send me a fairly detailed report on your illness, I shall consult a doctor whom I regard as a veritable aesculapian genius. However, he does not live here, but in Manchester.

I was greatly tickled by the Royal Prussian Amnesty which in effect excludes all refugees from its indulgence. Gottfried Kinkel, who has recently joined the National Association,” could, however, return, if a correct interpretation were put on the ‘act of grace’. As for Bucher, Freiligrath, Borkheim, Zimmermann of Spandau, and many others, they have long been ‘naturalised Englishmen’.

Faucher, former London correspondent of the Neue Preussische Zeitung, afterwards co-editor of the (Manchester School) Morning Star, — a chap, by the by, with whom anyone can consort since he does not conceal but, indeed, openly flaunts, a lack of character typical of the Berliners, and who isn’t actually taken politically au sérieux by any of his acquaintances, — believes that he can now play the Prussian Cobden. Good luck to him. Such, at least, was his plan when he left London.

One of my friends, J. Ph. Becker, is at present with Garibaldi in Caprera. He has written, telling me that the Mazzinists were almost exclusively responsible for the serious part of the south Italian movement, that Garibaldi does not exactly possess a superfluity of brains, and that the utmost confusion reigns in his friends’ camp. Garibaldi, by the by, agrees with Mazzini in believing that Cavour isn’t even well-intentioned with regard to Victor Emmanuel, that he is rather Bonaparte’s direct tool and that the Gaeta intervention, as well as Farina’s appointment to Sicily and Farini’s to Naples, etc., are nothing but carefully calculated moves to compel Vic. Em. to make fresh territorial concessions to France, and concessions in favour of Murat in southern Italy. Which will succeed, and soon become manifest.

The slavery crisis in the United States will bring about a terrible crisis in England in a year or two; the Manchester cotton lords are already beginning to tremble.

I seldom read German stuff. Recently, however, I happened upon A. Bastian, Der Mensch in der Geschichte, etc. I think it’s a bad book, formless and pretentious. His endeavour to explain psychology in terms of ‘natural science’ amounts to little more than a pious wish. His endeavour to explain history in terms of ‘psychology’, on the other hand, shows that the man does not know what psychology is, or, for that matter, history.

Darwin’s work is most important and suits my purpose in that it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle. One does, of course, have to put up with the clumsy English style of argument. Despite all shortcomings, it is here that, for the first time, ‘teleology’ in natural science is not only dealt a mortal blow but its rational meaning is empirically explained.

I have lately had the opportunity of seeing rather more German newspapers. Ghastly stuff. And, withal, a self-satisfied mediocrity which is indeed nauseous.

Could you send me the 2nd volume of Eichhoff’s PolizeiSilhouetten? Not to be had here.

Another thing I have just read is Walesrode’s Totenschau. Has some nice tales! But lamely presented, though this is excusable in view of the time of its publication.

Wishing you all good health, and with regards from my wife,

Your

K. M.

Mieroslawski, who has just been in Paris, told my friend Schily that things looked ‘bad’. At the same time, he expressed himself most unfavourably with respect to ‘Klapka’. Yet I myself can’t quite make up my mind about Mieroslawski.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 261;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 14 February 1861

Dear Frederick,

You must really forgive me for not having answered your very kind letter before now. In the meantime, you will have received a communication from philistine Freiligrath.

I have had, and still have, an enormous amount of running about to do. For I intend to go to Holland so as to put my affairs over here in order, otherwise they will get out of hand. There are two things I require for the purpose, a passport and money, both of which I shall manage to get hold of here d'une maniere on d'une autre. (I may have to go as far as Aachen.)

I haven’t written to Lassalle yet. No doubt something in the nature of a weekly would be best, but, then again, what a risk we should run, given the indiscretion of our friend, if he were there on the spot as editor-in-chief, and thus in a position to get us all into hot water! He would, of course, immediately stress that the thing was a party organ, so that we, too, should be held responsible for every imbecility and our position in Germany would be ruined before we had so much as regained it. This requires the most careful consideration.

The conspiration de silence in the German press is having a seriously adverse effect on sales of Herr Vogt. After a good start, they have accordingly come to a stands still The Allgemeine Zeitung seems pretty well determined not to carry Bucher’s review either. At any rate, we shall know one way or another in the next few days, for, if it intends to publish it at all, it can’t go on putting it off much longer. Kolatschek is a certainty.

My wife recommends that you read Hans Ibeles by Johanna Mockel, in which Willich figures as Wildemann, etc., Mrs von Brüningk as Platonina, and that blackguard Kinkel as Don Juan. I myself know nothing about the rubbish save for what my wife has told me. She says that the book provides irrefutable evidence that Johanna Mockel threw herself out of the window because she had been crossed In love. (by the by, my wife’s complexion is still far from smooth and probably won’t be for some time to come.) At any rate, it’s commendable in Parson Kinkel’ that he should make money out of the late Mockel’s confessions by selling them to Cotta, and then consume it with Minna Werner, by whom he already has a child. Parsons are the cleverest of men. However, Johanna Mockel was an acrimonious body and her breath, for all her love of music, was acrid, too.

Have had the Nazione. Very good. Ditto the Volunteer Journal. But not your pamphlet.

Vogt will never forgive Vincke for having put him in the shade so completely. Incidentally, those Prussian swine are making fools of themselves in every respect. Firstly, the blackguards ask Bonaparte to continue his intervention at Gaeta; secondly, the rascals have joined Bonaparte and Russia in declaring themselves in favour of continued French intervention in Syria . Austria opposes this, and, of course, so does Palmerston, for appearance’s sake. And the way they're carrying on at home! The rotten bunch is bound to come a cropper.

Wilhelm Liebknecht has been almost completely laid off by his American newspapers as well. One of the papers for which he wrote was sacked in New Orleans.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 264;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 27 February 1861

Dear Engels,

I am leaving tomorrow on a passport made out not to me, however, but to Bühring, [Bühring — formerly represented the Faucher proletariat, his Free-Trade proletarians — has real inventive genius, but is not a business man, hence invariably swindled while others exploit his inventions — note by Marx]. valid for Holland. This created a vast amount of trouble, as did raising enough money for me to get away at all. Have paid quite small sums on account to the most pressing creditors; in the case of others (e.g. grocer), I invoked the American crisis and obtained a respite, but only on condition that my wife paid weekly during my absence. In addition, she has to pay £2 18/- in rates next week.

Nota bene. I presume you got a letter from my wife (about a week ago) in which she thanked you for the wine? She is a little worried lest it should have fallen into the wrong hands. The children, too, are greatly obliged to you for the wine. They would seem to have inherited their father’s fondness for the bottle.

I shall probably go to Berlin as well — without a passport — to look into the matter of a weekly (Apropos — in Berlin William I is called Handsome William), and survey the dungheap generally.

In the last number of the Hermann, that swine Blind published a letter Mazzini had written him. The importunate slimy creature clearly succeeded in convincing Mazzini that he represents the German émigrés. He uses the said Hermann as a receptacle for his filthy twaddle — patriotic — on the subject of Schleswig-Holstein, and also makes the latter an occasion for writing letters under his own name to the Globe, etc. Through Bronner — with him and Schaible he constitutes the ‘Association for Freedom and Unity’ — he extorted so much money from a Bradford merchant that he was able to start a rotten little rag in Hamburg — the Nordstern — so as to throw his weight about in the North, while in the South, through Schaible’s agency, he courts notoriety as ‘Blind, mail of iron’ in the columns of the Stuttgart Beobachter (a kind of South German Volkszeitung). The purpose of all this business on the part of the wretched creature is, on the one hand, to shout down the disgrace inflicted on him in Herr Vogt and, on the other, to become Hecker secondus. Le pauvre hère.

The Cologne people have done my library proud. The whole of Fourier stolen, ditto Goethe, ditto Herder, ditto Voltaire and, what to me is ghastliest of all, the Economistes du 18 siecle (brand-new, cost me some 500 fr.) and many volumes of classical Greek writers, litany, single volumes of other works. If I go to Cologne, I'll have something to say about it to that National Association man Bürgers. Hegel’s Phenomenology and Logic ditto.

During the past fortnight there’s been such a lot of confounded running around to do — real ingenuity was needed to prevent a complete break-up of the household — that I have read no newspapers whatsoever, not even the Tribune on the American crisis. However, for recreation in the evenings I have been reading Appian’s Civil Wars of Rome in the original Greek. A most valuable book. The fellow comes of Egyptian stock. Schlosser says he is ‘soulless’, probably because he probes the material basis of the said civil wars. Spartacus emerges as the most capital fellow in the whole history of antiquity. A great general (no Garibaldi he), of noble character, a real representative of the proletariat of ancient times. Pompey a real shit; acquired spurious fame only by misappropriating, as Sulla’s ‘young man’, etc., Lucullus’s victories (over Mithridates), then Sertorius’s (Spain), etc. As a general, was the Roman Odilon Barrot. As soon as he was brought face to face with Caesar and had to show what stuff he was made of — a mere louse. Caesar perpetrated the most stupendous military blunders, deliberately crazy ones, to discountenance the philistine opposing him. Any ordinary Roman general — Crassus, say — would have annihilated him six times over during the battle in Epirus. But anything could be done with Pompey. In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Shakespeare would seem to have had some inkling of what Pompey was really like.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

I shall write to you from Holland. You will know without my telling you how grateful I am for the outstanding proofs of friendship you have given me.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 279;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 7 May 1861

Dear Frederick,

Habes confitentem reum. [Your prisoner has a confession to make, Cicero] But the circonstances atténuantes for my not writing were as follows: D'abord I spent, as you, know, the greater part of my time in Berlin at Lassalle’s house where it would have been impossible for me to write to you without my telling Lassalle what was in the letter, and that did not serve my purpose. Later, I was continually en route, from Berlin to Elberfeld, Cologne, Trier, Aachen, Bommel, Rotterdam, and Amsterdam. Lastly, my original plan, as I wrote and told my wife, had been to go from Rotterdam to Hull and from Hull to Manchester so that I could give you a detailed verbal report. This was frustrated by my cousin Jacques Philips. For, as I was about to leave Rotterdam, he told me he would be coming to London the following day, and he was as good as his word. So, of course, I had to proceed direct to London in order to do him the honneurs there. He did not leave here until the day before yesterday.

In any case, I now hope that you will come to us for a few days at Whitsuntide. I heard in Elberfeld that you wanted to visit your family at Whitsuntide. Even if you do, you could so arrange matters that you spend at least a couple of days with us. I have much to tell you, and this can be done better by word of mouth than in writing. Moreover, it irks my womenfolk if you always give London a miss.

First, then, to business. For a start, I squeezed £160 out of my uncle so that we were able to pay off the greater part of our debts. My mother, with whom any discussion about cash is out of the question, but who is rapidly nearing her end, destroyed some I.O.U.s I had given her in the past. That was the distinctly pleasant result of the two days I spent with her. I myself said nothing to her about money matters and it was she who took the initiative in this connection. Further, when in Berlin, I paved the way for me to establish a connection with the Vienna Presse should the need arise; in view of the present situation in America, this will doubtless prove indispensable. Finally, I have arranged through Lassalle for the second part of my political economy to be published by Brockhaus instead of Duncker. As to Duncker, Camilla Essig (alias Ludmilla Assing) rightly remarked to me that, if one wants to keep a book secret, one must get Duncker to publish it. However, I do at least figure in the recent piece by Rau-Rau — the German Say.

Apropos. With regard to your Po and Rhine, etc., I am told by la Hatzfeldt — who converses with all the Prussian generals at the house of her brother-in-law, General von Nostitz, and whose nephew Nostitz is, furthermore, an aide-de-camp to ‘handsome William’ — that your pamphlet is considered in high, if not the highest, military circles (including, inter alia, that of Prince Charles Frederick) to be the product of an anonymous Prussian general. The same thing happened in Vienna, or so I was told by assessor Friedländer (brother of the editor of the Vienna Presse). I myself have discussed it with General Pfuel, now 82, but still mentally alert and become very radical. Pfuel didn’t know, of course, that we had conferred on him the honorary title of ‘von Höllenstein’. He has, by the by, fallen out of favour and is ranked by the Court with the Jacobins, atheists, etc.

Now to political business.

In Berlin there is, of course, no haute politique. Everything revolves round the struggle with the police (not that the latter are in the least presumptuous just now, being a model of civility and tolerance) in that people would like to see Zedlitz, Patzke, etc., removed from office and punished; secondly, round the opposition between the military and civilians. It is over these issues (in bourgeois circles, other particularly sore points are the military bills and tax exemption for the landowners) that matters will come to a head. (Count Tavernier, an artillery officer, told me that they would like nothing better than to turn their batteries on the Garde du Corps.) The prevailing atmosphere is one of general dissolution, and people of every rank regard a catastrophe as inevitable. This would seem to be more the case in the capital than in the provinces. Curiously enough, military circles share the general conviction that the first clash with the crapauds will result in a trouncing for the Prussians. Berlin is in a cheeky, frivolous mood. The Chambers are despised. In one theatre I visited, a comical ditty about Vincke was sung to the accompaniment of loud applause. Among a broad section of the public there is much dissatisfaction with the existing press. At the coming new elections (in the autumn) to the Second Chamber, there is no doubt that most of the fellows who sat in the Prussian National Assembly will be elected. This is important, not on account of the said fellows, but because ‘William the Handsome’ mistakes them for red republicans. All in all, ‘handsome William’ has been dogged by the spectre rouge ever since he became king. He considers his popularity as a ‘liberal’ to be a trap set for him by the overthrow Party.

Now, under the circumstances it might, in fact, not be inopportune if we could bring out a paper in Berlin next year, although I personally find the place unpleasant. 20-30,000 talers would have to be got together in association with Lassalle, etc. But hic jacet. Lassalle put the proposal to me direct. At the same time, he confided that he would have to be editor en chef along with myself. And Engels? I inquired. ‘Well, if three aren’t too many, Engels can also be editor en chef, of course. Though you two ought not to have more votes than me, for other-wise I would always be outvoted.’ As reasons why he, too, must take the helm he stated: 1. that he was generally regarded as being closer to the bourgeois party and hence could procure funds more easily; 2. that he would have to sacrifice his ‘theoretical studies’ and his theoretical tranquillity and ought, after all, to get something out of it, etc. If, however, we were unwilling, he went on: ‘I would still be prepared, as before, to assist the paper financially and in literary ways; that would be an advantage to me; for I should have the benefit of the paper without the responsibility for it,’ etc. This was just sentimental hot air, of course. Lassalle, dazzled by the esteem earned him in certain learned circles by his Heraclitus and, in another circle, consisting of spongers, by his good wine and food, doesn’t know, of course, that he is of ill repute with the public at large. And then his intractability; his obsession with the ‘speculative concept’ (the fellow actually dreams of a new Hegelian philosophy raised to the second power, which he intends to write), his inoculation with early French liberalism, his arrogant pen, importunity, tactlessness, etc. If subjected to rigid discipline, Lassalle might be of service as one of the editors. Otherwise, we would simply make fools of ourselves. But, in view of the great friendliness he showed me, you can see how difficult it was for me to speak my mind. So, I was generally non-committal and told him I could settle nothing without prior discussion with you and Lupus. (That was the main reason why I didn’t write to you from Berlin, for I didn’t want to have a reply from you about this while I was there.) If we decide against it, the countess and Lassalle intend to set out on a year’s trip to the East or to Italy. But here’s the rub. He now expects me to give him an answer, which I can’t put off any longer. Qu'en dis-tu?

He’s a frightfully pompous fellow, and so I had no alternative but to be constantly ironical at his expense, which wounded his amour-propre, the more so in that it aroused in the countess, whom he has impressed as a universal genius, a disquieting urge to emancipate herself from this Buddha. At certain times, strangely enough, la Hatzfeldt’s voice has a Jewish intonation that has been acquired from and instilled in her by him.

Lupus’s reservations about the Prussian police are quite out of place. The only difficulty that still remains can at most affect those who had formerly taken the military oath of allegiance. Assessor Friedländer tells me that Lupus is still the most popular man in Breslau and in another district of Silesia as well, I forget the name. Elsner has turned into a good-for-nothing on the Schlesische Zeitung, just as Stein has on the Breslauer. Nevertheless, a go-ahead democratic party has again been formed in Breslau. The enclosed excerpt from the Preussische Gerichts-Zeitung was inserted at my instigation by its editor, Stadtrichter Hiersemenzel. Actuarius Stein, who has returned to Berlin from Zurich, sends Lupus his kindest regards.

You shall hear of my negotiations with the Prussian government and/or police in my next letter.

Apropos. I have a present for you from Lassalle, a fine military atlas, which you must come and fetch in person.

Salut to you, Lupus and Gumpert.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 292;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 10 June 1861

Dear Frederic,

I have had a letter from Vienna today. To start with, Friedländer wants me to send him 2 articles, 1 about the business in America (in which I am to provide a brief political and military résumé of the whole mess, for 1 or 2 leaders) and 1 on the situation in England. Later (i.e. when he has had these articles) he will let me have his further suggestions; and, in fact, I am to get £1 for each article, 10/- for mere news-letters. This is good pay by German standards and I shall have to agree to the thing, car il faut vivre. Since I should like to get the 2 sample articles off this week, you must do the military part about America for me. I will then fit it into the political part.

A week ago I made a serious start on my book [a second instalment to Critique of Political Economy]. Have heard nothing more of Lassalle, save what his cousin Friedländer (Lassalle does not and must not know anything about the transactions with the Presse) wrote and told me from Berlin, namely:

‘Since his return from Breslau, F. Lassalle has been partly busying himself with the affair of your naturalisation, whose satisfactory outcome I believe he prejudices by his excessive zeal and his memoranda tending to prove too much, and partly spending his time perusing and reading out loud the numerous letters that pour in from professors and privy councillors thanking him for a book so fine, so interesting and so witty, etc. These letters provide him with a grand opportunity to make conversation about his “excellent” book, thus proving that he is quite insensible to little titillations of this kind and wholly immune to vanity. The poor countess, who is fighting off a severe attack of influenza, finds it ever more difficult to play her official role of opposer, and I, too, am beginning to tire of acting as seconder.

So much for Friedländer.

As regards the goings-on in-the so-called National Association down here and Kinkel’s consequent downfall, I shall write tomorrow, having still to write to Berlin and Vienna today.

Salut. Regards to Lupus.

Cavour’s death! Qu'en pensez-vous? Garibaldi, the jackass, has made a fool of himself by a solidarity letter to the Yankees.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 293;

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart, 1922.

[London,] 11 June 1861

Dear Lassalle,

Perhaps you would be so kind as to pass on the enclosed letter to the countess.

Many thanks for your book [Das System der erworbenen Rechte], which arrived here a day or two since (I immediately sent the other copies to their respective destinations in Manchester). I began at the end, namely with the Pelasgian affair, and then went back to the law of succession at the beginning, having now progressed as far as p. 215. It is an important work in every respect. However, I cannot send you a criticism, assessment, etc., until I have read right through the whole thing. Merely en passant, then: In India, adoption is the prevailing form. English law has taken a course diametrically opposed to that of French law. Complete testamentary freedom (whereby no Englishman or Yankee is compelled to leave his family a farthing) dates back to the bourgeois revolution of 1688 and evolved in the same measure as ‘bourgeois’ property developed in England. Thus, it would seem after all that, aside from its specifically Roman origins, etc., complete testamentary freedom, indeed the making of wills generally, is a delusion, Which, in bourgeois society too, must have roots of its own, independent of mythology, etc.

I have, alas, had a letter from Germany saying that the £10 cannot be remitted to you before the end of this month. Until then, I must trust to your diplomatic finesse. As you know, I was disagreeably surprised by the fact that my uncle, who honoured the bills I currently owed, put off giving me the additional amount I asked for until some months later. All the same, I couldn’t help laughing at such a typically Dutch turn of events.

Whether or not I am accorded Prussian nationality there might still be some question of myself and family travelling to Berlin on my passport as a ‘foreigner’, and spending the winter there.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 294;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 12 June 1861

Dear Moor,

Unfortunately, I haven’t been keeping any newspapers on the American war, besides many of the places are not to be found on the map. The essential points are as follows:

The South had been quietly arming for years, particularly since the fuss over the presidential elections ... and, at the very last moment, had received money and arms en masse as a result of the treachery on the part of Buchanan’s ministers. By 4 March, therefore, the North was completely crippled. Moreover, prior to the fall of Sumter, Lincoln did not or could not do anything, save effect a somewhat greater concentration of his few regular troops (18,000 in all, the majority scattered about the West on anti-Indian duties) and refurbish their equipment. Now finally, after the attack on Sumter, the North was sufficiently aroused to silence all outbursts on the part of the opposition, thereby making powerful military action a possibility. 75,000 men were drafted and may now be serving, but it would seem that ten times that number were eager to volunteer, so that there may be up to 100,000 men now serving even though they won’t by any means have been concentrated yet. A further call-up by Lincoln is expected daily and will take less time, for everything is better prepared now. The 75,000 men, or rather the element occupying positions in the Washington region, on the Ohio facing Kentucky, and in St Louis (Missouri) (i.e. not counting the reserves in Ohio and Pennsylvania), have been sufficient for the time being to restore the balance between the forces of North and South along the line of the Potomac and momentarily even to permit a limited offensive by the North.

For the South, just as for the North, the primary objective was Washington. The South’s offensive in that direction was far too weak; beyond Richmond the main force was evidently not strong enough to put in a timely thrust. All they managed to do was send a mobile column to Harper’s Ferry on the Potomac above Washington. This position is ideally suited to an offensive against the North (Maryland and Pennsylvania), for it lies at the confluence of the Shenandoah, an important river, and the Potomac, is extremely strong tactically and commands both rivers completely. Seemingly, it was not without intent that the Federal Armory was sited up there by a government that foresaw and favoured future secession. The occupation of Harper’s Ferry disrupts the control of the Potomac line by Union troops at a sensitive spot and will immediately afford the Southern troops complete command of both banks, assuming they advance en masse to this line.

The fate of Maryland and Delaware was dependent on Washington being held by the North; cut off from the South and occupied by Union troops, they at once fell to the Union. A second success for the North.

The reconquest of Missouri by the St Louis Germans was the third success and one of enormous importance, for whoever holds St Louis blocks the Mississippi. The extent to which Kentucky’s neutrality is favourable to North or South will probably depend on circumstances and events. For the time being, at any rate, it will restrict the theatre of war to the area that lies further east.

Result: Thus, for all its preparations, the South has achieved nothing, save that the North, after only 1 month’s preparation, has already wrested from it the national capital and three slave states, while a fourth slave state doesn’t dare secede; also that the South’s offensive on the Potomac has come to a halt, whereas the North has already advanced beyond this river, as yet without meeting resistance. For every man the South can still produce, the North will produce three or four. The seceded states have about 7½ million inhabitants, of which more than 3 million are slaves; a minimum of 1 million whites must be deducted to guard the slaves, so that barely 2½ million are left as the aggregate of the population available for war. If 10% of these are mobilised, probably the largest number ever mobilised for defensive purposes, this will produce at most 250,000 men. But there would certainly not be a muster of that order. Switzerland, with pretty well the same population — rather more than 2 millions — has on paper about 160,000 militiamen. By contrast the North — reckoning the free states alone — numbers nearly 20 millions, all of whom are available with the exception, perhaps, of California, Utah and the territories in the far West. If we say the available population amounts to 17 millions and if we assume that not 10% but simply one third of that, i.e. 3 1/3%, are available for an offensive war, we arrive at over 500,000 men, more than enough to quell the South, even if it exerts itself to the utmost. Man for man, there is no question that the people from the North are markedly superior to those from the South, both physically and morally. Your pugnacious Southerner has a good deal of the cowardly assassin in him. Each of them goes about armed, but only because this will enable him, during a quarrel, to fell his antagonist before the latter expects to be attacked. That is the aver...

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 297;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 19 June 1861

Dear Frederick,

I have put off writing for so long because Weber (the Palatine watchmaker) had promised me a report on the London National Association meeting, which was the scene of Kinkel’s strange experience and was attended by Weber as a guest. I did not receive the enclosed from him until today. You will have seen from the last Hermann what it was all about. The final meeting has been adjourned until Saturday week. In the meantime, Juch, having been given the necessary supplies by a German businessman in the City, has set off to Coburg with the intention of getting the central committee of the National Association there to expel Zerffi (and hence implicite Kinkel). It’s really splendid that Gottfried’s boot-licking attitude to the English should have inspired such fanatical rage in all the liberal bourgeois in the City.

Letters have even arrived from Bonn, threatening Gottfried ‘with a drubbing’ should he return. The secret behind the support given to MacDonald by Zerffi (no doubt acting on instructions) and Gottfried is this: Gottfried holds an English appointment as lecturer at the Kensington Museum, the good Zerffi likewise at an Ashley (Shaftesbury) institution. Gottfried’s only allies are the louts of the ‘apolitical’ choral and other drinking societies. Last week Gottfried bribed these people (probably with English money) to join the National Association en bloc. (For anyone can become a member of the beastly association by obtaining a card from Trübner, at a minimum contribution of 3/-) Again, Gottfried held a private meeting of his followers and sent a deputation to Heintzmann asking him to resign voluntarily (on account of the insult to Gottfried’s dignity) from his position as chairman, failing which a motion would be proposed to that end.

By the by, I should not forget to tell you that, while the row was going on, my friend Rheinlander joined the National Association (after talking it over with me), and brought in some fifty members, (mostly clerks) from his Islington Choral Society; it was they more than anyone else who kicked up the anti-Gottfried row.

Rheinlander tells me that never before has the German business contingent in the City taken sides so fanatically over a political issue. How priceless it would be if Gottfried were forced to resign from the National Association because of his kow-towing to a foreign government! That would put paid to his status among the German middle-class riff-raff, and where would he be without them? Gottfried is aware that this is the issue upon which he will stand or fall, and is therefore busying himself after his own fashion. What particularly irks him just now is the way everyone is saying that ‘the Volk and “Marx” had been right about him after all’. He told an acquaintance of Hirschfeld’s, the printer, that the ‘Brimstone Gang’ were the invisible leaders of the whole business’. Nice, is it not, that we, who haven’t raised a finger, should be endowed by our enemies with such mystical ‘powers'?

The second enclosure I am sending you (which please return as I have got to answer it) is a letter from la Hatzfeldt. I shall keep her as my private correspondent in Berlin as she has incomparably more political nous (not to mention her good contacts) than ‘the step that bears in itself the systematic principle of its walking’. (Lassalle, Vol. II, p. 545.) (Apropos. I presume you and Lupus have had L.’s opus?) There are two passages in her letter I should explain to you. With regard to the Blanqui affair, I had arranged for a letter to be sent her from Brussels (from Denonville). Initially, it’s a matter of obtaining money to print a pamphlet, emanating from Denonville, about the — infamous — Blanqui trial. (Debates, etc., and discussion thereof.) Blanqui himself has, through Denonville, expressed his heartfelt gratitude to me and to the parti prolétaire allemand (in partibus) for the sympathy we have shown him. I consider it a very good thing that we should again have direct links with the decidedly revolutionary party in France.

Second point: In the letter in which I notified Lassalle that there was nothing doing just now so far as the newspaper was concerned, I endeavoured to sugar the pill by saying that I might perhaps come to Berlin next winter.

La Hatzfeldt’s assessments of official democracy in Berlin is perfectly correct. She doesn’t, of course, come into contact with the genuine rank and file, nor, of course, is she familiar with the prevailing mood in the pubs — which is better.

Many thanks for your letter about America. If anything of importance (military) should happen, you will, I presume, not fail to write and let me have your views about it. From the picture I have gained of General Scott — now 76, to boot — from the Mexican War (see Ripley), I would expect him to make tremendous blunders — if, that is, the old jackass isn’t supervised by others. Above all, slow and irresolute. Incidentally, from the facts appearing in the Tribune I see that the North is now speaking openly of a slave war and the abolition of slavery.

Yesterday in the Commons, on the occasion of the Schleswig-Holstein affair, Lord Montagu, having previously given notice of his intention, raised the matter of Palmerston’s London Protocol (on the Danish Succession) of 1850, etc. The Old Man had recourse to his usual method. Hardly had Montagu embarked on his speech than he was brought up short by a pre-arranged count-out of the House.

On Saturday I have £2 to pay out in rates and should be most grateful if you could send this to me. At the beginning of July I shall be getting a bit more money. The fact that I have already spent what I brought back with me will not surprise you, since, besides the debts which occasioned the trip, nothing has been coming in for nearly 4 months, while school and doctor alone ate up nearly £40.

What’s this about L. Simon, of whom there is some mention in the last part of la Hatzfeldt’s letter? Was Simon in the Landwehr? At any rate, you have sinned more than Ludwig (who was nowhere in the field, etc.). I don’t understand the business. Regards to Lupus.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 300;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 1 July 1861

Dear Frederic,

I was delighted to see Lupus here, as was the whole family. Despite his gout, the old man had quite a youthful air. He immediately handed over your letter, and £2, which promptly went to the Tax Gatherer. I was expecting to get a supply from Germany this morning, but nothing has arrived yet. Since I am completely without revenue for the time being and yet in a continual course of consumption (this being how some economists account for ‘profit” which they see as deriving, not from the costs of production, but from the costs of consumption), any supplies from Manchester would be most welcome.

Please write and tell me at once what you think about the moves (military) in Virginia. The blunders made by officers of the militia — Brigadier-General Pierce, by nature a ‘tailor’ from the State of Massachusetts — will, of course, recur often enough on both sides. Is Washington still threatened? Do you believe that the Southerners’ position at Manassas Junction is an offensive one? Or aren’t the fellows engaged rather in a withdrawal? In Missouri the defeat of the Southerners seems certain, and who should now turn up there but the terrible ‘Colonel Bornstein'? From a private letter to Weber it transpires that ‘Colonel Willich’ is in command of a corps from Cincinnati. He would not appear to have gone into action yet.

On studying these American affairs more closely, I have come to the conclusion that the conflict between South and North — for 50 years the latter has been climbing down, making one concession after another — has at last been brought to a head (if we disregard the effrontery of ‘Chivalry’s’ fresh demands) by the weight which the extraordinary development of the North Western States has thrown into the scales. The population there, with its rich admixture of newly-arrived Germans and Englishmen and, moreover, largely made up of self-working farmers, did not, of course, lend itself so readily to intimidation as the gentlemen of Wall Street and the Quakers of Boston. According to the last census (1860), it had grown by 67 p. c. between 1850 and 1860, in which year it numbered 7,870,869, whereas, according to the same census, the entire free population of the seceded Slave States was about 5 million. These North Western States furnished not only the bulk of the ruling party, but also the President in 1860. It was also this self-same area in the North that first came out unequivocally against any recognition of the independence of a Southern Confederacy. They cannot, of course, allow the lower reaches and estuary of the Mississippi to pass into the hands of foreign states. Again, in the Kansas affair (from which this war really dates), it was the population of these North Western [States] who came to blows with the border ruffians.

A closer look at the history of the secession movement reveals that secession, constitution (Montgomery), Congress ibid., etc., are usurpations without exception. Nowhere did they allow the people en masse to vote. This ‘usurpation’ — which is concerned, not only with secession from the North, but also with consolidating and intensifying the oligarchy of the 300,000 slave lords in the South vis-à-vis the 5 million whites — has been the subject of highly characteristic articles which appeared in the Southern papers at the time.

And now let us turn to high politics — Kinkel and the National Association in London. You will no doubt recall that, a week ago last Saturday, Heintzmann had adjourned the meeting (a fact he advertised in the Hermann), because Juch had been sent to Coburg, there to move a placitum patrum. At the same time, the great Heintzmann had convened an extraordinary meeting for Tuesday to commemorate the Battle of Waterloo, etc.

Foxy Gottfried, however, together with Zerffi, sent out secret circulars to their people (see last Hermann) summoning them to a meeting on Saturday. Gottfried and his people, having now got the field to themselves, effectively held their meeting behind the backs of the others. Gottfried (as one of the vice-presidents of the National Association) took the chair, and Zerffi (as a member of the committee of the self-same National Association) acted as secretary. It goes without saying that the resolutions pertaining to the MacDonald business, etc., that were adopted at this meeting were agreeable to Gottfried and Zerffi. Now, on the following Tuesday, Heintzmann called for a reading of the minutes of the last meeting at which he had taken the chair, and acted as though he knew nothing whatever about the interim meeting held by Gottfried and Co. Nor did Gottfried and Zerffi, who were present, call for the reading of the relevant minutes or, for that matter, say a single word about the meeting they themselves had arranged. What Gottfried did do, however, was to write to Juch the following day, requesting him to reproduce in the Hermann the minutes of his, Gottfried’s, meeting enclosed in his letter. He even ominously invoked an agreement which he had made with Juch on handing over the Hermann. The latter, however, said ‘quod non’ (see last Hermann). The day before yesterday, it would seem, the row was discussed at a meeting of the National Association at Seyd’s Hotel. But I haven’t had a report on it yet.

This will give you some idea of what the ‘Machiavellismus Gottofredi Magni’ is like. You will further see from the last Hermann’s account of the meeting of the National Association that Blind — who has as many little dodges up his sleeve as there are fleas on a dog — invited ‘Dralle’ to join, in order to secure for himself a vote of thanks as the saviour of Schleswig-Holstein. This was, however, capped by Heintzmann, who didn’t even give Dralle’s notion a chance to be put to the vote. This same summus Blind got third party to ask Weber, etc., whether he should ‘appear as speaker’ at the meeting to be held by the German communist association and the Frenchmen’s associations in honour of the June insurrection. Reply: If he wanted a drubbing — yes.

Ad vocem Lassalle’s work:

Lupus has made me a present of his copy, for disposal as follows: to be sent by you to my cousin, addressed to: ‘A. Philips, Advokaat, Keizergracht bij de Westermarkt. L. L. 267, Amsterdam.'

You must, of course, erase Lassalle’s dedication to Lupus. My cousin is interested in the theory of jurisprudence.

You yourself, in order to get a foretaste — both of what is insipid and what is good in Lassalle’s book, should, for a start, read the foreword to Volume I and Chapter XLI in Volume II, beginning at p. 517.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 303;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[Manchester.] 3 July 1861

Dear Moor,

Your questions about the state of affairs in Virginia are easier put than answered. Is Washington still threatened? Not immediately, otherwise the Southerners would not have evacuated so much territory; but one doesn’t know, of course, how the opposing sides compare in terms of strength. Should the first major attack by the Northerners be decisively repulsed, it’s impossible to say what might happen, for there is no knowing where they would come to a halt again. However, the chances are three to one that, even in that case, the Potomac would form an adequate obstacle.

The position at Manassas Junction is determined by the Southerners’ need to maintain communications with North-West Virginia along the railway to Paris and Strasburg. If M. J. is lost, their nearest railway communication with West Virginia (on the far side of the mountains) would be the line from Richmond via Gordonsville to Staunton — 80 miles to the south; they would lose the opportunity of rapidly moving their reserves, particularly those immediately to the rear of their dispositions, from west to east, etc., as need arose, while any elements in West Virginia could be cut off or forced to make a wide detour. Such is the significance of the position — whether it has any tactical importance I can’t say, for no conclusions at all can be drawn from the maps. All in all, the war in West Virginia will now turn on the railway junctions.

The affair at Big Bethel is of no significance. Tactically speaking, it was abominably mismanaged; a night attack carried out with volunteers like these and, what’s more, with each column separated from the rest, could only end in confusion, mutual slaughter, and panicky flight.

On the other hand, the North would seem to be at fault in 2 respects: 1. the massive strength of the newly formed and fully mobile corps doesn’t appear to have been called on at all; they were kept kicking their heels some 400-500 miles from the scene of the fighting, whereas on the Potomac they would have been worth their weight in gold, and 2. brave old Scott would again appear to have made colossal plans for an encirclement which can only lead to a colossal dispersal of his troops; to what extent this may lead to defeats, given the slack ways and unknown heroes of the South, it is impossible to determine.

What is this about not voting on secession?’ According to all the papers up here, the resolutions at the conventions were ratified in each state by popular vote.

Let me know how il capitano che'l gran Sepolcro liberò di Cristo, Goffredo il Magnanimo subsequently got on in the affair.

Enclosed SL 62585, five pounds, Liverpool, 12 May 1860.

I shall see if I can’t send you some more towards the end of the week.

How did Lupus get on at the Prussian Embassy?

Many regards to the Ladies.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 305;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 5 July 1861

Dear Engels,

Your letter enclosing £5 most gratefully received.

For the past 3 days I have had a foul inflammation of the eyes which has prevented me from doing any writing or reading. However, I believe it will pass in a couple of days.

Lupus found Alberts extremely obstructive. (I would mention in passing that the latter is Bernstorff’s factotum. Also chief police agent and chief pimp to the more select visitors from Prussia.) However, with his own particular brand of rudeness, he finally browbeat Alberts into entering a long scrawl on his Swiss passport to the effect that Lupus, an exile, was availing himself of the amnesty, etc., to travel to Wiesbaden, etc., for such and such a purpose. Initially, he had been told that, because of his 10 years’ residence abroad — so this is the story they dish out to everyone — he had lost his Prussian citizenship. He should therefore have himself naturalised as an Englishman and travel on an English passport.

Zedlitz, by the by, told Lassalle shortly before his resignation that I had republican or, at least, anti-royalist views, and it was their unvarying principle never to renaturalise anyone of that couleur. They didn’t want to set a praecedens in my case. Winter, Zedlitz’s successor, told Lassalle he could not reverse his predecessor’s decision. Finally Schwerin, who was also being pestered by Lassalle and wanted to be rid of him, said he would refer the matter to the Berlin municipal council — which, however, he won’t do. During the debate in the Chamber on the subject of refugees, Vincke et cie applauded loudly when Schwerin announced that the government would always reserve the right to decide each particular case as it thought fit.

As to the secession business, the matter has been quite wrongly represented in the English papers. Everywhere, with the exception of South Carolina, there was the strongest opposition to secession.

First: border Slave States. A convention of the border States was held in the winter of 1861. Those invited were Virginia, Kentucky, Arkansas, Maryland, Delaware, Tennessee and North Carolina. For this purpose, further Conventions were held in each of the above states so that delegates might be sent to the General Convention.

Delaware refused even to call a convention for this purpose.

Tennessee ditto. Its Democratic Legislature took it out of the Union by coup de main. Admittedly, an election was later held to ratify this invalid Act. This took place under a reign of terrorism. More than 1/3 didn’t vote at all. Of the remainder, 1/3 were against secession, including the whole of East Tennessee, which at this moment is arming to oppose the secessionists.

Kentucky. 100,000 for the Union ticket, only a few thousand for secession.

Maryland declared itself in favour of Union, and has now elected 6 Union men as Members of Congress.

North Carolina and even Arkansas elected Union delegates, the former actually by a large majority. Subsequently terrorised.

Virginia. The people elected a Union Convention (by a majority). Some of these chaps allowed themselves to be bought. When the Southern fever was at its height — fall of Sumter — an Ordinance of Secession was passed secretly by 88 to 55. All other moves — while the Ordinance continued to be kept secret — aimed at the capture of the Federal Navy Yard at Norfolk and the Federal Armory at Harper’s Ferry were carried out secretly. Were betrayed to the Federal Authorities before their execution. An alliance with Jefferson Davis’ Government was concluded in secret, and a huge mass of Confederate troops was suddenly pitched into the territory. Under their protection (truly Bonapartist, this), it now voted for secession. 50,000 Union votes nevertheless, despite the systematic terrorism. As you know, North Western Virginia has now publicly broken with the secessionists.

Second: Gulf States. A popular vote proper was taken only in a few states. In most of them, the conventions, which were chosen to decide the attitude of the southern states to Lincoln’s election (subsequently, at the Montgomery Congress, it was they who formed the delegates), usurped the power not only to decide on secession but also to recognise the Constitution, Jefferson Davis, etc. How this actually came about you will learn from the extracts below, taken from Southern American papers.

Texas, where, after South Carolina, there is the largest Slave Party and terrorism, nevertheless 11,000 votes for Union.

Alabama. No popular vote either on secession or on the new Constitution, etc. The convention elected here passed the Ordinance of Secession by 61 votes to 39. The 39 were from the Northern Counties, peopled almost exclusively by whites, but they represented more free men than the 61; for, in accordance with the United States Constitution, each slave-holder also votes for 3/5 of his slaves.

Louisiana. More Union votes than secession votes were cast at the election for delegates to the convention. But the delegates defected.

The interests of the mountain districts, the west of Carolina, the east of Tennessee, the north of Alabama and Georgia, are very different from those of the southern swamps.

The 2nd Decembrist nature of all this manoeuvring for secession (which is also why the fellows were compelled to provoke a war so that with the cry ‘The North against the South’ they could keep the movement going), which will be apparent to you from the following excerpts, is also evident from the fact that the traitors in Buchanan’s administration who were at the head of the movement — War Secretary Floyd, Navy Secretary Toucey, Treasury Secretary Cobb, Secretary of the Interior Thompson — together with the leading senators of the South, were deeply involved in the dilapidations running to many millions which, in the course of December 1860, had been referred by Congress (House of Representatives) to a Committee of Enquiry. For some of these fellows, it was, at least, a question of escaping the penitentiary. Hence they are the most willing tools of the 300,000-strong slaveholders oligarchy. It goes without saying that the concentration, status, and resources of the latter enable it to put down any opposition for the time being. Among one section of the ‘poor whites’, they found the mob that served them in place of Zouaves.

Georgia. ‘The Griffin Union’:

‘It is mere mockery for the same men who made the Constitution in Montgomery to come back to Georgia and ratify it under the name of a state convention.'

The Macon journal:

‘The State Conventions ... called for another purpose ... assume that they are the people, and under such an assumption of power can appoint delegates to a General Convention without consulting the people. All the acts of the Congress of their Confederacy are passed in secret session with closed doors, and what is done is kept from the people.’

The Augusta Chronicle and Sentinel (largest Georgia paper):

‘The whole movement for secession, and the formation of a new Government, so far at least as Georgia is concerned’ (and Georgia is the most populous of the slave states), ‘proceed on only a quasi consent of the people, and was pushed through, under circumstances of great excitement and frenzy-by a fictitious majority. With all the appliances brought to bear, etc., the election of the 4th of January showed a falling off of nearly 3,000, and an absolute majority of elected deputies of 79. But, upon assembling, by wheedling, coaxing, buying, and all the arts of deception, the convention showed a majority of 31’ (against Union). ‘... the Georgia Convention and the Confederate Congress have gone forward in their work, as none can deny, without authority from the people.”

Alabama. ‘The Mobile Advertiser’:

‘The Convention has adopted the permanent Constitution in behalf of the State of Alabama... The great fact stands forth that the delegates were not chosen for any such purpose.’

The North Alabamian:

‘The Convention made haste to usurp the prerogative, and ratify the Constitution... It is a remarkable fact that the substantial, physical force of the country, the hard-fisted, hand-working men, expected to do all the fighting when the country calls, were from the beginning opposed to the Ordinance of Secession.’

Mississippi. Similar complaints about usurpation in the Jackson Mississippian and Vicksburg Whig.

Louisiana. ‘New Orleans True Delta’:

‘Here secession succeeded only by suppressing the election returns... The government has been changed into despotism.'

At the State Convention of Louisiana (New Orleans) on 21 March 1861, old Roselius (one of the leading politicians in the United States), said:

‘The Montgomery instrument ... did not inaugurate a government of the people, but an odious and unmitigated oligarchy. The people had not been permitted to act in the matter.’

In LouisvIlle, Kentucky, Senator Guthrie (pro-slavery man, Treasury Secretary under Pierce) said on 16 March 1861 that the whole movement was a ‘plot’ and ‘usurpation’. Inter alia:

‘In Alabama a majority of the popular vote was cast against going out, but a small majority of the delegates were for secession, they, took Alabama out, and refused the people to have any voice in the matter. The vote of Louisiana, too, was against secession, but the delegates suppressed it,’ etc.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 309;

First published: in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 12 July 1861

Dear Engels,

Your last letter together with enclosure, or rather the enclosure minus letter, most gratefully received.

The grand tragi-comedy of Gottfried Kinkel has come to a worthy end, and poor Gottfried has been knocked on the head.

To put the grand goings-on into a nutshell, what actually happened was this: On 15 June, Gottfried and Co., as I have already related, had, off their own bat, held a special meeting, at which they passed resolutions agreeable to themselves. On 18 June, Heintzmann took the chair at an extraordinary meeting, whose agenda did not include the great point at issue, since they were still awaiting a reply from Coburg.

The crucial meeting finally took place on 6 July, an answer having meanwhile arrived from the oracle at Coburg. Both parties were there in force, including the 35 members of the Association of German Men bought by Gottfried for cash. However, before the day of the meeting there had already been a considerable amount of agitation. For instance, the Association of German Men had been harangued by Heinztmann et cie and told about Gottfried’s machinations. The chairman of that association, a ship agent by the name of Schmidt (a Hanoverian), went over to the ‘patriotic’ side, of course,

Heintzmann — by the by — has, of course, a twofold interest in view: on the one hand, to appear pleasing to the Prussian government, on the other, perhaps to obtain hac via from that government some important trustive office connected with the forthcoming industrial exhibition. From what I hear, the fellow has performed the office of chairman after the true heavy-handed fashion of your Royal Prussian Elberfeld prosecutor. Not that this isn’t the right way to handle the melodramatic Gottfried.

Well then, after the meeting (on 6 July) had been declared open, Heintzmann called for the reading of the minutes of 1 and 18 June. Neither Kinkel nor Zerffi dared so much as suggest that their minutes of the 15th should be read. Thus, they admit the illegality of the meeting secretly organised by themselves. Next, Heintzmann read out the letter from Coburg. The oracle over there had written as follows: While expulsion from the National Association could, of course, only be effected by the senate at Coburg, expulsion from the comite (as in Zerffi’s case) was a local matter and hence must be decided In London.

Now, it so happened that the election of new officials to the London National Association was in general due to take place on 6 July. Hence, when Schmidt moved that they proceed with the agenda and allow the elections to decide the case, his motion was carried.

Gottfried made a very long speech and generally conducted himself in a melodramatically excited manner. The few hairs he still possesses stood on end. He was by turns acrimonious and threatening and even, at times, had recourse to irony, a field that is quite foreign to him. Throughout his speech, the utmost disorder reigned. Hissing. Notably, too, reiterated shouts of ‘Gottfried’, which he always regards as a grievous outrage. But oddest of all, it seems, was the manner in which, during the succeeding debate, even though he no longer had the floor, Gottfried kept leaping to his feet in order to interrupt, whereupon Heintzmann, raising a menacing arm, caused him by a mere gesture. to subside into his seat.

At the elections Gottfried and his whole gang were thoroughly trounced. Heintzmann was elected chairman by 133 votes to Gottfried’s 5. So, even the fellows he had suborned voted for the most part against him. No sooner had these results been proclaimed than he apparently adopted a most ‘dignified’ pose, a synthesis of the ‘dying gladiator’ and ‘Christ crucified’. Has Gottfried deserved this of ‘his beloved Germany’?

In the meantime, however, that creature Blind — who, as a ‘republican’, does not, of course, belong to the National Association had succeeded by dint of obsequiousness, sharp practice, and intrigues of all kinds in having himself loudly acclaimed as the courageous and patriotic champion of Schleswig-Holstein at both the National Association meetings of 15 and 18 June.

So much for this war between mice and frogs. You will have seen that even the Kladderadatsch contained a joke or two at the expense of the noble poet.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Antoinette Philips

In Zalt Bommel

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 311;

First published: in International Review of Social History, Vol. 1, Part 1, Assen, 1956.

[London,] 17 July 1861

My sweet little Cousin,

I hope you will not have misinterpreted my long silence. During the first time I did not exactly know where to direct my letters to, whether to Aachen or to Bommel. Then, there came a heavy pressure of business, and during the last 2 or 3 weeks I laboured under a most disgusting inflammation of the eyes which very much limited the time I had disposable for writing or reading. So, my dear child, if I must plead guilty, there are many attenuating circumstances which I trust you, as a gracious judge, will allow to influence your sentence. At all events, you would do me great wrong in supposing that during all that time one single day had passed away without the remembrance, on my part, of my dear little friend.

My Berlin affair has not yet been brought to a definite issue. You will remember that during my stay in the Prussian metropolis the Hohenzollern authorities seemed to yield, and even furnished me with a passport for one year. Yet hardly had. I turned my back upon them, when Lassalle, to his utter astonishment, received a letter from the Polizelpräsident v. Zedlitz to the purpose that I could not be ‘renaturalised’ because of my ‘politische Bescholtenheit’. At the same time the Prussian government declared that all the Political Refugees, having been absent from Prussia for more than 10 years, had lost their right of citizenship, had become foreigners, and would, consequently, like all other foreigners, only be re-naturalised at the pleasure of the king. In other words, they declared their so-called ‘amnesty’ to be a mere delusion, sham and share. This was a point I had tried to drive them to during my Berlin stay, and it was more than even the Prussian press and the Prussian chamber of deputies were able to bear silently with. Consequently, the case gave rise to bitter discussions in the journals, and to an interpellation of the cabinet in the Abgeordnetenhaus. For the nonce the ministry escaped by means of some equivocous and contradictory statements, but the whole affair contributed not a little to disillusion people in Germany as to the ‘new era’ inaugurated by what the Berliners irreverently call the ‘Schöne Wilhelm’ Lassalle, with his usual stubbornness, tried hard to get the better of the authorities. First he rushed to Zedlitz and made him such a scene that the Frelherr got quite frightened and called his secretary for assistance. A few weeks later, Zedlitz having been removed from his post, in consequence of hostile demonstrations against him by the Berlin mob, Lassalle called upon Geheimrath Winter, the successor of Zedlitz, but the ‘successor’ declared that his hands were bound by the decision of his ‘predecessor’. Lassalle, lastly, caught hold of Count Schwerin, the minister of the Interior who, to escape from the violent expostulations of my ‘representative’, promised him to leave the whole case to the decision of the Berlin magistrate — a promise he is, however, not very likely to keep. As to myself, I have attained at least the one success of forcing the Berlin government to throw off its liberal mask. As to my return to Berlin, if I should think proper to go there before May 1862, they could not prevent it because of the passport granted to me. If I should delay my return, things will perhaps have so altered in Prussia, that I shall not want their permission. It is really ridiculous that a government should make so much fuss, and compromise itself so much, for fear of a private individual. The conscience of their weakness must be awful.

At the same time I had the good fortune of being honoured by the singular attention of the French government. A person at Paris whom I do not know, had a translation of my pamphlet Herr Vogt already in print, when an order on the part of M. de Persigny forbade him going on with the translation. At the same time a general warning was communicated to all the booksellers at Paris against selling the German original of Herr Vogt. I got only acquainted with this occurrence by a Paris correspondence published in the Allgemeine Augsburger Zeitung.

From the Gräfin Hatzfeldt I have received a letter filling 16 pages. Take an example of this, my dear child. She has gone — of course, in company of Lassalle — to a bathing place near Frankfurt on the Main. Thence they will proceed to Switzerland, and, after a month’s sojourn there, to Italy. She feels much ennuyée and thinks herself much to be pitied, because she has no other business on hand save that of amusing herself. It is in fact a bad plight for an active, stirring and rather ambitious woman whose days of flirtation are gone by.

A propos. I have sent from Manchester to August the two volumes of Lassalle’s new juridical work and should like to hear whether the packet has found out its address. From Jacques I have heard nothing.

I think not, my dear child, that Mrs Marx and her daughters will find an occasion of paying this year a visit to Bommel, because the Doctor thinks a sea-bath during the hot season would be the best she could do for getting rid of the remainders of the terrible disease that befell her last autumn. On the other hand, I hope you will not forget your promise to visit London where all the members of the family will feel happy to receive you. As to myself, I need not tell you that nothing in the world would give me greater pleasure.

I hope, my sweet little charmer, you will not prove too severe, but, like a good Christian, send me very soon one of your little letters without revenging yourself for my too long protracted silence.

Recommend me to your father, to my friend ‘Jettchen’, the Doctor, your brother Fritz and the whole family, and believe me always

Your most sincere admirer

Charles Marx

I am quite astonished at the news of the attentat on his Prussian Majesty, alias ‘Der schöne Wilhelm’. How could any person of common understanding risk his own head in order to kill a brainless ass?

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 314;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 20 July 1861

Dear Engels,

I do not believe that you can apply to the Prussian Embassy in London for a ‘certificate of good conduct’ without presenting the fellows with a document most compromising to yourself.

Neither under Prussian nor international law is the Prussian Embassy a supervisory body obliged to issue testimonia as to the conduct of foreigners or Prussians. Only insofar as it issues passports does it have to consider whether someone’s reputation, either as a result of a court decision or by rumor publicus, is that of a criminal. As for the rest, it is supposed to know nothing about private individuals. What it does know, it knows per abusum as a moucharderie institution. Thus, a certificate of good conduct from that quarter would be tantamount to a certificate of good conduct from the illegal (and hence officially non-existent) secret political police, sub auspiciis of Alberts, the Embassy clerk. But you cannot recognise such an authority, and the chief of police in Barmen would be very hard put to it, were you to ask him to indicate the paragraph in the Prussian statute book according to which the Prussian Embassy in London possesses such attributes.

The same cannot be said of the Prussian consul in Manchester. Consuls are commercial, not political representatives of their state. Hence they are supposed to know the businessmen of their locality and, in particular, those of their own nationality. Hence the consul would be able to give a certificate to the effect that X. X. has lived in Manchester for 10 years as a respectable businessman and is known to be such. The Prussian government has no right whatever to demand any other kind of testimonial and would be too cautious to do so officially. But the former it can demand, because your request for renaturalisation has put you on the same footing as foreigners of whom suchlike testimonials, etc., may be required when they apply for naturalisation in Prussia.

The Prussian government has no more right to demand any sort of testimonial concerning your political conduct than, say, a confession of political faith executed by you yourself.

I have heard nothing more either from Vienna or from Dana, although the latter sends me the Tribune every week.

Brockhaus will not definitely make up his mind until I have sent him the manuscript. [a second instalment to Critique of Political Economy] This is a far from pleasant condition since he will submit the manuscript to the judgment of his idiots of literary advisers over there. Come to that, I'm not progressing as fast as I should like, owing to much domestic trouble.

Have you read any of Lassalle’s book? Have you sent the book to my cousin? This last is of importance to me, since I am sorely in need of that youth’s bons offices.

Lassalle and the countess are at a spa near Frankfurt am Main.

I was called upon by an emissary from the Poles, who at the same time brought me a whole bundle of J. Ph. Becker’s letters, sent by Schily, which I haven’t yet read. Hasn’t paid me a second visit, probably because he didn’t like the home-truths I told him about the poor outlook for any kind of conspiracy in Prussia just now. You shall have the Becker letters as soon as I've read them; ditto a letter from Lassalle to me, as soon as I have answered it. Heard anything from Lupus?

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 316;

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

[London,] 22 July 1861

Dear Lassalle,

You must attribute my somewhat prolonged silence to sundry ‘attenuating circumstances’. D'abord, I have as yet not succeeded — despite the most positive assurances that have been given me in this respect — in putting my financial affairs in order and thus, which galls me more than anything else, letting you have the remaining £10.

Secundo: For a few weeks now I have been suffering from a horrible inflammation of the eyes (better just during the last day or two) which made all reading and writing exceedingly irksome.

Let me begin by thanking you sincerely for your endeavours with regard to my renaturalisation. At least, we have managed to compromise the Prussian government and demonstrate the emptiness of its so-called amnesty. I believe that O. Becker’s strange attempt at assassination (it’s not clear from the newspapers whether he’s a Russian or a German) will greatly contribute to a frightful termination of the ‘new era’.

I have read the 2nd part of your work (when I wanted to begin on the first, I was prevented by my eye-trouble) and have derived very great pleasure from it. I began with No. II because the subject was more congenial to me; not that this will prevent me from subsequently considering the thing in its totality.

You have misconstrued to some extent the very brief comments in my previous letter — no doubt it was the way I put it that was to blame. D'abord, by ‘testamentary freedom’ I didn’t mean freedom to make a will, but freedom to make it with complete disregard for one’s family. In England, the will as such goes back a very long way, nor can there be the slightest doubt that the Anglo-Saxons adopted it from Roman jurisprudence. That the English, even at a very early date, considered testacy rather than intestacy to be the norm, is evident from the fact that as far back as the Late Middle Ages, if a pater familias died ab intestato only the obligatory portions went to his wife and children, according to circumstances, whereas 1/3 or 1/2 fell to the Church. For the priests assumed that, had he made his will, he would for the salvation of his soul have left a certain amount to the Church. Generally, it seems to be in this sense that wills in the Middle Ages had a religious connotation and were made for the benefit of the deceased rather than the survivors. But the point I was trying to make (I am not, of course, concerned here with feudal property) was that, after the revolution of 1688, the restrictions governing family settlements, to which the testator had till then been legally subject, were lifted. That this was in keeping with the system of free competition and the society based thereon cannot seriously be questioned; nor that Roman law, modified to a greater or lesser extent, was adopted by modern society because the legal idea that the subject of free competition has of himself corresponds to that of the Roman person (not that I have any intention of enlarging at this juncture on what is a most important point, namely that the legal representation of certain property relations, though undoubtedly deriving from them, is not for all that, and cannot be, congruent with them).

You have shown that the adoption of the Roman will originally rested on a misconception (and still does, so far as the sagacity of learned jurists is concerned). But it by no means follows from this that the will in its modern form — no matter with what misconceptions of Roman law modern jurists may construe it — is the misconceived Roman will. If this were so, it might be said that every attainment of an earlier age adopted by a later one is a misunderstanding of the past. It is certain, for instance, that the 3 unities, as theoretically construed by the French dramatists in Louis XIV’s day, rest on a misconception of Greek drama (and of Aristotle as the exponent thereof). On the other hand, it is equally certain that they understood the Greeks in a way that corresponded exactly to their own artistic needs. Hence their continued adherence to this so-called ‘classical’ drama long after Dacier and others had provided them with a correct interpretation of Aristotle. It is also certain that all modern constitutions are largely based on a misconception of the English constitution, adopting as essential precisely that which appears to be declining in the English constitution — and which continues to exist in England in name only per abusum — e.g. a so-called responsible cabinet. The misunderstood form is precisely the general one. It is the one that lends itself to general use at a certain stage in the development of society.

Whether, for example, the English would or would not have had the form of will they now have (which, although it derives directly from the Roman and corresponds to Roman forms is not the Roman) without Rome is, to my mind, neither here nor there. Now, let me put the question another way, e.g.: Might not legacies (and under the so-called will of today the chief beneficiary becomes, in fact, merely a universal legatee) have arisen of themselves out of bourgeois society, even without any reference to Rome? Or, in place of legacies, just written instructions on the part of the defuncti as to the disposal of their assets?

What still seems to me not proven is that the Greek will was imported by Rome, although there would admittedly seem to be every probability that this is so.

You will have seen that Blanqui’s sentence — one of the most outrageous that have ever been pronounced — has been confirmed in the court of appeal. I am now curious to see what his friend in Brussels will have to tell me.

My wife sends her kindest regards.

Your

K. M.

As regards Brockhaus, I shall consider the matter as soon as I have finished [the second instalment of the Critique of Political Economy]. Hitherto I have never sent a manuscript out on spec.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 330;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[Manchester, 2 December 1861]

I/Z 07595, Newcastle on Tyne, 14 August 1860

Dear Moor,

The above is the number of the enclosed fiver, which could not go off till today, as the first of December fell on a Sunday. Once again, I didn’t register it.

During the past few days I have at last read some of the Lassalle. His stuff about retroaction may be quite plausible, but doesn’t hold water, as is apparent, e.g., in the case of divorce legislation, of which it might also be said, and has in fact been said by many a Berlin philistine: ‘If I'd known how difficult it was to get divorced, I should never have got married. By the way, it’s grossly superstitious of the fellow to go on believing in the ‘idea of law’, absolute law. His objections to Hegel’s philosophy of law are for the most part perfectly justified, but he hasn’t yet really got into his stride with his new philosophy of mind; even from the philosophical standpoint he should have progressed sufficiently to regard the process alone, not just its momentary result, as the absolute, in which case no other idea of law could follow than precisely the historical process itself. The style’s nice, too. ‘The hand-wringing despair of the contradictions’, etc., and then the introduction. Pure Ephraim Artful. I dare say I shan’t get very much further, unless I find it might come in useful as a course in Roman law, in which case I shall read the whole thing. How, by the way, one could think it worthwhile to send so simple and, au fond, insignificant an idea chasing right through the Corpus juris, applying it to every single point — as though it would gain weight in the process — is quite beyond my comprehension. But even nicer is the assumption that this wild goose chase, conducted in and around the ‘plenitude of the concrete’, is the proof of his pudding and he must therefore remain infallible ever after.

In Berlin things will now begin to hum. The new little Chamber’s half-hearted ‘Progress’ democracy will prove too red for handsome William, after all, and by March they'll already find themselves in a state of mild chronic crisis. I am curious to see what happens. If only the chaps in the Chamber aren’t too timid, they will yet succeed in toppling the handsome one, but I don’t trust that democratic breed.

I hope your wife is feeling better. Cordial regards to her and the girls.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 332;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 9 December 1861

Dear Engels,

From my pertinacious silence you may discern with what reluctance I write to you at all. Considering the great efforts — greater, even, than you can manage — that you make on my behalf, I need hardly say how much I detest perpetually boring you with my lamentations.

The last money you sent me, plus a borrowed pound, went to pay the school bill — so that there shouldn’t be twice the amount owing in January. The butcher and épicier made me give them I.O.U.s, one for £10, the other for £12, due on 9 January. Although I didn’t know with what I should pay them, I couldn’t risk being sued lest I bring the whole house tumbling about my ears. I owe the landlord £15, and shall owe him £21 in January. Ditto the green grocer, the baker, the news agent, the milkman, and the rest of the rabble whom I had placated with payments on account after my return from Manchester, lastly the tallyman, since the onset of winter meant buying indispensable items of winter clothing, which therefore had to be got on tick.

The amount I can expect at the end of the month is £30 at most, since those scoundrels from the Presse are not printing some of my articles. I have, of course, first to accustom myself to keeping within the ‘bounds of German reason’. (Incidentally, though, they are making quite a splash in their paper with my contributions.)

What I have to pay (including interest at the pawn-shop, etc.) amounts to £100. It is remarkable how, despite an occasional helping-hand, the loss of all income combined with debts that are never quite paid off invariably brings the same old muck to the surface again.

Today I have written to Dronke because he still owes me some money. But just gently nudging his memory, not urging; I made so bold as to tell him that if he could make me an advance, you would guarantee its repayment.

Once I'm out of this mess, New York and Vienna will allow me at least to jog along again.

My wife was in a dangerous nervous condition, and for a few days Dr Allen was most alarmed. He knows, or rather suspects, where the shoe pinches, but is too tactful to say anything untoward. The poor woman is still very out of sorts, but so resilient is she by nature that, as soon as things take a turn for the better, I feel sure she will be all right again.

There isn’t going to be war with America, as I have said from the very beginning in the Presse, and I am only sorry I didn’t have the means to exploit the boneheadedness of a Stock Exchange dominated during this silly season by Reuter and The Times.

I agree with your strictures on Izzy (who writes from Florence to say he ‘has had a very interesting meeting’ with Garibaldi, etc.). The 2nd volume is more interesting, if only by reason of the Latin quotations. Ideologism permeates everything, and the dialectical method is wrongly applied. Hegel never described as dialectics the subsumption of vast numbers of cases under a general principle.

My writing [of the second instalment of Critique of Political Economy] is progressing, but slowly. Circumstances being what they were, there was, indeed, little possibility of bringing such theoretical matters to a rapid close. However, the thing is assuming a much more popular form, and the method is much less in evidence than in Part I.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 334;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 19 December 1861

Dear Engels,

You know how the Dronke business came about. I wrote to him, not because of the bill, but to dun him. In the circumstances, I was, of course, compelled to inform him of the critical situation I was in, a situation which he, like anyone else, must, and did, find quite natural in view of the American affair. As a result of this communication, he came to see me and, thus, the arrangement was made which, to begin with, I would never even have thought of, had you not expressly stated in your letter that you would accept the bills if I was able to get them discounted through Freiligrath or ‘some other person’. I say this much in order to absolve myself of any semblance of indiscretion.

There is nothing doing with F., as I already knew beforehand. He only had the tailor and by the time of the Tribune affair he'd already lost him, because two of his clerks had obtained articles of clothing to the value of £70 on his recommendation and decamped without paying. Moreover, my relations to F. were so changed that, when he arranged to have even my bills on the Tribune discounted again by Bischoffsheim, he did so only with reluctance. But, even if he had wanted to, he couldn’t particularly since the latent bankruptcy of his bank court par les rues de Londres.

This letter will go off at the same time as one to Dronke, informing him that I embarked on the transactions with him as a result of a misunderstanding and asking him therefore to regard them as non avenues. I also told him that, if he could discount the bills on me personally without any intervention of other persons, this would be agreeable to me. I had to tell him that, because I can see no way out, and indeed my situation is one of the utmost peril.

His address, letters to be marked private, is 49 Oldhall Street, Liverpool. Judging by what Dronke says (though I believe he’s in Newcastle and not in Liverpool at all), he would simply try to arrange the matter with his own banker.

Unfortunately, I couldn’t help informing my wife of the contents of your letter, insofar as it referred to the bill transaction. And news of this kind always brings on a kind of paroxysm.

As to war with America, Pain may possibly succeed in bringing it about, but not without difficulty. He has got to have a pretext and it doesn’t seem to me as though Lincoln will give him one. Some of the Cabinet, Milner Gibson, Gladstone, plus ou moins Lewis, can’t be so easily be fooled as John Russell.

Taken by and large, the Americans have not been at fault, either materially or. formally, under English maritime law, which is in force there. As to the question of material right, the English Crown lawyers have themselves given a decision along these lines. They have therefore adduced, since Pam needed a pretext, an error in forma, a technicality, a legal quibble. But this, too, is erroneous. Under English maritime law one must distinguish between two cases. Whether a neutral ship carries belligerent goods and persons or contraband of war, either in the form of objects or persons. In the latter case, the ship with cargo and persons is to be seized and brought into a port for adjudication. In the first instance — if it is established beyond doubt that the goods (properly speaking an impossibility in the case of persons) have not passed into the possession of a neutral, the belligerent goods or persons may be seized on the high seas, while. the ship, etc., gets off scot-free. This sort of jurisprudence has — if we disregard the authorities — been constantly asserted by England, as I have discovered for myself by consulting Cobbett’s Register’ on all the squabbling that has gone on with neutrals since 1793.

Conversely, since the English Crown lawyers confined the problem to an error in forma and thus conceded the Yankees the right to seize all English ships with belligerents aboard and bring them into port for adjudication, the Yankees may very well — and in my view will — declare that they are satisfied with this concession, that in future they will commit no formal infringements in case of seizure, etc., and deliver up Mason and Slidell for the nonce.

If Pam is absolutely set on war, he can, of course, bring it about. In my view, that is not his intention. If the Americans act in the way I imagine they will, Pam will have provided stupid John Bull with fresh proof that he is ‘the Truly English Minister’. The chap will then be free to do whatever he likes. He will seize this opportunity,

1. to force the Yankees to recognise the Declaration of Paris on the rights of the neutrals;

2. to use this as a pretext for something he has hitherto not dared to do, namely request and prevail upon the English Parliament to sanction the abandonment of the Old English Maritime Law, the said abandonment having been subscribed to by Clarendon — on his (Pam’s) instructions — unbeknown to the Crown and without the prior knowledge of Parliament.

Pam is an old man, and, since the time of Catherine II, the Russians have been trying to enforce the declaration published in Paris. There are still two things they lack: the sanction of the English Parliament and the accession of the United States. On this occasion, both would be achieved. It seems to me that these warlike alarums are simply theatrical props with which to make stupid John Bull believe that the definitive abandonment of his own Maritime Laws in favour of Russia is a victory over the Yankees won thanks to the pluck of the ‘Truly English Minister’.

Additional reasons for these warlike alarums seem to be: Diversion of attention from Poland (for at public meetings even fellows such as Conningham from Brighton are demanding the Stoppage of further payment of the Dutch-Russian Loan) and diversion of attention from Denmark where Russia is engaged at this moment in ousting Glücksburg, the Heir presumptive appointed by herself.

It is, of course, possible that the Yankees won’t give way, and, in that case, Pam will be forced into war by his preparations and rodomontade to date. However, I would rate the odds at 100 to 1 against.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 337;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 27 December 1861

Dear Engels,

When the outside world first began to ‘dun’ me, I wrote — since I didn’t want to be always pestering you — not only to my mother and other relations, but also to Siebel. Now that young man, as I see from his letter, has again written to you. Consider the matter as non avenue.

I am extremely vexed that you should have had to give Dronke an I.O.U. for my sake. Originally, he promised to arrange the matter in less onerous a form and to give longer terms.

I don’t yet know quite how I am to weather this crisis. Whatever happens — since otherwise it would be plainly impossible — I shall write to my landlord and tell him that he cannot be paid now, that I intend to give him a bill, etc.

The court case is also going wrong. Since the point at issue turns on partnership, my lawyer considers it necessary — if I am not to be made to pay the £20 — that the case be removed from the Sheriff’s Court and taken before a Superior Court. I am due to appear at the Sheriff’s Court on January 3rd. My mistake lay in not having concluded a written contract with A. Petsch. Sidney, my attorney, believes I should be pretty safe in the Superior Court.

The rotten Presse is printing barely half my articles. They're jackasses. I wonder how they propose to pay, whether I'm expected to write individual articles on ‘spec’, or what?

In the meantime, may I wish you in advance every happiness for the New Year. If it’s anything like the old one, I, for my part, would sooner consign it to the devil.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

1862

Marx to Josef Valentin Weber. 15 January

Marx to Engels. 25 February

Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. 26 February

Engels to Marx. 28 February

Marx to Engels. 3 March

Engels to Marx. 5 March

Marx to Engels. 6 March

Engels to Marx. About 8 March

Marx to Engels. 15 March

Marx to Engels. 28 April

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 28 April

Engels to Marx. 5 May

Marx to Engels. 6 May

Engels to Marx. 12 May

Engels to Marx. About 18 May

Marx to Engels. 19 May

Engels to Marx. 23 May

Marx to Engels. 27 May

Engels to Marx. 29 May

Engels to Marx. 4 June

Engels to Carl Siebel. 4 June

Marx to Engels. About 6 June

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 16 June

Marx to Engels. 18 June

Engels to Marx. About 3 July

Marx to Engels. 5 July

Marx to Engels. 1I July

Marx to Engels. 21 July

Engels to Ferdinand Lassalle. 23 July

Engels to Marx. 30 July

Marx to Engels. 30 July

Engels to Marx. 31 July

Engels to Marx. 1 August

Marx to Engels. 2 August

Marx to Engels. 7 August

Engels to Marx. 8 August

Marx to Engels. 9 August

Engels to Marx. Before 12 Aug.

Engels to Marx. 13 August

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 13 August

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 14 August

Marx to Engels. 14 August

Marx to Wilhelm Schwarz. 19 August

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 20 August

Marx to Engels. 20 August

Engels to Marx. 21 August

Engels to Ferdinand Lassalle. 21 August

Engels to Marx. Early Sept.

Engels to Marx. 9 September

Marx to Engels. 10 September

Marx to Wilhelm Wolff. 4 October

Engels to Marx. 16 October

Marx to Engels. 29 October

Marx to Engels. 4 November

Engels to Marx. 5 November

Marx to Ferdinand Lassalle. 7 November

Marx to Engels. 9 November

Marx to Engels. 14 November

Engels to Marx. 15 November

Marx to Engels. 17 November

Marx to Engels. 20 November

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 15 December

Marx to Engels. 24 December

Engels to Marx. 26 December

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 28 December

Engels to Marx. 30 December

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 347;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 6 March 1862

Dear Frederick,

My best thanks for the Post Office order and the wine. That swine Koller, who has an I.O.U. of mine, had already dunned me yesterday.

I enclose herewith the 3 last Free Presses. I haven’t yet seen Collet in person, but feel sure he will be able to get hold of the other numbers as well.

In my letter to you, read Japan for Java. I obtained the actual facts from sundry numbers of the Tribune which contained the official Russian communiqués and reports from American consuls — all of them suppressed by the English press. I sent the relevant numbers to Urquhart and haven’t yet got them back. I had previously used them for a Presse article on the Russian advance in Asia. However, the jackasses didn’t print it. Now, you know what a bad memory for names I've got. So, at the moment I can’t provide you with the names. The first island lies exactly half way between the south-western extremity of Japan and the Korean mainland. It has a large harbour and, according to the American account, is capable of becoming a second Sevastopol. As regards the other islands that are actual Japanese possessions, one of them, if I am not mistaken, is called Jeso. However, I shall see if I can retrieve the documents.

Chinese trade, compared with what it was like up to 1852, has certainly increased, but by no means on the same scale as have all other markets since the Californian-Australian discoveries. Moreover, in earlier reports Hong Kong, as an English possession, is shown separately from China, so that exports under the heading ‘China’ invariably (from the 40s on) amount to less than total exports. Finally, the increment achieved since 1859 fell back in 1861 to its former level.

In consequence of the American crisis, the Board of Trade report for 1861 shows a considerable change in the ranking order of the various markets for English exports. India leads with £17,923,767 (including Ceylon and Singapore. India alone, £16,412,090).

Second market Germany, normally 4th. 1860: £13,491,523. 1861: £12,937,073 (not including what goes via Holland and, to a lesser degree, via Belgium). In view of Germany’s economic importance to England, what a diplomatic advantage it would give us, circumstances being different, over bluff John Bull!

France this year the 5th market. 1860: £5,249,980. 1861: £8,896,282. However, that includes Switzerland as well. England, on the other hand, now ranks as the premier market for France.

Out of the total exports of £125,115,133 (1861), £42,260,970 go to English ‘possessions’ and ‘colonies’. If one adds to that what England exports to other parts of Asia, Africa and America, there remains at most 23 to 24% for export to the countries of Europe.

Should Russia continue to advance in Asia at the same rapid pace as during the past 10 years, until all her efforts are concentrated on India, it will be the end of John Bull’s world market, a demise that will be hastened by the United States’s protective tariff policy, which that country will certainly be in no hurry to relinquish, if only out of revenge against John. Moreover, John Bull is discovering to his horror that his main colonies in North America and Australia are becoming protectionist to the same extent as he himself is becoming a Free-Trader. The complacent, brutal stupidity with which John has acclaimed Pam’s ‘spirited policy’ in Asia and America, will one day cost him damned dear.

To me it does not seem very probable that the Southerners will have concluded peace by July 1862. When the Northerners have 1. secured the Border states — and it is upon these, in fact, that everything has centred from the start — and 2. the Mississippi as far as New Orleans and Texas, the war may well enter a 2nd phase during which the Northerners will make no great exertions of a military nature but, by isolating the Gulf states, finally bring them to the point of voluntary re-annexation.

During this war Bull has acted with what must be wholly unprecedented effrontery.

In terms of brutality on the English side, the Mexican Blue Book exceeds anything previously known in history. Menshikov appears a gentleman compared with Sir C. Lennox Wyke. Not only does this blackguard evince the most immoderate zeal in the execution of Pain’s secret instructions but, by his insolence, also seeks to avenge himself for the fact that, in the exchange of diplomatic dispatches, Senor Zamacona, the Mexican Foreign Minister (now resigned) and erstwhile Journalist, invariably proves himself superior. As for the chap’s style, herewith a few examples from his dispatches to Zamacona.

*‘the arbitrary act of stopping all payments for the space of two years is depriving the parties interested of their money for that space of time, which is a dead loss of so much value to them.’ ‘A starving man may justify, in his own eyes, the fact of stealing a loaf on the ground that imperious necessity impelled him thereto; but such an argument cannot, in a moral point of view, justify his violation of the law, which remains as positive, apart from all sentimentality, as if the crime had not had an excuse. If he was actually starving, he should have first asked the baker to assuage his hunger, but doing so’ (starving?) ‘of his own free will, without permission, is acting exactly, as the Mexican government has done towards its creditors opt the present occasion.’ ‘With regard to the light in which you view the question, as expressed in your above named note, you will excuse me for stating that it cannot be treated of partially, without also taking into consideration the opinions of those who directly suffer from the practical operation of such ideas as emanating from yourself. “I had a full right to complain ... of having first of all heard of this extraordinary measure ... by seeing it in printed bills placarded through the public streets ...”

‘I have a duty to perform both to my own Gvt. and to that to which I am accredited, which impels me...,’ etc.,

‘I suspend all official relations with the Government of this Republic until that of Her Majesty shall adopt such measures as they shall deem necessary.*”

Zamacona writes and tells him that the intrigues of foreign diplomatists in the past 25 years have been largely to blame for the troubles in Mexico. Wyke replies that

*‘the population of Mexico is so degraded as to make them dangerous, not only to themselves, but to everybody coming into contact with them!'*

Zamacona writes, saying that the propositions he [Wyke] has made would put an end to the Republic’s independence, and were incompatible with the dignity of any independent state. Wyke replies:

*‘Excuse me for adding that such a proposition as I have made to you does not necessarily become undignified and impracticable simply, because you, an interested person,’* (i.e., Foreign Minister of Mexico) *'are pleased to say so.'*

But satis superque.

According to a letter from Schily to Rheinländer, things look most precarious in Paris and, unless there is war, Badinguet cannot hold on for another year. What bad luck for the chap that he should have the Parisians to govern, and not the Berliners, who admire him.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

PS. 1. How do I translate gigs into German?

2. What are feeders on circular frames?

3. Could you inform me of all the different types of workers employed, e.g., at your mill (all, that is, except the warehouse), and in what proportion to each other? For in my book, I need an example showing that, in mechanical workshops, the division of labour, as forming the basis of manufacture and as described by A. Smith, does not exist. The proposition itself has already been set forth by Ure. All that is needed is an example of some kind.

I must write and tell the chaps at the Presse that some new arrangement will have to be made. It’s all the same to me if they don’t print the best articles (although I always write them in such a way that they can print them). But financially it’s no go if, out of every 4 or 5 articles, they print 1 and only pay for 1. That places me far below the penny-a-liners.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 352;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 15 March 1862

Dear Engels,

Because your article failed to arrive, I have been unable to write to New York today. My relations with the Tribune are no longer such that, if (assuming they print the article) I send them something else in place of the sequel, they will print it. Rather, I am convinced that they are on the point of giving me my congé again along with all the other European correspondents. Their format has been reduced. They print perhaps one article in 3 or none at all. These are the usual indications of such a procedure.

So, let me have the sequel by Tuesday or better still, the conclusion, since it is only the conjectural part relating to the future that can be of any real interest to them.

I'm not getting on very well with my book [the second instalment of Critique of Political Economy], since work is often checked, i.e. suspended, for weeks on end by domestic disturbances. Little Jenny is still by no means as well as she should be.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 355;

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

London, 28 April 1862

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

You'll be terribly angry with me, old boy, and justifiably so, but, at the same time, with absolutely no justification. If I postponed writing to you from one day to the next, it was because I was hoping from one day to the next to put my affairs so far in order as to be able at least to pay off the £10 I owed you and, besides, write to you with an easy mind. Instead, the situation has grown worse every day. The Tribune, with which I had taken up again — though at 1/3 of my former income — has finally got rid of all its foreign correspondents. So, I now find myself in a complete vacuum. I have no intention of treating you to a tale of woe of any sort; it’s a wonder I haven’t actually gone mad. If I mention the beastly mess at all, it’s simply so that my other misfortunes should not be compounded by a misunderstanding with you.

What you say about J. Ph. Becker in your last letter is absolutely wrong. I. e., you don’t know the man except from hearsay. He is one of the noblest German revolutionaries there has been since 1830, a man who can be reproached with nothing save an enthusiasm which fails to take account of circumstances. As for his connections with the Italians, a bosom friend of Orsini’s has entrusted me with papers that leave no room for doubt on this score, whatever the Italians, and even Garibaldi, may say. As for his relationship with Türr — whom I had denounced over here in The Free Press even before 1859 — all it amounts to is this: During the Baden campaign Becker made Türr a lieutenant. Hence a kind of comradely relationship. Had Becker intended to exploit this connection and accept the offers made him in Paris by Türr in the presence of one of my London friends, he would not have endured the martyrdom which he, a man of 60, is in fact enduring. I know full well the sources whence Becker has obtained his exiguous financial support. They are confined to people within our closest circle. True, he fell foul of some of the Italians because his strongly Teutonic sentiments caused him to reject certain well-intentioned plans. It is indeed exasperating that men of Becker’s stamp should be so egregiously slandered.

As for my book [second instalment of Critique of Political Economy] it won’t be finished for another two months. During the past year, to keep myself from starving, I have had to do the most despicable hackwork and have often gone for months without being able to add a line to the ‘thing’. And there is also that quirk I have of finding fault with anything I have written and not looked at for a month, so that I have to revise it completely. At all events, the work loses nothing thereby, and pro anno the German public has, after all, far weightier things to think about.

Ad vocem your book which I have of course now quite finished, and individual chapters reread, it strikes me that you apparently haven’t read Vico’s ‘new science’. Not that you'd have found anything in it immediately to your purpose; but it does provide a philosophical view of the spirit of Roman law, contrasting with that of the legal philistines. You would scarcely be able to work your way through the original, as it is not only written in Italian but in a very peculiar Neapolitan idiom. However, I commend the French translation, La Science nouvelle, etc.; traduite par 1'auteur de l'essai sur la formation du dogme catholique. Paris, Charpentier, Editeur — 1844. To whet your appetite, I shall do no more than quote the following sentences:

‘Ancient Roman law was a grave poem and ancient jurisprudence austere poetry which contained the first attempt to formulate legal metaphysics... ancient jurisprudence was highly poetical in that it supposed true those facts that were not so, and refused to admit the truth of facts that were so indeed; in that it regarded the living as dead, and the dead as living in their inheritance.’ ‘The Latins called heroes heri: whence comes the word hereditas ... the heir ... represents, vis-à-vis the inheritance, the deceased pater familias.’

Vico contains in embryo Wolf (Homer), Niebuhr (Römische Königsgeschichte), the fundamentals of comparative linguistics (even if in fanciful form) and a whole mass of really inspired stuff. So far, I have never been able to get hold of his legal writings proper.

Under the circumstances in which I now find myself (and have found myself for the better part of a year) I shall not be able to do a critique of your book until by and by. On the other hand, I should be grateful, not for my own sake, but for that of my wife, if, without a prior quid pro quo on my part, you could let Brockhaus advertise the first part of the political economy.

Never have the English middle classes (and aristocracy) put their foot in it with such effrontery as during the great struggle that is taking place on the far side of the Atlantic. By contrast, the English working class, which suffers most from the bellum civile, has never before shown itself as heroic and noble. This is the more admirable when one knows, as I do, all the mechanisms that were set in motion, both here and in Manchester, to incite them to stage a demonstration. The only major organ they still have, the Newspaper owned by that low-down scoundrel Reynolds, has been bought by the Southerners, as have the most important of their lecturers. But all in vain!

Varnhagen’s book interested me a great deal and I can understand how timely its appearance was. On no account must you fail to congratulate Ludmilla about it on my behalf. Nevertheless, this has not raised Varnhagen in my esteem. I find him shallow, insipid and paltry and would ascribe his abhorrence of Counsellor to the Legation Kölle to the shock of encountering his own double.

Please return the enclosed letter from the régicide Simon Bernard. Do you think I should get involved in the matter? I rather think not.

My kindest regards to the Countess. She shall soon have a letter from me all to herself. I hope she has never allowed herself to be misled by trifles such as my omitting to write, nor ever doubted the lasting attachment and admiration I feel for her.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 358;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 5 May 1862

Dear Moor,

There was no end of trouble at the office last week, on top of which I didn’t feel very well, hence didn’t manage to write. Friedländer’s magnanimous letter returned herewith. Those people have peculiar ideas of London!

As to the Tribune, I saw in the Manchester Examiner and Times’ literary gossip an item to the effect that Dana is resigning from the Tribune ‘On account of Differences of Opinion with Mr Horace Greeley. So, that old jackass with the face angelic seems to have been behind it all. But I wouldn’t let the fellows off just like that without at least writing to Dana, asking for further elucidation as to what it all means and who is now managing the Tribune in his place, so that you know whom you are to have recourse to. If the chaps want to sever the connection, at least get them to say so; I wouldn’t just tamely put up with indirect hints. If you were subsequently to go to another New York journal, they could always say that you were being disloyal to them. Besides, they must surely give a reason.

Borkheim writes to say that he has paid the balance of the money, so I hope you will be saved from arrest.

Ad vocem Ariadne, there’s no doubt I'm right. All the old constellations still exist on the modern charts. What Diodorus maintains is not authoritative. The fellow wasn’t an astronomer. Moreover, it was a question of the wording. I betted on constellation. But subsequently it struck me, too, that she figures among the recently discovered asteroids; that, however, has absolutely nothing to do with the case, of course.

What I want besides the War Department estimates (for 1862) is a paper laid before Parliament which sets out the new organisation of the Indian native army (as it has existed since 1861) (i.e., the number of regiments with their old and new names and in what way these have been retained or renumbered).

Can you send me The Free Press for April? I shall try and get hold of the May issue up here.

As regards America:

1. Battle of Corinth. May be classed with all well fought major modern battles, in which the antagonists have been of approximately equal strength. Eylau, Wagram, Lützen, Bautzen (admittedly the French were much stronger here, but, being without cavalry, they were incapable of pursuit), Borodino, Magenta, Solferino. The battle, to use Clausewitz’s words, smouldered away like damp powder, exhausting both sides, and, when it was over, the positive advantages gained by the victorious side were of a moral rather than a material nature. At all events, the momentary advantage gained by Beauregard on Sunday was more intensive and much greater than that gained by Grant and Buell on Monday. The bulk of the trophies went to the Confederates, even though they were ultimately beaten, i.e., compelled to forego their attack and withdraw. That is the tactical aspect. But the strategic one is this:

Beauregard had concentrated all the troops he could get hold of so as to pounce on the approaching Federal divisions, one by one when possible. This miscarried; the troops under Grant, Buell and Wallace were sufficient to repulse him. Had they lost this battle, the Federals would have lost Tennessee; now they have kept it. It was thanks only to the redoubts at Corinth that Beauregard was not at once compelled to move further south. Whether these earthworks are capable of protecting him from an attack by Halleck (who has now assumed command), there is no way of telling. No more can we credit the rumour that he has received massive reinforcements from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Alabama. If this is to some extent the case, they can certainly be nothing but raw recruits, who will be more of a hindrance to him than a help. On the other hand, the forces at Pittsburg Landing were so close to being evenly matched that, without reinforcements, Halleck, too, will find it difficult to carry out an assault on a fortified camp or undertake some other major offensive operation. We don’t know what troops the Federals still have in Tennessee or Kentucky, other than those engaged at Pittsburg Landing, so it’s hard to say what the odds are. In the meantime, the Unionists have cut the railway from Memphis to Chattanooga (i.e., to Richmond, Charleston, Savannah), both to the west as well as to the east of Corinth. Consequently, Beauregard is restricted to one railway (to Mobile and New Orleans), and the question arises whether his troops will be able to subsist in Corinth for any appreciable time.

2. Virginia. Hero McClellan is in a dead fix. I think this will mark the passing of his spurious glory. He has had another division transferred to him from McDowell, but that won’t help him much. All that can save him are the ironclads, yet another of which (the Galena) has sailed for Monroe. Concerning this topic, see today’s Morning Star, American news; of great interest to Austria. You will also learn from it why, not long ago, the Monitor lay quietly at anchor when the Merrimac, the Yorktown, etc., seized the 3 transports. If they cleared the rivers to right and left and engaged the flanks and rear with their guns, these ships could once again save this jackass or traitor, in the same way as the gunboats at Pittsburg Landing saved Sherman (who had nothing but young troops, who had never been under fire before).

3. Mountain Department . Frémont is still at Wheeling, the result being that the mountainous portion of south Virginia as well as east Tennessee is still in enemy hands. I.e., the very best Union regions! Impossible to explain why. At all events, the Confederate regiment that was raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, as recently as the beginning of April, will doubtless go over at the first shot.

Bonaparte is up to his tricks again in America. He'll take good care not to stir up that hornet’s nest. Before the year was out (vide ‘Morning Star'), his ironclads and likewise all French merchantmen would be gone from the ocean, and then farewell to pleasure!

Apropos. You will have seen in today’s Standard (or Morning Herald) that General Hecker has become chief nigger catcher (Manhattan). Be sure to keep the paper.

What do you make of the Prussian elections? So colossal is the government’s defeat that it’s tantamount to a decisive victory, for the same. For it can only drive handsome William to extremes. Now they are sending him nothing but democrats! The Hamburger Correspondent as well is already saying that, under the present electoral law, there is nothing to be done and that it is impossible to govern. The worthy Twesten has already completely relapsed into parliamentary cretinism and wants to move a vote of no confidence in the ministers. At any rate, troubles are mounting, and the tide is rising.

How is little Jenny placed for wine? Tell me which kinds Allen usually recommends. I can now send you some port as well, old, light, no spirits, which I highly recommend; but only after it has been well filtered, for the crust has loosened.

Warm regards.

Your

F. E.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 365;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 23 May 1862.

Dear Moor,

The wine was delayed for the same reason as the letter. In such matters I have to attend to everything myself and, before getting to the stage of buying the hamper, etc., I'm frequently distracted. I have had to dispense with port on this occasion too, since it is at my lodgings and I wasn’t able to get it sent over to the warehouse. The hamper is leaving today. The red wine and 1846 Hochheimer are specially for little Jenny. The 3 bottles with the red seal and no label are 1857 Rüdesheimer (the same as we drank up here); too stimulating for invalids, though excellent for those in good health.

Strohn was here (as you can see, cela ne finit pas with these visits). He was in Berlin shortly before the dissolution... and indulged in much carousing with the Rhenish deputies. The fellows took the whole situation tremendously seriously, trusted in their omnipotence, and have relapsed into parliamentary cretinism almost as felicitously as at any time in 1848. Red Becker, whose hair has become much paler in the meantime, trotted round all day in evening dress, black from top to toe, and a dress-coat. His paunch is fatter than ever. Mr Rudolf Schramm, late of Striegau, was also gadding about there and complaining to all who would listen to him that nowhere did the public wish to elect him, which was beyond his comprehension. One evening Schramm was talking some colossal rubbish about England, whereupon Strohn said to him: ‘Now listen, Mr Schramm, if I'd been in England as long as you, I'd be ashamed to talk such nonsense; you must have been asleep the whole time you were there.’ Whereat Schramm, usually so insolent, replied: ‘In England, you know, I was compelled, on account of my wife, to mix with company where I was not in my element and, for that very reason, couldn’t see the people I should like to have seen!!!'

McClellan is carrying on in his familiar manner. The Confederates always give him the slip because he never makes straight for them, his excuse being that they are a good deal stronger than he is. That is why they keep on running away. Never before has a war been waged like this, in return for which he will get his vote of thanks. In the meantime, these wretched little rearguard actions and the constant desertions are certainly enough to demoralise the Confederates severely, and, if it comes to a decisive battle, they'll find this out.

The capture of New Orleans was a daring feat on the part of the navy. Quite outstanding — the passage of the forts, especially. Afterwards everything was simple. The moral effect on the Confederates was obviously enormous, and the material effect will already have made itself felt. Beauregard in Corinth now has nothing left to defend; the position had served a purpose only so long as it protected Mississippi and Louisiana, particularly New Orleans. Strategically, Beauregard has been put in a position where one lost battle will leave him no alternative but to disband his army and employ them as guerrillas, for without a large city in the rear of his army as a focal point of railways and resources, he cannot marshal massed bodies of men.

If the Confederate army is beaten in Virginia, it must, after the demoralising incidents of the past, quickly disband of its own accord and operate as guerrillas. Admittedly, its prospects are better, because the numerous rivers run from the mountains to the sea athwart its line of withdrawal, and also because it is facing that jackass McClellan; however, it is in the nature of things that it will be forced either to accept a decisive battle or to split up into bands without a battle. Just as the Russians were compelled to fight at Smolensk and Borodino against the will of the generals who had judged the situation correctly.

If Beauregard, or the army of Virginia, wins a battle, however big, it can be of little help. The Confederates are not in a position to derive the slightest benefit from it. They can’t advance 20 English miles without getting stuck and hence must await a fresh attack. They lack everything. Incidentally, I regard such an eventuality as quite impossible without outright treachery.

So, the fate of the Confederate armies now hangs on one single battle. We have still to examine the prospects for guerrilla warfare. Now, it is exceedingly surprising that in this of all wars the part played by the population should have been not so much small as non-existent. In 1813, French communications were repeatedly disrupted and harassed by Colomb, Lützow, Chernyshev and a score of other leaders of irregulars and Cossacks; in 1812, in Russia, the population vanished completely from the French line of march; in 1814 the French peasants took up arms and killed allied patrols and stragglers, but here nothing whatever is happening. They abide by the outcome of the big battles and console themselves with victrix causa diis, etc. All that boasting about a war to the knife has turned out to be just rubbish. ‘And how can guerrillas be expected to fare on such a terrain? I certainly anticipate that the white trash of the South’ will try something of the sort after the final disbandment of the armies, but I'm too convinced of the bourgeois nature of the planters to doubt for one instant that this would at once turn them into rabid pro-Unionists. Just let those others make an attempt at brigandage and the planters everywhere will receive the Yankees with open arms. The bonfires along the Mississippi may be attributed solely to the 2 chaps from Kentucky who are said to have arrived in Louisville — certainly not by the Mississippi. The fire in New Orleans was easily organised and will be repeated in other cities; elsewhere, too, a great deal will undoubtedly be burnt down, but the affair must inevitably bring to a head the split between the planters and the merchants on the one hand, and the white trash on the other, and then it will be all up with secession.

The fanatical support for the Confederation among the New Orleans merchants is accounted for simply by the fact that the fellows had to accept a mass of Confederation scrips in exchange for cash. I know of several examples here. This should not be forgotten. A good, big forced loan is a splendid means of shackling the bourgeois to the revolution and diverting them from their class interests by way of their personal interests.

Kindest regards to your wife and the girls.

Your

F. E.

Lupus was again suffering badly from gout. He is going to Germany in 5 weeks’ time.

You must surely have read that thing about Bernard saying that they have put him into a lunatic asylum? Is the affair above-board or is there some suggestion of foul play?

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 369;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 27 May 1862

Dear Frederick,

The children and the whole family send you their best thanks for the spirituous hamper.

In Eichhoff’s letter enclosed herewith, you will find, recaptured to the life, the kind of polemics beloved of Parson Kinkel. Where would Gottfried be without his piss-a-bed!

I may not have written to tell you yet that Dr Klein in Cologne has won 35,000 talers in the Prussian lottery; he will now probably marry Mrs Daniels, provided he hasn’t changed his mind.

It’s quite true that Bernard, always very eccentric and having in any case overworked during the past few weeks, has become subject to ‘hallucinations’. The only unfair thing about it is that this was instantly seized upon as an opportunity to put him away, which was quite unnecessary since the family in Dorking to whom he was tutor was prepared to look after and assume responsibility for him. Ditto Allsop. But the presence of the latter, who had provided the money for Orsini’s assassination attempt, and his renewed intercourse with Bernard, had long been worrying Bonaparte’s police, at whose request the English police had long been keeping an eye on Bernard.

Last Saturday I received from my Gas Company a summary demand that I pay them £1 10/- before next Saturday, failing which (it’s a final notice) I shall be ‘cut off’. Since I am now sans sou, I am forced in this mess to turn to you.

The blowing up of the Merrimac seems to me a clear indication of cowardice on the part of the Confederate swine. The curs might still have hazarded another throw. It’s truly marvellous how The Times (which backed all the anti-Irish Coercion Bills with such intense enthusiasm) is now lamenting that ‘liberty’ will be lost should the North tyrannise over the South. The Economist is no less pleasing. In the last issue, it declares that it finds the financial good fortune of the Yankees — the non-depreciation of their paper money — incomprehensible (although the thing is as plain as a pikestaff). Up till then it had, for week after week, consoled its readers with talk of such depreciation. Although it now admits to not understanding what it should know about ex officio and hence to having misled its readers on the subject, it presently consoles them with gloomy reflections on the ‘military operations’, of which it officially understands nothing.

What made paper operations exceptionally easy for the Yankees (given the main factor — confidence in their cause and hence in their government) was undoubtedly the circumstance that, as a result of secession, the West was virtually stripped of paper money, i.e. of a circulating medium generally. All the banks whose principal securities consisted in bonds issued by the slave states, went bankrupt. In addition, there was a drain of currency amounting to millions which had circulated in the West in the form of actual bank notes issued by the Southern banks. Then, partly as a result of the Morrill Tariff and partly as a result of the war itself, which had largely put a stop to the import of luxury goods, throughout the whole period the Yankees had a favourable balance of trade, and hence rate of exchange, vis-à-vis Europe. An unfavourable rate of exchange might have gravely affected the philistines’ patriotic confidence in paper.

How absurd, by the by, is John Bull’s concern over the interest Uncle Sam will have to pay on the national debt! As though it weren’t a bagatelle by comparison with Bull’s national debt, besides which the United States is now undoubtedly richer than were the Bulls in 1815, with their debt of a milliard.

Hasn’t Pam got Bonaparte into a fine old mess in Mexico?

I have now — if only out of desperation — really put my nose to the grindstone and am writing away for dear life — at the political economy I mean.

1 article a week is coming out in the Presse. That, in fact, is all I send them, in accordance with Mr Friedländer’s letter.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

My regards to Mrs Bortman and sister.

Marx To Ferdinand Lassalle

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 376;

First published: in F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922.

[London,] 16 June 1862

Dear Lassalle,

Bucher has indeed sent me 3 Julian Schmidts, but none of the other works you mention. Mr Schmidt, Mr Schmidt (of which I have sent Engels and Wolff the copies intended for them) was all the more welcome to me for arriving at a time when I was feeling far from cheerful. Moreover, although I had only read, or rather leafed through, very little of Schmidt’s stuff, I have at heart always detested the chap as the quintessence of middle-class snobbism, no less revolting in literature than elsewhere. As you rightly intimate, your attack is aimed indirectly at the middle-class cultural vulgarians. Here it’s a case of aiming at the donkey blows intended for the driver. Since we can’t for the present actually ‘crop’ the driver’s ears for him, it increasingly behoves us to slice the heads off the noisiest and most pretentious of his cultural donkeys — with our pens, notwithstanding poor Meyen who, in the Freischutz, found ‘this literary playing at guillotines’ as puerile as it was barbaric.’ What especially tickled me was the Schwabenspiegel and the ‘seven wise men’ — I almost said ‘seven Swabians’ — of Greece. Incidentally — since in the case of Julian Schmidt, Julian the Grabovite (which is unjust, because it looks like a blow aimed at the Apostate, or, at any rate, casts some ridicule on the other Julian), one may permit oneself to digress — I was at one time greatly interested in the sofos as the mask peculiar to Greek philosophy (using mask here in the best sense). First, we have the seven Swabians or wise men as forerunners, mythological heroes, next, in the middle, Socrates, and finally, the sofos as the ideal of the Epicureans, Stoics, and sceptics. I derived further amusement from drawing a comparison between this sofos and what is (in some respects) his caricature, the French ‘sage’ of the 18th century. And then the sofisths as a necessary variant of the sofos. It is typical of the moderns that the Greek combination of character and knowledge implicit in the sofos has survived in popular consciousness solely in the form of sophists.

Julian — not Julian the Grabovite, but Julian the Apostate — was the cause of a recent brush I had with Engels who, as I was already aware when the dispute began, was essentially in the right. But so specific is my aversion to Christianity that I have a predilection for the Apostate and do not like to see him identified either with Frederick William IV or with any other romantic reactionary, not even mutatis mutandis. Don’t you feel the same?

Your admonition as to Rodbertus and Roscher reminded me that I still had notes to make front and about both. As regards the Rodbertus, I failed to do it justice in my first letter to you. There’s really much in it that is good. Except that his attempt to produce a new theory of rent is almost puerile, comical. For he would have us believe that, in agriculture, raw materials are not taken into account because — the German farmer, or so Rodbertus maintains, does not himself regard seed, fodder, etc., as expenditure, does not take these production costs into account, i.e., he reckons wrong. In England, where the farmer has been reckoning correctly for over 150 years now, rent ought not, therefore, to exist. Hence the conclusion would not be that drawn by Rodbertus, namely that the tenant pays rent because his rate of profit is higher than in industry, but rather because, in consequence of his wrong reckoning, he contents himself with a lower rate of profit. This one example, by the by, suffices to show me how the partial under-development of German economic conditions necessarily tends to confuse people. Ricardo’s theory of rent as it now stands is undoubtedly false, but every objection that has been raised against it is either due to a misunderstanding of it or at best demonstrates that certain phenomena do not, prima facie, tally with Ricardo’s theory. Now, this latter fact in no way discounts a theory. On the other hand, the positive theories that set out to refute Ricardo are vastly more false. Puerile though Mr Rodbertus’s positive solution may be, it does, nevertheless, tend in the right direction, but to go into that here would take too long.

As regards the Roscher, it will be some weeks before I can sit down with the book beside me and write any comments on it. I shall reserve this fellow for a note. Such professorial schoolboys have no place in the text. Roscher undoubtedly has a considerable — and often quite useless — knowledge of literature, although even here I seem to discern the Göttingen alumnus rummaging uneasily through literary treasures and familiar only with what might be called official, respectable literature. But that’s not all. For what avails me a fellow who, even though he knows the whole of mathematical literature, yet understands nothing of mathematics? And so complacent, self-important, tolerably well-versed, eclectic a dog, too! If only such a professorial schoolboy, by nature totally incapable of ever doing more than learn his lesson and teach it, of ever reaching the stage of teaching himself, if only such a Wagner were, at least, honest and conscientious, he could be of some use to his pupils. If only he didn’t indulge in spurious evasions and said frankly: ‘Here we have a contradiction. Some say this, others that. The nature of the thing precludes my having an opinion. Now see if you can work it out for yourselves!’ In this way his pupils would, on the one hand, be given something to go on and, on the other, be induced to work on their own account. But, admittedly, the challenge I have thrown out here is incompatible with the nature of the professorial schoolboy. An inability to understand the questions themselves is essentiellement part and parcel of him, which is why his eclecticism merely goes snuffling round amidst the wealth of set answers; but, here again, not honestly, but always with an eye to the prejudices and the interests of his paymasters! A stonebreaker is respectable by comparison with such canaille.

Ad vocem Toby. If you believe you can use Toby Meyen, then use him. Only don’t forget that the company of a dunderhead can be very compromising unless great precautions be taken.

We are, indeed, but few in number — and therein lies our strength.

We shall all be very glad to see you over here. It will greatly please my family, not to mention myself, as they hardly ever see a ‘human being’ now that my English, German and French acquaintances all live outside London. I haven’t seen Mario. No doubt friend ‘Blind’ warned him against visiting ‘such a dreadful person’.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 380;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 18 June 1862

Dear Engels,

The idea of pouring out my misère to you again sickens me, but que faire? Every day my wife says she wishes she and the children were safely in their graves, and I really cannot blame her, for the humiliations, torments and alarums that one has to go through in such a situation are indeed indescribable. As you know, the £50 went on debts, more than half of which remain to be paid. The £2 on gas. The wretched money from Vienna won’t arrive till the end of July, and then there'll be damned little of it, since the swine aren’t even printing 1 article a week now. To that must be added the fresh expenditure since the beginning of May. I won’t say anything about what, in London, is the truly parlous situation of being without a centime for 7 weeks — since for us it is a chronically recurring state of affairs. But from your own experience, you will at any rate know that, all the time, there are current expenses that have to be paid in cash. This has been done by putting back in pawn the stuff that had been redeemed at the end of April. But that source was exhausted weeks ago, so much so that, a week ago, my wife attempted to sell some books of mine ‘in vain’. I feel all the more sorry for the unfortunate children in that all this is happening during the Exhibition Season, when their friends are having fun, whereas they themselves live in dread lest someone should come and see them and realise what a mess they are in.

For the rest, I myself, by the by, am working away hard and, strange to say, my grey matter is functioning better in the midst of the surrounding misère than it has done for years. I am expanding this volume [second instalment of Critique of Political Economy], since those German scoundrels estimate the value of a book in terms of its cubic capacity. Incidentally, another thing I have at last been able to sort out is the shitty rent business (which, however, I shall not so much as allude to in this part). I had long harboured misgivings as to the absolute correctness of Ricardo’s theory, and have at length got to the bottom of the swindle. Again, since we last saw each other, I've hit on one or two pleasing and surprising novelties in connection with what’s already going into this volume.

I'm amused that Darwin, at whom I've been taking another look, should say that he also applies the ‘Malthusian’ theory to plants and animals, as though in Mr Malthus’s case the whole thing didn’t lie in its not being applied to plants and animals, but only — with its geometric progression — to humans as against plants and animals. It is remarkable how Darwin rediscovers, among the beasts and plants, the society of England with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence’. It is Hobbes’ bellum omnium contra omnes and is reminiscent of Hegel’s Phenomenology, in which civil society figures as an ‘intellectual animal kingdom’, whereas, in Darwin, the animal kingdom figures as civil society.

Buckle has played a trick on Ruge by dying. In his imagination, Ruge had envisaged another library to be written by Buckle and ‘transposed’ into German by Ruge. Poor Ruge! And poor Buckle who, this very day, is traduced by a ‘friend’ in a testimonium pietatis in The Times.

Have you and Lupus received the 2 Julian Schmidts I sent off?

Apropos. If it could be done very briefly, without making undue demands on you, I should like to have a sample of Italian book-keeping (with explanations). It would help to throw light on Dr Quesnay’s Tableau Économique.

No one comes to see me, and I'm glad of it, for I don’t give a... for the sort we have here. A fine crew!

Salut.

Your

K. M.

I've heard from Lassalle. He may come over here in July. In the late autumn he will make a start on the initial draft of his ‘Political Economy’, which, however, is going to take him a ‘long time’. He’s in for a surprise.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 403;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 30 July 1862

Dear Moor,

I was very sorry not to have been able to come on Friday. Apart from anything else, I had more or less fallen out with Ermen, and hence could neither ask a favour of him, nor stay away without saying a word. Otherwise, nothing would have prevented me from coming, not even the risk of missing something important on the Saturday.

Things are going awry in America and, in fact, Mr Stanton is after all chiefly to blame in that, after the conquest of Tennessee, sheer boastfulness led him to stop recruiting, so that the army was doomed to grow constantly weaker at the very time when it particularly needed reinforcing with a view to a rapid and decisive offensive. With a steady influx of recruits the war had hitherto not, perhaps, been decided, but there could be no doubt about its successful outcome. Moreover, the run of victories had ensured a brisk supply of recruits.

This measure was all the more inane in that, at that very time, the South was calling up all men aged between 18 and 35, i.e. staking everything on one throw. It is these men, who have meanwhile become seasoned troops, that have since enabled the Confederates to gain the upper hand everywhere, and assured them the initiative. They pinned down Halleck, drove Curtis out of Arkansas, beat McClellan and, in the Shenandoah Valley, under Jackson, gave the signal for guerrilla bands, which are now already penetrating as far as the Ohio. Stanton could not have acted more stupidly had he tried.

Again, when Stanton saw that he would be unable to oust McClellan from the command of the Potomac Army, he perpetrated the stupidity of reducing McClellan’s strength by detaching special commands to Frémont, Banks and McDowell, and dispersing the forces with a view to displacing McClellan. Not only was McClellan defeated as a result, but public opinion is laying the blame for that defeat, not on McClellan, but on Stanton. Serves Mr Stanton right.

None of this would have signified, and it might even have been all to the good in as much as the war might at last have been conducted along revolutionary lines. But there’s the rub. Defeats don’t spur these Yankees on, they just make them flabby. If things have come to such a pass that, to get recruits at all, they say they are prepared to take them on for only 9 months, then this is tantamount to admitting: ‘We're in the shit and all we want is a make-believe army to do some sabre-rattling during the peace negotiations.’ Those 300,000 volunteers, that was the criterion, and in refusing to muster them, the North is declaring that it doesn’t, au fond, give a damn about the whole thing. And then, what cowardice on the part of the government and Congress!

They shrink from conscription, from resolute fiscal measures, from attacking slavery, from everything that is urgently necessary; everything’s left to amble along at will, and, if some factitious measure finally gets through Congress, the honourable Lincoln hedges it about with so many clauses that it’s reduced to nothing at all. It is this flabbiness, this wilting like a pricked balloon under the pressure of defeats, which have destroyed an army, the strongest and the best, and left Washington virtually undefended, it is this complete absence of any resilience among the people at large which proves to me that it is all up. The occasional mass meeting, etc., means nothing at all, and doesn’t even rival the excitement of a presidential election.

Add to that a complete want of talent. One general more stupid than the other. Not one who would be capable of the slightest initiative or of an independent decision. For 3 months the initiative has again rested wholly with the enemy. Then, the fiscal measures, each one crazier than the last. Fecklessness and cowardice everywhere except among the common soldiers. The same applies to the politicians — just as absurd, just as much at a loss. And the populus is more feckless than if it had idled away 3,000 years under the Austrian sceptre.

For the South, on the other hand — it’s no use shutting one’s eyes to the fact — the affair is a matter of life and death. Our not getting any cotton is one proof of this. The guerrillas in the Border States are another. But, in my view, what clinches the matter is the ability of an agrarian population, after such complete isolation from the rest of the world, to endure such a war and, having suffered severe defeats and the loss of resources, men and territory, nevertheless to emerge victorious and threaten to carry their offensive into the North. On top of that, they are really fighting quite splendidly, and what remained of union feeling, save in the mountain districts, will now, with the re-occupation of Kentucky and Tennessee, undoubtedly evaporate.

If they get Missouri, they will also get the territories, and then the North might as well pack up and go home. As I have already said, unless the North instantly adopts a revolutionary stance, it will get the terrible thrashing it deserves — and that’s what seems to be happening.

How is little Jenny getting on?

Cordial regards to your wife and children.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 388;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 30 July [1862]

Dear Engels,

From the enclosed scrawls you will partly see how bothered I am. So far, the landlord has allowed himself to be placated; he has yet to receive £25. The piano chap, who is being paid in instalments for the piano, should already have had £6 at the end of June, and is a most ill-mannered brute. I have rate demands in the house amounting to £6. The wretched school fees — some £10 — I have fortunately been able to pay, for I do my utmost to spare the children direct humiliation. I have paid the butcher $6 on account (the sum total of my quarterly takings from the Presse!), but I’m again being dunned by that fellow, not to mention the baker, the teagrocer, the greengrocer, and such other sons of Belial as there may be.

The Jewish nigger Lassalle who, I’m glad to say, is leaving at the end of this week, has happily lost another 5,000 talers in an ill-judged speculation. The chap would sooner throw money down the drain than lend it to a ‘friend’, even though his interest and capital were guaranteed. In this he bases himself on the view that he ought to live the life of a Jewish baron, or Jew created a baron (no doubt by the countess). Just imagine! This fellow, knowing about the American affair, etc., and hence about the state of crisis I’m in, had the insolence to ask me whether I would be willing to hand over one of my daughters to la Hatzfeldt as a ‘companion’, and whether he himself should secure Gerstenberg’s (!) patronage for me! The fellow has wasted my time and, what is more, the dolt opined that, since I was not engaged upon any ‘business’ just now, but merely upon a ‘theoretical work’, I might just as well kill time with him! In order to keep up certain dehors vis-à-vis the fellow, my wife had to put in pawn everything that wasn’t actually nailed or bolted down!

Had I not been in this appalling position and vexed by the way this parvenu flaunted his money bags, he’d have amused me tremendously. Since I last saw him a year ago, he’s gone quite mad. His head has been completely turned by his stay in Zurich (with Rüstow, Herwegh, etc.) and the subsequent trip to Italy and, after that, by his Herr Julian Schmidt, etc. He is now indisputably, not only the greatest scholar, the profoundest thinker, the most brilliant man of science, and so forth, but also and in addition, Don Juan cum revolutionary Cardinal Richelieu. Add to this, the incessant chatter in a high, falsetto voice, the unaesthetic, histrionic gestures, the dogmatic tone!

As a profound secret, he told me and my wife that he had advised Garibaldi not to make Rome the target of his attack but instead proceed to Naples, there set himself up as dictator (without affronting Victor Emmanuel), and call out the people’s army for a campaign against Austria. Lassalle had him conjure 300,000 men out of thin air — with whom, of course, the Piedmontese army joined forces. And then, in accordance with a plan approved, so he says, by Mr Rüstow, a detached corps was to make, or rather set sail, for the Adriatic coast (Dalmatia) and incite Hungary to revolt, while, heedless of the Quadrilateral, the main body of the army under Garibaldi marched from Padua to Vienna, where the population instantly rebelled. All over in 6 weeks. The fulcrum of the action — Lassalle’s political influence, or his pen, in Berlin. And Rüstow at the head of a corps of German volunteers attached to Garibaldi. Bonaparte, on the other hand, was paralysed by this Lassallean coup d’éclat.

He has just been to see Mazzini, and ‘the latter, too,’ approved and ‘admired’ his plan.

He introduced himself to these people as the ‘representative of the German revolutionary working class’ and assumed they knew (to use his own words) that his (Izzy’s) ‘pamphlet on the Italian war’ had prevented Prussia’s intervention and, in fact, that he had controlled ‘the history of the past three years’. Lassalle was absolutely furious with me and my wife for poking fun at his plans, quizzing him as ‘an enlightened Bonapartist’, etc. He shouted, blustered, flung himself about and finally got it fixed in his mind that I was too ‘abstract’ to understand politics.

As to America, it’s of no interest whatever, he says. The Yankees have no ‘ideas’. ‘The freedom of the individual’ is merely a ‘negative idea’, etc., and other antiquated, mouldering, speculative rubbish of the same ilk.

As I have said, if circumstances had been different (and he hadn’t disrupted my work), the chap would have amused me tremendously.

And on top of it all, the sheer gluttony and wanton lechery of this ‘idealist’!

It is now quite plain to me — as the shape of his head and the way his hair grows also testify — that he is descended from the negroes who accompanied Moses’ flight from Egypt (unless his mother or paternal grandmother interbred with a nigger). Now, this blend of Jewishness and Germanness, on the one hand, and basic negroid stock, on the other, must inevitably give rise to a peculiar product. The fellow’s importunity is also nigger-like.

If, by the by, Mr Rüstow was responsible for thinking up the march from Padua to Vienna, I should say that he also has a screw loose.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

One of our nigger’s great discoveries — which, however, he only confides to his ‘closest friends’ — is that the Pelasgians were of Semitic descent. The main evidence: in the Book of Maccabbees, the Jews send emissaries to solicit the help of Greece on grounds of kinship. Furthermore, an Etruscan inscription has been found in Perugia, and this was simultaneously deciphered by Hofrat Stucker in Berlin and an Italian, and both independently converted the Etruscan into the Hebrew alphabet.

So that we can no longer discomfit him with ‘Blue Books’, he has bought 20 pounds’ worth of Blue Books (under Bucher’s guidance).

He has converted Bucher to socialism, or so he maintains. Now Bucher’s quite a fine little man, if a cranky one, and, in any case, I can’t believe that he has accepted Lassalle’s ‘foreign policy’. Bucher is the ‘compositress’ in Julian Schmidt.

If you’d been here just for a day or two, you’d have been able to lay in enough material to keep you laughing for a whole year. That’s why I was so anxious to have you here. One doesn’t get an opportunity like that every day.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 394;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 2 August 1862

Dear Frederick,

Best thanks for the £10.

I very much dislike your being in financial difficulties on my account, but que faire? Who is capable of withstanding such a crisis as the American one? Not to mention my peculiar bad luck in having a rotten rag like the Vienna Presse to deal with. Otherwise, the fellows might, at least, have been able to make up for the loss of the Tribune to some extent. Do you suppose, perhaps, that the time has now come for me to approach, say, the Evening Post (the Abolitionist paper in New York) about my contributing to it?

All things considered, it’s a real miracle that I have been able to get on with my theoretical writing to such an extent. I now propose after all to include in this volume an extra chapter on the theory of rent, i.e., by way of ‘illustration’ to an earlier thesis of mine. Let me say a word or two about what will, in the text, be a lengthy and complex affair, so that you may let me have your opinion on it.

As you know, I distinguish 2 parts in capital: constant capital (raw material, matières instrumentales, machinery, etc.),whose value only reappears in the value of the product, and secondly variable capital, i.e., the capital laid out in wages, which contains less materialised labour than is given by the worker in return for it. E.g. if the daily wage = 10 hours and the worker works 12, he replaces the variable capital + 1/5 of the same (2 hours). This latter surplus I call surplus value.

Let us assume that the rate of surplus value (that is the length of the working day and the surplus labour in excess of the necessary labour performed by the worker to reproduce his pay) is given, e.g. = 50 p.c. In this case, in a 12 hour working day the worker would work e.g. 8 hours for himself, and 4 hours (1/2) for the employer. And indeed, let us assume this to apply to all trades so that any variations there may be in the average working time simply allow for the greater or lesser difficulty of the work, etc.

In these circumstances, given equal exploitation of the worker in different trades, different capitals in different spheres of production will, given equal size, yield very different amounts of surplus value and hence very different rates of profit, since profit is nothing but ‘the proportion of the surplus value to the total capital advanced’. This will depend on the organic composition of the capital, i.e., on its division into constant and variable capital.

Let us assume, as above, that the surplus labour = 50 p.c. If, therefore, e.g. £1 = 1 working day (no matter whether you think in terms of a day or a week, etc.), the working day = 12 hours, and the necessary labour (i.e. reproductive of the pay) = 8 hours, then the wage of 30 workers (or working days) = £20 and the value of their labour = £30, the variable capital per worker (daily or weekly) =£2/3 and the value he creates = £1. The amount of surplus value produced by a capital of £100 in different trades will vary greatly according to the proportion in which the capital of £100 is divided into constant and variable capital. Let us call constant capital, C, and variable capital, V. If, e.g. in the cotton industry, the composition was C 80, V 20, the value of the product would = 110 (given 50 p.c. surplus value or surplus labour). The amount of the surplus value = 10 and the profit rate = 10 p.c., since the profit = the proportion of 10 (the surplus value) : 100 (the total value of the capital expended). Let us suppose that, in a large tailoring shop, the composition is C 50, V 50, so that the product = 125, the surplus value (at a rate of 50 p.c. as above) = 25 and the profit rate = 25 p.c. Let us take another industry where the proportion is C 70, V 30, hence the product = 115, the profit rate = 15 p.c. Finally, an industry where the composition = C 90, V 10, hence the product = 105 and the profit rate = 5 p.c.

Here, given equal exploitation of labour, we have in different trades very different amounts of Surplus Value and hence very different rates of profit for capitals of equal size.

If, however, the above 4 capitals are taken together, we get:

Value of the product

1. C 80 V 20

110

profit rate =

10 p.c.

2. C 50 V 50

125

profit rate =

25 p.c.

3. C 70 V 30

115

profit rate =

15 p.c.

4. C 90 V 10

105

profit rate =

5 p.c.

Capital

400

Profit =

55

Rate of surplus value in all cases = 50 p.c.

On 1 00, this makes a profit rate of 13 3/4 p.c.

If the total capital (400) of the class be considered, the profit rate would = 13 3/4 p.c. And capitalists are brothers. As a result of competition (transfer of capital or withdrawal of capital from one trade to the other), capitals of equal size in different trades, despite their different organic compositions, yield the same average rate of profit. In other words, the average profit, which F.I. a capital of £100 yields in a certain trade, it yields, not as a capital specifically applied to the same nor, therefore, in the proportion in which it of itself produces surplus value, but as an aliquot part of the total capital of the capitalist class. It is a share of the dividend on which will be paid in proportion to its size out of the total amount of the surplus value (or unpaid labour) produced by the total variable (laid out in wages) capital of the class.

If then 1, 2, 3, 4 in the above illustration are to make the same average profit, each category must sell its goods at £ 113 1/3. 1 and 4 will sell them at more than their value, 2 and 3 at less.

The price so regulated = the expenses of capital, + the average profit (F.I. 10 p.c.), is what Smith called the natural price, cost price, etc. It is the average price to which competition between different trades (by transfer of capital or withdrawal of capital) reduces the prices in different trades. Hence, competition reduces commodities not to their value, but to the cost price, which, depending on the organic composition of the respective capitals, is either above, below or = to their values.

Ricardo confuses value and cost price. He therefore believes that, if there were such a thing as absolute rent (i.e., rent independent of variations in the fertility of the soil), agricultural produce, etc., would be constantly sold for more than its value, because at more than cost price (the advanced capital + the average profit). That would demolish the fundamental law. Hence he denies absolute rent and assumes only differential rent.

But his identification of values of commodities and cost prices of commodities is totally wrong and has traditionally been taken over from A. Smith.

The facts are as follows:

If we assume that the average composition of all not agricultural capital is C 80, V 20, then the product (assuming that the rate of surplus value is 50 p.c.) = 110 and the profit rate = 10 p.c.

If we further assume that the average composition of agricultural capital is C 60, V 40 (in England, this figure is statistically fairly correct; rent for pasture, etc., has no bearing on this question, being determined not by itself, but by the corn rent), then the product, given equal exploitation of labour as above = 120 and profit rate = 20 p.c. Hence, if the farmer sells his agricultural product, for what it is worth, he is selling it at 120 and not at 110, its cost price. But landed property prevents the farmer, like his brother capitalists, from equalising the value of the product to the cost price. Competition between capitals cannot enforce this. The landowner intervenes and pockets the difference between value and cost price. A low proportion of constant to variable capital is in general an expression of the poor (or relatively poor) development of the productive power of labour in a particular sphere of production. Hence, if the average composition of agricultural capital is e.g. C 60, V 40, while that of not agricultural capital is C 80, V 20, this proves that agriculture has not yet reached the same stage of development as industry. (Which is easily explicable since, apart from anything else, a prerequisite for industry is the older science of mechanics, while the prerequisites for agriculture are the completely new sciences of chemistry, geology and physiology.) If the proportion in agriculture becomes C 80, V 20 (in the above premise), then absolute rent disappears. All that remains is differential rent, which I shall also expound in such a way as to make Ricardo’s assumption of the constant deterioration of agriculture appear most ridiculous and arbitrary.

Having regard to the foregoing definition of cost price as distinct from value, it should further be noted that, besides the distinction between constant capital and variable capital, which arises out of the immediate production process of capital, there is the further distinction between fixed and circulating capital, which arises out of the circulation process of capital. However, the formula would become too involved if I were to seek to incorporate this in the above as well.

There you have — roughly, for the thing’s fairly complicated — the critique of Ricardo’s theory. This much you will admit — that by taking into account the organic composition of capital, one disposes of a mass of what have so far seemed to be contradictions and problems.

Apropos. There are certain reasons, of which I shall inform you in my next letter, why I should be very glad if you would write me a detailed military critique (I shall deal with the political aspect) of Lassalle-Rüstow’s liberation nonsense.

Your

K. M.

Regards to the ladies.

Imandt has announced himself. Izzy leaves on Monday.

It will be evident to you that, given my view of ‘absolute rent’, landed property (under certain historical circumstances) does indeed put up the prices of raw materials. Very important, communistically speaking.

Assuming the correctness of the above view, it is by no means essential for absolute rent to be paid under all circumstances or in respect of every type of soil (even if the composition of agricultural capital is as assumed above). It is not paid when landed property does not exist, either factually or legally. In such a case, agriculture offers no peculiar resistance to the application of capital, which then moves as easily in this element as in the other. The agricultural produce is then sold, as masses of industrial products always are, at cost price for less than its value. In practice, landed property may disappear, even when capitalist and landowner are one and the same person, etc.

But it would be otiose to go into these details here.

Differential rent as such — which does not arise from the circumstance that capital is employed on land instead of any other field of employment — presents no difficulty in theory. It is nothing other than surplus profit which also exists in every sphere of industrial production wherever capital operates under better than average conditions. It is firmly ensconced in agriculture only because founded on a basis as solid and (relatively) stable as the different degrees of natural fertility of various types of soil.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 399;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 7 August [1862]

Dear Engels,

The landlord came to see me on Monday and told me that, after having forborne so long, he would hand things over to his land agent, unless I paid him within the shortest possible time. And that means putting the broker in. I likewise — oddly enough on the same day — got a final demand for the rates, as well as letters from the épiciers, most of them acquainted with the landlord, threatening to prosecute me and withhold provisions.

Lassalle left on Monday evening. I saw him once more after all these events had taken place. From my dejected air, he saw that the crisis, which he had long known about, had led to a catastrophe of some kind. Questioned me. Having heard my tale, he said he could let me have £15 by 1 January 1863; also that bills could be drawn on him for any desired amount, provided payment over and above the £15 were promised by you or someone else. More he could [not] do, he said, in view of his straitened circumstances. (That I can well believe, for, while here, he spent £1 2/- daily on cabs and cigars alone.)

Might you perhaps be able to do something in this way, using Borkheim as escompteur so as to stave off the crisis? Of the £10, I paid 6 to the piano man, a nasty brute who wouldn’t have hesitated to bring me before the County Court. With 2 of the pounds I redeemed things that were in pawn and put what was left at my wife’s disposal.

I assure you that if it wasn’t for family difficulties, I would far rather move into a model lodging house than be constantly squeezing your purse.

There is, in addition, another circumstance, namely Dr Allen’s telling me that it’s absolutely essential for little Jenny to spend at least a fortnight at the seaside, ditto for our youngest who had jaundice of some kind last year and isn’t all right once again.

Izzy also told me that he would perhaps found a paper when he returned in September. I told him that, if he paid well, I would be its English correspondent, without assuming any other kind of responsibility or political partnership, since all we had in common politically were a few remote objectives.

I don’t quite share your views on the American Civil War, I do not believe that all is up. From the outset, the Northerners have been dominated by the representatives of the border slave states, who were also responsible for pushing McClellan, that old partisan of Breckinridge, to the top. The South, on the other hand, acted as a single whole right from the very start. The North itself turned slavery into a pro- instead of an anti-Southern military force. The South leaves productive labour to the slaves and could thus take the field undisturbed with its fighting force intact. It had a unified military leadership; the North did not. That there was no strategical plan is evident if only from the manoeuvrings of the Kentucky Army after the capture of Tennessee. In my view, all this is going to take another turn. The North will, at last, wage the war in earnest, have recourse to revolutionary methods and overthrow the supremacy of the border slave statesmen. One single nigger regiment would have a remarkable effect on Southern nerves.

The difficulty of raising 300,000 men is, I should say, purely political. The North-West and New England wish to and will compel the government to abandon the diplomatic warfare they have waged hitherto, and are now making terms on which the 300,000 men shall come forth. If Lincoln doesn’t give way (which he will, however), there'll be a revolution.

As regards the lack of military talent, the choice of generals, hitherto dependent purely on diplomatic and party chicanery, has hardly been calculated to bring it to the fore. However, I should say that General Pope was a man of energy.

As for financial measures, they are clumsy as, indeed, they are bound to be in a country where in fact taxation has hitherto been non-existent (so far as the country as a whole is concerned), but not nearly as silly as the measures taken by Pitt et cie. I should say that the present depreciation of money is attributable not to economic, but to purely political grounds, namely distrust. It will therefore change, when policy changes.

The long and the short of it is, I think, that wars of this kind ought to be conducted along revolutionary lines, and the Yankees have so far been trying to conduct it along constitutional ones.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Imandt is here. Another very tiresome interruption at the moment. I believe my work [2nd instalment of Critique of Political Economy] will run to 30 sheets.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 403;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 8 August 1862

Dear Moor,

In giving you an account of my expenditure, I never remotely intended to deter you from further ‘squeezing’, as you call it. On the contrary, we shall, I think, go on giving each other as much mutual aid as we can, it being quite immaterial so far as the cause is concerned which of us happens to be the ‘squeezer’ at the moment and which the ‘squeezed’, roles that are, after all, interchangeable. My only object in drawing up this statement was to demonstrate the impossibility of laying my hands on more than £10 just at the moment.

I assume that you promptly requisitioned the £15 in cash from Lassalle, or what exactly does ‘by January’ a mean? That he doesn’t want to fork out till then? Now as regards bills, I for my part can perfectly well draw from £40 to £45 or some 260 to 300 talers on Lassalle, at 3, preferably 4 months’ date, provided Borkheim will cash them. I shall also be able to send you another £10 in cash if I keep Borkheim waiting till September for the money I owe him for wine. That would make 10 from me, 45 for the bill, 15 Lassalle, total £70. But it would mean that I was completely cleaned out for some little while, not that that would really matter, provided it got you out of the mire and enabled little Jenny to go to the seaside. Since Borkheim is constantly having to disburse money on the Continent — and he knows that, come what may, I have got to honour the bill if I don’t want my position here to be ruined, there’s absolutely no reason why you shouldn’t go and ask him whether he’s willing to negotiate the thing for us. You can tell him that just now, when times are bad for cotton, I am honour-bound to draw as little money as possible from the firm and hence would sooner adopt this method. You have far less cause to feel ill at ease with him about the affair than I have, so go and see him at once and arrange matters so that I can draw on Monsieur le Baron forthwith.

Lupus arrived on Monday, in the grip of influenza and rheumatism, which confined him to bed for a day, the only one he spent in London. As soon as he felt a little better, he came straight up here. That was why he didn’t come and see you. He is now better, but, being in monetibus likewise on his beam ends, came straight to me about the £10.

You've absolutely got to pull off another financial coup, otherwise I cannot see how on earth we're going to make up for the loss of the Tribune. Nor are the other New York papers in any kind of a position to take the place of the Tribune so far as you are concerned; but, should a suitable occasion arise, it would do no harm to try, as something might come of it. With 30 sheets, the book will raise at most some £70, but how do things stand with Brockhaus? Did you discuss the matter at all with Lassalle? And how much longer will it take?

I have again made contact with the Allgemeine Militär-Zeitung and shall see how it goes, though 1 article every 6 weeks is the maximum here. Mightn’t you be able, through your mussurus or otherwise, to arrange for me to contribute military articles to an English paper in London? But all this is marginal stuff and, unless we can discover the art of shitting gold, there would hardly seem to be any alternative to your extracting something from your relations by one means or another. Réfléchis-la-dessus.

Shall write to you shortly about Lassalle’s war plans and your theory of rent,; though I must say I'm by no means clear about the existence of ‘absolute’ rent — for, after all, you have to prove it first. I've got frightful piles and can’t go on sitting down any longer.

Regards to the family.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 403;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

9 August 1862

Dear Engels,

Izzy doesn’t want to pay the £15 before 1 January.

So, I've been to see Borkheim. You are to draw 400 talers on Lassalle (I didn’t, of course, in speaking of Lassalle to Borkheim, say anything as to the £15 to be paid by Lassalle). At 3 months. Then, however, the thing will have to be renewed, as I told Borkheim that it wasn’t payable until 1 January. (This being the date stipulated by Lassalle.)

So, the main thing is that you should send Borkheim the bill.

As regards the theory of rent, I shall, of course, have to wait until I get your letter. But what follows will simplify the ‘debate’, as Heinrich Bürgers would say:

I. All I have to prove theoretically is the possibility of absolute rent, without infringing the law of value. This is the point round which the theoretical controversy has revolved from the time of the physiocrats until the present day. Ricardo denies that possibility; I maintain it. I likewise maintain that his denial rests on a theoretically false dogma deriving from A. Smith — the supposed identity of cost prices and values of commodities Further, that where Ricardo illustrates the thing with examples, he invariably presupposes conditions in which there is either no capitalist production or (factually or legally) no landed property. But the whole point is to examine the law precisely when such things do exist.

II. As regards the existence of absolute rent, this would be a question that would require statistical solution in any country. But the importance of a purely theoretical solution may be gauged from the fact that for 35 years statisticians and practical inert generally have been maintaining the existence of absolute rent, while the (Ricardian) theoreticians have been seeking to explain it away by dint of very forced and theoretically feeble abstractions. Hitherto, I have invariably found that, in all such quarrels, the theoreticians have always been in the wrong.

III. I demonstrate that, even presupposing the existence of absolute rent, it by no means follows that the worst cultivated land or the worst mine pays rent under all circumstances; rather, these will, in all likelihood, have to sell their products at market value, but at less than their individual value. In order to prove the opposite, Ricardo invariably supposes — which is theoretically false — that, under all conditions of the market, it is the commodity produced in the most unfavourable circumstances which determines the market value. You yourself had already put forward the correct argument against this in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.

That is all I have to add as to rent.

As regards Brockhaus, Lassalle has promised to do his utmost, and I believe he will, having solemnly declared that he can neither publish his magnum opus on political economy, nor set to work on it — which in his case amounts to the same thing — until my book has come out.

Salut.

Your

K.M.

Borkheim further adds:

You are to draw the 400 talers on Lassalle at 3 months and renew it a fortnight before due date, till 1 January 1863. If you can’t manage to pay in instalments, Borkheim will see to it that Lassalle gets the money on the first due date.

As for the Evening Post, I should be glad if you could draft a letter for me, since I'm very bad at writing colloquial English.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 410;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 20 August [1862]

Dear Engels,

I've had a whole series of mishaps over the bill.

First Borkheim, who means very well but also enjoys bragging and chooses just the wrong moment to prevaricate post festum, promised to discount the bill (out of his own pocket). He did so, knowing that Lassalle’s acceptance wasn’t to be had for some little while. Then, without a word to me, he sent it through Bruckner (Brothers) to Berlin so as to get it discounted by the said Bruckners. Perhaps — he pretends to have forgotten how it all began — he took fright in the meantime.

Secondly: Baron Artful [Lassalle], with whom I discussed the transaction on the eve of his departure when he declared himself ‘prepared to do anything’, writes today from Wildbad whither I had sent him an advice:

‘If I am to accept, I shall have to have a bond from Engels himself in which he undertakes to put me in possession of the covering amount a week before due date. Not, of course, (!) that I doubt you wrote at his behest, but simply because, if I have to accept a bill which I cannot meet myself I must, if unforeseen circumstances are to be precluded and the worst comes to the worst, at least possess a personal written undertaking from the man who can and is to send me this remittance.

I thereupon wrote the baron, who is now in Zurich (has left Wildbad) and ‘may’ be going on to Italy in a few days’ time, a very ironical letter, telling him that I would forthwith request you to send the bond to me. This I now do.

Yesterday Borkheim read me his letter to you. I'd be very glad if you would write to him privately saying he should do everything possible to obtain the money for me, since I am (and this is true) in dire need, while Lassalle’s return will be delayed by his adventures abroad.

(By the by, I wrote and told Izzy that, on receipt of your bond, he should write to ‘Meyer’ Brothers in Berlin, who have the bill, saying he will accept it on his return — if, that is, he’s not going to be long enough in any one place for the bill to be sent on for his acceptance.)

Say what you will, dear boy, it really is embarrassing to have to bother you as I do with my misères! If only I knew how to start some sort of business! All theory, dear friend, is grey, and only business green. Unfortunately, I have come to realise this too late.

With the £20 advanced by Borkheim, I first of all paid the rates, then the shoemaker who was proposing to sue me, etc. I used £5 to send my family to Ramsgate yesterday, since little Jenny could not remain here any longer. I cannot thank you enough for having made this possible. She’s the most perfect and gifted child in the world. But here she had to suffer twice over. Firstly from physical causes. And then she was afflicted by our pecuniary trouble. How glad I was today that my wife and children were away and were thus spared the sight of Izzy’s letter!

Can’t you come down for a few days? In my critique I have demolished so much of the old stuff that there are a number of points I should like to consult you about before I proceed. Discussing these matters in writing is tedious both for you and for me.

One point about which you, as a practical man, must have the answer, is this. Let us assume that a firm’s machinery at the outset = £12,000. It wears out on an average in 12 years. If then £1,000 is added to the value of the goods every year, the cost of the machinery will have been paid off in 12 years. Thus far, A. Smith and all his successors. But, in fact, this is only an average calculation. Much the same applies to machinery having a life of 12 years as, say, to a horse with a life — or useful life — of 10 years. Although it would have to be replaced with a new horse after 10 years, it would in practice be wrong to say that 1/10 of it died every year. Rather, in a letter to Factory Inspectors, Mr Nasmyth observes that machinery (at least some types of machinery) runs better in the second year than in the first, at all events, in the course of those 12 years does not 1/12 of the machinery have to be replaced in natura each year? Now, what becomes of this fund, which yearly replaces 1/12 of the machinery? Is it not, in fact, an accumulation fund to extend reproduction aside from any conversion of revenue into capital? Does not the existence of this fund partly account for the very different rate at which capital accumulates in nations with advanced capitalist production and hence a great deal of capital fixe, and those where this is not the case?

Piles or no piles, you might at least let me have a brief answer to this.

As for the Rüstow-Lassalle plan your comments would be of value to me because of Bucher.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 414;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 9 September 1862

Dear Moor,

You have no idea how I've had to buckle to during the past few days. Cotton, blast it, has risen fivefold on average, and you really wouldn’t believe how much work is involved in keeping all the customers informed of these successive increases.

I trust the Lassalliad over that wretched bill has been cleared up and that you're in possession of the money. I've at last reached a point at which I can go to Germany for a fortnight, leaving on Friday 7 ; unfortunately, I won’t be able to stop in London as the time at my disposal is very short and everything I've heard about that idiotic exhibition ... has made me hate it so much that I'm downright glad I shan’t be seeing it. But drop me another line to say how things went with the bill and how little Jenny is getting on — before I leave.

What with the cotton pother, the theory of rent has really proved too abstract for me. I shall have to consider the thing when I eventually get a little more peace and quiet. Likewise the question of wear and tear where, however, I rather suspect you have gone off the rails. Depreciation time is not, of course, the same for all machines. But more about this when I get back.

Individual chaps up here have made a hell of a lot of money during this rise. None of it will stick to ourselves, partly because the good Gottfried is indeed a breech-wetter and partly because spinners in general haven’t made a sou during this period. It’s all gone into the pockets of the commission houses.

The Bull Run affair No. II was a splendid little show by Jackson who is by far the best chap America has. Had he been supported on his front by an attack on the part of the main Confederate army, and had everything gone right (or only partially so), then Monsieur Pope would doubtless have been done for. But as it was, the affair came to nothing, save that the Confederates gained an important moral advantage — respect for their spirit of enterprise and for Jackson — and a few square miles of ground; on the other hand, however, they have speeded up the unification and concentration of the entire Federal army before Washington. The next steamer will most probably bring us news of fresh engagements, in which the Federals might well be victorious if their generals weren’t so bloody stupid. But what can you expect of such rapscallions! Pope is the lousiest of the lot; all he can do is brag, countermand, lie, and keep quiet about his reverses. Indeed, that know-all of the General Staff, McClellan, now strikes one yet again as being positively intelligent. What is more, the order that all future major-generals are to sit the exam for the Prussian ensign’s sword-knot. It’s too pitiful and, in contrast to the spineless goings-on in the North, the chaps in the South, who at least, know what they want, seem to me like heroes. Or do you still believe that the gentlemen of the North will suppress the rebellion?

Adieu!

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 415;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 10 September [1862]

Dear Engels,

My family has got back from Ramsgate; little Jenny is very much better.

Lassalle’s letter, containing a letter for Meyer Brothers with whom the bill is lodged in Berlin, and also his acceptance, didn’t arrive till yesterday. In the meantime, Borkheim had already gone away on holiday. Up till now he has paid £40 in driblets, the last 15 of the 40 thirteen days ago, when I was leaving. For I wanted to pester my uncle. But he, too, was travelling on the Continent. From there (passant par Cologne, etc.) I went to Trier to see my mater — fruitlessly, however, as I at once suspected when Monsieur l'oncle was not to be got hold of. On the 17th of this month, I have to pay a bill [of exchange] for £6 (six pounds) to my butcher, and Borkheim won’t have got back by then, his intention being to spend about 4 weeks bustling round Switzerland, etc.

As to the Yankees, I am firmly of the opinion, now as before, that the North will win in the end; true, the Civil War may pass through all kinds of episodes, perhaps even ceasefires, and be long-drawn-out. The South would or could conclude peace only on condition that it gained possession of the border slave states. In that case, California would also fall to it, the North-West would follow suit and the entire Federation, with the exception, perhaps, of the New England states, would again form one country, this time under the acknowledged supremacy of the slaveholders. It would be the reconstruction of the United States on the basis demanded by the South. But that is impossible and won’t happen.

The North, for its part, can conclude peace only if the Confederacy is restricted to the old slave states, and then only to those bounded by the Mississippi River and the Atlantic. In which case the Confederacy would soon come to a happy end. In the intervening period, ceasefires, etc., on the basis of a status quo could at most occasion pauses in the course of the war.

The way in which the North is waging the war is none other than might be expected of a bourgeois republic, where humbug has reigned supreme for so long. The South, an oligarchy, is better suited to the purpose, especially an oligarchy where all productive labour devolves on the niggers and where the 4 million ‘white trash’ are flibustiers by calling. For all that, I'm prepared to bet my life on it that these fellows will come off worst, ‘Stonewall. Jackson’ notwithstanding. It is, of course, possible that some sort of revolution will occur beforehand in the North itself.

Willich is a brigadier-general and Stephens, or so Kapp told me in Cologne, is also said to be on his way to the wars now.

It strikes me that you allow yourself to be influenced by the military aspect of things a little too much.

As to the economic stuff, I don’t propose to burden you with it on your journey.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

You might perhaps write and tell me where and when you will be passing through London on your journey. If at all feasible, I shall come and meet you.

It is possible (even though all manner of things still stand in the way) that I shall enter an English railway office at the beginning of next year.

What about Garibaldi?

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 419;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 29 October 1862

Dear Engels,

It isn’t right that, during your holydays, you should never have time to spend so much as one day in London.

Since going to the seaside, little Jenny has been much better, but she’s still not her proper self. For a year she’s been losing weight instead of putting it on.

Lassalle, who is exceedingly incensed with me, tells me that, since he has not got a banker, the remittance should be sent to him personally at his Berlin address, 13 Bellevuestrasse. — This month, he is being taken to court on account of one of his famous speeches.

Schily was here for a week, looking very wretched and ill, whereas his friend Imandt, who was also here before I left for Holland and Trier, has grown frightfully obese. It’s almost as though a second back had formed on top of his old one.

As regards America, I believe the Maryland campaign to be decisive in as much as it has shown that even in this most Southern-minded part of the border states there is little support for the Confederates. But the whole struggle revolves round the border states. Whoever has those, will dominate the Union. The fact that Lincoln promulgated the prospective emancipation decree at a time when the Confederates were advancing into Kentucky also shows that no further consideration is now being shown the loyal slave holders in the border states. The southward migration of slave holders with their black chattel from Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee has already assumed vast proportions and if, as is certain, the struggle goes on a bit longer, the South will have lost all support there. It was the South that began the struggle for the territories. The war itself has been instrumental in destroying its power in the border states, which, in the absence of any market for the breeding of slaves or the internal slave trade, have been daily loosening their ties with the South anyhow. In my opinion, therefore, the sole concern of the South will now be defence. But its only chance of success lay in an offensive. If there is confirmation of the news that Hooker is to be given active command of the Potomac Army, McClellan to be ‘withdrawn’ to the ‘theoretical’ post of Commander in Chief and Halleck to assume supreme command in the West, the conduct of the war in Virginia might take on a more energetic character. Moreover, the most favourable time of year for the Confederates is now gone.

From the point of view of morale, the failure of the Maryland campaign was of really tremendous importance.

As regards finance, the United States know from the time of the War of Independence, as we know from our observation of Austria, how far one may go with depreciated paper money. The fact remains that the Yankees have never exported so much grain to England as this year, that the present harvest is again far above average and that the balance of trade has never been so favourable for them as during the past 2 years. As soon as the new system of taxation (vapid though it is, and truly Pitt-like) is introduced, there will, at last, be a reflux of paper money, of which there has hitherto only been a steady issue. This will render unnecessary any increase in the issue of paper on the present scale, and further depreciation will thus be checked. What has made even the depreciation prevailing up till now less dangerous than it would have been in similar circumstances in France, or even England, is the fact that the Yankees have never prohibited the existence of two prices, a gold price and a paper price. The inherent disadvantage of the thing takes the form of a national debt, for which there has never been the appropriate funding, and a premium for jobbing and speculation.

When the English boast that their depreciation never exceeded 11 p.c. (according to others it amounted to more than twice that figure during some time), they choose to forget that they not only continued to pay the old taxes, but every year they paid new ones in addition to the old, so that the reflux of bank notes was assured in advance, whereas the Yankees have in effect conducted the war for 1 1/2 years without taxation (except for the greatly reduced import duties) simply by means of repeated issues of paper. Such procedure, which has now reached a turning-point, means that the depreciation is, in fact, still relatively modest.

The fury with which the Southerners are greeting Lincoln’s acts is proof of the importance of these measures. Lincoln’s acts all have the appearance of inflexible, clause-ridden conditions communicated by a lawyer to his opposite number. This does not, however, impair their historical import and does, in actual fact, amuse me when, on the other hand, I consider the drapery in which your Frenchman enwraps the merest trifle.

Like others, I am of course aware of the distasteful form assumed by the movement chez the Yankees; but, having regard to the nature of a ‘bourgeois’ democracy, I find this explicable. Nevertheless, events over there are such as to transform the world, and nothing in the whole of history is more nauseous than the attitude adopted towards them by the English.

Regards to Lupus. Salut.

Your

K. M.

£10 safely received.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 422;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 5 November 1862

Dear Moor,

The £60 will go off to Freiligrath tomorrow. I can’t say what is to be done about renewing the bill until I know whether the bill will be discountable for certain as soon as Lassalle accepts it, and who will attend to the discounting. On the one hand, it would serve no purpose to worry Lassalle unduly with bills that would not bring you in money immediately, and, on the other, it could hardly be much use to me if Borkheim (to whom the same considerations apply) sent me the money merely in small driblets. Then there are the expenses.

Quant à l'Amérique, I, too, of course, believe that the Confederates in Maryland have suffered an unexpected and very significant blow to their morale. I am also convinced that the definitive possession of the border states will decide the outcome of the war. However, I am by no means certain that the affair will develop in as classical a form as you seem to imagine. In spite of all the hullabaloo raised by the Yankees, there is still no sign whatsoever that the people regard the business as being truly a question of their national existence. On the contrary, the successes of the Democrats at the polls prove that the party that is weary of War is growing. If only there were some evidence, some indication, that the masses in the North were beginning to act as in France in 1792 and 1793, everything would be splendid. But the only revolution to be anticipated seems more likely to be a democratic counter-revolution and a hollow peace, which will also divide up the border states. That this would not settle the affair by a long chalk — granted. But it might do so temporarily. I must confess I feel no enthusiasm for a people who, faced with an issue as colossal as this, allow themselves to be beaten again and again by a force numbering 1/4 of their own population and who, after 18 months of war, have gained nothing save the discovery that all their generals are jackasses and their functionaries, crooks and traitors. Things must assuredly take a different course, even in a bourgeois republic, if it is not to be landed completely in the soup. What you say about the iniquitous way the English view the affair corresponds entirely to my own opinion.

The distress up here is gradually becoming acute. Gumpert tells me that the more serious cases of illness in his hospital are all characteristic of typhoid and that cases of tuberculosis, whose origin can be traced back to the last 8 or 9 months, are rapidly increasing. I imagine that by next month the working people themselves will have had enough of sitting about with a look of passive misery on their faces.

Kind regards.

Your

F. E.

A German businessman from Copenhagen, an ex-democrat of ’48, called on Freiligrath and, in consequence of a discussion about Schleswig-Holstein, was referred by the latter to Blind. I told the man that Blind was an old chatterbox.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 427;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 15 November 1862

Dear Moor,

You're right, I am very broke and, like the Prussian government, intensely preoccupied with ‘saving’. In the hope that, by leading a domesticated life in Hyde Road, I shall be able to make good the deficiency, I enclose herewith a five-pound note, O/L 28076, Manchester, 28 Jan. ‘62. At the same time, I am sending you a hamper of wine per Chaplin and Horne, containing about one dozen claret and 2 bottles of old 1846 hock for little Jenny, the rest being made up of 1857 hock. 24 bottles in all.

I am impatiently awaiting the steamer that will bring us news of the New York elections. If the Democrats win in New York State, I shan’t know what to make of the Yankees any more. That a people placed in a great historical dilemma, and one, in which its very existence is at stake to boot, should turn reactionary en masse and vote for abject surrender after 18 months’ fighting, is really beyond my comprehension. Desirable though it may be, on the one hand, that the bourgeois republic should be utterly discredited in America too, so that in future it may never again be preached on it’s own merits, but only as a means towards, and a form of transition to, social revolution, it is, nevertheless, annoying that a rotten oligarchy, with a population only half as large, should evince such strength as the great fat, helpless democracy. Should the Democrats win, by the way, it will give the worthy McClellan and the Westpointers a fine advantage and the show will soon be over. The fellows are capable of concluding peace, should the South agree to rejoin the Union on condition that the President shall always be a Southerner, and Congress always consist of an equal number of Southerners and Northerners. They are even capable of immediately proclaiming Jefferson Davis President of the United States and actually surrendering all the border states, if peace is not to be had otherwise. Then it’s goodbye to America.

Besides, the only apparent effect of Lincoln’s emancipation so far is that the North-West has voted Democrat for fear of being overrun by Negroes.

To descend from the sublime to the ridiculous, what do you think of worthy William? At last the fellow is himself again; he has expiated his liberal sins and said ‘mater peccavi’ to the crippled Elizabeth. In return for this, the Lord has endowed him with strength wherewith to smite the scrofulous mob of liberals and for that, says William, ‘for that I need the military’. So rabid is the fellow that even Bismarck is no longer reactionary enough for him. That you're a fool, Schapper, we know and you yourself know, but that you are such a fool, etc., etc. Things are going swimmingly, and what could be better than that, 14 years after 1848, the liberal bourgeoisie should have been landed in the most extreme revolutionary dilemma, and all because of a miserable 6 million talers, or about £850,000 sterling? If only the old jackass doesn’t let up again. True, he’s fairly going it now, but these Prussians can’t be relied on, not even for their stupidity. If things go on as they are, a set-to is absolutely inevitable and, when it really comes to the point, William will be amazed to see just how the ‘military’ join in, — the common soldiers, that is, who won’t thank him for having to fight for a 3 rather than a 2 year spell of service.

My warm regards to your wife and the girls.

Your

F. E.

Apropos. Will you send me the 4 last Free Presses? I can never get them here unless I fetch them on the proper day which I invariably forget to do.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 429;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 17 November [1862]

Dear Engels,

Best thanks for the £5.

It seems to me that you take too one-sided a view of the American fracas. At the American coffeehouse I have looked through a lot of Southern papers and from them it is plain that the Confederacy is in a very tight corner. The English papers suppressed information on the battle of ‘Corinth’. The Southern papers depict it as the most exceptional stroke of ill-luck to have befallen them since the call to arms. The State of Georgia has declared the Confederate ‘conscription bill’ to be null and void. Virginia, in the person of Floyd the thief, has contested the right of ‘Jefferson Davis’s creatures’ (sic) to continue raising men in that State. Oldham, who represents Texas in the Richmond Congress, has formally protested against the transport to the East, i.e., Virginia, of the South-West’s ‘crack troops’. From all these disputes two things undeniably emerge:

That the Confederate Government has overreached itself in its frantic efforts to fill the ranks of the army;

that the states are asserting ‘state rights’ vis-à-vis the Confederacy just as the latter made a pretext of them vis-à-vis the Union.

I consider the victories scored by the Democrats in the North to be a reaction and one which was made all the easier for that conservative and blackleg element by the poor manner in which the Federal Government waged the war and by its financial blunders. For that matter, it’s the sort of reaction that occurs in every revolutionary movement and that was so strong at the time of the National Convention, for instance, that the proposal to submit the King’s death to suffrage universel was considered counter-revolutionary, and so strong under the Directory that Mr Bonaparte I had to bombard Paris.

On the other hand, elections prior to 4 Dec. 1864 will not affect the composition of Congress; hence, they will merely act as a spur to the Republican government, over whose head a sword is hanging. And, in any case, the Republican House of Representatives will make better use of its term of office, if only out of hatred for the opposing party.

As to McClellan, in his own army he’s got Hooker and other Republicans, who would arrest him any day if ordered to do so by the government.

Add to that the French attempt at intervention which will evoke a reaction against the reaction.

So things are not, I think, too bad. Rather, what might possibly do damage to my views is the sheeplike attitude of the working men in Lancashire. Such a thing has never been heard of in the world. The more so since those scoundrels of manufacturers themselves don’t even pretend to be ‘making sacrifices’, but are content to leave to the rest of England the honour of keeping their army on its feet — i.e., let the rest of England bear the cost of maintaining their variable capital.

Of late, England has made more of an ass of itself than any other country, the working men by their servile Christian nature, the bourgeois and aristocrats by the enthusiasm they have shown for slavery in its most direct form. But the two manifestations are complementary.

As to our ‘handsome William’, the chap is in fact delectable, Bismarck’s government, by the by, is nothing more nor less than the Little German progressists’ pious wish come true. They used to rave about the ‘man of progress’, Louis Bonaparte. Now they see what having a ‘Bonapartist’ government in Prussia means. After all, Bismarck was in a sense appointed by Bonaparte (and Russia). I shall look out the Presses for you. Salut (also to the ladies).

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 432;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 24 December 1862

Dear Engels,

Since leaving you, I have had a most eventful time of it.

On Monday, there were the Manichaeans who, however, did not all come by appointment. I shared out £15 among them. I gave the worst one a bill for £12 at 6 weeks’ sight (actually 7, since l dated it from the end of this year), trusting to a chapter of accidents.

On Wednesday my wife left for Paris. She returned last night. Everything would have been all right if, just before she got there, Abarbanel had not been paralysed by a stroke, which left him helpless and confined to bed, although mentally unaffected. All in all, the series of mishaps that befell her was tragicomical. First, a great storm at sea. Her boat got through, another in her immediate vicinity (she travelled via Boulogne) went down. Abarbanel lives outside Paris. My wife went to see him by rail. Something happened to the engine which meant 2 hours delay in the journey. Later, an omnibus in which she was travelling overturned. And yesterday the wheels of the cab she had taken in London became entangled with those of another. She got out and arrived here per pedes, accompanied by 2 boys carrying her luggage. One thing, by the by, was achieved in Paris, where she saw Massol, etc. As soon as my work [Capital] comes out, it will be published in French.

But now for the worst piece of ill-luck. Marianne (Lenchen’s sister), whom Allen treated for a heart complaint a year ago, began to feel unwell on the day my wife left. By Tuesday evening, 2 hours before my wife’s return, she was dead. During those seven days I, together with Lenchen, was responsible for the nursing.

Allen had misgivings from the first day. The funeral is at 2 o'clock on Saturday, when I shall have to pay the undertaker 10/- in cash. So, this must be got hold of. A fine Christmas show for the poor children.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 435;

First published: in Die Neue Zeit, 1901-02.

London, 28 December 1862

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Sir,

A while ago, Freiligrath showed me a letter he had received from you. I would have written sooner had not a series of accidents that befell my family rendered me incapable of writing for some time.

I was delighted to see from your letter how warm an interest is taken by you and your friends in my critique of political economy. The second part has now at last been finished, i.e. save for the fair copy and the final polishing before it goes to press. There will be about 30 sheets of print. It is a sequel to Part I [Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy], but will appear on its own under the title Capital, with A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy as merely the subtitle. In fact, all it comprises is what was to make the third chapter of the first part, namely ‘Capital in General’. Hence it includes neither the competition between capitals nor the credit system. What Englishmen call ‘The Principles of Political Economy’ is contained in this volume. It is the quintessence (together with the first part), and the development of the sequel (with the exception, perhaps, of the relationship between the various forms of state and the various economic structures of society) could easily be pursued by others on the basis thus provided.

The reasons for the long delay are as follows. In the first place, a great deal of my time in 1860 was taken up with the Vogt rumpus, since I had a lot of research to do on material which was in itself of little interest, besides engaging in lawsuits, etc. In 1861, I lost my chief source of income, the New-York Tribune, as a result of the American Civil War. My contributions to that paper have remained in abeyance up till the present. Thus, I have been, and still am, forced to undertake a large amount of hackwork to prevent myself and my family from actually being relegated to the streets. I had even decided to become a ‘practical man’ and had intended to enter a railway officer at the beginning of next year. Luckily — or perhaps I should say unluckily? — I did not get the post because of my bad handwriting. So, you will see that I had little time left and few quiet moments for theoretical work. It seems probable that the same circumstances will delay my finishing the book for the printers for longer than I should have wished.

As regards publishers, on no account shall I give the second volume to Mr Duncker. He was sent the manuscript for Part I in December 1858, and it came out in July or August 1859. There is some, but not a very promising, prospect of Brockhaus publishing the thing. The conspiration de silence with which I am honoured by the German literary rabble as soon as the latter finds out that the thing can’t be dismissed with insults is, quite apart from the tendency of my works, unfavourable from the point of view of sales. As soon as I have a fair copy of the manuscript (upon which I shall make a start in January 1863), I shall bring it to Germany myself, it being easier to deal with publishers on a personal basis.

There is every prospect that, as soon as the German edition appears, arrangements will be made in Paris for a French version. I have absolutely no time to put it into French myself, particularly since I am going either to write the sequel in German, i.e. to conclude the presentation of capital, competition and credit, or condense the first two books for English consumption into one work. I do not think we can count on its having any effect in Germany until it has been given the seal of approval abroad. In the first part, the method of presentation was certainly far from popular. This was due partly to the abstract nature of the subject, the limited space at my disposal, and the aim of the work. The present part is easier to understand because it deals with more concrete conditions. Scientific attempts to revolutionise a science can never be really popular. But, once the scientific foundations are laid, popularisation is easy. Again, should times become more turbulent, one might be able to select the colours and nuances demanded by a popular presentation of these particular subjects. On the other hand, I had certainly expected that, if only for the sake of appearances, German specialists would not have ignored my work so completely. Besides, I had the far from gratifying experience of seeing party friends in Germany, who had long interested themselves in this branch of knowledge and sent me gushing encomia on Part I in private, not lift, a finger towards getting a critique or even a list of the contents into such journals as were accessible to them. If these be party tactics, then I must confess that they are an impenetrable mystery to me.

I should be most grateful if you could write to me occasionally about the situation at home. We are obviously heading for revolution — something I have never once doubted since 1850. The first act will include a by no means gratifying rehash of the stupidities of ’48-’49. However, that’s how world history runs its course, and one has to take it as one finds it.

With best wishes for the New Year,

Your

K. Marx

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 437;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 30 December 1862

252 Hyde Road

Dear Moor,

On Friday I sent you a registered letter containing 10 pounds, £5 in a Bank of England note and £5 in a Country Note of the Boston Bank payable at Masterman & Co., Bankers, London. Having heard nothing from you since, I feel a little uneasy.

Burnside’s defeat is being abominably exaggerated. Clearly it must affect the army’s morale, but by no means so badly as if they had been beaten in the open field. The tactical arrangements appear to have been very poor. The flank attack by the left wing would obviously have had to be developed first before the frontal attack went in under Sumner. But this was completely mismanaged. Sumner was evidently in dire trouble before Franklin even had so much as a chance of becoming properly engaged. Again, Burnside seems to have been incapable of making up his mind about his reserves. The successes on the left wing should have persuaded him to send at least part of them there, since, after all, that was evidently where the affair would have to be decided; instead he employed them on his front, and too late even there, namely, 1. as reliefs rather than reinforcements for Sumner’s beaten troops, and 2. so close to nightfall that it was dark before half of them were actually engaged. This is, of course, what I have gleaned from the indifferent material in the American papers and without arty knowledge of the terrain. However, it seems to me that Burnside would probably have been able to dislodge the rabble merely by means of an outflanking movement, especially since he appears to have had 150,000 men against 100,000. But he was obviously inhibited by the belief that Washington could be protected only so long as the army lay squarely between it and the enemy. However, the stupidity of allowing the Confederates a month in which to consolidate their position and then engaging them in a frontal attack admits of no criticism other than a kick in the arse.

Mary and Lizzy send their regards.

Your

F. E.

1863

Marx to Engels. 2 January

Engels to Marx. 7 January

Marx to Engels. 8 January

Engels to Marx. 13 January

Marx to Engels. 24 January

Engels to Marx. 26 January

Marx to Engels. 28 January

Marx to Engels. 13 February

Marx to Engels. 17 February

Engels to Marx. 17 February

Engels to Marx. 19 February

Marx to Engels. 20 February

Engels to Marx. c. 21 February

Marx to Engels. 21 February

Marx to Engels. 24 March

Engels to Marx. 8 April

Marx to Engels. 9 April

Marx to Engels. 18 April

Engels to Marx, [Abstract]. 21 April

Marx to Josef Valentin Weber. 22 April

Engels to Marx. 20 May

Marx to Engels. 29 May

Marx to Engels. 10 June

Engels to Marx. 11 June

Marx to Engels. 12 June

Marx to Engels. 22 June

Engels to Marx. 24 June

Marx to Engels. 6 July

Marx to Engels. 15 August

Marx to Engels. 12 September

Engels to Marx. 24 November

Marx to Engels. 2 December

Engels to Marx. 3 December

Marx to Engels. 4 December

Marx to Jenny Marx. 15 December

Marx to Engels. 22 December

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 23 December

Marx to Engels. 27 December

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 439;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 2 January 1863

Dear Frederick,

Happy New Year!

I've had so much running about to do this week, not to mention sickness, that I never got round to acknowledging receipt of your letter containing the money.

No reply from Brockhaus so far. I've heard, by the by, that the ‘head of the house’, as Bangya used to say, is absent from Leipzig.

Through Abarbanel, my wife made the acquaintance in Paris of a certain Reclus, who has some sort of a position in economic literature, and also knows German. The said R., together with Massol (all agents in commerce) who doesn’t know German, and a number of others, is willing to apply himself to my work. (They have a Brussels publisher at their disposal. In Paris, party spirit and solidarity still prevail within the parti socialiste. Even chaps like Carnot and Goudchaux are saying that, come the next upheaval, Blanqui ought to be made leader.

Burnside would seem to have perpetrated grave tactical blunders at the battle of Fredericksburg. He was clearly shy about employing so large a force. But as regards the basic folly, 1. his having waited 26 days, a contributing factor was undoubtedly outright betrayal by the military authorities in Washington. Even the New York correspondent of The Times admitted that it was weeks before Burnside received equipment that had been promised at an earlier date; 2. the fact that he did, nevertheless, proceed to make this attack is symptomatic of the man’s moral weakness. The worthy Tribune was beginning to question his ability and to threaten him with dismissal. Out of enthusiasm and ignorance, that paper is doing a great deal of harm.

The Democrats and McClellanists naturally howled in unison in order to make the setback seem worse than it was. The ‘rumour’ that McClellan, ‘the Monk’ of The Times, has been called to Washington, must be laid at Mr Reuter’s door.

‘Politically’, the defeat was a good thing. It wouldn’t have done for the chaps to have had a stroke of luck before 1 January 1863. Anything in that line might have led to a cancellation of the ‘Proclamation’.

The Times and co. are hellish annoyed by the workers’ meetings in Manchester, Sheffield, and London. It’s excellent that the scales should thus be removed from the Yankees’ eyes. Not that Opdyke (Mayor of New York and political economist) hadn’t already declared at a meeting in New York:

*‘We know that the English working classes are with us, and that the governing classes of England are against us.’*

I greatly regret that Germany should not be staging similar demonstrations. They cost nothing and are very remunerative ‘internationally’. Germany would be all the more justified in doing so in that she is helping the Yankees more in this war than France did in the eighteenth century. It’s the same old stupid German failure to emphasise or to vindicate in the eyes of the world what the country really accomplishes.

Have had a letter from Izzy, together with a pamphlet. Contents of letter: I am to send back the Roscher. Contents of pamphlet: Continuation of the lecture on the Prussian Constitution. Substance: Lassalle is the greatest politician of all time, and of his own in particular. It is Lassalle, and no mistake, who has discovered — and this on the basis of a theory untainted by any premises and pure without any qualifications — that the true constitution of a country is not the written one, but consists in the real ‘relations of power’, etc. Even the Neue Preussische Zeitung and Bismarck and Roon subscribe to ‘his’ theory, as he proves by means of quotations. Hence his public may rest assured that, just as he has discovered the correct theory, so he is in possession of the correct solution for the ‘present time’. And that solution is:

‘Since the government continues its military expenditure, etc., despite the resolutions of the Chamber, etc., thus belying the existence of a constitutional government, etc., the Chamber will prorogue until such time as the government declares that it will desist from that expenditure’.

Such is the power of ‘stating the facts’. To save them Work, he has provided the wording of the decree to be promulgated by the Chamber. Old Heiman has safely removed to Abraham’s bosom. Regards and compliments of the season to the ladies.

Your

K. M.

I see that there’s been a fall in cotton prices. In my opinion, however, this is only temporary.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 442;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 8 January 1863

Dear Engels,

The news of Mary [Burns]’s death surprised no less than it dismayed me. She was so good-natured, witty and closely attached to you.

The devil alone knows why nothing but ill-luck should dog everyone in our circle just now. I no longer know which way to turn either. My attempts to raise money in France and Germany have come to nought, and it might, of course, have been foreseen that £15 couldn’t help me to stem the avalanche for more than a couple of weeks. Aside from the fact that no one will let us have anything on credit — save for the butcher and baker — which will also cease at the end of this week — I am being dunned for the school fees, the rent, and by the whole gang of them. Those who got a few pounds on account cunningly pocketed them, only to fall upon me with redoubled vigour. On top of that, the children have no clothes or shoes in which to go out. In short, all hell is let loose, as I clearly foresaw when I came up to Manchester and despatched my wife to Paris as a last coup de désespoir. If I don’t succeed in raising a largish sum through a loan society or life assurance (and of that I can see no prospect; in the case of the former society I tried everything I could think of, but in vain. They demand guarantors, and want me to produce receipts for rent and rates, which I can’t do), then the household here has barely another two weeks to go.

It is dreadfully selfish of me to tell you about these horreurs at this time. But it’s a homeopathic remedy. One calamity is a distraction from the other. And, au bout du compte, what else can I do? In the whole of London there’s not a single person to whom I can so much as speak my mind, and in my own home I play the silent stoic to counterbalance the outbursts from the other side. It’s becoming virtually impossible to work under such circumstances. Instead of Mary, ought it not to have been my mother, who is in any case a prey to physical ailments and has had her fair share of life ... ? You can see what strange notions come into the heads of ‘civilised men’ under the pressure of certain circumstances.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

What arrangements will you now make about your establishment? It’s terribly hard for you, since with Mary you had a home to which you were at liberty to retreat from the human imbroglio, whenever you chose.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 443;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 13 January 1863

Dear, Marx,

You will find it quite in order that, this time, my own misfortune and the frosty view you took of it should have made it positively impossible for me to reply to you any sooner.

All my friends, including philistine acquaintances, have on this occasion, which in all conscience must needs afflict me deeply, given me proof of greater sympathy and friendship than I could have looked for. You thought it a fit moment to assert the superiority of your ‘dispassionate turn of mind’. Soit!

You know the state of my finances. You also know that I do all I can to drag you out of the mire. But I cannot raise the largish sum of which you speak, as you must also know. Three things can be done:

1. Loan Society. To what extent my guarantee would serve here remains to be seen — scarcely at all, no doubt, since I am not a householder.

2. Life assurance. John Watts is Manager of the European Life & Guarantee Society, of which the London Office is certainly in the Directory. I don’t see what there is to prevent you insuring your life for £400, and he will certainly make you a loan of £200 on the policy, since that is his business. If not completely ruinous, this is definitely the best way. So, you had best go straight to him, inquire about the terms and then inform me of them straight away.

3. If the worst comes to the worst, I might be able to raise about £25 in February — certainly not before — and am also prepared to sign a bill for £60, though I have got to have every assurance that it won’t have to be paid till after 30 June 1863, i.e. be assured of an extension until then. I must be given the necessary guarantees to that effect. In which case you would have to extract what was lacking from your uncle in Holland without fail.

I can see no other possibility.

So, let me know what steps you take and I will see to my side of it.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 444;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 24 January 1863

Dear Frederick,

I thought it advisable to allow some time to elapse before replying. Your position, on the one hand, and mine, on the other, made it difficult to view the situation ‘dispassionately’.

It was very wrong of me to write you that letter, and I regretted it as soon as it had gone off. However, what happened was in no sense due to heartlessness. As my wife and children will testify, I was as shattered when your letter arrived (first thing in the morning) as if my nearest and dearest had died. But, when I wrote to you in the evening, I did so under the pressure of circumstances that were desperate in the extreme. The landlord had put a broker in my house, the butcher had protested a bill, coal and provisions were in short supply, and little Jenny was confined to bed. Generally, under such circumstances, my only recourse is cynicism. What particularly enraged me was the fact that my wife believed I had failed to give you an adequate account of the real state of affairs.

Indeed, your letter was welcome to me in as much as it opened her eyes to the ‘non possumus’ for she knows full well that I didn’t wait for your advice before writing to my uncle; that I couldn’t, in London, have recourse to Watts whose person and office are both in Manchester; that since Lassalle’s latest dunning notice I have been unable to draw a bill in London and, lastly, that £25 in February would not enable us to live in January, still less avert the impending crisis. As it was impossible for you to help us, despite my having told you we were in the same plight as the Manchester workers, she could not but recognise the non possumus, and this is what I wanted, since an end has got to be put to the present state of affairs — the long ordeal by fire, ravaging heart and head alike, and, on top of that, the waste of precious time and the keeping up of false appearances, this last being as harmful to myself as it is to the children. Since then we have been through three weeks such as have at last induced my wife to fall in with a suggestion I had made long ago and which, for all the unpleasantness it involves, not only represents the only way out, but is also preferable to the life we have led for the past three years, the last one in particular, and which will, besides, restore our self-esteem.

I shall write and tell all our creditors (with the exception of the landlord) that, unless they leave me alone, I shall declare myself insolvent by the filing of a Bill in the Court of Bankruptcy. This does not, of course, apply to the landlord, who has a right to the furniture, which he may keep. My two elder children will obtain employment as governesses through the Cunningham family. Lenchen is to enter service elsewhere, and I, along with my wife and little Tussy, shall go and live in the same City Model Lodging House in which Red Wolff once resided with his family.

Before coming to this decision, I naturally first wrote to sundry acquaintances in Germany, naturally without result. At all events, this will be better than going on as we are, which is impracticable, in any case. It was as much as I could do, and involved all manner of humiliations, to obtain by dint of false promises the peaceable withdrawal of the landlord and butcher, together with the broker and a bill of exchange. I haven’t been able to send the children to school for the new term, since the old bill hasn’t been paid; nor, for that matter, were they in a presentable state.

But by adopting the above plan I shall, I think, at least attain tranquillity without intervention of any kind by third parties.

Finally, a matter unconnected with the above. I'm in considerable doubt about the section in my book that deals with machinery. I have never quite been able to see in what way self-actors changed spinning, or rather, since steam power was already in use before then, how it was that the spinner, despite steam power, had to intervene with his motive power.

I'd be grateful if you could explain this.

Apropos. Unbeknown to me, my wife wrote and asked Lupus for £1 for immediate necessities. He sent her two. It’s distasteful to me, but factum est factum.

Your

K. M.

Abarbanel is dead. Sasonow, too, has died in Geneva.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 446;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 26 January 1863

Dear Moor,

Thank you for being so candid. You yourself have now realised what sort of impression your last letter but one had made on me. One can’t live with a woman for years on end without being fearfully affected by her death. I felt as though with her I was burying the last vestige of my youth. When your letter arrived she had not yet been buried. That letter, I tell you, obsessed me for a whole week; I couldn’t get it out of my head. Never mind. Your last letter made up for it and I'm glad that, in losing Mary, I didn’t also lose my oldest and best friend.

To turn to your affairs. Today I went straight to Watts, whom I had believed to be still in London; he does have an office in London, by the way, at No. 2 Pall Mall. It’s no go with him. His company has stopped making loans. He gave me another address. The man is willing but, depending on the circumstances, requires two or even more sureties for the interest, premium and repayment. Unfortunately, we can’t comply with that. Whom could we find? Gumpert, at most, but it’s doubtful whether he would be acceptable. In addition, a third person would in any case be required, since neither of us has citizen status and, finally, the expenses are deductible from the loan in advance, so that little would be left.

It then occurred to me to sell part of the yarn bought on spec and, instead of repaying the amount to Ermen (to whom the money belongs), send it to you. This might possibly have worked, since the matter wouldn’t have come up for discussion until July and much can change in the meantime. But no chance. Today the market is so flat that I would have had to sell at a loss rather than a profit and might not even have managed to make a sale at all this week.

I can’t borrow any money. E. might, and probably, would, refuse me, and I can’t lay myself open to that. To borrow from a third party up here, a usurer, would mean giving E. the best of reasons for releasing himself from his contract with me. And yet, I can’t stand by and see you carrying out the plan you told me about in your letter. I therefore had a go at old Hill’s bills, helped myself to the enclosed for £100 on John Rapp & Co., due 28 February, and endorsed it in your favour. I don’t imagine it will come to light before July, and then we'll have a further reprieve. It is an exceedingly daring move on my part, for I'm now certain to incur a deficit, but the risk must be taken. I assure you I should never have dared do it had not Charles, who had drawn up a sort of balance sheet covering all items over the last six months, told me this afternoon that in my case the thing works out at approx. £30 à £50 more than I might have expected. I have made about £330 à £350 during the six months.

But equally you yourself must now realise that, as a result of the unusual exertions I have had to make since 30 June 1862, I have really been drained dry and you shouldn’t therefore count on any remittances at all from me until 30 June, save perhaps for trifling amounts. What the prospects will be after 30 June God only knows, for we're earning nothing at the moment, since the market is no longer rising.

The bill itself is as good as cash. Freiligrath will be delighted to discount it for you; there’s very little paper better than that, in circulation. But be so kind as to acknowledge receipt; a great deal of mail is being stolen just now and, since you're not in commerce, anyone can pass himself off as Dr K. M.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 448;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 28 January 1863

Dear Frederick,

A strange concatenation of events made it quite impossible for me to write to you yesterday to acknowledge receipt of your letter enclosing the bill.

I am well aware what a risk you were running in thus affording us such great and unexpected help. I can’t tell you how grateful I am, although I myself, in my inner forum, did not require any fresh proof of your friendship to convince me of its self-sacrificing nature. If, by the by, you could have seen my children’s joy, it would have been a fine reward for you.

I can tell you now, too, without beating about the bush that, despite the straits I've been in during the past few weeks, nothing oppressed me so much as the fear that our friendship might be severed. Over and over again, I told my wife that the mess we were in was as nothing to me compared with the fact that these bourgeois pinpricks and her peculiar exasperation had, at such a moment, rendered me capable of assailing you with my private needs instead of trying to comfort you. Domestic peace was consequently much disrupted, and the poor woman had to suffer for something of which she was in fact innocent, for women are wont to ask for the impossible. She did not, of course, have any inkling of what I had written, but a little reflection should have told her that something of the kind must be the result. Women are funny creatures, even those endowed with much intelligence. In the morning my wife wept over Marie [Burns] and your loss, thus becoming quite oblivious to her own misfortunes, which culminated that very day, and in the evening she felt that, except for us, no one in the world was capable of suffering unless they had children and the broker in the house.

In my last letter I asked you about the self-actor. The question, you see, is as follows: In what way, before its invention, did the so-called spinner intervene? I can explain the self-actor, but not the state of affairs that preceded it.

I am inserting certain things into the section on machinery. There are some curious questions which I originally failed to deal with. To elucidate these, I have re-read all my note-books (excerpts) on technology and am also attending a practical (purely experimental) course for working men given by Prof. Willis (in Jermyn Street, the Institute of Geology, where Huxley also lectured). For me, mechanics presents much the same problem as languages. I understand the mathematical laws, but the simplest technical reality that calls for ocular knowledge is more difficult for me than the most complicated combinations.

You may or may not know, for of itself the thing’s quite immaterial, that there is considerable controversy as to what distinguishes a machine from a tool. After its own crude fashion, English (mathematical) mechanics calls a tool a simple machine and a machine a complicated tool. English technologists, however, who take rather more account of economics, distinguish the two (and so, accordingly, do many, if not most, English economists) in as much as in one case the motive power emanates from man, in the other from a natural force. From this, the German jackasses, who are great on little matters like this, have concluded that a plough, for instance, is a machine, and the most complicated jenny, etc., in so far as it is moved by hand, is not. However, if we take a look at the machine in its elementary form, there can be no doubt that the industrial revolution originates, not from motive power, but from that part of machinery called the working machine by the English, i.e. not from, say, the use of water or steam in place of the foot to move the spinning wheel, but from the transformation of the actual spinning process itself, and the elimination of that part of human labour that was not mere exertion of power (as in treadling a wheel), but was concerned with processing, working directly on the material to be processed. Nor, on the other hand, can there be any doubt that, once we turn our attention from the historical development of machinery to machinery on the basis of the present mode of production, the only decisive factor is the working machine (e.g. in the case of the sewing-machine). For, as everyone knows today, once this process is mechanised, the thing may be moved, according to size, either by hand, water or a steam-engine.

To those who are merely mathematicians, these questions are of no moment, but they assume great importance when it comes to establishing a connection between human social relations and the development of these material modes of production.

Re-reading my technological and historical excerpts has led me to the conclusion that, aside from the invention of gunpowder, the compass and printing — those necessary prerequisites of bourgeois progress — the two material bases upon which the preparatory work for mechanised industry in the sphere of manufacturing was done between the sixteenth and the mid-eighteenth century, i.e. the period during which manufacturing evolved from a handicraft to big industry proper, were the clock and the mill (initially the flour mill and, more specifically, the water mill), both inherited from Antiquity. (The water mill was brought to Rome from Asia Minor in Julius Caesar’s time.) The clock was the first automatic device to be used for practical purposes, and from it the whole theory of the production of regular motion evolved. By its very nature, it is based on a combination of the artist-craftsman’s work and direct theory. Cardan, for instance, wrote about clock-making (and provided practical instructions). German sixteenth-century writers describe clock-making as a ‘scientific (non-guild) handicraft’, and, from the development of the clock, it could be shown how very different is the handicraft-based relation between book-learning and practice from that, e.g., in big industry. Nor can there be any doubt that it was the clock which, in the eighteenth century, first suggested the application of automatic devices (in fact, actuated by springs) in production. It is historically demonstrable that Vaucanson’s experiments in this field stimulated the imagination of English inventors to a remarkable extent.

In the case of the mill, on the other hand, the essential distinctions in the organism of a machine were present from the outset, i.e. as soon as the water mill made its appearance. Mechanical motive power. Primo, the motor for which it had been waiting. The transmission mechanism. Lastly, the working machine, which handles the material, each existing independently of the others. It was upon the mill that the theory of friction was based, and hence the study of the mathematical forms of gear-wheels, cogs, etc.; likewise, the first theory of measurement of the degree of motive power, the best way of applying it, etc. Since the middle of the seventeenth century almost all great mathematicians, in so far as they have concerned themselves with the theory and practice of mechanics, have taken the simple, water-driven flour mill as their point of departure. Indeed, this was why the words Mühle and mill, which came to be used during the manufacturing period, were applied to all driving mechanisms adapted for practical purposes.

But in the case of the mill, as in that of the press, the forge, the plough, etc., the actual work of hammering, crushing, milling, tilling, etc., is done from the outset without human labour, even though the moving force be human or animal. Hence this type of machinery is very old, at least in its origins, and, in its case, mechanical propulsion proper was applied at an earlier date. Hence it is virtually the only kind of machinery that occurs during the manufacturing period as well. The industrial revolution began as soon as mechanical means were employed in fields where, from time immemorial, the final result had called for human labour and not therefore — as in the case of the above-mentioned tools — where the actual material to be processed had never, within living memory, been directly connected with the human hand; where, by the nature of things and from the outset, man has not functioned purely as powers. If, like the German jackasses, one insists that the application of animal powers which is just as much voluntary motion as the application of human powers) constitutes machinery, then the application of this form of locomotor is far older than the simplest of manual tools in any case.

Izzy, as was inevitable, has sent me the speech he made in his defence (has been sentenced to four months) before the court. Macte puer virtute. To begin with, that braggart has had the pamphlet you've got, the speech on ‘the workers’ estate’, reprinted in Switzerland with the pompous title Workers’ Programme.

As you know, the thing’s no more nor less than a badly done vulgarisation of the Manifesto and of other things we have advocated so often that they have already become commonplace to a certain extent. (For instance, the fellow calls the working class an ‘estate’.)

Well. In his speech before the Berlin court, he had the effrontery to say:

‘I further maintain that this pamphlet is not just a scientific work like so many others, a mere compendium of ready-made answers, but that it is, in very many respects, a scientific achievement, an exposé of new scientific ideas.... I have ushered into the world comprehensive works in varied and difficult fields of scholarship, sparing myself neither pains nor nocturnal vigils in my endeavour to enlarge the frontiers of scholarship as such, and I may, perhaps, say with Horace: militavi non sine gloria! But this I myself tell you: Never, not even in my most comprehensive works, have I penned a single line that was reasoned with more rigorous scholarship than was this production from its first page to its last.... Cast an eye, therefore, on the contents of this pamphlet. The contents are nothing less than a philosophy of history, compressed into 44 pages.... It is an exposé of the objective, reasoning thought process, which has underlain European history for more than a millennium now, a discovery of the innermost soul, etc.

Is not this the most egregious effrontery? The fellow evidently thinks himself destined to take over our stock-in-trade. And withal, how absurdly grotesque!

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Get Lupus to give you today’s Star, and take a look at the letters it has reprinted from The Morning Herald on the subject of The Times and Delane.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 453;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 13 February 1863

Dear Frederick,

I enclose divers Urquhartiana. Of late, the fellows have really distinguished themselves by their stupidity. Take, for example, their ‘philosophy’ with regard to the movement in the United States.

I'd have written before now, but for some twelve days I've been strictly forbidden all reading, writing, or smoking. I had some kind of inflammation of the eye, combined with a most obnoxious affection of the nerves of the head. Things have improved to such an extent that I am venturing to write again for the first time at this moment. In between whiles I indulged in all manner of psychological fantasies about what it would feel like to be blind or insane.

What do you think of the Polish business? This much is certain, the era of revolution has now fairly opened in Europe once more. And the general state of affairs is good. But the comfortable delusions and almost childish enthusiasm with which we welcomed the revolutionary era before February 1848, have gone by the board. Old comrades such as Weerth, etc., are no more, others have fallen by the wayside or gone to the bad and, if there is new stock, it is, at least, not yet in evidence. Moreover, we now know what role stupidity plays in revolutions, and how they are exploited by blackguards. Incidentally, the ‘Prussian’ enthusiasts for the ‘Italian’ and ‘Hungarian’ nationalities are already finding themselves in a fix. The ‘Prussians’ are not going to deny their Russian sympathies. This time, let us hope, the lava will flow from East to West and not in the opposite direction, so that we shall be spared the ‘honour’ of the French initiative. Apart from that, the adventure in Mexico is providing a truly classical epilogue to the farce of the Lower Empire.

The ‘Herzenian’ soldiers appear to be setting about things in the traditional manner. However, there’s little to be deduced therefrom, either in respect of the masses in Russia, or even the bulk of the Russian Army. We know what was done by the ‘intelligent bayonets’ of the French, not to mention our own Rhineland ruffians in Berlin in 1848. But at present you should watch The Bell, for Herzen et cie. now have the chance to demonstrate their revolutionary integrity, — in so far as it is compatible with Slav predilections.

The Urquhartites will probably say that the Polish insurrection was stirred up by the St. Petersburg cabinet as a ‘diversion’ from Urquhart’s intended invasion of the Caucasus

In the United States things are going damned slowly. I hope that J. Hooker will extricate himself.

Well, make sure you first let me know what you're doing with yourself in Manchester now. It must be a damned lonely place for you. I know from my own experience how the region round Soho Square still sends a shiver down my spine if I happen to be anywhere near there.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 454;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 17 February, [1863]

Dear Frederick,

I am really worried by your silence. I hope you aren’t ill. Conversely, I hope I haven’t again given offence malgré moi. If, in my letter, acknowledging the £100, I discussed machinery, etc., this was really done to divert you, and distract you from your misery.

The Polish business and Prussia’s intervention do indeed represent a combination that impels us to speak. Not in person, partly so as to avoid any appearance of competing with the student Blind, partly so as not to deny ourselves entry to Germany. But the Workers’ Society here would serve well for the purpose. A manifesto should be issued in its name, and issued immediately. You must write the military bit — i.e. on Germany’s military and political interest in the restoration of Poland. I shall write the diplomatic bit.

Well, Old Boy, let me have an answer and, if you've got anything on your mind, speak out like a man in the assurance that no one takes a warmer interest in your weal and woe than does

Your

Moor

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 455;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 17 February 1863

Dear Moor,

You must excuse my long silence. I was in a very forlorn state, and it was high time I extricated myself from it. I tried Slavonic languages but the loneliness was unbearable. I had to force myself to seek distraction. That helped, and I am now my old self again.

The Poles are really splendid fellows. If they manage to hold out until 15 March, there'll be a general conflagration in Russia. At first, I was devilish afraid the business might go wrong. But now there would seem to be almost more chance of victory than of defeat. Nor should it be forgotten that the younger members of the Polish emigration have a military literature of their own in which all matters are discussed with special reference to Polish conditions, or that, in that literature, the idea of guerrilla warfare in Poland plays a leading role and is discussed in great detail. Oddly enough, the only two leaders to have been named so far are Frankowski, a Warsaw Jew, and Langiewicz, a Prussian lieutenant. The Russian messieurs, in view of their ineptitude, are bound to suffer appallingly as a result of guerrilla warfare.

Have you seen that Bakunin and Mieroslawski are dubbing one another liars, and are at loggerheads over the Russo-Polish frontiers? I have ordered the Kolokol, from which I shall presumably find out more about it. — Incidentally, I shall have to do some hard swotting before I can work my way through it again.

The Prussians are behaving infamously as always. Monsieur Bismarck knows that it will be a matter of life and death for him if there’s revolution in Poland and Russia. Not that there’s any hurry over Prussian intervention. So long as it’s not necessary, the Russians won’t permit it, and when it does become necessary, the Prussians will take care not to go.

If things go wrong in Poland, then we shall probably face a year or two of acute reaction, for in that case the Pravoslavnyiyi Tsar would again become head of a Holy Alliance, which last would again cause Monsieur Bonaparte to be looked on as a great liberal and champion of nations by the stupid crapauds. Apropos, how funny it is to see the entire English bourgeoisie pitching into Boustrapa, now that Kinglake has made public a small, improperly digested and improperly heard fragment of the same tittle-tattle about him and his lot as we've been telling them for ten years without their believing us. Revelations about the court in Paris are again becoming quite the rage and, in the Guardian, Mr Tom Taylor is portentously dishing up all that stuff re la Solms, Bonaparte, Wyse, the Jecker affair, etc., that we've long known far more about. There’s only one thing of interest, namely that Jecker had already supplied money for the Strasbourg or the Boulogne conspiracy — which, Taylor doesn’t know. This, then, accounts for the connection.

Things don’t look too good in Yankeeland. Indeed, by a stroke of irony not uncommon in world history, the Democrats have, in the eyes of the philistines, now become the war party while the bankrupt poetaster Ch. Mackay is once more thoroughly discredited. I also hear from Private sources in New York that the North is continuing to arm at a quite unprecedented rate. But, on the other hand, signs of moral prostration are daily more in evidence and the inability to win grows daily greater. Where is the party whose victory and avènement would be synonymous with prosecuting the war à outrance and with every available means? The people have been cheated, more’s the pity, and it’s lucky that peace is a physical impossibility or they'd have concluded it long since, if only so that they could again devote themselves to the almighty Dollar.

A Confederate major who took part in the fighting at Richmond as a member of Lee’s staff, recently told me that, according to documents which Lee himself showed him, the rebels had no fewer than 40,000 stragglers at the end of this battle! In particular, he spoke with great respect of the Federals’ western regiments, but is in other ways a jackass.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 457;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 19 February 1863

Dear Moor,

As regards Poland I am entirely of your opinion. I've been toying with the idea of a pamphlet for the past fortnight. However, your suggestion is better, as it means that the diplomatic stuff goes in at the same time and it’s an advantage to do the thing together.

How many sheets is the whole to amount to and how many of those do you think ought to be devoted to my bit? The form it takes will more or less depend on this. Who will print it? And when will your bit be ready for printing?

About machinery anon.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 461;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 24 March 1863

Dear Frederick,

You must know that for the past few weeks eye trouble has almost entirely prevented me from reading or writing. Hence the need to make up for lost time by some hard slogging. Hinc my silence.

Dronke has sent me £50.

The enclosed letter from Dr Kugelmann, which kindly return, will show you what muddle-headed fellows these German ‘party members’ are. My work on economics ‘isn’t opportune’ and yet I am expected, for the sake of the cause, to carry on with the whole business after this volume has appeared, merely for the theoretical satisfaction of a few high-minded souls. What I am expected to live on while engaged in my ‘inopportune works’ is not, of course, a question these gentry worry their heads about for one moment.

The Langiewicz affair is disgusting. But I am hoping that it won’t put paid to the business yet, even temporarily. Meanwhile, I am deferring the work on Poland so as to be able to see events when they have reached a rather more advanced stage.

Politically, the view I have reached is this: that Vincke and Bismarck do, in fact, accurately represent the principle of the Prussian State; that the ‘State’ of Prussia (a very different creature from Germany) cannot exist either without Russia as she is, or with an independent Poland. The whole history of Prussia leads one to this conclusion which was drawn long since by Messrs Hollenzollern (Frederick II included). This princely consciousness is infinitely superior to the limited mentality of the subject that marks your Prussian liberal. Since, therefore, the existence of Poland is necessary to Germany and completely incompatible with the State of Prussia, the State of Prussia must he erased from the map. Or the Polish question simply provides further occasion for proving that it is impossible to prosecute German interests so long as the Hollenzollerns’ own state continues to exist. Down with Russian hegemony over Germany means just the same as away with mischief, with the old sodomite’s brood.

What strikes me as very significant about the latest turn of events in America is the fact that they are again proposing to hand out letters of marque. Quoad England, this will put an entirely different complexion on the matter and may, under favourable circumstances, lead to war with England, so that self-satisfied John Bull will find not only his cotton but also his corn withdrawn from under his nose. At the beginning of the Civil War Seward had, off his own bat, had the presumption to accept the resolutions of the 1856 Congress of Paris as provisionally valid for America, too. (This came to light with the publication of the despatches concerning the Trent affair.) In Washington, Congress and Lincoln, enraged at the outfitting of Southern pirates in Liverpool, etc., have now put an end to the lark. This has greatly alarmed the Stock Exchange here, though the faithful hounds of the press are obeying orders, of course, and not mentioning the affair in the papers.

You will doubtless have noted with satisfaction how Pam, the old scoundrel, is playing precisely the same game as in 1830/31 (I have compared his speeches) and likewise getting The Times to play it. This time the progress of the affair is so far good. Louis Bonaparte is about to find himself in the soup (when this happened to the luckless Louis Philippe in 1831 the whole of Europe suffered) and in a very ugly dilemma with his own army. Mexico... and those genuflections before the Tsar in the Moniteur (into which Boustrapa was pushed by Pam) might well cost him his neck. So great was his alarm that he ordered the publication of the despatches demonstrating that his good will had been thwarted by Pam alone. (Although his case was identical, the luckless Louis Philippe went so far as to allow the impudent Pam to claim in Parliament that *'if it were not for the perfidy of the French and the intervention of Prussia, Poland would still exist'*.) He believes that he will thereby influence public opinion in England, as though the latter were not satisfied with Pam’s sop to the effect that Bonaparte wanted to reach the Rhine! And as though Pam did not manufacture three-quarters of this public opinion himself! The wretched Plon-Plon hadn’t the courage to say that Pam was working for Russia; rather, he maintains that wicked Russia is seeking to foment discord between France and England! Here once again I recognise the very image of my homme du Bas Empire, the wretched fellow who never dares stage his coups d'état au delà des frontières without the permission of Europe’s Supreme Authority. Had the wretched fellow the courage to tell the unvarnished truth about Pam (or simply threaten to do so), he could saunter up to the Rhine undisturbed. But now he has bound himself hand and foot, thus delivering himself completely into Pam’s power, as did Louis Philippe before him. Much good may it do him.

The goings-on in Staleybridge and Ashton are very cheering. So the double chins and pot-bellies have at last ceased to ‘respect’ the prolitaires. Edmund Potter makes a great fool of himself today in The Times which, faced with the unpopularity it now enjoys in such large measure, pounces upon that ass in order to catch a ha'pennyworth of popularity.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 464;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 8 April 1863

Dear Moor,

I have been meaning to write to you for the past six days and have been continually prevented from doing so. Especially by the worthy Eichhoff. The poor devil allowed himself to be so thoroughly cheated in Liverpool by Prussian lieutenants on the run and commercial swindlers that he has become responsible for about £100’s worth of debts over and above the capital that was thrown down the drain, not by him, but by his partner. He'd come here, he said, to stay for some time and would accept any post that was offered him; he was making a great mystery of what he was doing here, etc. However, it soon became apparent that, instead of looking round for posts, he was engaging in all kinds of mysterious agency transactions and it’s now plain to me that he is conducting a blockade-running business to the Confederate states on behalf of little Dronke, who is very deeply involved in this line. Hence all the secrecy, though the greenness of our friend is such (it is really beyond all bounds) that the secret keeps leaking out all the time. Enfin, the chap has little to do just now, and I'm often saddled with him in the afternoons. Since he refuses to be straightforward with me, I can’t, of course, do anything much to help him, save in cases where he actually asks my advice.

I fear the Polish business is going wrong. Langiewicz’s defeat would already seem to have made its mark in the Kingdom. The Lithuanian movement is by far the most important because 1. it extends beyond the borders of Congress Poland ... and 2. because the peasants here play a greater part and the thing, if one looks towards Kurland, becomes unmistakably agrarian but unless this movement makes good progress and revives that in the Kingdom, I don’t imagine the prospects are very considerable. Langiewicz’s conduct seems to me as very dubious. Which party first broke the contract of alliance — which was absolutely essential to the success of the uprising — it will be difficult to establish. But it would be interesting to know how much truth there is in the rumours that link Mieroslawski, on the one hand, and Koscielski, on the other, with Plon-Plon. If I'm not mistaken, Branicki has long since been a Plonplonist.

The worthy Kugelmann certainly seems to have the most wonderfully magnanimous plans for you. That men of genius must also eat, drink and be housed and even pay for these things, is much too prosaic a notion for these honest Germans, and to suspect them of so much as harbouring it would be virtually tantamount to an insult. I should like to find out who the know-all was who confided to him that I have disowned my book. You will doubtless enlighten the good man on this score. As to the new edition (which, according to the same premises, would certainly be anything but opportune), this is not a suitable moment in any case, now that the English proletariat’s revolutionary energy has all but completely evaporated and the English proletarian has declared himself in full agreement with the dominancy of the bourgeoisie.

I have read the new things by Lyell and Huxley, both very interesting and pretty good. Lyell has some rhetoric but also some fine witty remarks, e.g. where, having vainly quoted all the naturalists in an attempt to establish the qualitative difference between men and apes, he finally quotes the Archbishop of Canterbury as asserting that man differs from beasts by virtue of religion. Apropos, just now the old faith here is being well and truly sniped at, and from all sides. It will soon be found necessary to concoct a platitudinous system of rationalism for the protection of religion. Owen got someone to reply to Huxley in The Edinburgh Review: the answer conceded all the essential facts of the case and took issue only with the phraseology.

Little Dronke evidently thought there was something tremendously heroic in his intention to raise £250 with his banker on my acceptance and actually pay the expenses and interest, amounting to less than £15, himself. My refusal, when confronted with such heroism, to undertake to provide the £250 within a year — you're the best judge of why I couldn’t do so — struck him as mesquin in the extreme. I assure you that, but for you, I would have kicked the little blackguard in the arse. I was so annoyed that I got tight and while still in a state of tightness wrote you a furious letter on the subject, which doubtless contained some pretty splendid stuff, for I have absolutely no recollection of what I wrote. I merely mention the matter now, so that you can view it in its proper context.

Vale.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 466;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

London, 9 April 1863

Dear Frederick,

Little Tussy was delighted with the letter and its contents and cannot be dissuaded from replying in ‘person’.

I have known all about Mieroslawski’s Plonplonism for years now through J. Ph. Becker and Schily. Anyway, I had deduced it even earlier from a book he published during the last Russo-Turkish war. One of the things the magnanimous fellow proposed therein was the partition of Germany into 2 countries. But I've never heard anything of the kind in connection with Koscielski. As for M.’s ludicrous vanity and boundless credulity the minute his vanity is tickled, Becker sent me a highly comical account of it from Italy in 1860.

Izzy has already brought out 2 more pamphlets about his trial; luckily he has not sent them to me. On the other hand, the day before yesterday I received his open reply to the central working men’s committee for the Leipzig working men’s (read louts') congress. He gives himself all the airs of a future working men’s dictator — self-importantly dispensing the phrases he has borrowed from us. He solves the wages v. capital problem ‘with delightful ease’ (verbotenus). The workers, that is, are to agitate for general suffrage, after which they are to send people like himself into the Chamber of Deputies, armed ‘with the naked sword of science’. Next they organise workers’ factories, for which the state advances the capital and, by and by, these institutions spread throughout the country. This, at any rate, is surprisingly new! Let me quote a sentence for you:

‘If, today, a German labour movement is already discussing the question as to whether the association should be conceived in the light of his’ (Schulze-Delitzsch’s) ‘ideas or of mine, the merit is largely his; and that is where his true merit lies — a merit which cannot be esteemed too highly.... The cordiality with which I acknowledge that merit should not prevent us, etc.'

Ça ira!

At the very time when Palmerston was in Glasgow, another great man announced his coming, the student Karl Blind. Prior to his arrival, he sent an item to the Glasgow North British Mail under the heading ‘M. Karl Blind’, beneath which the paper had inserted the ominous word ‘communicated’.

This remarkable communique — written by himself, like all the items about him circulating in the press, and inserted in the paper by that jackass McAdam — opens with the following unique introduction:

*‘At the present moment when a patriot exile is about to visit Glasgow, for the purpose of bringing under public notice the merits of the Polish question, it is fitting that a few remarks should be made upon his political career, and more especially so from the unfortunate fact that he is comparatively unknown in Scotland. German by birth and German by exile, Mr Karl Blind’s efforts have not come so prominently and so persistently before Europe as to have gained for him universal admiration from the liberating party, or universal execration from the oppressing party. He has hitherto stood in that middle way, where he has the honour of being both beloved and hated; but in these two contending ranks which have rendered to him their tribute after its kind the whole of Europe is not ranged, Mr Karl Blind having the satisfaction of knowing there is a third section of his friends who are simply indifferent. He therefore comes before the Scottish public with perhaps less prejudice against him than has been the case with most of the distinguished exiles who preceded him’.*

There follows a short biographical note on the great unknown in which Scotland and ‘the third section’ of mankind are informed that the said ‘Mr Karl Blind’ is a native of Baden, and was originally, like Kossuth and Mazzini, trained to the law. That the ‘Badish Revolution’ was the result of his propagandism that the ‘governments of Baden and the Palatinate’ had sent him to Paris in June ‘in the capacity of diplomatic envoy’, etc., and that he acts ‘in that spirit of cooperation which so distinguishes the more celebrated exiles?

Isn’t that ‘naice’?

My wife has now been confined to bed for a fortnight and has gone almost completely deaf, heaven knows why. Little Jenny has had another attack of diphtheria of some sort. If you could send me some wine for both of them (Allen wants little Jenny to have port), I'd be most grateful.

Here in London a parson (as distinct from the atheists who preach in John Street) has been giving deistic sermons for the public, in which he makes Voltairian fun of the Bible. (My wife and children went to hear him twice and thought highly of him as a humorist).

I attended a trade unions meeting chaired by Bright. He had very much the air of an Independent and, whenever he said ‘in the United States no kings, no bishops’, there was a burst of applause. The working men themselves spoke very well indeed, without a trace of bourgeois rhetoric or the faintest attempt to conceal their opposition to the capitalists (who, by the by, were also attacked by papa Bright).

How soon the English workers will throw off what seems to be a bourgeois contagion remains to be seen. So far as the main theses in your book [Condition of the Working Class in England] are concerned, by the by, they have been corroborated down to the very last detail by developments subsequent to 1844. For I have again been comparing the book with the notes I made on the ensuing period. Only your small-minded German philistine who measures world history by the ell and by what he happens to think are ‘interesting news items’, could regard 20 years as more than a day where major developments of this kind are concerned, though these may be again succeeded by days into which 20 years are compressed.

Re-reading your work has made me unhappily aware of the changes wrought by age. With what zest and passion, what boldness of vision and absence of all learned or scientific reservations, the subject is still attacked in these pages! And then, the very illusion that, tomorrow or the day after, the result will actually spring to life as history lends the whole thing a warmth, vitality, and humour with which the later ‘grey on grey’ contrasts damned unfavourably.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 469;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 18 April 1863

Dear Engels,

Lassalle sent me the enclosed piece of nonsense marked in red (the newspaper is that of E. Meyen a week ago today; so, it arrived just one day after I had written you the letter in which I gave you a short excerpt from Izzy’s latest pamphlet. He now clearly expects me to enter the lists on his behalf. Que faire?

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 470;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 21 April 1863

Dear Moor,

It is hard to say what is to be done about Lassalle; apres tout, I'd have assumed it to be beneath the great Izzy’s dignity to reply to such petty Meyenian tittle-tattle with the heavy artillery of a formal démenti. Let the chap clear up his own messes; if he’s any good, he needs no testimonials from you, and why should you compromise yourself, now that you've told him that he can’t go hand in hand with us, or we hand in hand with him? Anyhow, what arrant stupidity to involve himself in the affairs of the Schulze-Delitzsch louts and try to form a party for himself out of that, of all things, on the basis of our earlier works. The very endeavour of S-D. and other such rabble in these bourgeois times to raise the outlook of the louts to the bourgeois level must needs be welcome to us, for otherwise we'd have to deal with this business during the revolution, and in Germany, where the small state system so greatly complicates matters, we might be confronted with this piddling stuff as something new and practical. That is now disposed of and we now have our opponents where we want them; the lout has achieved self-consciousness and thus finds himself in the ranks of the petty-bourgeois democrats. But to regard these fellows as representatives of the proletariat — it took Izzy to do that.

Lupus and I were greatly amused by the funny tale about student Blind. Lupus has had another severe attack of gout, aggravated by the obstinate way he insists on going out and giving lessons when not yet fully recovered, and only sending for the doctor when it’s far too late and he’s used up all his medicine. But it’s no use remonstrating; ‘I’m going!'

Latterly I've been reading Russian history in reverse, i.e., first Catherine and the partition of Poland, then Peter I. I must say that one would have to be an oaf to work up any enthusiasm for the Poles of 1772. After all, in most parts of Europe at that time the aristocracy was caving in with decency if not esprit, even though its general maxim may have been that materialism consists in what one eats, drinks, fucks, wins at gaming or is paid in return for one’s knavery; but no aristocracy save the Polish adopted so stupid a method as selling itself to the Russians. In other respects, the general venality of the gentils-hommes all over Europe presents a very jolly spectacle. Another thing that greatly interested me was the matter of Monsieur Patkul. This fellow was in fact the founding father of Russian diplomacy generally, and already possessed all its wiles in nuce. If you haven’t been able to procure his reports to the Russian government, published in Berlin in 1795, we'll try and get ourselves a copy by advertising in the Buchhandlerbörsenblatt. How small, by the way, were the contributions made by his successors! Always the same turns of speech, always the same approach, whatever the country. A necessary ingredient, come to that, is the objectivity of your Livonians, whose interests, far from being national, are at most local and private. A Russian would never be capable of such things.

Another very pretty affair is the coup d'état Catherine II brought off against Peter III. It was here Boustrapa learnt his most important lessons; the Russian commonness served him as a model down to the very last detail. It’s ridiculous the way all such dirty dealings are invariably repeated in every particular.

I have no port at present nor is anything good in that line to be had on the spur of the moment. However, I'll look out for some, and meanwhile go down into the cellar to fetch up some hock and some claret (the former for the healthy, the latter for the invalids). For which reason I shall now close this letter, enclosing a few stamps for little Tussy.

Your

F. E.

There are duplicates of some of the stamps. Over here these may be used for swaps. I can supply large quantities of Italian, Swiss, Norwegian and certain German ones.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 472;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 20 May 1863

Moro viejo, Moro viejo,

El de la vellida barba.

[Old Moor, Old Moor,

He of the hoary beard.]

What’s the matter with you, no longer sending word of your fortunes and rebus gestis? Are you ill or stuck fast in the depths of political economy? Or have you appointed little Tussy your correspondence secretary? Or how?

What do you think of the worthies in Berlin who have come to the conclusion that it is questionable whether their president is permitted to call a minister to order, should the minister say that, for all he cared, the whole Chamber could be triple damned, etc. Never has a parliament clung more patiently and more inopportunely to the thesis that the bourgeois opposition, in its struggle with absolutism and the Junker camarilla, is under an obligation to let itself be kicked. It’s our old friends of 1848 all over again. However, on this occasion times are somewhat different.

Lassalle’s goings-on and the rumpus they have created in Germany are really becoming obnoxious. It’s high time you finished your book; if only to provide us with propagandists of a different kind. In other respects, it’s quite a good thing that an audience for anti-bourgeois stuff should be recaptured in this way, though it’s disastrous that friend Izzy should thereby carve out a position for himself. However, that’s something we have never been able to prevent, any more than the heroic swordsman’s postures assumed in public by Karl Blind vis-à-vis the Grand Duke of Baden.

By the way, if you want to see how much time it takes before new scientific discoveries, even in wholly unpolitical fields, make any headway, you should read Lyell’s Antiquity of Man. Schmerling in Liége had discovered the fossilised human skull from Engis and shown it to Lyell as far back as 1834, when he also brought out his thick book. Nevertheless, it was only quite recently that anyone thought the thing worthy of serious investigation. Similarly, Perthes in Abbeville had correctly identified the flint instruments in the Somme basin and their geological age as early as 1842, but it was not until the end of the fifties that the thing was noticed. Such are those scoundrels, the patriarchs of science.

Lupus has again suffered severe attacks of gout but is better now.

I am also working hard at Serbian and the ballads collected by Vuck Stef. Karadzic. It comes more easily to me than any other Slavonic language.

Enclosed a few more stamps. A great deal of thieving in this article is going on at the office just now.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 474;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] British Museum, 29 May 1863

Dear Frederick,

My long silence will at once be explicable to you if you picture to yourself a badly swollen liver with all its ‘appurtenances’. For about 12 weeks now I have been enduring more of this nonsense than ever before. Nor can you have any conception of how it affects a person’s morale, namely the feeling of heaviness in the head and paralysis in the limbs. More specifically, one can’t bring oneself to do anything, not even, inter alia, to write letters. For the past two weeks the thing has again been endurable. This business has made writing of any kind so impossible that, despite various repeated attempts, I have not managed the stuff on Poland, which I'm very glad of now, since it would have simply deprived me of the chance of going to Prussia without being of any immediate benefit.

Meanwhile I wasn’t, of course, idle, though unable to work. What I did, on the one hand, was fill in the gaps in my knowledge (diplomatic, historical) of the Russian-Prussian-Polish affair and, on the other, read and make excerpts from all kinds of earlier literature relating to the part of the political economy I had elaborated. This at the British Museum. Now that I am more or less able to work again, I shall cast the weight off my shoulders and make a fair copy of the political economy for the printers (and give it a final polish). If it were possible for me to retreat into isolation at the moment, the thing would progress very quickly. At all events, I shall take it to Germany in person.

Little Jenny is not quite her proper self. She has had a nasty cough for the past fortnight.

As to Izzy, he had — or so I've been told in confidence by Freiligrath (he showed me Izzy’s letter) — asked F. to write a poem for him on the ‘new’ movement, i.e. sing Izzy’s praises. However, he was mistaken in F. In his letter he says inter alia: ‘Each day hundreds of newspapers carry my name to the furthest corners of Germany.’ ‘My proletarians! etc.’ Well, since F. won’t sing his praises, he has found another poet. Herewith a sample:

‘Thou German proletariat, come heed

The clarion call, nor any longer stay!

Here stands a man prepared to pave the way

To thy prosperity. Be thine the deed!

He hath no truck with lofty parliaments,

Nor doth he flaunt his gift of eloquence,

Speaks for us all with homely wit and colour,

Man of the People, Ferdinand Lassalle!

‘Tis not for others, not to fill their purse

That you shall sweat and toil your lives away,

While they wax sleek and richer every day

And you more ragged as your lot grows worse.

The fruits of labour shall be yours alone,

’tis you shall reap the harvest you have sown.

So hearken all unto the man of valour,

To the virile voice of Ferdinand Lassalle.

Macte puer! If that isn’t sauce for the gander!

My warm regards to Lupus. Now don’t indulge in tit for tat but let me hear from you soon.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 476;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 11 June 1863

Dear Moor,

Herewith £5 Bank of England note R/X 46271, 31 Jan. 1862, Manchester. 5 “ — “ — “ S/R 92394, 14 Oct. 1862, London, with which the butcher will, I hope, be placated. Since I cannot post the letter myself, it would be best if you would acknowledge its receipt.

I was very worried by your long silence but have meanwhile heard you were unwell and hope that that is now over. How is little Jenny’s cough?

Latterly, things would not seem to have been going so well in Poland. The movement in Lithuania and Little Russia is evidently weak, nor do the insurgents in Poland seem to be making any headway. The leaders are all either killed in action or captured and shot, which would seem to show that they have to expose themselves a great deal in order to egg on their men. Qualitatively the insurgents are no longer what they were in March and April, the best chaps having been expended. However, these Poles are always unknown quantities, and affairs might take a turn for the better, although the odds against it are worsening. If they hold out, they might yet become part of a general European movement which would be the saving of them; on the other hand, should things go wrong, it will be all up with Poland for the next 10 years, for an insurrection like this exhausts a people’s fighting potential for many years to come.

I should say that the chances of there being a European movement were good because the ordinary citizen has once more rid himself of all fear of the communists and might even, if need be, go into action with them. The French elections prove this no less plainly than do the goings-on in Prussia since the last elections. However, I scarcely think that a movement of this kind would originate in France. The election results in Paris were altogether too bourgeois; wherever the workers put up candidates of their own, they lost, nor for that matter did they have the power to force the bourgeoisie to put up radicals. Besides, Bonaparte knows how to keep large cities in check.

In Prussia they would still be chattering away if the good Bismarck hadn’t put a stop to it. Whatever turn things may take there, peaceful constitutional progress is now at an end and your philistine must get ready for the fray. And that’s enough to be going on with. Little though I esteem the valour of our old friends the democrats, it is, nevertheless, here more than anywhere else, I should say, that combustible material is accumulating and, since it is scarcely possible that the Hohenzollerns will fail to perpetrate the worst blunders in foreign policy, it might well happen that, with half the troops deployed at the Polish frontier and the other half on the Rhine, Berlin would be left free and a coup would result. It would be a poor enough outlook for Germany and Europe were Berlin to find itself in the van of the movement.

What surprises me most is that a peasants’ movement should not have arisen in Greater Russia. In this instance, the Polish uprising would seem to have had a positively unfavourable effect.

In America things are in a pretty pickle. Fighting Joe’s rodomontade has made him look a frightful ass, Rosecrans slumbers and Grant alone is performing well. His move on Vicksburg from the south-west to the north-east, his isolation of the relief army, his repulse of the same, then the rapid advance on Vicksburg and even the energetic if fruitless assaults, are all first-class. I do not believe it will be possible to muster enough relief troops on time. On the other hand, we have so often seen American generals suddenly perform well for a couple of weeks and then revert to the most dreadful bungling, that it’s quite impossible to tell what their future moves will be.

I was already familiar with Lassalle’s poem (genitivus objectivus) from a pamphlet Siebel sent me and which you presumably have as well. Very jolly. The chap’s now operating purely in the service of Bismarck and, one of these days, when Monsieur B. tires of him, he might well find himself under lock and key, making the acquaintance of Prussian common law, which he always seems to confuse with the Code. It’s nice, by the way, that, after the stand he took in Vogtibus, he should now find himself under the aegis, not only of the Augsburger, but also of the Kreuz-Zeitung.

I am now reading Kinglake and am becoming more convinced than ever that somewhere in every Englishman’s brain a board is nailed up beyond which nothing penetrates.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 479;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 12 June 1863

British Museum

Dear Engels,

I hereby acknowledge the £10 with many thanks. Being uncertain whether you would be able to send the money for Monday, and in view of the great fear of bills of exchange which obtains in this house, I had simultaneously written to Dronke. For the past four weeks little Jenny has again had a slight cough. Today I sent her to see Dr Allen.

I myself am not quite fit either, but am rid of my worst complaint. In the meantime, which would certainly delight Vogt, I have been wolfing sulphur!

Izzy has sent me (and you, too, perhaps) the speech he made in court about indirect taxation. One or two individual bits are good, but for one thing it is, on the whole, written in an unbearably officious, chatty style, with absurd pretensions to scholarship and consequentialness. In addition, it is essentiellement the confection of a ‘pupil’ who cannot wait to make a name for himself as a ‘thoroughly learned’ man and original scholar. Hence the abundance of historical and theoretical blunders. One example may suffice (should you not have read the thing yourself). To impress the court and the public, he tries to give a kind of retrospective history of the argument against indirect taxation and therefore, going back at random beyond Boisguillebert and Vauban, cites Bodin, etc. And here he shows himself to be the schoolboy par excellence. He omits the physiocrats, clearly ignorant of the fact that everything A. Smith, etc., wrote on the subject was cribbed from them and that in general they were the protagonists where this question was concerned. Likewise, ‘indirect taxation’ is, in true schoolboy fashion, seen as ‘bourgeois taxation’, and so indeed it was ‘In the Middle Ages’, but not today (not, at least, where the bourgeoisie is developed), to discover which he need seek no further than Mr R. Gladstone et co. in Liverpool. The jackass doesn’t appear to know that the argument against ‘indirect’ taxation is one of the platforms of the English and American friends of ‘Schulze-Delitzsch’ et cie, and hence isn’t at any rate directed against them — the Free-Traders, I mean. Again, in true schoolboy fashion he applies a proposition of Ricardo’s to the Prussian real estate tax. (Quite wrong, this.) Quite touching, how he imparts to the court ‘his’ discoveries, the fruit of the most profound ‘learning and truth’ and of terrible ‘night vigils’, namely that, in the Middle Ages ‘landed property’ prevailed, in later times ‘capital’, and at present the ‘principle of the workers’ estate’, ‘labour’, or the ‘moral principle of labour'; and, on the same day as he was imparting this discovery to the louts, Senior Councillor to the Government Engel (knowing nothing about him) was imparting it to a more distinguished audience at the Academy of Singing. He and Engel exchanged ‘epistolary’ congratulations upon their ‘simultaneous’ scientific findings.

The ‘workers’ estate’ and the ‘moral principle’ are indeed achievements on the part of Izzy and the Senior Councillor to the Government.

I have not been able to bring myself to write to the fellow since the beginning of this year.

If I commented on his stuff, I'd be wasting my time; besides, he appropriates every word as a ‘discovery’. To rub his nose in his plagiarism would be absurd since, in view of the state they are in after he has finished with them, I have no desire to relieve him of our ideas. Nor would it do to accord recognition to such rodomontade and indiscretions. The fellow would instantly exploit it.

So, there’s nothing to be done but wait until he ultimately boils over. Then I shall have a very nice excuse, namely that (like Senior Councillor to the Government Engel) he is for ever insisting it’s not ‘communism’. So, in my reply, I shall say that, had I wished to take any notice of him, these repeated asseverations of his would have compelled me

1. to show the public how and where he had cribbed from us;

2. how and wherein we differ from his stuff.

Hence, so as not to compromise ‘communism’ in any way or injure him, I had ignored him completely.

Come to that, the chap is making all this hullabaloo out of sheer vanity. Throughout 1859 he was heart and soul for the Prussian liberal bourgeois party. Now he may find it more convenient to attack the ‘bourgeois’ under the auspices of the government than to attack the ‘Russians’. To rail against the Austrians and adulate the Italians has always been as typical of your Berliner as to keep one’s trap shut about the Russians, which is what the valiant lad does.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 483;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 6 July 1863

Dear Engels,

D'abord, my best thanks for the £250. About four months ago Dronke sent me £50, and today £200.

Unfortunately, little Jenny still isn’t quite as she should be. The cough hasn’t completely gone yet, and the child has grown too ‘light’. I shall send her to a resort with the others as soon as the school term is over. Although I have great confidence in Allen, I should be glad if Gumpert, who I presume will be going on holiday on the Continent, would pay us a flying visit here, see for himself how things are, and let me have his opinion. To be frank, I am much alarmed about the child. To lose flesh at this age seems to me most dubious.

Palmerston plays his old tricks in the Polish affair. The Notes presented to the Russians had originally been sent from St. Petersburg to London. Pam bought Hennessy from Urquhart by giving the said Irish blackguard a remunerative post (sinecure) with a Franco-English railway in France. Indeed, the venality of the politicians here eclipses anything that goes on in that line on the Continent. No one at home or in France can have any conception of this absolute shamelessness. As for ‘Count Zamoyski’, I had repeatedly told the Urquhartites that the fellow betrayed the Poles in 1830/31 by leading an intact corps across the Austrian border instead of against the Russians. In the end, this fellow has aroused their suspicions because of his perpetual personal underhand dealings with Pam.

The Southerners’ expedition against the North was, in my opinion, forced on Lee by the clamour of the Richmond papers and their supporters. I regard it as a coup de désespoir. This war, by the by, is going to be a lengthy business, which is, so far as European interests are concerned, altogether desirable.

Izzy has sent me yet another pamphlet, his speech at Frankfurt am Main. Since I now spend 10 hours a day working ex officio at economics, I can hardly be expected to waste my leisure hours on reading these schoolboy essays. So, for the present the thing’s been filed away. My spare time is now devoted to differential and integral calculus. Apropos, I have a superfluity of works on the subject and will send you one, should you wish to tackle it. I should consider it to be almost essential to your military studies. Moreover, it is a much easier branch of mathematics (so far as mere technicalities are concerned) than, say, the more advanced aspects of algebra. Save for a knowledge of the more ordinary kind of algebra and trigonometry, no preliminary study is required except a general familiarity with conic sections.

Will you write me a reasonably well-founded assessment of the enclosed pamphlet by the ‘Duc du Roussillon’ — you may still have some recollection of him under the name of ‘Pi’ — since he writes to me daily asking me for my ‘opinion’?

If at all possible in this heat, will you take a reasonably close look at the enclosed. ‘Tableau Économique’ which I am substituting for Quesnay’s table and let me know your objections, if any. It embraces the whole process of reproduction.

As you know, A. Smith sees the ‘Natural’ or ‘Necessary price’ as being composed of wages, profit (interest) and rent — i.e. as wholly resolved into revenue. This nonsense has been taken over by Ricardo, although he excludes rent from the catalogue as being purely fortuitous. Nearly all economists have taken this over from Smith, and those who contest it succumb to some other folly.

Smith himself is conscious of the nonsensicality of subsuming the gross product of a society simply under revenue (which may be consumed annually), whereas in the case of each individual branch of production he resolves price into capital (raw materials, machinery, etc.) and revenue (wages, profit, rent). If this were so, a society would have to start each year de novo, without capital.

[See attached diagram]

Now as regards my table, which figures in one of the last chapters of my work by way of recapitulation, the following is essential to a proper understanding of it:

1. The figures, which are arbitrary, represent millions.

2. Here means of subsistence are taken to mean everything that goes into the consumption fund each year (or might without accumulation, which is excluded from the table, go into the consumption fund).

In Class I (means of subsistence) the gross product (700) consists of means of subsistence which are, by their very nature, not therefore included in constant capital (raw materials and machinery, buildings, etc.). Similarly, in Class II, the entire product consists of commodities that constitute constant capital, i.e. re-enter the process of reproduction in the form of raw materials and machinery.

3. Ascending lines are dotted, descending ones continuous.

4. Constant capital is that part of capital that consists of raw materials and machinery. Variable capital that which is exchanged for labour.

5. For example, in agriculture, etc., one part of the same product (e.g. wheat) goes to form means of subsistence, whereas another part (wheat, for instance) re-enters reproduction in its natural form (e.g. as seed) as a raw material. But this does nothing to alter the case, since such branches of production figure under Class II or Class I according to which capacity is involved.

6. The hub of the matter, then, is as follows:

Category I. Means of subsistence. Working materials and machinery = e.g. £400 (i.e. that part of these that is included in the annual product as dechet; that part of the machinery, etc., which is not used up does not figure at all in the table). The variable capital exchanged for labour = 100, reproduces itself as 300, since 100 replaces wages in the shape of the product, and 200 represents surplus value (unpaid surplus labour). The product = 700, of which 400 represents the value of the constant capital which, however, has passed entirely into the product and must hence be replaced.

In the case of this relationship between variable capital and surplus value it is assumed that the worker works 1/3 of the working day for himself and 2 /3 for his natural superiors.

Hence 100 (variable capital), as is indicated by the dotted line, is paid out in money as wages; with this 100 (indicated by the descending line) the worker buys the product of this class, i.e. means of subsistence for 100. Thus, the money flows back to capitalist class I.

The surplus value of 200 in its general form = profit, which, however, is split up into industrial profit (commercial included), and further into interest, which the industrial capitalist pays in money, and rent, which he likewise pays in money. This money paid out for industrial profit, interest and rent, flows back (indicated by descending lines) since the product of class I is bought in return for it. Hence all the money laid out by the industrial capitalist within class I flows back to him, while 300 of the product, 700, is consumed by the workers, entrepreneurs, monied men and landlords. In class I this leaves a surplus of products (of means of subsistence) of 400, and a deficit of constant capital of 400.

Category II. Machinery and raw materials.

Since the gross product of this category, not only that part of the product which replaces constant capital, but also that which represents the equivalent of wages and surplus value, consists of raw materials and machinery, the revenue of this category cannot be realised in its own product but only in the product of category I. Disregarding accumulation, as is done here, category I can, however, buy only as much from category II as it needs for the replacement of its constant capital, while category II can lay out on the product of category I only that part of its product which represents wages and surplus value (revenue). Hence the workers in category II lay out their money, = 133 1/3, on the product of category II. The same thing happens with the surplus value in category II, which, as sub I. is split up into industrial profit, interest, and rent. Hence 400 in money flows from category II to the industrial capitalists in category I, who, in return, transfer the remainder of their product, = 400, to the former.

With this 400 in money, class I buys what is necessary to replace its constant capital, = 400, from category II, to which the money paid out in wages and consumption (by the industrial capitalists themselves, the monied men and the landlords) thus flows back. Hence category II retains 533 1/3 of its gross product, and, with this, it replaces its own constant capital, which has been used up.

The movement, partly within category I, partly between categories I and II, also shows how money flows back to the respective industrial capitalists in both categories, money which will again go to pay wages, interest and rent.

Category III represents reproduction as a whole.

The gross product of category II is shown here as the constant capital of society as a whole, and the gross product of category I as that part of the product which replaces the variable capital (the wages fund) and the revenues of the classes which share the surplus value between them.

I have put Quesnay’s table underneath and will explain it in some words in my next letter.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Apropos. Edgar Bauer has been given a post in — the Prussian Press Department.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 488;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 15 August 1863

Dear Frederick,

May the devil take me, as the red one used to say, if I didn’t get up every morning this week with the firm intention of writing to you. But no sooner did I reach my study than I allayed my conscience by pleading that all I wanted was to add half a dozen lines to the manuscript at the point where I had broken off the day before. And once I had departed from the path of righteousness, I saw that the evil deed is accursed in that it must constantly engender evil.

My family left for Hastings last Friday. The departure took place so tardily because Lenchen had had to spend a fortnight in Germany in connection with family affairs.

The enclosed photographs (the children forced me to have mine taken) will soon be followed by those of Jenny and Laura.

In one respect, my work (preparing the manuscript for the press) is going well. In the final elaboration the stuff is, I think, assuming a tolerably popular form, aside from a few unavoidable M-C’s and C-M’s. On the other hand, despite the fact that I write all day long, it’s not getting on as fast as my own impatience, long subjected to a trial of patience, might demand. At all events, it will be 100 p. c. more comprehensible than No. 1. When, by the by, I consider my handiwork and realise how I've had to demolish everything and even build up the historical section out of what was in part quite unknown material, I can’t help finding Izzy a bit of a joke; for he has already got ‘his’ political economy in hand and yet everything he has peddled around hitherto has shown him to be a callow schoolboy who trumpets abroad as his very latest discovery, with the most repulsive and impertinent garrulity, theses that we were doling out 20 years ago as small change to our partisans, and ten times better at that. In other respects, too, this same Izzy is storing up in his manure factory our party faeces excreted 20 years ago which he proposes to use as fertilizer for world history. Thus, for instance, he got the Nordstern to print a letter of support from ‘Herwegh’ (who has undoubtedly given proof of his platonic love of the ‘principle of labour’). Because the same Nordstern is edited by that ne'er-do-well Bruhn, whom Lassalle bought from Blind. Thus, Izzy has nominated ‘Moses Hess’ his ‘proconsul in the Rhine Province’, etc. And he still seems unable to shake off the idée fixe that his praises should be sung by Freiligrath, who would never dream of doing so. For he has again got his Leipzig ‘proconsul’ to summon F. urgently, citing the good example of G. Herwegh. If only he knew how F. and I had laughed about this renewed onslaught!

‘Oh Izzy, Oh Izzy, didst thou not see

That Herwegh and Moses thy gallows would be?'

The philistines down here are furious with The Times for having fobbed them off so nicely over the Confederate Loan. After all, those worthies might have known if only from Cobbett’s disclosures, that The Times is nothing but a ‘commercial concern’, which doesn’t give a damn how the balance turns out, providing it is a balance in its own power. The Times chaps, such as J. Spence — ‘that man’, according to the Richmond Enquirer, ‘whom we have paid in solid gold’ — obtained the loan scrips partly for nothing, partly at a 50 p. c. discount on the nominal rate. So, to cry them up till they reached 105 was a nice piece of business.

It is, I should say, of prime importance to the United States that they should seize the remaining ports, Charleston, Mobile, etc., because they may be involved in a clash with Boustrapa any day now. That same imperial Lazarillo de Tormes is presently caricaturing, not only his uncle, but even himself. For after all, the ‘suffrage’ in Mexico is a pretty caricature, not only of the suffrage whereby he turned himself into a Frenchman, but also of that whereby he made Nice and Savoy French. I myself am in no doubt that Mexico will be the hurdle at which he'll break his neck, provided he hasn’t been hanged first.

The Polish affair has gone completely off the rails because of this same Boustrapa, and the influence his intrigues have given the Czartoryski party. Colonel Lapinski, who returned a few days since from the ill-fated trip he undertook with Bakunin and to which Palmerston put so neat an end on the Swedish coast, complains bitterly about the committees in Warsaw, London and Paris being wholly under Bonap.-Czartor. influence.

Our fatherland would seem to be in a pitiful state. In the absence of a licking administered from without, there’s no doing anything with these curs.

Apropos. Since you wrote your book about England, a second Children’s Employment Commission Report has at long last appeared. It shows that all those horrors that were banished from certain spheres of industry by the Factory Acts, have proliferated with redoubled vigour wherever there is no control! It would make a splendid sequel to your book, once the complete reports have come out.

My congratulations to Gumpert. At any rate, he has seen to it that his marriage did not remain childless.

In Borchardt’s case, the flesh would appear to be more urgent than befits his priestly office. And he'll make all the other Jewesses jealous.

Is Lupus back? If so, give him my kindest regards. There’s nothing I should like better just now than to have you here for a couple of days so that I could chat and go drinking with you. It’s such a long time since we were together.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

‘Pi’ has been answered.

Apropos. Among the curious information I have gleaned at the Museum, was the following:

‘The true discovery of the achievements of Germany, first discovered by herself, not in intoxication from wine, as a certain calumniator ... sceptically maintains. but by strength of body and mind and communicated to the rest of the world, etc.’, author Michael Mayer, Frankfurt, 1619.

The munera and discoveries Germaniae are:

‘Roman imperial dignity, gunpowder, hook printing, religious reform, the medicaments of Theophrastus Paracelsus, the secrets of the Rosicrucians — Inventum politicum, bellicum, litteraricum, theologicum, medicum, chymiscum.'

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 491;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1897-98 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 12 September 1863

Dear Frederick,

My family has been back for about 10 days. Little Jenny is much better and has stopped coughing. She is now taking salt water baths at home, i.e. baths with sea salt. About 2 months ago I, too, started taking a bath at home every morning, sluicing myself with cold water from head to foot, since when I have been feeling much better.

The most interesting acquaintanceship I have struck up here is that of Colonel Lapinski. He is without doubt the cleverest Pole — besides being an homme d'action — I have ever met. His sympathies are all on the German side, though in manners and speech he is also a Frenchman. He cares nothing for the national struggle and only knows the racial struggle. He hates all Orientals, among whom he numbers Russians Turks, Greeks, Armenians, etc., with equal impartiality. He spent some time here in company with Urquhart, but, not content with describing him as a ‘humbug’, he actually doubts his probity, which is unjust.

The ‘Circassian’ princes exhibited in England by Urquhart and Lapinski were two — menials. Lapinski maintains that Urquhart is being well and truly led by the nose by Zamoyski, who in turn is himself simply a tool of Palmerston’s and hence, by this circuitous route, of the Russian Embassy. Although of Catholic stock, he (Lap.) finds Urquhart’s relations with the Catholic bishops in England highly suspect. As soon as ‘action’ was called for, he says, — e.g. the equipping of a Polish corps to invade Circassia, which L, too, regards as the best diversion — Urquhart allowed himself to be dissuaded by Zamoyski. By and large, Urquhart only wants to ‘talk’. He is a ‘big liar’ and he (Lap.) took it particularly amiss that he should have made him (L.) his co-liar without consulting him beforehand. Not a soul in Circassia knows Urquhart, who spent only 24 hours there and doesn’t speak the language. By way of illustrating U.’s imaginative powers, he mentioned the latter’s boast that he (Urq.) had killed Chartism in England!

There has been another purge of the National Government in Warsaw. This had been infiltrated by Czartoryski’s supporters as a result of the intrigues of Bonaparte and Palmerston. Three of these were stabbed and that, pro nunc has intimidated the rest. (The said Czartoryski party was headed by Majewski.) The power of the National Government is evident from the fact that the Grand Duke Constantine accepted a passport from it for a journey abroad. According to L., Herzen and Bakunin are thoroughly chapfallen because your Russian, upon being scratched a little, has again revealed himself to be a Tartar.

Bakunin has become a monster, a huge mass of flesh and fat, and is barely capable of walking any more. To crown it all, he is sexually perverse and jealous of the seventeen year-old Polish girl who married him in Siberia because of his martyrdom. He is presently in Sweden, where he is hatching ‘revolution’ with the Finns.

In Poland, L. said, it had been necessary de prime abord to disregard the peasantry, that ‘ultra-reactionary rabble’. But they were now ripe for the fray and would rise at the government’s call for a levée en masse.

Without Austria, he went on, the movement would have come to grief long ago and, if Austria were to close her frontiers in earnest, the rebellion would be done for in 3 weeks. But Austria was cheating the Poles. Solely out of desperation, because Francis Joseph knew that he was threatened by a Russian-Serbian-Romanian-Italian-French-Hungarian-Prussian bomb did he go to Frankfurt, and it was for the same reason that the Pope had issued his latest edict in support of Poland.

L. told me there could be no doubt whatever that it was not just Bangya who had an understanding with Russia, but also Stein, Türr, Klapka, and Kossuth.

His aim now is to raise a German legion in London, even if only 200 strong, so that he can confront the Russians in Poland with the black, red and gold flag, partly to ‘exasperate’ the Parisians, partly to see whether there is any possibility whatsoever of bringing the Germans in Germany back to their senses.

What’s lacking is money. Efforts are being made down here to exploit all the German societies, etc., to this end. You must be the best judge of whether anything can be done in this line in Manchester. The cause as such would appear to be excellent.

Give my regards to Lupus and tell him that I've sent on his letter to Eccarius.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Jenny Marx [wife]

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 41, p. 498;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1897-98 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1963.

Trier, 15 December 1863,

Wednesday

Gasthof von Venedig

Dear sweet darling Jenny,

I arrived here exactly a week ago today. Tomorrow I am going to Frankfurt to see Aunt Esther (NB: the lady, who was in Trier, was formerly in Algiers, and lives with my aunt, is also my father’s sister, also an aunt, is called Babette, familiarly ‘Bäbchen’, is rich). From Frankfurt I shall go to Bommel, as I wrote my uncle yesterday, probably to his dismay.

If I have been so long in writing to you, this was certainly not out of forgetfulness. Quite the reverse. I have made a daily pilgrimage to the old Westphalen home (in the Neustrasse), which interested me more than any Roman antiquities because it reminded me of the happiest days of lily youth arid had harboured my greatest treasure. Moreover, every day and on every side I am asked about the quondam ‘most beautiful girl in Trier’ and the ‘queen of the ball’. It’s damned pleasant for a man, when his wife lives on like this as all ‘enchanted princess’ in the imagination of a whole town.

The reason I didn’t write was that every day I hoped to have something definite to say, but up to this moment don’t yet know of anything definite. For this is how matters stand. On my arrival I naturally found everything under seal save for such furniture as was in daily use. My mother, with her usual mania for assuming ‘supreme command’, had told Conradi not to bother about anything; she had so arranged matters that Uncle would see to ‘everything’. What she gave Conradi was a notarial copy of a sort of will, which contained nothing but the following terms: 1. She left all the furniture and linen to Emilie with the exception of the gold- and silverware; 2. To her son Carl she leaves the 1, 100 talers, etc.; 3. To Sophie, father’s portrait. That’s all there is to the will. (NB: Sophie has 1,000 talers a year, for the most part given her by the Philipses. So, after all, you see, my relations are decent ‘folk’.)

Apart from this scrap of paper, my mother had lodged another (now invalid) legally attested will. This was of an earlier date and was nullified by the more recent will. It had been drawn up before Emilie’s marriage. In it she had made Emilie the beneficiary of everything of which she was entitled to dispose. In addition, she had appointed Uncle Martin and Uncle Philips her executors. She — or rather her bibulous notary Zell (deceased) — forgot to repeat this clause relating to executors in the scrap of paper which now alone is valid and which I have described above, so that if Uncle is the executor, it is only thanks to our bonne grace. (For which I, of course, have my own ‘reasons’.) As yet, I know nothing about the actual value of the estate, because all the papers are in the sealed cupboard. The seals have not yet been removed because of the time-consuming formalities that have to be gone through before the Dutch powers of attorney (for Juta and Sophie) can arrive here. So far as I am concerned this will take too long. I am therefore giving Conradi power of attorney. Besides, there’s nothing left here in Trier (Grünberg was sold long ago) except 5 casks of 1858 wine, which my mother refused to sell at the right moment, and some gold- and silverware. This will be shared out equally among the heirs. The real assets, however, are all in Uncle’s hands.

My mother died at 4 in the afternoon of 30 November, on the very day and at the very hour of her marriage. She had predicted that she would die at that time.

Today I am attending to the things for Mr Demuth and Lieschen. I shall write to you at greater length from Frankfurt or Bommel. Greetings and much love to everyone. Above all and in particular, please give the Chinese Successor [Eleanor] a thousand kisses on my behalf.

Your

Karl

(I hope to be able to send you some money in my next letter.)

1864

Engels to Marx. 3 January

Marx to Engels. 20 January

Marx to Lion Philips. 20 February

Marx to Engels. 25 February

Marx to Engels. 11 March

Marx to Lion Philips. 29 March

Marx to Lion Philips. 14 April

Marx to Engels. 19 April

Engels to Marx. 29 April

Engels to Marx. 1 May

Engels to Marx. 2 May

Engels to Marx. 2 May

Marx to Jenny Marx. 9 May

Marx to Jenny Marx. 10 May

Marx to Jenny Marx. 13 May

Marx to His Daughter, Jenny. 17 May

Engels to Hermann Engels. 24 May

Marx to Engels. 26 May

Engels to Marx. 30 May

Marx to Engels. 3 June

Engels to Marx. 3 June

Marx to Engels. 7 June

Engels to Marx. 9 June

Marx to Engels. 16 June

Marx to Lion Philips. 25 June

Marx to Engels. 1 July

Marx to Engels. 4 July

Engels to Marx. 5 July

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 12 July

Marx to Engels. 25 July

Marx to Lion Philips. 17 August

Marx to Engels. 31 August

Engels to Marx. 2 September

Marx to Engels. 2 September

Marx to Jenny Marx. 2 September

Engels to Marx. 4 September

Marx to Engels. 7 September

Marx to Sophie von Hatzfeldt. 12 September

Marx to Carl Klings. 4 October

Marx to Sophie von Hatzfeldt. 16 October

Marx to Engels. 2 November

Engels to Marx. 2 November

Engels to Hermann Engels. 2 November

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 4 November

Engels to Marx. 7 November

Engels to Marx. 9 November

Marx to Engels. 14 November

Engels to Marx. 16 November

Marx to Engels. 18 November

Engels to Marx. 22 November

Marx to Engels. 24 November

Marx to Sophie von Hatzfeldt. 24 November

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 24 November

Marx to Engels. 25 November

Marx to Sophie von Hatzfeldt. 26 November

Marx to Sophie von Hatzfeldt. 28 November.

Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 29 November

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 29 November.

Marx to Lion Philips. 29 November

Marx to Engels. 2 December

Mars to Engels. 8 December

Marx to Engels. 10 December

Marx to Engels. 22 December

Marx to Sophie von Hatzfeldt. 22 December

Marx to Carl Siebel. 22 December

Marx to Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

January 20, 1864

Apropos of Lazarus I am reminded of Renan’s The Life of Jesus. In many regards this is a mere novel, full of pantheistic-mystical phantasies. However, the book is in some ways superior to its German predecessors, and since it isn’t very long, you must read it. Naturally it is based on the German studies. Quite remarkable. Here in Holland, the German critical theological school is so much a l'ordre du jour that clerics openly proclaim their allegiance to it from the pulpit.

Marx To Lion Philips

In Aachen

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 512;

First published: in the original German, in International Review of Social History, Assen, 1956.

London, [29 March 1864]

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill, N.W.

Dear Uncle,

I presume all of you are already or still in Aachen, and am therefore sending this letter there. Had you decided to wait for the fine weather, you'd have had to stay at Bommel until now. Here, at any rate, March has been quite abominable, apart from one or two fine days — cold, wet, and changing from one moment to the next. This may be one reason why I haven’t so far rid myself of those confounded brutes, my furuncles. I curse them, but under my breath.

Little Eleanor has had a rather bad cough for the past two days, which is what is preventing her from writing to you. However. she asks me to send you many salutations and, *in regard to the Danish Question, begs me to tell you, that ‘she don’t care for such stuff’, and that ‘she considers one of the parties to the quarrel as bad as the other, and perhaps worse’*.

The difficulty about understanding Prussia’s policy is due solely to people’s delusion in crediting it with serious and far-sighted aims and projects. The Mormon Bible, for instance, is similarly most difficult to understand, precisely because there isn’t an iota of sense in it. What Prussia was primarily aiming at was to make the army popular, an aim which the Schleswig-Holstein campaigns were already having to subserve in 1848. Secondly, she was intent on closing the territory against German volunteer forces, democrats and the small states. Finally, Prussia and Austria, by exerting pressure from without, were to enable the Danish king, who is hand in glove with them to compel the Danes to make certain concessions at home and abroad. Austria could not, of course, leave Prussia to play this role on her own, and, at the same time, seize on the opportunity to effect a closer alliance with her against other peripeties.

The conference meets in London on 12th April. The very most it will do is resolve that Schleswig and Holstein be bound to Denmark in a personal union — maybe less, certainly not more. How little in earnest the whole affair is, despite powder, shot and blood-letting, will be apparent to you if only from the fact that, up till this moment, neither Prussia nor Austria has declared war on Denmark, nor Denmark on Prussia and Austria. There is no better way of throwing dust in people’s eyes than to set armies marching, horses stamping, and cannon thundering.

Despite all that, serious conflicts may be imminent once again, Bonaparte finds himself virtually compelled to set his troupiers up in business as ‘freedom’ exporters because of the great disaffection which is riot only prevalent in Paris, but provokingly rearing its head in the elections. And this time, the way has been paved for him by those dogs of Prussians.

Garibaldi’s trip to England and the great ovations he will receive from all sides here are, or at least are meant to be, merely the prelude to a new rising against Austria. As an ally of the Prussians in Holstein and Schleswig and an ally of the Russians by virtue of the state of siege in Galicia, Austria has made things very easy for her enemies. What with the present conditions in Poland, Hungary, and Italy, the popular sentiment in Germany and the total change in England’s position, a new Holy Alliance would enable even Napoleon le Petit to play the great one. At this moment, the best thing would be for peace to continue, for any kind of war would delay the outbreak of revolution in France.

May God damn me if there be anything more stupid than this political chessboard!

There were two other things I had actually meant to write to you about — Roman division and darkness in outer space. But as the light is failing, my paper is running out and it’s almost time for the last post, I must conclude for the time being by sending my kindest regards to the whole family. Ditto to Karl and his wife, not forgetting Jean.

Your affectionate nephew,

K. Marx

Marx To Jenny Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 523;

First published: in the language of the original (German), in Annali, an. 1, Milan, 1958.

[Manchester,] 9 May 1864

Dear Jenny,

Poor Lupus died today, at 10 minutes past 5 in the afternoon. I have just left his death-bed.

I went to see him on the evening of the day I arrived from London, but he was unconscious. The next morning he recognised me. I saw him in company with Engels and the two doctors and, when we were leaving, he called after us (in a weak voice): ‘You will come back, won’t you?’ It was a moment of lucidity. Soon afterwards he relapsed into a state of apathy. Up till Thursday — or really Friday — evening, things hung in the balance so that there was some doubt about the outcome. But he was unconscious from Friday evening until the moment of his passing away. So long did it take for him to die, though he was not in pain. He was unquestionably the victim of that bombastic bungler. I shall write at greater length tomorrow.

In him we have lost one of our few friends and fellow fighters.

He was a man in the best sense of the word. His funeral will be on Friday.

Your

Karl

Marx To Jenny Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 524;

First published: in the language of the original (German), in Annali, an. 1, Milan, 1958.

[Manchester,] 10 May 1864

Dear Jenny,

Poor Lupus, as it now transpires — and as Borchardt already knew — had accumulated a nest-egg by dint of hard and unremitting work.

In his will (of December 1863) he appointed Engels, Borchardt and myself his executors, and the notary has just read us his will. In it he leaves:

1. £100 to the Manchester Schiller Institute

2. £100 to Engels

3. £100 to Borchardt and

4. The entire residue, amounting to six or seven hundred pounds, to me (to you and the children should I predecease him; he took care of all eventualities), likewise his books and all other effects.

I must now go to his lodgings and sort out his papers. Luckily he was living — during the final 6 or 7 weeks, at any rate — with exceptionally good and worthy people and enjoyed the best possible nursing. The inane telegrams about nursing attendants — of which Gumpert knew nothing — were sheer ostentation and consequentiality on the part of Bombastus B.

A thousand kisses to you and the children.

Your

Karl

Marx To Jenny Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 525;

First published: in the language of the original (German), in Annali, an. 1, Milan, 1958.

[Manchester,] Friday, 13 May 1864

Dear Heart,

Today was the day of our good comrade’s funeral [Wilhelm Wolff’s]. We purposely didn’t send out any invitations, otherwise half the town would have been there. So, it was attended by Borchardt, Gumpert, Engels, Dronke, Steinthal, Marotzki (the Friends of Light Protestant pastor at whose house Lupus used to teach and who came as a personal friend), Beneke (one of the leading business men here), Schwabe (ditto), 3 other business men, a few boys and some 15-20 members of the ‘lower classes’ amongst whom Lupus was very popular. I naturally made a short funeral oration. It was an office by which I was much affected so that once or twice my voice failed me. Freiligrath wrote, begging to be excused, because of the presence in London of his principal, Fazy. Engels, and more especially Dronke, refused to countenance this excuse, and tomorrow D. will be taking him to task in London.

I shall have to stay here for at least another 3 or 4 days in order to get through with the whole business, pay the estate duty, swear oaths, etc. Naturally I shall not leave Manchester until everything is settled.

At first, it was thought that poor Lupus was suffering from incipient softening of the brain. This was wrong, however. Gumpert had previously said that he was suffering from cerebral hyperaemia (excessive accumulation of blood in the brain). This was confirmed at the post mortem, which also proved that he would still be alive today had he received correct treatment of the most common or garden kind. Borch had completely and utterly neglected the thing in the most unscrupulous way. And yet one can’t raise a shindy about it, if only because of B.’s family, who were deeply attached to Lupus (especially B.’s eldest daughter) and did a great deal for him, and whom he for his part thought highly of. All the same I refused B.’s invitation to dinner today (at which Engels, etc., were to be present) on the grounds that I could not accept hospitality on the day of Wolff’s funeral.

Dronke asks you to excuse him for not having replied to your letter. The poor little man was too much distressed by the death of his children to be able to write.

Lupus had carefully kept all our children’s letters, and it was only a few weeks ago that he again told Mrs Borchardt how much he enjoyed getting little Tussy’s notes.

The day before yesterday Marotzki (while confirming the children, amongst them one of the younger Borchardts) pronounced a public eulogy on Lupus in his church. I don’t believe anyone in Manchester can have been so universally beloved as our poor little friend (who as a child broke both legs and was in pain for years until they had healed again). Amongst the letters he left, I found evidence of the warmest sympathy on the part of all kinds of people — pupils, both girls and boys, and, in particular, their mothers.

My warmest greetings to all.

Your

Karl

Send 3 photographs of dear Eleanor immédiatement.

Marx To his Daughter, Jenny

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 526;

First published: in Russian, in Voinstvuyushchii materialist, 1925.

[Manchester,] Tuesday, 17 May 1864

Sweet child, Badman,

Probably I shall leave Manchester on Thursday (May 19) this week, and probably Engels will come with me. If arrangements be changed, I'll advertise you timely.

I visited Ernest Jones yesterday and renewed my old friendship with him. He received me very cordially. Eichhoff, who is here at this moment, and sends to all of you his compliments, wrote me this morning that the son-in-law of Dr. Rohde — Marriett — has suddenly died; the daughter being thus thrown back upon Liverpool and the parents. Eichhoff has at last settled down as a commercial employé.

Little Dronke, who to-day arrived from London, told funny stories as to the meeting he had a few days since with Freiligrath. Fazy, Freiligrath’s master, was present at the rendezvous at 2 Royal Exchange Buildings.

Strohn, an old friend of mine — who, unhappily, finds himself in a very bad state of health, and whom I was hardly able to recognise — came down from Bradford to see me; Eichhoff having told him of my sojourn at Manchester.

Gumpert has been blessed with a son.

I address these lines to you, because you will probably have to make room for Engels, your room being, I believe, the only disposable one. You don’t want to care about wine which we bring with us, but a dozen bottles of Pale Ale for our Manchester man will be welcome. I cannot finish my business here, because this week is a holiday for lawyers here. So things will not be settled before next week, and in my absence.

I have seen, from Möhmchen’s [Jenny’s, Marx’s wife] letter, with great concern, that Marie Lormier is not going on in the right direction. These doctors are a lot of quacks.

Any letter you'll address me, will still find me at Manchester, if you post it tomorrow before 5 o'clock p.m.

I hope, my dear child, to find you in full bloom. My humble compliments to your successor, and my knowing wink to mine secretary.

Your truly

Old one

I should very much like to buy here Manchester silk for the whole family, but the delay that, consequent upon the holiday, has taken place in the settlement of affairs, prevents me from indulging my fancy.

G. J. Harney, as you may tell Möhmchen, has again married, and, moreover, left Europe for Australia [in fact Harney emigrated to America in May 1863].

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 533;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 3 June 1864

Dear Frederick,

Herewith

1. A scrap of paper sent me today in a wrapper from Brussels by jackass Kertbeny;

2. Cutting from the Rheinische Zeitung containing an obituary of Lupus — written by Elsner, now one of the editors of the Breslauer Zeitung, from which the Rheinische has reprinted it;

3. Another cutting from the Rhein. Zeit., in which I would draw your attention to the article ‘Der feudale Sozialismus';

4. Letter from one Klings of Solingen to one Moll over here. To enable you to understand this letter, I should explain that Moll (and also a companion of his) is a working man from Solingen, who (along with the aforesaid companion) has evaded a 4 months’ prison sentence (the result of Lassalle’s performances last year). Klings, ditto a working man, is Baron Izzy’s authorised representative in Solingen.

The two Solingen refugees came to see me here; they informed me of their enthusiasm for Izzy and how the workers had harnessed themselves to his carriage when he was last in Solingen. They assumed as a matter of course that we two were hand-in-glove with Izzy (who, when last in Elberfeld, made a speech about Lupus). Klings, they said, was a former member of the League, as were all the working men who were leaders of Izzy’s movement in the Rhine Province, and that, now as ever, all were our resolute supporters. He also showed me Klings’ letter, and I asked whether I might have it to send to you. To this he assented. So, don’t return it. I did not, of course, enlighten the chaps as to our relations, or rather non-relations, with Izzy, but got others to drop some pretty vague hints.

Now the men are hanging about here, unemployed. 50 talers are to be sent them from Solingen, the local Workers’ Society is giving them £2; we shall be collecting a bit more here, and it would be a good thing if Manchester could contribute a pound or two. The fellows must be conveyed to America, since they are factory hands (Solingen cutlers, etc.) and are quite unsuitable for London handicrafts.

‘What’s come over me?’ I asked myself more than once while reading Izzy’s Lohnarbeit und Kapital. For in its essentials it seemed to me familiar, literally so (if embellished in the Izzian manner), yet not cribbed direct from the Manifesto, etc. Then, a couple of days ago, I happened to look at my series of articles on ‘Wage-labour and Capital’ in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1849) which were in fact merely a printed version of lectures I had delivered in 1847 at the Brussels Workers’ Society. There I found my Izzy’s immediate source and, as a special act of friendship, I shall reproduce the whole caboodle from the N. Rh. Z. as a note or appendix to my book — on false pretences, of course, and without any mention of Izzy. He won’t enjoy it in the least.

The books have arrived, ditto the wine, for which many thanks. Tussy asks me ‘To give you her love and to tell you that your cotton has somewhat improved.’

Borkheim has made about £2,000 — under the patronage of Oppenheim, the ‘Jew Süss’ of Egypt. Oppenheim, to whom, according to the account B. himself gave me, he played more or less the part of jester in the land of the pyramids, wanted to keep him there on the spot. But Europeans die there like flies, so B. arranged instead to be entrusted from time to time with a little bit of business by Abul Haim, as Oppenheim is called by the Arabs. This summer he will again visit Constantinople to that end.

The girls and madame send you their kindest regards.

My compliments to Liccy.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Apropos.

Wherever honours are being handed out, there friend Freiligrath is sure to be. Cf. Elsner’s obituary. Remember Harney’s funeral oration for Schramm. And now New York has seen the publication by a local society of a very sumptuous Record of the Revolution in which all the events, documents, etc., of the present Civil War are registered from the time it first started. Well, this record has been sent gratis to some 20 or 30 people (including various European libraries), among them the Queen Of England, J. Stuart Mill, Cobden. Bright, and — Freiligrath. He informed me of this, with the phrase that the Yankees had ‘afforded him great pleasure and done him a great honour’, and gave me the accompanying letter to read along with the printed list of the fortunate few. I should dearly like to know what the good fellow has done, might do, or intends to do for the Yankees. But loi generale: Freiligrath is to receive the honneurs on behalf of the German nation because the worthy citizen adopts So worthy and neutral an attitude, ‘and, come to that, hasn’t really learnt anything’.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 536;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 7 June 1864

Dear Frederick,

Have received your photogram, also those of Lupus. I need at least 4 more copies of the latter. Your photogram is excellent. The children say that it makes you look a ‘pleasant subject’. As the new photograms we intended to have taken have not yet materialised, little Jenny yesterday sent you the glass thing. The Dagbladet received with thanks.

The enclosed letter from Liebknecht which I got yesterday will interest you in several respects. You should place it in the archives, like the other letters of this kind I send you. I immediately replied to L., generally commending him for his attitude and only reprimanding him for the silly stipulation — our collaboration — he made in regard to the proposed publication of Lassalle’s paper — now happily abandoned. I explained that, while we consider it politic to give Lassalle a completely free rein for the time being, we cannot identify ourselves with him in any way.... In the course of this week I shall send him (Liebknecht) some money. The poor devil seems to be doing damned badly. He has given a very good account of himself and his continued sojourn in Berlin is most important to us.

Borkheim showed me a letter from the great Orges, presently in Vienna. 0. intimates that ‘softening of the brain’ has ‘got the better’ of the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung, that ‘particularism’ rather than ‘Teutonism’ holds sway over the paper, that one of the four proprietors of the Augsburg A. Z. had ‘insulted’ him (the ‘great Orges’) ‘almost personally’, that his hands had long been tied and he had finally resigned, etc. serves O. right. The fellow treated us vilely over the Vogt affair.

Borkheim has given me very exact particulars in writing, authenticated on the spot, concerning progress on the Suez Canal. I shall see that Daud Pasha is advised of the same.

As for the Danish affair, the Russians are in a very difficult position. They drove Prussia into the war by promising her the earth and, as a quid pro quo for Prussia’s help, past and present, over the Polish business, held out great prospects in regard to Schleswig-Holstein. Needless to say, handsome William, now that he looks upon himself as William The Conqueror, cannot be fobbed off in the same way as his brilliant predecessor. As for Palmerston, his hands are tied by the Queen. Bonaparte, whom the Russians and their Pam wanted to use as a scapegoat to propitiate the Germans, has reasons of his own for playing the deaf-mute. Come to that, aside from a possible secret treaty with Prussia, the Russians are now chiefly concerned with ‘German sympathies’. It is therefore possible that, under such circumstances, they will ‘sacrifice’ Schleswig-Holstein, just as, in the 3rd partition of Poland, Catherine II declared the cession of the present kingdom of Poland to the Prussians to be a great sacrifice on her part — with the mental reservation, of course, that, when the time came, the sacrifice would be retrieved. The outrageous step the Russians have now taken in the Caucasus, watched by the rest of Europe with idiotic indifference, virtually compels them — and indeed makes it easier for them to turn a blind eye to what is happening elsewhere. These 2 affairs, the suppression of the Polish insurrection and the annexation of the Caucasus, I regard as the two most important events to have taken place in Europe since 1815. Pam and Bonaparte can now say that they have not ruled in vain, and, if the Schleswig-Holstein war has served no other purpose than to hoodwink Germany and France about those two great events, it will have done its job for the Russians, whatever the outcome of the London Conference. You will see from Liebknecht’s letter that the Prussian liberal press is too cowardly even so much as to remark on the continued surrender of Polish refugees by the Prussians. Bismarck has killed it stone dead with the Schleswig-Holstein business.

The American news looks very good to me; I was particularly delighted by today’s leader in The Times, in which it is proved that Grant has been continually beaten and may perhaps be punished for his defeats — with the capture of Richmond!

Salut.

Your

Moor

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 539;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913, and in full in MEGA, Berlin 1930.

Manchester, 9 June 1864

Dear Moor,

Your telegram received; the other halves of the five banknotes follow herewith. I have cleaned up the glass photogram a bit and now find that it’s very good. I shall show it to Gumpert and his wife this evening.

Clearly it’s of the utmost importance to us that Liebknecht should be in Berlin to spring surprises on Izzy and also, at an appropriate moment, quietly to enlighten the workers at large about our attitude towards him. At all events, we must keep him there and support him to some extent. If you send him some money now, it will encourage him a great deal and, if you think any more is needed, let me know and I'll send you a five pound note for him.

Apropos obituary for Lupus. We must do a kind of biography; I think we ought to have it printed in Germany as a pamphlet, with the whole of the parliamentary debate as an appendix. Let’s not allow the thing to slide.

What do Borkheim’s reports say about progress on the Suez Canal? Have matters actually got to a stage that point to its early completion?

I'm very anxious to see how things go in Virginia. The sides still seem to be almost evenly matched and mere chance, the opportunity of scoring an isolated victory over just one of Grant’s corps, might restore Lee’s superiority. The battle before Richmond may be fought under quite different circumstances, for Butler is certainly weaker than Beauregard, otherwise he wouldn’t have let himself be forced on to the defensive and, even if one were as strong as the other, Lee, if he linked up with Beaur. at Richmond, would certainly be stronger than Grant and Butler combined. For Lee can debouch with his entire force from his fortified camp on each side of the James River, whereas Grant must detach part of his troops (to the south side of the river). But I am hoping that Grant will, nevertheless, go through with the affair; at all events, there can be no doubt that, after the first battle in the Wilderness, Lee has shown little further inclination to engage in decisive encounters in the open field, on the contrary, he has always kept his main force in fortified positions and only committed himself to brief attacks. I also like the methodical pace of Grant’s operations. On such terrain and with such an opponent it’s the only correct method.

A collection for the Solingen chaps won’t produce anything up here; however, it goes without saying that I shall send you something for them. Let me know, when you've reached that stage, how much they have got for the journey and how much it will cost.

Three days ago our old Hill finally handed in his cash box, but is, understandably enough, still quite incapable of tearing himself away from the office. He still haunts it every day, just as he has always done. It was not until today that he stayed away, at least for the morning, but after his dinner couldn’t stand it any longer.

Many regards.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Jenny Marx

In Brighton

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 556;

First published: in the language of the original (German), in Annali, Milan, 1958.

[London,] 2 September 1864

Dear Jenny,

Yesterday I got a letter from Freiligrath — copy below — from which you will see that Lassalle has been gravely wounded in a duel in Geneva. We were genuinely dismayed by the news since, whatever one may say, L. is too good to go under in this way. After receiving the letter, I went to see Freiligrath, i.e. at his private address, knowing that Ida was away. He seemed very ‘agreeably’ surprised by my visit. His daughter Louise was with him. The rest of the crew are coming back at the end of this week. Louise had been staying in Brighton for a fortnight with Franziska Ruge. Bearing in mind the Freilig.-Ruge, etc., connection, you should take care with your baroness’s cards. Ruge would be just the fellow to turn something like that to account.

Freilig. was by no means as ‘moved’ as he made out in his letter, but cracked his little jokes as always, even on the subject of L. He told me that his bank was in a state of crisis and that the Geneva affair in particular and the role played therein by Fazy were doing it a great deal of harm. Finally, here is Tussy’s last. It being plain from F.’s letter that L. had fought a duel on account of a lady he wished to marry, Laura recalled how he told every woman he could ‘only love her for 6 weeks’. So, says Tussy. ‘He is warranted for 6 weeks’.

Little Jenny is working like mad in her greenhouse. All are well and send their love.

The Old One

F.’s letter

‘I have just had a letter from Klapka in Geneva. He writes:

‘“Lassalle had been conducting a love-affair here, though with perfectly honourable intentions as he wished to marry the girl, the daughter of the Bavarian envoy, Mr von Donniges. The father objected to the marriage, the girl deceived poor Lassalle; a man to whom she had been previously engaged, the above-mentioned pseudo-prince, arrived from Berlin; then came explanations, an unpleasant exchange of letters, and a challenge ensued. Lassalle’s seconds were Colonel Rüstow and my fellow countryman, General Count Bethlen. Lassalle, as befitted a man of his reputation and political position, behaved with no less courage than dignity. He was shot in the stomach and is now laid up at the Hôtel Victoria with his life hanging in the balance. Unfortunately for him, the bullet is lodged deep in the body, so the wound might well become gangrenous. I went to see him at once upon my arrival and found him dictating his will, but otherwise calm and resigned to death. I am exceedingly sorry for him; often one does not get to know a person until his end is near at hand. Let us hope that, despite the doctors’ unfavourable prognoses, he will come safely through the crisis.”

‘So much for Klapka. I cannot but confess’ (what an affected way of putting it — as though he was on the rack!) ‘that I was deeply affected by the news and immediately, telegraphed Klapka, asking him to convey my sympathy and grief to Lassalle, if he should still be alive. Klapka will reply by telegraph and I shall immediately pass on to you anything I learn.’

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 558;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 4 September 1864

86 Mornington Street, Stockport Road

Dear Moor,

Your telegram arrived yesterday even before I had opened your letter, my attention having first been claimed by all kinds of business. You can imagine how surprised I was by the news. Whatever Lassalle may have been in other respects as a person, writer, scholar — he was, as a politician, undoubtedly one of the most significant men in Germany. For us he was a very uncertain friend now and would, in future, most certainly have been our enemy; but nevertheless, it’s very galling to see how Germany destroys all those in the extreme party who are in any way worth their salt. What jubilation there will be amongst the manufacturers and amongst the Progress swine, for L. was indeed the only man actually inside Germany of whom they were afraid.

But what an extraordinary way to lose one’s life: To go and fall seriously in love with a Bavarian envoy’s daughter — this would-be Don Juan —, ask for her hand, clash with an ex-rival, not to say Wallachian swindler, and get himself shot dead by the same. Such a thing could only happen to L., with his strange and altogether unique mixture of frivolity and sentimentality, Jewishness and chivalresquerie. How could a political man like him exchange shots with a Wallachian adventurer?

You can see with what speed the news travelled from the fact that his death had already been announced on Thursday evening in the Kölnische Zeitung, which arrived here at midday yesterday — 2 hours after your telegram.

What do you think of things in America? Lee is making masterly use of his fortified camp at Richmond, and small wonder, this being already the third campaign to revolve around it. He is pinning down Grant’s massive force with comparatively few men and is employing the better part of his own troops for offensive action in West Virginia and as a threat to Washington and Pennsylvania. A first-class object-lesson for the Prussians, who could learn from it down to the last detail how to conduct a campaign centred upon the fortified camp of Coblenz, but who are, of course, far too arrogant to learn anything from these improvised generals. Grant — discharged from the army for drunkenness 6 years ago when a lieutenant, subsequently a bibulous engineer in St. Louis — has much unity of purpose and considerable contempt for the lives of his cannon-fodder; he would also seem to be very resourceful as a small-scale strategist (i.e. day-to-day operations), but I look in vain for any signs that he has enough breadth of vision to be able to survey the campaign as a whole. It seems to me that the campaign against Richmond is on the point of collapse; the impatience with which G. is attacking now in one place now in another, but nowhere proceeding methodically with saps and mines is a bad sign. Altogether, so far as the Yankees are concerned, the engineering branch would seem to be in a poor state; for this calls, not only for theoretical knowledge, but also for a tradition of practice which cannot be readily improvised.

Whether Sherman will cope with Atlanta seems doubtful, but his chances are, I think, rather better. Skirmishing by guerrillas and cavalry to his rear are unlikely to do him much harm. The fall of Atlanta would be a hard blow for the South, Rome would fall at the same time and that’s where their gun foundries, etc., are; in addition, the railway connection between Atlanta and South Carolina would be lost.

Farragut is the same as always. The fellow knows what he’s about. But whether Mobile itself will fall is very doubtful. The town is very strongly fortified and can, so far as I know, only be taken from the landward side, since vessels of deep draught can’t approach near enough. But how stupid to split up the attacking forces on the coast, where Charleston and Mobile are being attacked simultaneously instead of one after the other, but each time with all available forces.

I don’t set much store by the peace-talk that is now so prevalent. Not even by the negotiations allegedly conducted direct by Lincoln. All this I regard as an electioneering ploy. As things now stand, I should say that Lincoln’s re-election is fairly certain.

My mother is at Ostende and will be going home again on Saturday, as a result of which news I have changed my travelling arrangements and shall be leaving for Ostende on Thursday evening. I'm afraid I shall only be able to catch the night train to London which gets in before 6 a.m. But, if I can manage it, I shall take the 4.15, thus getting to Euston station at 9.15, when I shall either go straight on to Dover (s'il y a moyen), or spend the night at the hotel at London Bridge Station. If the latter, I shall write to you beforehand, in which case we might be able to meet. Meanwhile, write and tell me what you think about America.

Best wishes to the girls.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 41, p. 560;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 7 September 1864

Dear Frederick,

During the past few days my thoughts have been damnably preoccupied with Lassalle’s misfortune. After all, whatever else he may have been, he was one of the vieille souche and the foe of our foes. And then the thing came so unexpectedly that it’s hard to believe so noisy, stirring, pushing a person is now dead as a door-nail and compelled to hold his tongue altogether. As regards the cause of his death, you are perfectly right. It is one of the many indiscretions he committed in the course of his life. With all that, I am sorry that our relationship should have been clouded in recent years, though the fault lay with him. On the other hand, I am very glad that I resisted every incitement from whatever quarter and never attacked him during his ‘year of triumph’.

Heaven knows, our ranks are being steadily depleted, and there are no reinforcements in sight. I'm convinced, by the by, that this catastrophe would never have happened had L. not consorted with military adventurers and révolutionnaires en gants jaunes in Switzerland. But he was fatalement drawn again and again to this Coblenz of European revolution.

The Bavarian envoy’s daughter, is none other than the daughter of Donniges of Berlin, a fellow university demagogue of Rutenberg and co.’s, originally one of that little weed Ranke’s jeunes gents — or rather, since they were no gentlemen, jeunes gens — whom he got to edit beastly old German imperial annals, etc. What that capering little troll Ranke regarded as wit — playful anecdotalism and the attribution of all great events to mean and petty origins — was strictly forbidden these young men from the country. They were supposed to stick to what was ‘objective’ and leave wit to their master. Our friend Donniges was regarded as something of a rebel, since he contested Ranke’s monopoly of wit, in deed if not word, and showed ad oculos in various ways that he, no less than Ranke, was a born ‘valet’ of ‘history’.

Well, I wonder what will become of the organisation built up by L. Herwegh, that platonic friend of ‘labour’ and practical friend of the ‘Muses’, isn’t the right man. In general, none of its lesser leaders are anything but rubbish. According to what Liebknecht writes, the Schulze-Delitzsch Association in Berlin can now boast no more than 40 members. How things stand over there is clear from the fact that our Wilhelm Liebkn. is a consequential political personage. Should L.’s death lead fellows like SchuIze, etc., to make insolent remarks about the deceased, we can only hope that L.’s official supporters conduct themselves in such a way as to enable us to enter the lists if necessary. I must now find out who has his correspondence. I shall at once obtain an injunction — for already the mob of memoir vultures such as Ludmilla, etc., are circling round these literary remains — prohibiting the publication of a single line of mine or yours. If necessary, this can be legally enforced in Prussia.

So far as America is concerned, I consider the present moment, entre nous, to be extremely critical. If Grant suffers a major defeat, or Sherman wins a major victory, so all right. Just now, at election time, a chronic series of small checks would be dangerous. I fully agree with you that, to date, Lincoln’s re-election is pretty well assured, still 100 to 1. But election time in a country which is the archetype of democratic humbug is full of hazards that may quite unexpectedly defy the logic of events (an expression which Magnus Urquhartus considers no less idiotic than ‘the justice of a locomotive'). An armistice would seem to be quite essential to the South, if it is to be saved from complete prostration. It was the first to raise this cry, not only in its northern organs, but actually in those of Richmond, although, now that the said cry has evoked an echo in New York, the Richmond Examiner is scornfully tossing it back to the Yankees. It is altogether symptomatic that Mr Davis should have decided to treat Negro soldiers as ‘prisoners of war’ — the last official order of his war secretary.

Lincoln has at his disposal considerable means for achieving election. (Needless to say, the peace proposals made by him are mere humbug.) The election of an opposition candidate would probably lead to a genuine revolution. Nevertheless, there is no mistaking the fact that during the next 8 weeks, in the course of which the matter will be decided pro tem, much will depend on military eventualities. This is undoubtedly the most critical moment since the beginning of the war. Once this has been shifted, Old Lincoln can blunder on to his heart’s content. The old man, by the by, cannot possibly ‘create’ generals. He'd be better able to select ministers. Yet the Confederate papers attack their ministers just as the Yankees do those in Washington. Should Lincoln succeed this time — as is highly probable — it will be on a far more radical platform and in completely changed circumstances. Then the old man will, lawyer-fashion, find that more radical methods are compatible with his conscience.

I hope to see you tomorrow! Regards to Madame Liz.

Herewith a photograph of Laura. I am hourly awaiting that of Jenny, but it has not, alas, arrived yet.

Salut Old Boy.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Carl Klings

In Solingen

[Draft]

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 3;.

First published: in Russian, in Bolshevik, No. 8, 1934.

London, 4 October 1864

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Friend,

I was glad to receive further signs of life from the workers of the Rhine Province, as conveyed in your letter of 28 September.

B. Becker or M. Hess? I know them both; both are old members of the movement. Both are honest. Neither of them is capable of leading a movement of any import. Becker is a weak man, in fact, and Hess a muddle-head. It is therefore difficult to decide between the two. I also think it scarcely signifies which of the two you elect, as there will be no difficulty in finding the right people at the decisive moment.

Enquiries have reached me, e.g. from Berlin, as to whether I would accept the presidency? I replied that it was impossible, because for the present I am still forbidden to take up residence in Prussia. [in any case, if I were to assume the leadership, the government would immediately suppress the whole thing] However, I would certainly think it a good gesture by the party, vis-à-vis both the Prussian government and the bourgeoisie, if the workers’ congress were to elect me, to which I would make a public reply explaining why I cannot accept the election. Such a step would be important for the following reason in particular: a big public meeting of workers took place here in London on 28 September, with English, German, French and Italian workers participating. The Parisian workers had, moreover, sent over a special delegation, headed by Tolain, a worker, who was put up as a candidate by the working class in Paris in the last elections for the Corps législatif.

At this meeting, a Comité was elected — an international Comité to represent the workers’ interests, which is directly linked to the workers in Paris and includes the leaders of the London workers. I was elected as representative of the German workers (and my old friend Eccarius, the tailor, along with me). [to establish a liaison between the German workers’ movement and the English one] If I were thus nominated by the German congress — although I would have to decline the election now — the Comité and with it the workers in London and Paris would regard this as a gesture on the part of the German workers. Next year, the Comité will be calling an international workers’ congress in Brussels. Unfortunately, I shall not be able to attend in person, as I am still exiled from the model state of Belgium, just as I am from France and Germany.

I shall send you some ‘Manifestoes’ at the first safe opportunity.

This letter will be brought to you by one of my friends from Barmen.

I have been sick throughout the past year (being afflicted with carbuncles and furuncles). Had it not been for that, my work on political economy, ‘Capital’, would already have come out. I hope I may now complete it finally in a couple of months and deal the bourgeoisie a theoretical blow from which it will never recover.

Farewell; you may count on my remaining ever a loyal champion of the working class.

Yours

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 6;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 2 November 1864

Dear Moor,

The crisis and its innumerable vexations must be my excuse for not writing to you earlier. Never in my whole life have I had such a glut of Jewish chicanery as now, and you can just imagine how much correspondence that entails.

Later this week, I shall go and see Borchardt to complete the business of Lupus’ legacy, which is now about to be concluded.

My travels took me as far as Sonderburg; I did not go to Copenhagen, in part because I had neither the time nor a passport, and in part because Bille, the editor of the Dagbladet, had just arrived in Lübeck when I was in Kiel, and so I had no contact in Copenhagen at all, never having seen any of the other papers anywhere.

Schleswig is a curious country — the cast coast very pretty and prosperous, the west coast also prosperous, heath and moors in the middle. All the bays extremely beautiful. The people are decidedly one of the biggest and heaviest of all the human races on Earth, especially the Frisians on the west coast. One only needs to travel across the country to be convinced that the main stock of the English comes from Schleswig. You know the Dutch Frisians, in particular those colossal Frisian women with their delicate white and fresh red complexions (which also predominate in Schleswig). They are the ancestral types of the northern English, and in particular those colossal women, who are also found here in England, all are of decidedly Frisian type. There is no doubt in my mind that the ‘Jutes’ (Anglo-Saxon eotena cyn), who migrated to England with the Angles and Saxons, were Frisians, and that the Danish migration to Jutland, as to Schleswig, dates only from the 7th or 8th century. The present Jutland dialect is proof enough of this.

These fellows are great fanatics and, for that reason, really took my fancy. You must have read something by that extraordinary ‘Dr K. J. Clement of North Friesland’. The man is typical of the whole race. These fellows are in deadly earnest about their struggle against the Danes, which is their whole purpose in life, and the Schleswig-Holstein theory is not an end but a means for them. They regard themselves as a physically and morally superior race to the Danes, and indeed they are. Bismarck was really kidding himself when he thought he could get the measure of such people by his own methods. We have held out against the Danes for fifteen years and became consolidated on our territory, and are we supposed to let these Prussian bureaucrats get us down? — that’s what these fellows were saying.

The situation regarding language and nationality is most bizarre. In Flensburg, where the Danes claim that the whole of the northern part is Danish, especially by the harbour, all the children, who were playing down by the harbour there in droves, spoke Low German. On the other hand, north of Flensburg the language of the people is Danish — i.e. the Low Danish dialect, of which I hardly understood a word. The peasants in the tavern at Sundewitt, however, spoke Danish, Low German and High German by turns, and neither there nor in Sonderburg, where I always addressed the people in Danish, was I answered in any language but German. At all events, Germanisation has encroached considerably on North Schleswig, and it would be very difficult to make it entirely Danish again, certainly more difficult than German. I would rather it was more Danish, for one day something will surely have to be given up to the Scandinavians here, for decency’s sake.

I have recently been doing some work on the philology and archaeology of the Frisians, Angles, Jutes and Scandinavians, and here, too, I have come to the conclusion that the Danes are no more than a nation of advocates, who will knowingly and brazenly lie, even in matters of scholarship, if it is in their interest. Mr Worsaae on the Danes etc. in England to wit. By way of contrast, next time you come here I will show you a book, which is in the main very good, by the lunatic Clement from North Friesland about Schleswig and the migration to England in the 6th to 8th centuries. The fellow is certainly knowledgeable, despite his eccentricity. But he does appear to be a prodigious drinker.

To my surprise, the Prussians in Schleswig created a very good impression, particularly the Westphalians, who looked like giants at the side of the Austrians, but admittedly much more ponderous. The whole army went around entirely unshaven, with their buttons undone and generally bearing themselves in a most unsoldier-like fashion, so that the natty Austrians acted almost like Prussians here. Amongst the officers of the Prussian artillery and engineers I encountered several very agreeable fellows, who told me all kinds of interesting things, but the infantry and cavalry maintained a most dignified reticence and enjoyed a thoroughly bad reputation with the population. There was a notable lack of enthusiasm for Prince Frederick Charles’ conduct of the war, and no one at all, not even those who had been decorated, had a good word to say about the distribution of rewards. The non-commissioned officers behaved well towards the older soldiers, and indeed generally when in company; on the other hand, I did see one of the Brandenburg sappers drilling recruits in Sonderburg, a real old infamous Prussian. It was, by the way, remarkable to observe the different tone that prevailed in the 3rd and 7th army corps in this respect. Your March Tribe, as Georg Jung has it, submit to being kicked around and trampled on, whereas with the Westphalians (amongst whom there is a very strong admixture of Rhinelanders from the right bank) the non-commissioned officers mostly associate with their men d'égal à-égal.

What do you think of the commercial crisis? I think it is all over, i.e. the worst is. It is a pity these things do not come to a proper head.

Can you explain: Rüm Hart, klar Kimmang?

Give my kindest regards to your wife and the girls.

Your

F. E.

Engels To Hermann Engels

In Barmen

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 9;

First published: in Deutsche Revue, 1921 and the Deutsche Revue.

Manchester, 2 November 1864

Dear Hermann,

No joy with the Niersteiner. The wine arrived here with a distinct sourness to it, it does not taste at all as it did at your house, and I shall therefore have to forgo any more orders.

The money crisis, I think, is over. Now only 3 things can have any effect:

1. possible major insolvencies owing to bad news from India. Such are, however, not expected by those most deeply involved. India had its crisis in the spring, when discount was at 32% in Bombay.

2. large deliveries of cotton arriving in Liverpool, say 100,000 bales in one week, which would mean the sudden completion of a mass of loss-making contracts and consequent insolvencies. This danger also appears to be receding. The Liverpool men know how deeply they are all implicated and are being extremely tolerant towards each other. Those who cannot pay the difference lost in full are offering part of it, and a settlement is usually reached. Moreover, the deliveries arriving are moderate, and the cotton now at sea (400,000 bales from India and China) will probably come little by little, and no one will be hit very hard.

A favourable factor in both cases is that the money market is experiencing a decided lift and confidence is returning.

3. if in America Lincoln were not elected. However, his re-election is as certain as anything ever can be in America. I have no doubt that the war will be continued until the South is totally subjugated, irrespective of who becomes President, but if McClellan should be elected, at least 6 months of uncertainty would ensue, until people learned precisely what his policy was. But after the elections in the individual states, there can be no question of that happening.

The result of all this will, in my view, be as follows: the American war will continue, certainly, until late next year, and will end with bands of Southerners resorting to brigandry, as in Naples 2 years ago, in the course of which much cotton will be burnt. We shall therefore remain dependent on the same sources for our cotton as in the past year. Supplies from these are only increasing slowly. However, since consumption has become more and more limited owing to high prices, stocks of finished goods, even in the hands of the individual consumers themselves, must now be exceedingly small, and as consumption after all absolutely requires a very large quantity of cotton goods, I believe that increased demand will fully accommodate the increased supply of raw cotton, and, consequently, not only will the downward trend cease to continue, but by next summer we ought, by and large, to see a general rise.

During the money crisis the price of cotton was not determined by the state of the cotton trade but by the state of the money market in general. I believe we've got over that now, and prices will once more be determined naturally by supply and demand, and then with the healthy state of business and the absolute deficiency in stocks, and with prices lower now, I am sure we can expect business to thrive with prices as a whole rising.

There may yet be sporadic shocks, perhaps from India, perhaps from Liverpool. We may, in consequence, again find ourselves momentarily somewhat depressed, but it cannot last, nor will it be of any import, and it would assuredly be an error to speculate la baisse [on prices falling] on such evidence. Conversely, I am equally persuaded that any attempt to force prices up again rapidly would immediately be frustrated by the customers here and by the money market, too. This was already shown yesterday. Cotton has risen 3 - 3 1/2d. above its lowest point, yarns 1d., in some instances 1 1/2d. Yesterday, the spinners were demanding a further increase of approx. 1d. and business came to an immediate halt. If we succeed in forcing prices down another 1/2 penny à 1 penny in Liverpool, the spinners will be able to accept the prices being offered; otherwise, the purchasers will presumably have to pay the extra in the end, as the demand is undeniably there.

SEWINGS were still very quiet, especially seven LEAS, for which there is not a buyer to be found.

This is my opinion. We are covered for one to two months and are expecting substantial orders in a week or two.

Please pass on my regards to Emma, the little ones, Rudolf, the Blanks and the Boellings, and, if you are writing to Engelskirchen, then to mother and everyone there, too. The chicaneries arising from the fall in prices have caused me a deal of botheration.

Your

Frederick

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 11;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 4 November 1864

Dear Frederick,

I was very pleased to hear from you again.

All well here. Myself included, since your departure from here until the day before yesterday, when yet another carbuncle appeared below my right breast. If the thing does not clear up quickly and others appear, I intend to use Gumpert’s arsenic remedy this time.

I would translate your runic rüm hart, etc. as Dutch-Frisian for open heart, clear horizon. But I fear that there may be a quite different explanation, so I give up the riddle.

You must send all the enclosed papers back to me as soon as read. I still need them. So that I do not forget any of the things I wanted to tell you, I am going to number them.

1. Lassalle and Countess Hatzfeldt.

The lengthy document is a copy of a circular that Herwegh’s wife (honi soit qui mal y pense), Emma, sent to Berlin immediately after the catastrophe, so that extracts from it could be put in the newspapers. You will see from it how cleverly Emma manages to put herself and her spineless Georg in the limelight at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of the report; how the account evades two important points, firstly Rüstow’s meeting with Donniges and daughter, when the latter must have renounced Lassalle before the scene recounted by Emma took place. Secondly: how the duel came about. Lassalle wrote the insulting letter. But then something happened which is not reported and which led directly to the duel.

The suppression of two such important and crucial points makes one sceptical of the accuracy of the account.

The Hatzfeldt letter. On her arrival in Berlin I got Liebknecht to take her a brief letter of condolence from myself. Liebknecht wrote to me that she was complaining ‘I left Lassalle in the lurch’, as if I could have done the man any greater service than by keeping my mouth shut and letting him do as he liked. (In his last speech before the Düsseldorf assizes, he played the part of Marquis Posa with handsome William as Philipp II, whom he was trying to persuade to suspend the present constitution, proclaim universal direct suffrage and ally himself with the proletariat.) You can see what is behind her letter and what she wants of me. I wrote a very amicable but diplomatically discouraging letter in reply. The latterday Redeemer! That personage and the sycophants, who surround her, are mad.

Apropos. A couple of numbers of E. Jones’ Notes to the People (1851, 1852) happened to fall into my hands again; as far as the economic articles are concerned, the main points in them had been written directly under my guidance and partly even in direct collaboration with myself. Well! What do I find in them? That at that time we conducted the same polemic — only better — against the co-operative movement, since it claimed, in its present narrow-minded form, to be the last word, as Lassalle conducted against Schulze-Delitzsch in Germany 10-12 years later.

In his last will and testament Lassalle has ‘installed’ Bernhard Becker, the unfortunate fellow, who was Juch’s editor on the Hermann for a while, as his successor in the office of President of the General Association of German Workers — in his ‘last will and testament’ (like a ruling prince). The Association’s congress meets in Düsseldorf this month, 16 and strong opposition to this ‘decree’ by last will and testament is expected.

Also enclosed, letter from a worker in Solingen, Klings, in fact the clandestine leader of the Rhineland workers (former member of the League). This letter is not to be returned but filed.

2. Workingmen’s International Association

Some time ago, London workers sent an address to workers in Paris about Poland and called upon them to act jointly in the matter.

For their part, the Parisians sent over a deputation headed by a worker named Tolain, who was the real workers’ candidate in the last elections in Paris, a thoroughly nice fellow. (His compagnons were quite nice lads, too.) A public meeting in St Martin’s Hall was called, for 28 September 1864, by Odger (shoemaker, President of the local Council of All London Trades’ Unions and, in particular, also of the Trades’ Unions Suffrage Agitation Society, is which is connected with Bright) and Cremer, a mason and secretary of the Mason’s Union. (These two had arranged the big Trade-Union meeting on North America chaired by Bright in St James’s Hall, ditto the Garibaldi manifestations.) A certain Le Lubez was sent to ask me if I would participate pour les ouvriers allemands [for the German workers], and, in particular, whether I was willing to provide a German worker to speak at the meeting, etc. I provided them with Eccarius, who put on a splendid performance, and I was also present myself in a non-speaking capacity on the platform. I knew that on this occasion ‘people who really count’ were appearing, both from London and from Paris, and I therefore decided to waive my usual standing rule to decline any such invitations.

(Le Lubez is a young Frenchman, i.e. in his thirties; however, he grew up in Jersey and London, speaks capital English and is a very good intermediary between the French and English workers.) (Music teacher and leçons of French.)

At the meeting, which was chock-full (for there is now evidently a revival of the working-classes taking place), Major Wolff (Thurn-Taxis, Garibaldi’s adjutant) represented the London Italian Workingmen’s Society. It was resolved to found a ‘Workingmen’s International Association’, whose General Council is to have its seat in London and is to ‘Intermediate’ between the workers’ Societies in Germany, Italy, France, and England. Ditto that a General Workingmen’s Congress was to be convened in Belgium in 1865. A Provisional Committee was set up at the meeting, with Odger, Cremer and many others, some of them former Chartists, former Owenites, etc., representing England, Major Wolff, Fontana, and other Italians representing Italy, Le Lubez, etc. for France, Eccarius and myself for Germany. The committee was empowered to co-opt as many people as it chose.

So far so good. I attended the first meeting of the committee. A Sub-Committee (including myself) was set up to draft a declaration des principes and provisional rules. Indisposition prevented me from attending the meeting of the Sub-Committee and the subsequent meeting of the full committee.

At these two meetings, which I did not attend, — that of the Sub-Committee and the subsequent one of the full committee — the following occurred:

Major Wolff had submitted the regulations (statutes) of the Italian Workers’ Associations (which possess a central organisation, but, as emerged later, are essentially associated Benefit Societies) to be used by the new Association. I saw the stuff later. It was evidently a concoction of Mazzini’s, and that tells you in advance in what spirit and phraseology the real question, the labour question, was dealt with. As well as how the nationalities question intruded into it.

What is more, an old Owenite, Weston — now a manufacturer himself, a very amiable and worthy man — had drawn up a programme full of extreme confusion and of indescribable breadth.

The subsequent full committee meeting instructed the Sub-Committee to remodel Weston’s programme, ditto Wolff’s regulations. Wolff himself left to attend the congress of the Italian Workingmen’s Associations in Naples and persuade them to join the central association in London.

A further meeting of the Sub-Committee, which again I did not attend, as I was informed of their rendezvous too late. At this meeting, ‘une déclaration des principes’ and a revised version of Wolff’s rules were presented by Le Lubez and accepted by the Sub-Committee for submission to the full committee. The full committee met on 18 October. Eccarius wrote to me that it was a case of periculum in mora [danger in delay], so I went along and was really shocked when I heard the worthy Le Lubez read out a fearfully cliché-ridden, badly written and totally unpolished preamble pretending to be a declaration of principles, with Mazzini showing through the whole thing from beneath a crust of the most insubstantial scraps of French socialism. What is more, the Italian rules had by and large been adopted, whose aim, apart from all their other faults, was really something quite impossible, a sort of central government of the European working classes (with Mazzini in the background, of course). I remonstrated mildly, and, after prolonged debate. Eccarius proposed that the Sub-Committee should subject the thing to further ‘editing’. However, the sentiments expressed in Lubez’ declaration were carried.

Two days later, on 20 October, Cremer representing England, Fontana (Italy) and Le Lubez met at my house. (Weston was unable to be present.) I had not previously had the papers (Wolff’s and Le Lubez) in my hands, so could not prepare anything; but I was absolutely determined that not one single line of the stuff should be allowed to stand if I could help it. To gain time, I proposed that before we ‘edited’ the preamble, we ought to ‘discuss’ the Rules. This was done. It was 1 o'clock in the morning before the first of the 40 Rules was adopted. Cremer said (and that was my whole aim): we have nothing to put before the committee that is to meet on 25 October. We must postpone it until 1 November. But the Sub-Committee can meet on 27 October and attempt to reach a definite conclusion. This was agreed and the ‘papers’ were ‘bequeathed’ to me for my perusal.

I could see it was impossible to make anything out of the stuff. In order to justify the extremely peculiar way in which I intended to edit the sentiments that had already been ‘carried’, I wrote an Address to the Working Classes (which was not in the original plan; a sort of review of the adventures of the working classes since 1845); on the pretext that all the necessary facts were contained in this ‘Address’ and that we ought not to repeat the same things three times over, I altered the whole preamble, threw out the declaration des principes and finally replaced the 40 Rules by 10. Insofar as International politics is mentioned in the ‘Address’, I refer to countries and not to nationalities, and denounce Russia, not the minores gentium [smaller nations]. The Sub-Committee adopted all my proposals. I was, however, obliged to insert two sentences about ‘duty’ and ‘right’, and ditto about ‘Truth, Morality and Justice’ in the preamble to the rules, but these are so placed that they can do no harm.

At the meeting of the General Committee my ‘Address’, etc., was adopted with great enthusiasm (unanimously). The debate on the form of publication, etc., is to take place next Tuesday. Le Lubez has a copy of the ‘Address’ for translation into French and Fontana one for translation into Italian. (For a start there is a weekly called Bee-Hive, edited by Trade Unionist Potter, a sort of Moniteur.) I am to translate the stuff into German myself.

It was very difficult to frame the thing so that our view should appear in a form that would make it acceptable to the present outlook of the workers’ movement. In a couple of weeks, the same people will be having meetings on the franchise with Bright and Cobden. It will take time before the revival of the movement allows the old boldness of language to be used. We must be fortiter in re, suaviter in modo [strong in deed, mild in manner]. You will get the stuff as soon as it is printed.

3. Bakunin sends his regards. He left today for Italy where he is living (Florence). I saw him yesterday for the first time in 16 years. I must say I liked him very much, more so than previously. With regard to the Polish movement, he said the Russian government had needed the movement to keep Russia itself quiet, but had not counted on anything like an 18-month struggle. They had thus provoked the affair in Poland. Poland had been defeated by two things, the influence of Bonaparte and, secondly, the hesitation of the Polish aristocracy in openly and unambiguously proclaiming peasant socialism from the outset. From now on — after the collapse of the Polish affair — he (Bakunin) will only involve himself in the socialist movement.

On the whole, he is one of the few people whom after 16 years I find to have moved forwards and not backwards. I also discussed Urquhart’s denunciations with him. (Apropos: the International Association will probably lead to a rupture between myself and these friends!) He inquired a great deal after yourself and Lupus. When I told him of the latter’s death, he said straightaway that the movement had suffered an irreplaceable loss.

4. Crisis. By no means burnt out on the Continent yet (esp. France). Incidentally, what the crises have lost in intensity, they have now gained in frequency.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 19;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 7 November 1864

Dear Moor,

Your Frisian solution is quite right, but for one word. In North Frisian, Kimmang means: look, or eye; these North Frisians are of a speculative disposition and have substituted the inward horizon for the outward one, rather as Wagener is now calling for an ‘inward Düppel’. It is an old sailors’ saying.

The Herwegh and Hatzfeldt papers returned enclosed. What was the further provocation you refer to which Lassalle inflicted on the Walachian and was suppressed by Emma? Lassalle’s fatal error was obviously that he did not throw the hussy [Helene von Donniges] straight on the bed in the boarding house and deal with her appropriately, it was not his fine mind but his Jew’s pizzle she was interested in. It is yet another of these affairs that only Lassalle could get involved in. That it was he, who forced the Wallachian into the duel, is doubly crazy.

Old Hatzfeldt’s idea that you should write an apotheosis of the latterday Redeemer [Lassalle] is really priceless.

The letter from the Solingen worker was not enclosed.

I cannot wait to see the Address to the Workers, it must be a real masterpiece, to judge by what you tell me of the people involved. But it is good that we are again making contact with people who do at least represent their class, which is what really matters ultimately. The effect on the Italians will be particularly good, as there is some chance that this will at last put an end to this Dio e popolo among the workers — it will come as quite a surprise to the worthy Giuseppe. Incidentally, I suspect that there will very soon be a split in this new association between those who are bourgeois in their thinking and those who are proletarian, the moment the issues become a little more specific.

Concerning Lupus’ legacy, we had a meeting with the lawyer this morning. The sum still owing to you will amount to a little over £200; as soon as I have the money, I shall send most of it to you. There are still some details we do not know exactly, so we cannot finally calculate yet. The tax authorities want a list of all the books, and the exact value, of the clock Lupus left. Please send me something itemising all the larger works and at the end just: so many pamphlets etc., everything in one clump.

I must close now, as I have to go to a Directors’ meeting of the Schiller Institute, of which I am chairman, as you know, to Mr Borchardt’s annoyance. Happily, beer has been introduced.

Kind regards to your wife and the girls.

Your

F. E.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 21;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 9 November 1864

Dear Moor,

In respect of the legacy, a further £200 enclosed in 1/2 £100 banknotes. All being well, there will be approx. £40 to come. I'll send the other two halves as soon as you telegraph receipt.

You will have received the Dagblätter with the celebrated article. Unfortunately, I could not find the 2nd section of the article, but there was not much in it.

The end appears to be approaching at Richmond? However, as long as Lee is not obliged to stay entirely on the defensive, which in particular means pulling all his troops back from the Shenandoah Valley as well, and as long as Richmond is not completely encircled, all the advances Grant makes against the defences at Richmond or Petersburg will be of little importance. It is just as it was at Sevastopol, which was not encircled either. I cannot imagine what Monsieur de Beauregard will do, probably no more than Hood before him, if as much. I have no confidence at all in this much-vaunted hero.

I am sending you yesterday’s Guardian; you must have a look at the Relief Committee’s report in it, and see what a difference there is between Mr Marie’s ateliers nationaux and those of your English gentlemen. In the case of the former, tasks of doubtful utility were performed, but most of the money that was spent passed into the hands of the workers, who had lost their jobs. Here, tasks of similarly doubtful importance (but ultimately of definite utility to the bourgeoisie) were also performed, but of the £230,000 a mere £12,100 is going to pass into the hands of the factory operatives, for whom the whole sum was intended (in other words, just that which is set down as being for unskilled labour). The Act for the Relief of the Distressed Factory Operatives is thus turned into one for the Relief of the Undistressed middle classes, who thereby save on rates.

All my regards.

Your

F. E.

i.e. Dagbladet — ‘Central Executive Relief Committee’, The Manchester Guardian, No. 5686, 8 November 1864

[Note by Marx]

Please return this letter, as I am going to file it on account of the remarks at the end.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 22;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 3, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 14 November 1864

Dear Engels,

I have had to stay mainly in bed for almost a week on account of the carbuncle. The thing is now healing up. However, as the carbuncle is just below the breast, I still have trouble leaning forward in order to write. So, to keep it as brief as possible:

1. Please send the enclosed letters addressed to me back to me (both the one from Schweitzer and the one from Liebknecht) and reply by return, as the people need our reply as soon as possible.

My view is that we should promise occasional contributions from time to time. It is important for us to have a mouthpiece in Berlin, especially for the sake of the association I was involved in founding in London, and for the sake of the book [Capital] I am planning to publish. It is also important that whatever we do, we do it together.

If you agree with me, you can send me a few lines for these chaps, or say in a few lines what statement I am to make in your name.

2. You will receive the ‘Address’ along with the ‘Provisional Rules’ etc., in a few days. The thing was not quite so difficult as you think, because we are dealing with ‘workers’ all the time. The only literary man in the Association is the Englishman, Peter Fox, a writer and agitator who is, at the same time, one of the people from The National Reformer (atheist but anti-Holyoake). I am sending you the very kind note he passed on to me concerning the ‘Address’. Mazzini is rather disgusted that his people are among the signatories, mais il faut faire bonne mine a mauvais jeu [one has to grin and bear it].

3. Your stuff from the Guardian I find most valuable. I had already pieced this abomination together from the ‘Factory Reports’, but only in a most laborious and fragmentary fashion.

4. 2 copies received from the Manchester solicitor for signing, etc. In a day or two, I shall send you the signed copies, along with the list (inventory), etc., which you will then have to record. Of course, I can no longer reel off a complete list of all the stuff we left in the flat, etc., and put a value on it.

That old humbug McCulloch has died. I hope the British Museum buys up his economical library. But no doubt Edinburgh will get in first.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

I have just come across P. Fox’s letter, which I am enclosing; please send it back as soon as you have had time to peruse it.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 25;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 18 November [1864]

Dear Fred,

1. I am sending the stuff for the Solicitor. You will have to copy the enclosed inventory and put it into whatever shape you think fit.

2. Ad vocem Solingen. I had put the letter out ready when I sent you the last but one letter-package, and it hasn’t been ‘seen any more since then’. I suspect it has ensconced itself in a notebook and will turn up one fine morning.

3. Ad vocem Schweitzer.

Is a Dr of Law, formerly of Frankfurt am Main. Published a confused pamphlet against Vogt in 1859. Subsequently, a social novel I have not read. Declared his vigorous support for Lassalle. Later, during Lassalle’s lifetime, he got to know sundry writings of ours at Liebknecht’s house while staying in Berlin and, even at that time, sent me a message through Liebknecht saying how amazed he was at finding that everything about Lassalle that he liked had been plagiarised.

I have written, like you, concerning the prospectus of contributors. Have sent Liebknecht German translation of the address of the International Committee at the same time, with a view to eventual publication in the paper. (The stuff will appear today or tomorrow and will be sent to you.)

As far as Lassalle’s apotheosis is concerned, the Hamburg Nordstern, edited by that jackass Bruhn (who at the same time continues to print Heinzen’s elucubrations, as though nothing had happened), is exclusively dedicated to this matter just as before, and the Social-Demokrat can scarcely compete with it in that respect.

Old Hatzfeldt seems to be most disappointed by the letter I sent in reply to her ‘ploy’, although it was most delicate and considerate in tone. Since that time, she has — kept silence.

Social-Demokrat is a bad title. But there is no need to throw away the best titles immediately on things that may prove to be failures.

Wilhelm Liebknecht is an unquestionably big man among the Berlin workers, as you can see from the Berlin correspondence of The Morning Star. I am only afraid he will soon be sent packing.

4. Ad vocem Péritonitis, it says in Andral: ‘Clinique Médicale’: ‘La Peritonite aiguë ... in some cases just a few hours elapse between the onset of the disease and death, whereas on other occasions peritonitis, which is always acute in its symptoms, does not cause death for from 30 to 40 days.'

And under the rubric:

‘Péritonite par violence exterieure’ he describes the case of a Parisian worker who was kicked in the stomach by a horse, in the region of his navel. Was only taken to the Charité le surlendemain, ‘exhibits all the symptoms of acute phlegmasia of the peritoneum’ (later confirmed by autopsy). Died on the 5th or 6th day, and amongst the general observations concerning this case, it says: ‘Until the very last, no disturbance of the mind or senses is observed’.

5. Take care to keep the enclosed memorandum for student Blind published in a rag in which he has puffed himself up with surpassing zeal since 1859. This ‘Beobachter est le ‘grand’ organe de la démocratie Suabaise [the grand organ of Swabian democracy]!

6. Prof. Huber has held his ‘labour convention’ with about 100 workers’ associations. He is conservative in politics but a cooperator as far as political economy is concerned. His Leipzig Convention nearly ended in a real ‘thrashing’ for Huber and his comrades, with the great majority declaring themselves to be ‘radical’ in politics.

7. I gather all kinds of things have been published by the Committee in Manchester about the cotton-famine — I mean in regard to the workingmen. Can you get hold of it for me?

8. My chest still hurts me when I write and lean forward. Hence this ‘itemised’ letter.

Regards to Gumpert.

Ditto to Madame Lizzy.

Your

K. M.

[Enclosure: List relating to W. Wolff’s Legacy]

I have put a much higher valuation on the stuff than it would fetch if sold, what with the selling-price of secondhand books in England. On the other hand, all kinds of things are missing that I have not been able to remember. There is thus compensation. If you want to add anything regarding the other goods and chattels, please do so.

Engels To Joseph Weydemeyer

In St Louis

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 37;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, 1906-1907 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.

Manchester, 24 November 1864

Dear Weydemeyer,

I was most pleased to hear from you again at long last. We have been without your address for years, otherwise you would already have received a reminder from me earlier on. My address is still Ermen & Engels and will probably continue to be so for five years or so yet, unless the storm breaks in Germany. Marx’ address is No. 1, Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill, London, but Dr Marx, London, will also suffice if need be.

Our plump little pig Blind is showing off here in Europe, wherever he can, just as he did over there, it is the only little pleasure the poor wee creature has, and he indulges it with an assiduity worthy of a better cause and greater success. However, ever since Marx belaboured him so thoroughly in Herr Vogt, he has been keeping out of our range.

As far as Lassalle’s flirtations with Bismarck are concerned, they are beyond dispute. The passages quoted by Blind were, of course, actually uttered by Lassalle in the speech he made in Düsseldorf in his defence and published by him, so there is nothing to be done there. For all his distinctive qualities, Lassalle had that Jewish respect for momentary success, which made it impossible for him to deny Louis Bonaparte his respect, or to refrain from professing such overtly Bonapartist principles as he did. Those, who were more closely acquainted with him, knew that these things were not occasional happenings. You can readily imagine that this was as disagreeable to us as it was grist to the mill of piglet Blind, and that alone would have been sufficient ground for us to have had nothing to do with all Lassalle’s agitation during his lifetime, although there were other reasons, too. Nevertheless, that is all over and done with now, and we shall have to see whether his agitation was just a flash in the pan, or whether there was really something to it.

You will have heard that our poor Lupus died here on 9 May of this year. His was a loss for the party of an altogether different order from Lassalle’s. We shall never again find such a steadfast fellow, who knew how to talk to the people and was always there when things were at their most difficult. For 4 long weeks he had the most terrible headaches, his German doctor neglected him, and at length a vessel burst in his brain from the colossal pressure of the blood, he gradually lost consciousness and died 10 days later.

Nothing of much interest is happening here in Europe. The suppression of the Polish uprising [in the autumn of 1863] was the last decisive event; for his assistance in this, the Tsar gave Bismarck permission to take Schleswig-Holstein from the Danes. It will be a long time before Poland is capable of rising again, even with help from outside, and yet Poland is quite indispensable to us. The despicable behaviour of the liberal German philistines is to blame; if those curs in the Prussian Chamber had had more insight and courage, all might be well — Austria was ready to march in support of the Poles at any time, and it was only Prussia’s attitude that prevented it, and the treachery of Mr Bonaparte, who was, of course, only prepared to keep his promises to the Poles if he could do so safely, i.e. if he was covered by Prussia and Austria.

That war of yours over there is really one of the most stupendous things that one can experience. Despite the numerous blunders made by the Northern armies (enough by the South, too), the tide of conquest is rolling slowly but surely onward, and, in the course of 1865, at all events the moment will undoubtedly come when the organised resistance of the South will fold up like a pocket-knife, and the warfare turn into banditry, as in the Carlist war in Spain [1833] and more recently in Naples. A people’s war of this kind, on both sides, has not taken place since great states have been in existence, and it will, at all events, point the direction for the future of the whole of America for hundreds of years to come. Once slavery, the greatest shackle on the political and social development of the United States, has been broken, the country is bound to receive an impetus from which it will acquire quite a differed position in world history within the shortest possible time, and a use will then soon be found for the army and navy with which the war is providing it.

It was incidentally quite understandable that the North had some difficulty in providing itself with an army and generals. From the outset, the South’s oligarchy had brought the country’s few military forces under its control, it supplied the officers and furthermore raided the arsenals. The North found itself with no resources other than the militia, while the South had been training for years. From the outset, the South had a population accustomed to the saddle for use as light cavalry, on a scale the North could not match. The North adopted the habit, introduced from the South, of filling positions with party supporters; the South, in the midst of a revolution and with a military dictatorship, could brush that aside. Hence, all the blunders. I do not deny that Lee is a better general than any the North has, and that his latest operations around the fortified camp at Richmond are masterpieces from which our glorious Prince Frederick Charles of Prussia could learn much. But, ultimately, the determined attacks of Grant and Sherman made all strategy superfluous. It is clear that Grant is sacrificing a colossal number of men, but what else could he do? I have absolutely no idea of the level of discipline in your army, its cohesion under fire, its capacity and willingness to endure hardship, and in particular the nature of its morale, i.e. what can be demanded of it without its becoming demoralised. With such scanty reports and no proper maps, one needs to know all this before permitting oneself any judgment on this side of the water. What does seem certain to me, however, is that the army now commanded by Sherman is the best you have, as superior to Hood’s as Lee’s is to Grant’s.

Your field-manual and elementary tactics are, as I hear, positively French — the basic formation thus presumably being the column with intervals between platoons. What kind of field artillery do you now have? If you can enlighten me on these points, I shall be greatly obliged. What has become of the great Anneke? Since the battle at Pittsburgh Landing was all but lost because he was not supplied with everything which he should have had, according to the Prussian field-manual, he has quite vanished from my view. Of the Germans who have joined in the war, Willich appears to have given the best account of himself, whereas Sigel has unmistakably demonstrated his mediocrity. And Schurz, the valiant Schurz, farting away amidst the shower of bullets and shells, what foes is he demolishing now?

Apropos. The Prussian cannons that smashed Duppel and Sonderburg from 6,500 paces were our old long bronze 24-pounders, rifled and rebuilt as breech-loaders, 54-pound shells with 4-pound charge! I've seen them with my own eyes.

Kindest regards to your wife

Your

F. Engels

Marx To Joseph Weydemeyer

In St Louis

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 43;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, 1906-1907 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.

London, 29 November 1864

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill, N. W.

Dear Weiwi,

The whole household and myself were extraordinarily pleased to hear from you and your family again. My wife asserts that she wrote to yours last and is thus expecting to have the first letter back from her.

I am, at the same time, sending you by mail 4 copies of a printed ‘Address’, of which I am the author. The newly established International Workers’ Committee, in whose name it has been put out, is not without significance. Its English members consist chiefly of the heads of the Trade-Unions here in other words, the real worker-kings of London, the same people who organised that gigantic reception for Garibaldi and who, by that monster meeting in St James’s Hall (under Bright’s chairmanship), prevented Palmerston declaring war on the United States, which he was on the point of doing. On the French side, the members are unimportant figures, but they are the direct spokesmen of the leading ‘workers’ in Paris. There is likewise a link with the Italian associations, which recently held their congress in Naples. Although I have been systematically refusing to participate in any way whatsoever in all the ‘organisations’, etc. for years now, I accepted this time because it concerns a matter by means of which it is possible to have a significant influence.

For the past 14 months I have been suffering almost constantly from carbuncles, which often threatened my life. More or less cured now.

Engels will have written to you of the loss of our friend Lupus.

Curiously enough, I received a letter from Berlin last Friday, in which the old Hatzfeldt woman urged me to defend Lassalle against Blind’s ‘Republican Protest’. The next day I received your letter to Engels, containing the much amended American edition of the same garbage. By a third coincidence, I was, at the same time, sent 2 numbers of the Swabian Beobachter (from Stuttgart) which I never see otherwise. In the first number the editor was poking fun at a letter from Mr Blind to the American nation which had been translated from the English by ‘Mr Blind’ and sent to him and to other South German editors; in it, ‘almost at official request’, as he puts it, he gives his inexpert opinion on Lincoln’s election, etc. In the same number, the editor said that one can see from my book attacking Vogt what Blind’s vanity leads to, etc. Whereupon, Blind sent the enclosed reply through his man-of-straw, Dr Bronner of Bradford, 1. setting out just how powerful his influence in America was, and 2. having the impudence to say that the Vogt affair was ‘a put-up-job’. This then enabled me (using your letter and copying the passages relating to Blind) to put out the statement 2 as desired by the old Hatzfeldt woman against that clown, without identifying myself with those aspects of Lassalle’s agitation which are not to my liking. Write soon.

Your

K. Marx

The source of Blind’s boastful epistle which I am copying out for you is No. 268 of the Beobachter (Stuttgart), 17 Nov., 1864.

It is absolutely essential that you write me a few lines, suitable for publication, about Mr Blind’s American influence.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 45;.

First published: in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902.

London, 29 November 1864

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill, N. W.

Dear Friend,

Today you will receive from me by post 6 copies of the ‘Address of the Workingmen’s International Association’, of which I am the author. Please be so good as to convey a copy with my kindest regards to Madame Markheim (Fulda). Give one to Mr Miquel as well.

The Association — or rather its Committee — is important because the leaders of the London trade unions belong to it, the same people who organised that enormous reception for Garibaldi and thwarted Palmerston’s plan for a war with the United States by means of the monster meeting in St James’s Hall. The leaders of the Parisian workers are also in contact with it.

In the last few years I have been much afflicted with illness (e.g., in the last 14 months by a recurrence of carbuncles). My private circumstances have improved in consequence of a legacy from the death of my mother.

I think that my book on capital (60 sheets) will at last be ready for the press next year.

You will doubtless understand the reasons for not allowing myself to become involved in Lassalle’s movement in his lifetime, without my spelling them out in detail. However, that cannot deter me — the more so since persons close to him are urging me to do so — from taking up his defence, now that he is dead, against such despicable curs as the clamorous K. Blind.

I am afraid that in mid-spring or early summer of next year there will be war between Italy, Austria and France. This will be very damaging for the movement in France and England, which is growing significantly.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Yours very respectfully

K. Marx

Marx To Lion Philips

In Zalt-Bommel

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 46;

First published: in International Review of Social History, Assen, 1956.

London, 29 November 1864

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Uncle,

I hope that you are in the best of health despite the abominable weather. All is well here. Except that, to the great alarm of the whole family, I had a most malignant carbuncle below the left breast at the beginning of this month, which kept me in great pain for 2-3 weeks. Other than that, everything has been going well.

The trade crisis, which I predicted to you long before its actual arrival has by this time long since lost its edge, although its consequences in the manufacturing districts proper are still very considerable. On the other hand, I believe a political crisis is to be expected in the spring or early summer. Bonaparte has again reached the point where he will have to make war again if he is to raise a loan. The Venetian business is being kept open (I am acquainted with some of the agents there) so that it can provide a point of contact if need be. It is possible that Bonaparte will again find a way out, and then he will keep the peace (for he is no real Napoleon), but that is rather improbable.

The enclosed printed Address is written by myself. The matter hangs together like this: in September the Parisian workers sent a delegation to the London workers to demonstrate support for Poland. On that occasion, an international Workers’ Committee was formed. The matter is not without importance because 1. in London the same people are at the head who organised the gigantic reception for Garibaldi and, by their monster meeting with Bright in St James’s Hall, prevented war with the United States. In a word, these are the real workers’ leaders in London, with one or two exceptions all workers themselves. 2. On the Parisian side, Mr Tolain (ouvrier himself, as well) et Co. are at the head, i.e., the same people who were prevented by a mere intrigue on the part of Garnier-Pagès, Carnot, etc., from entering the Corps législatif at the last elections in Paris as representatives of the workers there, and 3. on the Italian side, it has been joined by the representatives of the 4-500 Italian workers’ clubs which held their general congress in Naples some weeks ago an event which even The Times considered important enough to merit a few dozen lines in the paper.

Courtesy toward the French and the Italians, who always require florid language, has obliged me to include a few superfluous turns of phrase in the preamble to the ‘Rules’, though not in the ‘Address’.

A few day’s ago I received a letter from America from my friend Weydemeyer, Colonel in the regiment stationed at St Louis (Missouri). Amongst other things, he writes — and these are his exact words:

‘We are regrettably being detained here at St Louis, since, in view of the many “conservative” elements here, a military force is a continuing necessity to prevent a break-out and the possible release of the numerous Southern prisoners. ... The whole campaign in Virginia is a blunder, which has cost us innumerable men. But for all that, the South will not be able to hold out much longer: it has sent its last man into battle and has no fresh army to call upon. The present invasion of Missouri, like the incursions into Tennessee, has only the character of a raid, a foray: there can be no thought of a lasting re-occupation of districts that have been lost.’

When you reflect, my dear Uncle, how at the time of Lincoln’s election 3½ years ago it was only a matter of making no further concessions to the slave-owners, whereas now the avowed aim, which has in part already been realised, is the abolition of slavery, one has to admit that never has such a gigantic revolution occurred with such rapidity. It will have a highly beneficial influence on the whole world.

At a public meeting this week the fellow-member of our race Benjamin Disraeli has again made a dreadful laughing-stock of himself by assuming the mantle of guardian angel of the High Church and Church rates, repudiating criticism in religious affairs. He furnishes the best evidence of how a great talent unaccompanied by conviction creates rogues, albeit gold-braided and ‘Right Honorable’ ones.

Those jackasses in Germany have again made a proper laughing-stock of themselves over the Muller affair, with ex-parson Kinkel at their head.

With kindest regards from the whole family to you and from me to Jettchen, Dr, Fritz et Co.

Ever your faithful nephew

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 49;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 2 December 1864

Dear Fred,

Thanks for The Guardian.

I did send on a few copies of the ‘Address’ to E. Jones afterwards, with a letter to him saying that he would probably receive one from you first. He writes today that he has neither seen nor heard anything from you. His address is 55, not 52, Cross Street. He says in his letter that, when the Assizes are over, he will form a branch association in Manchester amongst his acquaintances.

Could you by any chance dig up the address of the musician Petzler (maybe from the Manchester directory, or the Schiller Association )? He has a lot of contacts among the Manchester workers, and without any intervention on your part I could put him in touch with E. Jones from here. You would only need to send me Petzler’s address.

The worst thing about agitation of this kind is that one gets very bothered as soon as one becomes involved in it. E.g. Address to Lincoln now on the agenda again, and again I had to compose the thing (which is far more difficult than writing a proper work) — so that the phraseology to which that kind of writing is limited, is at least distinguishable from vulgar-democratic phraseology. Fortunately, Mr Fox is doing the Polish business which is coming up in connection with 29 November, the anniversary of the Polish revolution of 1830.

In the Committee, since the address for Lincoln is to be handed over to Adams, some of the English wanted to have the deputation introduced by a member of Parliament — as is customary. This desire was suppressed by the majority of the English and the unanimity of the continentals, and it was declared instead that such old English customs ought to be abolished. On the other hand: M. Le Lubez, as a real crapaud, wanted the address to be directed not to Lincoln but to the American people. I made him look suitably foolish and made it clear to the English that French democratic etiquette is not worth a farthing more than monarchical etiquette.

Apropos. Naturally it is impossible to have a movement here without its own press-organ. The Bee-Hive (weekly, organ of the trades-unions) was therefore declared to be the organ of the Association. By a stroke of ill-luck, to which the workers are particularly susceptible, a scoundrel called George Potter (in the building strikes he acted as mouthpiece in The Times, but with articles written not by himself but by others) has installed himself as Manager with a clique of shareholders, who have so far formed the majority. The Committee, whose English members are mostly Bee-Hive shareholders (a share costs only 5s., and no one can have more than 5 votes, even if he holds 5,000 shares; thus 1 vote per share up to a maximum of 5), has therefore decided that we should set up a share-fund here which will enable us to create shareholders and to swamp the old majority. I would appreciate it if you would let us have a contribution for this purpose as well. The whole operation must, of course, be confined to the close friends of the members of the Committee, as otherwise counter-measures would be promptly taken by the other side (i.e. before the general meeting of shareholders which is not far off now).

Besides the Hermann, there was also another little paper here, the Londoner Anzeiger, which belongs to the worthy Jewish bookseller Bender. It is trying to build itself up as a competitor to the Hermann, as the editorship has been taken over by a certain L. Otto von Breidtschwerdt, although he writes under the name of L. Otto. I shall hardly become directly involved in the thing at all, as I had my fill with the Volk but it is good for reprinting statements in London as soon as they appear in the German newspapers, e.g. like the one against Blind.

This Otto first got to know Eccarius, at whose suggestion he became a German member of the International Committee. He is a Swabian, Stuttgarter born and bred. Quite a young fellow, about 27 or 28. Very much like my wife’s elder brother. Began as a cadet in the Austrian army, where he learnt all kinds of languages and was stationed all over the place. Subsequently studied in Tübingen. As a person, he is a very pleasant, witty fellow and well-mannered. His head is still stuffed full of petty Swabianisms and Germanic nonsense. For all that, very good knowledge and ability. But he seems to me to have more inclination than a gift for writing; dull, doctrinaire. He is useful as a go-between with South Germany and especially the Land of the Swabians. Also writes in the Augsburger from time to time, which is, incidentally, entirely what you would expect from the Vogt standpoint.

I wrote to Mr Klings that it was difficult, but also quite unnecessary, to decide between Moses and Bernhard. Both were honest and both incompetent. I said that, at the present moment, it was neither here nor there who has the title of President. When the time became decisive, there would be no difficulty in finding the right people.

I am very much afraid I can feel another carbuncle starting on my right hip. Allen knows nothing about it as I have been treating myself for some time. If I went to him now about the arsenic business, which after all you cannot start without a doctor and to which he might perhaps not even agree, he would give me the most dreadful dressing down for having been carbuncling for so long behind his back!!

Yours

K. M.

In his reply to Mayer the Swabian (via his man-of-straw Bronner), Blind states that Lincoln and Frémont were fighting for his vote because it would decide the election. And in an American newspaper, The Radical Democrat that he was responsible for the Polish revolution.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 53;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 3, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 10 December 1864

Dear Fred,

My compliments to Mrs Lizzy.

You had already given me your private address some time ago, but not the ‘firm’ to which to write. I am very glad to have it now, as I sometimes find it desirable to drop you a few lines on Saturdays.

The £5 for Wilhelm [Liebknecht] is already on its way to Berlin today.

You have not sent me back the Becker. However cunningly, the Red fancies he has extricated himself from the matter, his letter is a document which one fine morning he may find to turn up for unforeseen purposes. The old Hatzfeldt woman will, incidentally, ensure that the statement gets to the right person.

What about Sherman’s expedition?

Apropos. Your poor-house Purdy is said to have published an absolutely disgraceful document during the cotton-famine, recommending reducing support to a minimum, on the grounds that the health of the cotton-operatives was said to have improved; as a result of this, famine diseases are said to have broken out in the East of Lancashire. (That was in the early days of the cotton-famine.) Do you know anything about it? And, in general, can you obtain for me the official papers in Manchester (of the Committee, etc.) relating to the cotton-famine?

Lothario Bucher, whom Lassalle appointed executor to his will and to whom he left £150 a year pension, has, as you probably already know, gone over to Bismarck’s camp. Baron Izzy [Lassalle] would perhaps have done the same himself as ‘Minister of Labour’, Marquis Posa to Philipp II of the Uckermark, but not in the small way of Lothario, with whom the Hatzfeldt woman has fallen out and who can now shake hands with Edgar Bauer and the Prussian consul in Milan, Mr R. Schramm. The Prussians were looking for a post for Mr Schramm ‘where yer don’t need no exam’. I also fancy Mr Rodbertus’ intentions are ‘none too ‘onourable’ because he is claiming to ‘have entirely divorced the social question from politics’ [quoting Liebknecht’s letter of 2 Dec 1864], a sure sign that he has got the ministerial itch. What a contemptible gang, all that riff-raff from Berlin, Brandenburg and Pomerania!

I fancy there is a secret understanding between Prussia, Russia and France for the war against Austria in next Spring. Venetia will, of course, provide the war-cry. The Austrians are behaving with abysmal cowardice and stupidity. This ensues from Francis Joseph himself interfering personally in Austrian politics. Buol-Schauenstein, etc., all the sensible hommes d'état, are obliged to keep their traps shut, and the Russian agents, such notorious fellows as the present Austrian Foreign Minister, are giving all the orders. For all that, the Austrians’ behaviour would be inexplicable, unless these fellows either have faith in Prussia’s perfidious promises or are determined to accept the long-standing promise of compensation in Turkey.

What do you say to Collet’s profound discoveries — based on Urquhart — about Nebuchadnezzar and the Russians’ Assyrian ancestry, and the further discovery, which is cited as ‘Urquhart’s’, that in Italy the Pope is the only real thing?

Today’s The Miner and Workman’s Advocate — the Moniteur of the mineworkers in England and Wales — is printing the whole of my ‘Address’. The London ‘bricklayers’ (over 3,000 men) have announced they are joining the International Association, and they are fellows who have never before joined a movement.

There was a sub-committee meeting last Tuesday, at which Mr Peter Fox (his real name is P. Fox Andre) presented his address on Poland to us. (This kind of thing is always dealt with beforehand in the subcommittee before going to the general committee.) The piece is not badly written and Fox has endeavoured to apply the concept of ‘class’, at least a semblance of it, although it is normally alien to him. His real forte is foreign policy, and it is only as a propagandist of atheism that he has had dealings with the working classes as such.

But easy though it is to get the English workers to accept a rational approach, one has to be all the more careful the moment men of letters, members of the bourgeoisie or semi-literary people become involved in the movement. Fox, like his friend Beesly (Professor of Political Economy at the University of London, he took the chair at the founding meeting in St Martin’s Hall) and other ‘democrats’, have a fanatical ‘love’ of France, which, as far as foreign policy is concerned, they extend not only to Napoleon I but even to Boustrapa, as opposed to what they call, not without justice, the English aristocratic tradition, and as a continuation of what they call the English democratic tradition of 1791/92. Well! Not content in his address (which, incidentally, is not to appear as an address from the whole Association but as an address from the English section concerning the Polish question, endorsed by the whole Committee) with telling the Poles, which is true, that the French people has been traditionally more sympathetic towards them than the English, Mr Fox winds up his address mainly by consoling the Poles with the passionate friendship that the English working classes have conceived for the French democrats. I opposed this and unfolded a historically irrefutable tableau of the constant French betrayal of Poland from Louis XV to Bonaparte III. At the same time, I pointed out how thoroughly inappropriate it was that the Anglo-French Alliance should appear as the ‘core’ of the International Association, albeit in a democratic version. To cut matters short, Fox’s address was accepted by the subcommittee on condition that he altered the ‘tail’ in accordance with my suggestions. Jung, the Swiss Secretary (from French Switzerland), declared that, as a minority on the General Council, he would move that the address be rejected as altogether ‘bourgeois’.

Our Major Wolff has been locked up by the Piedmontese for the moment in the fortress of Alexandria.

Louis Blanc has written to the General Secretary Cremer that he approves the ‘Address’ and regrets not having been able to attend the St Martin’s Hall meeting, etc. Altogether, the sole purpose of his letter is to get him co-opted an honorary member. Foreseeing that attempts of this kind would be made, I had, however, fortunately got the by-law accepted that no one (except workers’ societies) could be invited to join and that nobody at all could be an honorary member.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Gumpert will get the photograph as soon as he sends me the long-promised one of his wife.

Marx To Carl Siebel

In Elberfeld

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 58;

First published: in Deutsche Zeitung, 16 October 1920.

London, 22 December 1864

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Siebel,

A Happy New Year!

You will perhaps have seen that Engels and I have agreed to become contributors to the Berlin Social-Demokrat. Nevertheless — this entre nous — either that paper will have to dissociate itself from the apotheosis of Lassalle, or we shall dissociate ourselves from it. But the poor devils have a lot to contend with.

You will have received the ‘Addresses’ sent to you and have no doubt guessed I am the author. For the sake of the movement here, it is important for us that German workers’ associations should join the Central Committee here. (As has happened in many cases with the Italians and the French.) Now Liebknecht has written to me that the Berlin printers’ association will be joining, but that it is very doubtful whether the ‘General Association of German Workers’ will join, on account of the intrigues of Mr Bernhard Becker, whose importance was ‘invented’ by Lassalle. (Entre nous this is perhaps Lassalle’s only invention.)

Today I wrote the old Hatzfeldt woman a kind of threatening letter, sub rosa, of course.

Now it would be highly desirable for you to pay a brief visit to Solingen to explain on my behalf to the cutler, Klings, how exceedingly important it is that the Association of German Workers should decide to join the International Association at its congress in Düsseldorf on 27 December of this year. You might surreptitiously hint that, for such nonentities as B. Becker, etc., what matters is, naturally, not the cause but the ‘infiniment petit’, i.e., their own persons. But such a hint must be dropped diplomatically, without implicating rite.

You understand that it is necessary that the General Association of German Workers should join only for a start, on account of our opponents here. At a later date, the whole organisation of this association will have to be broken up, as its basis is fundamentally wrong.

If you do not now at last write me a few lines, I shall presume that you have become totally disloyal to me, and will proclaim you excommunicated.

Your

K. M.

1865

Marx to Hermann Jung. c. 8 January

Engels to Rudolf Engels. 10 January

Marx to His Daughter Jenny. 11 January

Marx to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer. 16 January

Marx to Engels. 25 January

Engels to Marx. 27 January

Marx to Engels. 30 January

Marx to Engels. 1 February

Marx to Engels. 3 February

Engels to Marx. 5 February

Marx to Engels. 6 February

Engels to Marx. 7 February

Engels to Marx. 9 February

Marx to Engels. 10 February

Marx to Engels. 11 February

Engels to Marx. 13 February

Marx to Engels. 13 February

Marx to Victor Le Lubez. 15 February

Marx to Engels. 16 February

Marx to Engels. 18 February

Engels to Marx. 20 February

Engels to Marx. 22 February

Marx to Engels. Before 22 Feb.

Engels to Otto Meissner. 22 February

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 23 February

Marx and Engels to the Editorial Board of the Sozial-Demokrat, 23 February 1865

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 23 February

Engels to Marx. 24 February

Marx to Engels. 25 February

Engels to Carl Siebel. 27 February

Engels to Marx. 27 February

Engels to Marx. 3 March

Marx to Engels. 4 March

Engels to Marx. 6 March

Marx to Engels. 7 March

Marx to Engels. 10 March

Engels to Joseph Weydemeyer. 10 March

Engels to Marx. 11 March

Marx to Engels. 13 March

Marx to Hermann Jung. 13 March

Engels to Marx. 14 March

Marx to Engels. 18 March

Engels to Friedrich Albert Lange. 29 March

Marx to Sophie von Hatzfeldt. 10 April

Marx to Engels. 11 April

Engels to Marx. 12 April

Marx to Hermann Jung. 13 April

Marx to Leon Fontaine. 15 April

Engels to Marx. 16 April

Marx to Engels. 22 April

Marx to Hermann Jung. 25 April

Marx to Engels. 1 May

Engels to Marx. 3 May

Marx to Engels. 9 May

Engels to Marx. 12 May

Marx to Engels. 13 May

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 20 May

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. c. 25 May

Marx to Engels. 24 June

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 24 June

Marx to Eleanor Marx. 3 July

Engels to Marx. 15 July

Engels to Marx. 25 July

Marx to Leon Fontaine. 25 July

Marx to Engels. 31 July

Marx to Engels. 5 August

Engels to Marx. 7 August

Marx to Engels. 9 August

Engels to Marx. 16 August

Marx to Engels. 19 August

Engels to Marx. 21 August

Marx to Engels. 22 August

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 11 September

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 20 September

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 21 September

Marx to Hermann Jung. 30 September

Engels to Marx. 4 October

Marx to Engels. 19 October

Marx to Engels. 8 November

Marx to Salomon Fuld. 9 November

Engels to Marx. 13 November

Marx to Engels. 14 November

Marx to Hermann Jung. 15 November

Engels to Marx. 17 November

Marx to Engels. 20 November

Marx to Hermann Jung. 20 November

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 21 November

Marx to Cesar de Paepe. c. 25 Nov.

Engels to Marx. 1 November

Marx to Engels. 2 December

Marx to Engels. 26 December

Marx to Engels. End December

Engels To Rudolf Engels

In Barmen

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 61;

First published: in Deutsche Revue, 1921.

[Manchester,] 10 January 1865

Dear Rudolf,

My view of the American war is this: the South is gradually becoming exhausted and cannot replace its armies. The North has not yet mobilised the half of its resources. The South is limited to defence, so much so in fact that counter-attacks such as, e.g., Longstreet undertook in the Shenandoah Valley, are now a thing of the past. Hood attempted yet another one, but, in so doing, revealed his own impotence and decided the whole campaign at one stroke. The North is superior to its Southern opponents at all points and, furthermore, has Sherman’s 40,000 men at its disposal who can go wheresoever they please, everywhere destroying the South’s forces, communications, resources and supplies deep in the South’s own territory. Charleston is certain to fall in 4-6 weeks at the latest, once Sherman has encircled it on land. The South has but one army left, that at Richmond. That will assuredly be quite decisively beaten in the present year, and with that the defence of the South by armies will be at an end. A guerrilla war, brigandry, etc., may then ensue and will probably do so into next year.

If the South arms its Negroes, that will be so much the better for the North. However, they will take good care not to. At the last moment, if at all. The Negroes are not so stupid as to allow themselves to be massacred for the whip that flays their backs.

There will certainly still be moments when things look better for the South than they do now, but we have seen that happen too often before, and I shall not be deceived by that. Such moments are merely a respite.

I do not believe we shall get cotton from America; but I do believe we shall see a temporary fall. Cotton is at present so subject to speculation that prices are affected by every vicissitude of public opinion. There are, moreover, 500,000 bales in Liverpool, and the people here do have a tendency to fly to extremes immediately and shout: the South is done for, is bound to surrender in 14 days, etc — a rise is thereby inconceivable. We shall be at the mercy of whatever news we receive, though always with the proviso that we know the stock in Liverpool to be double what it was last year. I also believe we shall see the year 1865 close below present prices, as we must expect more cotton from all parts.

Your

Friedrich

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 65;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 25 January 1865

Dear Frederick,

Letters enclosed

1. from Weydemeyer,

2. from Schily,

3. from Liebknecht. I must have all 3 back.

4. from Schweitzer and 5. a scrawl about Vogt; which I would also like back.

By way of explanation for letters 2, 3 and 4, the following: I do not know whether you get the Social-Demokrat (or have taken out a subscription to it). (If neither should be the case, Bender can always send you one from here, as he has ordered 6 copies on the off-chance.)

There was a contribution in the Social-Demokrat from that jackass Moses Hess, in which he related how we had approached L'Association (paper of the Paris associations) asking them to print a translation of our address (on the contrary, Massol had made Schily an offer to that effect) and join our Association; they are said to have refused, however, because we had originally approached Tolain and others who were Plon-Plonists. Tolain himself had admitted as much, etc.

I discovered this scrawl on the day after my return from Manchester. Therefore wrote furious letters to Paris and Berlin. From Schily’s and Schweitzer’s letters it emerges that the whole thing can be blamed on Hess’ asininity (mixed with a certain amount of malice, perhaps) and on Liebknecht’s asininity toute pure.

The affair created a great furore in the Comité here yesterday. Le Lubez, entirely on Tolain’s side, declares the whole thing to be slanderous, since fellows like Horn (Einhorn, rabbi) and that gas-bag Jules Simon (of La Liberté) are on the Comité of L'Association. However, at my suggestion, it was resolved not to send the 500 cards of membership to Paris until Schily had reported further from Paris.

The Association is doing famously here. At its soirée, which I did not attend, about 1,200 people (they would have had 3X as many if the hall had been big enough) gathered, which brought approximately £15 into our exceedingly depleted exchequer.

Letter has come from Geneva about joining, and from different parts of England.

There will be a meeting for the Poles in the course of February (especially to collect money for the new émigrés, which also explains Lord Townshend as Chairman), organised by the (English) Polish League, the Polish society here and our Association.

What do you say to Lassalle’s ‘bequest’, as described by Liebknecht? Is it not exactly like his own Sickingen, who wants to compel Charles V to ‘assume the leadership of the movement’?

Yesterday, I sent Article on Proudhon to Schweitzer, in response to his urgent request (and also to make up to him for having bitten his head off instead of Liebknecht’s for the blunder in the Soc.-Dem.). You will see from it that several very savage blows, ostensibly aimed at Proudhon, strike home at our ‘Achilles’ and were intended to do so.

Apropos. Each secretary of our Association will receive a package of cards of membership next week (for the ‘Association’, not for the ‘Comité’, of course) for distribution (1s. for annual subscription, 1d. for the card). You must get rid of a few in Manchester. It will not be many. But let me know about how many I can send for this purpose? It is in fact one of the ways and means of the Association.

My compliments to Mrs Burns. Will she, perhaps, become a member? Ladies are admitted.

Yours Truly

K. M.

P.S. I left a pair of winter boots (shoes) at your house in Dover Street, ditto new pair of knitted stockings, and probably the 2 silk handkerchiefs as well. I only mention it so that you can drop a word to your landlords ‘some time or other’ so that they know that an eye is kept on them.

By means of a most ingenious experiment Prof. Tyndall has managed to separate out the rays of the sun into a heat-ray, which even melts platinum, and a cold light-ray which has no heat at all. This is one of the finest experiments of our days.

P.S. II

Liebknecht has also sent me a note from the editors, urgently asking for a contribution from you. For the moment they are thinking either of the Yankee war or the Prussian Army Reform, as they say their paper is read by more people of standing than any other Berlin paper.

Now, as far as the Yankee war is concerned, you explained to me before that it was not suitable for the Social-Demokrat.

Regarding the Prussian Army Reform, the paper would be a very good place for it. Only question for me is this: would not an analysis of this topic involve you in a one-sided conflict with the men of progress, which would be undesirable at this moment and on this topic, since the King has declared he will not give way on any point, so has naturally turned the question into a burning constitutional issue? Or can you treat the question, in accordance with your military view, in such a way as to kill both birds, which is what is wanted?

At all events, as I have already sent the paper an article directly (signed by me), you can be published there, too. And you ought to do so, while there is still an organ in existence at all.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 68;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 27 January 1865

Dear Moor,

I will send the letters back to you tomorrow or on Sunday, as I simply have to read this dreadful handwriting and these pale inks by daylight; yesterday evening I was only able to skim through them.

Moses really has been extraordinarily tactless (no doubt the head of the party took a certain malicious pleasure in it), but Liebknecht even more so. But I am surprised the latter has not already committed more such gaffes, it always was his forte.

I am sending the fellows the little Danish folksong about Tidmann, who is struck dead by the old man at the Thing for imposing new taxes on the peasants. It is revolutionary but not indictable, and above all it is directed against the feudal nobility, which the paper absolutely must condemn. I am making a few remarks to that effect. I shall probably be able to do the article on the reorganisation of the army as soon as I get the new military budget proposals, etc.; I am writing to ask them to send them to me and am telling them at the same time that I shall be coming out against the government — past and present — just as much as against the men of Progress, and that the article must not be published if the first point is unacceptable to them. As far as the American war is concerned, perhaps something can be made of it at a later date after all. The present phase is not yet complete, the calm, to use J. Grimm’s term, is ‘inorganic’.

Good old Lassalle is after all gradually being unmasked as a common or garden scoundrel. It has never been our practice to judge people by what they thought but rather by what they were, and I do not see why we should make an exception in the late Izzy’s case. Subjectively, his vanity may have made the affair seem plausible to him, but objectively it was the act of a scoundrel, the betrayal of the whole workers’ movement to the Prussians. Throughout, the stupid fop does not seem to have obtained from Bismarck anything at all in return, nothing specific at all, let alone guarantees; he seems just to have taken it for granted he would definitely do Bismarck in the eye, in exactly the same way as he could not fail to shoot Racowita dead. That’s Baron Izzy all over for you.

Incidentally, it will not be very long now before it becomes not merely desirable but necessary to make this whole affair public. We can only gain from it, and, if the business with the Association and the paper in Germany bears fruit, the fellow’s heirs will have to be thrown out soon enough now. Meanwhile, the proletariat in Germany will soon see what it has got in Bismarck.

Kind regards to the Ladies.

Your

F. E.

I can only see my way to disposing of approx. 1/2 dozen cards; I will see Jones about it, I'm very busy just now.

Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels in Manchester, 30 January 1865

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... What kind of people our Progressives [1] are is shown once more by their conduct in the combination question. (By the way, the Prussian Anti-Combination Law, like all continental laws of this description, takes its origin from the decree of the Constituent Assembly of 14 June 1791, in which the French bourgeois strictly punish anything of the sort, and indeed any kind of workers’ associations – condemning violators to, for instance, a year’s loss of civil rights – on the pretext that this is a restoration of the guilds and a contravention of constitutional liberty and the ‘rights of man’. It is very characteristic of Robespierre that at a time when it was a crime punishable by guillotining to be ‘constitutional’ in the sense of the Assembly of 1789, all its laws against the workers remained in force.)

Notes

1. Progressives – members of the Prussian bourgeois Progressive Party (Fortschrittspartei) which came into being in June 1861. The party stood for Germany’s unification under Prussian supremacy, the convocation of an all-German parliament and the creation of a strong liberal government responsible to the chamber of deputies. Its fear of the working class and hatred of the socialist movement caused the Progressive Party to accept the ascendancy of the Prussian Junkers and a semi-absolute monarchy in Germany – Progress Publishers.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 72;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 1 February 1865

Dear Frederick,

Enclosed letter from Strohn to be returned; write to me and let me know your thoughts about the publishing business at the same time.

This ‘Siebold’ is the Siebold of champagne fame, no doubt about that. I really am rather afraid that he did not merely find my reception of his bubbly enthusiasm very dry, but that he caught some queer words at Gumpert’s door, as I told you at the time. At all events, it is nice of the fellow and quite typical of wine-salesman politics to go straight from us to Karl Blind and run as his messenger to Hamburg. Has Blind perhaps also placed an order for ‘sparkling wines’ and granted his most gracious protection to scum-scoundrelism as well? I hope for the sake of bubbly’s good reputation that Siebold is no such venal scum, although there was no mistaking that while one of his eyes was sparkling with enthusiasm, the other had an eye to business. Regarding Freiligrath, I feel sure that he is much too cautious to agree publicly in any way to collaborate (in partibus [to all appearances], it goes without saying) with Blind. However, I shall try to ascertain the fact. At all events, it is very good that Strohn has so gratifyingly baulked Ruge and Blind. I sent off a few sarcastic marginalia to him earlier today, intended specifically for Meissner, concerning the nobile par of antagonistic brothers.

You must excuse the scraps of English in my epistle as there was a sitting of the Council yesterday which lasted until One o'clock. (‘Liquor’ and ‘smoke’ are banned from these ‘sittings’.) The first thing was the answering epistle from Lincoln, which you may find in tomorrow’s Times and certainly in The Daily News and The Star. In the reply to the London Emancipation Society (which counts among its members such illustrious figures as Sir Charles Lyell and the ‘Voice of World History’, alias K.B.), published in yesterday’s Evening Star, the old man drily dismisses the fellows with two formal clichés, exactly as he had done in his earlier answer to the Manchester branch of the Emancipation Society; whereas his letter to us is in fact everything we could have asked for, and, in particular, the naive assurance that the United States could not involve itself directly in ‘propagandism’. At any rate, it is the only answer so far on the part of the Old Man that is more than a strictly formal one.

Secondly, a delegate was there from the Poles (aristocrats), who have links with the ‘Literary Society’, through whom these gentlemen conveyed their solemn assurance, with an eye to the forthcoming meeting on Poland, that they are democrats and that every Pole is now a democrat, since the aristocracy has dwindled away to such a degree that they would be mad not to recognise the impossibility of restoring Poland without a peasant rising. Whether or not these fellows believe what they say, at all events, the last lesson they had does not seem to have been entirely wasted on them.

Thirdly, there were statements from various trades unions about their joining. Ditto from an association in Brussels which is promising to organise branches throughout Belgium.

I then handed over an issue of the Daily St. Louis Press which had arrived just yesterday containing leader about our ‘Address to the Workingmen’ and an excerpt from it which had obviously been arranged by Weydemeyer.

But now the most remarkable thing of all.

Cremer, our Honorary General Secretary, had received a written invitation for the ‘Council’ as well as a private visit, from a Provisional Committee which is meeting privatim at the London Tavern next Monday. Object: Monster meeting for Manhood Suffrage. Chairman: — Richard Cobden!

The point is this: as E. Jones told us previously, these fellows have been a complete failure in Manchester. They have therefore adopted a broader platform, in which registration ‘for paying poor rate’ figured instead of Manhood Suffrage, however. That is what is stated in the printed circular sent to us. However, since various indications made it clear to them that nothing less than Manhood Suffrage can attract any co-operation whatever on the part of the working classes, they have announced they are prepared to accept the latter. A big demonstration in London would lead to similar ones in the provinces, write the provincials ‘yet once again’, having ‘all ready’ realised that they are not able to set the ball a-going.

The next question raised yesterday was this: should our Society, i.e. Council, agree to what these fellows want (they include all the old sham city agitators such as Sam. Morley, etc.) and send a few delegates to attend the transactions of their provisional committee as ‘watchmen’? Secondly, if these fellows pledge themselves directly to the slogan of manhood suffrage and the public meeting is being called under this slogan, should we promise our support? The latter is, you see, just as crucial to these fellows as it was in the American business. Without the Trades Unions, no mass meeting is possible, and without us, the Trades Unions are not to be had. This is also the reason why these gentlemen have come to us.

Opinions were very divided, for which Bright’s latest silly tricks in Birmingham were much to blame.

On my motion, it was decided that: 1) the delegation should be sent (in my motion, I excluded foreigners from it; but Eccarius and Lubez were elected on to it as ‘Englishmen’ and silent witnesses) just as ‘observers'; 2) so far as the meeting is concerned, we should act with them firstly if manhood suffrage is proclaimed directly and publicly in the programme, and secondly if people selected by us are included on the permanent committee, so that they can keep an eye on those fellows and compromise them in the event of fresh treachery, which, as I made plain to all of them, is at any rate intended. I am writing to E. Jones about the matter today.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 75;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 3 February 1865

Dear Frederick,

Enclosed

1. Letter from Siebel reporting on his meeting with Klings, with which I had ‘charged’ him. My only comment on it is that I am not going to interfere in the affair any further. If Klings succeeds — without our help — in getting rid of B. Becker and his testamentary importance, together with the beastly old girl [Sophie von Hatzfeldt], that suits me. There is nothing to be done with the Workers’ Association as bequeathed by Baron Izzy [Lassalle]. The sooner it is disbanded, the better.

2. Rheinische Zeitung with leading article, probably by Red Becker. It amounts to an appeal ad misericordiam from the ‘men of Progress’.

My opinion is now that the two of us must issue a statement, and that this crisis particularly gives us the opportunity to reoccupy our ‘legitimate’ position. About 10 days ago, I wrote to Schweitzer that he must stand up to Bismarck and the workers’ party must drop even the appearance of flirting with Bismarck, etc. By way of thanks, he has ‘all ready’ been philandering with Pissmarck more than ever.

‘Yet again’ Moses Hess is ‘all ready’ denouncing the ‘International Association’ for the second time in No. 16 of the Social-Demokrat, which contains the letter I wrote about Proudhon, bristling with misprints. I wrote a furious letter to Liebknecht about it yesterday, telling him that this was the very last warning; that I do not give a farthing for ‘good will’ when its actions are those of ill-will; that I cannot make it clear to the members of the ‘International Committee’ here that things like that occur in bonne foi out of pure stupidity; that while their gutter rag continues to eulogise Lassalle, even though they know what treachery he had up his sleeve, and while it conducts this cowardly flirtation with Bismarck, it has the effrontery to let the Plonplonist Hess accuse us here of Plonplonism, etc.

My opinion is now that we should take up Moses’ denunciation or insinuation in order d'abord to issue a brief declaration of war against Bonaparte Plon-Plon, at the same time making honourable mention of Moses’ friend, the Rabbi Ein-Horn. Then we should use this to declare ourselves ditto against Bismarck, as well as against the rogues or fools who are dreaming or drivelling about an alliance with him for the sake of the working class. Then, of course, in conclusion the beastly men of Progress should be told that they have, on the one hand, run their cause into the ground by their political cowardice and helplessness, and that, on the other hand, if they are demanding an alliance with the working class against the government — which at the moment is, of course, the only correct line — then they would at least have to make the concessions to the workers that accord with their own principle of free trade and ‘democratism’, in other words, repeal of all the exceptional laws against the workers, which in addition to the combination laws quite specifically include the present Prussian legislation on the press. They would ditto have to proclaim, at least in principle, the restoration of universal suffrage, which was abolished by the coup d'état in Prussia. This would be the minimum to be expected of them. Maybe something ought to be put in about the military question as well. At all events, the thing needs to be tied up quickly. And you must get your ‘Ideas’ about the whole statement down on paper. I will then add mine to it and knead it all together, will send the whole thing back to you once again and so forth. The moment seems to me to be favourable for this ‘coup d'état’. We cannot miss this moment for our ‘restitutio in integrum’ out of consideration for Liebknecht or for anyone else.

At the same time, you must not fail to let the Social-Demokrat have your article on the military question [Engels, The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party] so soon as possible.

I would of course write to them — quoad statement — that, if they do not accept same immediately, same will ‘all ready’ appear in other papers.

If they do accept it, well and good, and it will not even matter if it blows them sky high. (Although Bismarck will take care not to resort to forcible measures at the present moment.) If they do not accept it, we have a decent excuse for getting rid of them. At all events, the air must be cleared and the party purged of the stench left behind by Lassalle.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 81;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 7 February 1865

Dear Moor,

Statement enclosed. They will take exception to the fact that we refer to Moses by name, which, when published, could be regarded as a breach of editorial secrecy. Do not forget to give Liebknecht instructions about this, so that a justifiable technical objection of this kind does not delay the matter again.

Liebknecht is becoming more and more stupid. He calls it a compromise that we should not merely sanction in silence every stupid thing that appears in the paper but also tolerate the paper casting aspersions on our own affairs and actions, in defiance of every convention. But we always have a fine lot of agents to act for us and will certainly not be such jackasses as Lassalle and ‘bequeath’ anything to them, s'il y avait de quoi [if there were anything to bequeath]. If things go wrong in Berlin, Liebknecht would do best to come over, leaving his family behind, we will then see what can be done, he will be able to make acquaintances soon enough at the Schiller Institute here, and whatever else can be done, will be; I think he might very well manage to settle down here like that, and if not, nothing is lost, and if it works out all right, he can bring his family over later. If he brings his family along straightaway, he will certainly go to the dogs here, because the cost will then be so much greater that the attempt cannot possibly last long. It will not be easy to obtain work teaching children, as Lupus did; but he can, of course, explore the possibilities.

Bender has sent me a bill for 5s. per quarter for my subscription to the Social-Demokrätchen, which seems exorbitant to me.

The devil knows how one’s work here is subject to all kinds of interruptions. Another committee meeting of the Schiller Institute yesterday, so this evening is the first time since Friday that I have managed to get down to the military question.

The attempt by Hatzfeldt and Klings to throw out Bernhard Becker has been a complete fiasco, and Klings has been thrown out. Whatever happens we must avoid soiling our hands in that dirty business; it is just as the worker said in the Gürzenich [a hall in Cologne used for public meetings during the 1848-49 revolution] in 1848: they may fall as they will, a rogue will always come out on top.

What mad German Schweitzer writes ‘as who’! This second leader on Bismarck’s ministry is once again as pretentiously abstruse as it could possibly be, even though there is no longer any direct flirtation with Bismarck, and it is good that he openly calls Prussia’s policy anti-German. But how naive of Liebknecht that he demands that we ought to make clear to them what their attitude to the government should be, whereas what he should do is to ask above all for a categorical statement from Mr Schweitzer as to what attitude he intends to adopt towards the government.

It looks to me as if a compromise is at hand in Prussia now, with the Prussian Chamber rescuing its prerogative regarding the budget, but giving way on everything else. Bismarck will certainly not think of seriously disputing the budget-prerogative in the long run, since, if he did so, he would get neither money nor credit and he is badly in need of both. Meanwhile, the affair can still founder on any number of trivial details.

In America, the start of the Richmond campaign in March or April will probably be decisive for the whole year. If Grant succeeds in driving Lee out, the Confederacy is played out, their armies will break up, and only bandit-warfare, like that already rife in West Tennessee now and in general nearly everywhere, will remain to be overcome. In reality, the only army the Southerners now have is Lee’s; everything depends on its destruction. Now we can already assume that the area from which Lee procures his supplies is confined to South Virginia, the Carolinas and at most part of Georgia.

Salut.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 84;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 10 February 1865

Dear Frederick,

The thing [Engels, The Prussian Military Question and the German Workers’ Party] is good. Although the style is too slapdash in places, it would be nonsense to polish or elaborate it at all now, as the main thing is to get it out in the nick of time, as the conflict is ‘all ready’ on the point of being resolved.

My advice therefore is this:

Send the pamphlet straight to Meissner in Hamburg and tell him that speed of publication is paramount; and he should let you know immediately whether he will take it (leaving him to decide the fee), because then you would attract attention to the thing in advance in the Berlin and Rhineland papers.

The thing is much too long and ‘too cheeky’ for the Social-Demokrat in present circumstances. But I would arrange for notices, short ones, in the Social-Demokrat (through Eccarius), in the Düsseldorfer Zeitung through Siebel, and maybe even send a notice to the Rheinische Zeitung, to the effect that a pamphlet by you is being published at such and such a place, in which you are simply setting out our position on this specific question, as opposed to that of the Reaction, men of Progress and Lassalleans, along with treatment of the purely ‘military question’.

Even if there are still things you have got to add to it, send the manuscript immediately ad Meissnerem (Hamburg) all the same and tell him that a few additions are to follow relating to such-and-such page (you can mark the places). There should have been rather more mention of the country people, which your German lout is far too inclined to ignore as non-existent. To judge by Strohn’s last letter, he himself is probably away from Hamburg again, so that the piece cannot be sent to him but will have to go direct to Meissner.

An evil wind of reconciliation is blowing in Berlin, fanned from the direction of Russia this time and further strengthened by the turn for the worse in the business with Austria. The Petersburger Zeitung advises unconditionally making concessions to the chamber in the matter of budget-approval and two-year military service. It says, amongst other things:

‘The present time appears to us, if not an alarming one, then, nevertheless, a grave one, and if circumstances do not become especially advantageous, it is still to be feared that the future will be dismal. In times of distress and danger, however, as history has proved only too often, the strict enforcement of discipline in the army and the civil service is rarely enough on its own. The real power of the state is then based, as it always is in general, far more on the unity of government and people. Although we do not underestimate the conciliatory manner, in which the government approached the people’s representation in this year’s session, nevertheless, in view of what we have just said, we cannot suppress the desire that this conciliatory spirit may also spread to action.’.

It appears that the Muscovites need their Prussians for the wheeling-movement they are about to execute against Austro-Galicia, as announced in the Moscow Newspaper. According to the same Moscow Newspaper, this final subjugation of Poland, which however necessarily means the ruthless continuation of Muraviov’s policy, would ‘open a hole into the heart of Germany’. Our good ‘men of Progress’ and equally good ‘Lassalleans’ are missing all that by sleeping.

Letter from Schily enclosed.

To Moses’ great distress, the ‘International Association’ is creating a great stir amongst the workers in Paris. As a result of Moses’ gaffe, Tolain has stepped down. (We have not formally accepted his resignation.) H. Lefort (editor of the Avenir , etc.), who is also on the editorial committee of L'Association, has at his request been appointed literary defender (Attorney General) of our Association in Paris. The latter is already under attack from Horn (a paragraph in the Rules ). This Jew Horn will soon notice that Moses Hess is not the only German around. Fribourg has opened a bureau de renseignement for us; cards of membership were sent to him the day before yesterday.

At the preparatory session for the Polish meeting, I also saw Old Oborski again, who does not send his regards.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Apropos. The fact that Lincoln answered us so courteously and the ‘Bourgeois Emancipation Society’ so brusquely and purely formally made The Daily News so indignant that they did not print the answer to us. However, since they saw, to their dismay, that The Times was doing so, they had to publish it later in The Express. Levy also had to eat humble pie. The difference between Lincoln’s answer to us and to the bourgeoisie has created such a sensation here that the West End ‘clubs’ are shaking their heads at it. You can understand how gratifying that has been for our people.

Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels in Manchester, 11 February 1865

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Fred

As today is Saturday I imagine you will not be sending off your thing [1] on the same day, in which case there will still be time for these ‘additional’ proposals for modification:

1) In the passage where you ask what the workers want I should not answer as you do that the workers in Germany, France and England demand so and so. For the answer sounds as if we accepted Itzig’s [2] slogans (at least it will be so interpreted). I should say rather somewhat the following:

It would seem that the demands put forward at the present moment by the most advanced workers in Germany amount to the following, etc. This does not commit you at all, which is all the better considering that later on you yourself criticise universal suffrage without the requisite conditions. (The word ‘direct’ moreover would indeed have no sense in England, etc, for example, and is only the opposite of the ‘indirect’ franchise invented by the Prussians.) The form in which the philistines in Germany conceive state intervention à la Lassalle is of such a kind that one must avoid identifying oneself with ‘them in any way’. It is much grander (and safer) if you take the philistines at their word and let them say themselves what they want. (I say the philistines, because they are the really argumentative and Lassalleanised section.)

2) I should not say that the movement of 1848-49 failed because the middle class was against direct universal suffrage. On the contrary, the latter was declared an ancient German right by the Frankfurters and it was proclaimed with due formality by the imperial Regent. (I think moreover that as soon as the matter comes to be discussed seriously in Germany, this franchise must be treated as part of the rightfully existing law.) As that is not the place for a longer exposition, I would extricate myself by using the phrase that the middle class at that time preferred peace with slavery to the mere prospect of a struggle with freedom, or something of the sort.

As a whole the thing is very good and I am especially tickled by the part where it is shown that the present movement of the philistines exists in fact only by the grace of the police.

I'm in a great hurry.

Greetings

Yours

KM

Notes

1. Marx is referring to the pamphlet Die Preussische Militärfrage und die deutsche Arbeiterpartei (The Military Question in Prussia and the German Workers Party) by Engels – Progress Publishers.

2. Ferdinand Lassalle – Progress Publishers.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 89;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

London, 13 February 1865

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Engels,

You'll see from the enclosed how things stand with regard to our statement [’to the Editor of the Social-Demokrat’] about Moses. At the same time, you will have read Moses’ scrawl in the last Social-Demokrat.

This time I believe Liebknecht is right: Mr von Schweitzer is pretending to see in our statement only a personal attack on Moses; he ‘overlooks’ the stand against Bonapartism, etc., probably knowing full well what he is about. It might perhaps not come amiss to Schweitzer if a public break (who knows whether he has committed himself to something which will soon force one or not?) were occasioned by this Moses business, instead of ad vocem Bismarck? I have therefore written him letter (copy retained ) in which I d'abord give him a summary of our relations to date and ask him where in all this we for our part have gone ‘beyond the bounds’? And I analyse the Moses case once more. I then say that because of Moses’ latest silly outburst, our statement is to a certain degree out-of-date, and the matter can therefore be allowed to rest. As far as the other point in the statement is concerned, the hint to the workers, we would be setting out our position at length elsewhere on the attitude of the workers towards the Prussian government. At the same time, I took the opportunity — apropos of the telegram in today’s Times about the Prussian ministerial statement — to make our opinion quoad Bismarck and Lassalle clear to Mr von Schweitzer once again.

(I would in fact not be at all surprised if Bismarck were to reject outright the repeal of the Combination Laws to the extent that some of the men of Progress have now been obliged to demand. The right of combination, and all that it entails, interferes too much with police domination, the Rules Governing Servants, the flog-'em and birch-'em rural aristocracy and bureaucratic tutelage in general. As soon as the bourgeoisie (or some of them) appear to turn serious, the government will certainly make a joke and do a volte-face. The Prussian state can not tolerate coalitions and trades unions. That much is certain. On the contrary, government support for a few lousy co-operative societies suited their dirty game to a tee. Officials becoming even more nosey, control of ‘new’ money, bribery of the most active of the workers, emasculation of the whole movement! However, since the Prussian government is so short of money just now, this plan is scarcely more to be feared than the Order of the Swan of old!

Nota bene, Lassalle was opposed to the campaign for the right of combination. Liebknecht improvised it among the Berlin printers against Lassalle’s wishes. That was the starting-point of the whole affair that beau Becker has now taken over.)

For the present we should — in my opinion — exercise ‘restraint’ quant au the Social-Demokrat. I.e. write nothing (Eccarius excepted). Things will soon reach such a pass that we shall either have to break openly with it, or we shall be able to collaborate with it in a proper manner. Moses will have to receive his chastisement on some later occasion.

Meanwhile, I am delighted that you have got into the swing again. You are by nature always able to get back to working at speed. I take it my letter came in time?

As long as these abominable Lassalleans rule the roost in Germany, that country will be infertile ground for the ‘International Association.’ For the present, we must be patient. The Prussian government will put an end to this foul morass of Izzyness soon enough.

Apropos. Cutting from the latest Hermann enclosed. You must make a few bad jokes about this notice from Messrs Blind-Wolffsohn, for me to pass on to Eccarius for insertion in his London correspondence. I have been so put out by this lousy correspondence with Berlin (apart from the amount of time the International Association inevitably takes up) that I absolutely must make up the lost ground.

Tyndall has succeeded in using a simple mechanical technique to break down sunlight into heat-rays aria pure light-rays. The latter are cold. You can light your cigar straight from the former, and through a burning-glass they can melt platinum, etc.

* My best compliments to Mrs Burns. I am indeed very glad to hear that the o was an inorganic intrusion upon her name, and that she is a namesake of the great poet. If Mrs Gumpert declines becoming a member of a Workingmen’s Association, I hope Mrs Burns will not follow that example, but will believe with her namesake that ‘a man is a man for all that’.*

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Have an eye upon Jones! He is a fellow ‘too clever by half'!

Apropos. I think I should be in a position to send you the cards by Tuesday. I send about 2 dozen, which you don’t need to dispose of all at once. But give some of them to E. Jones.

The latter has written to me about the electoral agitation (whereupon I wrote him that he should write me a 2nd letter which I could read out at the Comité which he duly did). But he didn’t say anything in his letter about the International Association. As he is a fox and I want to pin him down, you should insist that he forms a branch committee immediately (the number of members doesn’t matter for the present) and that he and his friends take out cards of membership. They must realise that the ‘International’ is the only means and method of establishing co-operation (political) between London and the provinces!

Concerning the cards, our Rules are as follows: existing societies (unions, etc.) who wish to affiliate in that capacity need only take out corporate membership. That doesn’t cost them anything, or they can make a voluntary donation. On the other hand, every member of such a society who wishes to become an individual member of the Association, must take out his annual membership card at 1s. 1d. In France and Belgium, because of the laws there, it has ‘turned out’ that they will all have to become ‘individual’ members of the English society, since they are not able to join as societies. Every branch society or affiliated society outside London and environs elects a secretary to correspond with us. We can ‘reject’ people we disapprove of.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 94;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 18 February 1865

Dear Fred,

Enclosed 2 letters from Liebknecht, 1 to you and 1 to me. Ditto an earlier one from Schweitzer.

My view is this:

Once Liebknecht has given in his notice, il faut en finir [we must put an end to it]. If he had put the matter off, we could have done so, too, since your pamphlet is on the stocks.

I consider Schweitzer to be incorrigible (probably has a secret arrangement with Bismarck).

What confirms me in that view is

1. the passage I have underlined in his letter of 15th enclosed;

2. the timing of the publication of his ‘Bismarck III’.

To do justice to both points, I shall now copy out for you word for word a passage from my letter to him of 13 February:

‘...since our statement has become partially out-of-date, following the correspondence from M. Hess in No. 21 received today, we will allow the matter rest there. Our statement did, of course, contain another point as well: praise of the anti-Bonapartist stance of the Parisian proletariat and hint to the German workers that they should follow this example. We regarded this as more important than our sally against Hess. Meanwhile, we shall set out our views in detail elsewhere on the relation of the workers towards the Prussian government.

‘In your letter of 4 February you say that I warned Liebknecht myself not to overstep the mark, so that he would not be sent to the devil. Quite right. But I wrote to him at the same time that one could say anything if one put it in the right way. A form of polemic against the government which is “possible” even for the Berlin meridian is certainly very different from flirting with the government or even pretending to compromise with it! I wrote to you myself that the Social-Demokrat must eschew even the appearance of doing so.

‘I see from your paper that the ministry is making ambiguous and procrastinatory statements with regard to the repeal of the Combination Laws. On the other hand, a Times telegram reports that it was in favour of the proposed state aid for the co-operative societies. It would not surprise me at all if The Times had for once telegraphed a correct report!

‘Combinations and the trades unions they would give rise to are of the utmost importance not merely as a means of organising the working class for the struggle against the bourgeoisie — just how important is shown among other things by the fact that even the workers of the United States cannot do without them, in spite of franchise and republic — but in Prussia and indeed in Germany as a whole the right of combination also means a breach in the domination of the police and the bureaucracy, it tears to shreds the Rules Governing Servants and the power of the aristocracy in rural areas, in short, it is a step towards the granting of full civil rights to the “subject population” which the Party of Progress, i.e. any bourgeois opposition party in Prussia, would be crazy not to be a hundred times more willing to permit than the Prussian government, to say nothing of the government of a Bismarck! As opposed to that, however, the aid of the Royal Prussian government for co-operative societies — and anyone who is familiar with conditions in Prussia also knows in advance its necessarily minute dimensions — is worthless as an economic measure, whilst, at the same time, it serves to extend the system of tutelage, corrupt part of the working class and emasculate the movement. Just as the bourgeois party in Prussia discredited itself and brought about its present wretched situation by seriously believing that with the “New Era” the government had fallen into its lap by the grace of the Prince Regent, so the workers’ party will discredit itself even more if it imagines that the Bismarck era or any other Prussian era will make the golden apples just drop into its mouth, by grace of the king. It is beyond all question that Lassalle’s ill-starred illusion that a Prussian government might intervene with socialist measures will be crowned with disappointment. The logic of circumstances will tell. But the honour of the workers’ party requires that it reject such illusions, even before their hollowness is punctured by experience. The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.

Well! He replied to this letter of mine of 13th with his letter of 15th, in which he demands that in all ‘practical’ questions I should subordinate myself to his tactics; he replies with ‘Bismarck III’ as a fresh specimen of these tactics!! And really it now seems to me that the impudent manner in which he raised the question of confidence apropos of the statement against Hess was not due to any tenderness for Moses but to the firm resolution not to give space in the Social-Demokrat under any circumstances to our hint to the German workers.

So, as a break must be made with the fellow after all, it had best be done at once. As far as the louts in Germany are concerned, they can scream as much as they like. Those of them who are any good will after all have to rally round us sooner or later. If the statement given below seems all right to you, make a copy of it, sign it and send it to me. As it was scrawled in great haste, alter anything that seems unsuitable to you, or re-write the whole thing, just as you wish.

Your

K. M.

To the Editor of the ‘Social-Demokrat’

The undersigned promised to contribute to the Social-Demokrat and permitted their being named as contributors on the express condition that the paper would be edited in the spirit of the brief programme submitted to them. They did not for a moment fail to appreciate the difficult position of the Social-Demokrat and therefore made no demands that were inappropriate to the meridian of Berlin. But they repeatedly demanded that the language directed at the ministry and the feudal-absolutist party should be at least as bold as that aimed at the men of progress. The tactics pursued by the Social-Demokrat preclude their further participation in it. The opinion of the undersigned as to the royal Prussian governmental socialism and the correct attitude of the workers’ party to such deception has already been set out in detail in No. 73 of the Deutsche-Brusseler-Zeitung of 12 September 1847, in reply to No. 206 of the Rheinischer Beobachter (then appearing in Cologne), in which the alliance of the ‘proletariat’ with the ‘government’ against the ‘liberal bourgeoisie’ was proposed. We still subscribe today to every word of the statement we made then.

I'll send the Weydemeyer back to you tomorrow. What do you say to the ‘Freiligrath-Blind’ Eidgenossenschaft [confederation].

For a couple of days now, I have had a carbuncle on my posterior and a furuncle on my left loin. All very nice.

Marx To the editor of the Social-Demokrat

Written: by Engels on February 23, 1865;

First published: in Barmer Zeitung, No. 60 and Elberfelder Zeitung, No. 60, February 26, 1865;

Translated: by Barrie Selman;

Transcribed: by director@marx.org.

The undersigned promised to contribute to the Social-Demokrat and permitted their being named as contributors on the express condition that the paper would be edited in the spirit of the brief programme submitted to them. They did not for a moment fail to appreciate the difficult position of the Social-Demokrat and therefore made no demands that were inappropriate to the meridian of Berlin. But they repeatedly demanded that the language directed at the ministry and the feudalabsolutist party should be at least as bold as that aimed at the men of Progress. The tactics pursued by the Social-Demokrat preclude their further participation in it. The opinion of the undersigned as to the royal Prussian governmental socialism and the correct attitude of the workers' party to such deception has already been set out in detail in No. 73 of the Deutsche-Brusseler-Zeitung of September 12, 1847, in reply to No. 206 of the Rheinischer Beobachter (then appearing in Cologne) [reference to Marx's article "The Communism of the Rheinischer Beobachter"], in which the alliance of the "proletariat" with the "government" against the "liberal bourgeoisie" was proposed. We still subscribe today to every word of the statement we made then.

Karl Marx and Frederick Engels

London and Manchester,

February 23, 1865

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 101;

First published: in Sozialistische Auslandspolitik, No. 18, 1918;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

London, 23 February 1865

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Friend,

Yesterday I received your letter, which I found most interesting, and will now reply to the various points.

First of all, I shall briefly describe my attitude towards Lassalle. Whilst he was pursuing his agitation, our relations were suspended, 1. on account of his bombastic self-adulation, which he managed to combine with the most shameless plagiarism of writings by myself and others; 2. because I condemned his political tactics; 3. because, even before he began his agitation, I had fully explained and ‘proved’ to him here in London that direct socialist intervention by a ‘Prussian state’ was an absurdity. In his letters to me (from 1848 to 1863), as well as when we met personally, he had always declared himself a supporter of the party I represent. As soon as he had become convinced in London (at the end of 1862) that he could not play his game with me, he resolved to set himself up as ‘workers’ dictator’ against me and the old party. In spite of all that, I acknowledged his merits as an agitator, although towards the end of his brief career even that agitation appeared to me in an increasingly dubious light. His sudden death, our friendship of old, the grief-stricken letters from Countess Hatzfeldt, my indignation at the cowardly impudence of the bourgeois papers towards the man they had feared so much while he was alive, all these things induced me to publish a short statement attacking that wretch Blind but not dealing with the substance of Lassalle’s doings (Hatzfeldt sent the statement to the Nordstern). For the same reasons, and in the hope of being able to drive out those elements whom I thought dangerous, Engels and I promised to contribute to the Social-Demokrat (it has published a translation of the ‘Address’, and, at its request, I wrote an article about Proudhon when the latter died) and allowed our names to be put out as contributors, after Schweitzer had sent us a satisfactory programme of its editorial board. We had a further guarantee in W. Liebknecht being an unofficial member of the editorial board. In the meantime, it soon became clear — the proof of this came into our possession — that Lassalle had in fact betrayed the party. He had entered into a formal contract with Bismarck (with no guarantees of any kind in his hands, of course). At the end of September 1864, he was to go to Hamburg and there (together with the crazy Schramm and the Prussian police spy Marr) ‘force’ Bismarck to incorporate Schleswig-Holstein, i.e. to proclaim such in the name of the ‘workers’, etc., in return for which Bismarck promised universal suffrage and a few spurious socialist measures. It is a pity that Lassalle was unable to play this farce through to its conclusion! It would have made him appear deuced foolish and an utter gull! And it would have put paid to all such attempts for ever!

Lassalle got on the wrong path because he was, like Mr Miquel, a ‘realistic politician’, only on a larger scale and with grander aims! (By-the-bye, I had long ago seen through Miquel sufficiently to explain his conduct to myself by the fact that the National Association offered a splendid excuse for a petty Hanoverian lawyer to make himself heard beyond his own four walls, in Germany at large, and then to exploit the enhanced ‘reality’ of his own self retrospectively in his native Hanover, playing the ‘Hanoverian’ Mirabeau under ‘Prussian’ protection, furthermore.) Just as Miquel and his present friends eagerly seized hold of the ‘New Era’ inaugurated by the Prussian Prince Regent in order to national-associate and to fasten on to the ‘Prussian leadership’, just as in general they cultivated their ‘pride of citizenship’ under Prussian protection so Lassalle wanted to play the Marquis Posa of the proletariat to the Philipp II of the Uckermark, with Bismarck as intermediary between himself and the Prussian monarchy. He was merely imitating the gentlemen of the National Association. But, if the latter were invoking Prussian ‘reaction’ in the interests of the middle class, he was shaking hands with Bismarck in the interests of the proletariat. Those gentlemen had more justification than Lassalle, inasmuch as the bourgeois is accustomed to regard the interest he perceives immediately in front of his nose as ‘reality’, and as this class has, in fact, compromised everywhere, even with feudalism, whereas the working class must in the nature of things be genuinely ‘revolutionary’.

For a histrionically vain character like Lassalle (who was not, however, to be bribed with such paltry things as office, mayoralties, etc.), it was a most seductive thought that he, Ferdinand Lassalle, might perform a deed for the direct benefit of the proletariat! He was, in fact, too ignorant of the real economic conditions required for such a deed to be critically self-consistent! The German workers, on the other hand, had ‘demoralised’ too far in consequence of the despicable ‘realistic politics’ with which the German bourgeoisie had tolerated the reaction of 1849-1859 and watched the people’s minds being stultified, for them not to hail such a mountebank of a saviour who was promising to help them reach the promised land with one bound!

So, to take up the thread where I left off above! Hardly had the Social-Demokrat been established when it became clear that the old Hatzfeldt woman was planning to execute Lassalle’s ‘testament’ posthumously. She had contact with Bismarck through Wagener (of the Kreuz-Zeitung). She placed the ‘Workers’ Association’ (Gen. German), the Social-Demokrat, etc., at Bismarck’s disposal. The annexation of Schleswig-Holstein was to be proclaimed in the Social-Demokrat, Bismarck to be generally acknowledged as patron, etc. The whole of this fine plan was frustrated because we had Liebknecht in Berlin and on the editorial board of the Social-Demokrat. Although Engels and I disliked the editorial board of the paper, its lick-spittling cult of Lassalle, its occasional flirting with Bismarck, etc., it was, of course, more important publicly to stay with the paper for the time being in order to thwart the intrigues of the old Hatzfeldt woman and prevent the workers’ party from being totally compromised. We therefore put on bonne mine à mauvais jeu [put brave face on it] although privatim we were constantly writing to the Social-Demokrat telling them that they should stand up to Bismarck just as much as to the men of Progress. We even tolerated that affected fop, Bernhard Becker, who is taking the importance bequeathed to him in Lassalle’s testament quite seriously, intriguing against the International Workingmen’s Association.

In the meantime, Mr Schweitzer’s articles in the Social-Demokrat were becoming more and more Bismarckian. I had earlier written to him to say that, although the men of Progress can be intimidated over the ‘Combination question’, the Prussian government would never under any circumstances concede the complete abolition of the Combination Laws because that would entail breaching the bureaucratic system, giving freedom of thought and expression to the workers, tearing up the Rules Governing Servants, abolishing flogging and birching by the aristocracy in rural areas, etc., etc., which Bismarck could never allow, it being altogether incompatible with the Prussian bureaucratic state. I added that, if the Chamber were to repudiate the Combination Laws, the government would resort to empty phrases (such as e.g. that the social question requires ‘profounder’ steps to be taken, etc.) in order to preserve them. All this has come to pass. And what did Mr von Schweitzer do? He wrote an article in support of Bismarck and is reserving all his heroism for such infiniment petits as Schulze, Faucher, etc.

I believe that Schweitzer, etc., mean it sincerely, but they are ‘realistic politicians’. They wish to take due account of the existing state of affairs and not leave this privilege of ‘realistic politics’ to Messrs Miquel et Comp. alone. (The latter seem to wish to reserve the right of intermixture with the Prussian government.) They know that the workers’ papers and the workers’ movement in Prussia (and hence in the rest of Germany) only exist par la grâce de la police. They thus want to take the circumstances as they are, not to irritate the government, etc., quite as our ‘republican’ realistic politicians want to ‘put up with’ a Hohenzollern emperor. As I am not a ‘realistic politician’, however, I found it necessary together with Engels to serve notice on the Social-Demokrat in a public statement (which you will probably soon see in one paper or other).

You will see at the same time why there is nothing I can do in Prussia at the moment. The government there has flatly refused to restore my Prussian citizenship. I should only be permitted to agitate there in a manner agreeable to Mr von Bismarck.

I prefer my agitation here through the ‘International Association’ a 100 times. The effect on the English proletariat is direct and of the greatest importance. We are now stirring the general suffrage question here, which is, naturally, of quite different significance here than in Prussia.

As a whole, the progress made by this ‘Association’ has exceeded all expectations here, in Paris, in Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy. Only in Germany, of course, I am opposed by Lassalle’s successors who 1. are stupidly afraid of forfeiting their own importance; 2. are aware of my avowed opposition to what the Germans call ‘realistic politics’. (It is this sort of ‘reality’ that puts Germany so far behind all civilised countries.)

Since any person who takes out a card at 1 shilling can become a member of the Association; since the French have chosen this form of individual membership (ditto the Belgians) because the law prohibits them from joining us as an ‘association'; and since the situation is similar in Germany, I have now resolved to ask my friends here and in Germany to form small societies, regardless of how many members there may be in each locality, each member of which will acquire an English card of membership. Since the English society is public, there is no obstacle to this procedure even in France. I should appreciate it if you, too, would get in touch with London in this way in your neighbourhood.

My thanks to you for your prescription. Oddly enough this vile disease had broken out once more 3 days before it arrived. So, the prescription was most timely.

In a few days I shall send you another 24 Addresses. I have just been interrupted in my writing by a friend, and, as I very much want to send off this letter, I shall take up the other points in your letter next time.

Yours

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 107;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 25 February 1865

Dear Fred,

I quite forgot — *you must excuse me — to send back Weydemeyer’s letter. I enclose it. Ditto a letter of Dr Kugelmann with enclosure of wiseacre Miquel’s letter. Ditto a prescription* from Kugelmann. Oddly enough the prescription arrived just after the disease had broken out afresh. (Nota bene, the passage in Kugelmann’s letter, saying I wrote that I wanted to defend Lassalle, referred to Blind’s attack. I have now told him (Kugelmann) the plain truth. Return the letters from Kugelmann and Miquel.) I have had the prescription made up and have already taken the powder, but I would still like Gumpert’s opinion of it. It’s a most troublesome business. Unlike last year, however, my faculties are not affected and (to the extent that sitting down for a long time is not physically troublesome) I am perfectly able to work. Incidentally, I have the feeling in every part of my cadaver that the stuff is about to burst out all over.

Strohn passed by here. He was still in Hamburg when your manuscript came in, in the nick of time to recommend to Meissner that he should accept it. Strohn was informed that a manuscript from Rüstow on the same topic was rejected. Apropos. Have you taken any steps yourself regarding your pamphlet in the newspapers, or am I to do it? On this occasion, Eccarius himself was responsible for the incomprehensible blunder. When his article arrived, I wrote to him at once (22 February) enquiring whether the thing had been falsified by Schweitzer? Quod non.

When I sent our statement to that jackass Wilhelm [Liebknecht] (23 February), I wrote this to him:

‘In the few brief excerpts, which Eccarius gives from my speech at the workers’ society, there are certain things that convey precisely the opposite of what I said. I have written to him about it, leaving it to him whether to correct it or not in the next piece he contributes, as it is not very important in the present circumstances.'

My letters to Eccarius and Liebknecht have been written so that, if Schweitzer (who from the private letter he had just previously received from me very well knew what he was about, of course) should try to use Eccarius’ blunder to defend himself, we could if necessary cut off this retraite. Meanwhile, I have told Eccarius privately not to make any bother about the whole filthy business until such time as Schweitzer’s own behaviour requires it. Eccarius was very unwell, and that is probably to blame for the nonsense. On the other hand, I imagine that Schweitzer, who already had Wilhelm’s resignation in his possession and was therefore prepared for a statement from us, was delighted to accept the report, 1. so as to show by means of the passage about Prussia what extravagant demands we were making of him, and 2. by means of the conclusion to the report that we did in fact share his views. The galantuomo [honourable man] is forgetting, by the way, that I have kept copies of my private letter to him.

I have informed Liebknecht that, if Schweitzer should turn it down, he should put the thing in the Berliner Reform and tell Schweitzer about this at the same time, and also that I have simultaneously sent the statement to two Rhineland papers, so that Schweitzer cannot procrastinate this time. I have in fact sent 2 copies to Siebel, instructing him to insert the thing in the Rheinische Zeitung and the Dusseldorfer Zeitung (the latter being the workers’ paper) two days after receipt of my letter, and to send us a report on any comments in the local press. So, this time there is nothing Schweitzer can do about it any more. I would not be surprised if the Lassalleans, especially in the Hamburg Nordstern, declared we had sold ourselves to the bourgeoisie. But never mind!

The ‘International Association’ has managed so to constitute the majority on the committee to set up the new Reform League that the whole leadership is in our hands. I have put the full details in a letter to E. Jones.

Such a conflict has broken out in Paris between our own representatives that we have sent Lubez to Paris to clarify matters and effect conciliation. His credentials state that Schily has been attached to him as an adjunct, and I have given Schily private instructions. We could have sold 20,000 cards in Paris, but since one group was accusing the other of having Plon-Plon behind them, etc., the distribution of cards has had to be suspended for the time being. Under this military despotism, people are naturally highly suspicious of each other (my impression is that this time both sides are doing each other an injustice), and they are not capable of sorting out their differences and reaching an understanding by meeting or through the press. A further factor is this: the workers seem to want to take things to the point of excluding any literary man, etc., which is absurd, as they need them in the press, but it is pardonable in view of the repeated treachery of the literary men. Conversely, the latter are suspicious of any workers’ movement, which displays hostility towards them.

(Apropos these ‘literary men’, I am reminded that the workers here (English) want to make me editor when The Bee-Hive is transformed, which is to happen in 3 months time, and have already informed me of this. However, I shall mull over the matter in all its multifarious aspects, before making a move in one direction or another.)

So, what we have in Paris is, on the one hand, Lefort (a literary man, well-to-do into the bargain, in other words ‘bourgeois’ but with an unsullied reputation, and, as far as La belle France is concerned, the real founder of our Association), and, on the other, Tolain, Fribourg, Limousin, etc., who are workers. Well, I shall let you know the outcome. At all events, Wolff, an acquaintance, who has just returned from Paris, tells me that there is growing interest in the ‘International Association’. The Debats has also intervened in the matter.

As far as the London unions, etc., are concerned, every day brings about new adhesion, so that by and by we are becoming a force to be reckoned with.

But that is where the difficulty begins as well. Already Mr Beales (the Registering Barrister of Middlesex, one of the most popular people in London at present, President of the Polish League, co-founder of the new Reform League, in fact the go-between between workingman and middle class, honest and well-meaning to boot) has got himself proposed as member for our Council. The opportunity arose because as a subcommittee together with him we were to prepare the Polish meeting (Marquis Townshend in the chair) for next Wednesday. This was most unfortunate for me. I could, of course, have prevented the matter by force, as all the Continentals would have voted with me. But I did not like any such division. So, by means of private letters to the principal English members, I have managed to persuade Beales’ proposer not to bring forward his motion again. The ‘official’ reason given was: 1. that Beales will stand for Marylebone at the next parliamentary elections and that our Association must by all means avoid appearing to serve the interests of any Parliamentary ambition; 2. that Beales and we ourselves can be of greater assistance to each other, if we sail our separate ships. Thus, the danger has been temporarily averted. Incidentally, other parliamentarians, such as Taylor, etc. (fellows, who have close links with Mazzini), had taken it into their heads to tell us that the time was not opportune for a Polish meeting. I answered through our Council that the working class has its own foreign policy, which is most certainly not determined by what the middle class considers opportune. They always considered it opportune to goad on the Poles at the beginning of a new outbreak, to betray them during its progress by their diplomacy, and to desert them when Russia had thrown them down. In fact, the chief purpose of the meeting is to raise money to support them. Are the poor émigrés (this time mostly workingmen and peasants and thus not in the least protected by Prince Zamoyski et Co.) to starve because it appears to the English middle class just now inopportune to mention even the name of Poland?

Cutting enclosed by Mr Blind from The Morning Star. Mazzini, who did tell Fontana that Blind was a liar, was absolutely furious that his Italian Workers’ Association here sent out the Italian version of my ‘Address’ into the world without the omissions Mr Mazzini had expressly demanded, e.g. the passages attacking the middle class.

Your

K. M.

Apropos. Some port wine and claret would do me a world of good under present circumstances.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 113;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 3 March 1865

Dear Moor,

You must excuse me for neglecting my correspondence this week. Borkheim was here and took up a lot of my time; he left this evening; then there is cotton-panic following Sherman’s advance with endless letter-writing and vain attempts to dispose of our stock. I think Richmond will be abandoned within a fortnight, and, unless by some miracle Lee manages to get a fresh respite of 2-3 months, the final, decisive battle will be fought within 4 weeks.

I must go home now and write to Meissner and Siebel, who is putting himself to a lot of trouble — he says he has sent you the statement. I am glad the thing is finally published; still nothing in the damned Social-Demokrat of 1 March — presumably, they tried to go back on it? It’s a load off my mind that we have at last made the break with that gang. So, now we have the grand concluding article on Bismarck which was supposed to patch everything up. O, jerum, jerum, jerum!

Your

F. E.

I have in my hurry not managed to find any decent port, but sent claret yesterday. Will keep looking for some port.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 114;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 4 March 1865

Dear Fred,

Our statement is in today’s Social-Demokrat. Although claiming that the statement from these ‘gentlemen’ requires no further comment, Mr Schweitzer has, nevertheless, ‘anonymously’ devoted one of his ‘bloody pretentious’ leaders to us. Lassalle and B. Becker, ‘President of Mankind’, for ever! At all events, I have Mr Schweitzer’s exceedingly humble letter of invitation, etc. in my possession. Siebel has sent 5 newspapers (the Barmer, the Elberfelder, the Düsseldorfer, the Rheinische and the Neue Frankfurter) carrying the statement. The enclosed cutting is from the Elberfelder. I am glad, firstly, that we are ‘out’ and, secondly, that we were ‘in’. If we had not been, we would never have penetrated the ‘mystères of Lassalle’.

I have written to Kugelmann (please send his prescription back to me) about your pamphlet (it looks very good in print; if there is a 2nd impression, only a sentence here and there would need to be altered). Can you send me another 2 copies? I would like to use Eccarius’ good offices to put two short notices in Bender’s rag (London) and in the Hermann, but that will hardly be possible unless I let them have 2 Copies.

The ‘Polish Meeting’ (Wednesday) went off very well, and full, although the bourgeois had done everything they could to wreck it by declaring it ‘inopportune’.

Affairs In France are very complicated. I will tell you about it and send you Schily’s report (I have to translate extracts from it this very day and accordingly inform the subcommittee of it) in my next letter. For the moment, I shall just mention that there is a fight between our original workers’ representatives and the politico-social gentlemen (including the boss of the Association so admired by Moses) as to who is to be in contact with us. The [French], particularly the Parisian workers (although already links with 25 other French cities, too) literally regard the London Council as a workers’ government ‘abroad’.

Major Wolff has returned after serving his sentence in Alessandria.

Apropos: did I tell you that Mazzini later secretly communicated his ‘displeasure’ to Fontana after all (and his predilection for K. Blind, whom he had himself branded as a ‘liar’)?

Your wine came yesterday; received with thanks.

For the past week my brother-in-law from the Cape has been here again; he leaves next Tuesday. My niece, from Maastricht came with him (daughter of my sister, widow Schmalhausen); I shall have to take her back in about a week later.

My old trouble is plaguing me in various sensitive and ‘aggravating’ places, so that sitting down is difficult.

Apropos: is the Lupus affair still not quite wound up? Ditto I never heard a word from Mr Borchardt about the outstanding money he was going to collect in. You will see from the enclosed scrawl, which is just one example, how I am being sent claims of every conceivable kind, things I had totally forgotten about. This is the most recent to have raised its head from the days of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. It is something I have to take into account in every possible way because otherwise the fellows will make a public scandal.

It seems all up with Confederacy.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

I wonder if you could send me the papers from the Manchester press relating to the cotton-crisis?

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 117;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 7 March 1865

Dear Fred,

My brother-in-law is leaving today to return to the Cape. I've got to accompany him onto the ship. So, I'm very short of time — hence just the following in the utmost brevity:

1. Ad vocem Bruhn. A worker in Paris received a letter from a worker in Hamburg saying that Bruhn is slandering us in every way he can. Firstly, he says I owe him 60 talers which I never repaid. Secondly, you and I are said to have sold the Prussian government, or rather ‘Police-Chief Stieber’, a manuscript about the refugees. The Parisian sent the letter to Lessner, who passed it on to me. I replied to Lessner by return of post, for communication to the Parisian, that I had never had any financial dealings with Bruhn (which I believed at that time to be the case), and in general considered that for Bruhn to ever have 60 talers to his name was like something out of Munchausen. Furthermore, I explained the affair of Bangya and the manuscript, in which connection our declaration of April 1853 in the New-Yorker Criminal-Zeitung [Hirsch’s Confessions] and references to it in Herr Vogt page such and such were to be consulted. Well! Then Bruhn’s letter arrived. So, I racked my brains and think I remember the following: in the spring of 1849 I came to Hamburg to collect money for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. I had just enough in my pocket to get to Hamburg. However, stayed 14 days in a first rate hotel. I explained to Baron Frisch, who later intended to send us donations, that I needed money to pay the hotel bill and my return fare. I now have a dim recollection that since I didn’t want to take the money as a ‘present’ from him and he for his part didn’t want it back, it was agreed that Bruhn who was just as much a scoundrel then as now, should receive it. I had forgotten the whole bloody business; however, I now wrote to Bruhn that I couldn’t remember any financial transaction with him. Since the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was banned when I got back to Cologne from Hamburg and I myself was kicked out of Prussia, it was possible that in the whirl of events at the time I had forgotten. It is still striking that he waited from 1849 to 1865 to remind me. But it was a simple matter. He should let me know by letter how much he thought he had on me and send me Grubel’s address. I would then write to Grubel myself. If the latter confirmed what he said, his demand would be satisfied. This procedure is absolutely essential, as I am still uncertain about the matter even at this moment, and the way I have been fleeced by claims of this kind is really scandalous.

2. From the enclosed from Schily you will see what transpired in Paris whither we sent Le Lubez to settle the disputes that had broken out there. (We had given Schily ditto full power to negotiate, as we were aware of Le Lubez’s bias towards Lefort. Here I should just mention in passing that Beluze, President of the People’s Bank, who controls the few Paris Associations and their organ L'Association, is with Lefort.) What else happens — which will only be concluded this evening, as far as our intervention is concerned — in the next letter.

3. The things from Siebel returned. It strikes me as most unfortunate that he gives London as the origin of the notice put in the Düsseldorfer Zeitung, thus exposing me as the presumed author.

4. Letter from Liebknecht enclosed.

5. One copy of the circular from the Geneva Branch Association enclosed.

6. The letter from Meissner enclosed.

7. Lange: not to be directly rebuffed. Write and tell him that he would do best to post the thing to you, 2 copies, and you would send one to me each time. As he rightly realises himself, after our recent experience we would have to hold back for the present from making contributions to any German paper. He would, of course, have the same right as any other Editor of a journal to reprint whatever extracts he liked from your pamphlet.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

The first numbers (2 sheets) of Blind’s Eidgenosse have come, with the only contributions by Blind, Struve and Rasch. Trivia. Emblem consisting of hand with dagger, to kill the ‘tyrants’.

Engels To Joseph Weydemeyer

In St Louis

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 121;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, 1906-1907, and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.

Manchester, 10 March 1865

Dear Weydemeyer,

At last I have got down to answering your letter of 20 January. I had sent it to Marx who — partly because he was indisposed — kept it a very long while, in fact did not return it until a week ago today, so that my letter could no longer catch the steamer; I was too occupied with business on that day.

My best thanks for your detailed answers to my questions. With the negligent reporting on militaria in the papers here, I had lost the thread of all the ‘combined’ operations; I found the Red River expedition quite puzzling and I was not much wiser about Sherman’s move eastward from Vicksburg, as there was no mention here of the Southern corps advancing from New Orleans. These combined operations with a point of meeting up not merely in the enemy’s territory but even behind his very lines show precisely how crude are the ideas of strategy of a nation that has no experience of war whatever. And yet if the noble Wrangel and Prince Frederick Charles had not been 2 to 1 in the Danish war they would have got up to much the same tricks. The battle at Missunde and the 2 inexplicable ‘demonstrations’ (to give a nameless thing some kind of name, nevertheless) against Düppel before the assault were, if anything, even more childish.

As to Grant’s conduct at Richmond, I am trying to explain it in another way. I am completely of the same opinion as you that strategically the only correct thing was to attack Richmond from the west. However, it seems to me — insofar as one can form a judgement from such a distance and from such vague reports — that Grant preferred the eastern side for 2 reasons:

1. because he could provision himself more easily there. Whilst on the western side he commanded only the roads to Fredericksburg and to Tennessee (both crossing areas that had been exhausted), on the eastern side he had the Fredericksburg line, and the York and James Rivers as well. Since the difficulty of supplying large armies with provisions has played an important part throughout the war, I would not like to condemn Grant out of hand until I am clear on that score. You reproach him with having turned his back to the sea. But if one controls the sea and has secure points of embarkation (Monroe and Norfolk), then that is an advantage. Compare Wellington’s campaigns in Spain and the Crimean campaign, where the Allies, who had been victorious on the Alma, positively ran away from the enemy in order to ensure their rear the protective cover of the sea south of Sevastopol. That the possession of the Shenandoah valley was the best way to secure Washington is clear. But? The question arises

2. did Grant (and Lincoln) want to have Washington completely secure? On the contrary, it seems to me that with the loose constitution of the Federation and the great indifference to the war in some parts of the North, Lincoln never seriously wanted to drive the Confederates out of Richmond, that, on the contrary, he just wanted to pin them down in a position where they represented something of a threat to Washington, Pennsylvania and even New York. I believe that without that he would have got neither the recruits nor the money to finish the war. I certainly believe that Grant would have very much liked to have taken Richmond in the last 3-4 months, but he has not sufficient forces to do so. I see them estimated at from 70-90,000 men and Lee at 50-70,000. If this ratio is approximately correct, then, with his attack acknowledged to be strategically wrong, he has done everything possible to frustrate any offensive defence by Lee, and to encircle Richmond on at least 3 sides out of 4. For, after distinguishing himself amongst all the other generals of North and South in the last 2 years just by his brilliant use of counter-attacks, I cannot believe that Lee would now abandon this tactic unless forced to. It was, however, a stupendous gain for the North if it succeeded in pinning down the South’s best army at Richmond, in one corner of the southern territory, because of a childish point d'honneur, until the whole hinterland was cut off and militarily disrupted for the South, firstly by conquest of the Mississippi valley and then again by Sherman’s campaign, until finally, and this seems to be the case now, all the Union’s available troops are marching on Richmond and one decisive blow can put an end to the whole business.

The latest news we have is from New York, dated 25 February, i.e. it includes the taking of Charleston and Wilmington, and Sherman’s advance from Columbia to Winnsborough. This Sherman appears to be the only fellow in the North who knows how to use his men’s legs to win battles. But he must, incidentally, have splendid lads under him. I can’t wait to see what will happen. If Lee assesses his desperate situation aright, he has no choice but to pack up and go south. But where to? The only way open to him is to Lynchburg and Tennessee; but that would be exceedingly hazardous to march into such a narrow mountain valley with just one railway, and Knoxville and Chattanooga fortified ahead of him. Besides, that would probably mean sacrificing Beauregard, Hardee and all other Confederate troops positioned in North Carolina, and exposing his flank to Sherman. Or he could advance from Petersburg, turn Grant’s left flank and march directly south against Sherman? Daring, but better; the only way to draw to himself the remnants of the fleeing armies, delay Grant by destroying the railways and bridges, and fall on Sherman with superior strength. If the latter offers battle to this combined force, he will certainly be beaten; if he falls back toward the coast, he will open up the road toward Augusta for Lee who will there be able to make his first respite. But Sherman and Grant would then surely join forces and Lee would then again be faced by a superior force, this time as good as in open country; for I do not believe the Confederates can again concentrate so many heavy guns in any one place inland as to organise another Richmond there. And even if they were to do so, they would only be jumping out of the frying-pan into the fire. Or else — invasion of the North? Jefferson Davis would no doubt be capable of this, but that would also spell the end within a fortnight.

Now, however, Lee can only send some of his forces southwards as well to join with Beauregard and company and stop Sherman, and this seems to me the most probable course. In this case, Sherman will probably give them a proper ‘drubbing’, as they say in South Germany, and then Lee will really be stuck. But even if Sherman were to be defeated, Lee would only have gained one month’s respite, and the troops advancing from every part of the coast — not to mention Grant’s successes in the meantime against the weakened Richmond army — would soon make his position as bad as it had been before. One way or another, the game is up, and I look forward to the arrival of each steamer with expectancy; there is a positive deluge of exciting news just now. The strategic speculations of the numerous Southern sympathisers here are most comical to listen to, they are all epitomised by the remark made by the Polish general Sznaycle in the Palatinate who said after every rout, ‘We are doing exactly what Kossuth did’.

Incidentally, I am most grateful to you for your explanations about military organisation in America, it was only as a result of them that I obtained a clear picture of many aspects of the war there. I have been familiar with the canons Napoléon for many a long year, the English had already replaced them (light, smooth-bore 12-pounders with a charge weighing 1/4 of the ball) when Louis Bonaparte re-invented them. You may have any number of Prussian howitzers, as they have all been withdrawn now and replaced by rifled 6-pounders and 4-pounders (which fire 13-pound and 9-pound heavy shells). I am not surprised that the elevation of your howitzers is only 5°, it was no higher with the old long howitzers the French had (until 1856), and, if I am not mistaken, the English ones were only a little more. In general, the high-angle fire from howitzers has been used for a long time only by the Germans; its great unreliability in range-finding in particular had brought it into disrepute.

Now to other matters.

A Frankfurt lawyer ‘von Schweitzer’ had indeed established himself in Berlin with a little paper called Der Social-Demokrat and asked us to write for it. As Liebknecht, who is in Berlin, was to join the editorial board, we accepted. But then, firstly, the little paper embarked on an insufferable cult of Lassalle, whilst we meanwhile received positive proof (the old Hatzfeldt woman told Liebknecht about it and urged him to work for the same ends) that Lassalle was much more deeply implicated with Bismarck than we had ever realised. There was an actual alliance between the two which had gone so far that Lassalle was to go to Schleswig-Holstein and there to advocate the annexation of the duchies by Prussia, while Bismarck had rather less definitely consented to the introduction of a sort of universal suffrage and more definitely to the right of combination and concessions regarding social policy, state support for workers’ associations, etc. The foolish Lassalle had no guarantee whatever from Bismarck, au contraire he would have been put in prison sans façon as soon as he became troublesome. The gentlemen on the Social-Demokrat knew this but, for all that, they continued to intensify their cult of Lassalle. In addition to that, the fellows allowed themselves to be intimidated by threats from Wagener (of the Kreuz-Zeitung) into paying court to Bismarck, flirting with him, etc., etc. That was the last straw. We published the enclosed statement and made our exit, with Liebknecht doing likewise. The Social-Demokrat then declared that we did not belong to the Social-Democratic Party, which excommunication naturally did not bother us. The whole Lassallean General Association of German Workers’ has taken such a wrong road that nothing can be done with it; however, it will not last long.

I was asked to write about the military question, which I did, but, in the meantime, relations between us became more strained, and the article turned into a pamphlet, which I have now had published separately; I am now sending you a copy of it by the same steamer. To judge by the newspapers I receive, the thing appears to be creating quite a furore, especially on the Rhine, and it will, at any rate, make it very difficult for the workers to ally themselves with reaction just now.

The International Association in London is going from strength to strength. In Paris especially, in London no less so. It is also going well in Switzerland and Italy. Only the German Lassalleans are refusing to bite, and in present circumstances least of all. However, we are again receiving letters and offers from all sides in Germany, a decisive change has taken place, and the rest will turn out right.

The only reply I can make to your wife’s question is that I have not yet entered into a state of holy matrimony.

Photographs enclosed, of Lupus and myself, I have come out a little too dark; but it is the only one I have left.

Schimmelpfennig has taken Charleston — Hurrah!

Write soon.

Your

F. Engels

Marx To Hermann Jung

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 131;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Moscow, 1934.

[London,] 13 March 1865

My dear Jung,

Mr Cremer has quite misunderstood me (and I shall write him immediately upon that point). I was so far from any intention of moving new amendments on Tuesday evening to the old resolutions that, before the arrival of your letter, I had to-day posted to Schily a letter containing the very same resolutions. I wrote him at the same time to wait with their communication until Thursday next, so as to give Mr Le Lubez the time to fulfil his functions, viz. to communicate himself the resolutions.

What I said to Cremer, and to Fox ditto, was, that if Le Lubez and Mr Wolff, by their foolish behaviour, had not excited the feelings, and killed the time, the resolutions would and might have been rédigées in a way more polite on the one, and more logical, on the other hand; [so that] f.i. Resolution II (concerning Lefort’s [defensive ways]) might, by a short phrase, have lost its aspect, while Resolution IV concedes too much to Lefort etc. All this might have been mended, and I expressed to Mr Cremer my regret that it had, after the vote on the contents of the resolutions, not been left to the subcommittee to give it the convenient stylistic form.

Yet, I should consider it the greatest folly to reopen the questions once settled, and which, as far as the substance of the resolutions goes, have been settled in the most fair spirit. I should consider it, particularly, quite unworthy of the Central Council to rescind one single word after the exhibitions Le Lubez and Wolff have made of themselves. Moreover, by my letter to Schily such a course has become impossible.

You will, of course, oblige me by communicating to me your résumé historique — but I beg you to understand me well. I shall like to read it, as the thing itself interests me, but not in order to control your writing. I am convinced beforehand that you will not embitter the spirits. I fear Mr Le Lubez has already sent to his friends private despatches in that childish spirit.

Yours fraternally

K. Marx

Engels to Friedrich Albert Lange

In Duisburg

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 135;

First published: in Die Neue Zeit, 1909.

Manchester, 29 March 1865, 7 Southgate

Dear Sir,

I must offer you my profound apologies for allowing your kind letter of the 2nd-4th inst. to remain unanswered for so long. I only hope you will not condemn me unheard. My excuse is that for the first few days I was greatly preoccupied in part with an accumulation of current business, but in part also with the large amount of urgent correspondence, which one always faces when one suddenly appears before the public again after long otium cum (vel sine) dignitate [honourable (or dishonourable) leisure] and at the same time has such merry adventures as we have had with the Social-Demokratchen. In addition to all that, I moved house, and that momentarily threw my papers into some disarray, in which your letter was mislaid; I only found it again the day before yesterday and I now hasten to reply to you.

I am most grateful to you for so kindly offering to send your Sphinx and other publications to Marx and myself. My bookseller here is Mr Franz Thimm, Manchester, through whom you may send everything to me. Sending things via the bookseller requires 3-4 weeks as a rule; if you would send me at least the first few Nos. in a simple open wrapper by post (it does not cost much), I should be obliged to you and will gladly reimburse you. Communications for Marx should be sent to me here, and he will receive them within 12 hours of arrival. As you yourself rightly realise, I could not commit myself at all at this stage regarding possible future contributions; let us leave the question open for the time being, although, in your case, we are at least not running the risk of incurring the suspicion of wishing to rule over any section of the proletariat in Germany from England.

Meanwhile, the involuntary delay in my reply has given me the opportunity to obtain your publication on the working-class question; I read it with great interest. I, too, was immediately struck on first reading Darwin by the remarkable similarity between his description of the vegetable and animal life and the Malthusian theory. Only my conclusion was different from yours, viz.: that it is to the everlasting disgrace of modern bourgeois development that it has not yet progressed beyond the economic forms of the animal kingdom. The so-called ‘economic laws’ are not eternal laws of nature but historical laws that appear and disappear, and the code of modern political economy, insofar as the economists have drawn it up correctly and objectively, is for us merely a summary of the laws and conditions in which modern bourgeois society can exist, in a word: its conditions of production and exchange expressed and summed up abstractly. For us, therefore, none of these laws, insofar as it is an expression of purely bourgeois relations, is older than modern bourgeois society; those which have been more or less valid for all previous history, are thus only an expression of such relations as are common to all forms of society based upon class rule and class exploitation. Amongst the former we may count the so-called Ricardian law, which is valid neither for serfdom nor for the slavery of antiquity; amongst the latter, whatever part of the so-called Malthusian theory can be sustained.

The parson Malthus filched this theory, like all his other ideas, directly from his predecessors; the only part of it which is truly his is the purely arbitrary application of the two progressions. The theory itself has long since been reduced by the economists in England to rational dimensions; the population exerts pressure on the means — not of subsistence, but of employment; mankind could multiply more rapidly than modern bourgeois society can stand. For us yet another reason to proclaim this bourgeois society to be a barrier to development which must fall.

You yourself raise the question of how the increase in the means of subsistence can be made to keep pace with the increase in population; but excepting one sentence in the preface, I find no attempt at an answer. We start from the premise that the same forces which have created modern bourgeois society — the steam engine, modern machinery, mass colonisation, railways and steamships, world trade — and which through the unending commercial crises are already now working towards its ruin and ultimate destruction — that these means of production and exchange will also be sufficient to reverse the relationship in a short while and to raise the productive power of every individual to such an extent that he will produce enough for the consumption of 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 persons, that enough people will become superfluous to urban industry to devote far more manpower than before to agriculture, that science will at last be applied to agriculture on a large scale as well and as systematically as in industry, that those areas of South Eastern Europe and Western America which have been inexhaustibly fertilised for us by nature itself will be exploited on a far mightier scale than before. Not until all these areas have been turned by the plough and there is then dearth, will it be time to say caveant consules.

Not enough is being produced, that is the root of the whole matter. But why is not enough being produced? Not because the limits of production have been reached — even for today and by present-day means. No, but because the limits of production are determined not by the number of hungry bellies, but rather by the number of purchasers with full purses. Bourgeois society has no desire, and can have no desire, to produce more. Those impecunious bellies, the labour which cannot be utilised with profit and is thus incapable of purchasing, fall prey to the mortality figures. Let us assume that there is a sudden boom in industry, such as is constantly occurring, to enable this labour to be employed with profit, then the labour will acquire the money with which to purchase, and the means of subsistence have as yet always been found. It is the endless circulus vitiosus in which the whole political economy revolves. One takes bourgeois conditions in their entirety as one’s premise, and then proves that each separate part is a necessary part thereof — ergo, an ‘eternal law’.

I was greatly amused by your description of the Schulzian co-operatives. We have been through all that here in a different form, although it is now more or less a thing of the past. People in Germany have yet to develop their proletarian pride.

There is a remark about old Hegel which I cannot let pass without comment: you deny him any deeper knowledge of the mathematical sciences. Hegel knew so much mathematics that none of his disciples was capable of editing the numerous mathematical manuscripts he left behind. The only man who, to my knowledge, has enough understanding of mathematics and philosophy to be able to do so is Marx. That the detail of the philosophy of nature is full of nonsense I will of course gladly grant you, but his real philosophy of nature is to be found in the second part of the Logic, in the theory of Essence, the true core of the whole doctrine. The modern scientific theory of the interaction of natural forces (Grove’s Correlation of Forces, which I think first appeared in 1838) is, however, only another expression or rather the positive proof of Hegel’s argument about cause, effect, interaction, force, etc. I am no longer a Hegelian, of course, but I still retain a deep feeling of piety and devotion for the titanic old fellow.

Yours very respectfully

Friedrich Engels

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 139;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 11 April [1865]

Dear Fred,

Returned home some twenty-four hours ago. So, for the moment just a few lines to let you know.

Letter from Wilhelmchen enclosed. I sent him the stamps he asked for.

Quoad B. Becker, I didn’t get to see his dirty work until I got here. But thought reply really was needed [‘the “President of Mankind”’]. (Rüstow and Herwegh have replied in the Nordstern on behalf of Hatzfeldt. Rüstow calls B. Becker a ‘police-spy’.) Sent it to Rheinische and Düsseldorfer. As soon as copies arrive, 1 for you.

I shall attend a sitting of the ‘International’ this evening for the first time for 3 weeks. In the interval, revolution. Le Lubez and Denoual gone, Dupont appointed French Secretary. As a result of Le Lubez’s intrigues, and more particularly those of Major Wolff who is a tool in Mazzini’s hand, the Italian delegates Lama and Fontana have left. Pretext: Lefort (who has meanwhile announced his departure in the journal L'Association) must keep his post as defender general in the Paris press. The Italian Working men’s Club has not withdrawn from the Association, but no longer has a representative on the Council. Meanwhile, I shall get Bakunin to lay some counter-mines for Mr Mazzini in Florence. The English Shoemakers’ Union — 5,000 strong — has joined the Association during my absence.

How’s the cotton-crisis? I want information on that point.

In great haste.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 140;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 12 April 1865

Dear Moor,

It’s good to have you back again, and I certainly hope this lousy squabble will soon be over. Letters from Dronke and Borkheim enclosed. I had told the latter how it was possible to work with Kolatschek’s great-German organ supporting Austrian rule in Hungary, Poland and Italy, as we would immediately have all our friends in the other countries down on us, hence the vague reply.

I had always half expected that the naive fraternité in the International Association would not last long. If there were an active political movement among the workers here, just the same splits would occur. It will pass through a lot more such phases and will take up a great deal of your time. But it does still remain something quite different from Lassalle’s Association.

I couldn’t resist a hearty laugh when I read in Wilhelmchen’s [Wilhelm Liebknecht’s] letter that the official Berlin community of that Association consists of 5 people, as there was recently a perfectly serious report in the Social-Demokrat of their transactions, in which they congratulated each other on such a large turn-out.

Ad vocem cotton-crisis, things are looking quite cheerful here. Cotton (middling Orleans) stood at 31 3/4d in July, was quoted at 14 3 /4d last Thursday, and today, if one is selling, it hardly fetches 14d. So, it has depreciated by more than half. It was still worth 27d on 30 December, which is a fall of 12 1/2 — 13d in 3 months! On top of that, there’s been a fall in flax, wool, sugar and all imports generally, which makes a loss of at least £40-50 mill. stg. You will readily understand that all the philistines are in a cold sweat. In Liverpool, bankruptcy has altogether gone out of fashion now. Anyone who becomes insolvent goes to his creditors (generally people there have only a couple), notifies them and offers them such and such an amount, which is always accepted at once as they are glad to get anything at all and have got to avoid any scandal so that the whole rotten edifice doesn’t collapse. Hundreds of such settlements are said to have been reached on the quiet, and today rumour even has it here that one of the biggest Stockport manufacturers, who owns 3 big factories and is reputed to have made £200,000 over the last few years in cotton speculation alone, has just come to a similar understanding on the quiet. But what we've seen so far is nothing. The bills, which were drawn from India against the white cotton, run out in the next 6 weeks, and there will be many more besides Joyce who will come to grief. A lot of people in Scotland are finished as well, and one fine day it’s bound to be the turn of the banks, and that'd be the end of the matter. The spinners and manufacturers are becoming bankrupt by the dozen in Austria, too — in the whole of Bohemia only ‘the great Liebig’ is still on his feet, all the others have gone bust — and in Poland it’s all just starting as well.

Industry itself is not much affected. The small fry mostly went bust ages ago or quietly melted away, and the big ones can operate reasonably profitably once more, if they can get any orders at all. Among them, the only ones who are going bust are those who have bad machinery or who couldn’t keep their fingers out of cotton. Everyone is making a loss on their stocks of cotton yarns and fabrics. We too could sing you a woeful song about that, twice as woeful for me in particular as it would have been if droned out last year. That’s what comes of being an associé.

Glorious is also the ethics of trade, as at present. You buy something today, and by the time it’s delivered, it is worth 3, 4, or 5d a pound less. This leads to all kinds of dirty tricks and repudiations, as people try to get out of these unprofitable contracts at any cost, and that lands you in interminable altercations and squabbling correspondence. I'm sick to the teeth with it. You can have no idea how much letter-writing and aggravation this entails.

I hope your wife got the £3? Final statement of account enclosed, I'll send the £12 in a few days, it’s too late for a Post Office order today.

Best wishes.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Hermann Jung

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 143;

First published: in Archiv fur die Geschichte des Sozialismus und der Arbeiterbewegung, Leipzig, 1916.

London, 13 April 1865

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill, N. W.

Dear Jung!

*In No. 30 of Der weisse Adler, 223 Münstergasse, Zürich there is a report of our Polish Meeting of 1 March. This report must have been translated from the Daily News or some other English middle-class paper which, intentionally, suppressed the Resolution, proposed in the name of the ‘International Association’, and unanimously adopted by the St Martin’s Hall Meeting.

As you are the Swiss Secretary, it belongs to you to rectify the report, and to request the Editor of the paper to print the notice which I translate literally from the Report in The Bee-Hive.

Yours fraternally

K. Marx

It goes without saying, dear Jung, that you can change the concluding words at your discretion. Since you are plus ou moins a Frenchman, I simply wanted to draft the scheme for you in German.

Marx To Leon Fontaine

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 144;

First published: in Russian, in Bolshevik, 1934.

[Draft]

London, 15 April 1865

Dear Citizen,

At its last sitting (see enclosure) the Central Council appointed me pro interim to be secretary for Belgium in place of Citizen Le Lubez, whose resignation as Council Member was unanimously accepted. Citizen Dupont has taken his place as secretary for France.

I will, if you wish, later give you a brief account of the disagreeable incidents which occurred within the Central Council. In my opinion, they were really instigated by a person alien to our Council, well known as an Italian patriot [Giuseppe Mazzini] but an inveterate enemy of the interests of the proletariat, without which republicanism could be no more than a new form of bourgeois despotism. Did he not, as one of his most blindly faithful followers confessed to me, go so far as to demand that all the passages hostile to the bourgeoisie should be deleted from the Italian translation of our ‘Address’.

Despite these regrettable incidents and the more or less voluntary resignation of several individuals, our Association is making glorious headway. Founded only a few months ago, today it already numbers almost 12,000 members in England alone.

The Central Council will be much obliged to you if you send me an official report on the present state of our society in Belgium.

In your correspondence please be so kind as to keep the official letters, which are destined for the Central Council’s archives, separate from such private communications as you may be good enough to send me.

My address is: A. Williams, Esq., 1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill, N. W. London.

Greetings and fraternity.

Karl Marx

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 147;

First published: in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[Manchester,] 16 April 1865

Dear Moor,

The Nordsterns returned enclosed. Herwegh and Rustow have certainly acquired a funny Dido dog in Reusche. The fellow is a real comic turn with his solemn declarations. The inevitable oath beside Lassalle’s dead body makes a precious counterpart to Willich’s apple-tree. It’s a real blessing that these people live so far away and that they still show a certain reserve in their attempts to approach us.

I haven’t received No. 43 of the Social-Demokrat so let me have it some time if there’s anything particular in it.

Your

F. E.

What do you say about Richmond? I had expected that Lee would act like a soldier and surrender, instead of taking to his heels, at least so as to secure better terms for the army. But it’s better the way it is. He has ended like a scoundrel, and the tragedy closes on a comic note.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 149;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 1 May 1865

Dear Fred,

You must excuse me for not writing until today and thus breaking my last promise. It happened not because it is ‘sheer delight to break one’s word’, but because I really am overworked, as completing my book [Capital], on the one hand, and the International Association on the other, are making very heavy demands on my time.

Today is little Jenny’s birthday, and this evening I shall be having Ernest Jones to my house along with Odger, Cremer, Fox and Jung, so it will be a political birthday party. Laura had ‘the question popped’ by one Charles Manning, born in South America, English father, Spanish mother. He’s rich and generally a nice fellow, but Laura ‘does not care a pin for him’. ‘She has already known how to damp’ the passionate southern temperament. However, as my girl is a friend of his sisters, and he is frightfully in love, it is a disagreeable case.

I enclose a ‘curiosity’. The Nordstern’s correction makes it a worthy organ of the German louts.

I am also enclosing for you the latter end of a letter from Schily, whose report on the Moses woman will amuse you.

The great achievement of the ‘International Association’ is this:

The Reform League is our work. On the inner committee of 12 (6 middleclassmen and 6 workingmen), the workingmen are all members of our Council (including Eccarius). We have baffled all attempts by the middle class to mislead the working class. This time the movement in the provinces is completely dependent on that in London. Ernest Jones, e.g., had despaired till we set the ball a-going. If we succeed in re-electrifying the political movement of the English working class, our Association will already have done more for the European working class, without making any fuss, than was possible in any other way. And there is every prospect of success.

You know that the Italian society has not withdrawn from the Association, but its delegates have from the Council. We now have Spaniards on it instead. One Roman nation for the other. If those fellows don’t appoint new delegates soon, as we have asked them to, Bakunin will have to arrange for some life Italians.

Weber junior has been thrown out of the workers’ society here for making false reports to the Social-Demokrat and for stirring up trouble in the branch society ‘Teutonia’, which is run by two fanatical Prussians by the name of Klinker.

Our joint statement really was successful beyond all expectation. Not merely have we blown apart the ‘General Association of German Workers’ as an organ of the Prussian government and in six words generally cleared the heads of the German workers of their intoxication with royalty. The present split in the Party of Progress was also the direct result of our stand.

The chivalry of the South has ended worthily. In addition, Lincoln’s assassination was the most stupid act they could have committed. Johnson is stern, inflexible, revengeful and as a former poor White has a deadly hatred of the oligarchy. He will make less fuss about these fellows, and, because of the treachery, he will find the temper of the North commensurate with his intentions.

Did you see how Blind heads the letter of condolence from the ‘influential’ Germans? Blind is a genius in his way. In the very nick of time he does not merely go running to Freiligrath, etc., but has enough presence of mind to realise that, of the other signatories, alphabetically ‘Berndes’ would open the list. So, he runs first to Freiligrath, etc., and gets him first of all to form a group and, after that worthy (who is now at one with Ruge as well), certain other influentials, I almost said infinitesimals, such as Heintzmann and Kinkel, and puts himself ‘alphabetically’ at the top. Then he goes running to Berndes and gets him to start a second column next to himself, so that another lot of names, Trübner, etc., follows on. That is how the matter appears in The Times. In the same day’s Morning Star the second column is added to the bottom of the first, with Blind at the top of the whole, and his footman Freiligrath after him, etc. And not content with that, at his instigation, the Star of the same number also carries a notice on the front page that ‘Karl Blind heads, etc.’.

Isn’t that genius for you?

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 151;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 3 May 1865

Dear Moor,

A belated many happy returns to little Jenny on her — 20th? — birthday. The other affair looks just like Laura all over. But what else can one say except repeat the verdict of the Stalybridge jury: serves him right.

I'll be sending all the things back to you in a few days time. I was very pleased to see in the Nordstern, that something has at last been started against Becker and Schweitzer in Solingen, too. As all I have seen concerning this business since your departure has been the Social-Demokrat and two letters from Liebknecht, I am not at all clear as to what has come to pass on the Rhine in this connection; from the miserable silence maintained by the Social-Demokrat about developments in the General Association of German Workers, I could only deduce that things must be looking bad for these gentlemen. But it is understandable that I really do need to know how things stand on the Rhine, especially since in the beginning the scoundrels had some momentary success there. If you've got any material on it, please let me have it, I'll send everything back to you, and in general I will as a rule send all the documents back in future because now you need to have this stuff together.

Have you taken out a subscription to the Nordstern? It would be a good thing if you did, because we've got to know what’s happening.

It is vital for us to have some contacts with the workers on the Rhine so that in future we can counter intrigues of that kind from the outset. Apropos, peculiar things seem to have been happening to Klings. Some jackass gave him my address as 58 Dover Street. Klings goes there, does not find me, of course, and goes to see Rode in Liverpool, and the latter tells Eichhoff I'd pretended to be out when Klings called, did not wish to see him, what is this supposed to mean, etc., to a man like Klings who was after all going to ‘organise everything’ in America with Weydemeyer and the others (which others?), etc., etc. Monsieur Rode, whom I've never met, did thereby express his surprise that I had ‘not yet’ sent him a copy of my pamphlet. Can you understand that?

The statement attacking the President of Mankind is very good. Just what was needed and no more.

The worst of it is that the people in Germany will now demand that someone assumes the leadership over them, and who can do it? Eccarius would be the man, but he won’t want to leave London.

The International Association really has gained an enormous amount of ground in such a short time and with so little to-do. But it is a good thing it is at present occupied in England, instead of eternally having to deal with the disorders in France. So, you have something to compensate you for the time it’s cost you.

How’s the book [Capital] going?

As far as the strategic situation is concerned, at Richmond Grant has achieved a precise replica of the battle of Jena, and with the same result: the whole of the enemy army is trapped. Only he didn’t have so far to march to gather the fruits.

Johnston has now surrendered, too, so I've won my wager of 2 months ago: that by 1 May the Southerners would have no army left. Whoever still offers resistance will be taken in as a brigand, and rightly so. At any rate, Johnson will insist on confiscation of the great estates, which will make the pacification and reorganisation of the South rather more acute. Lincoln would scarcely have insisted on it.

The Southern sympathisers here are consoling themselves for the hypocritical wailing they were obliged to put on over the assassination [of Lincoln], by prophesying that it'll be Grant I, Emperor of America, within 4 weeks. What jackasses they have made of themselves!

Incidentally, their ‘Majesties’ must be absolutely furious that Lincoln’s assassination has made such a colossal impact throughout the world. None of them has yet had such an honour.

Best wishes to your wife and the girls.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 154;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 9 May 1865

Dear Fred,

You need not send anything back (except Schily’s letter). just keep the things safely. I enclose one Free Press (the queer article on the ‘Reconstruction of Italy’ is from the pen of the High Priest himself, from Urquhart), also two Nordsterns (one of them somewhat out of date). I've got a subscription to the latter, but no longer to the Social-Demokrat. The latest Nordstern will give you some idea of the situation on the Rhine. Incidentally, the total number of the faithful whom B. Becker still commands is barely 1,000.

Before I forget: there were several allusions to your pamphlet in the debate in the Prussian Chamber. Gneist, for instance, said the Minister of War would not persuade them, even if his statistics spoke with the tongue of ‘Engels’ (Laughter.) (That is how the affair appeared in the Berliner Reform.)

As everywhere, the London workers, of course, also include a knot of asses, fools and rogues, rallying round a scoundrel. The scoundrel in this case is ‘George Potter’, a rat of a man, supported by a venal but witty Irishman by the name of Connolly, who is a dangerous stump-orator. Although the bourgeoisie hate the said Potter as chief strike-manager, they do, nevertheless, support him against our people because they smell venality in him, whereas they know that our people are true men. This Potter derives his power particularly from the fact that he is presently the Manager of The Bee-Hive, the official organ of the trades unions, although he uses it against the Official Council of these unions which is in our hands. Since the paper is based on shares, the idea is now to distribute as many shares as possible (5sh. per share) amongst our workers. For my part I have undertaken to collect the money for about 30 shares. For this, I'm counting on you (single handed or with friends) for £5, I write to Dronke for £1 and I will pay the rest myself. (Although my function with the Central Council costs me a lot of money, compared with what I can afford.) The money must already be at hand this week, as the General Meeting of the shareholders is next week. If we are only strong enough (and Odger, for instance, has guaranteed 50 shares) to elect the Directors, we shall have that rogue Potter (who is only the Manager) under our thumbs. This matter is of decisive importance for the whole movement.

E. Jones was here, very charming socially speaking. But between ourselves, he is only trying to use our Association for electoral agitation. Of the 12 cards I sent him, he returned 11, he had not sold a single one, whereas poor Schily, for instance, paid for 24 for himself alone. I told him he should just put them back in his pocket again, I would dispose of them later, but I could not appear in front of the English workers and tell them that. By and by he will find out that if only for speculative reasons he should not have treated the business so lightly and rather contemptibly. I will write to him and tell him to hand over the ‘Addresses’ to you. You can give them to whomsoever you please. They are just dead weight with him. Incidentally, I don’t take kindly to the fact that he was here to wangle a job as Recorder out of Sir G. Grey either.

Today I am to submit an ‘Address to President Johnson Mr Le Lubez wants to return to the Council as — Delegate for Deptford, the same fellow as resigned as Delegate for France, but his admittance (We have to confirm the delegates) will not run quite so smoothly as he seems to fancy. I would be pleased if you could form even just a branch of 6 men in Manchester, and could get yourself elected as their correspondent for London. For the corresponding people are eo ipso members of the Central Council, and have a seat and a vote on it, when at London.

New branches have been formed in Lyon, Neufchâteau (département des Vosges) and St Denis. The French branches (apart from Paris) are not linked with Paris, in view of the existing laws, but directly with London.

I'm hoping to put the finishing touches to my book [Capital] by 1 September (despite numerous interruptions). It’s going ahead well, although I am still not quite well.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 157;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 13 May 1865

Dear Fred,

The £5 received with thanks. Will be invested as suggested.

You are right about the Committee in Manchester.

Quoad E. Jones, it is necessary to march with him for the time being. He and his people will be figuring at the next Manchester Conference (next Tuesday) together with our delegates (Odger and Cremer on the part of the International Association), Howell as secretary of the Reform League (Bricklayer, one of the members of our Council) and Beales and Mason Jones as bourgeois representatives of the same League.

Without us this Reform League would never have come into existence, or else it would have fallen into the hands of the middleclass. The glorious failure of Baines’s Bill (which will result in a change of Ministry and the coming in of the Tories), originally supported by the Government, which wanted some such small measure for the hustings, occurred in the Lower House itself with direct reference to the ‘extravagant’ demands recently put up by the working class (i.e. our men).

As Dronke wrote me, Reinach I, who is now Managing Director of the Bank of Switzerland, will be ruthlessly putting an end to the office in London, which is causing nothing but expenses. Reinach I is, of course, not bound by the same political and personal considerations as Fazy and Klapka were.

A ghastly carbuncle has broken out again on my left hip, near the inexpressible part of the body.

Regards to Mrs Lizzy.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Apropos. Monsieur Le Lubez, who had miscalculated about how important and dangerous he is, wants now to return to the Central Council in the capacity of a representative ‘for Greenwich'! We replied that d'abord we had to wait for certain letters to come, which he had written to France at the time of the conflict.

I hardly think the Social-Demokrat will see out another quarter. Moses believed himself safely ensconced and didn’t want to give up his prestigious position as Lassalle’s really secret agent at any price. Le pauvre diable!

Lassalle’s will is now proven. He has left nothing to B. Becker apart from his ‘nomination’, accompanied by rules of conduct dictated ‘with all severity and authority’.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 159;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 20 May 1865

Dear Fred,

Cutting enclosed which includes my address to Johnson.

Edgar’s reappearance did, of course, surprise us greatly. Quite the fellow I thought him, and his career quite as I expected it. It is a pity that he could not always have been right-hand to Garibaldi He would have suited him to a tee. But the poor devil is still very weak. He will be staying here for some time, apropos of which you could be doing a good work by contributing to the replenishment of my wine-cellar.

I am working like a horse at the moment, as I must make use of the time when I am fit for work, and the carbuncles are still with me, though they only trouble me locally and do not disturb the brain-pan.

In between times, since one cannot always be writing, I am doing some differential calculus dx/dy. I have no patience to read anything else at all. Any other kind of reading always drives me back to my writing-desk.

Special meeting of the ‘International’ this evening. A good old codger, an old Owenist, Weston (carpenter), has put up the following two propositions that he is constantly defending in The Bee-Hive:

1. that a general rate in the rise of the rate of wages would be of no benefit to the workers;

2. that the trades unions for that reason, etc., are harmful.

If these two propositions, in which he alone in our Society believes, were to be accepted, we should be in a terrible mess, both in respect of the trades unions here and the infection of strikes now prevailing on the Continent.

He will be supported in the matter by a native Englishman — since non-members are also admitted to this meeting — who has written a pamphlet to the same effect. I am, of course, expected to produce a refutation. I ought therefore really to have worked out my réplique for this evening, but I thought it more important to get on with writing my book, and so I shall have to rely on improvisation.

I know in advance, of course, what the two main points will be:

1. that wages determine the value of commodities;

2. that if the capitalists pay 5s. today instead of 4, tomorrow they will sell their commodities for 5s. instead of 4 (being enabled to do so by the increased demand).

Trite though that is, and however little it penetrates the topmost surface of things, it is, nevertheless, not easy to explain to the ignorant all the competing economic questions involved. You can’t compress a course of political economy into 1 hour. But we shall do our best.

Edgar regards it as a good omen that he met you first in England. He liked Lizzy very much.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

It is a most strange irony of fate that this Edgar, who never exploited anyone other than himself and was always a workman in the strictest sense of the word, went through a war of and with starvation for the slave-owners. Ditto that both brothers-in-law have for the moment been ruined by the American war.

Marx To Wilhelm Liebknecht

In Berlin

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 160;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1946.

[London, about 25 May 1865]

Dear Library,

I should prefer it if the translation of the Address could appear in the Reform and the Rheinische Zeitung. It will, of course, be necessary to say that the original is in English, and it will do no harm if I am named as the author. The bourgeois papers are still holding it against us that of A. Lincoln’s replies to the various messages of congratulations on his re-election, only the reply to ours was more than a formal acknowledgment of receipt.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 42, p. 161;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Bd. 3, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA Abt. III, Bd. 3, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 24 June 1865

Dear Fred,

You must excuse my long silence. The whole time I have been suffering throughout from bilious nausea (probably on account of the heat), had all kinds of other troubles as well, and apart from that I have used the time, when fit to write, for official work on my book. [Capital] You know how, when one is in such a condition, one is always resolving to send letters but never manages to.

Not much new to report. The valiant Nordstern did not appear since my last despatch to you, probably for lack of money. I received it again today, and it does not mention the interval at all. As you will see, the rag is nothing but a dungheap of loutism. In their denunciation of B. Becker, these fellows are now declaring everyone a ‘traitor’ who dares to lay a finger on even one syllable of the truth as revealed by Lassalle. Meanwhile, Mr B. Becker has provisionally ceded his chairmanship to that lout Fritzsche (of Leipzig) and set up his residence in Berlin in order to do business with Mr Bismarck directly.

A pretty shambles Baron Izzy’s whole movement has degenerated into! But the fellow obviously had the right instinct for how to make himself Saviour of the German louts! Meanwhile, the ‘unfaithful one’ is living in blissful happiness as a boyar lady with her Wallachian in Bucharest.

I have had no letters from Liebknecht for some while. But that is no doubt because for a long time, while my correspondence was suspended, I did not answer the notes that used to come in almost daily from him, none of them having anything to say, and each successive one invariably confirming the nullity of its precursor.

In respect of the ‘International Association’, I will just mention the following here:

The Italian gentlemen have come back and indicated to us last Tuesday that they have yet once again nominated Major Wolff as their delegate. Mr Mazzini appears to have convinced himself that he may need us, whereas we care not a farthing for him.

A Yankee by the name of Leon Lewis (in Paris at the moment) has become the American secretary. In my opinion, he is worthless, although he has plenty of money and even more ambition. The fellow imagined that by founding a paper, The Commoner, he could revolutionise England in 24 hours or in 6 months at the very least. He offered this paper-to-be to us as our organ, but found that we are setting very business-like and by no means enthusiastic conditions, and so he has ‘temporarily’ left for France with his wife, who is also a great politician, I suspect to see if he can apply his ‘lever’ there with any more success.

I should like your advice on the following point:

I read a paper (which would perhaps cover two printed sheets) at the Central Council about the question raised by Mr Weston as to the effect of a general rise of wages, etc. The first part of it is a reply to Weston’s nonsense; the second a theoretical exposition, insofar as it was appropriate for the occasion.

Now they want to have it printed. On the one hand, that could perhaps be useful to me, since they are in contact with J. St. Mill, Professor Beesly, Harrison, etc. On the other hand, I have my doubts:

1. to have ‘Mr Weston’ as adversary is not exactly ‘vairy-flettering';

2. the second part of the paper contains, in an extraordinarily condensed but relatively popular form, many new ideas which are anticipated from my book, whilst at the same time it does, of necessity, have to skate over a lot of problems. The question is, whether it is advisable to anticipate things of that kind in such a way? I think you can decide on this better than I can because you can look at the matter with more detachment from a distance.

I also had a lot of trouble to put off the Congress announced for this year, in the face of pressure from Schily, J. Ph. Becker, and some of the Paris Committee. I did, however, succeed — and that was decisive — in persuading the Council here that in view of the electoral agitation, etc., there should only be a preliminary (private) conference in London this year, to which the Central Foreign Committees would each send one delegate (not the affiliated societies but their administrative committees). I am certain that the Brussels Congress would come to nought. The time was not yet ripe for it.

Our Eccarius has become one of the main London electoral agitators and would have accepted the invitation to agitate in the country (on £2 per week), if this were not the height of the tailoring season. He has a peculiarly dry, humorous manner of speaking which particularly appeals to the English.

Edgar is already much recovered. An odd fish for whom fodder and fancy clothes really are the only things of account; as egotistical as a dog or a cat, but a kind-natured one. His brain has also begun to display certain activity.

Johnson’s policy likes me not. A ludicrous affectation of severity towards individuals; hitherto excessively vacillating and weak when it comes down to it. The reaction has already set in in America and will soon be much fortified if the present lackadaisical attitude is not ended immediately.

What do you say to the debates in the Prussian Chamber? At any rate, the revelations about the judicial system, etc., following in rapid succession were splendid. Ditto the obvious blow which the National Association Great-Prussia men received, as was shown particularly in the Polish debates.

Ad vocem Poland, I was most interested to read the work by Elias Regnault (the same who wrote the ‘histoire des principautés danubiennes'), ‘La Question Européenne, faussement nommée La Question Polonaise’. I see from it that Lapinski’s dogma that the Great Russians are not Slavs has been advocated on linguistic, historical and ethnographical grounds in all seriousness by Monsieur Duchinski (from Kiev, Professor in Paris); he maintains that the real Muscovites, i.e., inhabitants of the former Grand Duchy of Moscow, were for the most part Mongols or Finns, etc., as was the case in the parts of Russia situated further east and in its south-eastern parts. I see from it at all events that the affair has seriously worried the St Petersburg cabinet (since it would put an end to Panslavism in no uncertain manner). All Russian scholars were called on to give responses and refutations, and these in the event turned out to be terribly weak. The purity of the Great Russian dialect and its connection with Church Slavonic appear to lend more support to the Polish than to the Muscovite view in this debate. During the last Polish insurrection Duchinski was awarded a prize by the National Government for his ‘discoveries’. It has ditto been shown geologically and hydrographically that a great ‘Asiatic’ difference occurs east of the Dnieper, compared with what lies to the west of it, and that (as Murchison has already maintained) the Urals by no means constitute a dividing line. Result as obtained by Duchinski: Russia is a name usurped by the Muscovites. They are not Slavs; they do not belong to the Indo-Germanic race at all, they are des intrus [intruders], who must be chased back across the Dnieper, etc. Panslavism in the Russian sense is a cabinet invention, etc.

I wish that Duchinski were right and at all events that this view would prevail among the Slavs. On the other hand, he states that some of the peoples in Turkey, such as Bulgars, e.g., who had previously been regarded as Slavs, are non-Slav.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Philistine Freiligrath descended on us with wife and daughter 2 weeks ago! He now has his immediate superior Reinach on his back who is here ‘to investigate’ and is giving him a proper roasting.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 167;.

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[Manchester,] 15 July 1865

Dear Moor,

Liebknecht has been expelled from Prussia; has he written to you since and given you his address? The poor devil will probably need money, and a few pounds will be more valuable to him at this moment than otherwise. But where should they be sent to?

Mr Johnson’s policy is less and less to my liking, too. Nigger[1]-hatred is coming out more and more violently, and he is relinquishing all his power vis-à-vis the old lords in the South. If this should continue, all the old secessionist scoundrels will be in Congress in Washington in 6 months time. Without coloured suffrage nothing can be done, and Johnson is leaving it up to the defeated, the ex-slaveowners, to decide on that. It is absurd. Nevertheless, one must still reckon on things turning out differently from what these barons imagined. After all, the majority of them have been completely ruined and will be glad to sell land to immigrants and speculators from the North. The latter will arrive soon enough and make a good number of changes. I think the mean whites will gradually die out. Nothing more will become of this race; those who are left after 2 generations will merge with the immigrants to make a completely different race.

The niggers will probably turn into small squatters as in Jamaica. Thus ultimately the oligarchy will go to pot after all, but the process could be accomplished immediately at one fell swoop, whereas it is now being drawn out.

I don’t think that you would win many laurels by a disputation with Mr Weston, and it would certainly not make a good début in English economic literature. Otherwise, I cannot see it would do much harm to anticipate a few odd points from your book [Capital] — N. B. if the latter is really almost finished now — how does it stand? The ultimate and final date for completion was 1 September, and the price, you remember, is 12 bottles of wine.

In the elections here Jones has been working body and soul for Heywood, but as a teetotaller and permissive Bills man he won’t pull much with the workers. Moore has been working hard, too.

The Manchester snobs will be gladdened by James, the fellow wants to become a judge and nothing more. The election is costing him a pretty penny, just for the champagne his committee and cronies have swigged. Talk about Bribery, corruption and treating, fellows like that fat Knowles came in droves to the Queen’s Hotel, where the headquarters was, gorged their fill and swigged rivers of champagne, and everything was settled with a slip of paper on which a committee-member wrote: valid for 2 luncheons and 3 bottles champagne. In Lancaster, the 3 candidates together disbursed £20,000, and there was free booze for a whole week in every pub. I was here in the Queen’s Hotel at 5 o'clock in the afternoon, the elegant smoking room looked like the old den in Windmill Street, and customers were served by cellar boys in white shirt-sleeves and aprons, instead of barmaids in satin dresses. The whole company was drunk, and at half past six the landlord had to have the hotel cleared by a police patrol. My task consisted in getting James’ committee people to tipple until they were incapable of doing their job, and in several cases I was successful beyond expectation.

I've had a very hard time at the office, Charles was away, Franz Ermen ditto, and a colossal amount of work to boot. Things are better now. I am now on Grimm’s Fairy Tales, German heroic epic, ancient Frisian law, etc. As soon as I have got through that somewhat, I'll have a serious go at Old Norse. The poetry in it is a tough nut because of its deliberate obscurity and all the many names in the mythology, and I can see it’s no use doing this just as a side line; I need to spend 4 weeks all at once on it and nothing else, when I have little to do.

Many regards to the Ladies.

Your

F. E.

Moore has been asking me about the shares for The Bee-Hive; how do things stand? And how did you get on with Potter?

1.: “Nigger” did not have quite the pejorative meaning in 19th Century England that use of the word later acquired. Note that all the words in bold were in English in the original.

Marx To Leon Fontaine

In Brussels

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 170;

First published: Marx and Engels, Works; Moscow, 1934.

[Draft]

[London,] 25 July 1865

Dear Citizen,

Some considerable time ago I sent a letter to you by an Englishman, who was to visit Germany and travel through Brussels. Since then I have had no news, either from you or from my Englishman. I shall not refer back to my reply to your letter, but will deal solely with current matters.

Mr Le Lubez has rejoined the Central Council as delegate from an English branch, and the Italian society in London has reinstated Mr Wolff as its representative on the Council.

Mr Charles Limousin, one of our correspondents in Paris and editor of the Tribune ouvrière..., following the seizure of the Tribune ouvrière, and being unable to find another printer in Paris, went to Brussels in an attempt to bring out the paper there. Whilst there, he investigated the state of our affairs. He was told that, after it had unanimously approved your proposal that it should amalgamate with our Association, the Société Fédérative had withdrawn:

1. because it insisted on the right to choose its own correspondents and not have them imposed on it by the Central Council;

2. because it refused to pay for the membership cards, although it remitted 1f. 50 just as before.

According to Mr Limousin’s letter, you had then approached the Société typographique, but with the same result owing to the same difficulties.

With regard to the election of correspondents, the Central. Council has acknowledged the right of affiliated societies to choose their own representatives. It has only retained the power to confirm them. Things were different in Brussels because no society had yet been constituted there. Would it not be possible to reach a compromise, whereby the societies would accept you as their correspondent, but they would, for their part, choose an administrative committee, as was done in Paris and Geneva?

With regard to the dues, the societies will readily realise that the Central Council would be prevented from any general action if all the affiliated societies claimed the right not to pay dues. It appears that the objection is to paying dues twice. Would it not be possible to find an amicable solution to these matters? The Central Council will make any concession compatible with its responsibilities.

For my part, I am convinced that your actions were dictated solely by your zeal for the common cause, and I am appealing to this same zeal in asking you to work for reconciliation and restoration of relations. You would oblige me greatly by replying immediately, firstly because I have to give the Central Council a report on this affair, and secondly because a preliminary conference of members of the various administrative committees will be taking place in London on 25 September.

The Central Council is persuaded that the congress cannot take place this year, but the preliminary conference in London will make preparations for it.

With fraternal greetings

Ch. Marx

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 172;.

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

[London,] 31 July 1865

Dear Engels,

As you may have suspected, the reasons for my prolonged silence are not the most pleasant.

For two months I have been living solely on the pawnshop, which means that a queue of creditors has been hammering on my door, becoming more and more unendurable every day. This fact won’t come as any surprise to you when you consider: 1. that I have been unable to earn a farthing the whole time and 2. that merely paying off the debts and furnishing the house cost me something like £500. I have kept accounts (as to this item) pence for pence, as I myself found it unbelievable how the money disappeared. To top that, I have been sent every conceivable, antediluvian IOU from Germany where God knows what rumours had been circulated.

To begin with, I wanted to come up to you to discuss the matter with you in person. But, at the present moment, any time lost cannot be made up as it is not good to interrupt my work. Last Saturday I told the Sub-Committee of the ‘International’ that I was going away, so as at least to have a fortnight for once completely free of disturbance for pushing on with my work.

I assure you that I would rather have had my thumb cut off than write this letter to you. It is truly soul-destroying to be dependent for half one’s life. The only thought that sustains me in all this is that the two of us form a partnership together, in which I spend my time on the theoretical and party side of the business. It is true my house is beyond my means, and we have, moreover, lived better this year than was the case before. But it is the only way for the children to establish themselves socially with a view to securing their future, quite apart from everything they have suffered and for which they have at least been compensated for a brief while. I believe you yourself will be of the opinion that, even from a merely commercial point of view, to run a purely proletarian household would not be appropriate in the circumstances, although that would be quite all right, if my wife and I were by ourselves or if the girls were boys.

Now, regarding my work, I will tell you the plain truth about it. There are 3 more chapters to be written to complete the theoretical part (the first 3 books). Then there is still the 4th book, the historical-literary one, to be written, which will, comparatively speaking, be the easiest part for me, since all the problems have been resolved in the first 3 books, so that this last one is more by way of repetition in historical form. But I cannot bring myself to send anything off until I have the whole thing in front of me. Whatever shortcomings they may have, the advantage of my writings is that they are an artistic whole, and this can only be achieved through my practice of never having things printed until I have them in front of me in their entirety. This is impossible with Jacob Grimm’s method which is in general better with writings that have no dialectical structure.

The English version will be dealt with differently on the other hand. Fox has no doubt that he can find me a publisher as soon as I get the first sheets of print back. I would then arrange with Meissner that, in addition to the proofs for correcting, he would also send me the clean proof of each sheet, so that the German could be corrected at the same time as it is being translated into English. Regarding the latter, I shall of course need your assistance. I am expecting my real earnings from this work to come from the English edition.

As far as the ‘International’ is concerned, the position is as follows:

I made over the £5 to Cremer to buy shares in The Bee-Hive. But since Cremer, Odger, etc., were going up to Manchester at that time, nothing came of it, and Potter had the better of it. They decided to postpone the matter until the next meeting of shareholders (actually, the annual one). But I don’t think that anything will come of it. Firstly, because the squabble between Odger and Potter has become a public scandal. Secondly, because The Miner and Workman’s Advocate has offered its columns to US. (Apropos. At a recent meeting with the Miner we undertook to let it have contributions gratis. So, if you have time to write a little article on foreign politics (Prussian, etc.), now and then, send it to me to be passed on to the paper.)

According to our Rules a public congress ought to be held in Brussels this year. The Parisians, Swiss and some of the people here, too, are going for it hammer and tongs. In the present circumstances — especially since I have so little time to write the necessary documents for the Central Council as well — I can only foresee a disgrace. Despite considerable opposition from the other side, I have succeeded in turning the public congress in Brussels into a private prealable [i.e. preliminary] conference in London (25 September) which only delegates of the Administrative Committees will attend and at which the future congress is to be prepared. Official reasons given for postponing the congress were:

1. The need for prealable understanding between the Executive Committees.

2. The obstacles to the Association’s propaganda arising from the strikes in France, the elections, Reform Movement and Workingmen’s Exhibitions in England.

3. The Alien Bill, recently pressed in Belgium which rules out Brussels as a rendezvous for an International Workingmen’s Congress.

I do not see the Social-Demokrat any more, as the Workers’ Society has also stopped it. Nor am I taking the Nordstern any more, but I do see it occasionally at the Society. It said the Rhineland branches had on the main question deserted Bernhard.

Edgar is a very expensive guest for us, especially in the present circumstances, and he does not seem in the least inclined to decamp.

In consequence of the hot weather and related biliousness, I have again been vomiting nearly every day for the past 3 months, as I did previously in Brussels.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 174;.

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 3, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1930.

London, 5 August 1865

Dear Engels,

My best thanks for the £50 and the speed with which the help came. I was greatly amused by the part of your letter which deals with the ‘work of art’ to be. [Capital] But you misunderstood me. The only point in question is whether to do a fair copy of part of the manuscript and send it to the publisher, or finish writing the whole thing first? I have decided in favour of the latter for many reasons. No time is lost by it, as far as the work itself is concerned, although some time is lost in printing; however, on the other hand, once begun, that cannot then be interrupted in any way either. Furthermore, in view of the level of the thermometer, progress with it has been as fast as anyone could have managed, even having no artistic considerations at all. Besides, as I have a maximum limit of 60 printed sheets, it is absolutely essential for me to have the whole thing in front of me, to know how much has to be condensed and crossed out, so that the individual sections shall be evenly balanced and in proportion within the prescribed limits. In any case, you can be sure that I shall spare no effort to complete as soon as possible, as the thing is a nightmarish burden to me. Not only does it prevent me from doing anything else, but it is also damnedly irksome to have the public kept entertained with the expectation of laurels to come (not by me, to be sure, but by Liebknecht and others). And furthermore, I know that time will not stand still for ever just as it is now.

Eichhoff has written a few lines to me, but couldn’t call on me owing to pressure of business. In his letter he said Dronke would visit (he was here yesterday) but in such a confused way there was no making sense of the scriptum. That ‘treatise’ is sticking to poor Eichhoff like his own skin, and no operation will detach it from him.

What do you make of Siebel’s productions as a patriotic-liberal poet? The thing appears to have been written during extremely depressing hangover. It is utter nonsense and surpasses everything our friend has previously produced.

The Social-Demokrat’s attempt to commit itself in support of the bourgeoisie is a sign of complete and utter fiasco, although I share your view that the first calls in Berlin did not occur without some ministerial prompting. However, the other Lassallean faction, which executed a volte face against the Social-Demokrat as a result of our statement, are also quite a pitiful rabble. These fellows are not merely at loggerheads with B. Becker and Co. as to whose faith in Lassalle is the true one, but several of their branches have published that phrase inspired by old Hatzfeldt and coined specifically with us in mind, that anyone who tried to overturn or change even one syllable of the truths as revealed by Lassalle, was declared a traitor to the ‘people’.

It is ages since I last answered Liebknecht, despite various notes he sent me; however I am going to do so now. He is in Hanover for the time being now, but his wife is still in Berlin. The reason why I did not write was partly that I was very busy, and also I had enough on my hands with my own troubles. On the other hand, I was furious with him for the nonsense which he had been retailing about me at the Berlin Lassalle-Association and which is there for all to read in the scrap of a pamphlet about B. Becker’s expulsion from that association which the old sow got someone called Schilling to publish (Farthing would have been a more appropriate name). With his usual talent for being too lazy to acquaint himself with the facts, he drivels the greatest nonsense about the Bangya-manuscript and my intercession for Becker quoad Vienna Botschafter, etc. And, moreover, the whole way in which he plays the part of my ‘patron’ and ‘apologises’ for me to the louts of Berlin for them not knowing my works; and generally behaves as though so far I had done nothing in affairs of action. So, I allowed some time to elapse, so as not to say anything rude to him and to pacify myself with the thought that Liebknecht will be Liebknecht and that his intentions are ‘good’. The 30,000 members of the old Berlin Journeymen’s Association, and ditto the Association of Printers there organised a kind of ovation for him when he was expelled. With his usual optimism, Wilhelmchen sees the proletariat of Berlin at my (that is, his) and our (yours and mine) feet. At the same time, he has not managed even to form a single branch of 6 members for the International Association in Germany, although the sanguine fellow must surely realise that I cannot serve up his delusions to the English as true coin. He also kept on writing to me about my ‘book’. But however often I sent him ‘books’ (first the whole remainder of ‘Vogt’, then the whole remainder of the ‘Communist Trials') at his most sanguine request, from the moment he received them, I never heard a dying word more about them.

Mr Groote, Party of Progress deputy for Düsseldorf, has written to him saying that what he did in Berlin has had more effect than the actions of 100 Party of Progress deputies.

Edgar has just recently caught a cold which has gone to his nose, which, as a result of this accident, looks positively Bardolphian.

During the warm weather I have been regularly working day and night by the open window. Outcome: an attack of rheumatism in my right arm, particularly the shoulder blade, which is very painful and makes writing, especially any lifting-movement, difficult. I instinctively cry out if I unintentionally raise my arm in bed at night, which tells you how nasty the thing is. Does Gumpert know of any kind of nostrum for it?

You probably know that at the Gymnastic Festival in Paris, the worthy Gottfried Kinkel refused the laurel crown he was offered by a Jew who was presiding, with the words: ‘I want no crown, not even a crown of laurel’, but at once added in fairly unvarnished words that he had by no means yet given up his claims to the Presidency of the German Republic, the ‘office’ that was his due. The Nordstern ridiculed him rather effectively as much for this bit of melodrama, and for his whole speech, which was disgusting. The Festival opened with a toast to Badinguet.

Where is Strohn?

As soon as you have time and inclination, do not forget to send me something ‘continental’ for the Miner.

Kindest regards to you from the whole family, and from me to Mrs Lizzy.

Your

K. Marx

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 178;.

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 3, 1913 and in full in MEGA, 1930.

Manchester, 7 August 1865

Dear Moor,

I have got a remedy for your rheumatism that Gumpert once used to cure me with within 24 hours, and from a much more severe attack, too. Get yourself 2 big bags of flannel made big enough to cover the affected part completely and a bit over; have these bags filled with bran and heated each in turn in the oven, just as hot as you can bear it; you put each in turn on the place, changing them as often as ever you can. All the while keep yourself warm and quiet in bed, and you will soon feel very considerable relief, but you mustn’t discontinue the treatment on that account until all the pain has gone (say 24-36 hours).

Eichhoff has just called; he has got himself made Director of a limited company in London; it is crystal clear to me from the whole affair that the idea is for him to be duped of a substantial sum again, but there’s absolutely no helping the fellow, with his mania for seeing everything couleur de rose. He has now gone so far as believing that the silk-trade here in England absolutely could not go on without him.

I'm so pleased the book [Capital] is making rapid progress, for I had really begun to suspect from one or two phrases in your last letter that you had again reached an unexpected turning-point which might prolong everything indefinitely. The day that manuscript is sent off, I shall drink myself to kingdom come, that is, unless you come up here the next day so that we can seal it together.

Many thanks for the Free Presses.

Our worthy Liebknecht simply cannot help putting his foot in it, or writing off to people just whenever the mood takes him. We shall always be annoyed with him for 10 months out of 12, as soon as he is by himself and has to act on his own initiative. In the meantime que veux-tu? Liebknecht does as Liebknecht is, and all the exasperation and all the grumbling will not help matters. And after all, when all’s said and done, at the moment he is the only reliable link we have in Germany.

A Workingmen’s Congress in Brussels would certainly be the greatest stupidity in present circumstances. Just remember our own experiences in that little country. That sort of thing can only be done in England, the Frenchmen ought to know that. It would just be throwing away money and time and trouble to attempt anything of that kind in Belgium.

Have you got Schilling’s pamphlet on B. Becker? You might let me have it for a couple of days.

I don’t know whether Strohn is in Hamburg or Bradford, I haven’t heard anything from him for quite a long time now.

The Rhineland philistines are supposed to be frightfully angry with Bismarck; it is splendid that those jackasses are having their ‘historical development on a legal basis’ so nicely demonstrated. Have you seen Bismarck’s latest dodge to raise money? The Cologne-Minden Railway had granted the state the right to buy up its shares at par in return for an interest-guarantee from the state (100-taler shares are now standing at over 200 talers); he has bartered away this right to the Railway for 13 million talers, and the Kölner Zeitung calculates that in this way he got hold of 30 million talers, including sale of the shares already owned by the state, etc. The question is, will the Cologne-Minden Railway pay up without the Chamber’s approval for the deal. If it does so, Bismarck will again have a clear road for years ahead, and the philistines will have been atrociously shitted upon. We shall soon see.

Lizzy says Edgar can’t have been wearing his Texan hat, or he couldn’t possibly have caught a cold in the nose.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 183;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 19 August 1865

Dear Fred,

Since you are setting off on your travels, I must tell you that I have to pay a bill for £10 to butcher on 28 August, and the landlord is also becoming very troublesome. By the by, the English state appears hard-pressed for money. At all events, the tax-gatherers were more pressing this month than ever before and have unexpectedly ‘relieved’ me.

I am still sick, although Allen is getting rid of the liver troubles. But now I have caught a kind of influenza, which, he says, will last 5-6 days and which really is the biggest nuisance of all, as far as mental activity is concerned. I hope that with that I shall have settled my debt to Nature.

Löhrchen [Laura] is not really very well either. For the past year she has been getting much thinner than she ought to be. But she is a strange child and only today agreed to go to the Dr with my wife. I hope it is nothing serious. Little Jenny and Tussy are very well. (Ditto Edgar’s state of health much improved.) My wife had bitten out the 2 front teeth in the middle of her lower jaw, and yesterday had 4 teeth fitted by way of replacement. These are more or less the only ‘events’ that have occurred here.

Being unwell, I am unable to write much, and then only by fits and starts. In between, I am just dabbling in irrelevancies, although with the influenza I cannot even read properly. I ‘took the opportunity’ to ‘take up’ a little astronomy again, amongst other things. And one thing I would like to mention that was new to me at least, but perhaps you have known about it for some time. You know Laplace’s theory of the formation of the celestial systems and how he explains the rotation of the various bodies about their own axis, etc. Proceeding from there, a Yankee, Kirkwood, has discovered a kind of law concerning the differences in the rotation of the planets, which had previously appeared quite abnormal. The law is as follows:

* ‘The square of the number of times that each planet rotates during one revolution in its orbit, is proportioned to the cube of the breadth of a diameter of its sphere of attraction,’*

This means that between two planets there must be a point at which their power of attraction is equally strong; so that a body at this point would remain stationary between them. On the other hand, the body would fall towards one planet or another on either side of that point. This point thus forms the limit of the sphere of attraction of the planet. This sphere of attraction is, in turn, the measure of the breadth of the gazeous ring from which, according to Laplace, the planet was formed when it first became separated from the general gazeous mass. Kirkwood concluded from this that, if Laplace’s hypothesis is correct, a specific relationship must exist between the velocity of the planets’ rotation and the breadth of the ring from which it was formed or its sphere of attraction. And he has expressed this in the above law, and proved it by analytical calculations.

Old Hegel made some very good jokes about the ‘sudden reversal’ of centripetal to centrifugal force, right at the moment when one has attained ‘preponderance’ over the other; e.g., centripetal force is greatest near the sun; therefore, says Hegel, centrifugal force is greatest, since it overcomes this maximum of centripetal force and vice versa. Moreover, the forces are in equilibrium when half-way between the apsides. Therefore they can never depart from this equilibrium, etc. Incidentally, taken as a whole, Hegel’s polemic amounts to saying that Newton’s ‘proofs’ added nothing to Kepler, who already possessed the ‘concept’ of movement, which I think is fairly generally accepted now.

You know that the President of the Bank of Switzerland is now Mr Karl Vogt, who betrayed his friend Fazy as soon as the latter left Geneva, and cheated together with Reinach (the real Acting Director). I asked Freiligrath how Mr Vogt, who is otherwise of ill repute as a financier in Switzerland, had come by this honourable post. Answer: the Swiss have hardly a share left in the ‘Bank of Swirzerland’. The Jews in Berlin and Frankfurt a. M. take the decisions. And they support Vogt. Meanwhile, Reinach has been teasing our poor Freiligrath so much that the latter wrote him the right-thinking rejoinder that even the Prussian police never persecuted him quite so much. They say Fazy swindled the bank out of 1 1/2 mill. frs.

A few weeks ago, Professor Beesly had an article about Catiline in The Fortnightly Review, vindicating the latter as a man of revolution. Much of it is uncritical (as one would expect from an Englishman, e.g. wrong information on Caesar’s position at that time), but his intense rage at the oligarchy and ‘respectable people’ is very nice. Likewise his sallies against the professional English ‘dull littérateur’. Mr Harrison had an article in the same Review expounding why ‘political economy’ can adduce ‘nothing’ in refutation of communism. It seems to me that now there is more movement amongst English thinkers than amongst the Germans. The latter are sufficiently preoccupied with celebrating Classen-Kappelmann.

Regards to Mrs Lizzy. The children are depending on you not to pass through London without stopping on your way home.

Your

K. M.

You cannot have the remotest conception of the utter nonsense contained in the Parliamentary Reports of 1857 and 1858 on banking, etc., which I recently had to refer back to. As in the monetary system, capital = gold. In the midst, shame-faced recollections of A. Smith and excruciating attempts to reconcile the chaos of the money market with his ‘enlightened’ ideas. MacCulloch, who has at last now gone the way of all flesh, distinguishes himself most of all. The fellow was obviously in receipt of a substantial douceur from Lord Overstone, who is consequently ‘facile maximus argentariorum’ and has to be cleared, come what may. I shall have to reserve my critique of this whole unsavoury stew for a later paper.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 198;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 20 November 1865

Dear Engels,

Little Jenny is on the mend again now and thanks you very much for the wine.

Regarding the financial questions, it would be futile to approach Dronke about it. To have some peace with the landlord, and that is at the root of it all, I have persuaded him to take a bill of exchange up till the middle of February for the current quarter, for which I owe him 2/3. As for the other creditors, I have satisfied the most pressing with the £15 and am considering ways and means of putting together at least an instalment for the others. Your offer is very generous, and as soon as my work [Capital] is finished and out, the remainder will have to be made up through other commitments, or if that should not succeed, although I fully expect it will, we shall have to move somewhere cheaper, perhaps to Switzerland.

The Berlin letter is genuine [re an impending split in the German Workers’ Association]. Some days after it arrived, I received a letter about it from Liebknecht, who is in continuous contact with the Berliners. It also emerges from Liebknecht’s letter that those curs from the Social-Demokrat would oh so dearly love to resume their ties with us. The kind of illusions Liebknecht is for ever indulging in can be seen from the following passage:

*‘the people that have applied to you from Berlin, are our friends. If you could come, show yourself but once — the gain would be immense. Come if it is possible.'*

Surely Liebknecht ought to know that even if I could go to Berlin at present, just as a visitor, I would have to be completely quiet and keep myself to myself and not address workers’ clubs!

Liebknecht also writes:

*‘Professor Eckardt’* (now the ‘Principal’ radical in the south, as a letter from Stumpf in Mainz makes clear) *‘of Mannheim places the Wochenblatt at our disposal. He would be delighted if you and Engels were to write for it a few articles, but not too strong.’*

The Workman’s Advocate is as weak as ever. However, it must have some appeal as it appeared in a larger format last week. I know no more details, as I shall be present at the Association again for the first time tomorrow. The Parisians have published a report on the conference together with the programme we drew up for the next congress. It appeared in all the liberal, quasi-liberal and republican papers in Paris. You will see what a friendly reception it had from the following report by Fox on the last meeting of our Council which I am cutting out of The Workman’s Advocate for you. Our Parisians are somewhat taken aback that the para. on Russia and Poland which they did not wish to have, is the very one to create the biggest stir. I hope that you will now use some of your leisure time to write the occasional article on one subject or another for the Advocate.

The Paris publication absolves me from the trouble of writing a report on France.

The Jamaican business is typical of the utter turpitude of the ‘true Englishman’. These fellows are as bad as the Russians in every respect. But, says the good old Times, these damned rogues enjoyed ‘all the liberties of an Anglo-Saxon Constitution’. I.e. they enjoyed the liberty, amongst others, of having their hides taxed to raise money for the planters to import coolies and thus depress their own labour market below the minimum. And these English curs with their sensibilities sent up an outcry about ‘beast Butler’ for hanging one man! and refusing to allow the former planters’ diamond-spangled yellow womenfolk to spit in the faces of the Federal soldiers! The Irish affair and the Jamaica butcheries were all that was needed after the American war to complete the unmasking of English hypocrisy!

Please do not forget to obtain the necessary data from Knowles for me (and as soon as possible). Average weekly wages, either for a mule spinner, or for a female throstle spinner; how much yarn (or cotton, that is, including the déchet that is lost in spinning) is spun per week on average by an average number (Or, for that matter, any number) by each individual; and then, of course, an arbitrary (corresponding to the labour-wage) price for the cotton and the price of yarn. I cannot write out the second chapter until I have these details.

Ernest Jones’ address is now 47 Princess Street.

Salut

Your

K. M.

Marx To Hermann Jung

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 200;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.

Passages enclosed between asterisks are reproduced from the English original, the remaining text is translated from French.

[London,] 20 November 1865

*My dear Jung,

The following are the questions:

I. Questions relating to the Association

1) Questions relating to its organisation.*

2) The establishment of friendly societies for the members of the Association. — Moral and material support to be given to the Association’s orphans.

II. * Social Questions*

1) Co-operative labour.

2) Reduction of the hours of labour.

3) Female and children’s labour.

4) * Trades Unions.* Their past, their present, and their future.

5) Combination of efforts, by means of the International Association, in the struggle between capital and labour.

6) International Credit foundation of international credit institutions, their form and their mode of operation.

7) Direct and Indirect Taxation.

8) Standing armies and their effects upon production.

III. *International Politics*

The need to eliminate Muscovite influence in Europe by applying the right of self-determination of nations, and the re-establishment of Poland upon a democratic and social basis.

IV. A Question of Philosophy

The religious idea and its relation to social, political, and intellectual development.

*The other resolutions as to the Congress etc. you find in the number of The Workman’s Advocate which contains the report on the three days’ sittings of the Conference .

Don’t forget to ask for an official report on Vésinier.

Send me the address of Kaub which I have mislaid.

Yours fraternally*

K. Marx

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 206;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 26 December 1865

Dear Fred,

Please forgive me for not thanking you on behalf of the family for the Christmas present until today, and indeed for not writing at all for so long. I have been so very bothered all that time over and have wasted so much time dashing this way and that, transactions right and left to satisfy A, and thereby falling into the clutches of B, etc., that my work has been chiefly confined to the night, and the good intention to deal with correspondence the next day comes to grief every day.

With regard to the International Association and all that that entails, it has consequently been weighing down on me like an incubus, and I would be glad to be able to get rid of it. But that is impossible, least of all at the present time. On the one hand, sundry bourgeois — Mr. Hughes, M.P., at their head — have conceived the idea of turning The Workman’s Advocate into a proper funded paper, and as one of the Directors I must watch the transactions, to prevent foul play. On the other hand, the Reform League, one of the organisations we founded, has had a triumphant success at the St Martin’s Hall meeting, the largest and most purely working-class meeting that has taken place since I have been living in London. The people from our Committee were at the head of it and put forward our ideas. If I resigned tomorrow, the bourgeois element, which looks at us with displeasure in the wings (foreign infidels), would have the upper hand. With the complete failure of the workers’ movement in Germany, the workers’ elements in Switzerland have grouped themselves all the more around the sections of the International Association there. In the middle of this month first number of the Journal de l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs. Section de la Suisse Romande appeared in Geneva, and a German organ will shortly appear under the editorship of Becker, which has a chance on account of the Nordstern’s demise and the discrediting of the Social-Demokrat. (Old Becker is desperate for articles and has asked me to write urgently to you about it, as pro nunc he has no contributors.) Finally, in France the Association is making great progress, in the absence of any other centres of movement. So, if I were to resign in these circumstances, I should be doing very serious damage to the cause; but, on the other hand, since I have so little time just now, it is no trifle for me: about 3 meetings in the West End or the City, every week first a session of the International Council, then of the Standing-Committee, then of the Directors or Shareholders of The Workman’s Advocate! And in addition all manner of writing to do.

I have had a few lines from Liebknecht. He is living at 2 Gerichtsweg, Leipzig, to be addressed as J. Miller, Esq. [Liebknecht] Things seem to be going badly with him as usual, but he seems to have some prospect of getting a position as a lexicographer, as well as of being granted civic rights in Leipzig, and becoming one of Beust’s subjects.

Dr Kugelmann has also written to me. Justus Möser’s successor, the present mayor of Osnabruck, Mr Miquel, has now openly turned renegade; for the moment with bourgeois leanings, but ‘already’ veering in the aristocratic direction. A certain Wedekind, formerly consul somewhere, rolling in money and an enthusiastic National-Association member, has rewarded him for his merits by making him his son-in-law. Kugelmann has seen ‘gentle Heinrich’ in Cologne. He is now cosily installed as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung. He complained that I had not visited him in Cologne and was treating him as a ‘turncoat’, etc. He claimed always to have ‘kept faith with the “cause"’ and only to be working with the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy now ‘to promote the evolution and clarification of the class contradictions’ (which in a speech in Cologne scarcely a year ago he declared non-existent), etc.

Bonaparte appears to me shakier than ever. The business with the students is symptomatic of ominous signs of conflict in the army itself, but above all the Mexico affair and that original sin of the Lower Empire, debts! Nor has the fellow managed to pull off a single coup in the past year. Indeed things have reached such a pass with him that Bismarck figures as a rival to him!

Palmerston’s death has obviously been a blow here. If he were still alive, Governor Eyre would have been awarded the ordre pour le mérite!

Freiligrath is also ending the year with tremendous bad luck. Jew Reinach has closed down the business here, with a great brouhaha, coming to London expressly for the purpose. Freiligrath, who owed the bank money anyway, suffered the further misfortune that 3 days before the arrival of the mighty Reinach one of his clerks absconded with £150. But still the old boy has got powerful protection to fall back upon. His Plonplonist friends in Paris (e.g. ex-Colonel Kiss, who married the daughter of the former French minister Thouvenel, a millionaire, and is now at the head of an enormous company) will find a new position for him soon enough.

Happy New Year! To Mrs Lizzy, too.

Your

K. M.

Letter to J B Schweizer

“On Proudhon”

Written: by Marx on January 24, 1865;

Source: Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume 2;

First Published: Der Social-Demokrat, Nos. 16, 17 and 18, February 1, 3 and 5, 1865;

Written: by Marx on January 24, 1865.

Der Social-Demokrat, No. 16, February 1, 1865

London, January 24, 1865

Dear Sir.

Yesterday I received a letter in which you demand from me a detailed judgment of Proudhon. Lack of time prevents me from fulfilling your desire. Added to which I have none of his works to hand. However, in order to assure you of my good will I will quickly jot down a brief outline. You can then complete it, add to it or cut it – in short do anything you like with it. [The editors of Der Social-Demokrat supplied a footnote here: “We found it better to print the letter without any changes.” ]

Proudhon’s earliest efforts I no longer remember. His school work about the Langue universelle shows how unceremoniously he tackled problems for the solution of which he still lacked the first elements of knowledge.

His first work, Qu’est-ce que la propriété?, is undoubtedly his best. It is epoch-making, if not because of the novelty of its content, at least because of the new and audacious way of expressing old ideas. In the works of the French socialists and communists he knew “propriété” had, of course, been not only criticised in various ways but also “abolished” in a utopian manner. In this book Proudhon stands in approximately the same relation to Saint-Simon and Fourier as Feuerbach stands to Hegel. Compared with Hegel, Feuerbach is certainly poor. Nevertheless he was epoch-making after Hegel because he laid stress on certain points which were disagreeable to the Christian consciousness but important for the progress of criticism, points which Hegel had left in mystic clair-obscur [semi-obscurity].

In this book of Proudhon’s there still prevails, if I may be allowed the expression, a strong muscular style. And its style is in my opinion its chief merit. It is evident that even where he is only reproducing old stuff, Proudhon discovers things in an independent way – that what he is saying is new to him and is treated as new. The provocative defiance, which lays hands on the economic “holy of holies,” the ingenious paradox which made a mock of the ordinary bourgeois understanding, the withering criticism, the bitter irony, and, revealed here and there, a deep and genuine feeling of indignation at the infamy of the existing order, a revolutionary earnestness – all these electrified the readers of Qu’est-ce que la propriété? and provided a strong stimulus on its first appearance. In a strictly scientific history of political economy the book would hardly be worth mentioning. But sensational works of this kind have their role to play in the sciences just as much as in the history of the novel. Take, for instance, Malthus’s book on Population. Its first edition was nothing but a “SENSATIONAL PAMPHLET” and plagiarism from beginning to end into the bargain. And yet what a stimulus was produced by this lampoon on the human race!

If I had Proudhon’s book before me I could easily give a few examples to illustrate his early style. In the passages which he himself regarded as the most important he imitates Kant’s treatment of the antinomies – Kant was at that time the only German philosopher whose works he had read, in translations – and he leaves one with a strong impression that to him, as to Kant, the resolution of the antinomies is something “beyond” human understanding, i.e., something that remains obscure to him himself.

But in spite of all his apparent iconoclasm one already finds in Qu’est-ce que la propriété’? the contradiction that Proudhon is criticising society, on the one hand, from the standpoint and with the eyes of a French small-holding peasant (later petit bourgeois) and, on the other, that he measures it with the standards he inherited from the socialists.

The deficiency of the book is indicated by its very title. The question is so badly formulated that it cannot be answered correctly. Ancient “property relations” were superseded by feudal property relations and these by “bourgeois” property relations. Thus history itself had expressed its criticism upon past property relations. What Proudhon was actually dealing with was modern bourgeois property as it exists today. The question of what this is could have only been answered by a critical analysis of “political economy,” embracing the totality of these property relations, considering not their legal aspect as relations of volition but their real form, that is, as relations of production. But as Proudhon entangled the whole of these economic relations in the general legal concept of “property,” “la propriété,” he could not get beyond the answer which, in a similar work published before 1789, Brissot had already given in the same words: “La propriété’ c’est le vol.”

The upshot is at best that the bourgeois legal conceptions of “theft” apply equally well to the “honest” gains of the bourgeois himself. On the other hand, since “theft” as a forcible violation of property presupposes the existence of property, Proudhon entangled himself in all sorts of fantasies, obscure even to himself, about true bourgeois property.

During my stay in Paris in 1844 I came into personal contact with Proudhon. I mention this here because to a certain extent I am also to blame for his “SOPHISTICATION”: as the English call the adulteration of commercial goods. In the course of lengthy debates often lasting all night, I infected him very much to his detriment with Hegelianism, which, owing to his lack of German, he could not study properly. After my expulsion from Paris Herr Karl Grün continued what I had begun. As a teacher of German philosophy he also had the advantage over me that he himself understood nothing about it.

Shortly before the appearance of Proudhon’s second important work, the Philosophie de la misère, etc., he himself announced this to me in a very detailed letter in which he said, among other things: "J’attends votre férule critique." This criticism, however, soon dropped on him (in my Misère de la philosophie, etc., Paris, 1847), in a way which ended our friendship for ever.

Der Social-Demokrat, No. 17, February 3, 1865

From what I have said here, you can see that Proudhon’s Philosophie de la misère ou Système des contradictions èconomiques first contained the real answer to the question Qu’est-ce que la propriété? In fact it was only after the publication of this work that he had begun his economic studies; he had discovered that the question he had raised could not be answered by invective, but only by an analysis of modern "political economy". At the same time he attempted to present the system of economic categories dialectically. In place of Kant’s insoluble "antinomies", the Hegelian “contradiction" was to be introduced as the means of development.

For an estimate of his book, which is in two fat volumes, I must refer you to the refutation I wrote. There I have shown, among other things, how little he had penetrated into the secret of scientific dialectics and how, on the contrary, he shares the illusions of speculative philosophy, for instead of regarding economic categories as the theoretical expression of historical relations of production, corresponding to a particular stage of development in material production, he garbles them into pre-existing eternal ideas, and how in this roundabout way he arrives once more at the standpoint of bourgeois economy. [“When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These relations therefore are themselves natural laws independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any” (p. 113 of my work).]

I show furthermore how extremely deficient and at times even schoolboyish is his knowledge of “political economy” which he undertook to criticise, and that he and the utopians are hunting for a so-called “science” by means of which a formula for the “solution of the social question” is to be devised a priori, instead of deriving science from a critical knowledge of the historical movement, a movement which itself produces the material conditions of emancipation. My refutation shows in particular that Proudhon’s view of exchange-value, the basis of the whole theory, remains confused, incorrect and superficial, and that he even mistakes the utopian interpretation of Ricardo’s theory of value for the basis of a new science. With regard to his general point of view I have summarised my conclusions thus:

“Every economic relation has a good and a bad side, it is the one point on which M. Proudhon does not give himself the lie. He sees the good side expounded by the economists; the bad side he sees denounced by the socialists. He borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations; he borrows from the socialists the illusion of seeing in poverty nothing but poverty (instead of seeing in it the revolutionary, destructive aspect which will overthrow the old society). He is in agreement with both in wanting to fall back upon the authority of science. Science for him reduces itself to the slender proportions of a scientific formula; he is the man in search of formulas. Thus it is that M. Proudhon flatters himself on having given a criticism of both political economy and of communism: he is beneath them both. Beneath the economists, since as a philosopher who has at his elbow a magic formula, he thought he could dispense with going into purely economic details; beneath the socialists, because he has neither courage enough nor insight enough to rise, be it even speculatively, above the bourgeois horizon....

“He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and the proletarians; he is merely the petty bourgeois, continually tossed back and forth between capital and labour, political economy and communism."

Severe though the above judgment may sound I must even now endorse every word of it. At the same time, however, one has to bear in mind that when I declared his book to be the code of socialism of the petit bourgeois and proved this theoretically, Proudhon was still being decried as an ultra-arch-revolutionary both by political economists and by socialists. That is why later on I never joined in the outcry about his "treachery" to the revolution. It was not his fault that, originally misunderstood by others as well as by himself, he failed to fulfil unjustified hopes.

Der Social-Demokrat, No. 18, February 5, 1865

In the Philosophie de la misère all the defects of Proudhon’s method of presentation stand out very unfavourably in comparison with Qu’est-ce que la propriété? The style is often what the French call ampoule. High-sounding speculative jargon, purporting to be German-philosophical, appears regularly on the scene when his Gallic astuteness fails him. A noisy, self-glorifying, boastful tone and especially the twaddle about “science” and sham display of it, which are always so unedifying, are continually jarring on one’s ears. Instead of the genuine warmth which permeates his first work, he here systematically works himself up into a sudden flush of rhetoric in certain passages. There is in addition the clumsy repugnant show of erudition of the self-taught, whose natural pride in his original reasoning has already been broken and who now, as a parvenu of science, feels it necessary to give himself airs with what he neither is nor has. Then the mentality of the petty bourgeois who for instance makes an indecently brutal attack, which is neither shrewd nor profound nor even correct, on a man like Cabet – worthy of respect for his practical attitude towards the French proletariat and on the other hand pays compliments to a man like Dunoyer (a “State Councillor,” it is true) although the whole significance of this Dunoyer lay in the comic zeal with which, throughout three fat, unbearably boring volumes, he preached a rigorism characterised by Helvetius as follows: “On veut que les malheureux soient parfaits” (It is demanded that the unfortunate should be perfect).

The February Revolution certainly came at a very inconvenient moment for Proudhon, who had irrefutably proved only a few weeks before that “the era of revolutions” was past for ever. His speech in the National Assembly, however little insight it showed into existing conditions, was worthy of every praise. After the June insurrection it was an act of great courage. In addition it had the fortunate consequence that M. Thiers, by his reply opposing Proudhon’s proposals, which was then issued as a special booklet, proved to the whole of Europe what infantile catechism served this intellectual pillar of the French bourgeoisie as a pedestal. Compared with M. Thiers, Proudhon indeed swelled to the size of an antediluvian colossus.

Proudhon’s discovery of “crédit gratuit” and the “people’s bank” (banque du peuple), based upon it, were his last economic “deeds.” My book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part I, Berlin, 1859 (pp. 59-64) contains the proof that the theoretical basis of his idea arises from a misunderstanding of the basic elements of bourgeois “political economy,” namely of the relation between commodities and money, while the practical superstructure was simply a reproduction of much older and far better developed schemes. That under certain economic and political conditions the credit system can be used to accelerate the emancipation of the working class, just as, for instance, at the beginning of the eighteenth, and again later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in England, it facilitated the transfer of wealth from one class to another, is quite unquestionable and self-evident. But to regard interest-bearing capital as the main form of capital and to try to make a particular form of the credit system comprising the alleged abolition of interest, the basis for a transformation of society is an out-and-out petty-bourgeois fantasy. This fantasy, further diluted, can therefore actually already be found among the economic spokesmen of the English petty bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century. Proudhon’s polemic with Bastiat (1850) about interest-bearing capital is on a far lower level than the Philosophie de la misère. He succeeds in getting himself beaten even by Bastiat and breaks into burlesque bluster when his opponent drives his blows home.

A few years ago Proudhon wrote a prize essay on Taxation, the competition was sponsored, I believe, by the government of Lausanne. Here the last flicker of genius is extinguished. Nothing remains but the petit bourgeois tout pur.

So far as Proudhon’s political and philosophical writings are concerned they all show the same contradictory, dual character as his economic works. Moreover their value is purely local, confined to France. Nevertheless his attacks on religion, the church, etc., were of great merit locally at a time when the French socialists thought it desirable to show by their religiosity how superior they were to the bourgeois Voltairianism of the eighteenth century and the German godlessness of the nineteenth. Just as Peter the Great defeated Russian barbarism by barbarity, Proudhon did his best to defeat French phrase-mongering by phrases.

His work on the Coup d’état, in which he flirts with Louis Bonaparte and, in fact, strives to make him palatable to the French workers, and his last work, written against Poland, in which for the greater glory of the tsar he expresses moronic cynicism, must be described as works not merely bad but base, a baseness, however, which corresponds to the petty-bourgeois point of view.

Proudhon has often been compared to Rousseau. Nothing could be more erroneous. He is more like Nicolas Linguet, whose Théorie des loix civiles, by the way, is a very brilliant book.

Proudhon had a natural inclination for dialectics. But as he never grasped really scientific dialectics he never got further than sophistry. This is in fact connected with his petty-bourgeois point of view. Like the historian Raumer, the petty bourgeois is made up of on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand. This is so in his economic interests and therefore in his politics, religious, scientific and artistic views. And likewise in his morals, IN EVERYTHING. He is a living contradiction. If, like Proudhon, he is in addition an ingenious man, he will soon learn to play with his own contradictions and develop them according to circumstances into striking, ostentatious, now scandalous now brilliant paradoxes. Charlatanism in science and accommodation in politics are inseparable from such a point of view. There remains only one governing motive, the vanity of the subject, and the only question for him, as for all vain people, is the success of the moment, the éclat of the day. Thus the simple moral sense, which always kept a Rousseau, for instance, from even the semblance of compromise with the powers that be, is bound to disappear.

Posterity will perhaps sum up the latest phase of French development by saying that Louis Bonaparte was its Napoleon and Proudhon its Rousseau-Voltaire.

You yourself have now to accept responsibility for having imposed upon me the role of a judge of the dead so soon after this man’s death.

Yours very respectfully,

Karl Marx

1866

Engels to Marx. 4 January

Marx to Engels. 5 January

Marx to Johann Phillip Becker. c. 13 January

Marx to Engels. 15 January

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 15 January

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 15 January

Marx to Sigfrid Meyer. 24 January

Engels to Marx. 26 January

Marx to Engels. 10 February

Engels to Marx. 10 February

Marx to Engels. 13 February

Marx to Engels. 14 February

Marx to Friedrich Lessner. 14 February

Engels to Marx. 19 February

Marx to Engels. 20 February

Engels to Marx. 22 February

Marx to Engels. 2 March

Engels to Marx. 5 March

Marx to Engels. 6 March

Engels to Marx. c. 10 March

Marx to Engels. 10 March

Marx to Engels. 15 March

Marx to Engels. 16 March

Marx to His Daughter Jenny. 16 March

Marx to Antoinette Philips. 18 March

Marx to Laura Marx. 20 March

Engels to Hermann Engels. 22 March

Marx to Engels. 24 March

Engels to Marx. 27 March

Marx to Engels. 2 April

Engels to Marx. 2 April

Engels to Marx. 6 April

Marx to Engels. 6 April

Engels to Hermann Engels. 6 April

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 6 April

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 6 April

Engels to Marx. 10 April

Engels to Marx. 13 April

Marx to Engels. 23 April

Engels to Marx. 1 May

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 4 May

Engels to Marx. 9 May

Marx to Engels. 10 May

Engels to Marx. 16 May

Marx to Engels. 17 April

Engels to Marx. 25 May

Marx to Engels. 7 June

Marx to Engels. 9 June

Engels to Marx. 11 June

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 20 June

Engels to Marx. 4 July

Marx to Engels. 7 July

Engels to Marx. 9 July

Engels to Marx. 12 July

Marx to Engels. 21 July

Engels to Marx. 25 July

Marx to Engels. 27 July

Engels to Marx. 6 August

Marx to Engels. 7 August

Engels to Marx. 10 August

Marx to Paul Lafargue. 13 August

Marx to Engels. 13 August

Marx to Engels. 23 August

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 23 August

Engels to Emil Engels. 23 August

Marx to Laura Marx. 28 August

Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. 31 August

Marx to Eleanor Marx. 5 September

Marx to Laura Marx. c. 8 September

Marx to Engels. 26 September

Marx to Engels. 1 October

Engels to Marx. 2 October

Marx to Engels. 3 October

Engels to Marx. 5 October

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 9 October

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 13 October

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 25 October

Marx to Engels. 6 November

Marx to Engels. 10 November

Engels to Marx. 11 November

Marx to Francois Lafargue. 12 November

Marx to Paul Lafargue. 7 December

Marx to Engels. 8 December

Engels to Marx. 14 December

Marx to Engels. 17 December

Engels to Marx. 21 December

Marx to Engels. 31 December

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 212;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 5 January 1866

Dear Fred,

In the greatest of haste.

Best thanks for the £10.

The bill of exchange falls due on 18 February, and is for £48. I wanted the landlord to draw it only for the 2 terms that were due and not for the third one as well, which is not due until the end of January. But he insisted.

A plot has been hatched against the International Association in which connection I need your co-operation. Further details later. For the moment, suffice to say: Mr Le Lubez and Vesinier (the latter well aware that an Inquiry into his past is in progress; he is in Brussels again) have a French branch here (in fact an opposition branch); Longuet, the editor of Rive gauche, also belongs to it, and it is tied up with all that pack of Proudhonists in Brussels. Vesinier began by publishing a long screed against us in the Echo de Verviers, of course anonymously. Then, in the same paper which is putting out the slanders against our Association (among other things, falsely calls Tolain and Fribourg Bonapartists, too), the London Branch published a programme, a draft of future statutes, which they, the Faithful, are going to put to the Congress.

The real crux of the controversy is the Polish question. The fellows have all attached themselves to the Muscovitist line pursued by Proudhon and Herzen. I shall therefore send you the earlier articles by the oracles in the Tribune du Peuple against Poland and you must do a refutation, either for our papers in Geneva (the ‘German’ one) or for The Workman’s Advocate. The Russian gentlemen have acquired some bran-new allies in the Proudhonised section of ‘Jeune France’.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Johann Philipp Becker

In Geneva,

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 213;

First published: Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.

London, [about 13 January 1866]

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill, N. W.

My dear friend Becker,

If you are vexed with me, you have ‘every right’ and at the same time ‘no right’ to be so. (You know from Heinzen that I am a ‘sophist’.) Apart from having some 1,200 pages of manuscript [of Capital] to copy and my publisher grumbling at me for a long time now, and apart from the fearful waste of time which the Central Committee, the Standing Committee and the Committee of Directors of The Workman’s Advocate commit me to in this Babylon, I have had the most exceptional aggravations and difficulties in my ‘private circumstances’ which obliged me to leave London for a while and are still unresolved, etc., etc.

You will see from the enclosed note, which I received today (or rather my wife did), that a parcel, which I sent to you about 14 days ago, has been most commendably confiscated by the French police. It contained chiefly ‘Manifestoes of the Communist Party’. Also a note from me briefly answering your questions and telling you that Bender agreed that I should publish your appeal in English in The Workman’s Advocate, ditto a report on activity in Switzerland, etc.

The reason why we decided not to publish any official report on the conference — apart from lack of money and the fact that the Rules oblige us to present a general report to the Congress, such double emploi thus to be avoided — was basically that to initiate the public in the situation, especially the very ‘fragmentary’ nature of the conference, would do us more harm than good and provide our opponents with a useful weapon. We knew that two members of the Central Committee, Le Lubez and Vesinier, were just waiting to seize this opportunity. Events have confirmed this. Firstly, Vesinier’s denunciation of the Central Committee and the conference in L'Echo de Verviers. Directly following that, in the same paper, came Le Lubez’ declaration of principles and draft of statutes that he hoped to impose on the Association in the name of the French branch he had founded in London as a counterweight to ourselves. This plot has meanwhile been frustrated. The branch has deserted its founder. Its two best men, Longuet (editor of the Rive gauche) and Crespelle, have joined the Central Committee. The latter has resolved that Vesinier must either substantiate his slanders or be expelled.

I cannot send you any articles pro nunc. I have not an hour to spare. Engels, however, will do so, as soon as he has seen the first number and knows where and how. Liebknecht will as well, from Leipzig. I will ditto write to Dr Kugelmann in Hanover about it. Ditto to Stumpf in Mainz.

No. 1 of Dupleix s paper is weak. Jung has written to him about it.

Liebknecht is living at 2 Gerichtsweg, Leipzig (address J. Miller [Liebknecht]). In one way the movement here has progressed well, but badly in another respect. The Reform League we founded has held a mass meeting for universal suffrage, bigger than I ever saw here in London . All the speakers were working men. The Times itself was shocked and published 2 leading articles about the ‘ugly’ incident. The obverse side is that this movement is demanding far too much of our best working-class forces.

The Workman’s Advocate is weak. It will improve now that Eccarius is editor. But there are enormous difficulties in raising the money for it.

I have received a letter from Berlin, signed by Vogt, Metzner and other workers, in which they give a perceptive and critical assessment of the present state of the workers’ movement in Germany. The only uncritical thing about it is their demand that I should come to Berlin and take the matter in hand. Surely they must know that the Prussian government has ‘forbidden’ me to settle in Prussia.

Before I hear from you by what way I can let you have the ‘Manifestoes’, I am going to send one experimentally via Mainz. You may be able to make use of some things in it for your paper.

The best thing the German sections can do is for the time being to register in Geneva and keep in continuous contact with you. As soon as some such arrangement is made, let me know, so that at last I can announce at least some progress in Germany here.

I am sending this letter under cover to Dupleix, on account of the ‘French confiscation’. The Empire seems to me to be tottering. D'abord, the business with Mexico and the United States. Then the mutiny of 3 French regiments. Then the student unrest. Bonaparte’s losing his head, as manifested in his row with England about the renewal of the ‘extradition treaty’ and his banning of the lickspittling ‘Indépendance belge’. Finally, the trade crisis, which will be greatly hastened by the present English, resp. European, over-importing to the United States.

Best greetings from wife and children.

Your

K. Marx

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 216;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 15 January 1866

Dear Fred,

Laura quite forgot to send you the Tribunes which I had put out ready a week ago. She is today making amends for her negligence. Ditto a Workman’s Advocate.

I am enclosing with this letter:

1. Communication from the publisher in Vienna. (You must send this back.)

2. Dr Kugelmann.

3. Meyer from Berlin. (I have only written back to these people today. Time is so very short.)...

In the meantime, we have crushed the wretched plot hatched by Vésinier in Belgium and by Le Lubez in London. The editor of the Rive gauche and friend of Rogeard, Longuet, also Mr Crespelle — the two most intelligent members of the branch founded by Le Lubez — have joined our Central Committee. His branch has declared itself against him, for us. The Central Committee has summoned Vésinier ‘To substantiate his accusations or to be expelled’. The fellow reproaches us in the Echo de Verviers among other things for:

‘They’ (the Committee) ‘were charged with one of mankind’s greatest concerns but are frivolously abandoning their lofty goal in order to degenerate into a committee of nationalities in tow to Bonapartism.’

And this degeneration was in fact made manifest in us by our statement in favour of Poland, against Russia.

‘Succumbing to pernicious influences’ (the idiot imagines the Polish § of the programme originated from the Paris delegates, whereas the latter sought in every possible way to get rid of it as ‘inopportune’), ‘they included in the programme for the Geneva Congress questions not concerning the goal of the Association and contrary to law, justice, liberty, fraternity and the solidarity of peoples and races, such as: “the elimination of Russian influence in Europe etc.”; and this they did at the very moment when the Russian and Polish serfs had just been emancipated by Russia, whereas the Polish nobility and priests have always refused to grant freedom to their own. It will at least be agreed that the moment was ill-chosen. Before approving these articles, the English members of the committee should have really asked themselves if it was not a matter of equal urgency to put an end to the frightening increase in English pauperism, in the prostitution of working women and the misery of working men in Great Britain, in famine and depopulation in Ireland, etc.! As for the German members of the committee, let them also tell us whether the influence of Mr Bismarck’s policy in Europe does not equally merit elimination; do not Prussia and Austria have an equal share in the partitioning of Poland, are they not equally responsible for Russia’s crime against that unfortunate nation? As for the self-styled delegates from Paris, does it come well from them to condemn the influence of Russia, when Bonaparte’s soldiers are occupying Rome, which they have bombarded, are massacring the defenders of the Mexican republic, having already destroyed the French republic? If one compares the misdeeds and crimes committed by governments, one is persuaded that no people should be put beyond the pale of humanity for the infamies of its oppressors, and that it was the duty of the Central Committee to proclaim solidarity and fraternity among all peoples, and not to put one of them alone beyond the pale of Europe.’

He then appended this lie:

‘This enormous error has already had dire consequences: the Poles have asked to join the Committee en masse and before long they will represent the overwhelming majority.’ (Captain Bobczynski is the only one who is on it — Holtorp doesn’t count and is himself conspiring with Le Lubez.) Already they do not shrink from saying that they will make use of the Association to help to restore their nationhood, without concerning themselves with the question of the emancipation of the workers.’

The Poles — they had just sent a deputation to see us — burst out laughing when these PASSAGES were read out. We are commemorating their revolution on 23 January.

You will be amused by wiseacre Denis’ concluding prayer to Proudhon. This sensational writer has done great harm with his little bit of learning and with his Lassalle-like trumpeting of scholarship, of which he had no conception, with his spurious critical superiority over the socialist sectarians.

Le Lubez is of no account. Fox rightly calls him ‘Le père enfantin’ [Le Lubez’ imitates the Saint-Simonian, Barthélemy Enfantin], but Vésinier is just the fellow for the Russians. Of little merit as a writer, as his Vie du Nouveau César and his other pamphlets attacking Bonaparte show. But with talent, great rhetorical power, much energy and above all unscrupulous through and through.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Wilhelm Liebknecht

In Leipzig

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 218;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1946.

[London,] 15 January 1866

Dear Library,

Happy New Year!

You must excuse my silence, ditto the brevity of these lines of mine. You will not believe how bothered I am for time. Indisposition, forever recurring periodically, all manner of unfortunate mischances demands made on me by the International Association, etc., have confiscated every free moment I have for writing out the fair copy of my manuscript. [Capital] I hope to be able to take Volume I of it to the publisher for printing myself in March. (The whole thing, the two volumes, will, however, appear simultaneously This is good.)

So, this very much by way of summary.

Today I am sending you by post the 2 latest issues of The Workman’s Advocate, of which Eccarius is now editor. If, as I hope, you send any articles for it, please do so to me (political, social, as you will).

I also enclose cards of membership for you. I have paid for them. You can therefore give them to whomever you like, and have only to inscribe the name and after the £, put 0, but after the Os., 1d.

The conditions, generally, are these: a society as such that wishes to join has an Association collective membership Card, for which 5s. per year is to be paid. But, if all the members join individually, they have to take out cards of the kind I am sending you. This is advantageous for workers. The cards serve as a passport abroad, and their confréres in London, Paris, Brussels, Lyons, Geneva, etc., will get jobs for them.

The Association has made great progress. It already has 1 official English paper, The Workman’s Advocate, a Brussels one, La Tribune du Peuple, a French one in Geneva, Journal de 1'Association Internationale des Travailleurs, Section de la Suisse Romande, and a German one in Geneva, Der Vorbote, which will be appearing in a few days. Address: 6 rue du Môle, Genf, J. P. Becker, in case you want to write to the old man occasionally (as I hope you will).

I am now hoping you will soon make it possible for me to announce the foundation of a Leipzig section and enable me to present correspondence. (In English. It can then be used in The Workman’s Advocate as well.) The number is not important, although the more, the better.

If people want to join en masse, as a society, you will see that the total price of 5s., which they have to pay annually, is nothing.

J. P. Becker writes to me:

‘Sections are going to be formed in Leipzig, Gotha, Stuttgart and Nuremberg; shall we register them here for the time being, until there is a large number and a Central Committee has been formed in Germany?’

I have replied in the affirmative. However, since there can be several branches in one town, you and your people can establish links direct with us.

I have had a second letter from the Berliners. I am at last writing to them today. Ditto to Dr Kugelmann.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

I will let you know next time what questions are to be dealt with at the Geneva Congress at the end of May.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 220;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902 and in full in Pisma Marksa k Kugelmanu (Letters of Marx to Kugelmann), Moscow-Leningrad, 1928.

London, 15 January 1866

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Friend,

A happy New Year and best thanks for your kind letter.

You must excuse the brevity of these lines on account of my being excessively busy at present. I'll write more fully next time. I am enclosing two cards and will let you know in my next letter which questions are to be dealt with at the public congress in Geneva at the end of May.

Our Association has made great progress. It already has 3 official organs, one in London, The Workman’s Advocate, one in Brussels, La Tribune du Peuple, one put out by the French section in Switzerland, Journal de 1'Association Internationale des Travailleurs, Section de la Suisse Romande (Geneva), and in a few days time a journal is to be put out by the German-Swiss section, Der Vorbote, under the editorship of J. P. Becker. (Address: 6 rue du Môle, Genf, J. P. Becker, in case you wanted to send him an occasional article, political or social).

We have succeeded in attracting into the movement the only really big workers’ organisation, the English ‘trade unions’, which previously concerned themselves exclusively with the wage question. With their help, the English society we founded to achieve universal suffrage (half of its Central Committee consists of members — working men — of our Central Committee) held a giant meeting a few weeks ago, at which only working men spoke. You can tell what effect it had from the fact that the leaders of two successive issues of The Times were concerned with this meeting.

As regards my work, [Capital] I am now busy 12 hours a day writing out the fair copy. I am thinking of taking the manuscript of the first volume to Hamburg myself in March and using the opportunity to see you.

I was much amused by the antics of Justus von Möser’s successor. How wretched a man of talent must be who seeks and finds satisfaction in trivialities of that kind!

As regards Bürgers, he is doubtless well-meaning, but weak. It is not much over a year ago that he declared at a public meeting in Cologne (it appeared in print in the Cologne papers) that Schulze-Delitzsch had ‘solved’ the social question once and for all and that only personal friendship for me had induced him (Bürgers) to stray onto the tangled paths of communism! After such public statements, could I regard him as other than a ‘renegade’?

Your most sincere friend

K. Marx

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 231;.

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1963.

[London,] 20 February 1866

Dear Fred,

You can imagine how opportunely the £10 came. I had been served with two threats of distraint, for £6 “0” 9d. for the bloody municipal taxes, and for 1sh. 16d. for the Queen’s taxes. And I had until Friday to pay.

As regards the carbuncles, the position is:

Concerning the upper one, from my long practical experience I was able to tell you that it really needed lancing. Today (Tuesday), after receiving your letter, I took a sharp razor, a relict of Dear Lupus, and lanced the cur myself. (I cannot abide doctors meddling with my private parts or in their vicinity. Furthermore, I have Allen’s testimony that I am one of the best subjects to be operated upon. I always recognise what has to be done.) The sang brûlé, as Mrs Lormier says, Spurted, or rather leapt, right up into the air, and I now consider this carbuncle buried, although it still wants some nursing.

As far as the lower cur is concerned, it is becoming malignant and is beyond my control and kept me from sleeping the whole night through. If this diabolical business advances, I shall have to send for Allen, of course, as, owing to the locus of the cur, I am unable to watch and cure it myself. And in general it is clear that on the whole I know more about carbuncular complaints than most doctors.

And by the by, I still hold to the view that I suggested to Gumpert during my last stay in Manchester: that is, that the itching and scratching between my testis and posterior over the past 2 1/2 years and the consequent peeling of the skin have been more aggravating to my constitution than anything else. The business started 6 months before the first monster carbuncle which I had on my back, and it has persisted ever since.

My dear boy, in all these circumstances one appreciates more than ever the good fortune of a friendship such as exists between ourselves. You should know for your part that there is no relationship I value so highly.

I will send you ‘Zaches’ and ‘Factory Reports’ tomorrow. You will understand, my Dear Fellow, that in a work such as mine, there are bound to be many shortcomings in the detail. But the composition, the structure, is a triumph of German scholarship, which an individual German may confess to, since it is in no way his merit but rather belongs to the nation. Which is all the more gratifying, as it is otherwise the silliest nation under the sun!

The fact, which Liebig had ‘denounced’ and which prompted Schönbein’s investigations, was this:

The upper layers of the soil always contain more ammonia than the deeper ones, instead of containing less of it as they would have to do if they had lost it through cultivation. The fact was recognised by every chemist. Only the cause was unknown.

Hitherto, decay was considered to be the sole source of ammonia. All chemists (including Liebig) denied that the nitrogen in the air could serve as a nutrient for plants.

Schönbein proved (by experiment) that any flame burning in the air converts a certain quantity of the nitrogen in the air into ammonium nitrate, that every process of decomposition gives rise to both nitric acid and ammonia, that the mere evaporation of water is the means causing the formation of both plant nutrients.

Finally, Liebig’s ‘jubilation’ at this discovery:

‘The combustion of a pound of coal or wood restores to the air not merely the elements needed to reproduce this pound of wood or, under certain conditions, coal, but the process of combustion in itself’ (note the Hegelian category) ‘transforms a certain quantity of nitrogen in the air into a nutrient indispensable for the production of bread and meat.

Feel proud of the Germans. It is our duty to emancipate this ‘deep’ people.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Antoinette Philips

In Salt-Bommel

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 241;

First published: in the language of the original, English, in the International Journal Review of Social History, Assen, 1956.

Margate, 18 March 1866

5 Lansell’s Place

My dear Child,

From the address you will see that I have been banished, by my medical adviser, to this seaside place, which, at this time of the year, is quite solitary. Margate lives only upon the Londoners, who regularly inundate it at the bathing season. During the other months it vegetates only. For my own part right glad I am to have got rid of all company, even that of my books. I have taken a private lodging which fronts the sea. In an inn or Hotel one might have been exposed to the danger of falling in with a stray traveller, or being pestered by local politics, vestry interests, and neighbourly gossip. As it is, ‘I care for nobody, and nobody cares for me’. But the air is wonderfully pure and reinvigorating, and you have here at the same time sea air and mountain air. I have become myself a sort of walking stick, running up and down the whole day, and keeping my mind in that state of nothingness which Buddhism considers the climax of human bliss. Of course, you have not forgotten the pretty little diction: ‘When the devil was sick, the devil a monk would be; when the devil was well, the devil a monk was he.'

Withdrawing a little from the seaside, and roaming over the adjacent agricultural districts, you are painfully reminded of ‘civilisation’, because from all sides you are startled by large boards, with governmental proclamations on them, headed: Cattle Disease. The ruling English oligarchs were never suspected to care one farthing for ‘der Menschheit ganzes Weh’ [all misery of mankind - Schiller], but as to cows and oxen, they feel deeply. At the opening of Parliament, the horned cattle gentlemen of both houses, commoners and lords, made a wild rush at government. All their talk sounded like a herd of cows lowing, translated into English. And they were not like honest king Wiswamitra, ‘der kämpfte und büsste für die Kuh Sabalah’ [who wrangled and suffered for the cow Sabalah — Heine]. On the contrary. They seized the opportunity to ‘battre monnaie’ [coin money] out of the cows’ ailings at the expense of the people. By the by, the East sends us always nice things — Religion, Etiquette, and the Plague in all forms.

I am very glad to hear of Waaràtje’s winding up adventure. Verily, verily, I tell thee, my sweet little cousin, I always felt deep sympathy for the man, and always hoped that one day or other he should fix his melting heart in the right direction, and not persevere performing the nasty part in the children’s tale: ‘The Beast and the Beauty’. I'm sure he will make a good husband. Is his inamorata a ‘Bommelerin’ or an importation?

A few days before leaving London, I made the acquaintance of Mr Orsini, a very fine fellow, the brother of the Orsini who was sent to the grave for sending Bonaparte to Italy. He has now left England for the U. States, in commercial matters, but during the few days of our acquaintance, he did me good service. Although an intimate friend of Mazzini’s, he is far from sharing the antiquated antisocialist and theocratical views of Mazzini. Now, during my forced and prolonged absence from the Council of the International Association, Mazzini had been busy in stirring a sort of revolt against my leadership. ‘Leadership’ is never a pleasant thing, nor a thing of ambition. I have always before my mind your father’s [Lion Philips] saying in regard to Thorbecke that ‘der Eselstreiber den Eseln immer verhasst ist’ [the ass-driver is always hateful to the ass]. But having once fairly embarked in an enterprise which I consider of import, I certainly, ‘anxious’ man as I am, do not like to give way. Mazzini, a most decided hater of freethinking and socialism, watched the progress of our society with great jealousy. His first attempt of making a tool of it and fastening upon it a programme and declaration of principles of his hatching, I had baffled. His influence, before that time very great with the London working class, had sunk to zero. He waxed wroth, when he saw that we had founded the English Reform League and a weekly paper, The Commonwealth, to which the most advanced men of London contribute, and of which I shall send you a copy after my return to London. His anger increased, when the editors of the Rive gauche (the journal of la Jeune France, directed by Rogeard, author of the Propos de Labienus, Longuet, etc.) joined us, and when he became aware of the spread of our society on the Continent. He improved my absence, to intrigue with some English workingmen, raise their jealousies against ‘German’ influence, and even sent his bully, a certain Major Wolff (a German by birth) to the Council there to lodge his complaints and more or less directly to denounce me. He wanted to be acknowledged as ‘the leader (I suppose par la grace de dieu) of the continental democratical movement’. In so doing, he acted so far quite sincerely, as he utterly abhors my principles which, in his eyes, embody the most damnable ‘materialism’. This whole scene was enacted behind my back, and after they had made sure that my malady would not allow me to be present. The English wavered, but, although still very weak, I rushed to the following séance, Mr Orsini accompanying me. On my interpellation, he declared them that Mazzini had lost his influence even in Italy and was, from his antecedents and prejudices, quite disabled from understanding the new movement. All the Foreign secretaries declared for me, and, if you, our Dutch secretary, had been present, I hope you would have also cast your vote for your humble servant and admirer. As it was, I carried a complete victory over this redoubtable adversary. I think that Mazzini has now had enough of me and will make bonne mine à mauvais jeu [a good face on a sad business].

I hope to receive a few lines from you. Don’t forget that I am quite an insulated hermit.

Your most sincere friend

Bloch

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 258;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Margate, 6 April 1866

5 Lansell’s Place

Dear Fred,

I have been greatly restored here, and not the smallest sign of a return of the atrocious carbuncles. The spot where the last and most malignant one was still feels a little tender. Perhaps it healed too quickly and an atom of pus is still lurking beneath the healed skin. However, if that were so, the warm sea bathes and the rough towel that I dry myself with would no doubt have dissipated the foul matter; and indeed in the last two days this vestige of the wound seems to be disappearing altogether. The only drawback is a recurrence here of rheumatic pains in my right shoulder, which is seriously disturbing my sleep. I have now been here for nearly 4 weeks and have lived for my health’s sake alone. It is time to put a stop to that soon.

Our letters crossed, so that you have answered mine. You do not mention the possibility of Italy creating a diversion for Prussia’s benefit.

There can be no shadow of doubt that Russia is behind the Prussians, although she is allowing Mr Bonaparte to act as arbiter on the stage. One must not lose sight of the fact (to use a Hegelian turn of phrase) that the Danubian mine was sprung at the very moment that Bismarck made his démarche.

Even granted, which is probable, that the Prussian curs withdraw with their tails between their legs, it remains clear, and must become clear even to the German philistines, that unless there is a revolution in Germany, the Hohenzollern and Habsburg curs will throw our country back for another 50-100 years by civil (dynastic) war.

I must tell you frankly that the ‘International’ is in a sorry state, particularly since the impatience of the French has led to the congress being fixed for the end of May.

The fact is this, that the English leaders in London, now that we have given them a platform (to which must be added the inability of any Englishman to do two things at once), are very cool within our movement proper. My absence for almost 3 months has done untold harm. What is to be done? In France, Belgium, Switzerland (and here and there in Germany, and even sporadically in America) the Association has made great and sustained progress. In England, the reform movement, which we brought into being, has almost killed us. That would be of no consequence, if the Geneva Congress had not been announced for the end of May, and if the Parisians, for whom this movement is the sole possibility, had not, through their own paper Le Congrès, made it almost impossible to prorogue the congress. The English would soon see the rottenness of the Reform Movement, as it now is. After my return the threat of flirtation with the Potter-clique, etc., would soon put everything back on the right lines. But there is no time. For the English even the failure of the congress is a trifle. But for us? A fiasco of European dimensions!! I really do see scarcely a way out. The English have neglected to do anything which might give the congress any kind of respectable form. Que faire! Do you think I should go to Paris to put to the people there how impossible the congress now is? Answer soon. The only possible way out I can see is by agreement with the Parisians. On the other hand, I know that their position itself is at stake if the congress does not take place. Que faire! Mr Vésinier has challenged our Parisians. They are to go to Belgium to shoot it out with him. L'imbécile. As to Orsini, I knew that there was nothing you could do. But I could not refuse him the introduction to you.

Your

K. M.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 6 April 1866

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Friend

I shall return to London the day after tomorrow. My doctor exiled me to this seaside place, [1] where indeed my health has greatly improved. But once again more than two months – February, March and half of April – have been entirely lost and the completion of my book again postponed. It is enough to drive one mad.

I was suffering from carbuncles, not furuncles. This time it was dangerous. Of course you are right in saying that ‘dietetic’ sins are at the bottom of it. I am too much given to working at night, studying by day and writing by night. That, together with all the worries, private and public, and – so long as I am working hard – the neglect of a regular diet and exercise, etc, is quite enough to disorder the blood.

I received Herr Menke’s 100 thalers for the International together with your letter. I have not got the addresses of my French friends in Paris here, but if Herr Menke writes to my friend C Kaub [2] (33 Rue des trois Couronnes du Temple) he can introduce him to V Schily [3] (German) and Tolain, [4] Fribourg, [5] etc, members of the Paris Committee.

The news from Germany is not very gratifying. Prussia is being pushed by Russia (and Bonaparte), Austria by the latter (following more reluctantly in self-defence). Will our philistines at last realise that without a revolution which removes the Hapsburgs and Hohenzollerns (it is unnecessary to speak of the lesser dung-beetles) there must finally come another Thirty Years’ War and a new partition of Germany!

A movement from the Italian side would help Prussia. But if we consider Austria and Prussia in themselves, it is practically certain that the latter would be at a disadvantage, despite all the Düppel-Rénommage. [6] In any case Benedek is a better general than Prince Friedrich Karl. Austria could enforce peace on Prussia single-handed, but not Prussia on Austria. Every Prussian success would be an encouragement to Bonaparte to interfere.

While I write these lines to you, Bismarck may have again drawn in his horns. But even that would only postpone the conflict. I think that such a postponement is probable.

This German trouble is a piece of extraordinary good luck for Bonaparte. His position is undermined on all sides. But war would give him a new lease of life.

Write to me soon, and particularly about German affairs.

Yours

KM

Notes

1. Margate, Kent – MIA.

2. C Kaub – German emigrant in Paris. In the 1850s and 1860s, friendly to Marx – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. Viktor Schily (1810-1875) – Lawyer at Trier; took an active part in the Baden rising of 1849; a close friend of Marx and Engels. Emigrated to Paris, where he consistently advocated the views of Marx in the French sections of the International. Was of great service to Marx in exposing K Vogt – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

4. Henri Tolain (1828-1897) – French working-class leader; Proudhonist and one of the founders of the French section of the International; member of the National Assembly in 1871. For his hostile attitude to the Commune he was expelled from the International. Senator under the Third Republic in 1876 – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

5. ES Fribourg – A French engraver; a Proudhonist. Took part in the First International – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

6. Boasting about Düppel, a fortified village in Schleswig captured in 1864 by the Prussians under Prince Friedrich Karl with many prisoners and rich booty – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx in Margate, 13 April 1866

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... So Bismarck has brought off his universal suffrage stroke even though without his Lassalle. It looks as if the German bourgeois will agree to it after some resistance, for Bonapartism is after all the real religion of the modern bourgeoisie. It is becoming more and more clear to me that the bourgeoisie has not the stuff in it to rule directly itself, and that therefore unless there is an oligarchy, as here in England, capable of taking over, for good pay, the management of state and society in the interests of the bourgeoisie, a Bonapartist semi-dictatorship is the normal form. It upholds the big material interests of the bourgeoisie even against the will of the bourgeoisie, but allows the bourgeoisie no share in the government. The dictatorship in its turn is forced against its will to adopt these material interests of the bourgeoisie as its own. So we now get Monsieur Bismarck adopting the programme of the National Association. [1] To carry it out is something quite different, of course, but Bismarck is hardly likely to come to grief through the German middle class. A German who has just returned relates that he has already found many who swallowed this bait; according to Reuter the Karlsruhe people have accepted the business and the profound embarrassment which this affair has caused the Kölnische Zeitung [2] clearly indicates the forthcoming turn of events...

Notes

1. The National Association was set up on 15-16 September 1859, at a conference held in Frankfurt on the Main of bourgeois liberals from the German states. Its purpose was the unification of all German states except Austria under Prussian hegemony. After the Austro-Prussian war and the creation of the North German Confederation on 11 November 1867, it disbanded itself – Progress Publishers.

2. Kölnische Zeitung – German daily newspaper published in Cologne since 1802; it was the organ of the big Rhenish bourgeoisie and the National Liberal Party; in the 1870s it was regarded as Bismarck’s mouthpiece – Progress Publishers.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 268;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 23 April 1866

Dear Fred,

You will have had little difficulty in explaining my long silence as arising from the mental condition that is generated by more than 2 weeks of incessant toothache and rheumatism. However, a turning-point appears to have been reached today.

As the pain of the rheumatism, which was particularly acute at night, greatly interfered with my sleep and my whole domestic routine — as a consequence of which I was several times attacked by vomiting — I thought it wise to stop, or suspend, the arsenic. But I shall continue with it again now (if a turning-point has really been reached). Nor is there the slightest sign of any furuncular or carbuncular bother, and I have not the slightest doubt that once I am over these incidents, which are connected more with the weather, I shall be fully restored. But indeed it is high time as I have already lost so much time.

With the ‘International’ the situation is as follows: since my return discipline has by and large been re-established. The successful intervention of the ‘International’ in the tailors’ strike (by means of letters from the secretaries for France, Belgium, etc.) has also created a sensation among the Trades Unions here. With respect to the Geneva Congress, I have resolved to do all that I can here to promote its success, but not to attend it in person. I thereby evade all personal responsibility for its conduct.

As far as The Commonwealth is concerned, the encroachments of Miall et Co. would be more tolerable if they were at least founded on the pretext of financial assistance really worthy of mention. But the fellows are exceedingly liberal with good advice and petty criticisms, and exceedingly parsimonious with cash, so that the existence of the paper is assured only from one week to the next. Its readership is spreading week by week, but a penny paper, be it ever so successful, needs to be funded for at least a year ahead. To make it self-supporting in a shorter space of time is quite out of the question. If the paper is for the moment no worse than it is, then that is thanks to Fox alone, who has to fight a continuing battle.

For the present, they do not seem to be coming to blows in the Fatherland after all. Prussian braggadocio is slow indeed to draw the sword! Whatever the outcome, we shall have the pleasure of a Prussian disgrace before both a domestic and foreign audience. For all that, it still seems uncertain whether war might not break out one fine morning. The Russians want war (although they have indeed already gained and are continuing to gain much merely from the bickering and bellicose threats in Germany), and for Bonaparte it would be a God-send. At all events, Mr Bismarck has set ‘the movement’ going again in Germany.

The phase of the Civil War over, only now have the United States really entered the revolutionary phase, and the European wiseacres who believe in the omnipotence of Mr Johnson will soon be disappointed.

In England, the Tories and Palmerstonian Whigs really deserve thanks for frustrating Russell’s quiet settlement. At one of the latest sittings, Mr Gladstone himself, expressed his ‘melancholy’ conviction that now, quite contrary to his benevolent expectations, a ‘long series of struggles’ was imminent.

What do you say to the ‘8th’ sage of the world — [J.S.] Mill?

Best regards to Mrs Lizzy.

Tout à vous

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 269;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 1 May 1866

Dear Moor,

I hope you are happily over your rheumatism and faceache and are once more sitting diligently over the book [Capital]. How is it coming on, and when will the first volume be ready? By the by, you must go on with the arsenic, it should be taken for at least 3 months and is quite unconnected with the rheumatism, etc. The liver troubles may have been a factor contributing to the carbuncles, by disturbing the digestion or blood-formation, and, for that very reason, you will also have to go on taking several hours continuous exercise regularly each day and keep off working at night, so that everything can return to normal. Where the tendency to hyperaemia of the liver has established itself in such a classic and systematic form as in your case, it does not, of course, just vanish again all at once.

It’s good that you have no more worries about the congress and the International Association. Apropos, a shipload of 57 German tailors has been imported to Edinburgh to put down a strike and 2 more loads are expected. Probably from Hamburg. Can you not discover the details in Edinburgh and put a stop to this, too?

Bismarck wants war à tout prix, and after he failed in Bohemia, he seems likely to succeed in Italy. I hope that, if he pulls it off, the Berliners will hit out. If they proclaim a republic there, the whole of Europe can be overturned in 14 days. But, but, will they? How do our connections there stand?

Have you seen how little Louis Blanc, as a good démocrate impérial, is now declaring in the Temps that, if Prussia absorbs the smaller German states, France must have at least the left bank of the Rhine. There’s a real revolutionary for you.

In order to incite my ancient rage somewhat, in the last few days I have been reading the book by Rockel, the 49er imprisoned in Dresden, about his treatment in gaol. These infamies perpetrated by the Saxons exceed everything that I have ever come across. There will be a harsh reckoning to be had with a large number of villains. Such brutality was quite unknown in the old days before ‘48, and the Prussian fortresses of that time seem like paradise in comparison.

These Adullamites really are tremendous jackasses to put up such resistance to this pauvre Reform Bill, the most conservative thing that has ever been done here. However, quem deus vult perdere, etc. [whom God wishes to destroy, he first makes mad]

I already sent my third article on Poland [What Have the Working Classes to Do with Poland?] to The Commonwealth 3 weeks ago and asked for it to be returned if it should be too late for that week. I then received a reply from Fox a week later that it could not appear until the forthcoming issue, returning the article at the same time. Sent it off again on Wednesday, but too late. You were still in Margate at that time. I will send the following Nos. to you again if time does not make immediate, direct submission necessary.

Kind regards to your wife and the girls.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 281;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 7 June 1866

Dear Fred,

I am in a most awkward situation: pawning has now reached its Thule and I am being most furiously dunned as well. Regarding my physical condition, there has fortunately been no recurrence of anything carbuncular. However, I was obliged to go to Allen about my liver trouble, since Gumpert is not here and this thing cannot be treated from a distance. I have still nearly a whole bottle of arsenic left, but have not taken it for several weeks now, as it is incompatible with my present style of life.

Were you among the victims of the Consolidated Bank: Dr Rode was here the day before yesterday and maliciously reported that Dronke has suffered serious losses owing to the Barnett Crash.

So, there will be war after all, unless a miracle occurs. The Prussians will pay dearly for their bragging, and, whatever happens, the idyll in Germany is over. The Proudhonist clique among the students in Paris (Courrier francais) is preaching peace, declaring war out of date and nationalities nonsense, and attacking Bismarck and Garibaldi, etc. As polemic against chauvinism, their activities are useful and understandable. But as faithful followers of Proudhon (my very good friends here, Lafargue and Longuet, are also among that number) who believe that the whole of Europe must and will sit quietly on its arse until the French monsieurs have abolished ‘la misère et l'ignorance’, under which latter they themselves are labouring in inverse proportion to their squawking about ‘science sociale’, they are grotesque. In their articles about the present agricultural crisis in France, their ‘knowledge’ quite takes one’s breath away [Ch. Longuet].

The Russians, who are for ever playing at the old game of playing off the jackasses of Europe against each other, and being partner at one moment of A, and at the next of B, have of late indisputably pushed on the Austrians, 1. because Prussia has not yet made the appropriate concession over Oldenburg, 2. in order to tie the Austrians’ hands in Galicia, and 3. no doubt also because Mr Alexander II, like Alexander I (in his last years), is in such a conservatively morose mood on account of the attempt on his life that his diplomatic gentlemen at least require some ’conservative’ excuses, and an alliance with Austria is conservative. Come the opportune moment, and they will show the backside of the coin.

The official tone adopted by the ‘blood and iron’ Prussians shows how very anxious they are. They are now even doing obeisance to the French Revolution of 1789! They are complaining about Austrian tetchiness!

The best thing in the lousy debate here in Parliament was the register of sins that Disraeli laid at the unfortunate Clarendon’s door.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Italian enthusiasm will no doubt get its bucket of cold water. Even its melodrama, in keeping with the national character, by the way, would be tolerable, if right underneath it all they were not setting their hopes on Badinguet. I cannot forget my Izzy [Lassalle]. If he were still alive now, what a scandal he would create!

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 286;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 20 June 1866

Dear Fred,

This damned weather is having a particularly evil effect sur mon physique; and this is the reason why I did not acknowledge the ‘wine’ earlier, nor write to you otherwise. There is no chance of coming to Manchester, as I cannot leave the house in my present state; besides, I have to be here for the ‘International’, where my French friends have already used my absence once in these trying circumstances to execute some tomfoolery in the name of the Association.

As regards newspapers here, in my view the best thing to do, if nothing comes of the Manchester business, is to send a proper military article to The Times to which you can present yourself as the English correspondent of the Darmstadt Militär-Zeitung. No need for any political considerations, as one London paper is just as bad as any other, and what matters is to obtain the widest publicity.

You must now keep me ‘critically’ au courant des affaires in Italy and Germany.

There was a debate at yesterday’s meeting of the International Council. about the present war. It was announced beforehand and our room was very full. Even the Italian gentlemen had honoured us with their presence again. The discussion was wound up, as could have been foreseen, with the ‘question of nationality’ in general and the attitude we should adopt to it. This sujet adjourned until next Tuesday.

The French, very strongly represented, gave vent to their cordial dislike for the Italians.

The representatives of ‘jeune France’ (non-workers), by the way, trotted out their view that any nationality and even nations are ‘des préjugés surannés’. [outdated prejudices] Proudhonised Stirnerianism. Everything to be broken down into small ‘groupes’ or ‘communes’, which in turn form an ‘association’, but not a state. Furthermore, this ‘individualisation’ of mankind and the mutualisme it entails are to proceed by bringing history to a halt in every other country and the whole world waits until the French are ready to carry out a social revolution. Then they will demonstrate the experiment to us, and the rest of the world, being bowled over by the force of their example, will do the same. Just what Fourier expected from his phalanstère modèle. D'ailleurs, everyone who clutters up the ‘social’ question with the ‘superstitions’ of the Old World is a ‘reactionary’.

The English laughed heartily when I began my speech with the observation that our friend Lafargue, and others, who had abolished nationalities, had addressed us in ‘French’, i.e., in a language which 9/10 of the audience did not understand. I went on to suggest that by his denial of nationalities he seemed quite unconsciously to imply their absorption by the model French nation.

For the rest, the position is difficult now because one must equally oppose the silly Italianism of the English, on the one hand, and the mistaken polemic against it of the French, on the other, and above all prevent any demonstration which would involve our Association in a one-sided course.

Salut

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 289;.

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 7 July 1866

Dear Fred,

D'abord my heartfelt thanks for the Californian consignment. Yet, I was unable to pay the landlord, who is again owed for two quarters. I had to allow priority to part-payments to the fellows who are dunning me every hour of the day.

As regards my state of health, first of all, I have had my nose properly to the grindstone again over the past two weeks, and hope that by the end of August, if I preserve this degree of health, I shall have finished the first volume [of Capital], which I am having published by itself. It is true that I am obliged to continue with Gumpert’s liver-medicine every day, as I would otherwise be laid low at once. Question: is the arsenic (put aside for many weeks now) compatible with it? I am asking because for 4 days now another carbuncle has been appearing above my right collar-bone. I owe more to the Bordeaux than to any medicine. I am incidentally only working in the day-time, as a sporadic attempt to work at night (once or twice) immediately had very unfortunate consequences.

Before passing to general matters, can you translate ‘put stretches upon the mule’ into German for me, and tell me what ‘picks’ in weaving are called in German? What is a ‘flyer’ on the mule?

The workers’ demonstrations in London are fabulous compared with anything seen in England since 1849, and they are solely the work of the ‘International’ Mr Lucraft, f.i., the captain in Trafalgar Square, is one of our Council. This shows the difference between acting behind the scenes whilst retiring in public, and the democrats’ habit of puffing themselves up in public and doing nothing.

The Commonwealth is about to expire. Fox is leaving it next week. Apropos. Stumpf has written to me from Mainz that among the workers the demand for your book ‘The Condition etc.’ is growing daily and that you must certainly bring out the second edition, if only for party reasons. At the same time, his personal experiences lead him to believe that immediately after the war ‘the labour question’ in Germany will come noticeably to the fore.

Freiligrath has put out a melancholy-lyrical little turd on the fratricidal war, which his daughter Kate has englished in today’s Athenaeum.

Beside a great Prussian defeat, which perhaps (oh but those Berliners!) might have led to a revolution, there could have been no better outcome than their stupendous victory. Thiers had been so successful in denouncing Bonaparte’s policy of helping to ‘make’ Prussia (for beside the English, your Frenchman in fact really hates only the Prussians), that Boustrapa had to amend the constitution he had imposed on the French and ‘abolish’ discussion of the address par ordre du Moniteur. (I am enclosing J. Favre’s speech on Mexico and Glais-Bizoin’s bad witticisms for you, so that you can see what Boustrapa’s position was before the outbreak of war). Mr Bonaparte was counting on victory and defeat swinging back and forth between Prussians and Austrians, so that eventually he would be able to step in between the exhausted combatants like Jupiter Scapin. The Prussians’ success really puts his regime in France in dire peril (it is his second great miscalculation since the American Civil War) if he does not manage to dictate the terms of peace. On the other hand, the same success (we are not back in 1815 now) makes it impossible, almost impossible, for the Prussian dynasty to accept terms other than those which Austria must reject, not to mention the fact that handsome William, alias Alexander the Great, cannot possibly cede German territory to France. The Prussians’ decision will depend on the ‘nephew’ in St Petersburg. It is impossible to say what he will do, as that would require one to be in possession of the material in the Russian State Chancellory. But I, for my part, cannot understand how the Russians, who are furthermore offended that the Austrians refused their help, can permit Austria to get her breath back and miss this favourable moment for their Turco-Danubian manoeuvres. Mr Victor Emmanuel is also in a pretty pickle. Venice now belongs to Bonaparte. If he accepts it from him as a present, that will be the end for his dynasty. On the other hand, what can he do against France, and where can he now attack Austria?

But what do you say to our Foxikins; who dashed breathlessly into our house the day before yesterday, exclaiming: ‘Bonaparte has saved Germany!’ This view is shared by Beesly, Harrison, etc., and the whole Comteist clique. Write to me soon, as pen and ink have to serve in place of oral communication in this eventful period.

My best compliments to Mrs Lizzy.

Little Jenny would like to know how your ‘Africans’ are doing?

Salut.

Your

K.M.

Naturally, Bonaparte does not want war now, until he has introduced the needle-gun or an equivalent. A Yankee has offered the war ministry here a rifle which, so I am assured by a refugee Prussian officer (Wilke), is as superior to the needle-gun as the latter is to ‘Old Bess’, by virtue of its extreme simplicity of design, non-susceptibility to heating, reduced need for cleaning, and cheapness. Is there any sphere in which our theory that the organisation of labour is determined by the means of production is more dazzlingly vindicated than in the industry for human slaughter? It really would be worth your while to write something on the subject (I have not the necessary knowledge for it) which I would include as an appendix to my book [Capital] under your name. Give the matter some thought. If you do it, however, it must be done pour le premier volume, in which I am dealing ex professo with this topic. You will appreciate what great pleasure it would give me if you were also to appear in my principal work (previously I have only produced trifles) as a direct collaborator, and not just in quotation!

I am studying Comte on the side just now, as the English and French are making such a fuss of the fellow. What seduces them about him is his encyclopaedic quality, la synthèse. But that is pitiful when compared with Hegel (although Comte is superior to him as a mathematician and physicist by profession, i.e., superior in the detail, though even here Hegel is infinitely greater as a whole). And this shitty positivism came out in 1832!

Friedrich Engels to Karl Marx in London, 25 July 1866

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... The business in Germany seems to me fairly simple now. As soon as Bismarck by using the Prussian army carried out the Little Germany scheme [1] of the bourgeoisie with such colossal success, the development in Germany has so firmly taken this direction that we, like others, must acknowledge the fait accompli, may we like it or not. As to the national side of the affair, Bismarck will in any case establish the Little German Empire in the dimensions intended by the bourgeoisie, that is, including South-West Germany – for the phrases about the line of the Main and the optional separate South German Confederacy are no doubt meant for the French, and in the meantime the Prussians are marching on Stuttgart. Moreover, before very long the German provinces of Austria will also fall to this empire, since Austria is now bound to become Hungarian, [2] and the Germans will be the third nationality in the empire – even after the Slavs.

Politically Bismarck will be compelled to rely on the middle class, whom he needs against the imperial princes. Not at the moment, perhaps, because his prestige and the army are still sufficient. But he will have to give something to the middle class even if only to secure from Parliament the necessary conditions for the central power, and the natural course of the affairs will always force him or his successors to appeal to the middle class again; so that if at present, as is possible, Bismarck does not concede more to the middle class than he actually has to, he will still be driven more and more into their camp.

The good side of the affair is that it simplifies the situation; it makes a revolution easier by doing away with the brawls between the petty capital cities and will certainly accelerate developments. After all a German Parliament is something quite different from a Prussian Chamber. The petty states in their totality will be swept into the movement, the worst localising influences will disappear and parties will at last become really national parties instead of merely local ones.

The chief disadvantage – a very great one – is the unavoidable flooding of Germany with Prussianism. Also – the temporary separation of German Austria, which will result in an immediate advance of the Slav elements in Bohemia, Moravia and Carinthia. Unfortunately nothing can be done against either of these consequences.

In my opinion, therefore, we have to accept the fact, without approving of it, and to use, as far as we can, the greater facilities now bound at any rate to become available for the national organisation and unification of the German proletariat.

There was no need for Stumpf [3] to write to me that brother Liebknecht’s view on Austria was bound to become increasingly fanatical. It could not possibly be otherwise. He moreover published furious articles, undoubtedly sent from Leipzig, in the Neue Frankfurter Zeitung. Blind’s [4] prince-devouring Neue Frankfurter Zeitung went so far as to reproach the Prussians for their disgraceful treatment of the ‘venerable Elector of Hesse’, [5] and waxed enthusiastic over the poor blind Guelph! [6]

Nothing more has appeared in the Guardian. [7]

Yours

FE

Notes

1. The Little Germany scheme – a plan to unite Germany, with the exception of Austria, under Prussian supremacy – Progress Publishers.

2. Engels alludes to the negotiations which were going on between the Austrian ruling circles and the moderate Hungarian opposition, consisting of the bourgeoisie and landowners, concerning a reform of the political structure of the Habsburg empire. The talks ended in the spring of 1867 with the Austro-Hungarian Agreement to transform the Austrian empire into the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary – Progress Publishers.

3. Paul Stumpf (1827-1913) – member of Communist League, took part in German working-class movement and in 1848-49 revolution, member of First International and of Social-Democratic Party of Germany – Progress Publishers.

4. Karl Blind (1827-1907) – German journalist, petty-bourgeois democrat, took part in revolutionary movement in Baden in 1848-49, in 1850s and 1860s one of leaders of German petty-bourgeois émigrés in London, subsequently National Liberal – Progress Publishers.

5. Ludwig III – Progress Publishers.

6. George V of Hanover – Progress Publishers.

7. The Manchester Guardian – Progress Publishers.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 299;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 27 July 1866

Dear Fred,

Best thanks for the £10. They came in the nick of time.

I have not written to Stumpf, precisely because he asked for a line of ‘conduct’, and my view was that he would do best not to ‘conduct’ himself at all until events took a decisive turn. That was a view which I rather thought advisable not to put to him in writing. Mainz is at present still encircled, so far as I know, so postal communication is also presumably interrupted. Did you write to Stumpf?

The comedy in Frankfurt makes up somewhat for the exhalation of the victors. Lord, lord, they howled, 25 million! And his worship the mayor goes and hangs himself! And the Prussians, for their part, officially declare that Frankfurt will have to fork out because its papers have ‘insulted’ His Majesty William the Conqueror. Since his government post in Brünn is only temporary, Stieber will eventually become mayor of the Frankfurter-on-Mainers, whom by the way I have always thought the most insufferable scoundrels. And Edgar Bauer will be imposed on them as Censor-in-Chief. But as regards the Eschenheimer Gasse, Privy Counsellor Duncker would — except that he is, of course, ruling in Kassel.

I am entirely at one with you that we must take the mess as it is. It is, nevertheless, pleasant to be far off at this youthful time of love’s first dawning. The arrogance of the Prussians and the foolishness of handsome William, who believes that nothing has changed since his dream of victory, except that he is now a great potentate, etc., will have their effect soon enough. The Austrians now find themselves where the Slav fanatics from Prague wanted them in 1848. However, for the moment their loss of Venice, their enforced concentration of strength is in no way to the Russians’ advantage. Being a Pan-Slavic empire themselves, they will be all the more antagonistic to the Moscovites. In view of the extraordinary decline of the Habsburgs, it is certainly to be feared that by and by they will allow the Russians to tempt them into a combined attack on Turkey.

For the workers, of course, everything that centralises the bourgeoisie is to their advantage. At all events, even if peace is concluded tomorrow it will be even more provisional than that of Villafranca and Zurich As soon as the ‘arms reform’ has been completed by the various parties, it will be back to ‘bashing’ as Schapper calls it. At all events, Bonaparte has suffered a setback, too, although the setting up of military kingdoms on all sides right and left fits the Plon-Plonist scheme ‘de la démocratie générale’.

The government has almost caused a mutiny here. Your Englishman first needs a revolutionary education, of course, for which two weeks would suffice if Sir Richard Mayne had absolute powers of command. In actual fact, it all hung on one point. If the railings had been used — and it almost came to that — for offence and defence against the police, and some score of the latter killed, the military would have had to ‘step in’, instead of merely parading. And then things would have got quite jolly. This much is certain: that these stiff-necked John Bulls, whose sconces appear made to measure for the constables’ bludgeons will accomplish nothing without a really bloody clash with those in power.

A touching scene, that, that old Beales and the equally asinine old Walpole. and then the intervention of the thin-voiced, intrusive self-important Holyoake who through ‘love of the truth’ is constantly finding his into The Times — nothing but peace and dissoluteness. Meanwhile, whilst these riff-raff are patting each other on the back and be lick-spittling each other, that cur Knox, the police magistrate of Marylebone, is sending people down in a summary fashion, which shows what would happen if London were Jamaica.

Disraeli has made a flue fool of himself, firstly by his pathetic remark in the Lower House, ‘he did not know whether he still had a house’, and then by the strong military occupation of that same house, although, thirdly, the mob (instructed beforehand by the Reform League people) deliberately left the house of Mr ‘Vivian Grey’ untouched. The house lost not a hair from its head. For which Elcho’s window-panes had to suffer the more. I had dropped the hint to Gremer and other managers that it might be appropriate to pay a visit to the ‘Times’ newspaper. As they did not immediately ‘take’ the hint, or did not want to, I did not press it.

The cholera is paying us (I mean the Londoners) its respects with the utmost gravity, and Dr Hunter’s report, in the VIIIth Report of the Health Board on the ‘Housing of the Poor’, which appeared last week, is presumably intended to serve Madam Cholera as a directory of addresses calling for preferential visitation.

My best compliments to Mrs Lizzy.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 303;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 7 August 1866

Dear Fred,

You inferred correctly from my last letter that my state of health has improved, although it fluctuates from one day to the next. Meanwhile, the feeling of being fit to work again does much for a man. Unfortunately, I am constantly interrupted by social troubles and lose a lot of time. Thus, for example, the butcher has suspended meat supplies today, and by Saturday even my stock of paper will be used up.

Since yesterday Laura is half promised to Monsieur Lafargue, my medical Creole. She treats him like the others, but the outbursts of feeling these Creoles are subject to, a slight fear that the jeune homme (he is 25) might do away with himself, etc., some fondness for him, undemonstrative as always with Laura (he is a good-looking, intelligent, energetic lad of athletic build), have more or less led to a semi-compromise. The boy attached himself to me first of all, but soon transferred the attraction from the old man to his daughter. His economic circumstances are middling, as he is the only child of a former planter-family. He is rayé de l’université de Paris Pour deux ans, on account of the congrès à Liège, but intends to sit his examination at Strasbourg. In my judgment, he has an outstanding gift for medicine, in which he is, however, infinitely more sceptical than our friend Gumpert. Scepticism in medical matters appears to be the order of the day with both professors and students in Paris. E. g., Magendie, who declares all therapeutics, in their present state, to be fraudulent. As always, this scepticism not only does not exclude crotchets, but embraces them. E. g., Lafargue believes in alcohol and electricity as the chief cures. Fortunately, he is having a good adviser in Professor Carrère, a refugee (hautes mathématiques; physics and chemistry), and will be able to acquire much practical experience in the London hospitals. I have managed to get him admitted there through the good offices of a third party.

A very important work which I shall send on to you (but on condition that you send it back, as it is not my property) as soon as I have made the necessary notes, is: ‘P. Trémaux, Origine et Transformations de l’Homme et des autres Êtres, Paris 1865. In spite of all the shortcomings that I have noted, it represents a very significant advance over Darwin. The two chief theses are: croisements [crossings] do not produce, as is commonly thought, variety, but, on the contrary, a unity typical of the espèces. The physical features of the earth, on the other hand, differentiate (they are the chief, though not the only basis). Progress, which Darwin regards as purely accidental, is essential here on the basis of the stages of the earth’s development, dégénérescence, which Darwin cannot explain, is straightforward here; ditto the rapid extinction of merely transitional forms, compared with the slow development of the type of the espece, so that the gaps in palaeontology, which Darwin finds disturbing, are necessary here. Ditto the fixity of the espece, once established, which is explained as a necessary law (apart from individual, etc., variations). Here hybridisation, which raises problems for Darwin, on the contrary supports the system, as it is shown that an espece is in fact first established as soon as croisement with others ceases to produce offspring or to be possible, etc.

In its historical and political applications far more significant and pregnant than Darwin. For certain questions, such as nationality, etc., only here has a basis in nature been found. E.g., he corrects the Pole Duchinski, whose version of the geological differences between Russia and the Western Slav lands he does incidentally confirm, by saying not that the Russians are Tartars rather than Slavs, etc., as the latter believes, but that on the surface-formation predominant in Russia the Slav has been tartarised and mongolised; likewise (he spent a long time in Africa) he shows that the common negro type is only a degeneration of a far higher one.

‘If not comprehended by the great laws of nature, man’s undertakings are but calamities, witness the efforts of the Czars to make Muscovites of the Polish people. [...] The same soil will give rise to the same character and the same qualities. A work of destruction cannot last forever, but a work of reconstitution is everlasting. The true frontier of the Slav and Lithuanian races with the Muscovites is represented by the great geological line which lies to the north of the basins of the Niemen and the Dnieper... To the south of that great line, the talents and the types fitted to that region are and will always remain different from those of Russia.’ [P. Trémaux, Origine et transformations de l’homme... pp. 402, 420, 421.]

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 306;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 10 August 1866

Dear Moor,

I don’t know whether I should offer full, semi- or no congratulations at all on Laura’s semi-engagement. But whatever quantity of congratulations may be admissible, it affects their quality not a wit, and I therefore congratulate with all my heart.

About how much does the Trémaux book cost? If it is not excessively dear on account of illustrations or anything, I'll get it myself, and then you won’t need to send it to me.

To allay your butcher’s wrath and replenish your stock of paper, I am enclosing J/F 65 865 and 66, 2 £5 notes totalling £10, dated Manchester, 30 January 1865. I wish that I could set aside more than £200 a year for you, but unfortunately I cannot. If all goes well, it is true that I shall probably be able to provide another £50, but cotton is failing again now, and Bonaparte’s note concerning the 1814 frontiers is alarming the philistine, and that affects the accounts.

That note of Bonaparte’s seems to indicate that a hitch has cropped up between him and Bismarck. Otherwise, his demand would surely not have been so discourteous and unexpected, nor would it have been made at such a very inopportune moment for Bismarck. Bismarck undoubtedly stands to lose nothing by complying with it, but how can he do so now? What will his victorious army say to it? And the German parliament, and the Chambers, and the South Germans? And the old jackass, who will now look as idiotically beatific as my black and white dog Dido when he’s eaten his belly full, and who has said, not an inch of German soil, etc.?

The note was a great folly on Bonaparte’s part, but the howling of the opposition and probably of the army, too, will presumably have forced him to precipitate the matter. It may turn out to be exceedingly dangerous for him. Either Bismarck enables a concession to be made, and then he will be forced to start a war with Bonaparte at the earliest opportunity in order to take his revenge; or else he may not give way, and then there will be war even sooner. In either case, Bonaparte runs the risk of fighting a war he does not want and without the appropriate diplomatic preparation, without any sure allies, for the publicly avowed purpose of conquest. Incidentally, Bismarck told the Hanoverian minister Platen several years ago that he would put Germany under the Prussian helmet and then lead it against the French in order to ‘forge it into one’.

Circulars are circulating here for a ‘Kinkel-fête’, put round by Leppoc, ‘a great poet and a great man’, on the occasion of Gottfried-the-Pious’ departure for Zurich. I have said I am willing to take part in it for the sum of one farthing.

With kindest regards to your wife and the girls.

Your

F.E.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 311;.

First published: in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902.

London, 23 August 1866

My dear Friend,

You must justifiably be angered by my prolonged silence, despite your sundry friendly communications.

However, you will have to excuse me, on account of the extraordinary circumstances in which I find myself.

In consequence of my long illness, my economic situation has reached a point of crisis. I have accumulated debts, which are a crushing mental burden and make me incapable of any activity other than the work in which I am immersed. If I do not succeed in taking out a loan of at least 1,000 talers at an interest of say 5%, I can really see no way out. And despite the numerous letters of acknowledgment I receive from Germany, I do not know where to turn. I can only accept aid from personal friends, nothing public. You will understand that in such conditions letter-writing becomes difficult.

I have not yet succeeded in re-establishing my former lucrative links with America. They are so taken up with their own movement there that they regard any expenditure on European reports as faux frais de production. I could help them by emigrating myself. But I consider it my duty to remain in Europe and complete the work on which I have been engaged for so many years [Capital].

As regards that work itself, I do not think I shall be able to deliver the manuscript of the first volume (it has now grown to 3 volumes) to Hamburg before October. I can only work productively for a very few hours per day without immediately feeling the effects physically, and for my family’s sake I suppose I must, however unwillingly, resolve to observe the hygienic limits until I am fully recovered. My work is furthermore often interrupted by the impingement of adverse external circumstances.

Although I am devoting much time to the preparations for the congress in Geneva, I cannot go myself, nor do I wish to, because my work cannot be subjected to prolonged interruption. I consider that what I am doing through this work is far more important for the working class than anything I might be able to do personally at any congrès quelconque [congress whatsoever].

I regard the international situation in Europe as only temporary. As regards Germany in particular, we must take things as we find them, i.e., promote the interests of revolution in a manner appropriate to the changed conditions. As to Prussia, it is now more important than ever to watch and to denounce her relations to Russia.

Your very sincere friend

K. Marx

Engels to Emil Engels

In Engelskirchen

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 312;.

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.

Manchester, 23 August 1866

Dear Emil,

In great haste, just to ask you to send the Funke document not to me but to

Hall & Janison, Solicitors,

Manchester,

as soon as it is signed.

I am leaving for Germany tomorrow, you see.

Kind regards to everyone. I am thinking of coming to Engelskirchen after Marie Blank’s wedding.

Your

Friedrich

Marx To Laura Marx

In Hastings

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 313;.

First published: in the original English, in Annali, Milano, 1958.

[London,] 28 August 1866

My dear Cacadou,

I have received your letter, but not unopened, since it had to pass through the fingered hands of the Emperor [Jennychen].

It was always my opinion that to give the last finishing stroke to your ‘heducation’ some sort of boarding school training was still wanted. It will do you a great deal of good.

II hidalgo della figure trista [the knight of the woeful character — Don Quixote, i.e., Paul Lafargue] left me at the corner of his house. His heart having been considerably shaken before, he seemed to bear his separation from me with a rather heroic indifference.

My best wishes to [Marx uses three mathematical symbols for ‘Eleanor’]: +/-∞-/+

I enclose 5 l., the remainder to be sent in the second week.

Yours humbly

Old One

Marx To Johann Philipp Becker

In Geneva,

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 314;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Moscow, 1934.

[London,] 31 August 1866

Dear Becker,

It is absolutely imperative that Jung be made President of the congress,

1. because he speaks the 3 languages, English, French, and German.

2. Jung truly represents the Central Council, Odger (who furthermore only knows his mother-tongue) was not elected by the Central Council; we elected 4 delegates, with Jung at the head; Odger was only to go if he could raise the money himself (guaranteed by us, of course). He has done nothing for the Association.

3. Cremer and Odger have hatched a very mean plot to prevent Jung and Eccarius leaving on the very last day.

4. Odger wishes to be elected President of the congress as a means of impressing the English and imposing himself as President of the Central Council for next year, against the wish of the great majority of the Council.

5. Cremer and Odger have both betrayed us in the Reform League, where they came to a compromise with the bourgeoisie against our wishes.

6. Mr Cremer has morally debased himself completely. All his efforts are now aimed at securing a ‘paid’ post for himself, so that he need not work. In no circumstances must he therefore be elected as General Secretary by the congress. (The only paid post.) They must elect Fox, on the pretext, which is incidentally true, that the General Secretary must know more than one language.

9. The President of the Central Council must not be elected by the congress but here in London, as a figure of merely local importance.

10. At the election of the President for the congress, you must say at the outset that an international congress can only be presided over by a man who can speak the various languages, simply to save time, etc.

11. Convey this to Dupleix.

12. I should be glad if you would get Eccarius to translate the instructions which I wrote in the name of the Central Committee for the London delegates into German beforehand.

Regards and handshake.

Your

Karl Marx

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 42, p. 320;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 2 October 1866

Dear Moor,

You did not tell me that you had signed a bill for £46, which was why I sent you half notes for only £40 yesterday; the missing halves follow today, as well as a further five-pound-note I/F 98815, Manchester, 30 January 1865.

Our cashier has not got a second five-pound-note, and it’s too late for a Post Office order, so I cannot include the remaining sovereign; but you will no doubt surmount that difficulty.

Regarding Moilin and Trémaux I will write at greater length in the next few days; I have not quite finished reading the latter yet, but I have come to the conclusion that there is nothing to his whole theory because he knows nothing of geology, and is incapable of even the most common-or-garden literary-historical critique. That stuff about the nigger Santa Maria and the whites turning into Negroes is enough to make one die of laughing. Especially the idea that the traditions of the Senegal niggers necessarily deserve credence, just because these fellows cannot write! In addition, it is another pretty notion of his to ascribe the differences between a Basque, a Frenchman, a Breton, and an Alsatian to the surface-structure, which is, of course, also to blame for the people speaking four different languages.

Perhaps the man will demonstrate in the 2nd volume how he explains that we Rhinelanders on our Devonian transitional massif (which has not been covered again by the sea since long before the coal was formed) did not become idiots and niggers ages ago, or else he will assert that we are really niggers.

The book is utterly worthless, pure theorising in defiance of all the facts, and for each piece of evidence it cites it should itself first provide evidence in turn.

Kindest regards to the Ladies.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 321;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 3 October 1866

Dear Engels,

The enclosed bill will give you some idea of what adventures I have had today and yesterday. It was not yesterday that it became due, as Sawyer had said. This delay of one day would have been welcome in other circumstances, but in present circumstances it was exceedingly unfortunate. When your letter arrived yesterday, I went straight to our baker, Whithers, as there was nothing left to pawn, and borrowed £1 from him. But when the bill arrived this morning, it was for £48-1-5d. and not, as I had thought, £46. It was my own fault, of course, for not noting the amount. I had thought Sawyer would have deducted the Proprietor Tax which I had paid and which was not deducted from the previous bill (by law it falls on him). That was not the case. (He will therefore have to deduct the whole lot for next quarter.) Hence my mistake over the £46. The bill was presented this morning at 9 o'clock sharp, and I discovered to my horror that I was £2-1-5d. short. Que faire? I asked the presenter of the bill to wait (at our house), as I had to go and change some money. I had no alternative but to return to the good baker, who pulled a very long face, as I am deep in the red on account of his supplying of provisions. However, he performed.

Ad vocem Trémaux: your verdict ‘that there is nothing to his whole theory because he knows nothing of geology, and is incapable of even the most common-or-garden literary-historical critique recurs almost word for word in Cuvier’s ‘Discours sur les Révolutions du Globe’ in his attack on the doctrine of the variabilité des especes, in which he makes fun of German nature-worshippers, among others, who formulated Darwin’s basic idea in its entirety, however far they were from being able to prove it. However, that did not prevent Cuvier, who was a great geologist and for a naturalist also an exceptional literary-historical critic, from being wrong, and the people who formulated the new idea, from being right. Trémaux’s basic idea about the influence of the soil (although he does not, of course, attach any value to historical modifications of this influence, and I myself would include amongst these historical modifications the chemical alteration in the surface soil brought about by agriculture, etc., as well as the varying influence which, with varying modes of production, such things as coalfields, etc., have) is, in my opinion, an idea which needs only to be formulated to acquire permanent scientific status, and that quite independently of the way Trémaux presents it.

Salut.

Your

K. Marx

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 322;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 5 October 1866

Dear Moor,

I am tickled by your naivety in having bills outstanding against you without knowing the amount; however, it’s lucky the difference was no bigger and the good baker was at hand. So that you can repay the sum in question to that excellent man at once and thus preserve your credit, I am enclosing £5 I/F 59667, Manchester, 30 January 1865, for you, and am also returning the bill now settled.

Ad vocem Trémaux. When I wrote to you, I had admittedly only read a third of the book, and that was certainly the worst part (at the beginning). The second third, the critique of the schools, is far better; the third, the conclusions, very bad again. The man deserves credit for having emphasised the effect of the ‘soil’ on the evolution of races and logically of species as well more than had previously been done, and secondly for having worked out more accurate (though, in my view, still very one-sided) views on the effects of crossing than his predecessors. In one respect, Darwin is also right in his views on the effect crossing has in producing change, as Trémaux incidentally tacitly acknowledges, in that, when it suits him to do so, he also treats crossing as a means of change, even if ultimately as one that cancels itself out. Similarly, Darwin and others have never failed to appreciate the effect of the soil, and if they did not especially emphasise it, this was because they had no notion of how the soil exerts an influence — other than that fertility has a favourable and infertility an unfavourable effect. And Trémaux is little the wiser about that either. The hypothesis that, as a general rule, the soil favours the development of higher species to the extent that it belongs to more recent formations, sounds exceedingly plausible and may or may not be correct; however, when I see the ridiculous evidence with which Trémaux seeks to substantiate it, of which 9/10 is based on erroneous or distorted facts and the remaining 1/10 proves nothing, I cannot but extend the profound suspicions I have of the author of the hypothesis to the hypothesis itself. But when he then goes on to declare that the effect of the soil’s greater or lesser age, modified by crossing, is the sole cause of change in organic species or races, I see absolutely no reason to go along with the man thus far, on the contrary, I see numerous objections to so doing.

You say that Cuvier also criticised the German natural philosophers for their ignorance of geology when they proclaimed the mutability of species, and yet they were proved right. At that time, however, the question had nothing to do with geology; but if someone puts forward a theory of the mutability of species based on geology alone and makes such geological howlers in it, falsifies the geology of whole countries (e.g., Italy and even France) and takes the rest of his examples from countries of whose geology we are as good as totally ignorant (Africa, Central Asia, etc.), then that is altogether a different matter. With regard to the ethnological examples in particular, the ones that concern countries and peoples which are generally known are almost without exception erroneous, either in their geological premisses or in the conclusions drawn from them — and he completely ignores the many contrary examples, e.g., the alluvial plains in Central Siberia, the enormous alluvial basin of the River Amazon, all the alluvial land southward from La Plata almost to the southern tip of America (east of the Cordilleras).

That the geological structure of the soil is closely related to the ‘soil’ in which everything grows is an old idea, likewise that this soil which is able to support vegetation influences the flora and fauna that subsist on it. It is also true that this influence has as yet been scarcely examined at all. But it is a colossal leap from there to Trémaux’s theory. At all events, he deserves credit for having emphasised this previously neglected aspect, and, as I said, the hypothesis that the soil encourages evolution in proportion to its greater or lesser geological age, may be correct within certain limits (or again it may not), but all the further conclusions he draws I consider to be either totally mistaken or incredibly one-sided and exaggerated.

I was very interested by Moilin’s book, particularly for the results the French have obtained by vivisection; it is the only way to ascertain the functions of certain nerves and the effects of interfering with them; these fellows appear to have taken the art of animal-torture to a very high level of perfection; and I can very well understand the hypocritical fury of the English against vivisection; these experiments no doubt came as a most unpleasant surprise to many of the comatose gentlemen here and overturned many of their speculations. Whether there is anything new in the theory of inflammations, I am in no position to judge (I intend giving the book to Gumpert); this whole new French school does, however, appear to have a certain free-and-easy character, making big claims and being rather less scrupulous with evidence. As regards medicines, it contains nothing that any competent German doctor does not also know and accept; Moilin just forgets that 1. one is often obliged to choose the lesser evil, medicine, in order to get rid of the greater, namely, a symptom which in itself represents a direct danger, in exactly the same way that by surgery one destroys tissues where there is no alternative, and 2. that one does have to stick to the medicines for as long as one has nothing better. As soon as Moilin can cure syphilis with his electricity, mercury will soon vanish, but scarcely until then. Incidentally, no one can go on telling me that only the Germans can ‘construct’ systems, the French beat them hollow at that.

Kindest regards.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 325;

First published: in Die Neue Zeit, Rd. 2, Nr. 2, Stuttgart, 1901-1902;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

London, 9 October 1866

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Friend,

I hope I must not conclude from your lengthy silence that my last letter has in any way offended you. The case should be quite the reverse. Any person, who is in desperate straits, sometimes feels the need to ventilate his feelings. But he only does so to people in whom he has a special and exceptional confidence. I do assure you that my domestic troubles disquiet me far more for being an obstacle to the completion of my work [Capital] than for any personal or family reasons. I could dispose of the whole problem tomorrow if I were prepared to take up a practical trade tomorrow, instead of working for the cause. And I equally hope that you are not embarrassed by the fact that you can do nothing to alleviate my plight. That would indeed be the most unreasonable of reasons.

And now to some more general matters.

I was profoundly apprehensive about the first congress in Geneva. By and large, however, it went off better than I expected. We had not in the least anticipated the effect it would have in France, England and America. I was unable to attend, nor did I wish to, but I did write the programme for the London delegates. I deliberately confined it to points which allow direct agreement and combination of efforts by the workers and give direct sustenance and impetus to the requirements of the class struggle and the organisation of the workers into a class. The Parisian gentlemen had their heads stuffed full of the most vacuous Proudhonist clichés. They prattle incessantly about science and know nothing. They spurn all revolutionary action, i.e. arising from the class struggle itself, every concentrated social movement, and therefore also that which can be achieved by political means (e.g., such as limitation of the working day by law). Beneath the cloak of freedom and anti-governmentalism or anti-authoritarian individualism these gentlemen, who for 16 years now have so quietly endured the most wretched despotism, and are still enduring it, are in actuality preaching vulgar bourgeois economics, only in the guise of Proudhonist idealism! Proudhon has done enormous harm. His pseudo-critique and his pseudo-confrontation with the Utopians (he himself is no more than a philistine Utopian, whereas the Utopias of such as Fourier, Owen, etc., contain the presentiment and visionary expression of a new world) seized hold of and corrupted first the ‘jeunesse brillante’ the students, then the workers, especially those in Paris, who as workers in luxury trades are, without realising it, themselves deeply implicated in the garbage of the past. Ignorantly vain, arrogant, compulsively talkative, rhetorically inflated, they were on the verge of spoiling everything, as they flocked to the congress in numbers quite out of proportion to the number of their members. In my report I shall give them a discreet rap over the knuckles.

I was exceedingly pleased at the American workers’ congress, which took place at the same time in Baltimore. The watchword there was organisation for the struggle against capital, and, remarkably enough, most of the demands I had put up for Geneva were put up there, too, by the correct instinct of the workers.

The reform movement here, which was called into being by our Central Council (quorum magna pars fui [in which I played an important part]), has now assumed enormous and irresistible dimensions. I have always kept behind the scenes and have not further concerned myself with the matter since it has been under way.

Your

K. Marx

Apropos. The Workman is a philistine paper, and has nothing to do with us. The Commonwealth belongs to our people, but has for the moment transformed itself purely into a mouthpiece for Reform (partly for economic and partly for political reasons).

I have recently read Dr T. Moilin: ‘Leçons de Médecine Physiologique’, which came out in Paris in 1865. A lot of fanciful ideas in it and too much ‘construing’. But a lot of criticism of traditional therapeutics, too. I would be glad if you would read the book and let me have your opinion in detail. I would also recommend to you Trémaux: ‘De 1'origine de tous les êtres, etc.’ Although written in a slovenly way, full of geological howlers and seriously deficient in literary-historical criticism, it represents — with all that, and all that — an advance over Darwin.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 327;.

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902 and in full in Pisma Marksa k Kugelmanu, Moscow-Leningrad, 1928.

London, Saturday, 13 October 1866

Dear Friend,

Since I wish to reply to you at once and your letter has arrived just before the Post closes (and no post goes from here tomorrow, Sunday), I shall summarise the quintessence of my intercepted letter in a few words. (This confiscation of letters is certainly not at all pleasant, as I have not the slightest desire to make Mr Bismarck a confidant to my private affairs. If, on the other hand, he wishes to know my views on his policies, he can approach me direct, and I am sure I shall not mince my words.)

My economic situation has deteriorated so much following my prolonged illness and the many expenses it entailed that I am faced with a financial crisis in the immediate future, something which, quite apart from its direct effects on myself and family, would also be ruinous for me politically, especially here in London, where one must keep up appearances. What I wanted to find out from you was this: do you know anyone, or a few people (under no circumstances must the affair become public), who could advance me about 1,000 talers at an interest rate of 5 or 6% for at least 2 years? I am now paying 20-50% interest for the small sums I am borrowing, but for all that I can no longer keep the creditors at bay, with the result that the old firm is about to come crashing down about my ears.

Since my penultimate letter to you. I have suffered another series of relapses and have consequently only been able to pursue my theoretical work very intermittently. (The practical work for the International Association goes on as ever, and there is a lot of it, as I am in fact having to run the whole Association myself.) I shall be sending the first sheets [of the first volume of Capital] to Meissner next month, and will continue to do so until I go to Hamburg with the remainder myself. At all events, I shall take that opportunity to call on you.

My circumstances (endless interruptions, both physical and social) oblige me to publish Volume One first, not both volumes together, as I had originally intended. And there will now probably be 3 volumes.

The whole work is thus divided into the following parts:

Book I. The Process of Production of Capital.

Book II. The Process of Circulation of Capital.

Book III. Structure of the Process as a Whole.

Book IV. On the History of the Theory.

The first volume will include the first 2 books.

The 3rd book will, I believe, fill the second volume, the 4th the 3rd.

It was, in my opinion, necessary to begin again ab ovo in the first book, i. e., to summarise the book of mine published by Duncker [Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] in one chapter on commodities and money. I judged this to be necessary, not merely for the sake of completeness, but because even intelligent people did not properly understand the question, in other words, there must have been defects in the first presentation, especially in the analysis of commodities. Lassalle, e. g., in his Kapital und Arbeit in which he claims to give the ‘Intellectual quintessence’ of my argument, makes serious blunders, which is incidentally something to which he is always prone with his very carefree manner of appropriating my works. It is comical how he even copies my literary-historical ‘errors’, because, you see, I sometimes quote from memory, without checking things. I have not yet finally made up my mind whether to pass a few remarks in the foreword about Lassalle’s plagiarising. The impudence of his disciples towards me would at all events justify it.

The London Council of the English trade unions (its secretary is our President, Odger) is deliberating at the present moment as to whether it should declare itself to be the British Section of the International Association. If it does so, the control of the working class here will in a certain sense pass into our hands, and we shall be able to give the movement a good ‘push on’.

Salut.

Your

K. Marx

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 25 October 1866

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Friend

A few lines at once.

1. To thank you for your efforts.

2. To tell you that I received this, as well as the previous letters.

3. You mistake my relations with Engels. He is my most intimate friend. I have no secrets from him. Had it not been for him I should long ago have been compelled to take up ‘business’. Therefore in no circumstances do I want any third person to intervene with him on my account. He also, obviously, can only act within certain limits.

Dr Jakobi, [1] I have been informed by workers, has become a very good citizen and consequently is not to be troubled in any way with my private affairs.

I must see about doing something, but I see that you have tried to do everything in your power, and therefore ask you to consider this affair settled.

I do not write for the Commonwealth.

Yours

KM

Miquel [2] and Co can wait a long time before they become Prussian ministers.

KM

Notes

1. Abraham Jakobi (1832-1900) – German doctor and in his youth an active member of the Communist League at Cologne. Sentenced in the Cologne trial of 1852; after serving his sentence emigrated to America, and left the labour movement – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Johannes Miquel (1828-1901) – German statesman; in the early 1850s a supporter of Marx and active member of the Communist League. In the 1860s he joined the National Liberals. Later, Prussian Minister of Finance – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 331;.

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 10 November 1866

Dear Engels,

My best thanks for coming to my aid so quickly and ditto for the port wine. I know your own circumstances exactly, and that makes it doubly painful for me thus to put pressure on you. You know, we really must put an end to this business once and for all, but that will not be possible until I can go to the Continent and act there in person.

Next week the first batch of the manuscript [of the first volume of Capital] will go off to Meissner at last! This summer and autumn it was really not the theory which caused the delay, but my physical and civil condition. It is just 3 years ago now that the first carbuncle was lanced. Since then I have had only short periods of respite from it, and as Gumpert will confirm, of all types of work, theory is the most unsuitable if one has this devil’s brew in one’s blood.

As regards the present fellow, it will be cured in the space of about 14 days. I now know exactly how it has to be treated and I have therefore started taking the arsenic again.

In great haste.

Your

K. Marx

Marx To Francois Lafargue

In Bordeaux

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 334;

First published: in the language of the original, French, in Annali, Milano, 1958;

Translated from the French.

London, 12 November 1866

My dear Mr Lafargue,

I hope our friend il amoroso [Paul Lafargue] has apologised to you on my behalf for my inexcusable silence. On the one hand, I have been plagued by constantly recurring illness, on the other, I have been so taken up by a very lengthy work [Capital] that I have neglected my correspondence with my closest friends. If I did not count you among that category, I should never have dared so to offend against propriety.

My sincere thanks for the wine. Being myself from a winegrowing region, and former owner of a vineyard, I know a good wine when I come across one. I even incline somewhat to old Luther’s view that a man who does not love wine will never be good for anything. (There are exceptions to every rule.) But one cannot, for example, deny that the political movement in England has been spurred on by the commercial treaty with France and the import of French wines. That is one of the good things that Louis Bonaparte was capable of doing, whereas poor Louis Philippe was so intimidated by the manufacturers in the North that he did not dare enter into commercial treaties with England. It is only to be regretted that regimes such as the Napoleonic one, which are founded on the weariness and impotence of the two antagonistic classes of society, buy some material progress at the expense of general demoralisation. Fortunately, the mass of working men cannot be demoralised. Manual labour is the great antidote for all the ills of society.

You will have been just as delighted by the defeat of President Johnson in the latest elections as I was. The workers in the North have at last fully understood that white labour will never be emancipated so long as black labour is still stigmatised.

On Saturday evening Citizen Dupont brought me a letter addressed to Paul by the secretary of the College of Surgeons. He required some papers which were neither in the possession of my daughter [Laura] (except for his baccalauréat diploma) nor of the person who has charge of your son’s effects. You will therefore have to send us these documents at once.

Please be so good as to tell your son that he will greatly oblige me by desisting from propaganda in Paris. This is a dangerous time. The best thing he can do in Paris is to use his time to profit by his association with Dr Moilin. It will do him no harm to spare his polemical strength. The more he holds himself in check, the better he will be as a fighter when the right moment comes.

My daughter asks me to request you to be so kind as to send with Paul some photograms of Madame Lafargue and of yourself.

All my family joins me in greetings to the Lafargue family.

Yours ever

Karl Marx

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 338;.

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 17 December 1866

Dear Fred,

Thanks for the £10.

As far as Rode is concerned, he is obsessed with political connections and his own self-importance. As you are finding this obsession a nuisance — and justly so — you should write to him at the first opportunity saying that you have not the honour of his acquaintance and requesting him to desist from such liberties.

The Revue des deux Mondes and the Revue Contemporaine had two detailed articles on the ‘International’, which treat it and its congress as one of the most significant events of the century. The like also in The Fortnightly Review, in consequence. Meanwhile, we are in practice paralysed by want of funds and even of men, with all the English being totally absorbed by the Reform Movement. The French government is (heureusement) beginning to treat us as enemies. One of our more dubious acquisitions was the joining (at New York) of Head Centre Stephens.

Was not the Pope’s address to the French officers capital? Only an Italian priest could thus, before the whole of Europe, deliver Bonaparte a kick in the form of a blessing.

It is highly characteristic of the status rerum that neither Bonaparte nor William the Conqueror are quite right in the top department. The latter believes that God Almighty has entrusted him with a special mission, and the former has been turned so topsy-turvy by Mexico and Bismarck that he sometimes appears positively demented.

And do you not think that there will be peace for another year yet at least (apart from accidents, of course, such as the death of Bonaparte, etc.)? The fellows all need time for the conversion and production of arms, do they not?

Not a word from Mr Meissner yet. I presume that now, at the year’s end, he finds the pressure of business very great. The contract does give me surety in the event of any evasive manoeuvres. In the second, emended and definitive version, the contract contains no stipulation whatever as to the term for which the manuscript [of the first volume of Capital] is to be ready. But if there is no answer by tomorrow, I shall write again.

As you enjoy credit with quelconque bookseller and I can not spend a farthing on books at the moment, you would be doing me a great favour if you could get as quickly as possible for me: ‘J. E. Th. Rogers: A History of Agriculture’. I must have a look at the book and have left a gap in one chapter for the purpose. Although it has already been out for a long time, it is not yet in the library. Nor at Mudie’s, so I am assured by Eccarius, for whom The Commonwealth took out a subscription there.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels to Marx

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

December 21, 1866

Old Horace reminds me in places of Heine, who learned so much from him and who was also au fond quite as much a scoundrel politice. Imagine this honest man, who challenges the vultus instantis tyranni and grovels before Augustus. Apart from this, the foul-mouthed old so and so is still very lovable.

1867

Marx to Engels. 19 January

Engels to Marx. 29 January

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 18 February

Marx to Engels. 21 February

Marx to Engels. 25 February

Engels to Marx. 13 March

Marx to Engels. 2 April

Engels to Marx. 4 April

Marx to Engels. 13 April

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 16 April

Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. 17 April

Marx to Engels. 24 April

Engels to Marx. 27 April

Marx to Sigfrid Meyer. 30 April

Marx to Ludwig Buchner. 1 May

Marx to His Daughter Jenny. 5 May

Marx to Engels. 7 May

Marx to Laura Marx. 13 May

Marx to Engels. About 22 May

Marx to Engels. 3 June

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 10 June

Engels to Marx. 16 June

Marx to Engels. 22 June

Engels to Marx. 24 June

Engels to Marx. 26 June

Marx to Engels. 27 June

Marx to Engels. 27 June

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 13 July

Marx to Engels. 20 July

Marx to Ferdinand Freiligrath. 20 July

Marx to Engels. 10 August

Engels to Marx. 11 August

Marx to Engels. 14 August

Marx to London Bookseller. 14 August

Engels to Marx. 15 August

Marx to Engels. 16 August

Engels to Marx. 23 August

Marx to Engels. 24 August

Engels to Marx. 26 August

Engels to Marx. 27 August

Marx to Auguste Vermorel. 27 August

Marx to Sigfrid Meyer. 27 August

Marx to Engels. 31 August

Engels to Marx. 1 September

Engels to Marx. 2 September

Marx to Engels. 4 September

Marx to Engels. 7 September

Engels to Marx. 9 September

Marx to Engels. 11 September

Engels to Marx. 11 September

Marx to Engels. 12 September

Marx to Engels. 12 September

Engels to Marx. 12 September

Marx to Engels. 13 September

Engels to Laura Marx. 23 September

Marx to Engels. 4 October

Engels to Marx. 8 October

Marx to Engels. 9 October

Marx to Engels. 10 October

Engels to Marx. 11 October

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 11 October

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 12 October

Engels to Marx. 13 October

Marx to Engels. 14 October

Engels to Marx. 15 October

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 15 October

Engels to Marx. 18 October

Engels to Hermann Meyer. 18 October

Marx to Engels. 19 October

Engels to Marx. 22 October

Engels to Marx. 1 November

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 2 November

Engels to Marx. 5 November

Marx to Engels. 7 November

Engels to Marx. 8 November

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 8/20 November

Marx to Engels. 9 November

Engels to Marx. 10 November

Marx to Carl Siebel. 10 November

Marx to Engels. 14 November

Engels to Marx. 24 November

Engels to Marx. 26 November

Marx to Engels. 27 November

Marx to Engels. 28 November

Engels to Marx. 28 November

Engels to Hermann Engels. 28 November

Marx to Engels. 29 November

Marx to Engels. 29 November

Engels to Marx. 29 November

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 30 November

Marx to Victor Schily. 30 November

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 30 November

Engels to Marx. 4 December

Engels to Marx. 6 December

Marx to Engels. 7 December

Marx to Engels. 7 December

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 7 December

Engels to Marx. 12 December

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 12 December

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 13 December

Marx to Engels. 14 December

Engels to Marx. 16 December

Marx to Engels. 17 December

Engels to Marx. 19 December

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 343;.

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 19 January 1867

Dear Engels,

After a long silence, for which he pleaded overwork, Meissner has written that my plan ‘is unacceptable to him’.

1. He wants to have the 2 volumes [of Capital] ready at the same time;

2. not to print piecemeal, as he wants to have one proof-sheet done per day and only to leave the final correction (revision) to me.

I replied ad 2 that it is a matter of indifference to me, as he can shortly have the whole manuscript of Volume I. If he commences printing later but prints by so much faster, it will be all the same in the end. However, in the case of a book with so much annotation in various languages, he should reflect whether the manner of correcting he is wanting is feasible without the text being gravely marred by printing errors. Ad 1, it is an impossibility without the whole job being greatly delayed, nor is anything of the kind agreed in our contract. I explicated the various reasons to him, but have as yet had no reply.

Aside from the delay, a yet greater obstacle to my committing myself to the 2nd volume is the fact that, when the first one has appeared, I shall have to make a pause for my health’s sake; and I shall in any case have to travel to the Continent to ascertain whether I can in any way sort out my financial circumstances. These are becoming worse day by day, and there is a danger of everything coming crashing about our heads. The baker alone is owed £20, and there is the very devil with butcher, grocer, taxes, etc. To crown it all, I recently received a letter from a Mr Burton in Torquay, informing me he has bought the house from Sawyer, and he is dunning me 1. for the outstanding rent for the last Quarter, 2. as my lease expires in March, requesting me to state if I wish to take the house subsequently, either for a longer lease or annually. I did not reply immediately. Whereupon I received a second letter yesterday, saying I must explain myself, as otherwise his ‘agent’ would have to take steps to find another tenant. So in a fix.

As for my physical condition, it has been better for some weeks, a few small carbuncles on my left loin, but not significant. Only dreadful insomnia, which makes me very restless, although the chief cause is probably mental.

Thanks for the Rogers. A lot of material in it. Regarding the strike question, or at least the Manchester Weavers’ dispute, I should be obliged to you if you would write me an exact account of the state of affairs, as I can still include it.

Politics frozen up, too cold even for the Russian bear. I am tickled by the Prussians’ black, white and red flag!

Best wishes to Mrs Lizzy.

What does Gumpert have to say about Moilin?

Your

K. M.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 18 February 1867

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

Will you see if you can get the following reply [1] inserted in the Zeitung für Norddeutschland, and if they refuse it, in another Hanoverian paper. It is important for me because I actually intend to go to Germany in a few weeks’ time. The whole notice smells like Stieber. [2]

In a few days I shall send you the official report of the Geneva Congress which is now appearing in serial form, both English and French, in a paper here. The Commonwealth is up to its neck in the reform movement. Its editorship is in very bad hands. At the moment we have reasons for letting it go on as it is, although we could intervene as share-holders.

Recently our Society has had all sorts of quarrels with Monsieur Bonaparte. More next time. Please let me know what Liebknecht is doing and where he is.

Yours

K Marx

Notes

1. Wilhelm Stieber (1818-1882) – Chief of the political department of the Prussian police and organiser of the famous Communist trial at Cologne in 1852 – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. The enclosure reads: ‘To the Editor of the Zeitung für Norddeutschland. It appears to me that the notice published, probably inadvertently, in no 5522 of your journal: “Dr Marx, resident in London, seems to have decided upon a journey to the Continent in order to conduct propaganda for this affair [the approaching Polish insurrection]” is a police fabrication hatched for I know not what “affair.” London, 18 February 1867.’ This declaration was not published in full, the Editors of the paper confining themselves to a short note of its contents – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx to Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

February 25, 1867

I can write you but a few lines at this moment, as the landlord’s agent is here and I must play opposite him in the role of Mercadet in Balzac’s comedy. Apropos of Balzac, I advise you to read his Le Chef-d'Œuvre Inconnu and Melmoth reconcilie. They are two little chefs d'œuvres full of delightful irony.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p 350;.

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 2 April 1867

Dear Engels,

I had resolved not to write to you until I could announce completion of the book, [Volume I of Capital] which is now the case. Nor did I wish to bore you by explaining the further delay, viz., carbuncles on my posterior and near the penis, the final traces of which are now fading but which made it extremely painful for me to adopt a sitting (hence writing) posture. I am not taking arsenic because it dulls my mind too much and I needed to keep my wits about me at least at those times when writing was possible.

Next week I shall have to take the manuscript to Hamburg myself. I did not like the tone of Mr Meissner’s last letter. Added to which, I received the enclosed scrawl from Borkheim yesterday. I have every reason to believe that the ‘continental friend’ is Mr Privy Councillor Bucher. Borkheim had written him a letter, you know, which he read out to me, about his arrangements for travelling to Silesia, which he wishes to visit on family business. Bucher replied directly. I therefore scent a plot behind these canards and will have to put the knife to Meissner’s breast myself. Otherwise, the fellow would be in a position to hold back my manuscript (some 25 closely printed proof-sheets by my reckoning) and, at the same time, not have it printed on the pretext that he was ‘awaiting’ the second volume.

I must now d'abord reclaim my clothes and timepiece from their abode at the pawnbroker’s. I can also hardly leave my family in their present situation, they being sans sou and the creditors becoming more brazen each day. Finally, before I forget, all the money that I could afford to spend on Laura’s champagne-treatment has gone the way of all flesh. She now needs red wine, of better quality than I can command. Voilà la situation.

Our ‘International’ has just celebrated a great victory. We were providing financial support from the London trade unions for the Paris bronze workers, who were out on strike. As soon as the masters learnt of that, they gave in. The affair has created a deal of commotion in the French papers, and we are now an established force in France.

It appears to me there must have been collusion between Bismarck and Bonaparte over the Luxemburg affair. It is possible, though improbable, that the former either cannot or will not keep his word. That the Russians have been meddling in German affairs is crystal clear from:

1. the treaty between Württemberg and Prussia, which was already concluded on 13 August before all the others;

2. Bismarck’s demeanour in respect of the Poles.

The Russians are more active than ever. They are setting the stage for trouble between France and Germany. Austria is pretty well paralysed in herself. Our English gentlemen are about to be led a fine song and dance in the United States.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Johann Philipp Becker

In Geneva

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 358;

First published: in Marx Festnummer zum 40. Todestage, Wien, 1923.

Hanover, 17 April 1867

Dear Friend,

I left London by steamer last Wednesday and after a tempestuous crossing reached Hamburg on Friday afternoon to deliver the manuscript of the first volume to Mr Meissner there. Printing has already started at the beginning of this week, so that the first volume will appear at the end of May. The whole work will appear in 3 volumes. The title is Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. The first volume comprises the First Book: ‘The Process of Production of Capital’. It is without question the most terrible missile that has yet been hurled at the heads of the bourgeoisie (landowners included). It is important now that you draw attention to the forthcoming publication in the press, i.e., in the papers to which you have access.

If you send the next issue of the Vorbote as a sample to Otto Meissner, Hamburg, he may be of assistance in the distribution of your paper, too.

I must finish now (more later) as Dr Kugelmann, who sends his best compliments, intends to acquaint me with the splendours of Hanover.

Tout à toi

K. Marx

Engels To Marx

In Hanover

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 362;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels and K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 27 April 1867

Dear Moor,

I have received both your letters, the second yesterday afternoon, and would have replied to your first long before, if I had known where to. Firstly, business. I am sending £10 to your wife, who wrote to me this morning, and likewise the other £10 to Wheeler at the beginning of next month. This will give you some peace of mind in that regard, and, from what you write, the future also looks rosier at last. I always had the feeling that that damn book [Capital], which you have been carrying for so long, was at the bottom of all your misfortune, and you would and could never extricate yourself until you had got it off your back. Forever resisting completion, it was driving you physically, mentally and financially into the ground, and I can very well understand that, having shaken off that nightmare, you now feel quite a new man, especially as, once you have got back into it again, the world doesn’t seem so gloomy a place as it did before. Especially when you have such a capital publisher as Meissner appears to be. Incidentally, a quick printing will only be possible, I fear, if you can remain in the vicinity throughout, i.e., on the continent; Holland would also be near enough for the purpose. I do not believe the Leipzig proof-readers will have enough learning for your approach. Meissner also got Wigand to print my pamphlet, and the things those wretches corrected into it! I am convinced that the book will create a real stir from the moment it appears, but it will be very necessary to help the enthusiasm of the scientifically-inclined burghers and officials on to its feet and not to despise petty stratagems. There is much that can be done to that end from Hanover after publication, and you could also enlist to advantage the support of amicus Siebel, who is at the moment en route back from Madeira via England, in the best of spirits, as he says. This will he necessary vis-a-vis the vulgar scribbling fraternity, of whose deep-seated hatred for us we have proof enough. Furthermore, thick, scholarly works are always slow to make their mark without such assistance, but with it they act like ‘wildfire’ — confer Heraclitus the Dark, etc. On this occasion, however, we must be all the more assiduous in ensuring this is done, as money is also at stake. Meissner will then be happy to take the collected essays, which would mean more money and further literary success. The pieces from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the ‘18th Brumaire’, etc., will make an enormous impression on the philistines just now, and once we have gained a little more ground on that basis, all manner of other lucrative possibilities will soon present themselves, too. I am exceedingly gratified by this whole turn of events, firstly, for its own sake, secondly, for your sake in particular and your wife’s, and, thirdly, because it really is time things looked up. In 2 years my contract with that swine Gottfried expires, and the way things are going here, neither of us will really be wishing to extend it; it is even not impossible that our ways may part even earlier. If that should be so, I shall have to leave commerce entirely, for to start up a business of my own at this late stage would mean 5-6 years of the most fearful drudgery with nothing worth speaking of to show for it, and then another 5-6 years of drudgery to reap the benefits of the first 5 years. But that would be the end of me. There is nothing I long for so much as for release from this vile commerce, which is completely demoralising me with all the time it is wasting. For as long as I am in it, I am good for nothing else, especially since I have become principal it has been much aggravated on account of the greater responsibility. If it were not for the increased remuneration, I really would rather be a clerk again. At all events, in a few years my life as a businessman will come to an end, and then my income will be very, very much reduced, and the question of what we can do then has always been in my mind. However, if things go as they are now beginning to, we shall be able to make provision for that all right, too, even if no revolution intervenes and puts an end to all financial schemes. If that does not happen, I have a plan up my sleeve to have a fling for my deliverance and write a light-hearted book entitled: Woes and Joys of the English Bourgeoisie.

I cannot go along with Meissner’s suggestion. A few sheets could be quickly knocked together, but something longer, 6 à 10 sheets, would require more work and be too late for the war now brewing. One really cannot just knock together rubbish in the manner of Vogt’s Studien. Furthermore, the stuff would be looked upon more or less as a party manifesto, and for that we would have to discuss the matter first. However, I have had an anti-Russian piece in mind for some time, and, if events provide me with an excuse, I shall start on it without more ado and write to Meissner. The only thing I am still in two minds about is whether I should make the ‘nationality principle’ or the ‘Eastern Question’ the chief theme.

I had expected that Bismarck would come knocking at your door, although not his haste. It is characteristic of the fellow’s mentality and outlook that he judges everybody by his own standards. The bourgeoisie may well admire the great men of today, it sees itself reflected in them. All the qualities to which Bonaparte and Bismarck owe their successes are the qualities of businessman: the pursuit of a specific purpose by a policy of wait-and-see and experimentation, until they hit the right moment, the diplomacy of always leaving the back door open, negotiating and haggling, swallowing insults if it is in one’s interest, the attitude of ‘ne soyons pas larrons’ [let us not be robbers], in short, the businessman in all things. In his own way, Gottfried Ermen is as great a statesman as Bismarck, and, if one follows the tricks of these great men, one is constantly reminded of the Manchester Exchange. Bismarck thinks, if I only continue knocking at Marx’s door, I am bound to hit upon the right moment eventually, and then we shall do a deal together after all. Gottfried Ermen to a tee.

I would not have expected the Prussians to be so hated there. But how do you reconcile that with the election results? Those jackasses from the National Association did get half their men through, and in Electoral Hesse all but one.

Vogt has got a life-size portrait of himself in the Gartenlaube. He has become a proper porker in the last few years, and looks fine.

In the Demokratische Studien which recently came my way, Simon of Trier has quite naively copied out whole pages from Po and Rhine, without suspecting from what poisoned source he was drawing! Similarly, in ‘Preussen in Waffen’, the lieutenant who writes the military articles in Unsere Zeit has borrowed at length from my pamphlet, likewise without giving his sources, of course.

Rüstow will stop at nothing to become a Prussian general, as though that could be as easily done as with Garibaldi. In his abysmal and slipshod book on the war, he grovels in optima forma before William the Conqueror and the Prince. That’s why he is moving to Berlin.

I saw Ernest Jones the other day, he has had enquiries from 4 places about standing for election under the new Bill — from Manchester as well. Has not a good word to say for the workers here and backs the Prussians at any odds against the French. I hope this wretched war passes over, I cannot see that any good can come of it. A French revolution saddled in advance with the obligation to go a-conquering would be very nasty; it almost seems as though Bonaparte would be satisfied with the tiniest tit-bit, but whether the Lord of Hosts will permit handsome William to grant him even that tit-bit, time alone will show.

My kindest regards to Dr Kugelmann, although we are not acquainted, and my thanks to him for The Holy Family.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Sigfrid Meyer

In New York

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 366;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, 1906-1907 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Hanover, 30 April 1867

Dear Friend,

You must think very badly of me, and all the more so when I tell you that your letters did not merely give me great pleasure but were a real comfort to me since they reached me at a time of great affliction. The knowledge that a capable man, à la hauteur des principes, has been won for our party, is some compensation to me for the worst. Your letters were furthermore full of such warm friendship for me personally, and you will appreciate that I who am engaged in a most bitter struggle with the (official) world can least afford to underestimate such things.

Why then did I not answer you? Because I was the whole time at death’s door. I thus had to make use of every moment when I was capable of work to complete my book [Capital] to which I have sacrificed my health, happiness, and family. I hope this explanation suffices. I laugh at the so-called ‘practical’ men and their wisdom. If one wanted to be an ox, one could, of course, turn one’s back on the sufferings of humanity and look after one’s own hide. But I should really have thought myself unpractical if I had pegged out without finally completing my book, at least in manuscript.

The first volume of the book will be published by Otto Meissner in Hamburg in a few weeks. The title of the work is: ‘Capital. A Critique of Political Economy’. I travelled to Germany to bring over the manuscript, and I am spending a few days with a friend in Hanover on my way back to London.

Volume I comprises the ‘Process of Production of Capital’. As well as setting out the general theory, I examine in great detail the conditions of the English — agricultural and industrial — proletariat over the last 20 years, ditto the condition of Ireland, basing myself on official sources that have never previously been used. You will immediately realise that all this serves me solely as an argumentum ad hominem.

I hope that a year from now the whole work will have appeared. Volume II contains the continuation and conclusion of the theory, Volume III the history of political economy from the middle of the 17th century.

As to the ‘International Working Men’s Association’, it has become a power to be reckoned with in England, France, Switzerland, and Belgium. You should form as many branches as possible in America. Contribution per member 1 penny (about 1 silver groschen) per year. However, every branch gives what it can. Congress in Lausanne this year, 3 September. Every branch can send one representative. Do write to me about this matter, about how you are faring in America and about conditions in general. If you do not write, I shall take it as showing that you have not yet absolved me.

With warmest greetings

Your

Karl Marx

Meyer, Siegfried (1840-72) German-American socialist, member of the First International; took part in the organization of the German workers' movement in New York.

Marx intended to publish the continuation of the first volume of Capital in one volume; this volume grew into two. Consequently the volume which had been planned as Volume III, Theories of Surplus Value, was numbered IV.

Marx To Ludwig Büchner

In Darmstadt

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 367;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Hanover, 1 May 1867 (c/o Dr Kugelmann)

Dear Sir,

Although we are entirely unacquainted, I am taking the liberty of addressing a personal letter to you, on a personal, although at the same time scientific, matter; and I hope you will excuse my so doing on account of the confidence you inspire in me as a man of science and of the party.

I have come to Germany to deliver the first volume of my work ‘Capital. A Critique of Political Economy’ to my publisher, Mr Otto Meissner in Hamburg. I have to stay here a few days longer to see if it will be possible for the printing to be done as quickly as Mr Meissner intends, viz., whether the proof-readers are sufficiently learned for such a mode of operation.

The reason I am writing to you personally is this: I should like to have the thing published in French as well, in Paris, after its publication in Germany. I cannot go there myself, at least not without risk, as I have been expelled from France, first under Louis Philippe and a second time under Louis Bonaparte (Président), and finally I have been ceaselessly attacking Mr Louis during my exile in London. I cannot therefore go personally to seek out a translator. I know that your work on ‘Stoff und Kraft’ has appeared in French, and therefore suppose that you can put me in touch, directly or indirectly, with a suitable person. As I have to prepare the second volume for printing this summer and the concluding third volume next winter, I do not have the time to attend to the French version of the book myself.

I consider it to be of the greatest importance to emancipate the French from the erroneous views under which Proudhon with his idealised petty bourgeoisie has buried them. At the recent congress in Geneva, ditto in the links that I have with the Paris branch as a member of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association, I am constantly confronted with Proudhonism’s most repugnant consequences.

As I do not know for how long I shall be staying here, I should be obliged to you for an early answer. If 1, for my part, can be of any service to you in London, I shall do so with the greatest pleasure.

Yours most respectfully

Karl Marx

Marx To His Daughter Jenny

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 369;

First published: in Russian, in Voinstvuyushchy materialism, 1925 and in the language of the original, English, in The Socialist Review (London), September 1929.

Hanover, 5 May 1867

My dear Child,

Your letter gave me the greatest pleasure. It is written in the true Imperial style. I hope to find you plump and fresh like a May rose.

The enclosed photograph was to be sent to you for your birthday, but was not ready. It is backed by the photograph of Mme Tenge (by-the-by, the aunt of the Baer’s girl, of whom Edgar b told us so much), who, however, is not so beautiful in reality as her shadow indicates. But she is a really noble nature, of a peculiar suavity, frankness and simplicity of character. Nothing of ‘falsche Bildung’.’ She speaks English, French and Italian (she is of Italian descent) perfectly. Although a great musician, she does not kill one with Kunstgeschwäts [chatter about art], which, on the contrary, she abhors. She is an atheist and inclines to Socialism, although rather little informed on that point. What distinguishes her above all is a spontaneous kindness and the absence of all pretensions. I feel sure you would in no time become very intimate friends. Mrs Kugelmann is also a nice little woman.

To-day, on my birthday, I receive the first ‘Bogen’ for revision. I fear the book will become rather a little too big. In consequence of the Easter week business, the printing did not commence before 29th April, Meissner growing very wild at this suspense. Meanwhile, time has not been lost. Preliminary notices have been published almost in all German papers. Kugelmann has very many connections, which were all put into motion.

Your birthday [1 May] was solemnly celebrated here.

Except part of the bourgeoisie, lawyers and such ones, there reigns here at Hanover a fanatical hatred of the Prussians, which much amuses me.

I was very glad to hear of your Polish surprise. If the things have no mercantile value, they have a historical one.

The delay of war is exclusively due to the Derby Cabinet. As long as it remains at the head of England, Russia will not sound the war signal — a phrase, by-the-by, which is conceived in the true colletian style.

I cannot exactly state the day of my return. I have still to receive letters from different sides. I shall return directly from here via Hamburg (there to have another interview with my publisher) to London.

I had, very soon after my arrival here, written to Liebknecht. He has answered. His wife cannot be saved. She is approaching the catastrophe. She sends her compliments to you all and was cheered up by your letters.

Hegel’s photograph will be looked after. It is not to be had at Hanover. As to his ‘Philos. of Hist.’, I shall try to find it at London.

I consider that Cacadou [Laura] might have written some lines long since, but excuse her with her equestrian studies.

And now, with my best wishes to all, adio, my dear ‘Joe’.

Your

Old One

I add a few lines for Tussy [Eleanor].

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 370;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Hanover, 7 May 1867

Dear Fred,

D'abord, best thanks for your intervention in the most pressing casus delicti, as well as for your very detailed letter.

First, business. That damned Wigand did not start printing [Capital] until 29 April, so that I received the first sheet for correction the day before yesterday, on my birthday. Post tot pericula! The misprints were relatively insignificant. It’s impossible to wait here until the printing is completed. In the first instance, I fear that the book will prove much fatter than I had originally calculated. Second, I am not getting the manuscript back, so that for many quotations, especially those involving figures or Greek, I need to have my home manuscript to hand, nor can I impose on Dr Kugelmann’s hospitality for too long. Finally, Meissner is demanding the 2nd volume by the end of the autumn at the latest. I shall therefore have to get my nose to the grindstone as soon as possible, as a lot of new material relating especially to the chapters on credit and landed property has become available since the manuscript was composed. The third volume must be completed during the winter, so that I shall have shaken off the whole opus by next spring. The business of writing, of course, is quite different once the proofs for what has already been done start coming in a fur et mesure, and under pressure from the publisher.

Meanwhile, my time here has not been wasted. Letters have been written to all and sundry, and preliminary notices have appeared in most German papers.

I hope and confidently believe that in the space of a year I shall be made, in the sense that I shall be able to fundamentally rectify my financial affairs and at last stand on my own feet again. Without you, I would never have been able to bring the work to a conclusion, and I can assure you it always weighed like a nightmare on my conscience that you were allowing your fine energies to be squandered and to rust in commerce, chiefly for my sake, and, into the bargain, that you had to share all my petites misères as well. On the other hand, I cannot conceal from myself that I still have a year of trial ahead of me. I have taken a step on which a great deal depends, viz., on which it depends whether several £100 will be made available to me from the only quarter where that is possible. There is a tolerable prospect of a positive outcome, but I shall remain uncertain for about 6 weeks. I shall not have definite confirmation until then. What I am most afraid of — apart from the uncertainty — is my return to London, which will be necessary in 6-8 days. My debts there are considerable, and the Manichaeans are ‘urgently’ awaiting my return. And then the torments of family life, the domestic conflicts, the constant harassment, instead of settling down to work refreshed and free of care.

Dr Kugelmann and his wife are being exceptionally kind to me and anticipate my every need. They are splendid people. They really leave me no time to explore ‘the gloomy paths of my inner self’. Apropos, the Bismarck affair must be kept absolutely secret. I promised to tell no one, not even Kugelmann, about it. Nor have I done so. I did, however, of course make the reservatio mentalis to except yourself.

You express surprise that the National-Liberals... (or, as Kugelmann calls them, the Europeans) did so well in the elections, when the Prussians are so hated here. The matter is very simple. They did badly in all the larger towns, in smaller places they owed their victories to their organisation, which has existed ever since Gotha. These fellows do, on the whole, show how important party organisation is. That is the position in Hanover. In Electoral Hesse, there is no limit to the influence of Prussian intimidation, backed up by the shouting of the members of the National Association. The Prussians meanwhile are operating quite in the Persian manner here. It is true that they cannot transplant the population to their Eastern provinces, but they are doing so with their officials, right down to the railway conductors, and for the officers. Even those poor devils of postmen are having to move to Pomerania. In the meantime, trains full of Hessians, Hanoverians, etc., are to be seen on the railway every day en route to Bremen, emigrating to the United States. Not since dear old Germany came into existence has it sent such a motley crowd of people from all parts across the Atlantic. One is trying to avoid his taxes, another, his military service, a third the political situation, and all of them the hegemony of the sword and the gathering storm of war.

I am greatly diverted by the (pro-Prussian) bourgeoisie here. They want war, but immédiatement. Business, they say, can stand the uncertainty no longer, and where the devil are the taxes to come from if business stagnates for much longer? Incidentally, you would scarcely conceive the burden that the last war and taxation have imposed upon the rural populace in Prussia. Here in the vicinity of Prussian Westphalia, e.g., truly Irish conditions prevail.

By the by a few days ago the director of the joint-stock foundry here (manufacturing chiefly water and gas pipes) conducted me round the works. On the whole, it is very well organised and utilises much quite modern equipment. But, on the other hand, there is still a good deal of turning by hand (detail work), where the English and Scots are using automatic machinery. The same director took me into the Hermann’s-column workshop. The thing is as long in the making as Germany itself. Hermann’s head is so colossal that you'd seem like a child beside it, and it has a fine look of honest stupidity, and Mr Arminius was above all a diplomat. His air of worthy Westphalian simplicity served but as a mask for a most subtle mind. As chance would have it, I had renewed my acquaintance with Mr Arminius, shortly before my departure from London, in the Grimm edition of historical sources with which you are familiar.

I am sure you will recall J. Meyer (at Bielefeld), who refused to print our manuscript on Stirner, etc., and sent the youth Kriege to annoy us? A few months ago he threw himself out of the window in Warsaw, whither his business affairs had taken him, and broke his neck, if you please.

Our friend Miquel, who declared himself prepared to sacrifice freedom so readily for the sake of unity, is believed to be job-hunting. In my view, le brave homme has miscalculated. Had he not hurled himself so fanatically and unconditionally at Bismarck’s feet, he would have been able to pick up a generous gratuity. But now! What need is there for that? He has made himself so hated by his performance in the North German Parliament... that he is chained to the Prussians like one convict to the next. And the Prussians, as you know, do not like to make ‘useless’ and superfluous dépenses. Recently, the Bismarckite newspaper, the Norddeutsche Allgemeine, produced by that scoundrel Brass published a very witty article about the National-Associationites, pleading inability to emulate even the de mortuis nil nisi bene [speak only good of the dead]. It sent Bismarck’s North-German-Confederationite, National-Associationite minions packing with some artistic kicks delivered con amore.

As far as the war is concerned, I am entirely of your opinion. At the present moment, it can only do harm. If it could be delayed, even just for a year, that would be worth its weight in gold to us. In the first place, Bonaparte and William the Conqueror would necessarily be made to look foolish. The opposition is reviving in Prussia (its only press organ just now is Die Zukunft in Berlin, founded by Jacobi) , and events may occur in France. Business is becoming more and more stagnant, and it will then be impossible to cover up the suffering there on the Continent with empty phrases, whether they be of Teutonic or Gallic provenance.

In my view, we owe the postponement of war exclusively to the Derby ministry. It is anti-Russian, and Russia dares not give the signal until she is sure of Britain. Gladstone, the phrasemonger (entirely under the influence of Lady Palmerston, Shaftesbury, and Lord Cowper), and Bright, not forgetting Russell, would gladly provide her with the guarantees that Britain was disposed as required. Derby had to be removed in 1859, too, in order to stage the Great Drama in Italy. In the North German Parliament Bismarck was obliged to throw down the gauntlet to the Poles in the most brutal manner and thus declare his total subservience to the Tsar.

In the Prussian army there prevails deep distrust of the Russians amongst the better officers, as I learnt personally from Captain von Bölzig here (Guards Regiment, raised in the Cadet Corps, loyal to the Prussian monarchy, but a nice fellow). ‘Bismarck’s conduct in North Schleswig is incomprehensible to me. Only the Russians,’ this he said quite unprompted, ‘have any interest in maintaining tension between ourselves and Denmark.’ He went on to call Frederick William IV a ‘shady cavalier’, who had turned Germany into Russia’s lackey for 1/2 century. The Russian officers were ‘shitty fellows’, the army good for nothing, except for the Guards Regiments, Austria alone was capable of matching the Russian army, etc. I also put a good many more ideas into his head about the Muscovites.

And now adio. Kindest regards to Mrs Lizzy.

Tout à vous.

Your

Moor

Marx To Laura Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 375;

First published: in German, in Die Neue Zeit, 1907-1908 and in the language of the original, English, in Annali, Milano, 1958.

Hanover, 13 May, 1867

My pretty little Cacadou,

My best thanks for your letter, and that of the worthy Quoquo [Eleanor].

You complain that I had given no signs of life, but on reviewing the question you will find that, on the whole, I have given weekly signals. Moreover, you know that I am not of a very ‘demonstrative’ character, of rather retiring habitudes, a slow writer, a clumsy sort of man or, as Quoquo has it, an anxious man.

I shall leave Hanover the day after to-morrow, and probably leave Hamburg by first steamer for London. Yet, you must not expect me to settle the day and the hour. I have still some business to transact with my publisher. At all events, this is the last week of my continental stay.

I am very glad that my photogramm has met with such good reception. The shadow is at all events less troublesome than the original.

As to Mrs Tenge, I wonder that you ask me how she looks, whether she is pretty? I have sent Jenny her photogramm, hidden behind my own. How could it have been lost? Now, to answer your questions, she is 33 years of age, mother of 5 children, rather interesting than pretty, and certainly no professional wit. But she is a superior woman. As to ‘flirting’, he would be rather a bold man who were to try it. As to ‘admiration’, I owe it, and there may, perhaps, have been on her side, some overestimation of your most humble and ‘modest’ master. You know, if no one is a prophet on his own dunghill (speaking symbolically), people are easily overvalued by strangers who, legen s'e nicht aus, so legen sie doch unter [if they do not interpret something in their own way, so they attribute it], and find what they were resolved upon to find in a fellah. She has left Hanover Thursday last.

Eight days since, the weather was still frosty and rainy. Now summer has at once burst into full bloom. On the whole, the weather, since my departure, was here as bad and changeable as it used to be in London. Only, and this is a great thing, the air is thinner.

These continentals have an easier life of it than we on the other side of the Northern sea. With 2,000 Thalers (300£) you can live here most comfortably. For inst., there exist here different gardens (à la Cremourn, but ‘respectable’, and where all sort of people meet), much more artistically arranged than any in London, good music being played every evening, etc., where you can subscribe for self and family — for the whole year — at the price of 2 Thalers, 6 sh.! This is only a specimen of the cheap life the Philister indulge in at this place. Young people amuse themselves more freely and at almost no expense, comparatively speaking. There is of course one great drawback — the atmosphere is pregnant with dullness. The standard of existence is too small. It is a lot of pygmées amongst whom you want no very high frame to feel like Gulliver amidst the Lilliputians.

There arrived this morning rather ‘excited’ letters from Berlin. It seems that a collision between the workmen and the Pickelhauben is apprehended. I do not expect much for the present, but there is something brewing. The working class, in the greater centres of Germany, are commencing to assume a more decided and threatening attitude. One fine morning there will be a nice dance!

And now my dear little birdseye, Cacadou, secretary, cook, equestrian, poet, auf Wiedersehn. Viele Grusse, an Möhmchen, Quoquo and Queque, Helen [Demuth], and, last not least, our ‘mutual friend’ [Paul Lafargue].

Adio.

Your master

Old Nick

Enclosed Hegel, presented by Kugelmann to Mons. Lafargue.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 10 June 1867

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Friend

The delay in this letter lays me open to the more or less ‘well-founded’ suspicion of being a ‘rascally fellow’. In extenuation I can but say that I have only been ‘residing’ in London a few days. Before that I was with Engels in Manchester. But you and your dear wife know me well enough by now to recognise that letter-writing sins are the normal thing with me. All the same I was with you every day. I count my stay in Hanover among the most beautiful and delightful oases in the desert of life.

I met with no adventures in Hamburg except that, in spite of all precautions, I made the acquaintance of Herr Wilhelm Marr. [1] He is, as far as his personality is concerned, a Christian edition of Lassalle, of course of much less value. Also, Herr Niemann [2] was playing during the few days which I spent there. But I was too spoilt by the company in Hanover to want to visit the theatre in less pleasant society. So I missed Herr Niemann.

À propos. Meissner [3] is prepared to print the medical brochure you intend to write. You have only to send him the manuscript and refer to me. As to particulars, you will have to make further arrangements yourself.

Except for rather raw weather on the first day, the journey from Hamburg to London was quite pleasant. A few hours before we reached London a German girl, who had already attracted my attention by her military bearing, announced that she intended to travel from London to Weston-Super-Mare that same evening and did not know how, with all her luggage, she was to set about it. The case was made worse by the fact that on the Sabbath helpful hands are lacking in England. She showed me the name of the railway station in London from which she was to travel. Friends had written it down on a card. It was the North Western station, which I too had to pass. So, like a good knight, I offered to put her down at the station. Accepted. And then it occurred to me that Weston-Super-Mare lies South West, while the station which I had to pass and which had been written down for the young girl was North West. I consulted the captain. And it turned out that she had to go from a part of London lying in a totally different direction from where I wished to go. [4] But I had undertaken to do it and had to make bonne mine à mauvais jeu. [5] We arrived at two in the afternoon. I took the donna errante [6] to the station, and learnt that her train did not leave until eight in the evening. So I was in for it, and had to kill six hours with Mademoiselle by walking in Hyde Park, visiting ice-cream shops, etc. It turned out that she was called Elizabeth von Puttkammer, a niece of Bismarck, with whom she had just spent a few weeks in Berlin. She had the whole Army List with her, for this family supplies our ‘brave army’ in abundance with gentlemen of honour and good figure. She was a gay, educated girl, but aristocratic and black – white [7] to the tip of her nose. She was not a little astonished to learn that she had fallen into ‘red’ hands. But I assured her that our rendezvous would pass ‘without bloodshed’ and saw her off, saine et sauve, [8] from the station. Just think what fodder my conspiracy with Bismarck would give to Blind [9] or other vulgar democrats!

Today I sent off the 14th corrected proof sheet. I received most of these while with Engels, who is extraordinarily pleased with them and, with the exception of sheets 2 and 3, found them written in a manner very easy to understand. His verdict set my mind at rest, for I find that, when printed, my things always displease me, especially at first sight.

I am sending your dear wife, to whom I ask you to convey my special thanks for her friendly and cordial reception, the photograph of my second daughter Laura, since there are no more of the others left, and new ones will have to be taken. Engels will also have new copies made of his own and Wolff’s [10] photograph. He was greatly pleased by your despatches.

My best greetings to the ‘Madämchen’, [11] Eleanor is at school, otherwise she would write to her. And now, Adio!

Yours

Karl Marx

Notes

1. Wilhelm Marr (1819-1904) – German publicist. In the 1840s an active supporter of the revolutionary movement of the German-Swiss artisans. After 1870 a fanatical anti-Semite – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Possibly Albert Wilhelm Karl Niemann (1831-1917), one of Germany’s leading operatic tenors of the period – MIA.

3. Otto Karl Meissner (1819-1902) – Hamburg publisher who brought out Marx’s Capital and a number of other works by Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

4. The North-Western station is Euston, the London terminus of the London North-Western Railway; services to Western-Super-Mare ran from Paddington, the London terminus of the Great Western Railway – MIA.

5. To put a good face on the matter – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

6. Wandering lady – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

7. The Prussian colours – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

8. Safe and sound – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

9. Karl Blind (1826-1907) – German publicist and petty-bourgeois democrat. Later supported Bismarck – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

10. Wilhelm Wolff (1809-1864) – The son of a Silesian serf. A close friend of Marx and Engels. Active in the 1848 Revolution, was associate editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Fled to England after the revolution. Marx dedicated to him the first volume of Capital – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

11. ‘Little lady’ – Kugelmann’s daughter – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 381;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913.

Manchester, 16 June 1867

Dear Moor,

I have been so distracted by all manner of bother with Monsieur Gottfried and other suchlike affairs and disturbances for the past week that I seldom had the leisure to study the form of value. Otherwise, I would have sent the sheets [of the first volume of Capital] back to you long ago. Sheet 2 in particular has the marks of your carbuncles rather firmly stamped upon it, but there is not much that can be done about it now and I think you should not deal with it any further in the supplement, as your philistine really is not accustomed to this kind of abstract thinking and will certainly not torment himself for the sake of the form of value. At most, you could provide rather more extensive historical evidence for the conclusions you have here reached dialectically, you could, so to speak, apply the test of history, although you have already made the most essential points in that respect; but you have so much material that you can surely still write quite a good excursus on it, which will by historical means demonstrate to the philistine the need for the development of money and the process by which this takes place.

It was a serious mistake not to have made the development of these rather abstract arguments clearer by means of a larger number of short sections with their own headings. You ought to have treated this part in the manner of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, with short paragraphs, each dialectical transition emphasised by means of a special heading and, as far as possible, all the excurses or merely illustrative material printed in special type. The thing would have looked somewhat like a school text-book, but a very large class of readers would have found it considerably easier to understand. The populus, even the scholars, just are no longer at all accustomed to this way of thinking, and one has to make it as easy for them as one possibly can.

Compared with your earlier presentation [Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] (Duncker), the dialectic of the argument has been greatly sharpened, but with regard to the actual exposition there are a number of things I like better in the first version. It is a great pity that the carbuncles have left their mark on the important second sheet in particular. However, there is nothing to be done about it now, and those who are capable of thinking dialectically will understand it, nevertheless. The other sheets are very good, and I was delighted by them. I hope you will soon be able to send me another five or six sheets (and could you please enclose sheet 5 again so that I can pick up the thread properly); the sheets I have been reading one by one here will make a much better impression when read together.

I've discovered a few more misprints. I would only list as errata those which really distort the sense.

I called on Gumpert yesterday. Pauvre garçon! He is deteriorating with each day that passes. It was impossible to arouse his interest in anything scientific or even political. Town gossip and nothing more than town gossip. And yet he cannot understand why people don’t call on him more often.

Have read Hofmann. For all its faults, the latest chemical theory does represent a great advance on the old atomistic theory. The molecule as the smallest part of matter capable of independent existence is a perfectly rational category, a ‘nodal point’, as Hegel calls it, in the infinite progression of subdivisions, which does not terminate it, but marks a qualitative change. The atom — formerly represented as the limit of divisibility — is now but a state, although Monsieur Hofmann himself is forever relapsing into the old idea that indivisible atoms really exist. For the rest, the advances in chemistry that this book records are truly enormous, and Schorlemmer says that this revolution is still going on day by day, so that new upheavals can be expected daily.

Best regards to your wife, the girls and the electrician [Lafarague].

Your

F. E.

Am sending back 5 sheets today.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 383;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 22 June 1867

Dear Fred,

Herewith 4 more sheets [of the first volume of Capital] enclosed for you which reached me yesterday. The fellows have left a number of misprints that I corrected perfectly legibly. One error we corrected in ourselves was ‘Childrens’ Employment Commission’, Childrens’. For Children is nominative pluralis, genitive mark is ‘. I saw it at once when I had another look at the Blue Books myself.

King has written to say that the Fenians are not yet out. They are postponing it for as long as possible and as near to the close of the session as possible.

I hope you are satisfied with the 4 sheets. That you have been satisfied with it so far is more important to me than anything the rest of the world may say of it. At all events, I hope the bourgeoisie will remember my carbuncles until their dying day. Here is a fresh sample of what swine they are! You know that the Children’s Employment Commission has been at work for 5 years now. When its first report appeared in 1863, the industries it exposed were at once ‘called to order’. At the beginning of this session the Tory ministry introduced a bill per Walpole, the Weeping Willow, accepting all the Commission’s proposals, though on a very reduced scale. The fellows who were to be called to order, among them the big metal manufacturers, and especially the vampires of ‘domestic industry’, maintained a cowardly silence. Now they are presenting a petition to Parliament and demanding — a New Enquiry! The old one, they say, was biassed! They are counting on the Reform Bill taking up the public’s entire attention, so that the thing would be cosily and privately smuggled through, at the very time that the trade unions are having a rough passage. The worst things about the reports are the fellows’ own statements. They are well aware that a new enquiry means one thing only, and that is precisely ‘what we bourgeois want’ — a new 5-year lease for exploitation. Fortunately, my position in the ‘International’ enables me to frustrate those curs’ little game. It is a matter of the utmost importance. What is at stake is the abolition of torture for 1 1/2 million people, not including the adult male working men!

With regard to the development of the form of value, I have both followed and not followed your advice, thus striking a dialectical attitude in this matter, too. That is to say, 1. I have written an appendix in which I set out the same subject again as simply and as much in the manner of a school text-book as possible, and 2. I have divided each successive proposition into paras. etc., each with its own heading, as you advised. In the Preface I then tell the ‘non-dialectical’ reader to skip page x-y and instead read the appendix. It is not only the philistines that I have in mind here, but young people, etc., who are thirsting for knowledge. Anyway, the issue is crucial for the whole book. The economists have hitherto overlooked the very simple fact that the equation 20 yards of linen= 1 coat is but the primitive form of 20 yards of linen = £2, and thus that the simplest form of a commodity, in which its value is not yet expressed in its relation to all other commodities but only as something differentiated from its own natural form, embodies the whole secret of the money form and thereby, in nuce [in embryo], of all bourgeois forms of the product of labour. In my first presentation [Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy] (Duncker), I avoided the difficulty of the development by not actually analysing the way value is expressed until it appears as its developed form, as expressed in money.

You are quite right about Hofmann. Incidentally, you will see from the conclusion to my Chapter III, where I outline the transformation of the master of a trade into a capitalist — as a result of purely quantitative changes — that in the text there I quote Hegel’s discovery of the law of the transformation of a merely quantitative change into a qualitative one as being attested by history and natural science alike [See Capital, Chapter XI]. In the note to the text (I was as it happened attending Hofmann’s lectures at that time) I mention the molecular theory, but not Hofmann, who has discovered nothing in the matter except contributing general direction; instead I do mention Laurent, Gerhardt and Wurtz, the latter being the real man. Your letter struck a faint chord in my memory, and I therefore looked up my manuscript.

Printing has proceeded slowly in the last two weeks (only 4 sheets), probably on account of Whitsun. But Mr O. Wigand will have to make up for this lost time. Apropos. Your book [Condition of the Working-Class in England] is still available. The Workers’ Association has ordered and been sent 2 new copies from O. Wigand. (2nd impression 1848.)

Now for private matters.

My children are obliged to invite some other girls for dancing on 2 July, as they have been unable to invite anyone for the whole of this year, to respond to invitations, and are therefore about to lose caste. So, hard-pressed though I am at the moment, I had to agree to it and am counting on you for the wine (claret and Rhenish), i.e. on your supplying me with it in the course of next week.

Secondly, as ‘misfortunes’ never come singly, Lina has announced her arrival for next week. My wife will then have to return to her the £5 which she owes her, and you will understand that after fending off the first wave of creditors, I cannot afford that.

I am in fact exceedingly vexed with the people who have promised me money but have not sent word (so far, at least). They have a personal interest in me. That I do know. They also know that I cannot continue my work unless I have a modicum of peace and quiet. And yet they have sent no word!

Our ‘noble’ poet Freiligrath really is going to collect a tidy sum. For they say that going begging to the rich Germans in South America and — China! and the West Indies! is most lucrative, as these fellows regard it as national duty! Meanwhile, the Freiligraths are continuing to live in relatively grand style, constantly entertaining and constantly visiting. That is one reason why the German merchants in London are so unforthcoming. Fat as he is, he is said (so I am told by my wife, who called on them) to look very nerve-wracked and unwell and depressed. But Ida is positively blooming and has never been in better spirits in her life.

Kindest regards to Mrs Lizzy.

Your

K. M.

Honoris causa you must procure Madame Gumpert’s photogramm for me.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 386;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913

Manchester, 24 June 1867

Dear Moor,

Sheets [of the first volume of Capital] up to and incl. 12 received with thanks, though have not yet read beyond No. 8. Thus far, the chapters on the transformation of money into capital and the production of surplus-value are the best, as far as presentation and content are concerned. Yesterday I did a rough translation of them for Moore, who understood them correctly and was most astonished that conclusions could be arrived at so simply. At the same time, I have solved the question of who should translate your book into English: Moore himself. He has enough German now to read Heine fairly fluently and will soon work his way into your style (except for the form of value and the terminology, where I shall have to give him considerable assistance). It is, of course, understood that the whole task will be performed under my immediate supervision. As soon as you have a publisher, who nota bene will pay him something for his work, he is quite ready to do it. The fellow is diligent and reliable, and, at the same time, has as much prior understanding of the theory as one can expect of an Englishman. I have told him that you would rewrite the analysis of commodities and the section on money in English yourself. For the rest, however, we also need a terminology (English) now to translate the Hegelian expressions, and you might be giving some thought to the matter in the meantime, as it is not easy, but there is no way round it.

I have quite lost track of how many sheets have now in fact been type-set — it must surely be half the book by now, mustn’t it? I am looking forward to the embarrassment of the economists when they reach the two above-mentioned passages. The development of the form of value is, of course, the quintessence of all the bourgeois trash, but the revolutionary consequences are not yet fully evident, and people can more easily get round these abstractions and confine themselves to clichés. But an end is put to that here, the issue is so crystal clear that I do not see what they can say to it.

I hope you will succeed in tripping up our bourgeois gentlemen with their new Enquiry. Just a few days ago, I heard one of the iron-founders and engineering manufacturers bemoaning the impending danger. Meanwhile, it is very good that the Commission has permanently frustrated the Sheffield star-chamber organisation. It was precisely this local terrorism and its great success that deterred the fellows from joining the great national movement, and confirmed them in their parochialism. The cries of horror emanating from the bourgeoisie are comical. As though our bourgeois gentlemen had not had their own star-chambers, their vigilance committees in Australia and California, etc., which acted in exactly the same fashion, but claimed far more victims.

I shall be sending you the wine, and another £10 before the end of this month. I would have preferred it if you had set a later date than 2 July for your party. You will understand that I cannot draw £100 on the very first day of the financial year without exciting considerable comment, and I shall have to prevent the people in the office wondering too much about what I may be up to with such a sum all at once.

Regarding the molecular theory, Schorlemmer tells me that Gerhardt and Kekulé are the chief figures involved, and that Wurtz has only popularised and elaborated it. He is going to send you a book setting out the historical development of the subject.

Are there not old pre-Baconian, pre-Lockeian philosophical writings in English, in which we might be able to find material for the terminology? I have a feeling that something of that kind exists. And how about English attempts at reproducing Hegel?

Kindest regards to your wife and the girls.

Your

F. E.

Engels to Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 388;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913

Manchester, 26 June 1867

Dear Moor,

‘Pursuant to mine faithfully of yesterday’, two half five-pound notes enclosed, whose 2nd halves will follow by 1st post early tomorrow morning and thus be in your possession tomorrow evening.

With regard to the production of surplus-value, another point: the manufacturer, and with him the vulgar economist, will immediately interject: if the capitalist only pays the worker the price of 6 hours for his 12 hours’ labour, no surplus-value can be produced, since in that case each hour of the factory worker’s labour counts only = 1/2 an hour’s labour, = the amount which has been paid for, and only that value can be embodied in the value of the labour product. Whereupon there will follow the usual formula by way of example: so much for raw materials, so much for wear and tear, so much for wages (wages actually paid per hour’s actual product), etc. Atrociously superficial though this argument may be, however much it may equate exchange-value with price, and value of labour with labour-wage, and absurd though its premiss may be that if for one hour’s labour only half an hour is paid, then only 1/2 hour’s worth goes into the value, I do, nevertheless, find it surprising that you have not already taken it into account, for you will most certainly be immediately confronted with this objection, and it is better to anticipate it. Perhaps you return to it in the following sheets.

You must supply me with an address in London to which I can have the £100 sent next week. I am thinking of taking Lizzie [Burns] via Grimsby to Hamburg, Schleswig, Copenhagen, etc., one week from now, and will probably be away for 4 weeks. I shall therefore have to get our cashier to send the money there on Thursday or Friday, for which purpose I need a neutral address, if possible commercial. You must therefore consider whom you would prefer for this purpose, and let me know at once.

When I have sent Lizzie back to Grimsby from Hamburg, I shall also go on to visit Meissner and Kugelmann, and then travel to the Rhine.

Kindest regards.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 389;

First published: in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 27 June 1867

Dear Fred,

The 2 half £5-notes received with kindest thanks. With respect to the address, use Borkheim. He knows my situation, though with as much concealment as I consider necessary in his regard. I would even like him to know that you are lending me money. But you must write and tell me when the money is to be sent to him. I do not see why I should involve yet a 3rd philistine.

The Fenians should be delivered to you today.

I was so very pleased by your lines of yesterday, and that requires no further elaboration from me.

Sheet 20 [of the first volume of Capital] was the latest to reach me. It will probably run to 40 or 42 sheets in all. I've not as yet received any corrected proofs after the ones already sent you. On your departure send me back those which are in your possession.

Regarding the objection that you mentioned the philistines and vulgar economists will infallibly raise (they forget, of course, that, if they reckon paid labour as wages, they are reckoning unpaid labour as profit, etc.), it amounts, in scientific terms, to the following question:

How is the value of the commodity transformed into its price of production in which

1. the whole of the labour appears paid for in the form of wages;

2. the surplus-labour, however, or the surplus-value, assumes the form of an addition to the price, and goes by the name of interest, profit, etc., over and above the cost-price (= price of the constant part of capital + wages).

Answering this question presupposes:

I. That the transformation of, for example, the value of a day’s labour-power into wages or the price of a day’s labour has been explained. This is done in Chapter V of this volume.

II. That the transformation of surplus-value into profit, and of profit into average profit, etc., has been explained. This presupposes that the process of the circulation of capital has been previously explained, since the turnover of capital, etc., plays a part here. This matter cannot therefore be treated prior to the 3rd book (Volume II is to contain books 2 and 3). Here it will be shown how the philistines’ and vulgar economists’ manner of conceiving things arises, namely, because the only thing that is ever reflected in their minds is the immediate form of appearance of relations, and not their inner connection. Incidentally, if the latter were the case, we would surely have no need of science at all.

Now if I wished to refute all such objections in advance, I should spoil the whole dialectical method of exposition. On the contrary, the good thing about this method is that it is constantly setting traps for those fellows which will provoke them into an untimely display of their idiocy.

By the by, Para. 3: ‘The Rate of Surplus Value’, which was the last one you had in your possession, is immediately followed by the Para.: ‘The Working Day’ (struggle for the reduction of working time), whose argument demonstrates ad oculus to what extent those bourgeois gentlemen comprehend the source and nature of their profit in practice. This is also shown in the Senior case, where your bourgeois assures us that his whole profit and interest derive from the last unpaid hour of labour.

Kindest regards to Mrs Lizzy.

Your

K. M.

You must stop over for a few days here on your journey home.

Apropos. I judged it in every way imprudent to take Mr Meissner into my confidence regarding my private circumstances.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 391;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 27 June 1867

Dear Fred,

The children send you their best thanks.

I have written to Meissner today that the ‘Leipzig’ method cannot continue in this fashion. I've had nothing since Monday. The proofs have been reaching me most irregularly throughout, so that I am for ever being interrupted in other work and am for ever kept quite pointlessly on tenterhooks. Having perhaps received 1 sheet in a whole week, on Saturday evening I at last get a successor which is too late for me to send off. I have written to Meissner that Wigand must send a minimum of 3 sheets on certain agreed days, but that he is always welcome to send more at anytime.

If I get 13th and 14th sheets of the corrected copy in time, you shall have them on Sunday. I would have liked you to see my dressing-down of Senior and my introduction to the analysis of the working day before your departure. Incidentally, the section on the ‘Working Day’ occupies 5 printed sheets, which do, of course, contain predominantly factual material. To show you how closely I have followed your advice in my treatment of the appendix, I'll now copy out for you the divisions, sections, headings, etc., of same appendix.

Appendix to Chapter I, 1

The Form of Value

I. Simple Form of Value

§ 1. The two poles of the expression of value: relative form and equivalent form of value.

a. Inseparability of the two forms.

b. Polarity of the two forms.

c. Relative value and equivalent, both being but forms of value.

§ 2. The relative form of value.

a. The relation of equality.

b. Value-relations.

c. Qualitative content of the relative form of value implied in value-relations.

d. Quantitative determination of the relative form of value implied in value-relations.

e. The relative form of value considered as a whole.

§ 3. The equivalent form.

a. The form of direct exchangeability.

b. Quantitative determination not contained in the equivalent form.

c. The peculiarities of the equivalent form.

a. First peculiarity: use-value becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, value.

b. Second peculiarity: concrete labour becomes the form of appearance of its opposite, abstract human labour.

c. Third peculiarity: private labour takes the form of its opposite, namely, labour in its directly social form.

d. Fourth peculiarity: the fetishism of the commodity-form more striking in the equivalent form than in the relative value-form.

§ 4. The form of value or independent manifestation of value = exchange value.

§ 5. Simple form of value of the commodity-- simple manifestation of the contradictions it contains within itself between use-value and value.

§ 6. Simple form of value of the commodity =simple form of an object as commodity.

§ 7. Relationship between commodity-form and money-form.

§ 8. Simple relative form of value and individual equivalent form.

§ 9. Transition of the simple into the expanded form of value.

II. Total or Expanded Form of Value

§ 1. The endless series -of relative expressions of value.

§ 2. Sequential determination implied in the expanded relative form of value.

§ 3. Defects of the expanded relative form of value.

§ 4. Expanded relative form of value and specific equivalent form.

§ 5. Transition to the general form of value.

III. The General Form of Value

§ 1. Altered character of the relative form of value.

§ 2. Altered character of the equivalent form.

§ 3. Concurrent development of relative form of value and equivalent form.

§ 4. Development of the polarity between relative form of value and equivalent form.

§ 5. Transition from the general form of value to the money-form.

IV. The Money-Form

(The following on the money-form is simply for the sake of continuity — perhaps barely half a page.)

§ 1. How the transition from the general form of value to the money-form differs from the previous transitions in the development.

§ 2. Transformation of the relative form of value into the price form.

§ 3. The simple form of commodity is the secret of the money-form.

You may sprinkle sand on this!

Your

K. Moro

Don’t forget to drop a line to Borkheim before you depart, so that no ‘misunderstanding’ is possible.

Regarding the English translation [of Capital], I am trying to track down a fellow in London who will pay decently, so that both Moro as translator and I as author get our due. If I am successful, Mrs Lizzy shall also receive her share (you must in that case allow me that pleasure — but the bird is not yet in the hand) in the form of a London dress. I have some expectations, as Mssrs Harrison et Co. are most desirous to study the book in English. Eccarius has, of course, told them that he is a humble Pupil of mine — (his critique of Mill has impressed them hugely, they having previously been believers in Mill) — and that the Prophet Himself is just now having the quintessence of all wisdom published, that is printed, in Germany.

I am quite sickened by the report on the Fenians. These swine boast of their English humanity in not treating political prisoners worse than murderers, street-thieves, forgers and pederasts! And this O'Donovan Rossa, what ‘a queer fellow’, because as a felony convict he refused to grovel before his worst enemies! A queer fellow indeed! Incidentally, would even the Prussians have been capable of acting in a more bureaucratic fashion than these emissaries of the weeping willow, that Knox (read ox) and Pollock (bull-dog), who naturally accept the evidence given by the subordinate ‘warder’ as unimpeachable. But if you don’t believe the warders, you have the word of Wermuth, the chief of police!

Mrs S O'Donovan Rossa has written the ‘International’ a very flattering and very graceful letter on her departure for America.

The fury of that Bismarck-oracle, the Norddeutsche, at Stanley’s and Derby’s statements about the Luxemburg Treaty has quite cured my nausea. That jackass Brass calls it an innovation! Palmerston has laid down once and for all the principle that common treaties impose only the right and not by any means the duty of intervention for any state. And if that were not so, whatever became of the obligations which England assumed at the Congress of Vienna with regard to Poland, in respect of both Prussia and Russia, and France ditto?

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 395;

First published: slightly abridged in Die Neue Zeit, 1901-1902 and in full in Pisma Marksa k Kugelmanu (Letters of Marx to Kugelmann), Moscow-Leningrad, 1928.

London, 13 July 1867

Dear Friend,

Thanks for Hegel and the young madam!

I shall now briefly answer all the points you raised.

Engels is in Denmark at present and will be paying you a visit one day in the course of this month. Ad vocem the same: you recall you told me that Menke (or whatever the man in your statistical office in Hanover is called) made some very appreciative remarks about the work of mine [Critique of Political Economy] that was published by Duncker. For Engels’ ears I have twisted this, to the effect that Menke expressed his great appreciation to me of Engels’ ‘Condition of the Working Class’. The reason for this pia fraus (and I have perpetrated various fraudes with the same object in view): to spur Engels on to write and publish the second volume, concerning the period from 1845 to the present. I have at last succeeded in this to the extent that he has promised to get down to it. So, if by chance conversation should turn to the statistician, do not let the cat out of the bag.

Nothing is fixed for my wife’s journey, nor can it be, it having been overtaken by another event, the proposed departure of my 3 daughters for Bordeaux, to visit Lafargue senior.

I do not advise you to go to Paris. It is impossible to study anything in the midst of that Babylon of things and among that throng of people, unless one stays there for at least 6 weeks, which is very expensive.

My book [Capital] comprises about 50 sheets. You see how I had miscalculated as to its extent. A few days ago I sent the Appendix, entitled The Form of Value, Appendix to Chapter I, I, to Leipzig. You know who was the author of this plan, and I herewith offer him my thanks for his suggestion.

You will excuse me if I terminate these lines here. Another proof-sheet has just come.

With my best compliments to your wife and the young madam.

Yours

K. Marx

With my next letter I shall send membership cards for Mrs Kugelmann and Mrs Tenge. One lady, Mrs Law, has been promoted to membership of our Central Council.

Best thanks from Eleanor for the stamps. The photograms will follow.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 402;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 16 August 1867, 2.00 a.m.

Dear Fred,

Have just finished correcting the last sheet (49th) of the book [Volume I of Capital]. The appendix — Form of Value — in small print — takes up 1 1/4 sheets.

Preface ditto returned corrected yesterday. So, this volume is finished. I owe it to you alone that it was possible! Without your self-sacrifice for me I could not possibly have managed the immense labour demanded by the 3 volumes. I embrace you, full of thanks!

Enclosed 2 sheets of corrected proofs.

The £15 received with best thanks.

Salut, my dear, valued friend.

Your

K. Marx

I do not need to have the corrected proofs back until the book is completely out.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 405;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 23 August 1867

Dear Moor,

I have now worked through as far as sheet 36 [of the first volume of Capital] approx., and I congratulate you on the comprehensive way in which the most complex economic problems are elucidated simply and almost sensuously merely by arranging them suitably and by placing them in the right context. Likewise, in respect of subject-matter, on the quite splendid exposition of the relationship between labour and capital — for the first time here in its full context and complete. I was also greatly diverted to see how you have worked your way into the language of technology, which must surely have given you much trouble and on which account I had various misgivings. I have corrected several slips of the pen in pencil in the margin, and also ventured to make a few conjectures. But how could you leave the outward structure of the book in its present form! The 4th chapter is almost 200 pages long and only has 4 sub-sections, indicated by four headings in ordinary print, which it is hardly possible to refer back to. Furthermore, the train of thought is constantly interrupted by illustrations, and the point to be illustrated is never summarised after the illustration, so that one is for ever plunging straight from the illustration of one point into the exposition of another point. It is dreadfully tiring, and confusing, too, if one is not all attention. It would have been highly desirable here to have subdivided the text more frequently and to have made the most important sections stand out more, and this must emphatically be done for the English version. In this exposition (especially of cooperation and manufacture) there are indeed several points that are not yet quite clear to me, where I cannot work out which facts lie behind the argument that is expressed solely in general terms. To judge by the outward form of the exposition, this 4th chapter also appears to be the most hurriedly written and the least carefully revised. However, all that is of no import, the main thing is that our economists are not given a weak point anywhere through which they can shoot holes; I am indeed curious to hear what these gentlemen will say, they have not been left even the smallest opening. Roscher and his ilk will not be unduly perturbed, but for the people here in England who do not write for 3-year-olds, it is a different matter altogether.

I very much look forward to your sending me some more sheets as soon as you can, I particularly want to read the section on accumulation in its context.

Give your wife my best wishes. When are the girls coming back?

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 407;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 24 August 1867

Dear Fred,

I have received no further corrected proofs [of the first volume of Capital] since the 2 last that I sent you. I am exceedingly vexed with Meissner. He has obviously held back what Wigand has sent him in order to send everything at once — and save 4d. postage!

The same Meissner wrote me last week that he is printing a certain part of my preface specially (and he has indeed made the right choice) to send to the German newspapers. I wrote asking him to send me copies of it at once. I reckoned that you would translate the thing into English (I shall then give it to The Bee-Hive, which is taken by Mill, Beesly, Harrison, etc.), and Lafargue with Laura’s help into French for the Courrier français, finally I wanted to send one copy to my correspondent in America. To save the 4d., Meissner has sent nothing. He will be sending it all together. But a great deal of time is lost in the process!

The best points in my book are: 1. (this is fundamental to all understanding of the facts) the two-fold character of labour according to whether it is expressed in use-value or exchange-value, which is brought out in the very First Chapter; 2. the treatment of surplus-value regardless of its particular forms as profit, interest, ground rent, etc. This will be made clear in the second volume especially. The treatment of the particular forms in classical political economy, where they are for ever being jumbled up together with the general form, is an olla potrida.

Please enter your desiderata, critical remarks, queries, etc., on the corrected proofs. This is very important for me, as I am reckoning on a 2nd edition sooner or later. As regards Chapter IV, it was a hard job finding things themselves i.e., their interconnection. But with that once behind me, along came one Blue Book after another just as I was composing the final version and I was delighted to find my theoretical conclusions fully confirmed by the facts. Finally, it was written to the accompaniment of carbuncles and daily dunning by creditors!

For the conclusion to the 2nd book (Process of Circulation), which I am writing now, I am again obliged to seek your advice on one point, as I did many years ago.

Fixed capital only has to be replaced in natura after, say, 10 years. In the meantime, its value returns partially and gradatim, as the goods that it has produced are sold. This progressive return of the fixed capital is only required for its replacement (aside from repairs and the like) when it becomes defunct in its material form, e.g., as a machine. Prior to that, however, these successive returns are in the capitalist’s possession.

Many years ago I wrote to you that it seemed to me that in this manner an accumulation fund was being built up, since in the intervening period the capitalist was of course using the returned money, before replacing the capital fixe with it. You disagreed with this somewhat superficially in a letter. I later found that MacCulloch describes this sinking fund as an accumulation fund. Being convinced that no idea of MacCulloch’s could ever be right, I let the matter drop. His apologetic purpose here has already been refuted by the Malthusians, but they, too, admit the fact.

Now, as a manufacturer, you must know what you do with the returns on capital fixe before the time it has to be replaced in natura. And you must answer this point for me (without theorising, in purely practical terms).

Salut.

Your

K. M.

(Salut to Mrs Lizzy!)

The children are still at Royan, near Bordeaux.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 409;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 26 August 1867

Dear Moor,

On the question of the replacement-fund, full details with accompanying calculations tomorrow. You see, I must ask some other manufacturers whether our practice is the customary one or an exception. The question is whether, with an original outlay of £1,000 on machinery, where £100 is written off in the 1st year, the rule is to write off 10% of the £1,000 in the 2nd year, or of £900, etc. We do the latter, and understandably the matter goes on thereby in infinitum at least in theory. This complicates the arithmetic considerably. But, otherwise, there is no doubt that the manufacturer is using the replacement-fund on average for 4½ years before the machinery is worn out, or at least has it at his disposal. However, this is included in the calculations, by way of what one might call a certain guarantee against moral wear and tear, or alternatively the manufacturer says: the assumption that in 10 years the machinery will be completely worn out is only approximately correct, i.e., it presupposes that I receive the money for the replacement-fund in 10 annual instalments from the outset. At all events, you shall have the calculations; regarding the economic significance of the matter, I am none too clear about it, I do not see how the manufacturer is supposed to be able to cheat the other partners in the surplus-value, that is, the ultimate consumers, by thus falsely representing the position — in the long run. Nota bene, as a rule, machinery is depreciated at 7½%, which assumes a useful life of approximately 13 years.

Moore sends you his photograph, enclosed, and reminds you that you promised him yours, which he is very eager to have. The chapter on accumulation is quite splendid.

Your

F. E.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 410;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 27 August 1867

Dear Moor,

Enclosed two schedules for machinery, which will make the matter fully clear to you. The rule is that part of the original sum is written off each year, usually 7 1/2%, but to simplify the calculation I have kept to 10%, which is not excessive for many machines either. Thus, e.g.,

1860 1 Jan.

Purchases

£ 1,000

1861 1 Jan.

Written off 10%

£ 100

£ 900

New purchase

£ 200

£ 1,100

1862 1 Jan.

Written off 10% £1,200 (£1,000+£200)

£ 120

£ 980

New purchase

£ 11 200

£ 1,180

1863 1 Jan.

Written off 10% £1,000+£200+£200

£ 140

etc

£ 1,040

In schedule No. 1 I am now assuming that the manufacturer puts his [money] out at interest for writing-off purposes; on the day when he has to replace the old machinery with new, he has not £1,000 but £1,252-11s. Schedule No. 2 assumes that he puts the money straight into new machinery, each year. As is shown in the last column giving the value of the total purchases as it stands on the last day of the 10 years, it is true that the value of his machinery then does not exceed £1,000 (and he cannot have more, as he has, after all, only invested the value of what has been worn out, and the total value of the machinery cannot thus grow by the process), but he has extended his factory from year to year, and as an average over the 11 years he has employed machinery which cost £1,449 in investment, in other words, he has produced and earned substantially more than with the original £1,000. Let us assume he is a spinner and every £ represents one spindle together with the roving-frame; in that case, he has on average spun with 1,449 spindles instead of 1,000, and, after the original spindles have ended their useful lives, he begins the new period on 1 January 1866 with 1,357 spindles that he has purchased in the meantime, to which is added a further 236 from the writing off as per 1865, which makes 1,593 spindles. The money advanced for writing off has thus enabled him to increase his machinery by 60% and without putting a farthing of his actual profit into the new investment.

Repairs have been disregarded in both schedules. At 10% write-off, the machine should cover its own repair costs, i.e., the latter should be included. Nor do they affect the issue, as they are either included in the 10%, or else they prolong the useful life of the machine in proportion, which amounts to the same thing.

I hope schedule No. 2 will be sufficiently clear to you; if not, just write, I have a copy of it here.

In haste.

Your

F. E.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 417;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 1 September 1867

Dear Moor,

I have just received payment for a very long-standing bad debt of £5 which will put me in a position to send you that sum tomorrow as soon as I have cashed the cheque. Otherwise, I should have been in something of a fix, what with the repayment of the £45 to Borkheim now due. What about Borkheim, is he back? I am now able and therefore wish to settle up.

The 8 sheets [of the first volume of Capital] received with thanks. The theoretical side is quite splendid, as is the exposition of the history of expropriation. But the piece you have inserted on Ireland was done in the most fearful haste, and the material is not properly knocked into shape at all. On first reading often positively incomprehensible. Further comments as soon as I have considered the stuff more closely. The résumé on the expropriation of the expropriators is most brilliant and will create quite an effect.

It is fortunate that almost all of the book is ‘enacted’ in England, so to speak; otherwise para. 100 of the Prussian Penal Code would be operable: ‘Whosoever ... shall incite the subjects of the State to hatred or contempt of each other’, etc. - and confiscation would ensue. Bismarck seems to be needing to stage a little demonstration against the workers anyway. In Erfurt or thereabouts a Lassallean poet, printer and publisher have been arraigned for high treason, and in Elberfeld they have even confiscated a scrawl by the noble Schweitzer. So, it is possible that the book would be prohibited in Prussia, but, anyway, that would not have any effect in present conditions.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 419;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 4 September 1867

Dear Fred,

The £5 received with thanks.

Borkheim wrote to me a few days ago from Berne and sent me ‘for comment if you would be so kind’ the brouillon [draft] for the speech, which he is intending to give at the Peace Congress in Geneva. He also wanted your assistance. I wrote to him, as we had agreed, that you had not yet returned. You can, however, send the money to his associate Schyler, 65 Fenchurch Street. But it is £50, not 45. When I looked, I found that the bill was on £48, and Borkheim then told me that he could probably give me the full sum of £50. I did not tell you of this before, as I was expecting the money I had been promised any day, and then wanted to pay the £50 myself.

Enclosed:

1. the last sheets of the proofs [of Capital].

2. 2 Diplomatic Reviews and 1 number of Courrier français.

Regarding the final sheets, they have put the Addendum to the Notes in large print, and the Appendix on the Form of Value in small print, despite my instructions. They probably did this so that the book should be neither over nor under 50 sheets in length. In my opinion, Meissner has made a serious blunder in increasing the purchase-price from 3 talers to 3 talers 10 silver groschen. It is, however, possible as well that he has subsequently received so many more firm orders that this was commercially the correct thing to do.

A word of explanation concerning the article in the Courrier français (which you must send back to me after you have read it through): ‘Les Conditions de la Paix’:

You know that on the General Council I expressed my opposition to our joining the peace-at-any-price party. My speech lasted about ½ hour. As minute-secretary, Eccarius reported on it in The Bee-Hive, giving only a few sentences of what I said. The reprint in the Courrier even omits the sentences about the necessity for armies vis-à-vis Russia and about the cowardice of these fellows. The affair has, nevertheless, created quite a stir. The jackasses from the Peace Congress, whose agent in London is M. de Colleville, completely changed their original programme and even smuggled into the new one, which is much more democratic, the words ‘The harmonizing of economic interests with liberty’, which could mean almost anything, including just freetrade. They have been bombarding me with letters and even had the impertinence to send me the enclosed scrap of paper with the new programme. Their impertinence consists in nominating me as a ‘Member of the Geneva, etc., Congress’ in the address. The Courrier, which was their most vociferous advocate in Paris, is deserting them, as you will see. The same Courrier has changed its policy in respect of Russia, following a private letter that I wrote to Vermorel about a fortnight ago (we are not acquainted).

The main point was that these fine gentlemen from the peace congress, Victor Hugo, Garibaldi, L. Blanc, etc., had kept themselves supremely aloof from our International Association. I have now obliged them to acknowledge us as a real force.

From Naples I have received the first 2 numbers of a paper Liberta e Giustizza. In No. I they declare themselves to be our organ. I have passed it to Eccarius to place before the congress.

No. II, which I shall send you, contains a very good attack on Mazzini. I suspect that Bakunin has a hand in it.

With regard to the confiscation and prohibition of my book, there is a world of difference between prohibiting electoral pamphlets and a book of 50 sheets which has such an air of erudition and even contains notes in Greek. Admittedly, that might be of little avail if I had chosen 12 administrative districts in Prussia instead of 12 counties in England to describe the conditions of the agricultural workers. I also feel that Mr Bismarck will think twice about the matter before provoking me into attacking his regime in London and Paris.

What conditions are like in Prussia, incidentally, is shown by the following statement by O. Hübner, Director of the Central Statistical Archive, in a message to his electors:

‘The people are already overburdened. Apart from the armament factories, almost every trade is depressed, hundreds of hungry men are applying for the humblest positions, in the cities the number of empty dwellings and of citizens, who cannot afford to pay rent, is growing, a whole host of estates and houses are being subjected to compulsory auction, the poor-houses are being besieged by our maimed victors and by the unemployed, everywhere there is a lack of confidence in the present and the future, and the budgets of the poorest are beset by the realisation that they are already paying more for the services of the state than they are worth.’

In Berlin, neither the government nor the National-Liberal Party... has got a single candidate through. But just what utter blockheads those men of Progress are who now form the extreme left, is shown amongst other things by the following extract from their ‘most radical’ organ, the Zukunft:

‘The whole English nation is permeated by a snobbery which treats all alike and to which all personal industry is anathema. [...] It is this same snobbery which is for ever urging reduction of working hours and prohibits overtime on account of the unions!'

Would you credit it! Even now the Parisian press is truly a giant compared with the German press!

Your

K. Marx

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 432;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 4 October 1867

Dear Fred,

Since my return from Manchester almost until now, I have had a feverish cold. I caught the cold in the course of the railway malheur [misfortunes].

As there are many things about which I wish to write to you, on public and private affairs, in this letter, I shall start with the book [Capital], so that I do not forget it. You would have spent long indeed searching in Table C for the decrease in the cultivation of green crops (p. 695). Mr Wigand has printed C instead of B (p. 690), which tells us, under the heading ‘Green Crops’, that from 1861-65 107,984 acres were put out of cultivation. Indeed you will observe from the schedule of misprints on p. 784 that Mr Wigand has wilfully abbreviated it from p. 292 onwards in order to accommodate it on the last page. The section concerning Ireland was certainly written very hastily, but for a second edition it could be put in order with but a few formal alterations. The most important thing is the facts, which are not known even in England.

I have heard nothing from Meissner. Schabelitz (Basle) told Borkheim he has requested 5 copies for sale or return on the strength of 5 copies which he ordered for cash payment, but Meissner replied he did not have enough to send him so many for sale or return. However, this may merely be a diplomatic manoeuvre on Meissner’s part. I see from the enclosed note from Liebknecht (who by the by has done us proud with his first intervention in the Reichstag, vide the Zukunft No. 229 of 1 October) that Meissner is not always so punctilious. It was agreed that he should send 1 copy to Liebknecht and 1 copy to Dr Weiss for the editors (Zukunft).

Professor Beesly has now returned home, and I shall be hearing from him before very long. Quant à Siebel, I should also like to know whether he has received the copies, 1 for himself and 1 for Rittershaus? and how the latter has requited it?

Ad vocem Vogt: you will find some news about Vogt in the enclosed letter from Kugelmann. After Kugelmann had departed and the gang thought Borkheim had likewise gone, a final meeting of the Germans took place, at which Borkheim suddenly appeared and witnessed the following occurrence. Mr Goegg handed a slip of paper to the Vice-President, Buchner, in which he declared that the Bonapartist rumours, etc., regarding Vogt were false, and offered a testimonium virtutis for the man, whom he claimed to have known for 20 years. He demanded that Büchner sign this note, i.e., certify that it had been communicated to him. Büchner naturally did so. Whereupon Little Beust jumps up, states in writing that Goegg is only expressing a private opinion which is by no means shared in Switzerland, etc., etc. Ditto demands certification of his protest by Büchner, which the latter supplies. Vogt’s manoeuvre was thus frustrated. To what depths that fellow has descended!

Another incident at the Peace Congress! Ludwig Simon approaches Goegg: ‘Why have you not moved my name nearer to the top of the list of speakers! Why is Borkheim given the floor before me?’ Goegg: ‘Those fellows — the proletarians — had 4 of the German vice-presidents. To bring in our man Grün and get Borkheim to give up his place, we had to make this concession to him, etc.!’ Hardly were the words out of that beau’s mouth than he looks round and to his horror sees Eccarius grinning behind his back.

Ad vocem Stumpf: Maybe Stumpf understands me, but I do not understand Stumpf. Perhaps you will be more fortunate and be able to ‘delineate the scientific process of pauperisation’ and ditto ‘the correct conclusion’ from the ‘evidence’ which he keeps in his pocket and does not divulge. His letter enclosed.

Ad vocem Dronke: Borkheim spoke to a man in Paris who has a precise acquaintance with all Dronke’s affairs and described him as a ‘voleur’ [thief]. The copper company had served notice on Dronke a year ago. It now has a firm in Glasgow as its associate and therefore has no more need of an English agency. Dronke, dicitur, has been guilty of much ‘embezzlement’ in the past year and has made himself the object of an ‘embarrassing’ investigation. I hope the affair will be hushed up.

Ad vocem Collet: what follows is by way of explanation for the enclosed curiosa: Collet’s little girl (whom you have met) and her even younger brother were visiting us a few days ago. The boy had a boxing match with Lafargue, who eventually pinned him to the floor in a humiliating position. Then says the boy, ‘Remember how you got on at Waterloo!’ Hence this comical correspondence, with the girl denouncing the lad to the old man.

Collet has withdrawn from The Diplomatic Review, although his name still figures on the paper this time. I immediately noticed the change of editor, as I was only sent 1 copy. You shall have it as soon as I am finished with it. It is a thoroughly foolish number. Garibaldi is described as ‘a common bandit, atheist, fool, etc.’, M. Dupanloup, the évêque [bishop] of Orleans, by contrast, as the great man of the age. Will David yet become a Catholic one day perhaps? The Peace Congress in Geneva was, of course, a fabrication of the Russians, which is why they sent along their ‘Well worn out agent Bakounine’. I have the impression that The Diplomatic Review is on its last legs.

Ad vocem International Association. At my suggestion, the office of president has been abolished, after Odger had already been proposed for re-election. — Fox, who has missed no opportunity to exhibit his profound hatred for Eccarius since the latter’s return, gave notice for the next meeting (Tuesday) that he would ask the Council to consider censuring Eccarius for his ‘Times’ articles. To Fox’s great surprise I thereupon gave ditto notice that I would interpellate Fox next Tuesday about a ‘secret letter’ that he had written to Becker requesting him ‘To do all in his power to remove the seat of the Central Council from London’. Fox, who is altogether composed of caprices and crotchets, imagines that he must found an ‘opposition party’ on the Couucil against the ‘German dictatorship’, as he calls it. He will be astonished at his success in this line!

Ad vocem Borkheim: d'abord, the following facts. Borkheim spoke (or rather read from his manuscript) for over 20 minutes, whereas only 10 were permitted by the rules. Naturally, like Garibaldi and Edgar Quinet, he too felt he could afford to take liberties. Secondly, he mounted the rostrum in a state of extreme excitement, and, as Eccarius says, ‘did not let himself get a word in edgeways’. Nobody understood him. All that people heard were the few catchwords about Schulze-Delitzsch, at which Vogt jumped up and clenched both his fists, and about the Cossacks. That was fortunate indeed. His speech was thought to be significant because it was not understood. He therefore plays some part, both in The Times and in the French press. But now comes the drawback. The fool wishes to have his speech printed in German, English, Russian and in the French original. I now have the latter in front of me. He sent it to me so that Lafargue could look through it. With the exception of the few catchwords, which I whispered into his ear, it is not merely a tasteless hotchpotch, but often pure balderdash. And his French! E.g.,

‘It would be impossible, without descending to the level of idiocy, to discuss whether the first task should be to arrange for the female Isabella to be abducted, for the male Bismarck to be overthrown, or for the nimble hermaphrodite Beust to evaporate. Among the French members of this Association there are some great orators and some profound thinkers, but were they all accomplished Mirabeaux and consummate Descartes, the Germans would be too squareheaded to accept roundly that it would be first and foremost the French government whose destruction would inaugurate the era of international peace.’

Assez! [Enough!]

How little he suspected the quality of ‘his French’ is clear from the note he jotted in the margin of the manuscript he sent me:

‘Please ask Mr Lafargue to look quickly through it and correct any (!) bad French in the margin!'

I was, of course, obliged to tell him that Lafargue would have to see him, as he could not proceed to make the ‘deletions’ (to begin with, Lafargue wants to delete the whole of the first half) and ‘amendments’ in his absence. He is therefore coming to see me this evening. Lafargue additionally showed me French commis voyageur slang in almost every sentence. E.g., ‘parlons rondement!'

Private affairs: I have talked to Borkheim about the possibility of finding me a loan of at least £100 in London. He says yes, he is willing to be 1 guarantor if you will be the other. But he would, after all, need to hear from yourself about the matter first. The situation is simply that I can neither complete Volume II, nor find the time for the intrigues required for the English edition, nor even remain in England, if I do not manage to pacify the Manichaeans for some weeks at least. If the English transaction succeeds, and if they proceed in such a manner in Germany — which does not seem difficult to me — that a 2nd impression soon becomes necessary, the crisis will have been overcome.

This damned year has been made even worse by Lafargue staying with me until now, Laura is to marry in the spring, etc.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 11 October 1867 [1]

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

D’abord [2] best thanks for your two letters. It gives me great pleasure to hear from you as often as your time permits you to write. Only you must not count upon strict reciprocity, because, as it is, my time scarcely suffices for the multifarious correspondence I must keep up on all sides.

Before I speak about my book, something immediate, or an immediate something. I am afraid that Borkheim, [3] malgre lui, [4] is on the point of doing me a very bad turn – he is having his speech at Geneva printed in four languages, French, German, English and Russian. [5] He has in addition decorated it with a baroque and tasteless introduction, overladen with quotations.

Between ourselves – and in the interests of the Party – I must tell you the whole truth. Borkheim is a capable man, and even an homme d'ésprit. [6] But when he takes up the pen – oh dear! All tact and taste leave him. And the necessary preliminary knowledge, too. He is like the savages, who think they beautify their faces by tattooing them in screaming colours. Banality and screaming buffoonery always trip him up. Almost every phrase of his instinctively puts on cap and bells. If he were not so thoroughly vain, I could have prevented the publication and made it clear to him how lucky he was that they did not understand him at Geneva, but only a few good points in his speech. On the other hand, I owe him my thanks for the part he took in the Vogt [7] affair and he is my personal friend. In his speech, etc, there are some phrases in which he repeats my opinions in a form suitable to the Kladderadatsch. [8] It will be a very fine game for my enemies (Vogt has already hinted in the Neue Züricher Zeitung that I am the secret author of the speech), instead of attacking my book, to make me responsible for Herr Borkheim, his stupidities and personalities. Should something of that sort happen, you must manage through Warnebold, [9] etc, to get into the papers open to you short articles revealing these tactics and, without insulting Borkheim in any way, say outright that only deliberate malice or the most complete lack of any critical faculty could identify such disparate views. The baroque and confused manner in which our opinions are reflected in Borkheim’s head (not when he speaks, but when he writes) naturally offers the common press gang a most welcome pretext for taking the offensive and may even give them the opportunity of indirectly injuring my book.

Should the press, however, be silent on the matter, which I can scarcely hope, since Borkheim has sent his offspring with all due care to all the newspapers, do not in any way disturb that solemn silence.

Were Borkheim not a personal friend, I would publicly disavow him. You understand my false position and, at the same time, my annoyance. One submits to the public a book worked out with painstaking care (and never perhaps has a work of that kind been written in more difficult circumstances) in order to raise the Party as high as possible and to disarm even the vulgar by the manner of presentation, and, at the same time, a Party member in motley coat and cap and bells thrusts himself to your side on the market and provokes rotten apples and eggs which may hit oneself and the Party!

I am very satisfait [10] with your manoeuvres against Vogt at Geneva. [11] I am glad that you like my book.

As to your questions:

Ernest Jones [12] had to speak to Irishmen in Ireland as a Party man; that is, since large-scale landownership there is identical with England’s property in Ireland, he had to speak against large-scale landownership. You should never look for principles in the hustings speeches of English politicians, but only for what is expedient for the immediate purpose.

Peonage is the advance of money against future labour. These advances then follow the usual course of usury. The worker not only remains a debtor all his life, that is, the forced labourer of the creditor, but the relation is handed down in the family to later generations, which in fact belong to the creditor.

The completion of my second volume depends chiefly upon the success of the first. This is necessary if I am to find a publisher in England and without that my miserable material position will remain so difficult and disturbing, that I shall find neither the time nor the peace for rapid completion. These are of course matters which I do not want Herr Meissner [13] to know. It therefore depends now on the skill and the activity of my Party friends in Germany whether the second volume takes a long or short time to appear. Genuine criticism – whether from friend or foe – can only be expected in the course of time, for such a comprehensive and to some extent difficult work requires time to read through and digest. But immediate success is the result, not of genuine criticism, but, to put it bluntly, of creating a stir, of beating the drum, which also forces the enemy to speak. To start off it is not very important what is said. Above all no time should be lost.

I have sent your last letter to Engels, so that he can let you have the necessary hints. He can write better about my book than I can myself.

My warmest greetings to your dear wife. In a few days I shall send her a prescription for reading the book.

Yours

KM

Keep me au fait with everything that happens in Germany in regard to Volume 1.

As Paul Stumpf [14] (Mainz) has written me a letter in which he calls Borkheim’s speech ‘my’ speech, and as at the moment I have no time to write to Stumpf, will you please write and explain to him, recommending silence when Borkheim’s pamphlet appears. Between ourselves, Stumpf also becomes a nuisance when he takes up the pen.

Notes

1. On the preceding day Marx had written to Engels: ‘Kugelmann’s enclosed letter will show you that the moment for action has come. You can write him about my book much better than I can.’ – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. First of all – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. Sigismund Borkheim (1825-1885) – German merchant and publicist who took an active part in the 1848 Revolution. Fled to Switzerland and later settled in London, where in the 1860s he became a close friend of Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

4. In spite of himself – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

5. A reference to Borkheim’s pamphlet, My Pearl Before the Geneva Congress. At the International Peace and Liberty Conference in Geneva (9-12 September) organised by petty-bourgeois pacifists and supporters of free trade, which was attended also by Kugelmann, Borkheim attempted to deliver a speech calling for war on tsarist Russia. The noisy peace advocates prevented him from finishing his speech which he decided to publish as a pamphlet – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

6. Man of wit – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

7. Karl Vogt (1817-1895) – German natural scientist, vulgar materialist and petty-bourgeois democrat. After the Revolution of 1848-49 he lived in Switzerland, an active member of the ‘League of Peace and Liberty’. In his book, Herr Vogt, Marx proved that during the Italian war Vogt acted as agent of Napoleon III (in 1870 it was proved by documentary evidence that he was in the pay of Napoleon) – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

8. The German equivalent of Punch – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

9. Warnebold – Active member of the National Union in Hanover – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

10. Satisfied – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

11. At the Geneva Conference organised by the League for Peace and Liberty in September 1867, Kugelmann made a speech against Marx’s old enemy, Vogt – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

12. Ernest Jones (1819-1869) – Chartist, lawyer and poet. Editor of the People’s Paper and Notes to the People, to both of which Marx contributed. At times stood close to Marx and Engels.

13. Otto Karl Meissner (1819-1902) – Hamburg publisher who brought out Marx’s Capital and a number of other works by Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

14. Paul Stumpf (1827-1913) – Member of the Communist League and of the First International. Friend of Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 445;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 13 October 1867

Dear Moor,

I have written Kugelmann two articles about the book from different points of view and sent them to him I think they are such as almost any newspaper can take, and he can do others from them. That should help him a bit.

I shall be writing to Siebel tomorrow, I must first know where the fellow is and how his health is.

Borkheim written to.

Liebknecht is doing very well; he has retained sufficient from us to realise that the only correct policy consists in voting against everything without exception. This he has faithfully done so far. If you should be writing to him again these days, you can draw his attention to the following: the final article of the law on freedom of movement reads: this law shall not apply to the Aliens’ Police. With the consequence that what one gains as a North German citizen, one loses again as an ‘alien’. It would have a great effect here if Liebknecht were to propose: the Aliens’ Police be abolished. Only on the Continent does such an absurdity exist; the proposition would have a great effect. In fact, it would in general strengthen his position to suggest he chaff the bourgeois members with the fact that he, the communist, is obliged to champion their own interests despite their opposition. Liebknecht’s speech was much better in the Kölnische Zeitung, by the way, than in the Zukunft.

I was very pleased to read the things about Vogt. For all his manoeuvres, your attack has put paid to him entirely, and only the liberal bourgeoisie still considers him the German Véron.

All that Stumpf is asking for is that you supply him with theoretical and factual material to explain how it comes about that the petty bourgeois gradually yields to the proletarian. And you know that as well as I do, but you just want to get out of the work. Of course, good old Stumpf thinks that one page of a letter would suffice — for him to learn how to handle the question. That, however, I would doubt.

Dronke. Borkheim is just as much of a scandalmonger as the little fellow himself, and if the 2 of them say anything about each other, it will be six of one and half a dozen of the other — Dronke still has enough jus in his little head to take care to avoid direct criminal prosecution, within the periods prescribed by present extradition treaties. You know, by the way, how in commerce even the most blatantly criminal affairs can be taken care of simply as civil law cases. But the little fellow has certainly been too clever by half and much too greedy.

Strohn is the same curious old fellow as ever. Fancy him applying a remark to himself the moment that I make it, when he has made it countless times himself!

I cannot wait to see Borkheim’s ‘Pearl’. In the matter of literary vanity, the fellow is pure ‘Yid’.

Gumpert has a cousin staying here, ex-Electoral-Hessian, now Prussian lieutenant. The fellow enlisted with the Prussians, full of high expectations, but found the old pack-drill in full flower once again. Gymnastics, etc., performed by commands; parading, ramrod marching order, etc. Some of it may be exaggerated, but there is no doubt that the latest successes have also lent a certain sanction to military display. The exaggeration derives from the disagreeable impression, which the newly recruited officers have already received, that 9 out of every 10 of them will never reach the rank of staff-officer. And the fellow is just looking for an opportunity to extricate himself.

Kindest regards to your wife, the girls and Lafargue.

Your

F. E.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 15 October 1867

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

You must not write to Borkheim. Besides it would be useless, since the work has already been announced in the publishers’ circular and Schabelitz has already brought it out. [1] Moreover, Borkheim himself is now in Bordeaux. Such a letter from you would have no other effect but to make Borkheim my enemy.

Ce qui est fait, est fait [2] – never mind! As I was in a state of great excitement from working at night, I exaggerated the malignity of the événement [3] at first. In fact je suis puni par ou j'ai peché! [4] Actually the idea of the scandal which our friend would make among the respectable philistines at Geneva amused me au premier abord. [5] It is true I did not foresee the publishers’ fruits. Moreover, I should have realised that in working out his plan Borkheim would naturally overstep the prudent limits I suggested in my letter. The only policy to be pursued now is to be silent, so long as our enemies do not speak, and once they speak and want to make me responsible, to make bad jokes about their being compelled to ascribe Borkheim’s pranks to me in order not to have to answer my book. Further, in that event Borkheim must be dealt with benevolently, for after all, apart from his literary vanity, he is capable and well meaning, and good as an homme d'action, [6] as long as he does not get the devil in him.

You will have received Engels’ recipe by now. I am in correspondence with Liebknecht and Becker. [7]

By ‘success of the book’ I mean nothing but its rapid sale, because of the effect that would have in England.

The Courier Français (the daily paper which arouses the most attention in Paris now) and the Liberté in Brussels have published a French translation of my introduction, together with complimentary preambles.

A certain Natzmer in New York has offered himself as English translator. Quod non. [8]

Liebknecht’s speech in Berlin gives me great pleasure. I sent him some instructions from here.

Poor Becker’s position is so bad that he is on the point of giving up his entire political and literary activity. How one regrets not being able to help in such circumstances!

Greetings to your dear wife and my little friend, for whose portrait I still have to thank you.

Yours

KM

Notes

1. A reference to Sigismund Borkheim’s pamphlet, My Pearl Before the Geneva Congress. At the International Peace and Liberty Conference in Geneva (9-12 September) organised by petty-bourgeois pacifists and supporters of free trade, which was attended also by Kugelmann, Borkheim attempted to deliver a speech calling for war on tsarist Russia. The noisy peace advocates prevented him from finishing his speech which he decided to publish as a pamphlet. Sigismund Borkheim (1825-1885) – German merchant and publicist who took an active part in the 1848 Revolution. Fled to Switzerland and later settled in London, where in the 1860s he became a close friend of Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. What is done, is done – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. Event – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

4. I am punished by my own sin – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

5. At first blush – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

6. Man of action – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

7. Johann Phillip Becker (1800-1886) – Member of the First International and an active supporter of Marx in the latter’s struggle against Bakunin. Editor of Der Vorbote, the German organ of the First International, published in Geneva – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

8. Nothing doing – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 458;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 2 November 1867

Dear Fred,

Although none of my recent carbuncles has fully developed, fresh ones are forever appearing; they always disappear again, but fret me. And then my old insomnia. But it has been better for about the last 3 days. The silence about my book [Capital] makes me fidgety. I have had no news of any kind. What good fellows the Germans are! Their achievements in the service of the English, French and even the Italians in this field would indeed entitle them to ignore me and my affairs. Our people over there do not have the knack of agitation. Meanwhile, we must do as the Russians do — wait. Patience is the core of Russian diplomacy and of their successes. But the likes of us, who only live once, may well never live to see the day.

Letter enclosed from the German communist association. Well meant. But strangely loutish in style.

Enclosed letter from Maughan, man of private means, old Owenite, very decent fellow. These people are obviously intending to emancipate the freethink movement from the professional agitators Bradlaugh, etc. I very politely declined. On the one hand, it is true that I would thereby have had the chance, which I am wanting so much, of becoming acquainted with all manner of people who are to a greater or lesser extent, directly or indirectly, connected with the English press. On the other hand, I have not the time, nor do I think it right that I should figure on the leading committee of any English sect.

A certain Auberon Herbert, brother of the Earl of Carnarvon and cousin to Stepney (who is member of our Central Council) and much dabbling in socialism (i.e., co-operative dodges, etc.), has asked Stepney to arrange a rendezvous with me. As I first want to have sight of the man and smell him over, I have made an appointment to see him next Tuesday at the Cleveland Hall, where we hold our meetings. This. ‘channel’ (Vogt) may perhaps prove useful for reaching publishers.

Apropos. Subscriptions for the International: now have to be renewed. As soon as Moore is back send your Subscriptions to me per Post Office Order (Charing Cross), but drawn on our Treasurer: Robert Shaw, 62 Hall Place, Hall Park, London W. It would be desirable for Schorlemmer to send his at the same time as you, even if only a few shillings. Is he back yet? When shall I be getting his Chemistry?

I don’t know whether you are familiar with the course of the Italian affair, fragments of which have accidentellement found their way into the English and German press in the form of extracts from Russian and other papers. It is easy to lose track of such threads.

At the time of the Luxemburg affair Mr Bonaparte came to an agreement (informal) with Victor Emmanuel, by which the latter was given the right to annex the remaining Papal States except Rome, in exchange for offensive alliance against Prussia in the event of war. But when the Prussian hornets’ nest turned into good will to all men, Mr Bonaparte began to regret the thing and with his usual cunning attempted to betray Emmanuel and make advances to Austria. As we all know, nothing came of it in Salzburg either, and so for a while the witches’ cauldron that is Europe appeared not to seethe. Meanwhile the Russian gentlemen, who had as usual procured a copy of the agreement, thought the moment had come to inform Mr Bismarck of it, who, in his turn, had the Prussian envoy lay it before the Pope. Whereupon, at the Pope’s instigation, the pamphlet written by Bishop Dupanloup of Orleans. On the other side, Garibaldi set on by Emmanuel. Subsequently: Rattazzi dismissed as an enemy of Prussia and Bonapartist. Hence the present imbroglio. That scoundrel Bonaparte is now up to his eyes in the mire. War, not just with Italy, but Prussia and Russia, and in a cause which in France enjoys the most fanatical hatred of Paris, etc., hated in England, etc. — or yet another retreat! The fellow attempted to save himself by appealing to Europe, a European Congress. But Prussia and England have already sent him their reply, that, having made his bed, he must now lie on it. The fellow does not know what year it is. He is no longer secret general to Russia and Europe.

If retreat, then with present corn-prices, business in crisis and disaffection in France revolution is possible one fine morning.

One good thing about our Bismarck — although he is the chief instrument of Russian intrigues — is that he is pushing things towards crisis in France. However, in respect of our German philistines, their entire past has shown that unity can only be imposed on them by the grace of God and the sabre.

The Fenian trial in Manchester exactly as was to be expected. You will have seen what a scandal ‘our people’ have caused in the Reform League. I sought by every means at my disposal to incite the English workers to demonstrate in favour of Fenianism.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

I once believed the separation of Ireland from England to be impossible. I now regard it as inevitable, although Federation may follow upon separation. The way the English are proceeding is shown by the agricultural statistics for this year, which appeared a few days ago. Over and above that the manner of the eviction. The Irish Viceroy, Lord Abicorn (the name is something like that). has ‘cleared’ his estate in the last few weeks by forcibly driving thousands from their homes. Among them, well-to-do tenant-farmers, their improvements and capital investments being thus confiscated! In no other European country has foreign rule assumed this form of direct expropriation of the natives. The Russians confiscate only for political reasons; the Prussians in West Prussia buy out.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 461;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 5 November 1867

Dear Moor,

Enclosed placed in the Elberfelder Zeitung by Siebel. It is such a pity that the poor devil, who will probably be arriving here tomorrow, will have to leave straight away, he would probably have arranged a few more things. However, I will see what else he can do, perhaps something will be possible nonetheless.

Notre ami Kugelmann appears to have miscalculated in respect of the Hanoverian newspapers, too — at least, to my utter astonishment I discovered one of the articles sent him, and the tamest of them at that, shortened and mutilated to boot, in the Zukunft! We hardly needed amicum for that, and at all events I would have written differently for that paper. But I was writing for the national-liberal papers he had boasted about.

We must adopt a different approach. Have you Liebknecht’s present address, or alternatively his old one in Leipzig? If you let me have it, I will spur him on a bit. I now realise that I shall have to write all the articles myself (Eccarius could probably also do one); the people on the Continent are finding the book is still lying too heavily on the stomach, and, if we are to wait until they have digested it, the opportunity will have been missed. I shall write to Kugelmann again, too, asking him at least what he has done with the other article and whether he can place any more. You must write to Meissner and ask whether he can place any if they are sent to him, and where. In addition, I shall write to Klein in Cologne about the Rheinische Zeitung, and offer an article if need be. It is a dreadful handicap not being on the spot oneself. If we were in Germany, we should already have created a stir in all the papers, and have managed to get the book denounced, which is always the best thing.

Louis in Paris does not know which way to turn. What a mess he has got himself into! Either another retreat or war on behalf of the Pope. I can hardly believe that he has really served the Italians an ultimatum to evacuate Roman territory, no more than I can believe that he can let things rest with Moustier’s churlish note. In either case, he is foutu [done for]. The present mood in Paris was shown at the cimetière Montmartre. Things may begin to happen any day now, and I hardly believe that the great man will celebrate another 2 December, or at least it will probably be for the last time. He is in such a bad way that even the philistines here only treat him as a common adventurer now.

If the storm does break, however, the revolution will everywhere be faced with a quite different situation from 1848. After last year, the disorganisation of that time will be out of the question in Germany, and even if an immediate violent uprising in Berlin has little chance, the impact of events would provoke clashes there, too, which would inevitably end in the downfall of the present regime. Monsieur Bismarck would very soon lose command of the situation. And then this time England would be dragged in straightaway and above all the social question would at once become the burning issue throughout Europe.

Yesterday Blackburn showed the depths to which the English judges have sunk when he asked the witness Beck (who had first sworn to William Martin, but said afterwards that it was John M.): Then, you swore to William, and you meant to swear to John? The whole prosecution will, I believe, crumble increasingly with each new batch of accused, the amount of perjury to get the £200 reward is quite incredible.

Can you tell me where I can find more details about Lord Abercorn’s evictions?

Louis in Paris would once more have to mind bombs and bullets. The Italians are not to be trifled with.

I shall return the Courriers to you tomorrow if I can.

Kindest regards to your wife, the girls and the lovelorn cobbler [Paul Lafargue].

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 463;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 7 November 1867

Dear Fred,

My remerciments for the Elberfelder [review of Capital by Engels].

Liebknecht’s old address: ‘11, Braustrasse, Leipzig.’ By the way, perhaps safer to forward it through Kugelmann, who is in contact with a friend of Liebknecht’s in Leipzig.

I forgot to tell you in my letter of Saturday 1 sheet maximum for the Fortnightly. If longer than half a sheet, it should be set out as First Notice, Second Notice.

As regards Meissner, it appears to me to be undiplomatic to let him see into our cards too much. What he can do from his own resources, he does anyway. It would be important — and for the present more important than the English article — to send a more detailed report (perhaps broken down into several articles) to the Austrian Internationale Revue (Arnold Hilberg’s publishing house, 4, Kolowrat-Ring, Vienna). As Arnold Hilberg lists you and me as his contributors (and through me has asked us both for contributions), there are no obstacles here. It is in fact the sole German ‘Review’ which is open to us.

The only weekly paper here in London which has a certain impartiality and is much concerned with things German, such as German philology, natural science, Hegel, etc., is a — Catholic paper, The Chronicle. It is obviously their tendency to show that they are more learned than their Protestant rivals. I sent them one copy at the end of last week with a short letter to the purpose, saying that my book does not share their opinions, but that the ‘scholarly’ nature of their paper suggests that some notice will be taken of this first attempt at applying the dialectic method to political economy. Nous verrons! There is a great desire prevailing at present in the more refined circles (I am referring, of course, to the intellectual portion of the latter) to become acquainted with the dialectical method. And perhaps that is after all the easiest way to get at the English.

The most interesting thing in the enclosed Diplomatic Review is the excerpts from the new book by Prokesch.

Detailed description of Abercorn’s evictions appeared about a fortnight ago in the (Dublin) Irishman. I may manage to get again the copy which was only lent me for 24 hours.

At the meeting presided over by Colonel Dickson and at which Bradlaugh delivered a lecture on Ireland, our old Weston, seconded by Fox and Cremer, put forward a resolution in support of the Fenians, which was passed unanimously. Last Tuesday ditto, during Acland’s lecture on the Reform Bill, Cleveland Hall (right above us, we were meeting downstairs in the coffee room, which is in the basement), tempestuous demonstration in favour of the Fenians. The business is boiling up in the intelligent section of the working class here.

How very characteristic of the diplomatic farce being enacted in Europe at present, that at the same time as Bonaparte is intervening in Italy, France, Italy and Prussia are jointly, and most obediently at Russia’s behest, delivering a threatening note to the Porte.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Old Urquhart with his Catholicism, etc., grows more and more disgusting.

The following confession from a nun is to be found in an inquisition record in Italy, who innocently prayed to the Madonna: ‘I beg of you, Holy Virgin, send me someone with whom I may sin.’ However, the Russians are plus forts in this, too. A case is reported of a fellow in the best of health who emerged dead after only 24 hours in a Russian nunnery. The nuns had ridden him to death. Of course, in their case le directeur des consciences n'entre pas tous les jours! [the Father Confessor does not come in every day]

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 465;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 8 November 1867

Dear Moor,

In great haste:

Siebel will be here tomorrow or in Liverpool, where I shall see him. He can place another 3 articles [on the first volume of Capital], which I have prepared at once and which we shall then despatch with all speed. If I had known that it would be so long before he came, he should have received them in Barmen long ago.

The idea about the Internationale Revue had already occurred to me, too, and shall be attended to. Likewise with The Fortnightly Review, as soon as acceptance is assured. For the moment, however, I believe it is most important to create a rumpus in the German daily press, pour forcer la main à ces gueux d'économistes [to force the hand of these miserable economists]. The downbreak of the police in the trial here has been more rapid and more complete than I had expected. But there is probably even better to come. Old Blackburn also appears to be changing his tune, today he complimented Ernest Jones most fulsomely on his speech.

Have you read Bismarck’s instructions to Usedom (in the Augsburger Abendzeitung denied, of course)? The fellow is making no bones about exposing the Italians’ intrigues with Bonaparte; one has to grant him that he is capable of the most undiplomatic manners if it suits him. (Kölnische Zeitung of Wednesday has reprinted it.) This stance of Bismarck’s also explains the Italians’ retreat and their present grovelling.

Concerning the true nature of the inspections, checks and interferences of the Prussian bureaucracy: my brother writes that the manufacturers want to set up an association on the Rhine and in the Ruhr, like the ones here, to have their boilers periodically examined by competent engineers, and he goes on to say of the government control:

‘Here at our place, a District Architect inspects 7 boilers in half an hour (!!) and goes home quite satisfied, in another factory a similar official took 2 hours for 35 boilers!! If anyone is so foolish as to imagine he can sleep soundly after such an inspection, he is, of course. deceived. It would be a real blessing if this nonsense were done away with and replaced by some sensible practical arrangement. At one inspection, I first explained the boiler with all its fittings to the District Architect, then I carried out his instructions as well and finally wrote the report for the government for him.'

There are the Prussians for you! Portrayed by themselves.

Engels To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 467;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

Manchester, 8 and 20 November 1867

Dear Kugelmann,

Since my last letter neither Marx nor I have heard anything from you, and I can scarce believe that you are so deeply ensconced in some anteflexio uteri as to be entirely incommunicado. I have, moreover, a letter to send to Liebknecht, and Marx advises me to forward it to you, as we do not have the exact address and do not know whether he is in Berlin or Leipzig; I am therefore enclosing it.

The German press is still observing complete silence in respect of Capital, and it really is of the greatest importance that something should be said. I have discovered that one of the articles [Engels’ Review of Volume One of Capital] I sent you is in the Zukunft; I am sorry I did not know that it might eventually be destined for that paper; one could probably have taken greater liberties there. However, it does not matter. The main thing is that the book should be discussed over and over again, in any way whatsoever. And as Marx is not a free agent in the matter, and is furthermore as bashful as a young girl, it is up to the rest of us to see to it. Please be so kind therefore and let me know what success you have so far had in the matter, and which papers you think you may still be able to use. In the words of our old friend Jesus Christ, we must be innocent as doves and wise as serpents. The good old vulgar economists at least have enough intelligence to treat the book with respect and to take good care not to talk of it if they are not obliged to. And that is what we must compel them to do. If the book is being discussed in 15-20 newspapers at once — never mind whether favourably or not, whether in articles, regular features or unsolicited pieces in the correspondence section — even if merely as a phenomenon of some significance that merits attention, then the whole crowd of them will start yapping away, too, of their own accord, and the Fauchers, Michaelis, Roschers, and Max Wirths will then have to do the same. We have a moral obligation to damned well get these articles into the papers, and as near simultaneously as possible, especially the European ones, and that includes the reactionary ones. In the latter, we might point out that the vulgarian gentlemen make a deal of noise in parliaments and economic gatherings, but now, when they are confronted with the consequences of their own science, they prefer to keep their mouths shut. And so forth. If you think my assistance would be desirable, let me know which paper you wish to have something for — in the service of the party I am always on call. The letter to Liebknecht concerns the same business, and you will therefore oblige me exceedingly by ensuring it reaches its destination.

The Roman affair has again been an absolute boon to us. The noble Bonaparte appears to me to be gargling his last gasp, and when this episode comes to an end in France, with the position in England becoming more revolutionary every day, and with revolution in Italy inescapable, then this must surely also spell the end of the reign of the ‘Europeans’, in Germany. Rapid progress is being made here in England with the formation of a really revolutionary party, and revolutionary conditions are developing hand in hand with it. With his Reform Bill, Disraeli has thrown the Tories into confusion and routed the Whigs, although all he has done is to render it impossible to continue dilly-dallying as before. This Reform Bill will either prove to be nothing at all (and this is now impossible, there is too much momentum behind it), or it will infallibly and immediately bring in its train Bills of an altogether different character, which will go much farther. The next steps, which will have to be taken forthwith, are the allotting of representatives in proportion to population and the secret ballot, and that will be the end of the old scheme of things here. The capital thing about Disraeli is that his hatred for the country gentlemen in his own party and his hatred of the Whigs have set things going on a course which can no longer be halted. You will be astonished, and the German philistines who think England is finished will be even more astonished, at what will happen here once the Reform Bill is in force.

The Irish are also doing their bit to keep things properly on the boil, and every day the London proletarians are more openly declaring their support for the Fenians, in other words, and this is without precedent here and really splendid, for a movement that firstly advocates the use of force and secondly is anti-English.

Have you heeded my medical advice and taken to horseback? Since my return I have again found the beneficial effects of riding amply demonstrated, and you will see how quickly all your complaints and reservations about drink disappear thanks to an hour’s riding daily. As a gynaecologist, you owe it to science, for after all gynaecology is intimately connected with riding or being ridden, and a gynaecologist must therefore be in every sense the master of his mount.

Schorlemmer kept an eye open for you at the congress of naturalists in Frankfurt but maintains you were not there.

So, dear friend, let us hear from you soon. The photograph of Lupus has been ordered and will be ready as soon as the fine weather comes, unfortunately we do not have much daylight here in winter. Please convey my best compliments to your wife, despite our being unacquainted, and best regards from

Yours

F. E.

Address: Ermen & Engels, Manchester For F. E.

20 November. Since I wrote the above, Marx has communicated to me your letter to him, and I am sorry to see from it that we can hardly count on further press-notices in your locality. Might it not be possible, perhaps through third persons, to get attacks on the book, either from a bourgeois or a reactionary point of view, into some of the papers? This seems to me to be one means of publicity, and there would be no difficulty in producing the articles. And then: what about scientific journals, or purely literary or semi-literary ones?

Respecting the Rheinische Zeitung, I am writing to Cologne in case there has still been no progress.

Büchner ought to be able to get things into the papers as well; you can refer him to me for the articles if necessary. Give him no peace.

I have still not received the photographs, but they are sure to come one of these days.

Once more, in all friendship

Yours

F. E.

Engels To Marx

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

November 24, 1867

Dear Moor,

I am returning the encl. letters.

So yesterday morning the Tories, by the hand of Mr. Colcraft, accomplished the final act of separation between England and Ireland. The only thing that the Fenians still lacked were martyrs. They have been provided with these by Derby and G. Hardy. Only the execution of the three [Michael Larkin, William Allen and Michael O'Brien] has made the liberation of Kelly and Deasy the heroic deed as which it will now be sung to every Irish babe in the cradle in Ireland, England and America. The Irish women will do that just as well as the Polish women.

To my knowledge, the only time that anybody has been executed for a similar matter in a civilised country was the case of John Brown at Harpers Ferry. The Fenians could not have wished for a better precedent. The Southerners had at least the decency to treat J. Brown as a rebel, whereas here everything is being done to transform a political attempt into a common crime.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 478;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 28 November 1867

Dear Fred,

I see that I did not enclose the 2 letters from Borkheim for you. But it is not really necessary. Yesterday we had the ‘discussion’ he desired. He has reverted to the idea (which I suggested to him 2 months ago) of a loan from the ‘Atlas’ Life Assurance Company, whose secretary is a friend of his. I completed the papers yesterday at his house. You only figure as a reference on them. £150 (of which Borkheim would receive £45), repayable on 1 September.

I no longer have any faith in the success of Borkheim’s operations. I have no doubt about his good will.

Have you received his ‘Pearl’? (French and German so far).

Important letter from Schily enclosed. Please send it back by return; give your opinion at the same time. Whatever happens I shall not permit Moses to derive ‘profit’ from my work without profiting to some extent from it myself.

I am having to be diplomatic about Fenianism. I cannot keep entirely silent, but under no circumstances do I want the fellows, when criticising my book [Capital], to confine themselves to the statement that I am a demagogue.

I am sending you Borkheim’s Gentz (important for the article on Russia) without his knowledge. Please return it to me as soon as you have finished.

I now have a rash of furuncles more or less all over, and am glad of it. It puts paid to the carbuncle malady.

Salut.

Your

Moro

*My compliments to Mrs Burns. Jenny goes in black since the Manchester execution, and wears her Polish cross on a green ribbon.*

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 483;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 29 November 1867

7 Southgate

Dear Moor,

Schily returned enclosed. Oh, Lord, have mercy upon us, here comes olle Moses pissing up to us again! And he is congratulating himself that you certified he was right when he asserted that capital is accumulated labour!

I would be just the tiniest bit reticent in respect of that worthy. He will then take the bait all the more surely, and you know how little we can trust him if we have not made quite sure of him. In my view, for the present you could permit him to publish a few extracts from it [Capital] in the Courrier francais, so that we may see how he proposes to handle the thing. He will naturally put his signature to these, and we shall thereby again have him to some degree qualified as a repentant sinner. Then you could talk about the translation of the whole book which he is envisaging; your right of revision always reserved; and discuss conditions as soon as a publisher has been found. What Schily says of Reclus seems important to me, as the man knows German.

You are perfectly right about the Fenians[*]. The vile deeds of the English must not allow us to forget that most of the leaders of this sect are jackasses and some of them exploiters, and that we can, under no circumstances, make ourselves responsible for the idiocies that are perpetrated in any conspiracy. That there will be some, is certain.

I need hardly tell you that black and green [i.e., Irish emancipation] are the prevailing colours in my house, too. The English press has again conducted itself abominably. Larkin is said to have fainted, and the others to have looked pale and confused. The Catholic priests who were there declare that is a lie. Larkin, they say, stumbled over an irregularity in the ground and all three showed great courage.

The Catholic Bishop of Salford complained bitterly that Allen refused to repent of his deed, saying he had nothing to repent, and if he were free, he would do the same thing again. The Catholic priests, incidentally, were very impudent, it was stated from the pulpit in every church on Sunday that these three men were murdered.

You will have received my letter of yesterday with the £30. As regards the life assurance, I am willing to guarantee the sum concerned, provided that Borkheim retains the original in his own keeping and merely gives the secretary a copy, in the hope that this will facilitate matters.

I agree that the furuncles appear to mark the crisis of the previous illness.

Best regards to your wife, the girls and Lafargue.

Now that Liebknecht has got a little paper, for which we shall be held responsible, it is very important that he does nothing stupid in respect of his German policy. I am most impatient for a letter from him.

Apropos. From 1 January the Internationale Revue will appear as joint successor to a journal produced by Prutz which is to merge with it. Could put paid to our plans. How do you think we should broach the matter with Hilberg? We shall have to be cunning about it.

Your

F. E.

Five Fenians were sentenced to death as a result of an attempt to liberate three Fenians leaders from the police, during which a policeman was killed. The Fenians were represented in court by Ernest Jones, and three were subsequently hanged on 23 November 1867.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 484;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

London, 30 November 1867

Dear Fred,

Regarding Moses, I shall follow your prescription exactly. At all events, we must make use of the man and, at the same time, prevent him from misusing us. Regarding Hilberg, it would indeed be a good thing if we could keep a hold on this Revue being the only one still open to us, but how? is not yet clear to me. This morning I received a copy of Schorlemmer and send him my thanks for it.

If you have read the papers, you will have seen that 1. the International Council sent memorial for the Fenians to Hardy, 2. the debate on Fenianism (a week ago last Tuesday) was public and The Times carried a Report on it. There were also reporters there from the Dublin Irishman and Nation. I did not arrive until very late (I have been suffering from a fever for about 2 weeks, and have only got over it in the last 2 days) and had not in fact intended to speak, first on account of my uncomfortable physical condition, and second because of the delicacy of the situation. However, the Chairman Weston wanted to force me to, so I moved adjournment, which obliged me to speak last Tuesday. What I had in fact prepared for Tuesday last was not a speech but rather the points for a speech ['Notes for an Undelivered Speech on Ireland']. However, the Irish reporters did not come, and by the time we had finished waiting for them it was 9 o'clock, whereas the premises were only available to us until 10 1/2. At my suggestion, Fox had prepared a long speech (because of a quarrel on the Council he had made no appearance for 2 weeks, and furthermore sent in his resignation as member of the Council containing furious outbursts against Jung). When the séance opened I therefore declared that, on account of the belated hour, I would yield the floor to Fox. In fact — because the executions in Manchester had intervened — our subject ‘Fenianism’ was bound up with the passions and heated emotions of the moment, which would have compelled me (though not the abstract Fox) to unleash a revolutionary thunderbolt. instead of the intended objective analysis of the situation and the movement. The Irish reporters thus did me a great service by staying away and so delaying the opening of the meeting. I do not enjoy getting embroiled with people like Roberts, Stephens, and the like.

Fox’s speech was good, first because it was delivered by an Englishman, and second insofar as it dealt only with political and international aspects. However, for that very reason he only skated over the surface of things. The resolution he brought forward was silly and pointless. I opposed it and had it referred back to the Standing Committee.

What the English do not yet realise, is that since 1846 the economic content and hence the political purpose of English rule in Ireland as well has entered an entirely new phase, and that for that very reason Fenianism is characterised by socialist (in the negative sense, as directed against the appropriation of the soil) leanings and as a lower orders movement. What could be more absurd than to lump together the barbarities of Elizabeth or Cromwell, who wanted to drive out the Irish by means of English colonists (in the Roman sense), and the present system, which wants to drive out the Irish by means of sheep, pigs and oxen! The system of 1801-1846 (evictions in that period were exceptional, particularly in Leinster, where the soil is especially suited to cattle-raising) with its rackfrents and middlemen, collapsed in 1846. The Anti-Corn Law-Repeal, in part a consequence of or, at all events, hastened by the Irish famine, took from Ireland its monopoly of supplying England with corn in normal times. Wool and meat became the watchword, hence conversion of tillage into pasture. So from then on, systematic consolidation of farms. The Encumbered Estates Act which made landlords of a mass of former middlemen who had grown rich, hastened the process. Clearing of the estates of Ireland! is now the sole meaning of English rule in Ireland. The stupid English government in London naturally knows even nothing of this immense change since 1846. But the Irish do. From Meagher’s Proclamation (1848) down to Hennessy’s election address (Tory and Urquhartite) (1866) the Irish have been expressing their awareness of it in the clearest and most forcible manner.

The question now is, what advice should we give the English workers? In my view, they must make repeal of the Union (in short, the farce of 1783, only democratised and adapted to meet present circumstances) an article of their pronunziamento. This is the only legal and hence the only possible form of Irish emancipation which can be adopted by an English party in its programme. Experience must later show, whether mere personal union between the 2 countries can continue to exist. I half believe it could if it comes about in due time.

What the Irish need is:

1. Self-government and independence from England.

2. Agrarian revolution. With the best will in the world the English cannot do this for them, but they can give them the legal means to do it for themselves.

3. Protective tariffs against England. From 1783-1801 every branch of industry in Ireland flourished. By suppressing the protective tariffs which the Irish parliament had established, the Union destroyed all industrial life in Ireland. The little bit of linen industry is in no way a substitute. The Union of 1801 affected Irish industry exactly as did the measures for the suppression of the Irish wool industry, etc., on the part of the English parliament under Anne, George II, and others. As soon as the Irish became independent, necessity would turn them, like Canada, Australia, etc., into protectionists. Before I put forward my views at the Central Council (next Tuesday, this time fortunately without reporters being present), I would appreciate it if you would let me know your opinion in a few lines.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Since Moses is a cousin of Hirsch, I am not surprised that he himself has a set of antlers. He bears it proudly.

Marx To Victor Schily

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 487;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.

London, 30 November 1867

Dear Schily,

I wrote to Meissner as soon as I received your letter and asked him to send you a copy of the book [Volume One of Capital] for Reclus. I believe Reclus to be just the man to undertake the French translation, with German co-operation. In a translation, I would indicate certain changes to be made in several parts and, at the same time, reserve the right to carry out the final revision myself.

What should be done, in the first instance, and as quickly as possible, is to bring out passages from the book in the Courrier français. I do not see why Hess should need to involve any third person for this. He would best do it by himself. I also think that the topic he had in mind on English factory legislation is the most suitable as an introduction. However, even that cannot be treated without a few introductory words about the theory of value, as Proudhon has sown total confusion in people’s minds on that subject. They believe that a commodity is sold for its value if it is sold for its prix de revient [prime cost] = price of the means of production which have been consumed in it, + wages (or price of the labour added to the means of production). They do not see that the unpaid labour which is contained in the commodity constitutes just as fundamental an element of value as the labour which has been paid for, and that this element of value now takes the form of profit, etc. They have no idea what wages are. Without an understanding of the nature of value, arguments about the working day, etc., in short, the factory laws, have no basis. A few words of introduction on this subject are thus called for.

My publisher is satisfied with sales in Germany. The liberal and vulgar-economist gang is, of course, seeking to harm it as much as they can by their tried and tested method of conspiration de silence. But this time they will not succeed.

I am here enclosing 1 copy of Liebknecht for you. You will see from the back page that he is bringing out a little weekly paper of his own in the coming weeks. I am to request contributions from you from Paris. (His address: 11 Braustrasse, Mr Miller.) I have given him a dressing-down for the phrase about the ‘social question’ (in the supplement) and ditto drew his attention to the fact that he should avoid uncritical stand of the South Germans in his polemic against Bismarck. What should already have perplexed him is the fact that Jakobus Venedey has become his admirer.

For all that Liebknecht’s bold stand in the Reichstag has done good.

The whole family send you their warmest greetings.

Your

A. Williams

The movement is on the march here!

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 489;

First published: in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902.

London, 30 November 1867

Dear Kugelmann,

Ill-health alone is to blame for my not replying sooner. I have been laid low again for weeks now.

Firstly, my best thanks for your efforts. Engels has written to Liebknecht (or will be doing so). Liebknecht, incidentally, was intending (in conjunction with Götz, and others) to make a demand in the Reichstag for an Enquiry into the conditions of the workers. He wrote to me about his intention, and at his request I sent him a few relevant English Acts of Parliament. The plan came to nothing because owing to the procedure there was no time left for it. On one point you are better placed to write to Liebknecht than either Engels or myself. And that is that it really is his duty to draw attention to my book [the first volume of Capital] at workers’ meetings. If he fails to do so, the Lassalleans will seize upon the thing and misconstrue it.

Contzen (lecturer at Leipzig, a pupil and follower of Roscher) has requested a copy of the book from me via Liebknecht and promised a detailed review of it, from his point of view, in return. Meissner thereupon sent him the book. This could be a good start. — I was pleased about the misprint ‘Taucher’ in place of ‘Faucher’ in your notice. Faucher is one of those ‘travelling preachers’ of political economy. The fellow has no place among the ‘scholarly’ German economists such as Roscher, Rau, Mohl, and others. It is doing him too great an honour even to mention him. And I have consequently never allowed him a role as a noun but only as a verb.

Please be so kind as to tell your good wife that the chapters on the ‘Working Day’, ‘Co-operation, Division of Labour and Machinery’ and finally on ‘Primitive Accumulation’ are the most immediately readable. You will have to explain any incomprehensible terminology to her. If there are any other doubtful points, I shall be glad to help.

In France (Paris) there are the best prospects that the book will be discussed in detail (in the Courrier français a Proudhonist paper unfortunately!) and even translated.

As soon as I am better, I will write more. Meanwhile I hope you will write frequently. I always find it has a spurring effect on me.

Your

K. M.

[From Eleanor Marx, in English]

My dear Fränzchen,

As Papa is in a hurry to send off his letter I have only time to send you my best love.

Your affectionate

Eleanor Marx

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 493;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 7 December 1867

Dear Fred,

Yesterday I presented myself at the Loan Society for bodily examination. This is more than just a formality, for if I were to die before September, the society would not get a farthing back. I was afraid I would have to undress (the fate of an Englishman who was there with me). In the first place, I do not like such inocular speculation, and second precisely at this moment I still have a carbuncle on the left loin not far from the centre of propagation, as well as numerous furuncles. Fortunately, the fellow was so impressed with my chest that he didn’t want to know about anything else. I shall get the money on Monday at 12 o'clock.

You forgot to put in the letter from Siebel. I am sending you back Kugelmann, along with enclosure. Also, a letter he has written to me, together with enclosures. The screed from Burgers to be put with the documents. That jackass was rightly reminded by the workers in Düsseldorf that 1. in Lassalle’s time he stated he ‘wished to take due account of conditions’, 2. he had lost his illusions about the class struggle’, and 3. he had found in Schulze-Delitzsch the solution to all past and future social mysteries.

As regards the little Swabian paper, it would be an amusing coup if we could hoodwink Vogt’s friend, the Swabian Mayer. It would be easy to contrive the thing as follows. D'abord to begin by saying that whatever one may think of the draft of the book [Capital], it is a credit to the ‘German spirit’, for which reason, too, it was written by a Prussian in exile and not in Prussia; Prussia having long ceased to be a country where any scholarly initiative, especially in the political or historical or social field, is possible or is actually to be found, it now being the representative of the Russian and not of the German spirit. In respect of the book itself, a distinction has to be drawn between two things, between positive developments (’solid’ would be the second epithet) given by the author, and the tendentious conclusions he arrives at. The former are a direct addition to the sum of human knowledge, since actual economic relations are treated in an entirely new way by a materialistic (‘Mayer’ has a liking for this catchword, on account of Vogt) method. Example: 1. the development of money, 2. the way in which co-operation, division of labour, the machine system and the corresponding social combinations and relations develop ‘spontaneously’.

Now as regards the tendency of the author, another distinction has to be drawn. When he demonstrates that present society, economically considered, is pregnant with a new, higher form, he is only showing in the social context the same gradual process of evolution that Darwin has demonstrated in natural history. The liberal doctrine of ‘progress’ (c'est Mayer tout pur) embraces this idea, and it is to his credit that he himself shows there is hidden progress even where modern economic relations are accompanied by frightening direct consequences. At the same time, owing to this critical approach of his, the author has, perhaps malgré lui [despite himself], sounded the death-knell to all socialism by the book, i.e. to utopianism, for evermore.

The author’s tendency to be subjective, on the other hand — which he was perhaps bound and obligated to assume in view of his party position and his past — i.e. the manner in which he represents to himself or to others the ultimate outcome of the present movement, of the present social process, bears absolutely no relation to its real development. If space permitted this to be more closely examined, it could perhaps be shown that its ‘objective’ development refutes his own ‘subjective’ fancies.

Whereas Mr Lassalle hurled abuse at the capitalists and flattered the backwoods Prussian squirearchy, Mr Marx, on the contrary, shows the historical necessity of capitalist production and severely criticises the landed aristocrat who does nought but consume. Just how little he shares the ideas of his renegade disciple Lassalle on Bismarck’s vocation for ushering in an economic millennium he has not merely shown in his previous protests against ‘royal Prussian Socialism’ but he openly repeats it on pp. 762, 763, where he says that the system prevailing in France and Prussia at present will subject the continent of Europe to the regime of the Russian knout, if it is not checked in good time.

That is my view on how to hoodwink the Swabian Mayer (who did after all print my preface), and small though his beastly rag is, it is, nevertheless, the popular oracle of all the Federalists in Germany and is also read abroad.

With regard to Liebknecht, it is indeed a disgrace that with the numerous petty provincial papers he has at his command, he did not spontanément send in short notices to them — it would not have required of him any of the study which is so contrary to his nature. Mr Schweitzer et Co. understand this better, as you can see from the enclosed Social-Demokrat. (Kugelmann sent it me.) Yesterday I sent Guido Weiss of the Zukunft (this just between ourselves) some juxtaposed texts [Plagiarism], on one side von Hofstetten’s bowdlerised plagiarisms, on the other the original passages from my book. I wrote to him at the same time that this must be printed not in my name but as though emanating from the Zukunft (or, if that is not feasible, then as though from a Zukunft-reader in Berlin). If Weiss takes this (and I think he will), then not merely will the attention of the Berlin workers have been drawn to the book through the quotation of passages which are of direct interest to them, but an extremely useful polemic will have been initiated, and Schweitzer’s plan to ignore the book and exploit its contents will have been dished. Marvellous how these fellows think they can go on with Lassalle’s plan. What could be more naive than the manner in which von Hofstetten and Citizen Geib have joined together at the general meeting of the General Association of German Workers in savaging the section I wrote on the working day.

Salut.

Your

K. Marx

My compliments to Mrs Burns. I have taken an extraordinary liking to Schorlemmer’s compendium.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 7 December 1867

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

Were there six people of your calibre in Germany, the resistance of the philistine mass and the conspiration de silence [1] of the experts and newspaper crowd would have been so far broken down that at least some serious discussion would have begun. Mais il faut attendre! [2] In these words lies the whole secret of Russian policy. I am enclosing a letter (please return it) from a German-Russian worker (a tanner). [3] Engels remarks, quite rightly, that the autodidactic philosophy – pursued by workers themselves – has made great progress in the case of this tanner in comparison with the cobbler Jakob Böhm; [4] also that only ‘German workers’ are capable of such cerebral work.

Borkheim [5] asked me yesterday who had written the article in the Zukunft (he is a subscriber). It must come from one of our people, since you had sent him a copy of it. I said I did not know. Nota bene! One should not put all one’s cards on the table.

My most cordial thanks to your dear wife for the trouble she took in copying the letter. You should not exploit her so much for ‘surplus labour’.

Bucher, [6] as, if I am not mistaken, I have already told you, has himself asked me to be the economic correspondent of the Royal Prussian Staatszeitung. So you see that if I wanted to make use of such sources, I could do so without the mediation of a third person.

My illness is the old one – nothing dangerous, but troublesome.

With best greetings to your dear wife and Fränzchen.

Yours

K Marx

Notes

1. Conspiracy of silence – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. But it is necessary to wait – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. Joseph Dietzgen (1828-1888) – German socialist and self-educated philosopher; leather tanner by trade. A dialectical materialist although an inconsistent one. Later lived in the USA where he took part in the socialist movement. See the letter from Joseph Dietzgen to which Marx refers.

4. Jakob Bohm (1575-1624) – German mystical philosopher, a cobbler by trade – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

5. Sigismund Borkheim (1825-1885) – German merchant and publicist who took an active part in the 1848 Revolution. Fled to Switzerland and later settled in London, where in the 1860s he became a close friend of Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

6. Lothar Bucher (1817-1892) – German publicist and politician. A radical democrat in 1848. In the 1860s he entered Bismarck’s service – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 501;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

[London,] 14 December 1867

Dear Fred,

This latest Fenian exploit[*] in Clerkenwell is a great folly. The London masses, who have shown much sympathy for Ireland, will be enraged by it and driven into the arms of the government party. One cannot expect the London proletarians to let themselves be blown up for the benefit of Fenian emissaries. Secret, melodramatic conspiracies of this kind are, in general, more or less doomed to failure.

I received the money on Monday and paid Borkheim his £45 back together with £1 1s for inquiry fees.

Would you do me a favour and inquire of Ernest Jones the most appropriate way of marrying civiliter in London, in doctors’ commons or where, as Laura is to marry at the beginning of April. As it is not to be a church wedding, it was originally intended that the marriage should take place in Paris. That is, however, complicated. I should have to prove my identity there and, in so doing, might strike the police as being a little too familiar. On the other hand, my wife would like the civil marriage to take place, if in London, as far as possible in secret, as she wants no gossip among her English acquaintances. Please also ask Jones what the position is regarding the consent of Lafargue’s parents? Whether it must previously be countersigned by the envoy (would that be the English one?) in Paris? I know that the formality is not necessary in England. It is, however, indispensable for the marriage to be valid according to French law as well. So, none of the formalities must be neglected in this respect.

What is the position regarding witnesses in England?

Nothing from the Zukunft yet. It is a pity these papers are so small in format, especially at a time when their columns are so full of parliamentary filibustering.

Our friend Stumpf is obviously a great muddle-head.

Siebel returned enclosed. He is mistaken about Lange. The latter must ‘buy’ the book [Capital] and will surely already have bought it long ago.

The quid pro quo with Heinrich is indeed most amusing.

Salut.

Your

K. Moor

On 13 December 1867 a group of Fenians attempted to free Fenian leaders from Clerkenwell Prison with a bomb which only destroyed a number of neighbouring houses, killing a few people and wounding hundreds. The British press used the occasion for a campaign of anti-Irish hysteria.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 505;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Manchester, 19 December 1867

Dear Moor,

Of course our correspondence with Wilhelmchen requires caution. As I have already told you, his narrow-minded one-sided singleness of purpose was his good fortune and the secret of his effectiveness in the Reichstag. Unfortunately however that will only work once, and the publication of his speeches — to say nothing of Kugelmann’s letters — shows that it had gone too far. Now we have the little paper to boot, in which his household words are recorded in black and white and are then laid at our door — then the Customs Union parliament, and therewith certainly a disgrace for us unless Wilhelmchen is given some instruction. With his egregious talent for making blunders, much was to be expected there, and may be still. No doubt we can only protect him from the most serious blunders, but his Viennese address and his friendship with the Federalists, i.e. Grün!! is already dreadful enough. I can therefore only put 2 chief considerations to him: 1. to regard the events and outcome of 1866 not simplement negatively, i.e. not as a reactionary, but critically (which he will admittedly find difficult), and 2. to attack Bismarck’s enemies just as much as the man himself, as they are equally worthless. You observe how beautifully he has already compromised himself with Grun et Co.; what a fine triumph that would be for Bismarck if we or our people concluded an alliance with that rabble! Well, we shall just have to wait and see what transpires.

The Clerkenwell folly was obviously the work of a few special fanatics; it is the misfortune of all conspiracies that they lead to such acts of folly because ‘we really must do something, we really must get up to something’. Especially in America there has been a lot of bluster amongst this explosive and incendiary fraternity, and then along come some individual jackasses and instigate this kind of nonsense. At the same time, these man-eaters are for the most part the greatest of cowards, including that man Allen who already appears to have turned Queen’s evidence. And then the notion that you can free Ireland by setting fire to some London tailor’s shop!

Have you read the Russians’ warning (Russian Invalid) that the alliance between France and Austria makes peace in Europe impossible because it prevents a solution to the German, Italian and Eastern questions? Very nice. Bismarck and Gorchakov now appear to be about to take the offensive.

Your friend Lippe has been sacrificed to the shades of the dispossessed — his dismissal was the price for which the National Liberals are dropping their opposition to the 25 million for the Guelphs and the house of Nassau.

Best regards to the Ladies.

Your

F. E.

1868

Marx to Engels. 3 January

Engels to Jenny Marx. 3 January

Engels to Marx. 6 January

Engels to Marx. 7 January

Marx to Engels. 8 January

Marx to Engels. 8 January

Engels to Marx. 10 January

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 11 January

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 11 January

Engels to Marx. I6 January

Engels to Marx. 23 January

Marx to Engels. 25 January

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 30 January

Marx to Engels. 1 February

Engels to Marx. 2 February

Marx to Engels. 4 February

Engels to Marx. 11 February

Marx to Engels. 15 February

Marx to Engels. 20 February

Engels to Marx. 20 February

Engels to Marx. 1 March

Marx to Engels. 4 March

Marx to Engels. 6 March

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, [Abstract]. 6 March

Engels to Marx. 10 March

Engels to Marx. 13 March

Marx to Engels. 14 March

Marx to Engels. 16 March

Engels to Marx. 17 March

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 17 March

Marx to Engels. 18 March

Engels to Marx. 19 March

Marx to Engels. 23 March

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 25 March

Engels to Marx. 29 March

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 6 April

Engels to Marx. 10 April

Marx to Engels. 11 April

Marx to Laura and Paul Lafargue. 11 April

Engels to Marx. 17 April

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 17 April

Marx to Engels. 18 April

Engels to Marx. 20 April

Marx to Engels. 21 April

Marx to Engels. 22 April

Engels to Marx. 26 April

Marx to Engels. 30 April

Marx to Engels. 4 May

Engels to Marx. 6 May

Marx to Engels. 7 May

Marx to Joseph Dietzgen. 9 May

Engels to Marx. 10 May

Engels to Marx. 15 May

Marx to Engels. 16 May

Engels to Marx. 22 May

Marx to Engels. 23 May

Engels to Marx. 25 May

Marx to Engels. 27 May

Marx to Engels. 20 June

Engels to Marx. 22 June

Marx to Engels. 23 June

Engels to Marx. 24 June

Marx to Engels. 24 June

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 24 June

Engels to Marx. 25 June

Marx to Engels. 26 June

Engels to Marx. 26 June

Marx to Engels. 27 June

Engels to Marx. 28 June

Marx to Engels. 29 June

Marx to Engels. 2 July

Engels to Marx. 2 July

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 2 July

Marx to Engels. 7 July

Engels to Marx. 4 July

Marx to Engels. 7 July

Engels to Marx. 10 July

Marx to Engels. 11 July

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, [Abstract]. 11 July

Engels to Marx. 14 July

Engels to Marx. 21 July

Marx to Engels. 23 July

Engels to Marx. 29 July

Marx to Engels. 29 July

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 31 July

Marx to Engels. 4 August

Engels to Marx. 6 August

Marx to Engels. 10 August

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 10 August

Marx to Friedrich Lessner. 11 August

Engels to Marx. 12 August

Marx to Engels. 13 August

Engels to Marx. c 14 August

Marx to Engels. 21 August

Engels to Marx. 22 August

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 26 August

Engels to Marx. 28 August

Marx to Engels. 29 August

Engels to Marx. 1 September

Marx to Engels. 9 September

Marx to Georg Eccarius and Friedrich Lessner. 10 September

Marx to Engels. 12 September

Marx to Sigfrid Meyer. 14 September

Marx to Hermann Jung. 14 September

Engels to Marx. 16 September

Marx to Engels. 16 September

Engels to Marx. 18 September

Marx to Engels. 19 September

Engels to Marx. 21 September

Marx to Engels. 23 September

Engels to Marx. 24 September

Marx to Engels. 25 September

Marx to Engels. 25 September

Engels to Marx. 25 September

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 26 September

Marx to Engels. 29 September

Engels to Marx. 30 September

Engels to Marx. 2 October

Marx to Engels. 4 October

Engels to Marx. 6 October

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 7 October

Engels to Marx. 8 October

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 10 October

Engels to Marx. 12 October

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 12 October

Marx to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer, [Abstract]. 13 October

Engels to Marx. 14 October

Marx to Engels. 15 October

Marx to Hermann Jung. 19 October

Engels to Marx. 22 October

Marx to Engels. 24 October

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 26 October

Engels to Marx. 28 October

Marx to William Jessup. 28 October

Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt. 28 October

Marx to Bassot. 30 October

Marx to Engels. 4 November

Engels to Marx. 4 November

Engels to Marx, [Abstract]. 6 November

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 7 November

Marx to Engels. 8 November

Engels to Marx. 10 November

Engels to Marx. 13 November

Marx to Engels. 14 November

Marx to Engels. 14 November

Marx to Hermann Jung. 14 November

Marx to Engels. 18 November

Engels to Marx, [Abstract]. 18 November

Engels to Marx. 20 November

Marx to Engels. 23 November

Engels to Marx. 23 November

Engels to Marx. 25 November

Engels to W Holzenhauer. 26 November

Engels to Marx. 29 November

Marx to Engels. 30 November

Marx to Engels. 5 December

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 5 December

Marx to Engels. 6 December

Engels to Marx. 8 December

Marx to Engels. 9 December

Marx to Engels. 10 December

Engels to Marx. 11 December

Marx to Engels. 12 December

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, [Abstract]. 12 December

Marx to Asher & Co. after 12 Dec.

Engels to Marx. 13 December

Marx to Engels. 14 December

Marx to Engels. 15 December

Engels to Marx, [Abstract]. 18 December

Engels to Hermann Engels. 18 December

Marx to Engels, [Abstract]. 19 December

Marx to Laura Lafargue. 22 December

Marx to Engels. 23 December

Marx to Hermann Jung. 28 December

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 511;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 7 January 1868

Dear Moor,

Herewith returned the Dühring [review of Capital by Dühring] and the Beobachter [review of Capital by Engels]. The former is highly amusing. The whole article is embarrassment and funk. You can see that the worthy vulgar economist is frappé au vif and can find nothing to say except that it will only be possible to judge the first volume when the 3rd has come out, that determination of value by labour time is not undisputed, and that there are people who have some modest doubts about the determination of the value of labour on the basis of its costs of production. You see that for this genus you are by no means learned enough, for you have not confuted the great Macleod on the decisive point. At the same time, there is the fear in every line that he may be exposed to a treatment à la Roscher. The fellow was happy when he had finished the thing, but I am sure he carried it to the post with a heavy heart.

Kugelmann and Wilhelmchen I shall return tomorrow. If there is anything in the copied letter from Lieutenant-Colonel Seubert which could be useful to me for a further Swabian article please enclose it.

I could do something for Vienna too. Richter could perhaps be asked about the Internationale Revue, he is supposed to know the situation there.

Wilhelmchen’s paper is just too lovely — everything ready except the security bond, and so it cannot be published. Incidentally, if Wilhelm should go to Vienna then the fuss about the Austrian agent would really get going.

How are things with Beesly, Lewes & Co. and the Fortnightly Review?

Best greetings to the ladies and the Doctor amorosus.

Your

F. E.

Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels in Manchester, 8 January 1868

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Fred

With regard to Dühring. [1] It is a great deal from this man that he almost positively receives the section on Primitive Accumulation. He is still young. As a follower of Carey, [2] he is in direct opposition to the free-traders. Added to this he is a university lecturer and therefore not grieved that Professor Roscher, who blocks the way for all of them, should get some kicks. [3] One thing in his appraisal has struck me very much. Namely, so long as the determination of value by working time is left ‘vague’, as it is with Ricardo, it does not make people shaky. But as soon as it is brought into exact connection with the working day and its variations, a very unpleasant new light dawns upon them. I believe that an additional reason for Dühring to review my book at all was malice against Roscher. His fear of being treated like Roscher is certainly very easily perceptible. It is strange that the fellow does not sense the three fundamentally new elements of the book:

1) That in contrast to all former political economy, which from the very outset treats the different fragments of surplus value with their fixed forms of rent, profit, and interest as already given, I first deal with the general form of surplus value, in which all these fragments are still undifferentiated – in solution, as it were.

2) That the economists, without exception, have missed the simple point that if the commodity has a double character – use value and exchange value – then the labour represented by the commodity must also have a two-fold character, while the mere analysis of labour as such, as in Smith, Ricardo, etc, is bound to come up everywhere against inexplicable problems. This is, in fact, the whole secret of the critical conception.

3) That for the first time wages are presented as an irrational manifestation of a relation concealed behind them, and that this is scrupulously demonstrated with regard to the two forms of wages – time rates and piece rates. (It was a help to me that similar formulae are often found in higher mathematics.)

And as for Dühring’s modest objections to the determination of value, he will be astonished to see in Volume 2 how little the determination of value ‘directly’ counts in bourgeois society. Indeed, no form of society can prevent the working time at the disposal of society from regulating production one way or another. So long, however, as this regulation is accomplished not by the direct and conscious control of society over its working time – which is possible only with common ownership – but by the movement of commodity prices, things remain as you have already quite aptly described them in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher... [4]

Notes

1. Marx refers to Eugen Dühring’s review of the first volume of Capital. Eugen Dühring (1833-1921) – German philosopher and economist, representative of reactionary petty-bourgeois socialism, his philosophical views, an eclectic mixture of positivism, metaphysical materialism and idealism, supported by some German Social-Democrats, were criticised by Engels in his Anti-Dühring – Progress Publishers.

2. Henry Charles Carey (1793-1879) – American vulgar economist, author of reactionary theory of harmony of class interests in capitalist society – Progress Publishers.

3. A reference to the criticism of Roscher’s vulgar economic views which Marx gives in the first volume of Capital (see Karl Marx, Capital, Volume 1 (Moscow, 1972), pp 95, 157, 199, 209, 220, 251, 343, 576.) [Available on the MIA at < http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/index.htm >.] Wilhelm Georg Friedrich Roscher (1817-1894) – German vulgar economist, founder of so-called historical school of political economy – Progress Publishers.

4. An allusion to Engels’ essay ‘Umrisse zu einer Kritik der National Ökonomie’ (‘Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy’), see Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844: Appendix – Progress Publishers.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 42, p. 519;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

[London,] 11 January 1868

Dear Fred,

The ‘Fop’ [Amand Goegg] was bustling around for a long time in London. He also visited Borkheim, where he produced just the same phrases as he did to you, only with better success, for he knew how to tickle the vanity, of our Borkheim. But after he had squeezed out of the latter money for 10 shares, ditto assimilated various of his wines, he was not seen there again. For the understanding of his further activity in London, the following preliminary report. Cremer, as you know, was removed a long time since from his post as Secretary of the International Council, and in his anger at this he long ago resigned as member of the Council, and was not re-elected as such by the last congress either. Mr Odger was re-elected. On my proposal, however, the post of president (the annual one) was abolished, and replaced by a Chairman, to be elected at each sitting. Odger, annoyed by this, stays away from us on principle. Well! Mr ‘Fop’ insinuates himself via Le Lubez to Odger (who introduced him to the London Trades Council ) and to Cremer. They appointed a London committee, Beales as President, etc. In short, an affair against the International Workingmen’s Association. (At the founding meeting Fop also introduced the noble Blind.) The fellows had the impudence to invite me to their 2nd meeting last week. Eccarius (in a very badly written article in the Bee-Hive last Saturday) denounced Fop and his consorts.

I am writing to you naked and with alcohol compresses. I went out again for the first time the day before yesterday, to the British Museum, of course, because I cannot write yet. Then yesterday there was a new outbreak under my left breast. The alcohol treatment, which Nélaton used in Paris for even the largest carbuncles, is, from my personal experience, by far the speediest and pleasantest for the patient (apart from cutting or lancing, depending on the case). The misfortune is only the constant activity, necessitated by the rapid evaporation of the alcohol.

At the museum, where I did nothing but leaf through catalogues, I also noted that Dühring is a great philosopher. For he has written a Natürliche Dialektik against Hegel’s ‘un-natural’ one. Hinc inae lacrimae. [Hence these tears!] The gentlemen in Germany (with the exception of theological reactionaries) believe Hegel’s dialectic to be a ‘dead dog’. Feuerbach has much on his conscience in this respect.

The French government has started a prosecution against the Paris Committee of the International Workingmen’s Association (as société inicite [illegal society]). This is very agreeable for me, since it means that the jackasses have been hindered and interrupted in their discussion of the programme they had already drawn up for the congress of 1868. Dupont has apparently written something incautious about the Fenians to his Paris correspondents that Bonaparte, who is now creeping dolefully up the arse of the British government, forwarded to Downing Street.

It is characteristic that the disclosures of Prokesch-Osten, Gentz and Count Munster are being printed one after the other — with the direct or indirect collaboration of the Austrian government. Urquhart, with his ignorance now becoming permanent, knows only the first one. It is also very indicative of his ‘totality’, that he does not know Moltke’s Turkish War of 1828, etc., which would have provided him with excellent material. Incidentally, at the time when I was in Berlin (at Lassalle’s) Moltke was regarded as a declared Russophobe, inside the Royal Prussian frontiers, naturally.

If you should be writing to Borkheim some time, request him to let you have a look at the two small Russian pamphlets about which I had told you. I would particularly like you to look at the one about the emancipation of the serfs, so that you can let me know the quintessence.

From the enclosed Courrier français you will see that the French government is entering into a direct polemic with General Cluseret.

If you could send little Tussy cotton-yarn ball on the 16th of this month I should be very pleased. It is her birthday and that little humbug loves all Chinese formalities.

It gives me much pleasure that the English government is persecuting The Irishman. This paper is in reality not Fenian, but simply wants repeal. What blockheads these John Bulls are!

My compliments to Mrs Lizzy.

Salut.

Your

Moor

Enclosed a portion of ‘new philology’ from the Hermann.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 11 January 1868

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

D'abord [1] my best happy new years to your wife, Fränzchen and yourself. And then my best thanks for the Jupiter and for the interest you display in doing propaganda and fooling the German press. As our friend Weerth, [2] too early dead, used to sing:

Es gibt nichts schöneres auf der Welt

Als seine Feinde zu beissen,

Als über alle die plumpen Gesellen

Seine schlechte Witze zu reissen! [3]

With all due respect to your medical authority, you have too low an opinion of the English, German and French doctors, whom I have consulted and still consult here, if you think that they cannot distinguish anthrax (carbuncles) from furuncles, particularly here in England – the land of carbuncles, which is actually a proletarian illness.

And even if the doctors could not distinguish between the two, the patient who knows both sorts of horrors, as I do, could do so; for the subjective impression they make is quite different, although, as far as I know, no doctor has as yet succeeded in making an exact theoretical diagnosis of the two. It is only in the last few years that I have been persecuted with the thing. Before that it was a complete stranger to me.

At the moment of writing to you I am not quite better and not yet able to work. Again several weeks lost and not even pour le roi de Prusse! [4]

The thing that appears most clearly in Herr Dühring’s criticism [5] is – fear. I should be very glad if you could get for me Dühring’s book Gegen die Verkleinerer Carey’s [6] and von Thünen’s Der isolierte Staat mit Bezug auf die Landwirtschaft [7] or something like that (together with a note of the price). Such orders from here take too long.

Finally I would ask you to be good enough to send me about 12 copies of my photograph (only the full-faced one). About a dozen friends are plaguing me for them.

Enclosed, for Mrs Kugelmann, the photographs of my eldest daughter Jenny and of Eleanor, who sends her best greetings to Fränzchen.

Ad vocem Liebknecht: Let him play le petit grand homme. [8] for a little while. All that will turn out for the best in the best of all possible worlds.

I had all sorts of personal anecdotes to relate, but shall save them for the next time, when the writing position no longer troubles me.

Salut

Yours

K Marx

One of my friends here, who dabbles a lot in phrenology, said yesterday when looking at the photograph of your wife: A great deal of wit! So you see, phrenology is not the baseless art which Hegel imagined.

Notes

1. First of all – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Georg Weerth (1821-1856) – Revolutionary German poet; member of the Communist League and intimate friend of Marx and Engels, with whom he worked on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (1848-49). Engels called him ‘the first poet of the German proletariat’ – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. There’s nothing nicer in the world / Than foes of his to bite on, / Than all the fellows ponderous / To try his jokes so trite on!

4. For the King of Prussia – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

5. Dühring’s review of Das Kapital appearing in the Ergänzungsblätter zur Kenntnis der Gegenwart, Volume 3, no 3 – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

6. Against the Belittlers of Carey – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

7. The Isolated State in its Relation to Agriculture – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

8. The great man in miniature – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 30 January 1868

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

Cut, lanced, etc, in short treated in every respect secundum legem artis. [1] In spite of that the thing is continually breaking out again so that, with the exception of two or three days, I have been lying quite fallow for eight weeks. Last Saturday I went out again for the first time – Monday another relapse. I hope that it will finish this week, but who will guarantee me against new eruptions? It is extremely disagreeable. Moreover it attacks my head. My friend, Dr Gumpert [2] in Manchester, urges me to use arsenic. What do you think of it?

Your Koppel is not yet here.

Kertbeny [3] is a German-Hungarian whose real name, between ourselves, is Benkert. The German-Hungarians love to Magyarise their names. I do not know him personally. Since he had a quarrel with Vogt [4] about 1860, I asked him for some notes but received nothing of any use. (My Hungarian material was obtained partly from Szemere, [5] partly from my own experience in London.) Later he applied to me in a quarrel he had with Kossuth. [6] As far as I have been able to learn, there is nothing politically suspicious against him. He seems to be a literary busybody. His heresies with regard to Bonaparte are held by many otherwise honest eastern barbarians – in any case watch him. I also consider it more diplomatic not to show any mistrust of him (and for that reason I am enclosing the biographical notice [7] which he requested). Nevertheless, as soon as the writing position no longer troubles me, I shall ‘order’ information about him from other sources.

You guessed rightly about Plagiarismus. [8] I was intentionally uncivil and hair-raising in order to make Hofstetten [9] suspect Liebknecht and to conceal my authorship. This between ourselves. You probably know that Engels and Siebel [10] have got articles about my book published in the Barmen-Zeitung, Elberfelder Zeitung, Frankfurt Börsen-Zeitung and – to the great grief of Heinrich Bürgers – in the Düsseldorf-Zeitung. [11] Siebel was the man in Barmen whose acquaintance I wanted you to make. He is now in Madeira for his health.

Last week the Saturday Review – the ‘blood and culture’ paper – had a notice about my book in a review of recent German books. I have come off pretty well, as you will see from the following passage:

The author’s views may be as pernicious as we conceive them to be, but there can be no question as to the plausibility of his logic, the vigour of his rhetoric, and the charm with which he invests the driest problems of political economy.

Ouff!

My best greetings to your dear wife and Fränzchen. You will get other photographs from here, for we have now discovered that the water colours which looked good the first day dissolved in patches immediately after.

Write to me as often as your time permits. During my illness and the many occasions for vexation, letters from friends are very welcome.

Salut

Yours

KM

Notes

1. According to all the rules of the art – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Edward Gumpert (?-1895) – German doctor in Manchester and friend of Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. Charles (Károly) Kertbeny (1824-1882) – Hungarian writer, active in the Revolution of 1848-49. While in emigration he wrote for the German press – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

4. Karl Vogt (1817-1895) – German natural scientist, vulgar materialist and petty-bourgeois democrat. After the Revolution of 1848-49 he lived in Switzerland, an active member of the ‘League of Peace and Liberty’. In his book, Herr Vogt, Marx proved that during the Italian war Vogt acted as agent of Napoleon III (in 1870 it was proved by documentary evidence that he was in the pay of Napoleon) – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

5. Bartholomew (Bertalan) Szemere (1812-1869) – One of the leaders of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848-49. In the 1850s while in emigration he headed the Left opposition against Kossuth. In this period Marx supported him – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

6. Louis (Lajos) Kossuth (1802-1894) – Leader of the Hungarian Revolutionary Government of 1848-49 and of the Hungarian national struggle against Austria – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

7. The autobiographical note read as follows:

Karl Marx, doctor of philosophy, born at Trier, 5 May 1818.

1842-43: At first collaborator, then chief editor of the Rheinische Zeitung (Cologne). During the period that he edited the paper, it was subject to double censorship, a second censor being appointed by the government in addition to the local censor. Finally suppressed by order of the government. Marx left Germany and went to Paris. In 1844, in Paris, he published with A Rüge the Deutsch-Französischen Jahrbücher (Franco-German Annuals). In addition, Die heilige Familie. Kritik der kritischen Kritik, gegen Bruno Bauer und Konsorten (The Holy Family: Critique of the Critical Criticism, contra Bruno Bauer and Company.

December 1845: Expelled from France by Guizot, at the instigation of the Prussian government, Marx went to Brussels, founded there, in 1846, the Association of German Workers, gave lectures on political economy, wrote for the Réforme (Paris), etc...

1847: Misère de la philosophie. Réponse à la Philosophie de la misère de M Proudhon (The Poverty of Philosophy: Reply to M Proudhon’s Philosophy of Poverty); ditto: Discours sur le libre échange (Speech on Free Trade) and various other pamphlets.

1848: In collaboration with F Engels, Manifesto of the Communist Party. Arrested and expelled from Belgium, invited to France by a letter from the provisional government. Left France in April 1848, founded at Cologne the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (June 1848 – May 1849). Marx was then expelled from Prussia, after the government had conducted an unsuccessful prosecution against him. Appeared twice in court (the first time to answer a charge against the paper, the second for inciting to rebellion; acquitted both times). Marx’s speeches in his own defence were printed in Two Political Processes (Cologne).

1849: The last number – printed in red – of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx went to Paris. Expelled in September 1849 with the choice of being interned in Brittany (Morbihan). Refused and went to London where he is now living.

1850: Published the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, politisch-okonomische Revue (Hamburg).

1852: The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (New York). Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial at Cologne. This edition was confiscated at the German frontier, and a new edition was published in Boston in 1853.

1853-54: Flysheets against Lord Palmerston.

1859: Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (Berlin).

1860: Herr Vogt.

1851-60: Regular contributor to the New York Daily Tribune and the New American Cyclopaedia.

1861: Went to Berlin after the Amnesty; the Prussian government refused him renaturalisation.

1864: Published for the Central Council of the International Working-Men’s Association the Address to the Working Classes of Europe.

1867: Capital, Volume 1 (Hamburg) (Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute)

8. The title of an anonymous article by Marx in the Berlin journal Zukunft (Future) of 12 December 1867, in which he proved that two Social-Democratic Reichstag deputies, Geib and Hofstetten, in their speeches used arguments from Volume 1 of Capital without mentioning the author – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

9. Johann Baptist von Hofstetten (?-1857) – Formerly a Prussian officer, then co-editor of the Lassallean organ Neuer Sozialdemokrat – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

10. Karl Siebel (1836-1868) – Radical poet and distant relation of Engels. During his stay in England during 1856-60 he became a friend of Marx and contributed to the popularisation of Capital in Germany – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

11. See Engels’ reviews of Capital.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW, Volume 42, p. 543;

First published: in Die Neue Zeit Stuttgart, 1901-1902.

London, 6 March 1868

Dear Friend,

As soon as Coppel vanished, my condition got worse again. Scarcely, I think, because of his departure. Post not propter. (After all he is, in his way, quite a nice man. But that particular way is, in my present state, too healthy for me to harmonise with it very well.) This is therefore the reason for my silence, so that I did not even inform you of the receipt of Thünen. There is something touching about the latter. A Mecklenburg squire (moreover, one with German distinction of thought), who treats his estate of Tellow as the land and Mecklenburg-Schwerin as the town, and who, proceeding from these premises, constructs for himself the Ricardian theory of ground rent, with the help of observation, differential calculus, practical accountancy, etc. This is estimable and at the same time ridiculous.

The curiously embarrassed tone used by Mr Duhring in his review [of Capital] is now clear to me. Usually, you see, he is a very bumptious, insolent lad, who sets himself up as a revolutionary in political economy. He has done two things. Firstly (basing himself upon Carey) he published a Kritische Grundlegung der Nationalökonomie (about 500 pages), and a new Natürliche Dialektik (against Hegelian dialectic). My book has buried him in both respects. He reviewed it out of hatred for Roscher, etc. Incidentally he practises deception, half intentionally and half from lack of insight. He knows full well that my method of exposition is not Hegelian, since I am a materialist, and Hegel an idealist. Hegel’s dialectic is the basic form of all dialectic, but only after being stripped of its mystical form, and it is precisely this which distinguishes my method. Quant à Ricardo, Mr Duhring has been vexed precisely because in my treatment the weak points do not exist which Carey, and 100 others before him, held up as proof against Ricardo. Consequently, he attempts, with mauvaise foi, [bad faith] to burden me with Ricardo’s narrow-mindedness. But never mind. I must be grateful to the man, since he is the first expert who has said anything at all.

In volume II (which will probably never appear if my condition does not change) property in land will be one of the subjects analysed, competition only in so far as called for in the treatment of other themes.

During my indisposition (which I hope will soon cease altogether) I have not been able to write, but have gobbled up enormous masses of ‘material’, statistical and otherwise; this alone would have made sick those whose stomachs are not accustomed to this type of fodder and the rapid digestion of the same.

My circumstances are very harassing, since I was unable to do any additional work which would bring in money, but must always maintain a certain appearance for the children’s sake. If I didn’t have to produce these 2 damned volumes (and look for an English publisher besides), which can be done only in London, I would move to Geneva where I could live very well with the means at my disposal. My daughter No. II [Laura] is getting married at the end of this month.

Greetings to Fränzchen.

Yours

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 42, p. 547;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 14 March 1868

Dear Fred,

Since the beginning of the week I have had carbuncles on my right thigh (not yet quite extinct). Despite this — and the consequent difficult gait — I went to the Museum, since this continuous being cooped up and lying down at home (the business has now lasted, with some intervals of course, over 4 months) would drive me mad. For all that, I am convinced that the present blossoms are only the last after-effects. At the Museum — by the by — I studied, amongst other things, the latest writings about the Constitution of the German Mark, Villages, etc., by Old Maurer (the old Bavarian Privy Councillor, who already played a role as one of the regents of Greece, and was among the first to denounce the Russians, long before Urquhart). He demonstrates at length that private property in land only arose later, etc. The idiotic Westphalian squirearchical opinion (Möser, etc.) that the Germans settled each by himself, and only afterwards established villages, districts, etc., is completely refuted. It is interesting just now that the Russian manner of re-distributing land at certain intervals (in Germany originally annually) should have persisted in some parts of Germany up to the 18th century and even the 19th. The view I put forward that the Asiatic or Indian property forms everywhere mark the beginning in Europe receives new proof here (although Maurer knows nothing of it). But for the Russians there disappears the last trace of originality, even in this line. What remains to them is that they still maintain forms long abandoned by their neighbours. Old Maurer’s books (from 1854 and 1856, etc.) are written with real German erudition, but, at the same time, in the more homely and readable manner which sets the southern Germans apart from the northern Germans (Maurer is from Heidelberg, but this applies even more to the Bavarians and Tyroleans, such as Fallmerayer, Fraas, etc.). Here and there a hat is doffed deeply — re, non verbis [in fact, not words] — to Old Grimm (Rechtsalterthümer, etc.). Besides, I looked at the things by Fraas, etc., on agriculture.

By the by, you must send me back the Dühring, and, at the same time, the page proofs of my book [Capital]. You will have seen from Dühring what Carey’s great discovery is, namely, that in agriculture humanity proceeds from poorer to increasingly better soil. Partly because cultivation descends from the dry hills, etc., to the damp lowlands. But in particular because Mr Carey considers the most fertile soil marshes and so on, which first have to be converted into soil. And finally because the English colonisation in America began with that lousy New England which is Carey’s model country: Massachusetts in particular.

Thanks for your efforts with the damned book. I cannot find Eynern’s letter but suffit to write to Meissner that you sent it to me. I have received the same letter from Vienna, with a few modifications. I enclose the cuttings about Lassalle sent me by Fox. Apart from the arch-blackguard B. Becker, Reusche is in Vienna; this vagabond is there for Hatzfeldt money (as our J. Ph. Becker writes to Borkheim) — the enclosed Viennese Lassalle — creature article is by him — in order to glorify Izzy as the Son of God, and the beastly old girl as the Mother of God.

From Holland I have still not heard anything, and the wedding should be on April 8th (with difficulty despite Lafargue I have postponed the business that far). In addition, I have on the 17th (next Tuesday) to pay about £5 for water and gas (also last summons). As for the Dutch, it appears to me that I shall not squeeze anything out of them until I once again pounce upon them personally, without previous notice. But just now there can be no question of this.

Have you read about the scandal (Borkheim informed me of it) between Dühring and ‘Privy Councillor’ Wagener, with the former accusing the latter of pinching his manuscript or something or other about workers’ cooperation.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

From Maurer I have noted that the change in opinions about the history and development of ‘Germanic’ property, etc., proceeds from the Danes who are apparently tremendously active in all kinds of archaeology in every corner. But, although they thus give the impulse, something is always missing with them somewhere or else. They lack the proper critical instinct, and in particular the sense of proportion. I was extremely struck by the fact that Maurer, though often referring, for instance, to Africa, Mexico, etc., knows absolutely nothing about the Celts, and therefore ascribes the development of common ownership in France solely to the Germanic conquerors. ‘As though,’ Mr Bruno [Bauer] would say, ‘as though’ we did not possess a Celtic (Welsh) book of laws from the 11th century which is entirely communist, and ‘as though’ the French in recent years had not just excavated original settlements in Celtic form here and there. As though! But the matter is quite simple. Besides German and ancient Roman relations, Old Maurer has only studied oriental (Greek-Turkish!) ones.

Marx To Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

March 16, 1868

The present way in which the English treat political prisoners in Ireland, and also suspects, or even those sentenced to ordinary prison terms (like Pigott of The Irishman and Sullivan of the News)[142] is really worse than anything happening on the Continent except in Russia. What dogs!

Notes

142. Richard Pigott, the publisher of The Irishman and Alexander Sullivan, the owner of the Irish bourgeois radical Weekly News appearing in Dublin from 1858, received prison sentences in 1867 and 1868 respectively for publishing articles in defence of the Fenians.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 17 March 1868

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Friend

Your letter affected me both unpleasantly and pleasantly (you see, I always move in dialectical contradictions).

Unpleasantly, because I know your circumstances and it would be rotten of me if I were to accept such presents at the expense of your family. I therefore regard these £15 as a loan, which I shall in time repay.

Pleasantly, not only as a mark of your great friendship (and in the bustle of the world friendship is the only personal thing that matters), but also because you have helped me out of a very difficult position in regard to the forthcoming marriage. Apart from medicines and doctors, I have spent so much money in the last four months on blue books, enquiries and Yankee reports, etc, on banks, that I really had nothing left for my daughter.

You may be sure that I have often discussed leaving London for Geneva, not only with myself and my family, but also with Engels. Here I have to spend from £400 to £500 annually; in Geneva I could live on £200. But considered all in all, it is for the time being impossible. I can finish my work only in London. And only here can I hope to draw at least a comparatively decent monetary profit from this work. But to do that I must stay here for a time. Apart from the fact that, if I were to leave here at this critical time, the whole labour movement, which I influence from behind the scenes, would fall into very bad hands and go the wrong way.

So, for the time being, all drawbacks notwithstanding, fate ties me to London. Quant à [1] Koppel, you do him wrong. Had I not been ill, he would have amused me and such a diversion never hurts the family.

Engels and I have not written for Liebknecht’s paper hitherto. (Engels has now sent him two articles on my book.) Eccarius [2] is the usual London correspondent.

Borkheim [3] wrote an article against Herzen [4] and company.

M’s [5] letter gave me great pleasure. But he has to some extent misunderstood my development of the subject. Otherwise he would have seen that I described large-scale industry not only as the mother of the antagonism, but also as the producer of the material and spiritual conditions for resolving that antagonism, although it is true the solution cannot proceed along pleasant lines.

With regard to Factory Acts – as the primary condition for giving the working class elbow-room for development and movement – I demand them from the state, as a compulsory law, not only against the manufacturers, but against the workers themselves (on page 542, note 52, [6] I refer to the resistance offered by working women to a limitation of the working day). If Herr M develops the same energy as Owen, [7] he can break that resistance. That the individual manufacturer (apart from the extent to which he tries to affect legislation) can do little in the matter, I also say on page 243: [8] ‘But looking at things as a whole, all this does not, indeed, depend on the good or ill will of the individual capitalist [etc].’ See also note 114 (p 260). [9] That, nevertheless, the individual can do something has been clearly demonstrated by such manufacturers as Fielden, [10] Owen, etc. Their main effectiveness must of course be of a public nature. As for the Dolfuses [11] in Alsace, they are humbugs, who have managed, by the conditions enumerated in their contracts, to establish a comfortable serf-relationship to their workers which is at the same time very profitable to them. They have been thoroughly exposed in the Paris press and for that very reason one of the Dolfuses, a short time ago, introduced and got carried in the corps législatif [12] one of the most infamous paragraphs of the press law – that ‘la vie privée doit etre murée’. [13]

With warmest greetings to your dear wife.

Yours

Karl Marx

À propos: Have you seen that my personal enemy, Schweitzer, [14] has heaped eulogies on my head in six numbers of the Sozialdemokrat because of my book? Very painful for that old harlot Hatzfeld. [15]

Notes

1. As to – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. George Eccarius (1818-1889) – German socialist, living in London. Secretary of the General Council of the First International and active participant in the London trade-union movement – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. Sigismund Borkheim (1825-1885) – German merchant and publicist who took an active part in the 1848 Revolution. Fled to Switzerland and later settled in London, where in the 1860s he became a close friend of Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

4. Alexander Herzen (1812-1870) – Famous Russian politician and writer. One of the founders of the Narodnik movement and Russian liberalism. Lived in emigration, chiefly in London and Geneva.

5. Menke – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

6. Capital, p 556, note 4, English edition – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

7. Robert Owen (1771-1858) – The most prominent English utopian socialist – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

8. Capital, p 255, English edition – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

9. Capital, p 284, note 2, English edition – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

10. John Fielden (1784-1849) – Economist, manufacturer and advocate of labour legislation. Author of the book The Curse of the Factory System. Came out against child labour in England – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

11. Jean Dolfus (1808-1887) – Alsatian manufacturer and free-trader. Became known on account of the cheap dwellings he caused to be built for his workers, with a view to keeping them in bondage – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

12. Legislative corps – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

13. Private life should be enclosed by a wall – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

14. Johann Baptist Schweitzer (1833-1875) – German working-class leader; friend of Lassalle. After the death of Lassalle, leader of the Lassalleans until 1871 – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

15. Countess Sophie von Hatzfeld (1806-1881) – Friend of Lassalle, who conducted her divorce case 1848-54. After his death she broke with the Lassallean General Association of German Workers – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 42, p. 557;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 25 March 1868

Dear Fred,

I wanted to write to you yesterday from the Museum, but I suddenly became so very unwell that I had to close the very interesting book I was reading. There was something like a black veil before my eyes. In addition, a frightful headache and chest constriction. So I crept home. The air and the light did me good, and at home I slept for some time. My state is such that I really should give up working and thinking entirely for some time; but that would be hard for me, even if I had the means to loaf.

Ad vocem Maurer: his books are extremely significant. Not only the primitive age but also the entire later development of the free imperial cities, of the estate owners possessing immunity, of public authority, and of the struggle between the free peasantry and serfdom, get an entirely new character.

The history of mankind is like palaeontology. Owing to a certain judicial blindness, even the best minds fail to see, on principle, what lies in front of their noses. Later, when the time has come, we are surprised that there are traces everywhere of what we failed to see. The first reaction to the French Revolution and the Enlightenment bound up with it was naturally to regard everything as mediaeval, romantic, and even people like Grimm are not free from this. The second reaction to it is to look beyond the Middle Ages into the primitive age of every people — and this corresponds to the socialist tendency, though these learned men have no idea that they are connected with it. And they are then surprised to find what is newest in what is oldest, and even egalitarians to a degree which would have made Proudhon shudder.

And we are all very much in the clutches of this judicial blindness: right in my own neighbourhood, on the Hunsrück, the old Germanic system survived until the last few years. I now remember my father talking about it to me from a lawyer’s point of view. Another proof: just as the geologists, even the best like Cuvier, have expounded certain faits in a completely distorted way, so philologists of the force of a Grimm, mistranslated the simplest Latin sentences because they were under the influence of Moser, etc. (who, I remember, was enchanted that ‘freedom’ never existed among the Germans, but that ‘Luft macht eigen [‘town air brings freedom, country air brings serfdom’]). E.g. the famous passage in Tacitus: ‘arva per annos mutant, et superest ager’, which means: they exchange the fields (arva) (by lot, hence also sortes in all later Leges Barbarorum), and there remains over communal land (ager in distinction to arva as ager publicus), Grimm and others translate: they till every year new fields, and there is still (untilled) land left over!

In the same way the passage: ‘colunt discreti ac diversi, [they till separately and scattered] is taken to prove that the Germans from the earliest times cultivated on individual farms like Westphalian squires. But the very same passage continues: ‘Vicos locant non in nostrum morem, connexis et cohaerentibus aedificii’s; suum quisque locum spatio circumdat’, [‘they do not lay out villages in our fashion, with adjacent buildings one next to the other; each surrounds his dwelling with a free space’] and such Germanic primitive villages, in the form described, still exist here and there in Denmark. Obviously Scandinavia must become as important for German jurisprudence and economics as for German mythology. Only by starting from there will we be able once again to decipher our past. Incidentally, even Grimm, etc., found in Caesar’s writings that the Germans always settled as kinship groups, and not as individuals: ‘gentibus cognationibusque, qui uno coierunt.’ [‘according to gentes and kinships, which settled together’ — Gaius Julius Caesar]

But what would Old Hegel say, were he to learn in the hereafter that the general [das Allgemeine] in German and Nordic means only the communal land, and that the particular, the special [das Sundre, Besondere] means only private property divided off from the communal land? Here are the logical categories coming damn well out of ‘our intercourse’ after all.

Very interesting is the book by Fraas (1847): Klima und Pflanzenwelt in der Zeit, eine Geschichte beider, namely as proving that climate and flora change in historical times. He is a Darwinist before Darwin, and admits even the species developing in historical times. But he is at the same time agronomist. He claims that with cultivation — depending on its degree — the ‘moisture’ so beloved by the peasants gets lost (hence also the plants migrate from south to north), and finally steppe formation occurs. The first effect of cultivation is useful, but finally devastating through deforestation, etc. This man is both a thoroughly learned philologist (he has written books in Greek) and a chemist, agronomist, etc. The conclusion is that cultivation — when it proceeds in natural growth and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois he naturally does not reach this point) — leaves deserts behind it, Persia, Mesopotamia, etc., Greece. So once again an unconscious socialist tendency!

This Fraas is also interesting as a German case-study. First Dr. med., then inspector and teacher of chemistry and technology. At present head of Bavarian veterinary services, university professor, head of state agricultural experiments, etc. In his latest writings you see his advanced age, but he is still a dashing fellow. He has been around a lot in Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt! His history of agriculture is also important. He calls Fourier this ‘pious and humanist socialist’. On the Albanians, etc. ‘every sort of shameless lechery and rape’.

We must keep a close watch on the recent and very latest in agriculture. The physical school is pitted against the chemical.

Do not forget to send me back the letter of Kugelmann’s manufacturer.

Nothing pleases me better than to see you here.

Your

K. M.

Apropos. Edgar’s planter’s hat has been found again, and this time you can take it to Mrs Lizzy.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 3;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902 and in full in Marx and Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, Moscow, 1964.

London, 6 April 1868

Dear Kugelmann,

The young pair [Paul and Laura Lafargue] were registered at a civil ceremony last Thursday (since a church wedding is not legally necessary here), and have left for France to celebrate their honeymoon. They send their best greetings to you and Mrs Gertrud.

Coppel paid a call on me here. Unfortunately, I could not receive him, since I was wrapped in cataplasms. Engels was here during the wedding, and left again yesterday. In response to his urgings, I have decided to take the arsenic cure, since an end must at last be put to this state of affairs. One of his friends in Manchester was completely cured by this method in a relatively short time. I had certain prejudices against arsenic after reading in the Gazette médicale about a discussion among French doctors.

The Irish question predominates here just now. It has naturally only been exploited by Gladstone and consorts to take over the helm again, and particularly to have an electoral cry at the next elections, which will be based on household suffrage. At the moment, this turn of affairs is detrimental to the workers’ party, because the intriguers among the workers, such as Odger, Potter, etc., who want to get into the next Parliament, have now found a new excuse for attaching themselves to the bourgeois liberals.

This is, however, only a penalty that England — and thus, also, the English working class — is paying for the great centuries-old crime against Ireland. In the long run it will benefit the English working class itself. You see, the English established church in Ireland — or what they used to call here, the Irish church — is the religious bulwark of English landlordism in Ireland and, at the same time, the outpost of the Established Church in England itself (I am speaking here of the Established Church as a landowner). The overthrow of the Established Church in Ireland would mean its fall in England, land the two will be followed (in their downfall) by landlordism, first in Ireland and then in England. And I have always been convinced that the social revolution must begin seriously from the ground, i.e. from landed property.

In addition, the whole thing will have the very useful result that, once the Irish church is dead, the Protestant Irish tenants in the province of Ulster will make common cause with the Catholic tenants and their movement in the 3 other provinces of Ireland, whereas so far landlordism has been able to exploit this religious antagonism.

The day before yesterday I received a letter from Freiligrath (wedding cards were, of course, sent to him), containing the following curious sentence. — It will perhaps amuse you more, however, if I enclose the letter itself, which I now do. But you must return it to me. So that you understand the letter properly, the following: In Berlin, shortly before my book [Capital] came out, there appeared Zwölf Streiter der Revolution von G. Struve und Gustav Rasch. In this publication, Freiligrath is acclaimed as ‘one’ of the 12 apostles and, at the same time, it is proved in great detail that he never was a communist, in fact that it was only through too great a condescension that he became associated with such monsters as Marx, Engels, Wolff, etc. Since Wolff was slandered here too, I wrote to Freiligrath for an explanation, particularly since I knew that G. Rasch (a scoundrel) headed his begging committee in Berlin. He replied very dryly, and with evasive philistine cunning. Later I sent him my book without, however, as was formerly our mutual custom, signing it. He appears to have taken the hint.

My best regards to your dear wife and Fränzchen. If at all feasible, I shall come under all circumstances and pay you a visit.

Yours

K. Marx

Apropos. Borkheim will visit you in a few days. Don’t forget that, despite all comradeship with him, I always observe reserve!

Liebknecht’s paper is much too narrow-mindedly ‘southern’. (He has not enough dialectic to strike out on two sides at once.)

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 11;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 17 April 1868

Dear Moor,

Horn ‘awaits receipt’, as commercial style puts it.

It is certain that there is theoretically nothing of interest and nothing new to be said about agiotage. It all comes down to fraud under false pretences and nothing can change here except the manner. The secret material about the history of the Crédit mobilier can, by the way, and probably will, reach the light of day by itself on the fall of the Empire, even if there is no intervention by the courts.

I had already seen about the glorious victory in Geneva in the newspapers on Saturday morning. The business is all the better since the stupid philistines had made out the International Association to be the real motive force of the affair, and it now receives all the glory. You will have seen that the intermediaries in the business were Police Prefect Camperio and the noble and serrrious Amand Goegg. This will have instilled new respect for our power in Mr Amand. Incidentally, I should like to know how long — following this business — they will leave the International Association unmolested in Germany.

By the by, the workers’ affairs are proceeding famously. First Belgium, then Geneva, now Bologna — I am only surprised that the International has not yet been blamed for this — it keeps going everywhere.

You will have received the Schweitzer.

Tomorrow I shall send you — I have forgotten it at the office — l. a new copy of Wilhelmchen’s rag, 2. Eichhoff’s further jeremiad, 3. a section of an editorial declaration from the Zukunft about the curious article ad vocem Vogt, from which you will see what shits they are.

Making extracts from your book is, with my limited time, giving me more work than I expected, car enfin if this job is to be done, it must be done properly and not just for this special purpose.

Next week I expect to have more time, there is a pause in business, and if I can get away between 4 and 5 in the evening, this gives the whole evening a different character for working.

Kugelmann returned enclosed. I was very interested in his uterine polyp removed by splitting and compressed sponge; he will have to tell me about it personally in more detail in good time. But the attempt to turn Virchow into a communist with the aid of this polyp looks very much like an extra-uterine pregnancy. Even if Virchow had knowledge and theoretical interest in politics or political economy, this upright citizen is after all much too deeply engaged.

Incidentally, you will come here before you leave for the continent, cela est entendu, and bring Tussy with you as promised.

Your arm must surely have settled down by now? The fact that Kugelmann recommends arsenic will certainly have allayed some of your anxieties. Schorlemmer took a lot of it in his time, and never noted the slightest ill effects.

Heartiest greetings to the ladies.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 12;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902 and in full in Pisma Marksa h Kugelmanu (Letters of Marx to Kugelmann), Moscow-Leningrad, 1928.

London, 17 April 1868

Dear Kugelmann,

You must regard me as a great criminal for taking so long to reply to the friendly letter from your dear wife and yourself. The situation is simply this. The old sanguinary herpes (to express myself poetically) attacked me with such tactical dexterity that I could not adopt the posture necessary for writing. I could, of course, have dictated, but you know that in such cases one always hopes to be all right next morning. Thus the delay, and thus, also, the brevity of these lines.

It is still quite uncertain when I shall be travelling to Germany for a few days; in any case, it won’t be soon. At all events, I shall come at a time when I know that you will not be away.

You have done me a great service with your lines to Virchow, though I doubt whether he will have the patience and the time to immerse himself in a subject out of his line. I know it cost me a great effort to read his Cellularpathologie in Manchester, particularly because of the way it was written.

The issues of Social-Demokrat hitherto concerned with my book are: No. 10 (22 Jan. 1868), No. 11 (24 Jan.), No. 12 (26 Jan.), No. 14 (31 Jan.), No. 15 (2 Feb.), No. 24 (23 Feb.), No. 25 (26 Feb.), No. 30 (8 March), 15 and another number, which I don’t have at the moment, but which contains only extracts.

With heartiest greetings to your dear wife and Fränzchen

Yours

K. Marx

Meyer paid me a visit here.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 16;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 22 April 1868

Dear Fred,

I have resumed work, and it’s going well. Only I have to limit the working time, for after about 3 hours my head starts to buzz and prickle. I shall now tell you briefly a ‘morsel’ which occurred to me when I was just glancing at the part of my manuscript about the rate of profit [Marx has in mind the beginning of the manuscript of Book III of Capital, written in 1864-65. See Engels’ Preface to Volume III of Capital]. It provides a simple solution to one of the most difficult questions. The question is how it can happen that as the value of money, or gold, falls, the rate of profit rises; and that it falls with the rise in the value of money.

Let us assume the value of money falls by 1/10. Then, other things remaining equal, the price of commodities rises by 1/10.

If, on the other hand, the value of money rises by 1/10, then the price of commodities falls by 1/10, other things remaining equal.

Given a fall in the value of money, the price of labour, unless it rises in the same proportion, falls, the rate of surplus value rises, and therefore, all other things remaining the same, the rate of profit rises too. This rise of the latter — as long as the descendant oscillation in the value of money continues — is due solely to the fall in wages, and this fall is due to the fact that the change in wages is slow. to match the change in the value of money. (As was the case at the end of the 16th and in the 17th century.) Conversely, if, with the value of money rising, wages do not fall in the same proportion, the rate of surplus value falls, and therefore, caeteris paribus, the rate of profit.

These two movements, the rise in the rate of profit when money falls in value, and its fall when the value of money rises, are, under these circumstances, both due solely to the fact that the price of labour has not yet been adjusted to the new value of money. These phenomena (and how they are explained has long been known) cease after the adjustment of the price of labour to the value of money.

This is where the difficulty begins. The so-called theorists say: As soon as the price of labour corresponds to the new value of money, e.g. has risen with the falling value of money, both profit and wages are expressed in so much more money. Their relation thus remains the same. Therefore there can be no change in the rate of profit. The specialists who concern themselves with the history of prices reply to this with facts. Their explanations are mere phrases.

The whole difficulty arises from confusing the rate of surplus value with the rate of profit. Let us assume that the rate of surplus value remains the same, e.g. 100%. Then, if the value of money falls by 1/10, wages of £100 (say for 100 men) rise to 110 and surplus value likewise to 110. The same total quantity of labour, formerly expressed in 200, is now expressed in £220. If the price of labour is adjusted to the value of money, the rate of surplus value can neither rise nor fall as the result of any change in the value of money. Assume, however, that the elements, or some elements, of the constant part of capital were to fall in value owing to the growing productivity of labour, whose products they are. If the fall in their value is greater than the fall in the value of money, their price will fall, despite the drop in the value of money. If the fall in their value only corresponded to the fall in the value of money, then their price would remain unchanged. Let us assume the latter case.

For instance, in a certain branch of industry the capital of 500 is composed of 400c + 100v, so with a rate of surplus value of 100% we have: 400c+100v | + 100m = 100/500 =20% rate a profit (in Volume II I intend to use 400c, etc., instead of c/400 , etc., as it is less complicated. Qu'en penses tu?). If the value of money falls by 1/10, then wages rise to 110 and ditto surplus value. If the money price of the constant capital remains the same because the value of its component parts has fallen by 1/10 as a result of the increased productivity of labour, then now: 400c+100v | +110m or 110/510 = 21 29/50 % rate of profit, which would therefore have risen by about 1 1/2 %, while the rate of surplus value, 100m/110v , remains as before 100%.

The rise in the rate of profit would be greater if the value of the constant capital sank faster than the value of money, and less if it sank more slowly. It will continue as long as any fall in the value of the constant capital is taking place, i.e. as long as the same quantity of means of production does not cost £440 where it formerly cost £400.

And it is an historical fact, and can be specially demonstrated from the years 1850-1860, that the productivity of labour, especially in industry proper, receives an impetus from the falling value of money, the mere inflation of money prices, and the general international rush for the increased quantity of money.

The opposite case can be developed in an analogous manner.

The extent to which, in one case, the rise of the rate of profit with the sinking value of money, and, in the other, the sinking of the rate of profit with the rising value of money, affect the general rate of profit will depend partly upon the relative size of the particular branch of production in which the change takes place, and partly upon the length of the change, for the rise and fall of the rate of profit in particular branches of industry takes time to infect the other branches. If the oscillation lasts a relatively short time, it remains local.

I am sending you the Courrier and Nain jaune which Lafargue sent me.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

[c stands for constant capital, v for variable capital, m for surplus value]

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 19;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 26 April 1868

Dear Moor,

The business with the rate of profit and the value of money is very neat and very clear. The only thing that is unclear to me is how you can assume m/(c+v) as rate of profit, for m does not flow solely into the pockets of the industrialist who produces it, but has to be shared with the merchant, etc.; unless you are taking the whole branch of business together here, therefore disregarding how m is divided up between manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer, etc. In general, I am very keen to see your exposition of this point.

Wilhelmchen, as you will have seen, is now also singing the praises of the honourable Jakobus Venedey! And they resemble one another just like one jackass resembles another. I have had enough of it now, I shall not write to him any more. Let him make a fool of himself on his own account.

To write 400c+100v+100m is quite acceptable, just as is £400 3s. 4d.

You have seen that the comfortable relationship between the honest Bismarck and his Reichstagers is beginning to come to an end; the latter want to make the officials of the debt administration legally answerable, and Otto the Great cannot stand that, naturally. He’ll not build them no fleet for that.

To give full expression to the hangover affecting handsome William because he confiscated the lands and property of his cousin Georg, the Prussian commission to administer King Georg’s property is composed of General von Kotze and Regierungsrat Sauerhering (literally).

It is very nice of Jenny that she dutifully drags you out to go for walks. I hope that she does not allow herself to be scared off by your physical indolence disguised as your need to work; in the present fine weather it would be shameful if you stayed at home. I hope that no traces of new carbuncles have shown themselves.

In the Customs Parliament old Rothschild sits right near to Wilhelmchen, and behind them the bunch of jackasses called the ‘People’s Party’.

Could you not collect some of the mineral stuff and send it here for analysis? I have not yet seen Gumpert.

The recent Women’s Suffrage meeting here was of course attended by the whole Borchardt family, male and female (only Mama Borchardt absent). Gumpert has a nice row with Borchardt. Borchardt had accused him of an infringement not only of medical professional etiquette, but of all ethics (because in the house of friends, where Borchardt is the doctor and a child had died of scarlet fever, Gumpert had expressed his surprise and astonishment that Borchardt should have allowed the other children and their friends to view the body — Borchardt has ‘grounds’ for declaring scarlet fever non-contagious) — and Gumpert has brought the case before the medical society here, whereby he has little to gain, however, since the committee consists of nothing but jackasses, a fact which he should, of course, have considered earlier.

When will the young married couple return, and have you found an apartment?

Best greetings to all.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 20;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 30 April 1868

Dear Fred,

For the case under discussion it is immaterial whether m (the surplus value) is quantitatively > or< than the surplus value created in the given branch of production itself. E.g., if 100m/(400c+100v) = 20%, and this becomes, owing to a fall in the value of money by 1/10, = 110m/(400c+100v) (assuming that the value of the constant capital sinks), it is immaterial if the capitalist producer pockets only half of the surplus value which he himself produces. For the rate of profit for him then = 55m/(400c+110v) > than the former. I retain m here in order to show qualitatively in the expression itself where the profit comes from.

But it is proper that you should know the method by which the rate of profit is developed. I shall therefore give you the process in the most general outline. In Book II, as you know, the process of circulation of capital is presented on the basis of the premisses developed in Book I. I.e. the new determinations of form which arise from the process of circulation, such as fixed and circulating capital, turnover of capital, etc. Finally, in Book I we content ourselves with the assumption that when, in the valorisation process, £100 becomes £110, it finds the elements into which it is converted anew already in existence in the market. But now we investigate the conditions under which these elements are to be found in existence, that is to say, the social intertwining of the different capitals, of parts of capital and of revenue (=m).

In Book III we then come to the conversion of surplus value into its different forms and separate component parts.

I. Profit is for us, for the time being, only another name for or another category of surplus value. As, owing to the form of wages, the whole of labour appears to be paid for, the unpaid part of it seems necessarily to come not from labour but from capital, and not from the variable part of capital but from the total capital. As a result, surplus value assumes the form of profit, without there being any quantitative difference between the one and the other. It is only an illusory manifestation of surplus value.

Further, the part of capital consumed in the production of a commodity (the capital, constant and variable, advanced for its production, minus the utilised but not consumed part of fixed capital) now appears as the cost price of the commodity, since for the capitalist that part of the value of the commodity that it costs him is its cost price, while the unpaid labour contained in the commodity does not enter into its cost price, from his point of view. The surplus value = profit now appears as the excess of the selling price of the commodity over its cost price. Let us call the value of the commodity W and its cost price K; then W= K+m, therefore W-m = K, therefore W > K. This new category, cost price, is very necessary for the details of the later analysis. It is evident from the outset that the capitalist can sell a commodity at a profit below its value (as long as he sells it above its cost price), and this is the fundamental law for comprehending the equalisations effected by competition.

Therefore, while profit is at first only formally different from surplus value, the rate of profit is, by contrast, at once really different from the rate of surplus value, for in one case we have m/v and in the other m/(c+v), from which it follows from the outset, since m/v > m/(c+v), that the rate of profit < than the rate of surplus value, unless c=0.

In view of what has been developed in Book II, it follows, however, that we cannot compute the rate of profit on the commodity product of any period we select, e.g. that of a week, but that m/(c+v) denotes here the surplus value produced during the year in relation to the capital advanced during the year (as distinct from the capital turned over). Therefore, m/(c+v) stands here for the annual rate of profit.

Then we shall first examine how variations in the turnover of capital (partly depending on the relation of the circulating to the fixed portions of capital, partly on the number of times the circulating capital turns over in a year, etc., etc.) modify the rate of profit while the rate of surplus value remains the same.

Now, taking the turnover as given, and m/(c+v) as the annual rate of profit, we examine how the latter can change, independently of changes in the rate of surplus value, and even of its total amount.

Since m, the total amount of surplus value, = the rate of surplus value multiplied by the variable capital, then, if we call the rate of surplus value r and the rate of profit p’, p'= r.v/(c+v) .Here we have the 4 quantities p', r, v, c with any 3 of which we can work, always seeking the 4th as unknown. This covers all possible cases of movements in the rate of profit, in so far as they are distinct from the movements in the rate of surplus value and, to a certain extent, even in its total amount. This has, of course, hitherto been inexplicable to everybody.

The laws thus found — very important, e.g., for understanding how the price of the raw material influences the rate of profit — hold good no matter how the surplus value is later divided among the producer, etc. This can only change the form of appearance. Moreover, they remain directly applicable if m/(c+v) is treated as the relation of the socially produced surplus value to the social capital.

II. What were treated in I as movements, whether of capital in a particular branch of production or of social capital — movements changing its composition, etc. — are now conceived as differences of the various masses of capital invested in the different branches of production.

Then it turns out that, assuming the rate of surplus value, i.e. the exploitation of labour, as equal, the production of value and therefore the production of surplus value and therefore the rate of profit are different in different branches of production. But from these varying rates of profit a mean or general rate of profit is formed by competition. This rate of profit, expressed absolutely, can be nothing but the surplus value produced (annually) by the capitalist class in relation to the total of social capital advanced. E.g., if the social capital = 400c+100v, and the surplus value annually produced by it = 100m, the composition of the social capital = 80c+20v, and that of the product (in percentages) = 80c+20v | +20m = 20% rate of profit. This is the general rate of profit.

What the competition among the various masses of capital — invested in different spheres of production and differently composed — is striving for is capitalist communism, namely that the mass of capital employed in each sphere of production should get a fractional part of the total surplus value proportionate to the part of the total social capital that it forms.

This can only be achieved if in each sphere of production (assuming as above that the total capital = 80c+20v and the social rate of profit= 20m/(80c+20v)) the annual commodity product is sold at cost price + 20% profit on the value of the capital advanced (it is immaterial how much of the advanced fixed capital enters into the annual cost price or not). But this means that the price determination of the commodities must deviate from their values.

Only in those branches of production where the percentual composition of capital is 80c+20v will the price K (cost price) + 20% on the capital advanced coincide with the value of the commodities. Where the composition is higher (e.g. 90c + 10v), the price is above their value; where the composition is lower (e.g. 70c+30v), the price is below their value.

The price thus equalised, which divides up the social surplus value equally among the various masses of capital in proportion to their sizes, is the price of production of commodities, the centre around which the oscillation of the market prices moves.

Those branches of production which constitute a natural monopoly are exempted from this equalisation process, even if their rate of profit is higher than the social rate. This is important later for the development of rent.

In this chapter, there must be further developed the various causes of equalisation of the various capital investments, which appear to the vulgar conception as so many sources of profit.

Also to be developed: the changed form of manifestation that the previously developed and still valid laws of value and surplus value assume now, after the transformation of values into prices of production.

III. The tendency of the rate of profit to fall as society progresses. This already follows from what was developed in Book I on the change in the composition of capital with the development of the social productive power. This is one of the greatest triumphs over the pons asini of all previous political economy.

IV. Until now we have only dealt with productive capital. Now there enters modification through merchant capital.

According to our previous assumption the productive capital of society = 500 (millions or billions, n'importe). And the formula was 400c+ 100v | + 100m. The general rate of profit, p’, = 20%. Now let the merchant capital=100.

So, the 100m has now to be calculated on 600 instead of 500. The general rate of profit is thus reduced from 20% to 16 2/3%. The price of production (for the sake of simplicity we will assume here that all of the 400c, i.e. the whole fixed capital, enters into the cost price of the annual output of commodities) now = 583 1/3. The merchant sells at 600 and therefore realises, if we ignore the fixed portion of his capital, 16 2/3% on his 100, as much as the productive capitalists; or, in other words, he appropriates 1/6 of the social surplus value. The commodities — en masse and on a social scale — are sold at their value. His £100 (apart from the fixed portion) only serve him as circulating money capital. Whatever the merchant swallows over and above that, he gets either simply by trickery, or by speculation on the oscillation of commodity prices, or, in the case of the actual retailer, as wages for labour — wretched unproductive labour that it is — in the form of profit.

V. We have now reduced profit to the form in which it appears in practice, according to our assumptions 16 2/3%. Next comes the division of this profit into entrepreneur’s gain and interest. Interest-bearing capital. The credit system.

VI. Transformation of surplus profit into rent.

VII. At last we have arrived at the forms of manifestation which serve as the starting point in the vulgar conception: rent, coming from the land; profit (interest), from capital; wages, from labour. But from our standpoint things now look different. The apparent movement is explained. Furthermore, A. Smith’s nonsense, which has become the main pillar of all political economy hitherto, the contention that the price of the commodity consists of those three revenues, i.e. only of variable capital (wages) and surplus value (rent, profit (interest)), is overthrown. The entire movement in this apparent form. Finally, since those 3 items (wages, rent, profit (interest)) constitute the sources of income of the 3 classes of landowners, capitalists and wage labourers, we have the class struggle, as the conclusion in which the movement and disintegration of the whole shit resolves itself.

Our young couple back again since last week, very love-sick. Apartment for them near Primrose Hill, where they moved in this evening.

Enclosed letters from Kugelmann, etc. I have sent Schily what he wanted, but not in the childish way he requested. In a few days I shall be 50. As that Prussian lieutenant said to you: ‘20 years of service and still lieutenant’, I can say: half a century on my shoulders, and still a pauper. How right my mother was: ‘If only Karell had made capital instead of etc.'

Salut.

Your

K. Marx

Of carbuncles only a very small trace on the right thigh, but will probably vanish without trace.

Ernest Jones has made a fool of himself by his lukewarm and nisi prius way of defending Burke. Burke has at least won a victory in forcing the old jackass Bramwell to abandon the hypocrisy of temper, and allowing his mean dog’s soul to rampage free of carrière.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 26;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931. Marx’s note appended to the letter was first published in: Marx and Engels, Works; Second Russian Edition, Moscow, 1964.

London, 4 May 1868

Dear Fred,

This morning I received enclosed letter and cutting from Schweitzer. Since he addresses himself to me as workers’ representative of one of the most industrial districts, I must naturally reply.

My view is that the Germans can stand a reduction of the protective tariff on pig iron and that the manufacturers of other articles are also exaggerating their howls. This view is based upon a comparison of the English and German exports to neutral markets. Enclosed, by way of example, a note on exports to Belgium.

At the same time, in my opinion, the point is to exploit this question in the interests of the party, without, however, procuring any new reliefs to the English.

My proposal would therefore be:

1. No reduction of tariffs before a parliamentary enquête into the state of the German iron-mining production and iron manufacture. This enquête should not, however, be confined, as the bourgeois gentlemen desire, simply to chambers of commerce and experts but should, at the same time, include the workers’ conditions in these branches; all the more so since Messrs manufacturers are ‘demanding’ the protective tariffs solely ‘for the protection’ of the workers, and have in addition discovered that ‘the value of iron’ consists only ‘of wages and freight’.

2. No reduction of tariffs before an enquête into how the railways misuse their monopoly, and before their freight (and passenger) tariffs are controlled by legal regulations.

I would like your view immediately, and also immediate return of the enclosures.

Very nice that your home-town chamber of commerce should bemoan the growing power and menace of the International Working Men’s Association.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 28;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 6 May 1868

Dear Moor,

I congratulate anyhow on the half saeculum [century], from which incidentally, I am also only a short span away. Indeed, what juvenile enthusiasts we were 25 years ago when we boasted that by this time we would long have been beheaded.

Enclosed returning Kugelmann, Büchner, Schily, Reclus, Schweitzer and the Elberfelder Zeitung, and additionally something on your book which Siebel’s wife sent me; he appears to be no longer capable of writing, is in Barmen and going to Godesberg.

The profit story is very nice, but I shall have to think it over further in order to grasp the portée in all its aspects.

Ad vocem Schweitzer. The rascal is utilising this business simply as an inducement to make us take the bait again. Of course, it does not matter that you give him information this time, but principiis obsta [beware the first step]. Don’t let the fellow catch your little finger lest he make an attempt on your whole hand. On the subject itself, I have no doubt at all that the German iron industry could dispense with the protective tariff, a majore, therefore, could also stand the reduction of the tariff on pig iron from 7½ groschen to 5 groschen per hundredweight (from 15s. to 10s. per ton), and the other reductions likewise. The export of iron is increasing every year, and not only to Belgium. This would bring ruin to a few ironworks established during the wave of speculation in the 50s, situated a long way from the coal and otherwise based on insufficient, poor pits. But these are for the most part already kaputt, and the vicinity of a railway would be more use to them than any protective tariff if they should ever become viable again. (There is one like this in Engelskirchen, 500 paces from my brothers’ factory — the coal has to be brought from Siegburg, 2½ German miles, by wagon — no wonder it lies idle. This sort of works cries out for protective tariff, and is cited as proof that it is necessary.)

The Elberfeld-Barmen Chamber of Commerce is the nastiest protective tariff institution there is, and notorious for it. Even though the main industry of the district is aimed at export. However, there are always a lot of trades in decline there, hence the lamentations.

For the rest, your plan about the enquête is rather good, and I like it very much. As far as railways go, the freight charges in Germany are lower than elsewhere, and, since goods traffic is the main thing in Germany, this could not be otherwise. They could be pushed still lower, and the governments have the power to do it, but what is most necessary is greater centralisation and equalisation in administration and freight charges, and constitutionally this is a matter for the Reichstag. By and large, the iron-chaps have no cause to yell about high freights.

Liebknecht has sent me the trades regulations, on which I have promised him some critical comments. Progress compared to the regression under Frederick William IV, but what bureaucratic confusion. I am sending you the stuff for the fun of it.

Yesterday the inevitable Leibel Choras arrived and prevented me writing. I asked him about the persecution of Jews in Moldavia; he wailed a bit, but it does not appear to be all that bad: we have to bear it, we Jews do not have the power; he would like to be Russian or Austrian, but it does not occur to him to leave. The Hohenzollern is a stupid boy, and the government in the hands of the ‘clerks’ (boyars in reduced circumstances playing at bureaucracy) and they squeeze the Jews so.

Many greetings to your wife, the girls and Monsieur and Madame Lafargue.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 30;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 7 May 1868

Dear Fred,

Best thanks for your marginal notes. I have included them in the letter to Schweitzer as far as necessary. My letter is so coolly phrased that it will not be ‘shown around’.

Now I would like to ask you for information on another subject. However, you can postpone this if it should interrupt the work for the Fortnightly, which is urgent.

The point is that I would like to link up with Volume I in the examples given in Volume II.

In order to use the data on your factory given on p. 186 completely sufficient to illustrate the rate of surplus value — for the rate of profit; the following would be necessary:

1. The missing data on the capital advanced for the factory building and the percentage of the sinking fund for this. Ditto warehouse. In both cases, the rent should be given, if paid. Also the office costs and costs of staff for the warehouse.

With regard to the steam engine, no data is given on the percentage at which the weekly wear and tear is calculated, and therefore the capital advanced for the steam engine is not visible either.

2. Now the real question. How do you calculate the turnover of the circulating part of capital (i.e. raw material, auxiliary materials, wages)? How great then is the circulating capital advanced? I would like to receive this answered in detail even illustrated, particularly the turnover calculation of the circulating capital advanced.

Tomorrow I shall send you the crazy Urquhart for your amusement.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 38;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 23 May 1868

Dear Fred,

It appears to me that you are on the wrong track with your fear of presenting such simple formulas as M — C — M, etc. to the English review philistines. On the contrary. If you were forced, as I am, to read the economic articles of Messrs Lalor, Herbert Spencer, Macleod, etc., in The Westminster Review, etc., you would see that all of them are fed up with the economic trivialities — and know their readers are fed up, too — so they try to give their scribblings some flavour through pseudo-philosophical or pseudo-scientific slang. The pseudo-character in no way makes the writing (content = 0) easy to understand. On the contrary. The trick lies in so mystifying the reader and causing him to rack his brain, that he may finally be relieved to discover that these hard words are only fancy dress for loci communes. [platitudes] Add to this that the readers of the Fortnightly and The Westminster Review flatter themselves that they are the longest heads of England (let alone the rest of the world, naturally). Even apart from that, if you had seen what Mr James Hutchinson Stirling dares to present to the public as The Secret of Hegel, not only in books but also in reviews, — Hegel himself would not understand it — you would realise — Mr J. H. Stirling is regarded as a great thinker — that you are really being too timid. People demand something new, new in form and content.

Since you want to start with Chapter II (you must not, however, forget to draw the reader’s attention somewhere to the fact that in Chapter I he will find a new treatment of that value and money stuff) the following should, in my opinion, be used for the beginning, naturally in the form agreeable to you.

In his investigations into currency Th. Tooke underlines that money in its function as capital flows back to its starting point (reflux of money to its point of issue), but in its function simply as currency does not flow back. This distinction, noted by Sir James Steuart, among others, long before Tooke, serves the latter simply for a polemic against what the preachers of the currency principle claim to be the influence the issue of credit money (banknotes, etc.) exercises upon commodity prices. Our author, however, makes this peculiar form of circulation of money which functions as capital (‘serve in the function of capital’, A. Smith) the starting point for his investigation into the nature of capital itself, and in the first place for an answer to the question: How is money, this independent form of value, converted into capital? (‘Conversion into Capital’ the official expression.)

All sorts of businessmen, says Turgot ‘have in common that they buy to sell ... their purchases are an advance which returns to them’. Buying to sell, this is in fact the transaction in which money functions as capital, and which conditions its reflux to its point of issues in distinction to selling to buy, where it need only function as currency. The differing sequence of the acts of selling and buying imposes upon money two different circulation movements. What is hidden behind this is the different behaviour of the value itself expressed in money form. To illustrate this, the author gives the following formulas, etc., etc., for the two different circulation movements.

I believe that you will make the matter easier for yourself and the reader by quoting the formulas.

I shall reply later to the other points of your letter. Of the carbuncles there remains only one, also soon finished. Last Wednesday I gave a lecture (about 5/4 of an hour) on wages (especially the form of the same) to about 100 German picked workers. I was very unwell that day, and I was advised to telegraph that I could not come. However, this was impossible, since some of the people had come from very distant parts of London. So I went there. The business went off very well, and after the lecture I felt better than before.

I have made concessions to my family doctor Lafargue in that I have not yet visited the Museum again. But I have perhaps, during the past weeks, meditated too much at home.

I shall, if possible, come to Manchester with Tussychen at the end of next week (say Saturday). But you will have to send me the money for the fares and some shillings which I shall leave for my wife.

Tussychen, of course, has reminded me of the trip about every day.

Enclosed new Liebknecht stuff.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 42;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 20 June 1868

Dear Fred,

Immediately after my return to London — our trip was marvellous — I found whole bundles of dunning and threatening letters. The people had been turned away with the excuse that I was ‘travelling’. But one might think the electric telegraph had announced my return to these fellows. Si licet parva componere magnis [if one may compare the small with the great], Old Niebuhr (the father of the historian) relates with what speed the facts of the Silesian War travelled from Europe to Asia in no time simply through the telegraphy of people’s tongues. And among creditors this form of natural telegraphy appears to work even more efficiently. Among the bills there are various ones that can scarcely be delayed for one week; the worst, however, is the enclosed scrawl payable on Tuesday, for, if the gas supply is publicly cut off, things will get quite out of control.

Last Tuesday there was a meeting of the International. In the meantime, papers have come into my hands which have made unavoidable a rescinding of the resolutions as to the Congress. D'abord, the declaration by Minister of Justice Bara that the Congress is not permitted to take place in Brussels. Secondly, a printed manifesto of the Committees of Brussels and Verviers in which they throw down the gauntlet to the Minister. Thirdly, letters from De Paepe and Vandenhouten that we would ruin the Association in Belgium by transferring the Congress. This would be interpreted as a concession to the government, etc.

I do not even mention the lousy intrigues of Vésinier, who is now here, and also Pyat, etc. Naturally they have been spreading the rumour that we are working at the dictation of Bonaparte.

They believed that a big scandal was to be expected at this last meeting and therefore sent guests to us. They were very désappointés when I withdrew my Resolutions after reading and referring to the documents, etc. I put the matter thus: The law against the foreigners was in no way a special threat against the International. It was general. The International would, however, have made a concession to the Belgian government if, under such legislation, it had selected Brussels as its meeting place. Now the matter was the other way round. Now that the Belgian government had directly threatened and provoked us we would be making a concession to it if we moved the Congress away from Brussels, etc. At the same time, I made a few very contemptuous jokes about the heroic tone adopted by those who attacked my resolutions (Odger, etc.) before they knew the changed state of circumstances. The only danger that could have been incurred, was that of cheap martyrdom and ridicule. Mrs Law shouted ‘Hear, hear’ for me several times, and showed her support by drumming on the table. Anyhow I managed things so that the laughter turned against Odger, etc., and that the rescinding of the resolutions did not appear as a victory on their part.

The heat is very nasty for me. I shall have Gumpert’s medicine made up for me, since I have ‘puked’ (as Mrs Blind would say) for several consecutive days, despite exemplary abstention from food and drink.

Salut.

Your

K.M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 44;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 22 June 1868

Dear Moor,

In great haste enclosed £10 in one note. Tomorrow I shall send you a further £10, which should help to meet the most urgent and most pressing needs.

The article is coming along well and will certainly be finished this week; I am, however, much more satisfied with the quantitative aspect than the qualitative. A 2nd article will then, I think, complete the whole thing. What do you think of the idea that Lafargue should put his name to it?

More tomorrow.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 45;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 23 June 1868

Dear Fred,

Best thanks for the £10.

Tussychen and Jennychen are both unfortunately very unwell — sore throats and vomiting. If things do not get better today, I shall have to call a doctor. Our Allen suddenly became paralysed a week ago, so he cannot leave his house.

Vésinier is wrangling here in the French Branch against Dupont and Jung, both of whom he brands ‘as Bonapartists’. During my absence he attended a meeting of the Central Council (which he has no right to do) and has written a fantastic report in the Cigale (Brussels paper). The venue of the Congress was just being discussed.

Lafargue cannot possibly sign, since he is a Frenchman, and in addition, my son-in-law. Sign it A. Williams or something of the sort. It would be best if Sam Moore signed.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Yesterday by accident I came across a fine passage in A. Smith. After he had explained that labour the prime cost, etc., and nearly said the right things though with constant contradictions; after he had ditto declared:

‘The profits of stock, it may perhaps be thought, are only a different name for the wages of a particular sort of labour, the labour of inspection and direction. They are, however, altogether different, are regulated by quite different principles, and bear no proportion to the quantity, the hardship, or the ingenuity of this supposed labour of inspection and direction’,

after that he suddenly does an about turn and wants to develop wages, profit, rent, as the ‘component parts of natural price’ (with him = value). Among other things, there is the following fine passage:

‘When the price of any commodity is neither more not less than what is sufficient to pay the rent of the land, the wages of the labour, and the profits of the stock employed in raising, preparing and bringing it to market, according to their natural rates, the commodity is then sold for what may be called its natural price. The commodity is then sold precisely for what it is worth or for what it really costs the person who brings it to market, for though in common language the prime cost of any commoditydoes not comprehend the profit of the person who is to sell it again, yet, if he sells it at a price which does not allow him the ordinary rate of profit in his neighbourhood, he is evidently a loser by the trade, since, by employing his stock in some other way, he might have made that profit.’ [The existence of profit in the ‘neighbourhood’ as an explanation for the same!] ‘His profit, besides, is his revenue the proper fund of his subsistence. As, while he is preparing and bringing the goods to market, he advances to his workmen their wages, or their subsistence, so he advances to himself, in the same manner, his own subsistence, which is generally suitable to the profit which he may reasonably expect from the sale of his goods. Unless they yield him this profit, therefore, they do not repay him what they may very properly be said to have cost him’.

This second manner of pressing the profit into the prime cost — because already consumed — is really fine.

The same man, in whom the organs of pissing and generation also coincide mentally, stated previously:

‘As soon as stock has accumulated in the hands of particular persons the value which the workmen add to the materials resolves itself into two parts of which the one pays their wages, the other the profits of their employer upon the whole stock of materials and wages which he advanced.'

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 46;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 24 June 1868

Dear Moor,

Enclosed S/K 60 115 and 60 116 — two fivers. Yesterday I had such a fuss because of the building work in the Schiller Institute that I left the warehouse without sending them to you and had not a moment until it was too late. Today again all sorts of things are preventing me from writing to you more fully, if I am not to sacrifice the time which should be devoted to the article this evening; in any case yesterday nothing was done on it.

Regarding the sore throats, be careful. Of course, they are now epidemic and mostly innocent, but since the time when diphtheria became epidemic here it has always been better to consult a doctor quickly so that you know where you are.

Your

F. E.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 24 June 1868

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Friend

I was prevented by all sorts of incidents from writing to you. Even now only a few lines.

My eldest and youngest daughters have both got scarlatina. I remember that in Hanover you spoke to me of the treatment required once the crisis was passed and the scaling-off process begins. Will you be so kind as to write me about it at once.

With best greetings to your dear wife and Fränzchen.

Yours

K Marx

Liebknecht is growing more and more imbecile in his South-German stupidity. He is not enough of a dialectician to criticise both sides at the same time.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 52;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 28 June 1868

Dear Moor,

You lifted a heavy stone from all our hearts with your letter of yesterday. The day before yesterday and even yesterday everybody here in the house was very depressed, but today everybody is merry as a cricket again, and I myself feel quite different.

The article is finished. You are quite right, Sam is the man to sign it. I shall tell him today and at the same time give him the article to look through and to note possible Germanisms. But let me know by return whether I can keep it for a few days more, say, till Wednesday evening; if not, I can send it off on Monday. The second and final article (the first goes up to the conclusion of absolute surplus value) can then be finished by the end of this inst., since I am unlikely to leave here before then, so the two articles can directly follow one another. First I shall send the Zukunft the article about Prussian military nomenclature.

Salut, ô connétable de Saint Pancrace! Now you should get yourself a worthy outfit: a red nightshirt, white nightcap, down-at-the-heel slippers, white pants, a long clay pipe and a pot of porter. Lafargue, as your squire, can invent his uniform himself. As you see, the Pancratian philistines insist that you should sacrifice yourself for the common good. And this year-long, touching attachment which nothing could shake — this you intend to reciprocate with the cold negation of Kiss my — - ? But ‘that’s just like the communists’.

Give Jennychen my heartiest greetings and tell her that since she has now finally had a fever, I would like to have heard her speaking in delirium; there would have been more sense and poetry in it than fat Freiligrath will ever develop. Ditto best greetings to your wife and the two Lafargues.

Your

F. E.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 55;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913.

[Manchester,] 2 July 1868

Dear Moor,

Enclosed the two second halves of the two fivers, S/K 11 185 Manchester, 14 January 1867, S/K 79 542 Manchester, 12 January 1867.

I have written to Borkheim to get himself a new Russian book: Zemlya i volya, Land and Freedom, in which a German Russian, a landowner, shows that since the emancipation of the peasants the Russian peasant is being ruined through communal property, and ditto Russian agriculture — small and large. The book is said to contain much statistical proof. Exchange value has already penetrated too deeply into these primitive communities, so that after the abolition of serfdom the situation no longer appears to be viable.

Tomorrow I hope to receive good news from you again. In the meantime, best greetings for the patients, your wife and the Lafargues.

Your

F. E.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 2 July 1868

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

Best thanks for your letter. The children are getting on well, although they are not yet well enough to go out (today is the ninth day).

As for my book, I received five copies of the Elberfelder-Zeitung yesterday, containing a very benevolent review by Dr Schnake [1] (I know the name from 1848, but do not know him personally). There is a good deal of confusion in his presentation of the matter. On the other hand, I am informed from Berlin that clown Faucher makes merry over my book in the June number of his journal. [2] It is good that the gentlemen at last give vent to their annoyance.

I do not yet know if and when I am coming to Germany. I am at last free of carbuncles.

Engels is certainly going over in August or September.

Salut! And my compliments to Mrs Kugelmann and the little one.

Yours

K Marx

Notes

1. This refers to an article by Friedrich Schnake who in the 1840s was a prominent representative of German ‘true socialism’ and contributed to papers of this tendency in the Rhine district. In the 1860s he was a progressive democrat – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Vierteljahrschrift für Volkswirtschaft und Kulturgeschichte (Quarterly Review of National Economy and the History of Culture). Julius Faucher (1802-1878) – German economist of the free-trade school. For a time Cobden’s personal secretary – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 62;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 7 July 1868

Dear Fred,

The children are progressing well. Yesterday for the first time they were outside for half an hour. The peeling is still very pronounced. Only when this is finished will they be movable.

During the past few days I have been pressed very hard by the baker, cheesemonger, assessed taxes, God and the Devil.

You will recall that the German Workers’ Educational Society here has celebrated the June [1848] Insurrection for about 18 years now. Only in the last few years have the French (their society here now exists as the French Branch of the International) taken part. And the old meneurs [leaders] always stayed away. I mean the petits grands hommes.

But this year, in public meeting, along came Mr Pyat and read out an alleged address of the Paris Commune (this is a euphemism for the identical Pyat, who is in no way inferior to Blind in this line) in which the assassinat of Bonaparte was preached, as it was years ago in his Lettre aux étudians. The French Branch, reinforced by other bawlers, acclaimed this. Vésinier had it printed in Cigale and Espiegle, Belgian papers, and presents Pyat as giving his direction to the ‘International’.

As a result, we get a letter from the Brussels committee, which just at the moment is making great propaganda, under difficult circumstances (Charleroi affair). Contents: This demonstration threatens to wreck the entire Association on the continent. Will the French Branch never move forward from the old demagogic phrases, etc.? etc., etc. It should be remembered that, at this very time, our people are behind bars in Paris. We yesterday issued a declaration (to be printed in Brussels), disavowing any connection between the above-mentioned Pyat and the International.

Indeed I regard the whole affair (naturally based upon the background of the enormous stupidity of the French Branch) as an intrigue of the old parties, the republican jackasses of 1848, especially the petits grands hommes who represent them in London. Our Association is a thorn in their flesh. After trying in vain to work against the Association, the next best thing, of course, is to compromise it. Pyat is just the man to do this de bonne foi. [in good faith] The cleverer ones therefore push him forward.

What could be funnier than this squint-eyed melodrama-writer and Charivari man before 1848, this toastmaster of 1848 who now plays Brutus, but from a safe distance!

The French Branch here will have to be thrown out of the International if it does not put a stop to its asininity. One cannot allow 50 unprincipled louts, round whom loudmouths of all nationalities gather at such public opportunities, to endanger the International Association at a moment when, as a result of conditions on the continent, it is beginning to become a serious power.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 67;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902 and in full in Pisma Marksa h Kugelmanu (Letters of Marx to Kugelmann), Moscow-Leningrad, 1928.

London, 11 July 1868

Dear Friend,

The children are getting on well, though still weak.

Thank you very much for the things you sent. Definitely do not write to Faucher, otherwise this mannequin pisse will feel too important. All he has achieved is that, if a second edition appears, I shall aim a few necessary blows at Bastiat where I speak about the magnitude of value. This wasn’t done before, since the 3rd volume will contain a separate and extensive chapter about the ‘vulgar economy’ gentry. Incidentally, you will find it quite natural that Faucher and consorts derive the ‘exchange value’ of their own scribblings not from the amount of labour power expended, but from the absence of such expenditure, that is from ‘saved labour’. Moreover, the worthy Bastiat did not even himself make this ‘discovery’, so welcome to these gentry, but just ‘cribbed’ it, in his usual manner, from much earlier authors. His sources are of course unknown to Faucher and consorts.

As for the Centralblatt, the man is making the greatest concession possible by admitting that, if value means anything at all, then my conclusions must be conceded. The unfortunate fellow does not see that, even if there were no chapter on ‘value’ at all in my book, the analysis I give of the real relations would contain the proof and demonstration of the real value relation. The chatter about the need to prove the concept of value arises only from complete ignorance both of the subject under discussion and of the method of science. Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour. It is self-evident that this necessity of the distribution of social labour in specific proportions is certainly not abolished by the specific form of social production; it can only change its form of manifestation. Natural laws cannot be abolished at all. The only thing that can change, under historically differing conditions, is the form in which those laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labour asserts itself in a state of society in which the interconnection of social labour expresses itself as the private exchange of the individual products of labour, is precisely the exchange value of these products.

Where science comes in is to show how the law of value asserts itself. So, if one wanted to ‘explain’ from the outset all phenomena that apparently contradict the law, one would have to provide the science before the science. It is precisely Ricardo’s mistake that in his first chapter, on value, all sorts of categories that still have to be arrived at are assumed as given, in order to prove their harmony with the law of value.

On the other hand, as you correctly believe, the history of the theory of course demonstrates that the understanding of the value relation has always been the same, clearer or less clear, hedged with illusions or scientifically more precise. Since the reasoning process itself arises from the existing conditions and is itself a natural process, really comprehending thinking can always only be the same, and can vary only gradually, in accordance with the maturity of development, hence also the maturity of the organ that does the thinking. Anything else is drivel.

The vulgar economist has not the slightest idea that the actual, everyday exchange relations and the value magnitudes cannot be directly identical. The point of bourgeois society is precisely that, a priori, no conscious social regulation of production takes place. What is reasonable and necessary by nature asserts itself only as a blindly operating average. The vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, faced with the disclosure of the intrinsic interconnection, he insists that things look different in appearance. In fact, he prides himself in his clinging to appearances and believing them to be the ultimate. Why then have science at all?

But there is also something else behind it. Once interconnection has been revealed, all theoretical belief in the perpetual necessity of the existing conditions collapses, even before the collapse takes place in practice. Here, therefore, it is completely in the interests of the ruling classes to perpetuate the unthinking confusion. And for what other reason are the sycophantic babblers paid who have no other scientific trump to play except that, in political economy, one may not think at all!

But satis superque. [enough and more than enough] In any case, it shows the depth of degradation reached by these priests of the bourgeoisie: while workers and even manufacturers and merchants have understood my book and made sense of it, these ‘learned scribes’ (!) complain that I make excessive demands on their comprehension.

I would not advise reprinting Schweitzer’s articles, though Schweitzer has made a good job of them for his paper.

You would oblige me if you sent me a few issues of the Staats-Anzeiger.

You should be able to get Schnacke’s address by enquiring at the Elberfelder.

Best greetings to your wife and Fränzchen.

Yours

K. M.

Apropos. I have received an article by Dietzgen about my book; I am sending it to Liebknecht.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 74;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

[London,] 29 July 1868

Dear Fred,

I hope that the business with your eye is nothing serious. Small blood vessels will burst now and then, without any particular consequence. Have you consulted Gumpert about it?

Unfortunately, the household will only go to the sea next week. And that is because of the Lafargue family, who wanted to join in and rent a lodging, etc., together. Because of Lafargue’s ties with his hospital (where he has been operating for weeks as house surgeon) the departure has been delayed from day to day, despite my curses, threats and shouts, so that now it is to take place at the beginning of next week, when my wife will go OFF with the rest, and Laura of course arguing that she will soon part completely from the family, etc. Tussy (highly delighted by your letter, I believe, she knows par coeur your 6 letters to her) is hale and hearty again. Not so Jennychen, who is also worrying about all sorts of things, etc. If I had made up my mind where on the continent I could just now depend with certainty upon a loan (especially since I would, if necessary, have your guarantee), I would cross over and take Jennychen with me. But this is perhaps the best time of the year to find nobody at home.

There have been all sorts of scandals here relating to Pyat, French Branch and General Council. On this tomorrow. Today only this. Schweitzer in his 2nd programme for the congress of the General Association of German Workers in Hamburg has an item about the International Working Men’s Association and another about my book. [Capital] The programme was printed in the Zukunft and elsewhere. On the other hand, A. Bebel, as president of the Workers’ Union meeting in Nuremberg, has sent an invitation to the General Council. We should send a delegate (Eccarius will go). That they will join the International Working Men’s Association and adopt our programme is already certain, he says. Finally, we have received an invitation from Vienna where the Austrian workers’ fraternal festival will be held, also at the beginning of September. We have sent to Fox, who is in Vienna, the authorisation to represent us there.

About the private negotiations between Wilhelmchen and Schweitzer I know no more than the former writes. Yet I know from another source that the influence of that cunning fox Schweitzer has grown to the same extent as Wilhelmchen has discredited himself among the workers by his over-close alliance with the South German provincial pettifoggers. It was evidently for this reason that Wilhelm found it necessary to set up a sort of cartel with Schweitzer, who is at present inside and who, moreover, was clever enough to have his title of nobility revoked by the Prussian court ‘for lèse-majesté’. As far as I am concerned — I mean as member of the General Council — I must conduct myself impartially between the various organised groups of workers. It is their business and not mine whom they have as leader. As Secretary for Germany I must answer all those who apply to me in their official capacity as presidents, etc., of workers’ groups. In this sense, I have also written to Schweitzer (always with an eye to the possible publication of the entire correspondence). Faced with the intrigues of the old ’48 democrats here, it was, however, high time to be able to display influence among the German workers in Germany.

That you, poor devil, with your sore eye, should also have to water the Gartenlaube — and in this weather, too — really cries to the heavens.

My comments are confined to:

Page 2 where I have put 1 x). The fact was actually this! For us the government sent, instead of the city censor, a special fellow from Berlin (Mr von St. Paul, etc.). When even this did not help, yet another tier of censorship, that of the Regierungspräsident of Cologne, was added. Finally, the Berlin cabinet, driven wild, issued a sort of manifesto against us, apprising the world of all our offences, and concluding with the announcement that at the end of the quarter they would shut up our shop. I resigned because the shareholders — even if in vain, as it later turned out — tried to negotiate with the Prussian government.

Page 3 (2x). It would perhaps be good to add here for the benefit of the philistines that the provisional government had invited me in writing to return to France.

Ditto page 3 (x3). You might add for the benefit of the democratic philistines that the Prussians expelled me par ordre du Muphti, after they had failed in the law courts.

Finally, would it not be better, instead of the title: ‘A German Political Economist’, to have: ‘A German Socialist'? Both are ‘hideous’, but the former probably more so.

More tomorrow about affairs here.

Salut.

Your

Moor

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 78;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

[London,] 4 August 1868

Dear Fred,

How is your eye?

You will probably have received the Eichhoff stuff. In the Zukunft there are ‘Economic Letters’ singing the praises of my book. [Capital] In fact these letters are largely cribbed from the book. In the Social-Demokrat the Executive of the General Association of German Workers is urged by the presidium to invite me as a guest of honour to the congress at Hamburg at the end of August.

A few days ago I wrote to Meissner to find out at last where and how.

Kugelmann has written me a few lines saying that the chamber of commerce and the polytechnical school in Hanover have ordered a number of copies of my book.

In the meantime, I am really more bothered by private economy or, as the English say, domestic economy, than by political economy. My landlord has dunned me and, unfortunately for me, is staying for some time at London. I have also been forced to sign diverse smaller bills of exchange, etc.

The filthy French branch has created a fine scandal for us. The Pyatists have published a blâme [censure] of the conseil général in the Cigale. Their channel was the infamous Vésinier. We ignored this vote of censure and simply passed a l'ordre du jour. There followed a meeting of the French Branch where there were fisticuffs. Dupont, Jung, Lafargue, Johannard, Lassassie and various others have quit this gang of scoundrels. This rabble now amounts to a total of perhaps 15 persons, although they confront us as the ‘souveraineté du peuple’. We are ‘des endormeurs’, ‘des ambitieux’, etc. Apart from the little bit of scandal which these Splegelbergs are making in that obscure Belgian paper, they are naturally nowhere. Nothing is more grotesque than the way in which this mob play Jacobin Club.

Apropos. Moses’ article has, after all, turned up. It is in the hands of Massol, who will print it shortly in his Morale indépendante, now that this has changed its skin to become a political journal. Reclus will ditto wade in with his Coopération now that this ditto has be-butterflied itself into a political paper.

My wife went to Ramsgate in advance on Monday to prepare the quarters. The gang will follow tomorrow.

Lafargue is only free from tomorrow. In the meantime, he has been operating like mad as assistant to the home surgeon of St. Bartholomew’s. Yesterday, e.g., from 9 in the morning until 11 in the evening. Woe to the corpus vile of male or female kind on which he gets his practice.

Best greetings from Tussy to you and Lizzy. The child declares to all and sundry that she is ready to emigrate to Manchester. Meanwhile she is teased here with the nickname ‘The poor neglected nation’.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

How do you translate gravel as distinct from sand and flint? And how peat as distinct from bog? Incidentally, there are perhaps 6 further different names for what are, more or less, nuances of peat-ground in the ‘Poor neglected Country’.

Finally, how do you manage to live in this heat? I would like best to hang on a tree in the air.

P. S. Now, when the Germans will join the ‘International Workingmen’s Association’ en masse, with the Association, for the time being, filling out at least the boundaries of its main territory — though it is still thin on the ground — my plan is that the General Council should move to Geneva for the next year and that we should function here only as the Britannic Council. It appears a shrewd move to me if the proposal comes from us. At the same time, it will show the jackasses in Paris, etc., that we are in no way anxious for this pleasant dictatorship. Qu'en penses tu?

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 10 August 1868

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

On receiving your letter I did what I could, but in vain. At the moment it is impossible to get money for foreign strikes from the unions here. I find the variety of information about the Lindon factory contained in the Hanoverian papers finally sent to me very interesting.

My family is at present at the seaside which was the more necessary as both the girls were very weak after their illness. Lafargue, after having passed his surgery examinations here in London, will perform operations in a hospital as assistant surgeon for a few weeks and then move to Paris, where he still has to take the French medical examinations.

At the moment I am more concerned with private than with public economy. Engels has offered to guarantee a loan of £100 – £150 for me at five per cent interest, the first half to be paid in January, the second in July. Up to the present, however, I have not been able to find the lender.

I hope very much that the state of my work will permit me to leave London for good and go to the Continent next year, at the end of September. I shall break away as soon as I can dispense with the Museum here. The dearness of living here is becoming more and more burdensome as time goes on. It is true that the pettiness of conditions over there is not much to my taste. However, ‘Ruhe ist die erste Bürgerpflicht’ [1] and it is the only way of attaining peace. There are all sorts of scandals here concerning the so-called French branch of the International Working-Men’s Association, about which I shall report in my next letter.

I am now solus [2] and it seems strange to be without all the noise of the children.

Salut

Yours

K Marx

Notes

1. ‘To keep the peace is the first duty of the citizen.’ From a proclamation posted in Berlin, 17 October 1806, after the battle of Jena, which began with the words ‘The King has lost a battle’, and continued as above – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Alone – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 89;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 26 August 1868

Dear Fred,

Still no ‘supplies’ from Germany. It is, of course, idiotic to depend completely upon half-promises. But if you are drowning you clutch at every straw. On Friday the bill of exchange for £12, about which I wrote to you, is due. Since nothing had arrived by today, and to have no protest in the house, I just visited my baker, who told me he could ‘perhaps’ get the money by tomorrow evening, but only for a few days. At the same time, I have received the enclosed scrawl from My landlord. That everything should happen to one just at this time. It is enough to drive one mad.

Bring me back or send me the screed by Becker. His theoretical-political-economic criticisms of Lassalle have been copied from your pamphlet on the military question.

This Becker has done us a great service with his Seileriana. He deserves to be Lassalle’s ‘testamentary successor’.

The invitation which I received to the congress of the General Association of German Workers (Hamburg, 22-25 August) is signed by Schweitzer as President and by more than 20 workers from different districts of Germany (members of the Executive Committee). I had to take the latter into consideration in my reply. I explained that I could not come because of the work of the Central Council of the International Working Men’s Association, and said I was glad to see that the starting points of any ‘serious’ workers’ movement — agitation for complete political freedom, regulation of the working day and international co-operation of the working class — were emphasised in their programme for the congress. That is to say, in other words, I congratulated them on having abandoned Lassalle’s programme. Whether they will notice the point remains to be seen. Schweitzer, the only man with brains in the whole Lassalle gang, will certainly detect it. But whether he will think it advisable to show this or to pretend to be dense, nous verrons.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Georg Eccarius and Friedrich Lessner

In Brussels

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 93;

First published: in Deutsche Worte, 1898.

London, 10 September 1868

Dear Eccarius and Lessner,

First, my thanks to Lessner for his long and interesting letter.

You must not allow the congress to last beyond this week.

Until now — as far as England is concerned — there has been nothing to discredit it.

If the Belgians and French should once again place masses of new stuff on the agenda, let them know it will not do, since

1. the Germans are very poorly represented, as their congresses are being held almost simultaneously in Germany;

2. England is almost not represented because of the suffrage movement;

3. the German Swiss are not yet represented at all, since they have only just affiliated, and those branches long in existence have exhausted their funds in the Geneva strike;

4. the discussions are being conducted one-sidedly, in French;

5. therefore, decisions on general theoretical questions must be avoided, since this can only lead to protests later from the non-Belgians and non-French.

The public is naturally interested mainly in the question of war.

Pompous declamations and high-faluting phrases do no harm here.

The decision to be taken in this connection would seem to be simply that the working class is not yet sufficiently organised to throw any decisive weight onto the scales; that, however, the congress protests in the name of the working class, and denounces those who instigate war; that a war between France and Germany is a civil war, ruinous for both countries and for Europe as a whole. A statement that war could only benefit the Russian government can hardly be made acceptable to the French and Belgian gentlemen.

Greetings to friend Becker.

K. Marx

If the question of crédit mutuel is raised, Eccarius should simply declare that the workers in England, Germany and the United States have nothing to do with Proudhonist dogmas and consider the credit question to be of secondary importance.

The resolutions of the congress should be telegraphed to the London newspapers. So don’t do anything discreditable.

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 95;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 12 September 1868

Dear Fred,

Luckily the congress ends today and up to Thursday — that is as far as the news goes — it had only compromised itself tolerably. But one must always fear some public disgrace, since the Belgians form the enormous majority. Mr Tolain and other Parisians want to have the General Council moved to Brussels. They are very jealous of London. It is a great step forward that the Proudhonist ‘braves Belges’ and French, who dogmatically declaimed against trades unions, etc., in Geneva (1866) and Lausanne (1867), are now most fanatically in favour. In spite of all their boasting, the ‘braves Belges’ had made no preparations. For example, the correspondent of The Daily News hunted in vain for 3 days for the possible meeting place until he accidentally ran into Jung and Stepney. In fact, the premises had not been booked in advance, and the ‘braves Belges’ wanted to charge the expenses (among others, those for their 250 participants) to the London General Council, to which they and the French owe about 3,000 frs. The sum is now being raised by private collections among the delegates.

I am in a bad scrape. Laura has fallen sick since you were here, and my wife was forced to borrow £10 from her simply to meet the extra expenses, as we are absolutely broke.

I have heard nothing at all from Holland and must therefore regard the silence as intentional. I really do not know what to do.

Apropos. It was a good thing that we changed the word convicts into victims.

On the return of Shaw — who was sent at Moore’s expense — the latter will receive his receipt.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Sigfrid Meyer

In New York

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 96;

First published: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Moscow, 1934.

London, 14 September 1868

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill

Dear Meyer,

Enclosed the issue of The Times containing the 4th Annual Report of the General Council (written by me), and the very interesting Times first leader on this document. This is the first time that it has abandoned its tone of moquerie about the working class, and taken it ‘verry’ au sérieux. Spread this around. Inform Jessup of this.

I must reply to both your letters, the first to me and the 2nd to Eccarius, which was handed me in his absence (he has not yet returned from Brussels).

As far as the first letter is concerned, it is your fault if Sorge (who is completely unknown to me) has received credentials. If you wanted simply to give him a recommendation for a particular purpose, you should have written so clearly. The way you put it in your letter, I believed that Sorge was your and A. Vogt’s man. So be more careful in future. Then you made the second mistake of giving the credentials to Sorge, instead of writing to me first about the misunderstanding!

The mistake has been made, but it is not irreparable.

The Brussels Congress has once again allotted the General Council to London. But it is now to be regarded as a new Council, which revises all old credentials. So write to me whether you and A. Vogt want credentials. Write, too, in which manner we should withdraw Sorge’s credentials or, alternatively, inform him that the new General Council has changed the credentials.

Drury was here for a while. Recently, shortly before the Brussels Congress, he was proposed as authorised agent of the International Workingmen’s Association to the American Labor Union and its congress. We did not agree to this at the time, since the source of the suggestion appeared suspicious to us. Please observe the man more closely first, either yourself or through friends.

No copies remain of the Commonwealth paper. For the past few years there have not been any agitational writings in our sense in England. My book has not yet been translated into English. Eccarius, otherwise very capable, but at the same time very ambitious, has intentionally not mentioned it in The Commonwealth or at other opportunities. He likes to appropriate my propositions for himself. At the congress in Brussels, Lessner mentioned my book in his speech about machinery. The correspondent of The Daily News reported this. Eccarius, who reported the congress sessions for The Times, suppressed it. His conduct is all the more absurd since he owes me not only his knowledge, but also his post as general secretary on the General Council. I alone supported him (at The Commonwealth too) against attacks by the English and French. He relies upon the experience he already has with me, that I am only concerned with the cause, and ignore personal stupidities!

I shall not give him your letter.

The more English excerpts from my book you can get into the American press the better.

Send them to me!

I attach the enclosed card. It was sent to us, with a letter, to establish contact with us. Address: G. W. Randall, Secretary, Workingmen’s Institute, 3 Tremont Row, Room 52, Boston N. E.

I lost contact years ago with all my acquaintances in America. I am still in touch only with Meyer in St. Louis, the friend of our J. Weydemeyer (deceased last year).

Write me all you can find out about the relationship between the railways and real estate.

You may have seen that, at its congress in Hamburg, the General Association of German Workers passed a special resolution giving recognition to my book.

Write to Randall on my behalf as German Secretary of the General Council.

Best greetings to A. Vogt and yourself.

Yours

K. Marx

I am sending 2 copies of The Times, one for you, the other for Jessup.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 100;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 16 September 1868

Dear Engels,

Thanks for the £10. At the end of the letter I shall say more about money matters. First about ‘general items’.

The policy of sending the report solely to The Times has proved itself. It has forced all London newspapers to speak, with the exception of the deeply-indignant Levy. The Times did not accept Eccarius’ reports from Nuremberg. It only took the bait after it had received the report from me. The Morning Advertiser of yesterday carried (upsetting Blind) A first leader in favour of the International against The Times. The Star declares the congress to have been a success, The Standard, which first attacked us, sneaks before the working class in a leading article yesterday. It knocks the capitalists and will now even pull grimaces about the land question. The Journal des Débats regrets that the English and the Germans and the Belgians, as shown by the resolution on the land, belong to the ‘secte communiste’ and that the French, on the other hand, keep on reproducing ‘les déclamations ridicules de Proudhon.’

People are very dissatisfied with Eccarius and next Tuesday a storm will break that will do him good. The points of the indictment are as follows:

He took almost no part at all in the congress and afterwards posed in The Times as the leading mind. Also in The Times, he took over the proposals of the General Council as his private property, and ditto the applause for them as due to him. He suppressed as far as possible the speeches of the others and, to flatter The Times, falsified Dupont’s concluding speech. Apart from this, Lessner has the grievance that when he (Lessner) read from my book, Eccarius suppressed this in The Times, ditto that he only included the resolution on the book in his correspondence under high pressure, and finally that he falsified the German resolution on war. He said that a European war would be a civil war, instead of saying, as the German resolution stated, that ‘a war between France and Germany was a civil war for the profit of Russia’. He completely omits the latter point. On the other hand, he attributes to the Germans and the English the Belgian nonsense that it was necessary to strike against war.

On the other hand, as a reporter he has done us some service. The long and the short of it is that he will be told that he should figure only as reporter in future, with the Council paying his travelling expenses and The Times paying for the articles. But he will never again be named as delegate. Thus preserved from the conflict of fractions.

Lessner says that we accomplished so much despite being so little represented at the congress, which was almost entirely Belgian (with the addition of Frenchmen), because on all decisive points the Belgian workers, notwithstanding their Brussels leaders, voted with London. Moses is said to have made the best speech against the Proudhonists. Tolain was so furious that he did not appear at the banquet. Not only has the Central Council here been appointed once again, but the list of members, purified by us, was accepted. Within four weeks Vésinier is to submit to a commission in Brussels proof of his suspicions regarding Tolain. In case these are baseless (and they are), the congress has already conditionally expelled him from the Association as a slanderer. The delegate of the French Branch tabled a bill of indictment against the General Council which, among other things, contained the modeste demand that the French member of the General Council should be named by the French Branch. In response, the congress simply proceeded with the agenda (exactly as we have treated the grievances of these fellows in the General Council).

At Nuremberg, Liebknecht committed a completely useless stupidity (even one contrary to the Rules) by forcing upon the people Becker’s confused wishy-washy stuff as the Programme of the International Working Men’s Association. Sonnemann remarked correctly that this was a quid pro quo. But Mr Wilhelm wanted to have democratic babble for the ‘People’s Party'!

Meissner wrote a few lines some weeks ago. He would only be able to render an account in some weeks. It appeared to him that up to the present no profit had been made. I am sending him The Times and Liebknecht and the Zukunft today. The advertisement will have to be done by you. I cannot advertise my own book. And it would be a very good thing if you yourself wrote a small popular explanatory pamphlet. Let us hope that things will now get going.

As regards money matters, I simply cannot go on in this way. It makes all work impossible. I believe it would be best if you would write to Borkheim and ask him whether it was not possible to raise money for me somehow since, after paying off the Loan Society and other accumulated debts, I was now in great difficulties because of extra expenses, including trousseau for Laura, who was soon going to Paris. (And this is in fact an aggravating circumstance!) I have studied Borkheim enough to know that he must believe that I have, within certain limits, a settled income, but that I am in particular difficulties because there is as yet no income from the book, etc. He should think that you are writing to him behind my back. Of course, you must give him your guarantee, or rather promise it.

It is a very good thing that Vogt is in England just when the International is arousing such interest. He can put two and two together.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 112;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 25 September 1868

Dear Fred,

By all means do the stuff for Liebknecht as quickly as feasible. Otherwise, the fellow will do it himself and, you may depend upon it, do it badly. It appears to me it would be a good thing if you were also to draw attention to what Bernhard Becker stole from your pamphlet and endorsed, after bitter experience, in his shitty pamphlet. (He cursed us so horribly when he was still ‘President of Humanity’.) You can have the pamphlet right away if you write immediately to Strohn, who took it with him to Bradford.

The time has now come to kick this ‘Lassalleanism’ ‘just for a start’. And there is no need at all to allow B. Becker’s shitty pamphlet to be buried in silence.

The ‘appeal’ the fiery Wilhelmchen speaks of is this: I (i. e. in the name of the International Association, as its Secretary for Germany) must naturally address some general lines to the German workers, now that their relationship to us has changed as a result of their various congress decisions. But no undue haste is necessary in so doing. In all these things ‘more haste, less speed’, and, as we know, our Wilhelmchen has shown no ‘haste’ with the matter for 6-7 years.

Quant à Schweitzer, I had a sort of presentiment that some turning point was looming somewhere. Although my reply to him had therefore been ready for some days — (in which I with schoolmasterly reserve point out to him, in particular, the difference in conditions between a sectarian movement and a real class movement) — I have, nevertheless, held the stuff back. And I will now only answer him after the results are available of his fresh attempt to call a congress in Berlin for forming trades unions. In any case, Schweitzer has learned one thing about me, that the promptness with which I answer his letters is always in inverse proportion to their ‘warmth of feeling’.

Wilhelm has only one copy left of The 18th Brumaire.

How did things go with Vogt’s lectures in the Schiller Institute?

Your

K. M.

Blanqui was in constant attendance during the Brussels Congress.

In a Blue Book about the crisis of 1857, Cardwell, Chairman of the Committee of Inquiry and the most disgusting washerwoman in the Peel-ite clique of old women, asks Dixon (Managing Director of a bank which had failed in Liverpool) whether the Shareholders of the bank had consisted largely of women, parsons and other persons with no knowledge of banking. By no means, Dixon replied, they were mainly ‘Mercantile men’ but, he added very knowingly:

‘The majority of them are people in business, mercantile men, but how far mercantile men can be considered competent to form an opinion on any other business than their own, is rather a question.’

Is that not nice?

Apropos!

Moore should send me Foster’s On Exchange from his lending library, since it is not in the library here. I shall send it back immediately.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 114;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 26 September 1868

Dear Fred,

Best thanks for £5. These lousy little shopkeepers are a wretched class. My wife immediately took the money to the house of the dun. The man himself had ‘made himself scarce’ for the time being (and he is in his way quite a decent fellow); his wife, dripping with tears, accepted the money for him. Many, in fact most, of these shopkeepers experience all the misery of the proletariat, plus the ‘fear’ and ‘serfdom of respectability’, and without the compensating self-esteem of the better workers.

Apropos. The squabble among the authorities of the trades unions, which in fact paralysed them for years, has at last been settled. The London Trades’ Council (Odger et Co.), London Workingmen’s Association (Potter et Co.) and the Amalgamated Trades Unions (I believe the main office is at present Sheffield, it changes annually) have finally agreed on joint action. This is the outcome of the bourgeois campaign against the trades unions.

I return the last numbers of Schweitzer, since you may need them in the article for Wilhelm. Keep them in Manchester, but in such a way that they can be found again if needed. I do not believe that Schweitzer had an idea of the impending blow. Had this been the case he would scarcely have clucked so triumphantly about the ‘tight organisation’. I believe it was the ‘International Workingmen’s Association’ that moved the Prussian government to this decisive blow. As for the ‘warm fraternal’ letter from Schweitzer to me, this is explained simply by his fear that following the Nuremberg decision I might now publicly speak up for Wilhelm and against him. Such a polemic would certainly be awkward after the Hamburg affair (le bonhomme had written to me requesting me kindly to come to Hamburg in person, ‘to have the well-earned laurels placed upon my brow'!).

The most essential thing for the German working class is that it should cease to agitate by permission of the high government authorities. Such a bureaucratically schooled race must undergo a complete course of ‘self help’. On the other hand, they undoubtedly have the advantage that they are starting the movement at a period when conditions are much further developed than they were for the English and that, as Germans, they have heads on their shoulders capable of generalising. Eccarius is full of praise for the parliamentary propriety and tact that reigned at the Nuremberg congress, particularly compared with the French at Brussels.

In Spain things still look doubtful; but it appears to me that the movement can be suppressed only for a short time at the most. One thing I do not understand is that the leaders did not wait until the ‘Innocent Lady’ had left Spain and was visiting Bonaparte. Could it be that the latter himself had a hand in the game?

Salut.

Your

K. M.

One of Schweitzer’s most ridiculous operations — to which, however, he is absolutely forced by the prejudices of his army and as the president of the General Association of German Workers — is that he regularly pledges himself in verba magistri, and each time he makes a new concession to the needs of the real workers’ movement he argues timidly that this does not contradict the dogmas of the Lassallean faith, the only guarantee of eternal salvation. The Hamburg Congress instinctively and quite correctly recognised that the General Association of German Workers, as the specific organisation of the Lassallean sect, was endangered by the real workers’ movement operating through trades unions, etc., and that by participating in these officially it would forfeit the distinctiveness that constitutes its point d'honneur and raison d'être.

Marx To Nikolai Danielson

In Petersburg

Source: MECW, Volume 32, p. 123;

First published: in Minuvshiye gody (Bygone Years), No. 1, St. Petersburg, 1908.

London, 7 October 1868,

1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, N. W.

Dear Sir,

In reply to your esteemed letter, the following:

1. You must not wait for the second volume [of Capital], the publication of which will be delayed by perhaps another 5 months. I cannot finish it until certain official enquêtes, instituted during last year (and 1866) in France, the United States and England, have been completed or published. In any case, Volume I constitutes a whole, complete in itself.

2. Enclosed is my photogram.

3. Socialist literature does not exist in the United States. There are only workers’ papers.

4. I myself possess no collection of my works, which were written in various languages and published in various places. Most of them are out of print.

Since I am unable to meet your request in this respect — la plus belle fille de France ne peut donner que ce qu'elle a [the most beautiful girl in France can only give what she has] — I shall have to confine myself to giving you some brief notes on my literary-political activity, which you might be able to use in the preface to your translation.

Dr K. Marx, born 1818 in Trier (Rhenish Prussia).

1842-43: Redacteur en chef of the Rheinische Zeitung (Cologne). This newspaper is forcibly suppressed by the Prussian government. Marx goes to Paris; publishes there, together with Arnold Ruge, the Deutsch-Französische jahrbiicher (Paris, 1844). At the end of 1844, Marx is expelled from France by Guizot; proceeds to Brussels. Together with Friedrich Engels publishes Die heilige Familie, oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik. Gegen Bruno Bauer und Consorten (Frankfurt am Main, 1845). (This work, like the essays by Marx in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, are directed against the ideological mysticism of Hegelian and, in general, speculative philosophy.) Also published during the stay in Brussels: Misère de la Philosophie. Réponse à la Philosophie de la misère de M. Proudhon (Brussels and Paris, 1847).

Discours sur le libre Échange (Brussels, 1848). Finally, at the beginning of 1848, together with Friedrich Engels: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (London).

Shortly after the outbreak of the February revolution, Marx is expelled from Belgium; receives at the same time from the French provisional government an invitation to return to France; proceeds to Paris and, in April 1848, to Cologne (Germany), publishing there:

Neue Rheinische Zeitung (from June 1848 to May 1849). Also there:

Zwei Politische Prozesse (Cologne, 1849). (Containing the trial proceedings and Marx’s defence speeches at the Assizes. Marx charged on one occasion with insulting the procureur du roi, and on the other, after the Prussian coup d'état (Manteuffel), with inciting rebellion. In both cases Marx acquitted by the jury.)

In the course of May 1849, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung is suppressed by the Prussian government and Marx expelled from Prussia. Proceeds once more to Paris. Again expelled from France; proceeds at the end of October 1849 to London, where he still resides. During his stay there, publishes:

Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-Oekonomische Revue (1850, Hamburg and New York).

Der 18te Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte (New York, 1852).

Enthüllungen über den Kommunisten-Prozess zu Köln (1853, two editions, one in Basle, one in Boston, United States).

Pamphlets Against Lord Palmerston (London Birmingham, Glasgow, 1853-1854).

Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie (Berlin 1859). Herr Vogt (London, 1860).

1851-1861, continuous contributions in English to the New-York Tribune, Putnam’s Revue and The New American Cyclopedia.

1864: The foundation programme of the ‘International Working Men’s Association’, that is: Address to the Working People of Europe and the Rules of the Association, later (1866) definitively sanctioned at the congress of the International Working Men’s Association at Geneva. Marx continuously, up to the present, Member of the General Council of the International Workingmen’s Association, and its Secretary for Germany.

1867: Das Kapital etc.

Yours faithfully,

Karl Marx

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 125;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 8 October 1868

Dear Moor,

I have been terribly plagued with commerce these days, so I can only return the letters today.

Schweitzer is a special case. The fellow is more cunning and more active than all his opponents together, although this time he has certainly been too cunning — according to the Kölnische Zeitung the real workers’ assemblies which are now appearing are everywhere repudiating the presidents imposed upon them by the ‘Congress’, and these self-elected fellows, up to and including Schweitzer, will realise that, as soon as there is real business, these tricks and attempts to impose their sect upon the real movement as a leadership are no longer effective.

As Secretary for Germany you will of course have to correspond with the unions that might be formed, as long as counter-unions are not formed within the individual trades, when a choice would have to be made between the two — or could they both affiliate? In this respect, you will have English precedents. Of importance is only the point that Schweitzer and his people should always be reminded that they are corresponding with the Secretary for Germany, not with Karl Marx, and you will see to this.

The Russian translation [of Volume I of Capital] is very gratifying; as soon as the matter has gone a little further, this should be got into the press.

I have not yet been able to look at the manuscript by Dietzgen.

Gaudissart becomes increasingly amusing. The 30 printed sheets are not dangerous for the time being; since they are supposed to appear simultaneously in 4 languages it will probably still take an eternity. As a Jew he simply cannot stop cheating, and it serves him right that he has burnt his fingers on Biscamp.

Wilhelmchen is not bad either. Regarding the Swabians, it thus appears to be money matters that bind him and his people to the federalists. This should be investigated more closely, afterwards all this will fall on our shoulders. I had drawn his attention to the fact that at a moment when revolutionary action came nearer, it was absolutely against the interests of our Party that our people should be too closely committed to one party in the basically rotten antagonism between Greater Prussia and Austrian-Federalist Greater Germany. The unfortunate fool still cannot see that the entire antithesis with its two sides is a case of narrow-mindedness pure and simple. I thought the Spanish revolution would have made him see some light, but no go.

I have seen no details yet about the course of the Schweitzer congress and its effects, since I only receive the Zukunft late.

Best greetings.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 127;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 10 October 1868

Dear Fred,

Thanks for the £5. I have given Lessner £8. There is, incidentally, a fairly important mistake in his bill which he had, however, corrected before the intervention of my wife.

Enclosed letter from Schweitzer together with a number of the Social-Demokrat which he sent me in the letter. You must return the letter to me by Tuesday, together with your advice. We cannot temporise any longer. So that you knew exactly how matters stand, the following:

For the time being, I have written to Liebknecht that I could take no action, that Schweitzer had hitherto given no official occasion, that an intervention on my part could only consolidate Lassalleanism, etc.

As to Schweitzer, I have not yet answered his previous letter, the dispatch of which he is probably now cursing. Since his Trades Unions Congress was so near, I thought it better to await the course of events, and to watch his operations. Now I must, of course, break my silence.

As regards the letter from Schweitzer, it is clear that he does not feel quite happy in his boots. His threat of ‘open war’ is silly, though the phrase is ‘ostensibly’ only aimed against Liebknecht et Co. His claim that Mr Nobody started it, is in no way correct. His alleged identification with the International Working Men’s Association stands in a certain contradiction to his hints in the Social-Demokrat after the Nuremberg affair that his association had ‘not’ joined the IWA. Above all it emerges from the whole letter that Schweitzer still cannot drop his fixed idea that he has ‘his own workers’ movement’. On the other hand, he is unquestionably the most intelligent and most energetic of all the present workers’ leaders in Germany, while Liebknecht in point of fact was only forced by Schweitzer to recall that there existed a workers’ movement independent of the petty-bourgeois democratic movement.

My plan is not to use diplomacy but to tell Schweitzer the unvarnished truth about my view of his dealings, and make it clear to him that he must choose between the ‘sect’ and the ‘class’. If he wishes to come to a rational understanding with the ‘Nuremberg majority’, I am ready as ‘Secretary for Germany’ to be of aid on terms which appear reasonable to me. If he does not desire this, I can only promise to maintain the necessary objective impartiality vis-à-vis his agitation. What I cannot promise, however, is that I will not, in my private capacity, publicly attack the Lassallean superstition as soon as I regard this as useful.

Pretty and truly Lassallean is Schweitzer’s notion that ‘two organisations can only be harmful’ and hence, since he preceded the others, they are, if not legally, then in a way morally, obliged to ‘dissolve’ themselves in him.

As you know, Mr Odger is standing for Chelsea, but I believe he has no chance of success. Odger has shown us the cold shoulder for the whole of last year since, on my proposal, ‘the president of the IWA’ and thus also ‘President’ Odger were abolished once and for all. Now he gives thanks for his re-election by the Brussels Congress and wishes us to support his election with a letter to his Electioneering Committee. We are only meeting his request because it is a step that is useful to the International and that recommends it in the eyes of the London workmen.

When you were here last, you saw the Blue Book on the Irish land question 1844-1845. By accident I found the Report and evidence on Irish Tenant Right 1867 (House of Lords) in a small second-hand bookshop. This was a real find. The economist gentlemen regard it purely as a question of conflicting dogmas whether rent is payment for natural differences in land, or on the other hand merely interest on the capital invested in the land; but here we have a real life and death struggle between farmer and landlord as to how far rent should include, apart from the payment for land differences, also the interest on the capital invested in the land not by the landlord but by the tenant. Political economy can only be turned into a positive science by replacing the conflicting dogmas by the conflicting facts, and by the real antagonisms which form their concealed background.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 12 October 1868

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

My dear Friend

Your obstinate silence is quite incomprehensible to me. Did I give cause for it in some way in my last letter? I hope not. In any case it was unintentional. I need not tell you explicitly, you know that you are my most intimate friend in Germany and I do not see that, inter amicos, [1] it is necessary to keep such a sharp watch on one another for any trifle. Least of all have you this right in regard to me, because you know how much I am obliged to you. You have done more – apart from everything personal – for my book than all Germany put together. But, perhaps, you are so energetically silent in order to show me that you are not like the crowd of so-called friends who are silent when things go badly and speak when they go well. But there was no need for such a ‘demonstration’ on your part. When I speak of a ‘good state of affairs’ I mean, firstly, the propaganda which my book has been doing and the recognition which it has found among the German workers, since you wrote me last. And, secondly, there is the wonderful progress which the International Working-Men’s Association has made, especially in England.

A few days ago a Petersburg publisher surprised me with the news that a Russian translation of Das Kapital is now being printed. He asked for my photograph for the title page and I could not deny this trifle to ‘my good friends’, the Russians. It is an irony of fate that the Russians, whom I have fought for twenty-five years, and not only in German, but in French and English, have always been my ‘patrons’. In Paris in 1843 and 1844 the Russian aristocrats there treated me most tenderly. My book against Proudhon (1847) and the one published by Duncker (1859) have had a greater sale in Russia than anywhere else. And the first foreign nation to translate Kapital is the Russian. But too much should not be made of all this. The Russian aristocracy is, in its youth, educated at German universities and in Paris. They always run after the most extreme that the West can offer.

It is pure gourmandise, [2] such as a part of the French aristocracy practised during the eighteenth century. Ce n'est pas pour les tailleurs et les bottiers, [3] Voltaire said of his own enlightenment. This does not prevent the same Russians, once they enter state service, from becoming rascals.

I am having a good deal of bother just now in Germany in connection with the quarrels of the leaders, as you can see from the enclosed letters, which you will please return. On the one side, Schweitzer, [4] who has nominated me Pope in partibus infidelium, [5] so that I can proclaim him the ‘workers’ emperor’ of Germany. On the other side, Liebknecht, who forgets that Schweitzer, in point of fact, forced him to remember that there is a proletarian movement apart from the petty-bourgeois democratic movement.

I hope that you and your family are well. And I hope that I have not fallen into disfavour with your dear wife. À propos: the International Women’s Association, duce Frau Gögg (read Geck), [6] has sent an epistle to the Brussels Congress, enquiring whether ladies may join. The answer, of course, was a courteous affirmative. Should you therefore persist in your silence, I shall send your wife a mandate as correspondent of the General Council.

I have suffered a good deal from the heat, because of my liver, but am at the moment well.

Salut

Yours

Karl Marx

PS 1: The Spanish revolution came like a deus ex machina [7] to prevent the otherwise inevitable and disastrous Franco-Prussian war.

PS 2: You wrote me once that I am to receive a book by Büchner. [8] When and how?

Notes

1. Among friends – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Gourmandise – fine feeding – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. Ce n'est pas pour les tailleurs et les bottiers – This is not for tailors and cobblers – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

4. Johann Baptist Schweitzer (1833-1875) – German working-class leader; friend of Lassalle. After the death of Lassalle, leader of the Lassalleans until 1871 – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

5. In the country of the infidels, that is, a functionary without a function – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

6. Gögg – Wife of a South German petty-bourgeois democrat and pacifist. Geck = fop – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

7. God out of the machine. A favourite device of the ancient Greek dramatists whereby a god suddenly makes his appearance on the scene out of some theatrical machinery and provides a happy solution of the apparently hopelessly entangled situation – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

8. Ludwig Büchner (1824-1899) – German vulgar materialist scientist – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx To Johann Baptist von Schweitzer

In Berlin

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 132;

First published: in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1896.

[Draft]

To von Schweitzer

London, 13 October 1868

Dear Sir,

A misunderstanding on my part accounts for your having received no reply to your letter of 15 September. I interpreted the letter as meaning that you would submit your ‘proposals’ to me for examination. So I waited for them. Then came your congress, and (being much overworked) I regarded a reply as no longer urgent. Before the arrival of your letter dated 8 October, I had already repeatedly appealed for peace, in my capacity as secretary of the International for Germany. I received the answer (and with it relevant quotations from the Social-Demokrat) that you yourself were provoking war. I declared that my role must necessarily be confined to that of ‘impartial referee’ at a duel.

In your letters you express great trust in me, and I believe I cannot respond better than to give you my opinion of the present state of affairs quite openly, without any diplomatic circumlocution. In doing so, I assume that, for you, as for myself, the cause is all that matters.

I recognise, without reserve, the intelligence and energy with which you are active in the workers’ movement. I have concealed this view from none of my friends. Wherever I have to express my views in public — in the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association and in the German Communist Association here — I have always treated you as a man of our party, and never let drop a word about points of difference.

However, such points of difference do exist.

D'abord, as regards the Lassallean Association, it was formed in a period of reaction. After fifteen years of slumber, Lassalle — and this remains his immortal service — re-awakened the workers’ movement in Germany. But he made great mistakes. He allowed himself to be influenced too much by the immediate circumstances of the time. He made the minor starting point, his opposition to the dwarf-like Schulze-Delitzsch, the central point of his agitation — state aid versus self-help. In this, he merely re-adopted the slogan circulated in 1843 sqq. by Buchez, the leader of Catholic socialism, against the genuine workers’ movement in France. Being far too intelligent to regard this slogan as anything but a transitory pis-aller, Lassalle was only able to justify its use on the grounds of its immediate (alleged!) practicability. To this end, he had to claim that it was feasible in the immediate future. The ‘state’ was, therefore, transformed into the Prussian state. He was thus forced to make concessions to the Prussian monarchy, to Prussian reaction (the feudal party) and even to the clericals. He linked Buchez’s state aid for associations with the Chartist call for universal suffrage. He overlooked the difference between conditions in Germany and England. He overlooked the lessons of the bas-empire, with regard to universal suffrage in France. In addition, like everyone who claims to have in his pocket a panacea for the sufferings of the masses, he gave his agitation, from the very start, a religious, sectarian character. In fact, every sect is religious. And just because he was the founder of a sect, he denied all natural connection with the earlier movement, both in Germany and abroad. He fell into Proudhon’s mistake of not seeking the real basis of his agitation in the actual elements of the class movement, but of wishing, instead, to prescribe for that movement a course determined by a certain doctrinaire recipe.

Most of what I am stating here post factum I predicted to Lassalle when he came to London in 1862 and called upon me to place myself, with him, at the head of the new movement.

You yourself know the difference between a sect movement and a class movement from personal experience. The sect seeks its raison d'être and its point d'honneur not in what it has in common with the class movement, but in the particular shibboleth distinguishing it from that movement. Thus when, in Hamburg, you proposed convening a congress to found trades unions, you could only suppress the opposition of the sectarians by threatening to resign as president. You were also forced to assume a dual personality, to state that, in one case, you were acting as the leader of the sect and, in the other, as the representative of the class movement.

The dissolution of the General Association of German Workers provided you with an opportunity to take a big step forward and to declare, to prove s'il le fallait [if necessary], that a new stage of development had been reached and the sect movement was now ripe to merge into the class movement and end all ‘eanisms’. With regard to the true content of the sect, it would, like all former workers’ sects, carry this as an enriching element into the general movement. Yet instead you, in fact, demanded that the class movement subordinate itself to a particular sect movement. Your non-friends concluded from this that you wished to conserve your ‘own workers’ movement’ under all circumstances.

Regarding the Berlin Congress, the time was d'abord not pressing, since the Combination Law has not yet been voted. You ought, therefore, to have reached an agreement with the leaders outside the Lassallean circle, worked out the plan together with them, and convoked the congress. Instead of this, you left them only the alternative of either publicly joining you, or lining up against you. The congress itself appeared to be only an extended edition of the Hamburg Congress.

As for the draft statutes, I regard them as unsuitable in principle, and I believe I have as much experience as any of my contemporaries in the field of trades unions. Without going further into detail here, I shall merely remark that a centralist organisation, suitable as it is for secret societies and sect movements, contradicts the nature of the trades unions. Were it possible — I declare it tout bonnement to be impossible — it would not be desirable, least of all in Germany. Here, where the worker is regulated bureaucratically from childhood onwards, where he believes in authority, in those set over him, the main thing is to teach him to walk by himself.

Your plan is also impracticable in other ways. In the ‘Union’ there are to be three independent authorities of differing origin: 1. The Committee, elected by the trades; 2. the President (here a completely superfluous personage) [In the Rules of the International Working Men’s Association there also figures a President of the Association. In reality his only function was to preside at the sessions of the General Council. On my proposal, this office — which I had refused in 1866 — was completely abolished in 1867, and was replaced by that of a Chairman, who is elected at each weekly session of the General Council. The London Trades’ Council also has simply a Chairman. Its sole permanent official is the Secretary, as he has a continuous business function to exercise.] [NB. This passage follows in the copy of the letter to Schweitzer after the end of this sentence], elected by a general vote; 3. the Congress, elected by the local branches. Thus — collisions everywhere, and this is supposed to promote ‘rapid action’! (At this point the inserted sentence.) Lassalle committed a bad mistake in borrowing the ‘président élu du suffrage universel’ ['president elected by universal suffrage'] from the French Constitution of 1852. And now this in a trades unions movement! The latter is mostly concerned with financial issues, and you will soon discover that all dictatorialism finds its end here.

Yet whatever the shortcomings of the organisation, they can perhaps be cancelled out, to a greater or lesser degree, by rational application. As secretary of the International I am ready to act — naturally on a rational basis — as mediator between you and the Nuremberg majority, which has adhered to the International directly. I have written in the same vein to Leipzig. I understand the difficulties of your position, and never forget that each of us depends more upon circumstances than upon his own will.

I promise you, under all circumstances, the impartiality that is my duty. On the other hand, I cannot promise that I shall not, some day, acting as a private author, — as soon as I feel it to be absolutely dictated by the interests of the labour movement — publicly criticise the Lassallean superstition, in the same way as I dealt, in its time, with the Proudhonist superstition.

With the assurance of my best wishes to you personally,

I remain

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 142;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

[London,] 24 October 1868

Dear Fred,

Enclosed:

1. Letter from Kugelmann. Some interesting things in it. In any case, I shall write to tell him that I forbid pour l'avenir [for the future] all his eccentric respectful outbreaks of esteem.

2. Letter from Liebknecht. The brute seems quite mad. Weeks ago he wrote to me saying he would let me have copies of Vogt. And, as always with Liebknecht, there the matter rests. Not another word about it. A mass of stupid suggestions instead. I, he says, should reply to Faucher, since Liebknecht cannot answer him, and Faucher has admirers in several Leipzig tap-rooms. He will refrain ‘for the present’, and against his will, from attacks on Schweitzer. As if he had not, on the other hand, asked me, in his honour, kindly to attack Schweitzer ‘for the present’. I am to place at his disposal a ‘selection of choice passages’ from Miquel’s private correspondence with me, since he fancies that Miquel is ‘dangerous’. I am to send him Freiligrath’s poem against Kinkel, so he can rehabilitate Freiligrath at Kinkel’s expense. Finally, I am to make a certain Stromeyer — (he means Strohn) — in Bradford the agent for Ernst Stehfest et Co., Crimmitschau (spinning and weaving partnership). What else? Luckily this time he has not done me the honour of asking me to purchase here, in the City, English mustard specimens for an alleged consumer society in Leipzig, and to establish a ‘connection’ with the firm. The upshot of the whole business was — in return for the mustard and the business information — the sentence: The mustard is excellent! This is in fact what the English economists call ‘consumptive demand’ par excellence.

Borkheim’s Russophobia (with which I inoculated him as the mildest sickness for the diversion of his superfluous vital spirits) is assuming dangerous dimensions; he now has a row with Old Philipp Becker, since the latter is on good terms with Bakunin and has written to Borkheim that he should not attack Bakunin in his letters. Borkheim regards this as a dangerous Muscovite conspiracy. He believes that his ‘masterly invectives’ in Wilhelm’s Wochenblatt are causing Byzantium — and therefore also Bakunin — to shake. In a stern letter to Becker, he has declared with his usual delicacy that he will maintain his friendship for him and his (by the by negligible) pecuniary support, but — politics should now be excluded from their correspondence!

The 12 ragamuffins of the so-called French Branch held a public meeting in London last Tuesday, again under Pyat’s chairmanship and with the reading of one of his melodramatic puffs for the revolution. There were big placards on the walls as follows:

République Française

La Branche française de l'Association Internationale, etc., etc. Then Félix Pyat in huge letters. The points for discussion, listed in French, included: 3. Vote d'adhésion au manifeste (the manifesto of the Commune de Paris, which exists only on the moon, which was to be read by Pyat and had been fabricated by him) et protestation, contre l'indifférence en matiere politique professée à Bruxelles au dernier Congrès de l'Association Internationale.

Under this, however, was the English notice (also distributed as a handbill): Democrats of all nations are invited, etc. ‘For the purpose of deciding whether the Workingmen’s International Association is to be a political Association.'

Last Tuesday I was empowered to disavow the fellows immediately and publicly if the London daily newspapers should treat or mention this as a demonstration of ours. Luckily, no notice was taken of them.

This evening there is, however, to be a Subcommittee at which witnesses are to be heard that one of this dozen was formerly a marchand d'hommes [white-slave trader] and a brothel keeper, another a gambler, a third a spy for the masters in the Tailors’ strike here, etc., etc. On the basis of the ‘morals paragraph’ of the Rules, these gentlemen will probably be kicked out. They are naturally doubly annoyed that all politics are left out in dealing with fellows like them.

Salut to Mrs Burns, Jollymayer and King Cole.

Your

K. M.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 26 October 1868

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

My dear Friend

Since at this moment, when your letter arrives, I am plagued with a visit, I shall write just these few lines.

Kertbeny’s [1] address: No I/III (what the III means I do not know; perhaps, third floor) Behrenstrasse.

Now permit me a word. Since you and Engels were of the opinion that it would be useful, I gave way to having this advertisement in the Gartenlaube. I was decisively opposed to it. And now I ask you urgently, to give up this joke definitely. It leads to nothing except that fellows like Keil and ‘Daheim’ believe that one belongs to the pack of great literary and other men, and needs or desires their protection.

I think it is more harmful than useful and beneath the dignity of a scientific man. For example, Meyer’s Konversationslexikon wrote asking me for a biography a long time ago. Not only did I not send one, but I did not even answer their letter. Everybody must reach salvation in his own way. As for Kertbeny, he is a confused, boastful, importunate literary idler and the less one has to do with him, the better.

Salut

Yours

KM

Notes

1. Charles (Károly) Kertbeny (1824-1882) – Hungarian writer, active in the Revolution of 1848-49. While in emigration he wrote for the German press – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 152;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 6 November 1868

Dear Moor,

Herewith return back Eichhoff’s letters and Dietzgen’s manuscript. The latter I had placed in a safe place, away from the tidying females, and there it was completely forgotten.

It is difficult to pass absolutely definite judgement on the thing; the man is not a born philosopher and, in addition, half self-taught. Some of his sources (e. g., Feuerbach, your book and various trashy publications on the natural sciences) can be immediately traced partly from his terminology, but one cannot tell what else he has read. The terminology is, of course, still very confused, hence the lack of precision and frequent reiterations in new terms. There is also dialectics in it, but appearing more in the form of flashes than in any connected way. The presentation of the thing-in-itself as a conceivable thing [Gedankending] would be very nice and even brilliant if one could be certain that he himself had discovered it. There is plenty of wit in it and, despite the poor grammar, a marked talent for style. All in all, however, a remarkable instinct to think out so much that is correct on the basis of such inadequate studies.

The repetitions are, as I said, partly a result of the shortcomings in terminology, partly due to his lack of logical schooling. It will be a hard job to get rid of them all. If the man definitely wants to print his stuff, I do not know if the reduction to 2 printed sheets would be the best for him; in any case, it would be a frightful job for him, since he is not aware of his repetitions. In addition, I do not know whether 2 sheets would get any attention at all. 6-8 sheets would be more likely to do this. But he will never get it into a magazine.

Borkheim has written to ask whether I would agree that he should reprint my Bakunin article from the Neue Rheinische Zeitung [‘Democratic Pan-Slavism’, Neue Rheinische Zeitung, 15-16 Feb. 1849] in Liebknecht’s paper and says, in this connection, that this article ‘fits, for him, most excellently in his framework’. I replied that we planned to publish our earlier articles, etc., jointly, that we were already negotiating with a book-dealer, but that I did not know how things stood at the moment and had therefore written to you. I don’t know though which article he means; there are several and he speaks of one. Besides, he repeats his nonsense about Bakunin, Eichhoff, etc.

Eichhoff’s thorough defence made me laugh.

Best greetings.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 154;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 7 November 1868

Dear Fred,

Thanks for the £5.

I (and the whole household here) are very worried because of the typhus raging in your parts. It is so contagious. Please report again soon on the status rerum.

It will be impossible to stop that damned Borkheim, whom I shall be seeing today, printing your 2 articles (those about Bakunin’s manifesto to the Slavs). However, I shall only tell him that you are an old personal friend of Bakunin, so that the business may under no circumstances appear in a context insulting to the latter. Borkheim takes himself completely au sérieux and really believes he has a political mission to fulfil. He is translating for me the main passages from a Russian book about agrarian disintegration, and has also given me a French book on the subject by the Russian Schédo-Ferroti. The latter is very much mistaken — he is altogether a very superficial fellow — in saying that the Russian communal system came into existence only as a result of the ban on peasants leaving the land. The whole business, down to the smallest detail, is absolutely identical with the primaeval Germanic communal system. Add to this, in the Russian case (and this may be found also amongst a part of the Indian communal systems, not in the Punjab, but in the South), (1) the non-democratic, but patriarchal character of the commune leadership and (2) the collective responsibility for taxes to the state, etc. It follows from the second point that the more industrious a Russian peasant is, the more he is exploited by the state, not only in terms of taxes, but also for supplying provisions and horses, etc. for the constant passage of troops, for government couriers, etc. The whole shit is breaking down.

I regard Dietzgen’s exposition, in so far as Feuerbach, etc., in short his sources, do not peep through, as entirely his own independent achievement. For the rest, I agree with everything you say. I shall have something to say to him about the repetitions; it is his bad luck that it was precisely Hegel that he did not study.

The great Weber on behalf of ‘German Association for Revolutionary Agitation, etc.’ has held a meeting together with the French Mayers under Pyat’s chairmanship and with other vagabonds, at which they instructed the Yankees in an address to intervene in favour of the Spanish Republic.

Our Negro, Paul Lafargue, had the misfortune that the French would not recognise his English diploma; they want to make him run the gauntlet of five new examinations, instead of the maximum 1 or 2 as he expected.

Mrs Laura sends you her compliments.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 161;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

[London,] 18 November’ 1868

Dear Fred,

The Landlord (unfortunately he is living pro tempore in London), wrote me the enclosed letter some time ago. Yesterday he called, but was not, of course, admitted, since I was allegedly absent. The devil of it is that, because of the Overend Affair, this fellow lives on his house rents; in addition, he will not accept bills of exchange. At other times the pressure for the house has never been so immediate, since I only owe him for 1 quarter. Lessner, too, is kicking me for the remainder of my debt, his wife is desperately sick. Generally the situation is bad.

Yesterday evening, on the Central Council the English too late but unanimously acknowledged that I had forecast literally for them, the, for me, highly amusing upshot of the elections, with a criticism of the incorrect policy of the Reform-League. The present House is the worst since the election under Pam’s command. The long purses have never had such an exclusive preponderance. E. Jones deserved his tumble over and over. With regard to Bradlaugh, he had boasted in too Lassallean a manner. At the last Sunday meeting of his congregation in Cleveland Hall, there was displayed a placard to this effect. Farewell to the Great Iconoclast, the People’s Redeemer. Long Live to Mr Bradlaugh, the Dread Naught of St Stephens!

In France things look very serious, according to Lafargue’s last letters too. The government wants to force the lads on to the streets so that chassepot and rifled cannon may then laisser ‘faire merveille’ [work miracles]! Can you see any chance of successful street conflicts? Defection of the army without a previous thrashing appears scarcely credible.

Büchner’s clumsy work is of interest to me in as much as it quotes most of the German research in the field of Darwinism — Prof. Jäger (Vienna) and Prof. Haeckel. According to them, the cell has been abandoned as the primaeval form; instead a formless but contractile particle of albumen is taken as starting point. This hypothesis was later confirmed by the discoveries in Canada (later also in Bavaria and some other places). The primaeval form must naturally be traced down to the point at which it may be produced chemically. And it appears that the way to this point has been found.

The conscientiousness with which Büchner has acquainted himself with the English stuff is also shown by the fact that he classifies Owen as one of Darwin’s supporters.

Borkheim’s letter to you, which you sent me, I had the pleasure to have read to me for a second time by him in person. This nincompoop now accuses Eichhoff of being a ‘busy body’(!) and of ‘writing long letters’. What self-knowledge!

Apropos the Irish elections, the only interesting point is Dungarvan, where Burry is presenting himself under the protection of the defector O'Donovan. (Ditto under the protection of the priest.) There is a general cry against him amongst the Irish Nationalists since this blackguard, as government prosecutor during the first trial of the Fenians in Dublin, hurled such slanders (à la Constitutionnel against the June insurgents) that even the London papers gave him a wigging.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

I believe Nincompoop [Borkheim] has gone to Bordeaux! Such a business trip is certainly necessary to cool his brain fever.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 163;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 18 November 1868

Dear Moor,

What do you say about the elections in the factory districts? The proletariat has once again made an awful fool of itself. Manchester and Salford return 3 Tories against 2 Liberals, including the milk-and-water Bazley, Bolton, Preston, Blackburn, etc., almost all Tories. In Ashton it looks as if Milner Gibson has gone to the wall. Ernest Jones nowhere, despite the cheering. Everywhere the proletariat are the rag, tag and bobtail of the official parties, and if any party has gained strength from the new voters, it is the Tories. The small towns, the half rotten boroughs are the salvation of bourgeois Liberalism, and roles will be reversed: the Tories will favour more members for the big towns and the Liberals will favour unequal representation.

Here the electors have increased from 24,000 to not quite 48,000, and the Tories have increased their voters from 6,000 to 14-15,000. The Liberals have let slip a lot, and M. Henry did a lot of harm, but it cannot be denied that the increase in working-class votes has brought the Tories more than their simple percentage, and has improved their relative position. On the whole this is a good thing. As things look now, Gladstone should have a narrow majority and will be compelled to change the Reform Bill to stop the rolling stone; with a large majority, he would have let things take their course, as usual.

But it remains an appalling display of weakness by the English proletariat. The parson has shown unexpected power, and also the cringing before respectability. Not a single working-class candidate had a ghost of a chance, but mylord Tom Noddy or any parvenu snob could have the workers’ votes with pleasure.

The howls of the Liberal bourgeois would amuse me very much were it not for this accompanying experience. To cheer myself up properly, yesterday I made Borchardt’s son-in-law, who had dutifully drudged for the Liberals, as drunk as a lord.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 173;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902 and in full in Pisma Marksa k Kugelmanu (Letters of Marx to Kugelmann), Moscow-Leningrad, 1928.

London, 5 December 1868

Dear Kugelmann,

Have you got Dietzgen’s address? Quite a while ago he sent me a fragment of a manuscript on ‘intellectual capacity’, which, despite a certain confusion and too frequent repetitions, contained much that was excellent, and — as the independent product of a worker — even admirable. I did not reply immediately after reading it through, since I wanted to hear Engels’ opinion so I sent him the manuscript. A long time passed before I got it back. And now I cannot find Dietzgen’s letter with his new address. He wrote me, to wit, in his last letter from Petersburg, that he would return to the Rhine and settle there. Have you perhaps received his address from him? If so, be so kind as to send it to me by return. My conscience — one never becomes completely free of this sort of thing — is pricking me for leaving Dietzgen so long without a reply. You also promised to tell me something about his personality.

I have received Büchner’s lectures on Darwinism. He is obviously a ‘book-maker’ and probably for this reason is called ‘Büchner’. His superficial babble about the history of materialism is obviously copied from Lange. The way such a whipper-snapper disposes of, e.g., Aristotle — quite a different sort of natural philosopher from Büchner — is really astonishing. It is also very naive of him to say, referring to Cabanis, ‘you might almost be listening to Karl Vogt’. As if Cabanis copied Vogt!

Some time ago I promised to write you a few words about the French Branch. These ragamuffins are, a half or 2/3 of them, maquereaux [pimps] and such-like rabble, and all of them — after our people had withdrawn — heroes of the revolutionary phrase, who, from a safe distance, of course, kill kings and emperors, in particular Louis Napoleon. In their eyes we are, naturally, reactionaries, and they drew up, in all due form, an indictment against us, which was, in fact, submitted to the Brussels Congress — in the closed sessions. The fury of these blacklegs was heightened by the fact that they had been taken over by Felix Pyat, a failed French fourth-class author of melodramas, who, in the revolution of ‘48, was only used as a Toastmaster — (the name given by the English to the men paid to announce the toasts at public banquets, or to supervise the order of the toasts) — a man who has a perfect monomania ‘to shout in a whisper’ and to play the dangerous conspirator. Pyat wanted to use this gang to convert the ‘International Working Men’s Association’ into his following. In particular, the aim was to compromise us. Thus, at a public meeting which the French Branch announced and trumpeted by poster as a meeting of the International Association, Louis Napoleon, alias Badinguet, was in all due form sentenced to death, the execution naturally being left to the nameless Brutuses of Paris. Since the English press paid no attention to this farce, we also would have passed it over in silence. But one of the gang — a certain Vésinier, a circulator of chantange [blackmail] literature — spread the whole muck in the Belgian paper La Cigale, which claims to be an organ of the ‘International’, a sort of ‘comic’ paper, the like of which certainly cannot be found anywhere else in Europe. There is, you see, nothing comic about it except its seriousness. From the Cigale the stuff found its way into the Pays, journal de l'Empire. It was naturally grist to the mill of Paul de Cassagnac. Thereupon we — i.e. the General Council — officially announced, in 6 lines in the Cigale, that F. Pyat had absolutely no connection with the ‘International’, of which he was not even a member. Hinc illae irae! This frog-and-mouse war ended when the French Branch rancorously withdrew from us, and it now goes about its business on its own, under Pyat’s auspices. They have established here, in London, as a succursale, a so-called German Agitational Association, consisting of a dozen and a half, headed by an old refugee from the Palatinate, the half-crazy watchmaker Weber. Now you know all there is to know about this solemn, highfalutin and important event. Just one thing more. We had the satisfaction that Blanqui, through one of his friends, writing ditto in the Cigale, made Pyat absolutely ridiculous, leaving him only the alternative of being either a monomaniac or a police agent.

Yesterday evening I received a letter from Schweitzer announcing that he was off to the cachot [gaol] again, and that the outbreak of civil war — that is, war between him and W. Liebknecht — is unavoidable. I must say that Schweitzer is right on one point, that is, Liebknecht’s incompetence. His sheet is really wretched. How can a man whom I crammed orally for 15 years (he was always too lazy to read) have such things published as, for instance, Society and State, in which ‘the social’ (and that’s a fine category too!) is treated as the secondary, and ‘the political’ as the essential ? This would be incomprehensible were it not that Liebknecht is a South German, and seems always to have confused me with his old superior, the ‘noble’ Gustav Struve.

Lafargue and wife have been in Paris for 2 months. There, however, they don’t want to recognise the medical qualifications he achieved in London, and demand that he take 5 new ‘Paris’ exams!

As the result of a settlement, my ‘economic’ (not politico-economic) circumstances will take a satisfactory form from next year.

With best greetings to your dear wife and Fränzchen.

Yours

Karl Marx

Is your wife also active in the German ladies’ great emancipation campaign? I think that German women should begin by driving their husbands to self-emancipation.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 184;

First published: in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902.

London, 12 December 1868

Dear Friend,

I wanted to write to you at greater length, but am prevented from doing so by unforeseen external ‘business’. But do not let this keep you from taking up your pen again soon.

The letter from Freund (returned enclosed, with thanks) interested me greatly. It is high time for other people to come forward in Germany than the present ‘pillars’ of science.

I also return the portrait of Dietzgen. His biography is not quite what I had thought. But I always had a feeling he was ‘not a worker like Eccarius’. In fact, the sort of philosophical outlook he has worked out for himself demands a certain calmness and disposable time that the everyday workman does not enjoy. I have two very good workers living in New York, A. Vogt, a shoemaker, and Sigfrid Meyer, a mining engineer, both formerly from Berlin. A third worker who could give lectures on my book [Capital] is Lochner, a joiner (common working man), who has been here in London about 15 years.

Tell your dear wife that I never ‘suspected’ her of serving under Madame General Geck. I queried only in jest. Incidentally, the ladies cannot complain about the ‘International’, since it has appointed a lady, Madame Law, as a member of the General Council. Joking aside, very great progress was demonstrated at the last congress of the American ‘Labor Union’, inter alia, by the fact that it treated the women workers with full parity; by contrast, the English, and to an even greater extent the gallant French, are displaying a marked narrowness of spirit in this respect. Everyone who knows anything of history also knows that great social revolutions are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress may be measured precisely by the social position of the fair sex (plain ones included).

As far as the ‘settlement’ is concerned, there could never, from the outset, have been any question of my taking over a business before my book was finished. Otherwise I could long have extricated myself from any embarrassing situation. The fact is simply this — but strictly between us that, on the one hand, I made an arrangement with my family; on the other, Engels, without my knowledge, through agreement with his partner about his own income (he is leaving the business in June), has made a settlement for me, as a result of which, from next year, I shall be able to work in peace.

With best greetings.

Yours

K. M.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: December 14, 1868;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

I have found little new in the Ténot (Paris) except a few details — I have not yet read the Provinces. The enormous sensation the book has made in Paris and in France generally proves a very interesting fact, namely that the generation which has grown up under Badinguet knows absolutely nothing of the history of the regime under which it is living. Now the fellows are rubbing their eyes and seem as if they had just dropped from the clouds. If one may compare small things with great, have not we had just the same experience in our way? In Germany it is now spreading as a wonderful novelty that Lassalle was only one of our satellites and did not discover the "class war."

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 190;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 15 December 1868 Evening, after midnight

Dear Fred,

Would you please study the enclosed document... seriously, despite its fadaise. [absurdity] Your marginal notes should be written for me in French, and the stuff itself returned to me at the latest by Saturday next.

Mr Bakunin — in the background of this business — is condescending enough to wish to take the workers’ movement under Russian leadership.

This shit has been in existence for 2 months. Only this evening did Old Becker inform the General Council about it in writing. This time Nincompoop is right. As Old Becker writes, this association should make up for the deficient ‘idealism’ of our Association. L'idéalisme Russe!

There was great anger about the document this evening at the meeting of our Conseil Général, particularly among the French. I had known about the shit for a long time. I regarded it as stillborn, and out of consideration for Old Becker, wanted to let it die a quiet death.

But the business has become more serious than I expected. And consideration for Old Becker is no longer admissible. This evening the Council decided to repudiate this interloping society publicly — in Paris, New York, Germany and Switzerland. I have been commissioned with drafting the decree of repudiation (for next Tuesday). I regret the whole thing, because of Old Becker. Mais our Association cannot commit suicide because of Old Becker.

Your

K. M.

Strohn writes to me from Düsseldorf that his brother Eugen has died suddenly in Hamburg.

About the cotton bankruptcies in Manchester, etc., can you send me The Guardian?

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 191;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 18 December 1868

Dear Moor,

Best thanks for the Ténot and the Baudin trial. As soon as I have read the latter I shall send them both back. You can keep Province there; I have ordered them both at the bookshop; one really must have things of this sort. The complete oblivion of revolutionary-counterrevolutionary causality is a necessary result of every victorious reaction; in Germany the younger generation knows absolutely nothing about ’48, except the wretched howls of the Kreuzzeitung, which echoed in ’49-52 in all the papers; history comes to an abrupt stop there at the end of ’47. — The deliberations of the 10th Mairie are really exquisite; I had never read such a complete version.

By chance I read E. Strohn’s obituary in the Kölnische Zeitung. He died of articular rheumatism.

The Geneva document is very naive. Old man Becker has never been able to refrain from cliquish agitation; wherever 2 or 3 get together, he must be amongst them; yet if you had warned him in good time, he would probably have steered clear of it. Now he will be astonished by the bad effects of his well-meant efforts. It is as clear as daylight that the International cannot get involved in this fraud. There would be two General Councils and even two Congresses: this would be a state within the state and, right from the start, conflict would break out between the practical Council in London, and the theoretical, ‘idealist’, Council in Geneva. In the International there cannot be two (professional) international bodies, any more than two General Councils. Incidentally, who gives you the right to recognise a so-called Central Bureau without mandators, whose members will be of the same nationality and who constitute themselves (in paragraph 3 of the Rules this ‘themselves’ is omitted, and with good reason!) the national bureau of their country! Since these gentlemen have no mandators except themselves, they wish the International to constitute itself their mandator. If the International refuses to do so, who would recognise the ‘initiating group’ or, in other words, the ‘Central Bureau’ as its representatives? The Central Council of the International has passed through at least three successive elections, and the whole world knows that it represents countless workers; but these ‘initiators’?

And even if we wished to ignore the formalities of an election, what is represented by the names that make up this initiating group, this group that pretends to have been given ‘the special mission to study political and philosophical questions, etc.’? No doubt it is science they will represent. Will we find among them men known to have devoted their whole lives to the study of these questions? On the contrary. There is not a name whose bearer has so far dared as much as to claim to be a man of science. If they are without mandate as representatives of social democracy, they are a thousand times more without mandate as representatives of science.

The rest you remarked upon in your notes. Like you, I regard the business as a still-born, purely Genevan local growth. It would only be viable if you were to oppose it too violently, and thus gave it importance. I think it would be best calmly but firmly to rebuff these people with their pretensions to sneaking into the International. Apart from this, we should say that they had selected a special field and one would have to wait to see what they make of it and, we should also say that, for the present, there was nothing to stop members of one association from being members of the other. Since the fellows, to put it bluntly, have no other field of activity than chatter, they will soon enough bore one another to death, and since it may be expected that they will have no new adherents from outside (given such conditions), the whole concern will certainly soon collapse. But if you violently oppose this Russian intrigue, you will unnecessarily arouse the very numerous — particularly in Switzerland — political philistines among the journeymen, and harm the International. With a Russian (and in this case there are 4 [Bakunin, Zhukovsky, Elpidin and Bartenev], not counting the females), with a Russian one must never lose one’s temper.

I have never read anything more wretched than the theoretical programme. Siberia, his stomach, and the young Polish woman [A K Bakunina] have made Bakunin a perfect blockhead.

My trip will probably not come to anything before the New Year, the damned draft contract is still not ready.

Best greetings.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 195;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 19 December 1868

Dear Fred,

Thanks for your marginal notes! When I wrote to you that evening I was excited. But the next morning there was already a reaction and the decision to treat the matter diplomatically, quite as you advise.

Ténot’s Province is much better. It contains many new details for us. Had the Parisians held out a couple of days longer, the Empire would have been foutu. [finished] The movement (republican) among the rural population was much bigger than we knew.

Enclosed Réveil, the organ of Ledru-Rollin. Delescluze his ame damnée, républicain de vieille roche, asinus. He is the provisional government’s commissioner who led the Belgians into the guet-àpens of Risquons Tout. Thus traitor or arch-ass. Probably the latter.

The stupid idea of the workers who wanted to give a banquet for [U.S. Ambassador in London] R. Johnson has been blocked by us. Coningsby, whose initiative it was, is a blackguard. This character was on a pleasure trip to the United States and was paid by Seward for this London reception for R. Johnson. He is the same workman who wrote to The Times years ago, stating that the workers were politically satisfied and did not want the suffrage.

If you could send me a few £ for the Christmas week now beginning, it would be very welcome.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Hermann Jung

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 198;

First published: in G. Jaeckh, Die Internationale, Leipzig, 1904.

[London,] 28 December 1868

Dear Jung,

Scarcely had you gone when I received a letter from Bakunin assuring me of his special friendship.

From his letter I see that he has once again written at length to De Paepe, in order to lure him into the Alliance Internationale. To prevent later mischief or later complaints about the lack of timely information, you must dispatch to De Paepe as soon as possible a copy of our resolution on the Alliance. Of course, you must tell him, at the same time, that, because of the present state of affairs in Switzerland and in order to avoid any appearance of scission, we do not wish to have the resolution published, but are confining ourselves to communicating it confidentially to the respective central councils in the various countries.

Do not forget to invite Applegarth to the Saturday session in good time. It would probably be good to do the same with Odger.

Yours

K. M.

1869

Marx to Engels. 1 January

Engels to Marx. 3 January

Marx to Engels. 13 January

Engels to Marx. 17 January

Marx to Engels. 23 January

Engels to Marx. 25 January

Engels to Marx. 26 January

Marx to Engels. 28 January

Engels to Marx. 28 January

Marx to Engels. 29 January

Engels to Emil Blank. 4 February

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 11 February

Marx to Engels. 13 February

Marx to Engels. 15 February

Marx to Paul and Laura Lafargue. 15 February

Engels to Marx. 17 February

Marx to Hermann Jung. 17 February

Engels to Marx. 21 February

Marx to Engels. 24 February

Engels to Marx. 25 February

Marx to Engels. 1 March

Marx to Engels. 2 March

Marx to Engels. 3 March

Engels to Marx. 3 March

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann [Abstract]. 3 March

Marx to Heinrich Oberwinder. 3 March

Engels to Marx. 4 March

Marx to Engels [Abstract]. 5 March

Engels to Marx. 7 March

Marx to Engels. 14 March

Engels to Marx. 15 March

Engels to Marx. 18 March

Marx to Engels. 20 March

Engels to Marx. 21 March

Engels to Marx. 28 March

Marx to Engels. 29 March

Engels to Marx. 2 April

Engels to Marx. 4 April

Engels to Friedrich Lessner. 4 April

Marx to Engels. 5 April

Engels to Marx. 6 April

Marx to Engels. 7 April

Engels to Marx. 7 April

Marx to Engels. 8 April

Marx to John Malcolm Ludlow. 10 April

Engels to Marx. 14 April

Marx to Engels [Abstract]. 15 April

Engels to Marx. 16 April

Marx to Engels. 16 April

Engels to Marx. 19 April

Marx to Engels. 24 April

Engels to Marx. 25 April

Marx to Engels. 26 April

Marx to Eleanor Marx. 26 April

Marx to Engels. 1 May

Engels to Marx. 2 May

Engels to Marx. 2 May

Marx to Engels. 8 May

Engels to Marx. 11 May

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 11 May

Engels to Hermann Engels. 13 May

Marx to Engels. 14 May

Engels to Marx. 19 May

Marx to Engels. 21 May

Engels to Marx. 23 May

Marx to P Le Neve Foster, Esq. 2 May

Marx to Paul Lafargue. 2 June

Marx to His Daughter Jenny. 2 June

Marx to His Daughter- Jenny. 10 June

Marx to Engels. 16 June

Engels to Marx. 22 June

Marx to Engels. 26 June

Engels to Marx. 27 June

Engels to Marx. 1 July

Engels to Elisabeth Engels. 1 July

Marx to Engels. 3 July

Marx to P St King. 3 July

Engels to Marx [Abstract]. 6 July

Marx to Francois Lafargue. 7 July

Engels to Jenny Marx (daughter). 9 July

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 10 July

Marx to Francois Lafargue. 10 July

Marx to Engels. 14 July

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 15 July

Engels to Hermann Engels. 15 July

Marx to Engels. 17 July

Engels to Marx. 18 July

Engels to Marx. 21 July

Marx to Engels. 22 July

Marx to Engels. 24 July

Engels to Marx. 25 July

Marx to Engels. 27 July

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 28 July

Marx to Engels. 29 July

Engels to Marx. 30 July

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 30 July

Marx to Engels. 2 August

Engels to Marx. 3 August

Marx to Engels. 4 August

Engels to Jenny Marx (daughter). 8 August

Marx to Engels [Abstract]. 10 August

Engels to Marx. 12 August

Marx to Hermann Jung. 1 August

Engels to Marx. 16 August

Engels to Marx. 16 August

Marx to Engels. 17 August

Marx to Engels [Abstract]. 18 August

Engels to Marx. 5 September

Marx to Engels [Abstract]. 25 September

Marx to Paul Lafargue. 25 September

Engels to Marx. 27 September

Marx to Engels. 30 September

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 12 October

Marx to Paul and Laura Lafargue. 18 October

Engels to Marx. 22 October [abstract]

Marx to Engels. 23 October

Engels to Marx [Abstract]. 24 October

Marx to Engels. 30 October

Engels to Marx. 1 November

Marx to Engels. 6 November

Engels to Marx [Abstract]. 7 November

Marx to Engels. 12 November

Marx to Samuel Davenport. 12 November

Engels to Marx. 17 November

Marx to Engels [Abstract]. 18 November

Engels to Marx [Abstract]. 19 November

Marx to Engels [Abstract]. 26 November

Engels to Marx [Abstract]. 29 November

Marx to Kugelmann [Abstract]. 29 November

Marx to Engels. 4 December

Engels to Marx [Abstract]. 9 December

Marx to Engels [Abstract]. 10 December

Marx to Engels. 12 December

Engels to Marx. 15 December

Engels to Marx. 16 December

Marx to Engels. 17 December

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 201;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 13 January 1869

Dear Fred,

Thanks for the numbers of Zukunft. (Thesmar and Georgios Jung!)

I put off writing to you from day to day because of a frightful cold which, for about 2 weeks, has been absolutely besieging my eyes, ears, nose and entire head. Since, however, this damned foggy weather still gives no hope of an early delivery from the evil, I shall wait no longer. Is it so pleasant at your place in Manchester too? Little wonder that suicides are in full blossom here now. Only an Irishman, even in Seven Dials, says that ‘He would rather commit suicide on any one than himself’.

Did the young Th. von Gimborn from Emmerich, manufacturer in nuce, present himself to you? It is not quite clear to me what he wants. First, he told me he wanted to go into a factory as a technician for a certain period, say half a year, or as a simple worker, in order to study the organisation, etc., of English factory work. Now it is only a question of a 14-day stay in a factory supplying agricultural machinery. Does Gimborn, after all, simply wish to discover English factory secrets? He won’t find it easy.

Now a short report about the ‘international incidents’.

a) ‘Alliance Internationale de la Démocratie Socialists':

On 22 December 1868, a unanimous decision of the General Council which stated: 1. All the articles of the Rules of the Alliance, etc., laying down its relations with the International Working Men’s Association, are declared null and void. 2. The Alliance, etc., is not admitted as a branch of the International Working Men’s Association. The reasoning behind this decision (which I edited), is stated completely in legal form, and shows the conflict between the statutes of the planned Alliance and our Rules, etc. A final considérant, which must show old Becker, in particular, his asininity, is that the Brussels Congress already set a precedent with respect to the Ligne de la Paix et de la Liberté. With regard to this organisation, which wanted to be recognised by the International Association, the Congress declared: Since the League claims to follow the same principles and to pursue the same aims as the International Association, it has no ‘raison d'etre’ and, considérant this, stated finally, ‘a number of members of the Geneva initiating group’ also voted in this sense in Brussels.

In the meantime, we have received letters from Brussels, Rouen, Lyon, etc., declaring unconditional support for the General Council decision. Not one voice has been raised in support of le groupe initiateur de Genève. That this group did not act quite honestly is clear from the fact they only informed us of their establishment and their activities after they had already tried to win over the Brussels people, etc. I regard the matter as closed, though we have not yet received an answer to our ‘judgement’ from Geneva. The attempt has, in any case, failed.

b) Ad vocem Bakunin:

To understand his enclosed letter, you must know the following: D'abord, this letter crossed our ‘message’ regarding the ‘Alliance’. Bakunin is thus still under the pleasant misapprehension that he will be allowed to go his own way. Further: The Russian Serno was, in his earlier correspondence with Borkheim, decidedly against Bakunin. In my reply to Serno I wished to use this young man as an informant about Bakunin. Since I trust no Russian, I did it in this form: ‘What is my old friend (I don’t know if he still is) Bakunin doing, etc., etc.’ The Russian Serno immediately informed Bakunin of this letter, and Bakunin used it for a sentimental entrée!

c) Ad vocem Old Becker:

He has got himself badly stuck. D'abord he sends us, dated Geneva, 21 December, a 4-page letter about the Basle business, but without a single fait précis. We should, however, act immediately. At the same time, he writes to Lessner that we (the General Council) had already ‘compromised’ ourselves in the Geneva affair, and this should not happen again. Or, he says in these precise words (in his letter to Lessner),

‘does the General Council, like God, exist only in the faith of fools?’ In Geneva, people only speak of us with a shrug of the shoulders, etc.

Thereupon Becker received the reply from Jung that his 4-page epistle contained nothing. How can he expect to receive money in London on the basis of such a vacuum?

In his letter of 21 December, Becker announced a further elaborate report. Instead of this we receive the Vorbote. You saw for yourself that the Vorbote in fact only reported on the ‘concluded’ lockout of the Ribbon Weavers, and certainly did not make clear how the conflict has developed since. In short, to this very moment we know no more than is reported in Vorbote. Not only can no step be taken with the Trades Unions on this basis, but it is impossible to publish anything about the affair on behalf of the General Council. We cannot expose ourselves to a reply from the usurers of Basle that we are shouting to the world without knowing the facts.

Summa summarum, a week ago the General Council decided to reprimand both Becker and Perret (the French correspondent for Geneva) for not providing us to date with the necessary information on the Basle affair. The matter will rest there for the time being. I'm sorry for Old Becker. But he must realise that we hold the reins, although we refrain from direct intervention as long as possible.

d) Strikes in Rouen, Vienne, etc. (Cottonspinning):

Are about 6-7 weeks old. The interesting thing about the case is that, some time ago, the master-manufacturers (and spinners) in Amiens held a General Congress under the chairmanship of the maire of Amiens. Here it was decided — on the suggestion of a certain faiseur [intriguer] named Vidal, who had hung out in England for a considerable time — that competition should be offered to the English in England, etc. Namely, by establishing depots for French yarn, etc., in England, both for sale there and to overseas merchants who trade directly with England. And this should be brought about by a further reduction of wages, after it had already been admitted that, in France itself, assuming the present tariffs, English competition was only being withstood through the low wages (relative to the English ones). In fact, after this Amiens congress, they began with wage reductions in Rouen, Vienne, etc. Hence the strikes. We have let the people know, through Dupont, about the bad state of business here (especially also the cotton trade), and thus the difficulty of raising money at this time. Meanwhile, as you will see from the enclosed letter (Vienne), the strike in Vienne has come to an end. For the present we have sent to those in Rouen, where the conflict is still going on, a draft for £20 on the Paris bronze-workers, who still owe us this money from their lockout. Incidentally, these French workers act much more rationally than the Swiss and are, at the same time, much more modest in their demands.

Hoping that your head is not so sneezily and villainously idiotised as mine,

Your

K. Moro

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 11 February 1869

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Friend

The delay in this letter is due to two circumstances. Firstly, the damned foggy weather here – nothing but mist – gave me an extraordinarily severe grippe, which lasted nearly four weeks. Secondly, the enclosed photographs were taken at least seven weeks ago, but only just recently could copies be made from the plate, because of the same weather and the atmospheric darkness.

The enclosed letter from A Rüge [1] was given to my friend Strohn [2] in Bradford by one of his business friends. Rüge obviously could not resist the ‘negation of negation’. You must send the letter back to me at once, because Strohn has to return it to the addressee.

The treasurer of our General Council, Cowell-Stepney [3] – a very rich and distinguished man, but wholly, if in somewhat foolish fashion, devoted to the workers’ cause – enquired of a friend in Bonn about literature (German) dealing with the labour question and socialism. The friend sent him en réponse [4] a list made out by Dr Held, [5] Professor of Political Economy at Bonn. His comments show the terrible limitations of these learned mandarins. He (Held) writes about me and Engels:

Engels – The Condition of the Working Class in England, etc. The best product of German socialist-communist literature. Closely connected with Engels is Karl Marx, the author of the most scientific and most erudite work which Socialism as a whole can boast of, Das Kapital. Although it has only recently appeared, this book is still an echo [!] of the movement of 1848. That is why I mention it here in connection with Engels. The work is at the same time [!] of great interest for the present because [!!] in it we may study the source of Lassalle’s basic ideas.

Fine company to be in!

A reader in political economy at a German university writes me that I have quite convinced him, but – but his position compels him, ‘like other colleagues’, not to express his convictions.

This cowardice of the experts, on the one side, and the conspiracy of silence of the bourgeois and reactionary press, on the other, is doing me great harm. Meissner [6] writes that the accounts for the autumn quarter turned out badly. He is still 200 thalers below the cost of production. He adds: ‘If in a few large places such as Berlin, etc, half as much had been done, as Kugelmann has done in Hanover, we should already have had a second edition.’

I became a grandfather on 1 January; the new year present was a little boy. Lafargue has at last managed to get excused from three examinations and now has only two to take in France.

With best greetings to your dear wife and Fränzchen.

Yours

Karl Marx

The cross which my eldest daughter, Jenny, is wearing In the photograph is a Polish insurrection cross of 1864.

Notes

1. Arnold Rüge (1812-1880) – Radical German publicist and politician well known as a Left Hegelian. Together with Marx published the Deutsch-Französischer Jahrbücher in Paris in 1846. Fled to London after the Revolution of 1848, in which he took part. Remained a petty-bourgeois democrat until the 1870s when he went over to the side of Bismarck. The text of the letter from Rüge mentioned above is as follows:

25 January 1869, 7 Park Crescent, Brighton

Dear Mr Steinthal

Simultaneously with this letter I am having sent to you by book post Marx’s Capital.

Most cordial thanks! This book has kept me continuously occupied all the time, although I have had to work at all sorts of subsidiary things as well.

It is an epoch-making book and sheds a brilliant, often piercing light on the development, decline and the birth pangs and frightfully painful days of social periods.

The proof of surplus value through unpaid labour, of the expropriation of the workers who worked on their own account and of the approaching expropriation of expropriators, are classical.

The last on page 745: ‘The capitalist mode of appropriation, the result of the capitalist mode of production, produces capitalist private property. This is the first negation of individual private property, as founded on the labour of the proprietor. But capitalist production begets, with the inexorability of a law of Nature, its own negation. It is the negation of negation. This does not re-establish private property for the producer, but gives him individual property based on the acquisitions of the capitalist era: that is, on cooperation and the possession in common of the land and of the means of production.’ [English edition, page 789.]

Marx possesses a wide erudition and a magnificent dialectical talent. The book exceeds the horizon of many men and newspaper writers; but it will quite certainly make its way through and in spite of the broad foundation, indeed, just because of it, it will exercise a powerful influence.

With reference to religion, the author very pertinently remarks on page 608: ‘As in religion, man is governed by the products of his own brain, so in capitalist production he is governed by the products of his own hand.’ [English edition, page 635.]

And in order to set him free, it is far from sufficient to throw a light in the eyes of the owl; indeed, if he ever loses his master, like the Frenchman or the Spaniard, he himself sets him up again over himself.

Anyhow, much happiness for the year 1869! May it prove itself like its predecessors! My best greetings to Frau Steinthal and Herr Heydemann!

Entirely yours

Dr A Rüge – (Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute)

2. Wilhelm Strohn – German merchant; a member of the Communist League and, as an emigrant in England, a friend of Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. Fred Stepney-Cowell – Treasurer of the First International, 1869-72 – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

4. In reply – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

5. Adolf Held (1844-1880) – German economist and ‘professorial socialist’ – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

6. Otto Karl Meissner (1819-1902) – Hamburg publisher who brought out Marx’s Capital and a number of other works by Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx To Paul and Laura Lafargue

In Paris

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 216;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, Moscow, 1964.

London, 15 February 1869

Dear Paul and beloved Cacadou,

You know Falstaff’s opinion of old men. They are all of them cynics, so you will not be astonished at my passing over that stubborn fact — my prolonged silence. I jump at once into medias res [the crux of the matter], turning the back to the sins of the past.

In the first instance, I must frankly tell you that I feel much anxiety as to Laura’s health. Her prolonged sequestration I know not how to account for. Her invisibility to my friends, such as Dupont, stimulates my misgivings. So soon as certain arrangements permit, I shall come over for the single purpose of having a look at my child. After the publication of The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, I might not be quite safe at Paris. Do not, in your letters, drop any hint as to my secret plan.

I feel much obliged to little Fouchtra who tries his best at keeping his Grandfather up in the literature of the day. Vermorel’s book has much amused me. I generally concur in his appreciation of the persons that played in 1848 a part natural selection had not meant them for. Some men he treats too seriously, f.i. Odilon Barrot, la nullité grave [absolute nonentity]. What he lacks, is the knowledge of the finer nuances de classe represented, more or less unconsciously, as in the case of Ledru-Rollin, by those provisional, but not providential men. Il y a quelque chose qui cloche — his continuous attempt at revindicating, and in a very clever way too, that strange mixture of the chevalier d'industrie, the utopian, and the critic. I have named E. Girardin. As to his criticism, not of men, but of measures, l'gnorance et l'arrogance Proudhoniennes peep out at every instant.

As to the ouvrier artiste, he is not my man. The only thing I like is the portrait of Blanqui which I have sent to Beesly, to cure him of the strange prejudices he has imbibed in the book of that vieille cocotte, Daniel Stern. When we had him at dinner, he naively asked me whether Blanqui was not one of those irrespectable men, like Bradlaugh. I could not but chuckle in my sleeves at this truly John Bullian appreciation of revolutionary characters. I asked him, whether his hero, Catiline, had been a ‘respectable’ man?

The thing that amuses me most in Le Peuple is the circumstance — a good sample of historical irony — that these learned Proudhonians are forced to come out as gens de lettre, a part which they despise so much, and which, nevertheless, is their only true role, the only thing they are fit for.

As to Paul’s lively narration of his adventure with Mlle Rover, it has tickled Engels and my humble self. I was not at all astonished at his failure. He will remember that, having read her preface to Darwin, I told him at once she was a bourgeois. Darwin was led by the struggle for life in English society — the competition of all with all, bellum omnium contra omnes — to discover competition to [...] as the ruling law of ‘bestial’ and vegetative life. The Darwinism, conversely, considers this a conclusive reason for human society never to emancipate itself from its bestiality.

As to La Misère de la Philosophie, I do really not see what I can further do in this affair. The mass has been spoilt from the beginning. The books ought to have been thankfully received at once, but it is now too late to mend. I have written to Meissner to look after Vogler, but we will hardly gain anything by finding out that vagabond. The worst is that Vieweg not only keeps, but sequestrates the book. If he advertises it anew, at 2 fcs per piece, he might sell it — perhaps. Lafargue ought to speak with him in that sense.

I fear I cannot do much for the new paper contemplated. At all events, I shall try my best. Cowell Stepney will never advance £12,000. He is a well-meaning fool who fritters away his means in a most grotesque way. The Social Economist, a most stupid publication by old Holyoake, who is his own Cromwell — lives upon Stepney’s pocket. There is no sham philanthropical pie he has not his hand, or rather his pocket, in. So, if you want him to come out on a larger scale, he has neither the will nor the power to do so.

Our International makes great strides in Germany. Our new plan, proposed by myself, to allow only individual membership, and sell at 1d the cards, on whose back our principles are printed in German, French and English — works well. Jung becomes every day more and more a little master. The unction, affectation, and self-importance with which he drops his golden words and spins his long narrative yarn, grow really insupportable. So Dupont told him, adding that he (Jung) was even given, while speaking, to the habitude of putting his hands in his pockets and making jingle his purse. But he is really not so bad as that.

The old acquaintance of mine — the Russian Bakunin — had started a little nice conspiracy against the International. Having fallen out with and seceded from, the Ligne de la Paix et de la Liberté, on their last Berne Congress, he entered the Romande Section of our Association at Geneva. He very soon inveigled brave old Becker, always anxious for action, for something stirring, but of no very critical cast of mind, an enthusiast like Garibaldi, easily led away. Well, Bakunin hatched the plan of L'Alliance Internationale de la Démocratte Socialiste, which was to form at the same time a branch of our International, and a new independent International Association ‘with the special mission to elaborate the higher philosophical etc. principles’ of the proletarian movement, and, in point of fact, would, by a clever trick, have placed our society under the guidance and supreme initiative of the Russian Bakunin. The way in which they set to business, was quite characteristic. They sent their new programme, with old Becker’s name at the head of the signatures — and they sent emissaries too — behind our back, to Paris, Brussels, etc. Only in the last moment, they communicated the documents to the London General Council. By a formal judgment we annulled and stifled the Muscovite nursling. All our branches approved the decision. Of course, old Becker bears me now a grudge (and so does Schily on his account), but with all my personal friendship for Becker I could not allow this first attempt at disorganising our society to succeed.

Has Dupont told you that gallant Vésinier has been expulsed from the illustrious French Branch as a calumniator vile and base? En revanche, he has become the acknowledged hero of La Cigale, which has openly turned against ‘l'équivoque Conseil Général à Londres et ses acolytes à Bruxelles’. [the ambiguity of the London General Council and its accomplices in Brussels]

And now, my dear children, farewell, kiss little Fouchtra in my name, and remember

Old Nick

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 221;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 24 February 1869

Dear Fred,

Best thanks for the Report [on the coalminers in Saxony]. It is transparently clear. I have changed nothing, except to strike out the final sentence (or rather some words of it). Yesterday read out in the Central Council. Adopted. Will be sent first to The Times (or rather taken there by Eccarius). If they don’t take it, then to The Daily News. Then the English press cutting will be sent to Zukunft, Social-Demokrat and Wilhelm. The poor devils of Lugau will have the great satisfaction of being mentioned in the English press.

Enclosed Resolutions, etc., 6 in all. The circumstances are as follows. The resolution of the Congress (Brussels) obliged us to have the Brussels resolutions printed. Using the excuse that the Geneva resolutions form part of the platform, we have printed, at the same time, part of what was tabled at the Geneva congress by the London Central Council and adopted by the Geneva congress, omitting the amendments, etc., proposed by the French in Geneva and also adopted — rubbishy stuff. Thus, this portion is written by me. On the other hand, I had no part in drafting the 1868 Resolutions. The only phrase from me verbatim is the first considering ‘On the effects of machinery’.

That Bakunin should lay claim to the ‘Slav’ brothers in Courland and Livonia is great. Neither are his claims on Silesia bad.

What about Foster, Exchanges?

Meissner is a fine fellow; I sent him, a few days before your visit to London, a copy of Louis Bonaparte. Asked for immediate notification. No word yet.

Wilhelm remains unchangeably the same. He wrote to me that he had sent 50 or 60 copies to Kugelmann, but Kugelmann in fact has received only 6 copies!

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 224;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 1 March 1869

Enclosed 2 Lanternes and 1 Réveil

Dear Fred,

Thanks for the money. Paid out by Borkheim on Saturday. He read me your letter and then his answer. He is very proud supposedly to have been able to prove that you muddle up genders (which apparently often happens with you).

Ditto received Foster on Saturday evening. The book is indeed important for its time. First, because Ricardo’s theory is fully developed in it, and better than in Ricardo — on money, rate of exchange, etc. Second, because you can see here how those jackasses, Bank Of England, Committee of Inquiry, the theoreticians racked their brains over the problem: England debtor to Ireland. Despite the fact that the rate of exchange is always against Ireland, and money is exported from Ireland to England. Foster solves the puzzle for them: it is the depreciation of Irish paper money. In fact, two years earlier than him (1802), Blake had fully explained this difference between the nominal and the real rate of exchange, about which, incidentally, Petty had said everything necessary — but after him this business was forgotten once again.

The Irish amnesty is the paltriest of its kind ever seen. D'abord, most of those amnestied had almost served the term after which all penal servitude men are released on Tickets of Leave. And second, the chief ringleaders have been kept inside ‘because’ Fenianism is of ‘American’ origin, and thus all the more criminal. It is precisely for this reason that Yankee-Irishmen like Costello are released and the Anglo-Irish are kept under lock and key.

If ever a mountain gave birth to a mouse, it was this ministry of all talents, indeed in every respect.

I sent you earlier the report of Pollock and Knox (the same lousy London police magistrate, a former Times man, who so distinguished himself in the Hyde Park affair) on the treatment of Irish ‘convicts’ in England. One of the ‘convicts’ has exposed, in The Irishman, John Bull’s unprecedented infamies and the lies of that blockhead Knox.

Since Laura’s health is not quite as good as we thought, I had intended to go to Paris for a few days next week. I had written to Lafargue about it. As a result, an unknown man, i.e., a police agent, asked him whether Monsieur Marx had arrived yet. He had for him ‘une communication à faire’. How well the inviolability of the post is preserved in Paris — still! Now I am not going.

Lafargue has been excused 3 of the 5 examinations (French), and received permission, or rather instructions, to take the 2 remaining ones in Strasbourg. Meanwhile, he appears to me to be too absorbed in politics, which can become nasty, since his friends are a lot of Blanquists. I shall warn him. He should pass his examinations first.

The coterie he keeps you can see from the enclosed prospectus. What they lack is £250 security. This has a good side to it. It has emancipated Lafargue from Moilin, as follows:

‘I spoke to Moilin about the security; he promised to give it but, at the last moment, refused unless he were named editor. He did not say this, but allowed it to be understood. Tridon told me: Moilin is a diplomat and, incidentally, has the head of Fouché; so one should never quarrel with him: one has to sound him out, know what he wants, in order always to be on guard against him.'

With regard to my book against Proudhon [The Poverty of Philosophy], Lafargue writes:

‘Blanqui has a copy of it and lends it to all his friends. So Tridon read it, and was happy to see how il Moro had disposed of Proudhon. Blanqui has the greatest respect for you... He has found the best name I know for Proudhon; he calls him a hygrometer.'

After John Bull had compromised himself so nicely with the concessions he made in the Alabama Treaty, Uncle Sam has now kicked him in the behind. This is entirely the work of the Irish in America, as I have convinced myself from the Yankee papers.

Perhaps Prof. Beesly will realise that the Irish in the United States are not = 0.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

As a comparative philologist, you may find forms of interest to you in the following extract from an early 16th-century Scottish chronicle about the death of the Duke of Rothesay (son of King Robert III):

‘Be quhais deith, succedit gret displeseir to hir son, David Duk of Rothesay: for, during hir life, he wes haldin in virtews and honest occupatioun: eftir hir deith’ (namely Queen Annabella) ‘he began to rage in all maner of insolence: and fulyeit virginis, matronis, and nunnis, be his unbridillit lust. At last, King Robert, informit of his young and insolent maneris, send letteris to his brothir, the Duk of Albany, to intertene his said son, the Duk of Rothesay, and to leir him honest and civill maneris. The Duk of Albany, glaid of thir writtingis, ruk the Duk of Rothesay betwix Dunde and Sanct Androis, and brocht him to Falkland, and inclusit him in the tour theirof, but ony meit or drink. It is said, ane woman, havand commiseratioun on this Duk, leit meill fall daun throw the loftis of the toure: be quhilkis, his life wes certane dayis savit. This woman, fra it wes knawin, wes put to deith. On the same maner, ane othir woman gaif him milk of hir paup, throw ane lang reid; and wes slane with gret cruelte, fra it wes knawin. Than wes the Duk destitute of all mortall supplie; and brocht, finalie, to sa miserable and hungry appetite, that he eit, nocht allanerlie the filth of the toure cluhare he wes, bot his awin fingaris: to his gret marterdome. His body wes beryit in Lundonis, and kithit miraklis mony yeris eftir; quItil, at last, King James the First began to punis his slayaris: and fra that time furth, the miraklis ceissit.'

The Times does not seem to be publishing the Report. But as dernière instance there is The Morning Advertiser, which publishes everything out of stupidity.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 231;

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902 and in full in Pisma Marksa h Kugelmanu (Letters of Marx to Kugelmann), Moscow-Leningrad, 1928.

London, 3 March 1869

Dear Kugelmann,

The damned photographer has once again been leading me by the nose for weeks, and has still not supplied additional copies. But I shall not delay this reply longer because of this.

With regard to Herr Vogt, I wished to make sure of those copies which could still be saved from Liebknecht’s hands (I had sent him 300 from London to Berlin, i.e., all those still left) in case they were needed. I therefore took the liberty of ordering them to be stored at your place. But Orindur, solve for me this mystery of nature!

Liebknecht sent you just 6 copies, but announced to me that he had sent 50 copies. Will you please ask him for the answer to this riddle!

Quételet is now too old for one still to make any sort of experiment with him. He rendered great services in the past by demonstrating that even the apparently casual incidents of social life possess an inner necessity through their periodic recurrence and their periodic average incidence. But he was never successful in interpreting this necessity. And he made no progress, but simply extended the material for his observations and calculations. He is today no further on than he was before 1830.

It will probably take until the summer before I am finished with Vol. II. Then — with the manuscript — I shall come to Germany with my daughter [Jenny] and see you then. Or, to be more precise, shall descend on you.

In France — a very interesting movement in progress.

The Parisians are once again really studying their recent revolutionary past, to prepare themselves for the pending new revolutionary business. First, the origin of the Empire — then the coup d'état of December. This had been entirely forgotten, just as the reaction in Germany has been able to wipe out memories of 1848/49 completely.

That is why Ténot’s books about the coup d'état in Paris and the provinces aroused such enormous interest that they rapidly went through 10 editions. They were followed by dozens of other books on the same period. C'était la rage, and this soon became a speculative business for the publishers.

These writings came from the opposition — Ténot is an homme du Siècle (I mean the liberal bourgeois paper, not our century). All the liberal and illiberal rogues belonging to the official opposition promoted this mouvement. Also the republican democrats, people like Delescluze; for example, who was formerly Ledru-Rollin’s adjutant and now, as republican patriarch, edits Réveil in Paris.

Until now everybody has been indulging in these posthumous revelations, or rather reminiscences — everybody who was not Bonapartist.

But then came le revers de la medaille [other side of the coin].

First, the French Government itself got the renegade Hippolyte Castille to publish Les Massacres de Juin 1848. This was a blow in the face for Thiers, Falloux, Marie, Jules Favre, Jules Simon, Pelletan, etc., in short, the chiefs of what is called in France ‘l'Union Libérale’, who wish to perform a sleight of hand with the next elections, the infamous old rogues.

Then came the Socialist Party, which ‘unmasked’ the opposition and the old-style republican democrats.

Including Vermorel: Les Hommes de 1848 and L'Opposition.

Vermorel is a Proudhonist.

Last came the Blanquists, for example, G. Tridon: Gironde et Girondins.

So the whole historic witches’ brew is simmering.

When shall we have got this far?

To show you how well the French police are served:

I intended to go to Paris next week to see my daughter. Last Saturday a police agent enquired of Lafargue whether Mons. Marx had arrived yet. He had a commission for him. Forewarned!

My heartiest greetings to your dear wife and Fränzchen. How is Madame Tenge?

Yours

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 235;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 5 March 1869

Dear Fred,

The enclosed little document arrived yesterday (though dated 27 February). You must send it back as soon as you have read it, since I have to lay it before the Council on Tuesday next. The gentlemen of the ‘Alliance’ have taken a long time to produce this opus.

In fact, we would rather they had kept their ‘unnumbered legions’ in France, Spain and Italy to themselves.

Bakunin thinks: if we approve his ‘programme radical’ he can trumpet it forth and compromise us tant soit peu [however little]. If we declare ourselves against it, we shall be denounced as counter-revolutionaries. Moreover: if we admit it, he will see to it that, at the Congress in Basle, he is seconded by some riff-raff. I think the answer should be along the following lines:

According to para. 1 of the Rules, every workers’ society that is ‘aiming at the same end, viz., the protection, advancement and complete emancipation of the working classes’, is to be admitted.

As the stage of development reached by different sections of the workers in the same country and by the working class in different countries necessarily varies considerably, the actual movement also necessarily expresses itself in very diverse theoretical forms.

The community of action the International Working Men’s Association is calling into being, the exchange of ideas by means of the different organs of the sections in all countries and, finally, the direct discussions at the general congresses would also gradually create a common theoretical programme for the general workers’ movement.

With regard to the programme of the ‘Alliance’, therefore, it is not necessary for the General Council to submit it to an examen critique. The Council does not need to examine whether it is an adequate scientific expression of the workers’ movement. It has only to ask whether the general tendency of the programme is in opposition to the general tendency of the International Working Men’s Association — the complete emancipation of the working classes!

This reproach might apply to only one phrase in the programme, para. 2: ‘above all, it desires the political, economic and social equalisation of the classes’, interpreted literally, is simply another way of saying the ‘harmony of capital and labour’ preached by bourgeois socialists. The final aim of the International Working Men’s Association is not the logically impossible ‘égalisation des classes’, but the historically necessary ‘abolition des classes’. From the context in which this phrase appears in the programme, however, it seems to be merely a slip of the pen. The General Council has little doubt, therefore, that this phrase, which might lead to serious misunderstanding, will be deleted from the programme.

On this assumption, it is the principle of the International Working Men’s Association to leave each section the responsibility for its own programme. There is, therefore, no obstacle to the transformation of the sections of the Alliance into sections of the International Working Men’s Association.

As soon as this has taken place, the General Council must, in accordance with the Rules, be supplied with a dénombrement of the newly adhering sections, according to country, residence and numbers.

This last point — the census of their legions — will, of course, upset the gentlemen. When you return the letter, tell me what you want changed in this draft reply.

Quoad Liebknecht, I have given further thought to the matter. Publication in the lousy little sheet must not be allowed. Publication as a pamphlet by Wilhelm is a delusion. Should I write to Eichhoff asking whether his brother would publish it at a reasonable price? Could you, in this case, bestow your fee upon the General Council, which is greatly in need of money? I still have a copy of the 6th issue containing the Peasant War (apart from my bound Revue, which is complete). I could send this to Berlin.

Please reply by return.

Moreover, Wilhelm should reprint the last section of the pamphlet on military questions. The transaction with Meissner (in which Wilhelm would have to show his cash! — anyway Meissner is very ticklish upon such points) is impossible.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 239;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 14 March 1869

Dear Fred,

From the enclosed letter from Meissner you can see how things look with the Louis Bonaparte. Since Meissner told me directly (personally) that he only publishes pamphlets occasionally, now and then, in order to oblige, something of which you need not be aware, I would prefer you to write to him direct about the Peasant War. If nothing emerges, I shall write to Eichhoff, with whom I maintain ‘International’ relations.

Liebknecht has the gift of gathering the stupidest people in Germany around him. Exempli causa the author of ‘Die demokratischen Ziele und die deutschen Arbeiter’. This stuff can only be read, even to oneself, in south German patois. This dunderhead requests the workers to rid him of Bismarck and then promises to provide them with ‘full freedom of movement’ and other socialist achievements! Horreur!

The man from Zukunft is infinitely more cunning and sharp in the north German way. But with him, too, the upshot is that the workers should pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the democratic gentlemen and should not, for the time being, indulge in such pursuits as trades unions. If these gentlemen are such hot-headed friends of direct revolutionary action, why don’t they set the example, instead of writing careful and reserved articles for Zukunft! Do they expect such stuff to awaken revolutionary passion? That won’t catch anybody!

The reply to the Genevans has been sent off. In the French text I kept the tone still icier and passablement ironique. Luckily, this was not noticed by the English, who naturally only know my English translation.

Apart from the official communication about which I told you, the gentlemen also sent a 4-page private letter to Eccarius, according to which a direct breach had only been avoided thanks to the efforts of Becker, Bakunin, and Perret, author of the document. Their ‘revolutionary’ programme had had more effect in some weeks in Italy, Spain, etc., than that of the International Working Men’s Association had in years. If we should reject their ‘revolutionary programme’, we would [produce] a separation between the countries with a ‘revolutionary’ workers’ movement (these are listed as France, where they have all of 2 correspondents, Switzerland(!) Italy — where the workers, apart from those who belong to us, are simply a tail to Mazzini — and Spain, where there are more clerics than workers) and those with a more gradual development of the working class (viz., England, Germany, the United States and Belgium). Thus, a separation between the volcanic and plutonic workers’ movement on the one hand, and the aqueous movement on the other.

That the Swiss should represent the revolutionary type is really amusing.

Old Becker must have become very stupid if he really believes that Bakunin has invented a ‘programme’.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 245;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 21 March 1869

Dear Moor,

Lizzie [Burns]’s case was pleurisy, which, however, took a remarkably quick course — not till last Tuesday was the exudation on the right lung evident, and by this morning it had already vanished completely. She is getting up again today for the first time. Through a remarkable piece of divination, I diagnosed pleurisy for Gumpert on Sunday, he examined her, found nothing, declared it was bronchitis (which was also present), in addition to catarrh in the lungs, and it was naturally rather annoying for him when the pleurisy declared itself after all. I naturally do not claim that it was present when he could not find it.

Poor Löhrchen [Laura] must have had a hard time of it. Ten weeks in childbed is no joke, and it is good that it is over. When they get there Tussy and Jenny must give her and Lafargue too my hearty greetings.

The explanation about Castille was very useful to me. The wisdom of Solomon Beesly returned herewith. It is the greatest nonsense. In time, this Comtism will confirm an even stronger version of that remark made by that man from Bonn about the Hegelians: they do not need to know about anything in order to write about everything.

In Germany the conversion of the natural forces, for instance, heat into mechanical energy, etc., has given rise to a very absurd theory, which incidentally follows with a certain inevitability from Laplace’s old hypothesis, but is now displayed, as it were, with mathematical proofs: that the world is becoming steadily colder, that the temperature in the universe is levelling down and that, in the end, a moment will come when all life will be impossible and the entire world will consist of frozen spheres rotating round one another. I am simply waiting for the moment when the clerics seize upon this theory as the last word in materialism. It is impossible to imagine anything more stupid. Since, according to this theory, in the existing world, more heat must always be converted into other energy than can be obtained by converting other energy into heat, so the original hot state, out of which things have cooled, is obviously inexplicable, even contradictory, and thus presumes a god. Newton’s first impulse is thus converted into a first heating. Nevertheless, the theory is regarded as the finest and highest perfection of materialism; these gentlemen prefer to construct a world that begins in nonsense and ends in nonsense, instead of regarding these nonsensical consequences as proof that what they call natural law is, to date, only half-known to them. But this theory is all the dreadful rage in Germany.

I've not yet seen the Zukunft.

Tomorrow I shall send you stamps for one pound for the E. Jones demonstration.

Best greetings.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 262;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 15 April 1869

Dear Fred,

Jennychen arrived safely on Wednesday. During the return journey they had such fog at sea that the ship had a hair’s-breadth escape from running aground.

From Wilhelm the enclosed note. You will see, d'abord his first answer to my query about the ‘knavish tricks’ of which he accuses Schweitzer. ‘Political’ amongst this — only two enclosed electioneering things. You must send them back to me, for Wilhelm asks for them back, and they appear to constitute his entire political ‘evidence for the prosecution’.

Lafargue has sent me his French translation of the Communist Manifesto for us to revise. I am sending you the manuscript by post today. For the moment, the business is not urgent. I certainly do not want Lafargue to burn his fingers prematurely. However, if the stuff is eventually to be published in France, certain parts, such as those on German or ‘True’ Socialism, should be reduced to a few lines, since they are of no interest there.

To get back to the negotiations with Wilhelm. I write to him about the conditions on which you are ready to give him the Peasant War. He writes to you that Eccarius (who knew nothing about the matter) had informed him you would send him the stuff, and that he would not fulfil the conditions you laid down. He further writes to me that he has owed Eccarius 30 thaler for 2 quarters, and that I should advance it, since he would, ‘on his word of honour’, repay it at an — unspecified — date. I certainly feel no inclination towards this transaction, since I have already loaned somewhat more than this sum to my friend Dupont.

Ludlow is Barrister at Law, a leading contributor to the Spectator, a co-operator, devout, a determined enemy of the Comtists. He resigned publicly from our Commonwealth because Beesly, Harrison, etc., were contributors. He had sent me a few of his little pamphlets at an earlier date, and is a friend of Jones Lloyd or Lloyd Jones, or whatever the tailor’s name is. A few days ago, after I had seen the relevant issue of the Fortnightly, I sent him my last available copy of Capital. (Note of receipt enclosure No. I.) I naturally knew he read German. At the same time, I sent him a letter in which I made a few jokes about his article, in which he first stated that Lassalle disseminated my principles in Germany and then that I disseminated Lassalle’s principles in England. (Reply in No. 2.) I hope by this means still to achieve a review of my book in an English paper. Ludlow is, ditto, a great admirer of Ricardo, something exceptional today, after Mill mucked everything up.

I discovered by accident today that we had two Neveu de Rameau in our house, and so am sending you one. This unsurpassed masterpiece will once again give you a treat.

Referring to it, Old Hegel said: ‘The mocking laughter at existence, at the confusion of the whole and at itself, is the disintegrated consciousness, aware of itself and expressing itself, and is, at the same time, the last audible echo of all this confusion.... It is the self-disintegrating nature of all relations and their conscious disintegration... In this aspect of the return to self, the vanity of all things is the self’s own vanity, or the self is itself vanity ... but as the indignant consciousness it is aware of its own disintegration and, by that knowledge, has immediately transcended it... Every part of this world either gets its mind [sein Geist] expressed here or is spoken of intellectually [mit Geist] and declared for what it is — The honest consciousness’ (the role Diderot allots himself in the dialogue) ‘takes each element as a permanent entity and does not realise, in its uneducated thoughtlessness, that it is doing just the opposite. But the disintegrated consciousness is the consciousness of reversal and indeed of absolute reversal; its dominating elements is the concept, which draws together thoughts that, to the honest consciousness, lie so wide apart; hence the brilliance [geistreich] of its language. Thus, the content of the mind’s speech of and about itself consists in the reversal of all conceptions and realities; the universal deception of oneself and others and the shamelessness of declaring this deception is, therefore, precisely the greatest truth... To the quiet consciousness, which in its honest way goes on singing the melody of the True and the Good in even tones, i.e., on a monotone, this speech appears as “a farrago of wisdom and madness”, etc. (a passage from Diderot follows).

More amusing than Hegel’s commentary is that by Mr Jules Janin, which you will find in the form of an excerpt in the postscript to the little volume. This ‘cardinal de la mer’ deplores the absence in Diderot’s Rameau of the moral point, and consequently sets things in order by discovering that Rameau’s entire absurdity arises from his resentment at not being a ‘born gentilhomme’. The Kotzebue-like muck he has heaped upon this cornerstone is being melodramatically presented in London.

From Diderot to Jules Janin must be what the physiologists call a regressive metamorphosis. French intellect before the French Revolution and under Louis Philippe!

I shall ask Collet about the source of Brunnow’s maxim. I would not be at all surprised if it were to be found in the English Blue Book, in an English legation letter from Athens. I found similar things from Brunnow in a 1839 Blue Book about the Syrian-Egyptian affairs.

Eichhoff always sends me the Schweitzer in great masses. So he must be coming soon.

Mr Thornton has written a thick book about capital and labour. I haven’t seen it yet, only extracts in The Daily News, to the effect that capital, as a force separate from labour, will fade away in the distant future.

Take care with your eye.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels to Marx

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

April 16, 1869

Many thanks for Rameau, which will give me a great deal of pleasure.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 11 May 1869

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

You must forgive my protracted silence. Firstly I have for several weeks been suffering from my liver complaint, which always afflicts me in the spring months and is the more troublesome in that it makes me almost entirely unfit for intellectual work. Secondly, however, I have been waiting from one day to the next for the photograph that you want and that Herr Fahnenbach, a German sleepyhead, has not delivered to this day.

My wife and youngest daughter are at the moment visiting the Lafargues in Paris, so that we are very lonely here.

With the best will in the world, I could not find any Palmerston pamphlets (mine) for you. The Urquhart publications against Russia and Palmerston, although containing a good deal that is correct, spoil everything through the crotchets of the great ‘David’.

Your article sent to Engels. It will be difficult for us, in our complete isolation from the respectable press, to do anything for you in this field, but we shall try.

About the end of August I intend visiting you with my daughter and spending till the end of September with you in Germany, wherever you like, even at the risk of neglecting to finish my manuscript. I cannot, of course, stay any longer than that.

I read your letter to Borkheim. [1] You say quite rightly that the St Bartholomew nonsense about the Belgian massacres will not do. But you in your turn overlook the importance and the peculiar meaning of these events. Belgium, you must know, is the only country, where, year in, year out, swords and muskets have the last word to say in strikes. In an address of the General Council here, which I wrote in English and French, the situation is made clear. By tomorrow the English address will be ready. I will send it to you immediately. [2]

I have also just written an English address for the General Council of the International Association to the National Labour Union in the United States, in reference to the war with England, which the bourgeois republicans are just now wanting to stage. [3]

Herr Meissner [4] has had the (printed and corrected) manuscript of the 18 Brumaire since the end of January, but has constantly delayed printing it. That’s pleasant too! He waits until the time when it would be effective is past, from stupid booksellers’ business reasons.

With best greetings to your dear wife and Fränzchen.

Yours

Karl Marx

Notes

1. Sigismund Borkheim (1825-1885) – German merchant and publicist who took an active part in the 1848 Revolution. Fled to Switzerland and later settled in London, where in the 1860s he became a close friend of Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Marx wrote this address to the workers of Europe and the United States following the bloody events in Belgium in April 1869. On 20 April, the General Council heard the report of Eugen Hins, of the Belgian Federal Council of the International, who had been sent to the spot to investigate the details of the massacre in Seraing and Frameries. Marx was commissioned to draw up an address on behalf of the General Council to denounce the atrocities committed by the Belgian authorities. He wrote it in English and French and read it out at the General Council meeting of 4 May. The Council approved the address and decided to have it printed and distributed. In English it was published as a leaflet, ‘The Belgian Massacres: To the Workmen of Europe and the United States’, in London on 12 May 1869.

3. Address to the National Labour Union in the United States.

4. Otto Karl Meissner (1819-1902) – Hamburg publisher who brought out Marx’s Capital and a number of other works by Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 295.

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 22 June 1869

Dear Moor,

I don’t know whether you have such fine weather there as we have here, but daylight has been so exhausted that, on the longest day, we had to turn the gas on at 4 o'clock in the afternoon. And it is devilish to read or write when you don’t know whether it is day or night.

Tussy [Eleanor] is very jolly. This morning the whole family went shopping; tomorrow evening they want to go to the theatre. She has read right through [Goethe’s] Hermann und Dorothea, not without difficulty because of the idyllic philistines’ twaddle. Now I have given her the younger Edda, which contains several nice stories; then she can read from the elder one the songs of Sigurd and Gudrun. She also plays the piano sedulously. I have also read Danish Kjämpeviser with her.

So that is Wilhelm’s entire success: that the male-female line and the all-female line of the Lassalleans have united! He really has achieved something there. Schweitzer will naturally be re-elected in view of the precipitacy with which the business has been conducted — and then he will, once again, be the chosen one of general suffrage. Wilhelm is also preserving an obstinate silence about this event.

The Urning you sent me is a very curious thing. These are extremely unnatural revelations. The paederasts [homosexual paedophiles] are beginning to count themselves, and discover that they are a power in the state. Only organisation was lacking, but according to this source it apparently already exists in secret. And since they have such important men in all the old parties and even in the new ones, from Rosing to Schweitzer, they cannot fail to triumph. Guerre aux cons, paix aus trous-de-cul [war on the cunts, peace to the arse-holes] will now be the slogan. It is a bit of luck that we, personally, are too old to have to fear that, when this party wins, we shall have to pay physical tribute to the victors. But the younger generation! Incidentally it is only in Germany that a fellow like this can possibly come forward, convert this smut into a theory, and offer the invitation: introite [enter], etc. Unfortunately, he has not yet got up the courage to acknowledge publicly that he is ‘that way’, and must still operate coram publico‘ from the front’, if not ‘going in from the front’ as he once said by mistake. But just wait until the new North German Penal Code recognises the droits du cul [rights of the arse-hole] then he will operate quite differently. Then things will go badly enough for poor frontside people like us, with our childish penchant for females. If Schweitzer could be made useful for anything, it would be to wheedle out of this peculiar honourable gentleman the particulars of the paederasts in high and top places, which would certainly not be difficult for him as a brother in spirit.

At the end of the week, Schorlemmer will be going to Germany for 4 weeks via Grimsby and Rotterdam.

The strikes here in the cotton factories have been over since this morning, when the Oldhamites went back. So overproduction has no restraints any more.

Close of post. Best greetings.

Your

F. E.

Marx to Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

Written in German and French;

June 26, 1869

When rearranging my bookshelves, I came across a small old edition of La Rochefoucauld’s Réflexions etc. Leafing through it I found this:

“Sobriety is a mystery of the body, invented to hide the defects of the spirit.”

Thus Stern pinched it from La Rochefoucauld!

Very nice, too:

“We are all strong enough to suffer the misfortunes of others.”

“The old like to give good precepts as a consolation for no longer being able to give bad examples.”

“Kings mint people like coins; they give them any value they wish; and one is forced to accept them according to their rate of exchange, and not according to their true price.”

“When vices abandon us, we flatter ourselves with the belief that it is we who have abandoned them.”

“Moderation is languor and indolence of the soul, just as ambition is its activity and ardour.”

“We often pardon those who bore us, but we can never pardon those whom we bore.”

“The reason that lovers never tire of each other’s company, is that they always talk about themselves.”

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 299.

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 1 July 1869

Dear Moor,

Hurrah! Today doux commerce [sweet business] is at an end, and I am a free man [Engels’ contract with Ermen terminated on 30 June, freeing him from responsibilities at Ermen & Engels]. All the main points I settled with dear Gottfried [Ermen] yesterday; he gave way on everything. Tussy [Eleanor Marx] and I celebrated my first free day this morning with a long walk in the fields. In addition, my eye is considerably better, and with a bit of gentle treatment should soon be completely back to normal.

The accounts and the lawyers will keep me on the run for another few weeks, but this will not be anything like the time lost so far.

Beesly really seems to be improving. Just think what respect he still had for the English press that evening when he visited you.

Eichhoff returned enclosed. Wilhelm [Liebknecht] now appears to be pushing him forward in order to beg forgiveness. In the meantime, war has been declared again between Schweitzer and Wilhelm, and there is rebellion in the General Association of German Workers. But always the bold expectation that we should take the side of Wilhelm and the People’s Party. Wilhelm would do well to read the Manifesto on the attitude of the workers’ party, if reading or anything else would do any good! I am very anxious to see how this brawl develops; in any case, it will produce some amusing scandal. Schweitzer really showed colossal presumption towards his gang in expecting them to allow themselves to be bartered off like a herd of sheep.

I assume you received the 2nd halves of the notes on Monday.

The Irish members behaved wretchedly again in connection with Moore’s motion, and Mr Bruce made a happy laughing-stock of himself once again.

From Eichhoff’s information, it appears very questionable to me whether one should write to Meissner at all about popularising your book. [Capital] What do you think? In any case, if books for 5 silver groschen don’t sell, then one for 8 to 10 silver groschen will circulate even less. The only thing that would help here would be a small pamphlet of 1-2 sheets at 2 1/2 silver groschen, but this needs work and is nothing for Meissner. What do you think of this? Or will you reserve it for personal discussion, since you will certainly visit Meissner in Germany?

I suppose Jenny has gone to the seaside with her honourable Monroes.

Best greetings from all to all.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 303.

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

[London,] 3 July 1869

Dear Fred,

Best congratulations upon your escape from Egyptian bondage! In honour of this event, I drank ‘one glass too many’, but late in the evening, not before sunrise like the Prussian gendarmes.

Enclosed a momentous letter from Wilhelm [Liebknecht], from which you will see that he has suddenly appointed himself my curator, and lays down this and that which I ‘must’ do.

I must come to their August congress, must show myself to the German workers; must send the International cards immediately (after they had not replied to two queries on the subject in 3 months), must muck the Communist Manifesto about; must come to Leipzig!

It is really very naive that, in the same letter in which he complains that he cannot pay back the £2 (which I gave to Eccarius for him), he offers me my fare to Germany. Toujours le même!

He appears to be morally indignant about you. I have already replied to him that he has misinterpreted your letter. The fellow simply cannot grasp that convictions and business management are not poles apart, as he assumes in his newspaper administration, and as others have to assume if they do not wish to become suspects.

Our Wilhelm has a sanguine nature and is a liar. So there are probably, once again, exaggerations in his description of the victory over Schweitzer. Still, there must be something in it. Schweitzer would not have returned to the Church of Hatzfeldt had he not been shaky in his own association. On the other hand, he speeded up the general dissolution by the doltish management of his latest coup d'état. I hope that, as a result of this business, the German workers’ movement will finally leave the stage of Lassallean infantile disorders behind, and that the Lassallean residue will decay in sectarian isolation.

As for Wilhelm’s various ‘absolute commandments’, I have answered him to this effect:

I feel absolutely no need to show myself to the German workers, and will not go to their congress. Once they have really joined the International and given themselves a proper party organisation — and the Nuremberg Congress showed how little trust can be put in just promises, tendencies, etc. — then there will be an opportunity by and by. In addition, it must be clearly understood that the new organisation must be, for us, neither People’s Party nor Lassallean church — as little the one as the other. If we went now we would have to speak against the People’s Party, and that would not please Wilhelm and Bebel! And if they — mirabile dictu [strange to say] — would themselves admit this, we would have to throw our weight directly onto the scales against Schweitzer and Co., instead of having the change-over appear as a free action by the workers.

As far as polishing up the Manifesto is concerned, we would consider this as soon as we have seen the decisions of their congress, etc.

He should hang on to his £2 and not worry about my fare. I praise their action against Becker.

That’s all on that.

About Meissner it is probably best if I speak to him. Incidentally, if you have time (that is, if it doesn’t bother your eye) to finish something, it is easier to negotiate with a manuscript rather than without one. I know enough to know that Meissner prefers 5 sheets to 2. The shorter the pamphlet, the harder to sell, as he told me himself.

What do you say about the way that the virtuous Gladstone and puritanical Bright acted with regard to Overend, Gurney, et Co.?

Remarkable, also, was Bruce’s declaration on the Mold shooting, which was not so innocent as the Manchester papers reported. So the Riot Act need not be read. It is enough for some fox-hunting unpaid magistrate to whisper in the ear of an officer, and the peppering starts. Yet even this is not necessary. The soldiers may use their rifles in self-defence (and they themselves judge whether this is necessary). But then, shouldn’t the Arms Acts be repealed, so everybody would be able to use his own rifle in self-defence against the soldiers?

The Gurney business, or rather the attitude of the Ministry towards it, ditto the Mold affair, finally the ministerial trickery with Lamuda and other scoundrels against the Trades-Unions Bill — have made a mighty big dent in the fascination held by the names Gladstone and Bright amongst the workers here in London.

Laura was ill and bed-ridden for 14 days, but is said to be better now. They have given notice on their rooms, and in October will move to a more airy locality (Montmartre or some such).

Best compliments to all.

El

Moro

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 306;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 6 July 1869

Dear Moor,

Enclosed returned Wilhelm. In fact, it is amazing, what he says you must, must, must do. But always the same old story. When he gets involved in a squabble with Schweitzer, you must always be called in to help. This will happen again, too.

With regard to the Basle congress, I hope you have not minced words with him over the fact that only representatives of those who have really joined can be accepted. It would be vexing if he and Bebel had to be excluded on a technicality.

As far as my letter is concerned, his moans about ‘reproaches instead of money’ are the exact counterpart of Bismarck’s complaint: ‘Gentlemen, we ask for bread, and you give us stones’, when his taxes were rejected. The point that so ‘upset’ Mr Wilhelm was the question as to how he could tell me, in one and the same letter, that he did have the money to print the Peasant War, but at the same time had none for the sheet. Further, how is it that the sheet was already ‘guaranteed’ 1½ years ago, yet today it still doesn’t pay? On this point, Monsieur Wilhelm is completely silent and is morally indignant that I should remind him of the shares he promised at that time to send voluntarily and by return; naturally I shall not get them now either, since Wilhelm says I shall ‘naturally receive’ them. The shares were only mentioned in order to prompt Wilhelm to remark upon the status of the sheet; it is fairly clear to me that Wilhelm and his consorts have managed things so sloppily that the printer or some other creditor can take over the sheet, and turn them out as soon as it does pay. In this case, it might be very agreeable for Mr Wilhelm if he had a few shareholders sitting here, who could exercise their legal claims in his favour. If the idiot had given me a satisfactory answer (which, however, would scarcely have been possible), he would have got the money; but simply to send a demand, and this self-contradictory, and without excuse either for his earlier dawdling or a word on the condition of the sheet — I wouldn’t think of it. We don’t want Wilhelm to get into the habit of things like that.

The extent to which his shouts of victory are premature is shown by the 4 numbers of Social-Demokrat that you sent me today. Certainly Schweitzer is also a big liar, but, for the moment, he appears to have saved the mass of the rank and file. However, things with him are going quickly downhill and, if he had any other opponent than Wilhelm, the process would be speeded up greatly. But, of course, the sultry waffle Wilhelm is now having printed as his ‘speech’ will not help much. But Bebel is pressing Schweitzer hard, and cites some points that are very vexing to him, which would suggest the possibility that Schweitzer received his share of the Guelph funds surrendered to Stieber.

In any case, nothing can be done with Wilhelm until he has quite definitely separated his organisation from the People’s Party and placed himself, at most, in a loose cartel relationship with it. Charming, too, is his intention of putting the International on the title of his sheet, which would then, at one and the same time, be the organ of the People’s Party and of the International Working Men’s Association! The organ both of the German petty bourgeoisie and of the European Workers!

Another fine idea of Wilhelm’s is that concessions to the workers should neither be accepted nor extorted from the ‘present state’. He'll get a long way with the workers like this.

I can’t possibly prepare anything for you for Meissner in time. Until the accounts have been balanced, I have to go into town at least 2-3 times weekly, and probably even more often over the next few weeks, since I have to check the stuff carefully. My eye is much better, but still needs to be spared, since I don’t want to make it worse again. In addition, I must put a mass of other money matters, my private accounts, etc., once and for all in order, and this is occupying me a lot too. Also, and particularly in this special case, I would like to bear Meissner’s views first, since you say he is rather sensitive on such matters.

Tell Jenny I shall reply to her as soon as the beer in question puts in an appearance here, which so far is not the case.

Tussy [Eleanor Marx] says she will write tomorrow. She is now reading the Serbian folk songs in the German translation, and she appears to like them a lot; she has replaced me in giving piano lessons to Mary Ellen [Burns], to the latter’s great advantage. When the weather is good and I don’t have to go to town, we go for a walk for a few hours every morning, otherwise in the evening, weather permitting.

The pamphlet by Tridon was mainly of interest to me because of the second part, since I am not familiar with the newer material about the first revolution. The first part is, however, very confused, particularly about centralisation and decentralisation; it’s a good thing that the Renaissance has been adjourned for the time being; the people would have soon fallen foul of one another. It’s a comic idea that the dictatorship of Paris over France, which led to the downfall of the first revolution, could be accomplished without more ado today once again, and with a quite different result.

Bruce’s statement about Mold has indeed proved that previous ideas about the English laws in this connection were quite wrong, and that people take an entirely Prussian point of view. Useful, too, for the workers to know this.

I hope you will soon be able to give me better news about Laura’s health. In any case, to move lodgings is sensible.

Best greetings.

Your

F. E.

Engels To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 312;

First published: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Moscow, 1934.

Manchester, 10 July 1869

86 Mornington Street, Stockport Road

Dear Kugelmann,

As the enclosures show, I do keep my word, and I would have done so a long time ago, had it not been for the following: 1. I still had the enclosed photograph of Lupus, but none of me, and only after frequent sittings last winter did I get a bearable one; 2. then I found that the Lupus photo had been mislaid and, despite all the searching, could not be found. So, 3. I got the photographer who had the negative to make 24 more copies of Lupus [Wilhelm Wolff], but they turned out miserably, since it was very faded, and I wouldn’t like to send any of them. Finally, 4. I found the original one and les voici both.

I regretted to hear through Marx that you had to undergo an operation and that, now, for the summer, you want to live healthily, which is certainly very useful, and here and there also probably pleasant. I hope this will put you properly on your feet again, but will probably have the result that our friend Schorlemmer, who has been in Germany for 14 days, and who wanted to go via Hanover and visit you in about 10-12 days, will not find you there. Marx will probably be coming to Germany with his daughter Jenny at the end of this month or the beginning of next, how things will be with me I don’t know yet, for the following reasons:

On 30 June this year my agreement with my present associé expired. According to my original calculations, at the beginning of the agreement I had expected that, on its expiry, I would have made enough money out of noble commerce to live on, though very modestly by standards here, and be able to bid adieu to trade. This did not ensue completely, but after various negotiations with my associé we finally agreed that I would allow him to use my name in the firm for 5 years, and I would promise during these 5 years not to go into competition with him, for which he paid me quite a nice round sum, so that I have, in fact, reached the point at which I aimed. Since the 1st inst. I have been out of the business, and my time is finally my own again — that is, for the time being, purely theoretically since I cannot leave here until the balance has been drawn and the necessary documents have been arranged by the lawyers; and I shall still have to waste a lot of time to put these matters in order. I expect, however, to be finished during next month, and if you would let me know where you will be about that time, it might be possible for all of us to meet somewhere in Germany. I don’t need to tell you how happy I am to be rid of that damned commerce, and to be able to work for myself again. Particularly, too, since this was possible just now, when events in Europe are taking an increasingly critical turn and when, one fine day, the thunder may clap quite unexpectedly.

The Lassallean sect appears, not without dialectical irony, to seek its effective dissolution precisely in its nominal reunification. Schweitzer may, for the moment, still hold the majority of the people together, but no party or sect can endure the repeated expulsion of its leaders. And this time the dirty washing of this extremely unclean clique will produce all sorts of curiosa, which can only harm Schweitzer. The dissolution of the Lassallean sect and, on the other hand, the severence of the Saxon and South German workers from the leading-strings of the ‘People’s Party’ are the two fundamental conditions for the new formation of a genuine German workers’ party. The Lassalleans will now play their part themselves and devour one another, but it will be far more difficult to get rid of the South-German-republican philistine narrow-mindedness systematically drummed into the workers by Liebknecht. Just take the stupidity of inscribing on his sheet ‘Organ of the People’s Party’, i.e., of the South German philistines. If Bebel only had some theoretical knowledge, something like this could not happen; he seems to me to be quite a capable fellow, who simply has this one shortcoming. Then along comes Liebknecht and demands that we should come out on his side and that of his People’s Party against Schweitzer! Whereby it is obvious that 1. we have far less in common with the People’s Party, as a bourgeois party, than we have with Schweitzer’s Lassalleans, who are after all a workers’ sect; and 2. that Marx, in his capacity as Secretary of the International Working Men’s Association for Germany, is obliged to treat decorously every leader whom a sufficient number of workers place at their head and elect to parliament.

I would ask you from now on always to send your letters to my home address, given above.

Recently Marx sent me your study on the treatment of exanthematous disorders by means of ventilation. In my opinion you still apply the ventilation much too moderately. Here the window of the bedroom is kept open between 3 and 12 inches without further ado, without a screen, etc., and care is only taken that the patient is not lying in a direct draught — and this summer or winter. In addition extractum carnis and port in big doses, otherwise practically no medicine. My servant-girl was treated thus last November for typhoid fever, and Marx’s two unmarried daughters last summer for scarlet fever. I thought that this method of treatment had long been generally adopted in Germany too but, according to your account, the old keeping-warm and stink-hole method still seems to predominate.

Hoping to hear from you soon. With best wishes

Yours

F. Engels

Marx To François Lafargue

In Bordeaux

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 314;

First published: Marx and Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, Moscow, 1964.

Translated from the French.

Paris, 10 July 1869

My dear friend,

I arrived here on Thursday evening and I shall return to London on Monday.

In your letter, which I have re-read, you seem to believe that Madame Marx is also here. That is a mistake.

The first thing that struck me is that Laura is still suffering greatly, and her health is very delicate.

I begin with this remark because it explains the apparent apathy of our Paul. He has not interrupted his studies, but he has neglected to take the necessary measures to pass his examinations.

To my reproaches on this subject he replied — and I must say had every right to reply — the following: ‘Before I think of the future, I must occupy myself with the present. The state of Laura’s health demanded a great deal of care on my part. It did not even permit me to be absent for any length of time. In order not to cause anxiety to you or to my family, I wanted to conceal all this. Laura and myself, we even did our best not to rouse the suspicions of Madame Marx.

I have talked to a very good doctor whom Paul invited to the house. He told me that it was absolutely necessary for Laura to go to the seaside, and he suggested Dieppe because a prolonged voyage would do her harm.

Besides, Paul has promised me that on his return from Dieppe he will do his best to cut short the time necessary to pass his doctorate.

I must tell you frankly that the state of my daughter’s health is a matter of serious concern to me.

Our grandson is a charming boy. I have never seen a better shaped child’s head.

My compliments to Madame Lafargue.

Accept, my dear friend, the most sincere compliments of your

Karl Marx

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 315;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

[London,] 14 July 1869

Dear Fred,

Arrived in Paris last Tuesday evening, left again Monday (12 July). I managed to remain completely incognito; on landing at Dieppe I passed first the douaniers and police without them intervening, though, curiously enough, several innocent people (Including a Yankee with very black hair, who was taken for an Italian) were asked for their passports and, in accordance with the latest regulations, the Frenchmen had to give their names. I lodged as A. Williams in Paris, Rue St Placide, maison meublee (next street to Lafargue).

Laurachen has been suffering from a really serious illness. She is now convalescing, and is going tomorrow with Paul, etc., to Dieppe, where they will spend a month at the seaside, and will perhaps come over to England later. My business in Paris was to have a look at the status rerum, following a letter from Lafargue senior, and then write to the senior (from Paris), after consultations with the junior. Because of Laura’s state of health, Lafargue has naturally been completely absorbed by domestic worries, but has promised most solemnly to take the necessary steps as soon as Laura is completely restored. The senior also put his foot in it in his letters to Paris. I shall see what he writes to me in his reply.

Le petit [Blanqui] has left Paris (where he was present incognito at all the crowd-gatherings, etc.) for Brussels and, under the circumstances, his absence was by no means unpleasant for me. Because of this, the paper has been ‘postponed’.

I saw neither Schily nor anybody else, but confined myself entirely to the family, with whom I sauntered through more or less the whole of Paris. The bank where they live (Faubourg St Germain, etc.), has not changed much and is not Haussmannised. Then, as now, narrow stinking streets. However, things look much changed on the other bank of the Seine, where the change already starts with the front of the Louvre.

The females appear to have become much uglier.

The heat was unbearable, particularly in the train.

The biggest sensation, to the great annoyance of the democratic opposition (including the irréconciliables), was caused by Raspail’s short speech, in which he demanded the release of his election committee. He spoke of the injustice de la justice. Thereupon interruptions. He continued Do you deny the injustices committed against me by the Restoration? By this ridiculous Louis Philippe? etc. He wanted no peines, was ready à bruler [to burn] le code civil and le code pénal; in the meantime, the punishments of officials should be converted into fines (I.e., deductions from salary) and should begin with M. le préfet de la police, namely because of the ‘orgies infernales de casse-têtes’. [hellish orgies of bludgeoning] The language of the old man was in violent contrast to the roundabout prattle of the faux jeunes hommes. [hypocritical young men] And the next day, the government released his Comité.

The sessions of the Corps législatif were relatively very stormy. For this reason, Bonaparte has adjourned.

Tussychen [Eleanor Marx] must also write to me about her plans for staying in Manchester. Schnaps, a charming little lad, sends heartiest greetings.

Addio, Old Boy.

Moro

My compliments to Mrs. Burns.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 15 July 1869

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

Your letter of 2 June came while I was in Manchester. They forgot to send it on to me and later forgot its existence completely. I have only just found it, my attention having been called to it by your letter of 6 July. I only got this second letter yesterday because, as my Laura was ill, I have spent eight days incognito in Paris where, by the by, the growing movement is palpable. Otherwise I should have hastened to write to you while you were ill.

As for the 18 Brumaire, Meissner’s [1] assurances are sheer evasions. He has had the thing since the end of January. Naturally, he did not get the preface, because he had not sent the last two proof-sheets. I got those at last on 23 June and sent them back corrected the same day, together with the preface. So more than three weeks have passed again, until we are really landed in the dull season of the book trade.

I shall not come to Germany till September. I shall make the journey mainly because of my daughter. But in any case I would come to visit you in Heligoland (I am travelling through Hanover).

As to the biography by Engels, please send it back to me. He must rewrite it, as it is intended for a different public.

With cordial greetings to your dear wife and Fränzchen.

Yours

KM

Notes

1. Otto Karl Meissner (1819-1902) – Hamburg publisher who brought out Marx’s Capital and a number of other works by Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx to Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

July 17, 1869

The family poet Freiligrath amused me greatly with his “Räuber” and “Korsar"-Vienna man.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 335;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 30 July 1869

Dear Moor,

Old Becker must have gone completely off his head. How can he decree that the Trades Unions must be the real workers’ association and the basis of all organisation, that the other associations must only exist provisionally alongside, etc . And all in a country where real trades unions still do not yet even exist. And what a complicated ‘organisation’. On the one hand each trade centralises itself in a national leadership, on the other hand the various trades in each locality centralise themselves again in a local leadership. If one wanted to make the eternal squabbling permanent, this would be the arrangement to adopt. But it is au fond nothing but the old German journeyman’s desire to preserve his ‘inn’ in every town, and takes this to be the unity of the workers’ organisation. If many more such proposals come to light, the time at the Eisenach Congress will be nicely debated away.

The international plans have naturally no other purpose than to ensure the leadership for Becker as far as the German tongue is heard (he has already annexed Mulhause in Alsace, see Vorbote, p. 109 under ‘Basle'). In practice this fine organisation, with its leadership in Geneva, must come to grief on the German laws, since Becker has, as usual, made out the bill without the waiter. Generalising the idea of central committees based upon language, in other words putting the Genevan workers under Paris and the Antwerpers under Amsterdam (if Geneva is not intended to rule the whole of France and Walloon-Belgium, which those in free Geneva have very probably assumed), is presumably only designed to strengthen his claim to regency over the German language. But it is very good that the Eisenach Congress and not the international Basle Congress should settle these matters.

Incidentally, I would never claim to have understood Becker’s plan properly; given the German and the logic which rule there, sense and understanding come to a complete stop.

It’s quite clear that fat Bakunin is behind it. If this damned Russian really thinks of intriguing his way to the top of the workers’ movement, then the time has come to give him once and for all what he deserves and ask the question whether a pan-Slavist can be a member of an international workers’ association. The fellow can very easily be tackled. He should not imagine that he can play a cosmopolitan communist for the workers, and a burning national pan-Slavist for the Russians. A few hints to Borkheim, who is just dealing with him now, would be quite in order; Borkheim will undoubtedly understand a broad hint.

You will have seen that the worthy Swiss want to have ‘direct legislation by the people’ discussed at the congress. That will be nice.

It really is a disgrace that after nearly 40 years of political workers’ movement in England, the only workers’ paper’ in existence can be bought up by a bourgeois like S. Morley. But unfortunately it appears to be a law of the proletarian movement that everywhere a part of the workers’ leaders necessarily become corrupted, though it has happened nowhere else in the general fashion to which Lassalle developed it in Germany.

Tussy is now reading Firdusi in the very good version by Schack; so far she likes it very much, but whether she will work right through the enormous volume is something different.

At the end of next week I think I shall finally be through with honest Gottfried, and then I shall have about 14 days of freedom ahead of me. So if you want to make a plan for a journey, then make it and let me know; we could meet somewhere in Germany or in Holland too if you like, or we could leave London together. At the end of August I must meet my mother in Ostend, about the 20th or 25th. Can Tussy stay here in the meantime and keep Lizzie company? What do you think?

Your

F. E.

You will get money as soon as I am in order with Gottfried Ermen, possibly earlier, id est if he forks out before. Send the enclosed to Tussy in a disguised hand; she will wonder wherefrom

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 30 July 1869

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Friend

I had an abscess (carbunculous) for about 12 days (not yet quite healed) on my left arm, like the one that I had under the left armpit while I was staying with Engels in Manchester. But that is not the reason why I have delayed until today my answer to your letter of 17 inst.

Since I would be most unwilling to cut across your plans, and was also personally interested in enjoying your company, I tried several ways of arranging the affair to fit in with your intentions. But it is absolutely impossible. At the end of August I must be in Holland with my relatives, where I have many affairs to settle that are of great interest and importance to me. My suggestion, to postpone the rendezvous to another time, was emphatically turned down because the people I am to meet are all tied to their business and can only meet me in Brussels at that particular time.

So I shall leave London about the end of August. You must let me know when you will be back in Hanover. I shall see how far I can regulate my further progress to fit in.

With best greetings to your dear wife and Fränzchen.

Yours

KM

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 12 October 1869

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

In all haste, as Tussychen [1] and Engels have just arrived. You see from these lines that we arrived safely in England, yesterday.

We had a few sea adventures, and others, about which Jennychen will write you.

Meanwhile, our heartiest greetings to the whole house.

Yours

Karl Marx

Special greetings to Madame la Comtesse and Käuzchen. Ditto greetings from Engels, Lafargue, Mrs Marx, etc. The little one is better again.

Notes

1. Eleanor Marx – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 342;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

[London,] 10 August 1869

Dear Freddy,

I am in a great dilemma with Tussy [Eleanor Marx]. The Lafargues have written that they will be arriving here next Tuesday or Wednesday. If I do not inform Tussy that Fouchtra, whom she loves fanatically, is coming, she will reproach me later. If I do inform her, there will be a tragic collision between her wish to stay with Mrs Lizzie as promised, and the wish to see Fouchtra. I shall leave it to you to deal with the matter as you judge best.

In L'International, the French police sheet, an article ‘La Dictature Universelle’ against the International Working Men’s Association, evoked by the strikes in France, which follow blow upon blow. This article by Jerusalem concludes as follows:

‘Be this as it may, today one is aware that it depends upon the League to bring the life of society to a halt at that moment when it intends stopping everything with one word. If an ambitious minister were to be found who knew how to win their good graces, it may be understood what he would be able to undertake against rivals uncomfortable to him. We are perfectly convinced that this same minister, his goal once achieved, would find nothing more urgent to do than to take radical measures to destroy the League; we do not know whether he would be successful; but at present we declare that the International League is, in truth, the universal dictatorship. Wait until their cash-boxes are filled.'

If the fellow wants to wait until then he will have a long wait. The part of Wilhelm’s speech (delivered in Berlin) printed in the supplement demonstrates, beneath the stupidity, an undeniable cunning in arranging the affair suitably. By the way, this is very nice. Since the Reichstag may only be utilised as a means of agitation, one may never agitate there for something sensible and directly affecting the workers’ interests! The worthy Wilhelm’s illusion that, since Bismarck ‘is fond of’ turns of speech friendly to the workers, he would not oppose real workers’ measures is really charming! ‘As though’ — as Bruno Bauer would say — Mr Wagener would not declare himself theoretically in the Reichstag in favour of the Factory Acts, but in practice against them ‘since they would be useless under Prussian conditions'! ‘As though’ Mr Bismarck, if he really would and could do something for the workers, would not force the implementation of the existing legislation in Prussia itself! Merely because this occurred in Prussia, liberal ‘Saxony’ etc. would have to follow. What Wilhelm does not grasp is that the present governments flirt with the workers, but know full well that their only support lies with the bourgeoisie, and that they therefore scare the latter with phrases friendly to the workers, but are never really able to take steps against the bourgeoisie.

The brute believes in the future ‘state of democracy'! Secretly that means sometimes constitutional England, sometimes the bourgeois United States, sometimes wretched Switzerland. ‘It’ has no conception of revolutionary politics. Copying Schwabenmayer, he quotes as proof of democratic activity: the railway to California was built by the bourgeoisie awarding itself through Congress an enormous mass of ‘public land’, that is to say, expropriating it from the workers; by importing Chinese rabble to depress wages; and finally by instituting a new off-shoot, the ‘financial aristocracy’.

Incidentally, I find it a cheek on Wilhelm’s part to introduce our names ad vocem Brass. I declared myself outspokenly against his tippling with Brass and, at the same time, — viva voce — declared: if this led to a scandal we would publicly disavow him.

The following passages from Daniel Defoe’s ‘Memoirs of a Cavalier’ may interest you.

1. Speaking of Cardinal Richelieu’s army parade in Lyons, he states:

* ‘The French foot, compared to the infantry I have since seen in the German and Swedish armies, were not fit to be called soldiers. On the other hand, considering the Savoyards and Italian troops, they were good troops.'*

2. Speaking of the beginning of Gustav Adolf’s intervention in the German muck:

* ‘First, they’ (the German Protestant princes) ‘were willing to join him, at least they could not find in their hearts to join with the emperor, of whose powers they had such just apprehensions; they wished the Swedes success and would have been very glad to have had the work done at another man’s charge; but like true Germans they were more willing to be saved than to save themselves, and therefore hung back and stood on terms.’*

I hope to see you next Monday.

Salut.

Moro

Do not forget the small note-book I left with you. There are a few notes in it. Ditto regarding the worthy Dühring.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 349;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

[London,] 18 August 1869

Dear Fred,

Rather disappointed by your letter, since all had hoped to see you here this evening. The plan about Ireland is very good (Lizzie and Tussy will be able to admire the ‘convicted’ in natura) if nothing new intervenes. This evening the Lafargue family arrives, leaving Dieppe today at 10 o'clock.

The £10 received, but can’t send receipt before Saturday, on which day there is a meeting of the sub-committee. The money is very welcome just before closing time.

Yesterday Dupont announced that the French (or Paris) trades unionists (Bronze Workers) had paid back £45, i.e., sent it to him to pay back . This money was partly loaned and partly given to them years ago by the unions here through our mediation. (Even earlier, £20 was sent on our instructions from Paris to Rouen.) I have arranged that députés shall wait upon the unions here to appeal to their consciences when they pay in the money. — Incidentally, the Paris unionists have behaved very decently. Ditto, a letter arrived yesterday from Ludwig Neumayr, de dato Eisenach, with the following purport:

‘At the congress in Eisenach, it was resolved that the workers of Germany should be called upon to join the International Working Men’s Association by taking out cards as central members. Since I have now been appointed by Joh. Ph. Becker in Geneva as the agent of the German-language sectional groups of the international Working Men’s Association for Wiener-Neustadt and surroundings, I would request exact instructions as to how I should now act. With social-republican fraternal greetings, etc. Address: Ludwig Neumayr, editor of the Wiener-Neustadter Wochenblatt in Wiener-Neustadt, Austria.

This is a blow to Old Becker and also, in particular, to the ‘language-group cash-box’. But the matter itself may not be mucked about because of private friendship.

You will recall Werner (bookbinder) of Leipzig, to whom I wrote from Manchester. Since then he has worked for us diligently.

Yesterday the adherence of an (Italian) group from Trieste arrived. Ditto from Barcelona; I enclose a copy of the organ of this new group.

In Posen — as Zabicki reported — the Polish workers (joiners, etc.) have victoriously ended a strike with the assistance of their colleagues in Berlin. This struggle against Monsieur le Capital — even in the minor form of a strike — will deal with national prejudice differently from the peace declamations made by bourgeois gentlemen.

I hope to receive some lines from Tussy as to her state of health. My best compliments to Mrs Lizzie.

El Moro

Much to be regretted is the sudden death of Sylvis (aged 41), President of the American Labor Union, just before the meeting of the Labor Union Congress, for which purpose he travelled across the United States agitating for nearly a whole year. Part of his work will thus be lost.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 353;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Hanover, 25 September 1869

Dear Fred,

I had two unpleasant pieces of news from home today. Little Schnappy is in a very bad way, and during our short absence has lost 1 1/2 pounds. Kugelmann insists — and is writing in this sense to London today — that Dr West in London, a famous children’s doctor and, he believes, professor at Lafargue’s hospital (St Bartholomew’s) should be consulted. Second, Laura is again in interesting circumstances, which is equally bad luck for herself and for Lafargue.

We have been here for 8 days. We stayed for several days in Belgium (Bruges and Liege), then on to Cologne. From there a visit to Dietzgen the thinker in Siegburg. From there to Bonn, and from there by steamer to Mainz. This journey delighted Jennychen. Unfortunately, afflicted by an importunate guest. In Bonn I had paid a call on Hagen in the evening. Not at home. Appeared next morning at the moment of our departure. Announcing that he would accompany us to Rolandseck, we were saddled with him until Mainz. In Mainz we spent one day with Stumpf, who has a most delightful family (daughter and sister). Used the opportunity for a side trip to Wiesbaden. Omitted Ems. One day in Aachen with Karl Philips.

During this tour through Belgium, stay in Aachen, and journey up the Rhine, I convinced myself that energetic action must be taken against the clerics, particularly in the Catholic areas. I shall work in this vein in the International. Where it appears suitable, the rogues are flirting with workers’ problems (e.g., Bishop Ketteler in Mainz, the clerics at the Düsseldorf Congress, etc. ). In fact we worked for them in 1848, but they enjoyed the fruits of the revolution during the period of reaction.

Everywhere I went people knew nothing about my Louts Bonaparte. On this point I sent Meissner a note that was by no means courteous. He has not so far replied.

Liebknecht has written to me again about your Peasant War, which is to be printed as a propaganda piece. As, this time, the thing is appearing under the auspices of the Eisenach Central Authority, I would advise you to make the necessary corrections, and to send the thing in without delay. Since I shall probably have a rendezvous with Wilhelm in a few days, write to me by return about your intentions.

Feuerbach has written to Kapp in New York in a sense similar — mutatis mutandis — to that in which Ruge wrote about my book [Capital], and Kapp for his part has informed our Meyer in St Louis about the matter.

Jennychen has still not received an ordre de retour from her employers. The business is unpleasant. On the one hand, it is difficult to get away from here quickly. On the other, the change does the child a lot of good. She is looking really splendid.

Heartiest greetings to Mrs Burns and Tussychen.

Salut

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

September 27, 1869

We returned safely from Ireland on Thursday, a week ago; were in Dublin, the Wicklow Mountains, Killarney and Cork. Had quite a good time but both women came back even hiberniores than they had been before they left. Weather fine on the whole. According to the papers you are having even worse weather there than we are here.

Learned from Trench’s Realities of Irish Life why Ireland is so “overpopulated.” That worthy gentleman proves by examples that on the average the land is cultivated so well by the Irish peasants that an outlay of £10-15 per acre, which is completely recouped in 1-4 years, raises its rental value from 1 to 20 and from 4 to 25-30 shillings per acre. This profit is to be pocketed by the landlords.

Mr. Trench is in turn nicely checked by his own statements to Senior, which the latter has had published. Trench tells the liberal Senior that if he were an Irish peasant he would be a Ribbonman too!...

Ireland’s trade has grown enormously in the past 14 years. The port of Dublin was unrecognisable. On Queenstown Quay I heard a lot of Italian, also Serbian, French and Danish or Norwegian spoken. There are indeed a good many “Italians” in Cork, as the comedy has it. The country itself, however, seems downright depopulated, and one is immediately led to think that there are far too few people. The state of war is also noticeable everywhere. There are squads of Royal Irish all over the place, with sheath-knives, and occasionally a revolver at their side and a police baton in their hand; in Dublin a horse-drawn battery drove right through the centre of town, a thing I have never seen in England, and there are soldiers literally everywhere.

The worst about the Irish is that they become corruptible as soon as they stop being peasants and turn bourgeois. True, this is the case with most peasant nations. But in Ireland it is particularly bad. That is also why the press is so terribly lousy.

Engels to Marx

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

October 22, 1869

Ranc’s novel is very nice.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 362;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 24 October 1869

Dear Moor,

My grippe has happily — in the main — been conquered by limiting beer consumption, staying at home in the evening and consuming linseed tea with lemon and honey.

I was happy to discover the Wakefield here in my subscription library — that is to say, in the catalogue, for in reality it was not to be found. They are trying to track it down; I shall write to you about it again. It consists of 2 fat quarto volumes. In fact, I find that quite a number of the things I have here are very useful, particularly for the 1500-1800 period, and some very important, so if Wakefield comes to light and Young can be flushed out, I would need virtually only quite modern things. Sadler is here too.

About the Flerovsky — the name is non-Slav and, in particular, un-Russian, not a single Russian word starts with fl, apart from flangovy, flot, flankirovat, etc. — you will probably need Gaudissart; for although one can learn enough Russian in 3 months to read such a book, you have no time for this at the moment. Let Gaudissart look at it, and if it is worth something, I may be able to read myself to some extent into Russian again with it, as soon as I am finished with Ireland. From Ireland to Russia il n'y a qu'un pas. [it is only one step]

Enclosed envelope of your 2nd letter from Hanover, which shows signs of Prussian attention, though I fail to grasp how the people found the time, since you only posted the letter 10 minutes before the close of post. Between then and the time when the train left, however, they may have found the time for a tête-à-tête.

Irish history shows what a misfortune it is for one nation to subjugate another. All English abominations have their origin in the Irish pale. I still have to bone up on the Cromwellian period, but it appears clear to me that things in England would have taken another turn but for the necessity of military rule in Ireland and creating a new aristocracy.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 363;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 30 October 1869

Dear Fred,

Please return to me after reading the enclosed letters from Bonhorst and the Goeggiana.

That Serno should have expedited himself from life into death is only natural, but that Bakunin, with whom he stood on bad terms right to the end, should immediately have seized his papers, is an unnatural discovery.

Apropos. The secretary of our French Genevan committee is utterly fed up with being saddled with Bakunin, and complains that he disorganises everything with his ‘tyranny’. In the Égalite, Monsieur Bakunin indicates that the German and English workers have no desire for individuality, so accept our communisme autoritaire. In opposition to this, Bakunin represents le collectivisme anarchique. The anarchism is, however, in his head, which contains only one clear idea — that Bakunin should play first fiddle.

For a complete understanding of Goegg’s and Bonhorst’s letters, you should know that the bumpkins’ (or rather their representatives') party in Switzerland, Austria and Germany, are screaming blue murder about the resolution of the Basle Congress on propriété foncière.

The foolishness and weakness (exploited by the cleverer Schweitzer) with which Wilhelm and his consorts reply to the howls by Schwabenmayer and the rest of their anti-People’s Party supporters, make one’s hair stand on end. It has not even occurred to one of these jackasses to ask the liberal howlers if there does not, perhaps, exist in Germany, side by side with small peasant property, also large landed property, which forms the basis of the surviving feudal economy; whether it will not be necessary to put an end to this in the course of a revolution, if only to put an end to the present economy of the state; and whether this can be done in the antiquated manner of 1789? Quod non. The jackasses believe Schwabenmayer’s statement that the land question is only of direct practical interest for England!

The creation of the Land and Labour League (incidentally, directly inspired by the General Council) should be regarded as an outcome of the Basle Congress; here, the workers’ party makes a clean break with the bourgeoisie, nationalisation of land [being] the starting point. Eccarius has been appointed active secretary (in addition to Boon as honorary one), and is being paid for it.

I have been instructed by the General Council to write a few words to the English working class about the Irish prisoners’ demonstration last Sunday. Being so busy, I have no inclination to do it, but must be done. The demonstration was quite incorrectly reported in the London papers. It was capital.

Best greetings to Mrs Lizzie and the Sunday guests.

Your

K. M.

The Prussians closed my letter to you from Hanover so badly partly out of shortage of time, and partly out of anger at finding nothing in it.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 365;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

Manchester, 1 November 1869

Dear Moor,

The resolution on landed property has worked real wonders. It forces the fellows in Germany to think, for the first time since Lassalle started his agitation, something hitherto regarded as completely superfluous. This can be seen plainly in the letter from Bonhorst. In other respects, too, I find the letter not bad; despite the affectation and semi-education, it contains a certain healthy popular humour and, with the mortgage, he has hit the nail on the head. Incidentally, the people forget that, apart from the main business with big landed property, there are also various sorts of peasant: (1) the tenant farmer to whom it is immaterial whether the land belongs to the state or to the big landowner; (2) the owner, first the big peasant, against whose reactionary existence the day-labourers and farm-hands should be incited; second the middle peasant, also reactionary and not very numerous; and third, the debt-laden small peasant, who can be got at through his mortgage. In addition it may be said that, for the time being, the proletariat has no interest in raising the question of small land-holding.

It is delightful that that simple soul Goegg has now been sacked by his own people for being too communist! The worthy Ladendorff is behind this. Beust may be a communist on paper, but can easily be caught if he is told that the money was not given for that reason, but only to revolutionise Germany in general. Now we are supposed even to keep alive the unhappy Felleisen, though all that can be said is that, the sooner it goes to the devil, the better.

You could send me some characteristic specimens of the German stuff so that I might remain a little au courant.

The Prussians have once again produced a wonderful Prussian trick by destroying the Langensalza memorial in Celle. Never has anything been more grovelling than Mr Miquel’s interpellation on this point. Roon took the opportunity to conclude that, in Prussia, an official order from above is sufficient for the military to trample on any court decision.

I am sorry about Serno; he seems, for a change, to have been a decent Russian. But I am still sorrier for Goegg with his opinion about Serno’s classical French, of which we have also seen samples.

It is a real stroke of luck that the Bee-Hive is now flaunting the bourgeois colours both insolently and stupidly. I have never seen such a filthy issue as that of yesterday. This cringing to Gladstone and the whole bourgeois-patronising-philanthropic tone must break the back of the sheet, and make the need felt for a real workers’ paper. It is a very good thing that, just at the moment when the workers sober up from their liberal intoxication, their only paper should become more and more bourgeois. But Sam Morley should not be so stupid as to put such stupid chaps there, and to allow them to spread the bourgeois varnish so thickly and so obviously.

The Fenian demonstration in London simply proves once again the value the press attaches to public opinion. About 100,000 assembled in the most imposing demonstration seen in London for years and, since it is in the interests of respectability, the entire London press, with no exception, manages to depict this as a shabby failure.

In connection with the present strike by the spinners in Bolton a master spinner told Sam Moore quite frankly: we don’t care at all about the 5% reduction of wages, what we want and intend to have is a reduced production (that is to say a strike).

The Wakefield has still not been found here. But before I need it, I must check the basis more thoroughly, that’s to say, the history of 1600-1700.

So that my Irish sources should not lack a comic side, I have found here in the foreign library Irland by Jacobus Venedey!

Best greetings. Lousy weather here.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 367;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

London, 6 November 1869

Dear Fred,

I send you 1 Pionier, 1 Volksstaat, and various copies of Social-Demokrat.

You will see from the Pionier that Heinzen believes I only wrote Capital so that he should not understand it.

Schweitzer — utilising Liebknecht’s anxiety with regard to his democratic friends — is behaving as though polemics against landed property were the first word in the Lassallean creed! Quelle impudence! Incidentally, Bonhorst did him good service in an issue of the Volksstaat that I cannot find. I don’t know whether you receive the Volksstaat.

Bonhorst’s arrest is good.

There could be nothing more ridiculous than the respectable people’s fear concerning the Queen’s procession today. Everywhere overrun by police as in France. The whole alarm was produced by a hoax. A few agitators have had their fun in the past few weeks, circulating handbills calling on the starving workers of the East End to present themselves en masse to the Queen, and de ne pas laisser passer la reine [not let the Queen pass].

My family has just returned from the spectacle. Icy coldness amongst the public. Madame is said to have stared fuming-mad and ultra-crabby.

I shall send you, in the next few days, a volume I happened to pick up, which contains all sorts of pamphlets on Ireland. Those by Ensor (whom I also quoted in Capital) contain many piquant points. Ensor was a political economist of English origin (his father still lived in England when Ensor was born), Protestant and, despite all this, one of the most resolute Repealers before 1830. Being himself indifferent to religious things, he can defend Catholicism with wit against the Protestants. The first pamphlet in the book is by Arthur O’Connor. I had expected rather more of it, since this O’Connor played an important role in 1798, and I have found good articles by him about Castlereagh’s administration in Cobbett’s Political Register. Tussy should sometime look through Cobbett, for something there about Ireland.

This week Tussy and I lost 3 days putting my workroom in order. It had become jumbled to the frontiers of possibility.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Tussy sends her best compliments to the family.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 369;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 9 November 1869

Dear Moor,

That is quite a bit of impudence with the Vaudeville about the Régence I would scarcely have expected the Empire to put up with something like this. But we see what can be done with pluck, though of course, our Guidos and Wilhelms will not take this as their example.

The Réforme, just like Réveil and Rappel, is rather weak, though a certain amount of declamation can be excused at the moment. The fellows are confused, however. Among them, particularly Raspail. The idea of selecting a provisional government at this very date is as good as a joke against Bonaparte, but otherwise, naturally, nonsense. Bonaparte is supposed to be ill again; things appear to be drawing to an end for him physically, too.

Schweitzer’s turnabout immediately to adopt the Basle decision on landed property and to behave as though he and Lassalle had always preached this, is extraordinarily bare-faced, but very ingenious vis-à-vis the simple souls à la Wilhelm. But what should they do when confronted by this blackguard, who has enough brains always to behave correctly as far as theory is concerned, and who knows that they are completely at a loss as soon as a theoretical point comes up. Incidentally, I did not see the Volksstaat here.

I did not expect Monsieur Carey to be such an amusing bit of reading. I find his cock-and-bull stories of natural sciences read very well and provide plenty of occasions for laughter. I would not have dared consider the man so stupid and uninformed. For instance, he has disintegrated carbon, and it consists of carbonic acid and cinders! Ditto, water disintegrates into vapour. Geology proves that plants and even ferns were in existence long before any animal! The disintegration of metals is a mere trifle for him — in voltaic batteries the tin and copper of which they consist are disintegrated! And a hundred other things. Ditto, his historical fables. The fellow imagines that, in South Lancashire, among other places the Forest of Rossendale (a dense industrial district), the rental is so high only because the ground here is extremely productive of corn! I am making you a whole pile of marginal notes, etc., and as soon as I have read the rent theory I shall write my opinion of it and return the book to you. He naturally explains the origin of rent with just such a nonsensical cut-throat theory as Ricardo, and also his idea of how it took place is as absurd as the way all economists imagine such things. Yet this does not affect the theory of rent itself. What Carey means by the ‘best land’ can be seen from the fact that, according to him, even today in the Northern States it is only profitable in exceptional cases to cultivate the so-called best land!

Post closing. Best greetings to all.

Your

F. E.

Vaudeville to be returned tomorrow.

Engels To Marx

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

November 17, 1869

The best joke of the Irish is to propose O'Donovan Rossa as candidate for Tipperary. If this succeeds, Gladstone will find himself in a fine fix. And now another amnesty in Italy!

I hope to read the details about the debates, etc., in the International next Sunday in the Bee-Hive. Should there be any documents, please send them on to me. Last Sunday the Bee-Hive had nothing about the International although it did report on the wedding of the Duke of Abercorn’s daughters.

You would therefore greatly oblige me by ordering it immediately at a second-hand bookseller’s. Butt’s Irish People: none in London. Other Irish pamphlets, for example, those of Lords Rosse and Lifford: cannot find. Such are the answers my bookseller received from his London agent, and he told me at the same time that in general the English book trade cannot take it upon itself to obtain publications appearing in Ireland, since it is not the custom to have a correspondent in Dublin, but only in London. I'll write directly to Duffy in Dublin.

I've found some very useful things about Ireland here: Wolfe Tone’s Memoirs, etc., in the catalogue. Whenever I ask for these things in the library, they are not to be found, like Wakefield. Some old fellow must have had all the stuff together and returned it en masse, so that the whole lot is hidden away somewhere. But in any case these things must be found.

Goldwin Smith of Irish History and Irish Character is a wise bourgeois thinker. Ireland was intended by providence as a grazing land, the prophet Léonce de Lavergne foretold it, ergo pereat, the Irish people!

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 375;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 18 November 1869

Dear Fred,

I am sending you today a parcel by bookpost, containing 1. the volume of Irish pamphlets (especially Ensor of some value) 2. Social-Demokrat and Volksstaat, 3. 3 copies for you, Moore and Schorlemmer of the Report on the Basle Congress. I don’t know if I have already sent it. In this case, the copies can be given to other people.

I'll look after your commissions.

The Bee-Hive completely suppressed the report (by Eccarius) on the latest session [of the General Council], on the pretext that it had received it too late. The real reason was that:

1. it did not wish to announce that the General Council would open a discussion on the Irish question at its next meeting;

2. in the report, unfavourable references were made to it (i.e., to Mr Potter), about the Land and Labour League. The fact is that Mr Potter failed glaringly as a candidate for the Committee of the League.

Last Tuesday I opened the discussion on point 1: the attitude of the British Ministry to the Irish Amnesty Question. I spoke for about an hour and a quarter, much cheered, and then proposed the following resolutions on point No. 1:

* Resolved,

that in his reply to the Irish demands for the release of the imprisoned Irish patriots — a reply contained in his letter to Mr O’Shea etc. etc. — Mr Gladstone deliberately insults the Irish Nation;

that he clogs political amnesty with conditions alike degrading to the victims of misgovernment and the people they belong to;

that having, in the teeth of his responsible position, publicly and enthusiastically cheered on the American slaveholders’ Rebellion, he now steps in to preach to the Irish people the doctrine of passive obedience; that his whole proceedings with reference to the Irish Amnesty question are the true and genuine offspring of that ‘policy of conquest’, by the fiery denunciation of which Mr Gladstone ousted his Tory rivals from office;

that the General Council of the ‘International Working Men’s Association’ express their admiration of the spirited, firm and high-souled manner in which the Irish people carry on their Amnesty movement;

that these resolutions be communicated to all branches of, and working men’s bodies connected with, the ‘International Working Men’s Association’ in Europe and America.*

Harris (an O'Brien-man) declared to second. But the President (Lucraft) pointed to the clock (we may only stay until 11); Hence, adjourned until next Tuesday. However, Lucraft, Weston, Hales etc., in fact the whole Council, tentatively declared their agreement in informal way.

Milner, another O'Brienite, declared that the language of the resolutions was too weak (i.e., not declamatory enough); furthermore he demands that everything I said in support of the case should be included in the resolutions. (A fine kettle of fish!)

Since the debate will continue on Tuesday, now the time for you to tell, rather to write, me anything you might wish to amend or add to the resolutions. In the latter case, if you, for example, wish to add a paragraph about the amnesties all over Europe, Italy for example, write it at once in resolution form.

Incident of last Council’s sitting. Mr Holyoake — be every man his own Cromwell — appears and, after leaving, has himself proposed by Weston. Tentatively declared that he should first take out a card as a member of the International Working Men’s Association, otherwise he cannot even be proposed. His aim is simply to make himself important — and to figure as a delegate at the next General Congress. The debate on his admission will be stormy, since he has many friends among us and, as an offended intriguant, could play some nasty tricks on us. What are your ideas about the tactics to be followed?

Enclosed — screed from Liebknecht, who has also complained bitterly in his letter to Borkheim that we do not support him, either morally or materially. Return the 2nd enclosed letter from Wilhelm, which is addressed to Borkheim.

A branch establishment of the International founded in Dundee, ditto — new branch in Boston. (New England.)

Carbunculosa not yet quite vanquished.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Apropos L. Blanc: When Reclus was here he also visited L. Blanc and told me after the visit: the little fellow is filling his trousers at the mere thought of having to return to France. He feels devilish well here as the ‘Petit grand homme’ removed from danger, and he has — as he frankly told Reclus, lost absolutely all confidence in the French.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 377;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 19 November 1869

Dear Moor,

I hope Eccarius will force Potter to publish the report belatedly, particularly because of the Land and Labour League.

I think an addition on the amnesties in the rest of Europe would only weaken the resolution since, apart from Russia (which would be very good on its own), Russia would have to be excluded because of those sentenced in the Guelphic conspiracy. I would, however, polish up the language somewhat in: Alinéa 2 I would insert imprisoned or something of the sort before victims, to make it evident at first sight who is meant.

Alinéa 3, it is questionable whether one can speak of the teeth of a position, and instead of steps in I would say turns round.

Alinéa 4. With regard to appears to me more direct than with reference to.

Lizzie immediately passed a vote of thanks to you for the resolution, and is vexed that she will not be able to be there on Tuesday.

The business with Holyoake is vexatious. The fellow is simply a go-between for the radical bourgeoisie with the workers. The question is this: is the composition of the General Council such that a swamping by such rabble is to be feared or not? If you accept Holyoake, then others might follow, and they will do so as soon as the affair becomes more important. Moreover, if the times become more tempestuous, these gentlemen will certainly also visit the sessions, and try to grasp the leadership. And as far as I know, Mr Holyoake has never done the slightest thing for the working class as such. A priori, everything against his acceptance, but if his rejection would lead to splits in the Council, while his acceptance would, in practice, make little difference to the constitution of the General Council, eh bien. Despite this I cannot well envisage a workers’ Council with this fellow on it.

Before the receipt of yours of yesterday, I had sent Wilhelm £5 with a few frosty lines. The fellow really is too brazen-faced. First he insults me in every way, then I should give moral and material support, and send him articles for his sheet, which he has ceased sending me without saying a word. If you should write to him, you would be doing me a favour if you let him understand that, if he wants articles from me, he should pray write directly to me. To act as bootblack to Mr Wilhelm — that crowns it all! Enclosed, the letter returned.

Best thanks for the Irish pamphlets and reports, I shall deliver the two for Moore and Schorlemmer.

When was Reclus in London? And how is the French translation of your book going? Since I have been back here I haven’t heard a word about it.

And now for Carey.

The entire point at issue does not seem to me to be directly connected with political economy as such. Ricardo says that rent is the surplus yield of the more productive plots of land over that of the least productive. Carey says exactly the same.

Continuation by 2nd post.

Your

F. E.

They are agreed upon what rent is. But, how and by what agency rent materialises, is a matter of dispute. Now, Ricardo’s description of the process by which rent originates (Carey, p. 104), is just as unhistorical as all such historical travesties by the economists, and Carey’s own great Robinson-Crusoe-story about Adam and Eve (p. 96 et seq.). With regard to the older economists, including Ricardo, this is still excusable to some extent; they do not wish for historical knowledge; they are just as unhistorical in their whole conception as the other apostles of the 18th-century Enlightenment, for whom such alleged historical digressions are always only a façon de parler, enabling them to represent the origin of this or that in a rational manner, and in which primitive men always think and behave as if they were 18th-century French philosophers. But when Carey, who wants to propound an historical theory of his own, proceeds to present Adam and Eve to us as Yankee backwoodsmen, then he cannot demand that we believe him, for he lacks the same excuse.

The entire point at issue would be nil, had not Ricardo, in his naivety, simply called the more productive land ‘fertile’. According to Ricardo, the most fertile and most favourably situated land is cultivated first, just the way a thoughtful bourgeois, on land cultivated for centuries, must picture things. Now Carey clings to the ‘fertile’ and foists upon Ricardo the assertion that the lands that are in themselves the most productive are those first cultivated, and states: No, on the contrary, the lands in themselves the most capable of production (the Amazon valley, the Ganges delta, tropical Africa, Borneo and New Guinea, etc.) are not cultivated even today; the first settlers, because they cannot do otherwise, always commence cultivation on self-draining land, that is to say, strips situated on hills and slopes, and these are by nature poorer. And when Ricardo says: fertile and the most favourably situated, he is saying the same thing, without noticing that he is expressing himself loosely and that a contradiction can be seen between these two qualifications connected by and. But when Carey gives a sketch on p. 138 and claims that Ricardo places his first settlers in the valley, while Carey puts them on the heights (in the sketch on bare crags and impracticable slopes of 45 degrees) he is simply falsely imputing this to Ricardo.

Carey’s historical examples, as far as they apply to America, are the only useful things in the book. As a Yankee, he himself lived through the process of settlements, could follow it from the beginning, and is well posted about it. Nevertheless, there is undoubtedly a lot of uncritical stuff mixed up in it, which would have to be sifted. When he speaks of Europe, however, the structures and the untenableness get under way. And that Carey is not unprejudiced with regard to America is shown by the eagerness with which he attempts to prove the worthlessness, indeed the negative value — quality of the uncultivated land (that the land is, so to speak, worth minus 10 dollars an acre) and praises the self-sacrifice of societies that, to their own certain ruin, make waste land serviceable for mankind. Related in the country of colossal land jobbery, this becomes ludicrous. Incidentally, he never mentions prairie land here, and elsewhere it is touched upon very lightly. The whole story of the negative value-quality of the waste land, and all his calculated proofs are best contradicted by America itself. If the story were true, America would not only be the poorest of countries, but would become relatively poorer every year, because more and more labour would be thrown away on this worthless land.

Now, as for his definition of rent, the amount received as rent is interest upon the value of labour expended, minus the difference between the productive power (the rent-paying land) and that of the newer soils which can be brought into activity by the application of the same labour that has been there given to the work (pp. 165, 166), this may have a certain amount of validity here and there, within certain limits, especially in America. But rent is, in any case, such a complicated thing, to which so many other circumstances contribute, that even in these cases it can apply only ceteris paribus, only when 2 pieces of land lie side by side. Ricardo knew as well as he that interest for the value of labour expended is also included in rent. If Carey declares land as such worse than worthless, then rent must naturally be interest upon the value of labour expended or theft, as it is called on p. 139. Carey still owes us an explanation of the transition from theft to interest.

It seems to me that the origin of rent in different countries, and even in one and the same country, is by no means such a simple process as both Ricardo and Carey imagine. In Ricardo, as I said, this is excusable; it is the history of the fishers and hunters in the sphere of agriculture. It is not, in fact, an economic dogma, but Carey wants, furthermore, to make a dogma out of his theory and prove it to the world as such, for which, indeed, historical studies of a very different sort from Mr Carey’s are necessary.

There may even have been localities where rent originated as Ricardo suggests, and others where it originated in Carey’s way, and yet others where it had quite different origins. To Carey one may also remark that, where fever has to be reckoned with, in particular tropical fever, economics more or less come to an end. Unless his theory of population can be thus interpreted: with the increase in population, the surplus people are forced to cultivate the most fertile, i.e., the most unhealthy stretches of land, in which they either succeed or perish; in this way he would successfully establish harmony between himself and Malthus.

In northern Europe, rent originated neither in Ricardo’s nor in Carey’s way, but simply from the feudal burdens, later brought by free competition to their correct economic level. In Italy it was different again, vide Rome. To calculate what part of the rent in the long civilised countries is really original rent and what part is interest on labour invested is impossible, since it differs in each case. Moreover, it is of no importance, once it has been shown that rent can also increase without labour being put into land. The grandfather of Sir Humphrey de Trafford at Old Trafford near Manchester had such a load of debts on his back that he had no idea what to do. His grandson, after paying off all the debts, has an income of £40,000 a year. If we subtract about £10,000, which comes from building sites, £30,000 remains as the yearly value of the agricultural estate, which 80 years ago brought in perhaps £2,000. Further, if £3,000 be taken as the interest on invested labour and capital, and that’s a lot, there remains an increase of £25,000, which is five times the former value, including improvements. And all this, not because labour is contained in it, but because labour was put into something else nearby, since the estate lies close to a city like Manchester, where good prices are paid for milk, butter and garden produce. The same happens on a big scale. From the moment when England became a corn- and cattle-importing country, and even before then, population density became a factor determining or increasing rent, quite independently of the labour invested generally in the land of England. Ricardo, with his most favourably situated lands, also considers the relation to the market, but Carey ignores this. And if he were then to say: the land itself has only a negative value, but the location has a positive value, he would thereby admit what he denies — that land, just because it can be monopolised, has, or can have, a value independent of the labour invested. But on this point Carey is as quiet as a mouse.

It is equally a matter of indifference whether the labour invested in land in civilised countries pays regularly or not. I asserted more than 20 years ago that in today’s society no instrument of production exists that could last 60-100 years — no factory, no building, etc. — that, by the end of its existence, has covered the cost of its production. All in all, I still believe this is perfectly true. And if Carey and I are both right, this proves nothing either about the rate of profit or the origin of rent, but simply that bourgeois production, even measured by its own standards, is rotten.

These random comments on Carey will no doubt be enough for you. They are very mixed, because I made no excerpts. As for the historic-materialist-scientific trimmings, their entire value = those two trees, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, which he has planted in his paradisiacal work, not indeed for his Adam and Eve who have to drudge in the backwoods, but for their descendants. His ignorance and slovenliness are only equalled by the impudence that allows him to present such nonsense publicly.

You will not expect me to read the other chapters. It is pure blather, and the grammatical errors are no longer strewn so closely. I'll send you the book as soon as I go up to town; out here no pillar-box is large enough to take it. Monday or Tuesday.

Wilhelm’s sheet is really disgraceful. I am not referring to the free-church-clerical babble, but all the news from their associations, etc., is always 8-14 days old before it is printed. Schweitzer holds a meeting on the 9th in Leipzig, and dispatches triumphal telegrams, which are printed on the 10th in Social-Demokrat. On the 12th the Social-Demokrat states that Liebknecht receives 1,000 thaler from Frankel the banker. Up to the 17th no reply!! And we are supposed to take the responsibility for such stupidity and sloppiness. Tussy will be getting a letter soon. With best greetings.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 383;

First published: in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913.

[London,] 26 November 1869

Dear Fred,

This week I have not been really on my feet, and the business under my arm is still a bother. That’s why I didn’t thank you earlier for the notes on Carey, whose Volume I also received yesterday.

In my book against Proudhon, in which I still fully accepted Ricardo’s theory of rent, I already explained the fallacies, even from his (Ricardo’s) own point of view.

‘Ricardo, after postulating bourgeois production as necessary for determining rent, applies the conception of rent, nevertheless, to the landed property of all ages and all countries. This is an error common to all the economists, who represent the bourgeois relations of production as eternal categories.'

Mr Proudhon naturally converts Ricardo’s theory into an expression of egalitarian morals at once, and thus discovers in the rent determined by Ricardo:

‘an immense land valuation which is carried out contradictorily by the proprietors and the farmers ... in a higher interest, and whose ultimate result must be to equalise the possession of the land, etc.'

To this I remarked, inter alia:

‘For any land valuation based upon rent to be of practical value, the conditions of present society must not be departed from. Now we have shown that the rent paid by the farmer to the landowner expresses the rent with any exactitude only in the countries most advanced in industry and commerce. Moreover, this rent often includes interest paid to the landowner on capital incorporated in land. The location of the land, the nearness of towns, and many other circumstances influence the farm rent and modify the land rent... On the other hand, rent could not be the invariable index of the degree of fertility of the land, since every moment the modern application of chemistry is changing the nature of the soil, and geological knowledge is just now, in our days, beginning to revolutionise all the old estimates of relative fertility ... fertility is not so natural a quality as might be thought; it is closely bound up with the social relations of the time.’

As far as the development of cultivation in the United States is concerned, Mr Carey ignores even the most familiar facts. For instance, Johnston, the English agricultural chemist, shows in his Notes on the United States: the agricultural migrants from New England to New York State left worse for better land (better not in Carey’s sense of land, which still had to be made first, but in the chemical and also economic sense); the agricultural migrants from New York State who first settled beyond the Great Lakes, say in Michigan for instance, left better for worse land, etc. The settlers in Virginia exploited so abominably the land so suitable both in location and fertility for tobacco, their main product, that they had to move on to Ohio, where the land was worse for this product (if not also for wheat, etc.). The nationality of the immigrants also made itself felt in their settlements. The people from Norway and from our timber forests selected the rugged northern forest land of Wisconsin; the Yankees in the same territory kept to the prairies, etc.

Prairies, both in the United States and Australia, are, in fact, a thorn in Carey’s flesh. According to him, land not absolutely overgrown with forest is infertile by nature, that is all natural grasslands.

The joke of it is that Carey’s two great final conclusions (with regard to the United States) directly contradict to his dogma. First, as a result of England’s diabolical influence, the inhabitants, instead of socially cultivating the good model lands of New England disseminated to the poorer (!) lands of the West. Thus, a move from better land to worse. (Besides, by the by, Carey’s dissemination, in opposition to association, is all copied from Wakefield b) Second, in the south of the United States we have the misfortune that the slave-owners (whom Mr Carey, as a harmoniser, defended in all his previous works) take the better land under cultivation too soon and skip the worse. Thus, just what should not happen: starting with the better land! If, with this example, Carey convinces himself that the real cultivators — in this case the slaves — are induced neither by economic reasons, or other reasons of their own, but by external constraint, he should have been able to count on his own 5 fingers that this occurs in other countries too. According to his theory, cultivation in Europe should have originated in the mountains of Norway and proceeded from there to the Mediterranean countries, instead of marching in the other direction.

Carey tries, by means of an extremely absurd and fantastic theory of money, to conjure up anyway the very disgusting economic fact that, in contrast to all other improved machinery, the always better earth-machine, increases the cost of its product — at least for a period — instead of cheapening it. (This was one of the circumstances that struck Ricardo; but he poked his nose no further than the history of corn prices in England from about 1780 to 1815.)

As a harmoniser, Carey first proved there was no antagonism between capitalist and wage labourer. The second step was to show the harmony between landowner and capitalist, and this is done by showing land-ownership as being normal where it has not yet developed. The fact that may, under no circumstances, be mentioned is the great and decisive difference between a colony and an old civilised country: that, in the latter, the mass of the population is excluded by landed property from the soil, whether it be fertile or infertile, cultivated or uncultivated; while in the colonies, the land can, relatively speaking, still be appropriated by the cultivator himself. This may play absolutely no part in the rapid development of the colonies. The disgusting ‘property question’, and that in its most disgusting form, would of course put a spoke in the wheel of harmony.

As regards the deliberate distortion that, because in a country with developed production the natural fertility of the soil is an important factor in the production of surplus value (or, as Ricardo says, affects the rate of profit), it follows conversely that the richest and most developed production will be found in those areas most fertile by nature, so it should be higher in Mexico, for example, than New England; I have already answered this in Capital, p. 502 et seq.

Carey’s only merit is that he asserts, just as one-sidedly, the movement from worse to better land as Ricardo asserts the opposite. In fact, however, soil-types of differing grades of fertility are always cultivated simultaneously, and for this reason the Germans, the Slavs and the Celts very carefully distributed scraps of land of different types amongst the members of the community; it was this that later made division of the community lands so difficult. As for the development of cultivation in the course of history, this — depending on the circumstances — takes place in both directions simultaneously, and one direction or the other dominates according to the epoch.

The factor that makes the interest on the capital invested in the land a component part of differential rent is precisely the fact that the landowner receives this interest from capital which not he, but the tenant-farmer has invested in the land. This fact, known throughout Europe, is claimed to have no economic existence, because the tenant-farmer system has not yet developed in the United States. But this fact presents itself in another form there. The land jobber and not the tenant-farmer is ultimately paid in the price he gets for the land, for the capital expended by the tenant-farmer. Indeed, the history of the pioneers and the land jobbers in the United States is reminiscent of the worst horrors taking place, for instance, in Ireland.

But now damn Carey! Viva! for O'Donovan Rossa!

Last Tuesday’s meeting was very fiery, lively, vehement. Mr Muddlehead [Thomas Mottershead], or the devil knows what he’s called — a Chartist, an old friend of Harney’s — had foresightedly brought Odger and Applegarth along. On the other hand, Weston and Lucraft were absent, attending an Irish ball. Reynolds’s had published my resolutions in its Saturday issue, together with an abstract of my speech (as well as Eccarius could do it; he’s no stenographer) and Reynolds’s printed it right on the front page of the paper following opening editorial. This seems to have scared those who are flirting with Gladstone. Hence the appearance of Odger and a long rambling speech of Mottershead, who got it in the neck badly from Milner (himself an Irishman). Applegarth sat next to me, so did not dare to speak against; on the contrary he spoke for, obviously with an uneasy conscience. Odger said that, if the vote were forced, he would have to vote for the resolutions. But unanimity was surely better and could be obtained by a few minor modifications etc. Then I declared — since it is precisely him I wish to push into a corner — that he should present his modifications at the next session! At the last session, although many of our most reliable mentors were absent, we would thus have declared the resolution against one single vote. On Tuesday we shall be in full force.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 387;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 29 November 1869

Dear Moor,

It is very amusing that Carey is also worthless in the only field in which one might expect that he must have a certain knowledge, in the history of the colonisation of the United States. After this, au fond, the fellow is left with nothing.

The election in Tipperary is an event. It launches the Fenians from empty conspiracies and the fabrication of coups on a path of action that, even if legal in appearance, is still far more revolutionary than what they have done since their abortive insurrection. In fact, they are adopting the methods of the French workers, and this is an enormous advance. If only this business is carried on as intended. The fear this new turn has produced amongst philistines, which is now screeching through the whole liberal press, is the best proof that, this time, the nail has been hit on the head. The Solicitors’ Journal is typical noting with horror that the election of a political prisoner is unprecedented in the British realm! Tant pis [so much the worse], show me the country except England where this doesn’t happen every day! The worthy Gladstone must be terribly annoyed.

But you really should look at The Times these days. Three leaders in 8 days either urging the Government to end the excesses of the Irish national press, or in which the Government itself urges this.

I long to hear about your debate tomorrow evening, and about the result, of which there can be no doubt. It would be fine to get Odger into a pickle. I hope that, apart from him, Bradlaugh will stand for Southwark, and it would be much better if he were elected. Incidentally, if the English workers can’t take an example from the peasants of Tipperary, then they are in a bad way.

Here, in the Free Library, and the Chetham Library (which you know) I have discovered a mass of very valuable sources (besides the books with secondhand information), but unfortunately neither Young nor Prendergast, nor the English edition of the Brehon law commissioned by the English Government. Wakefield, on the other hand, has put in an appearance again. Also, various things by old Petty. Last week I ploughed through the tracts of old Sir John Davies (Attorney General for Ireland under James); I don’t know whether you've read them, they are the main source, but you've certainly found them quoted 100 times. It’s downright shame that the original sources are not everywhere available; one gets infinitely more out of them than from the compilers, who make everything that is clear and simple confused and intricate. The tracts show clearly that, in Anno 1600 common ownership of land still existed in full force and was cited by Mr Davies in his pleas on the forfeited land in Ulster as evidence that the land did not belong to the individual owners (peasants), and thus [belonged] either to the Lord, who had forfeited it or, from the outset, to the Crown, I've never read anything finer than this plea. Reallotments were made every two or three years. In another pamphlet he describes the income of the chief of the clan in exact detail. I've never seen these things quoted, and if you can use them, I'll send you them in detail. At the same time, I've caught out Monsieur Goldwin Smith beautifully. The fellow never read Davies, so makes the most ridiculous assertions to exonerate the English. But I shall catch the fellow.

Today I have not yet been able to set my eyes on the oration of the noble Louis-Napoleon, but only the sweet hopes of the worthy Prévost-Paradol, who imagines he is living once again under Louis-Philippe and that the constitutional millennium will dawn today. Incorrigible!

I wanted to get good old Dido [Engels’ dog] to reply to Tussy’s letter this evening, which only arrived today; but the cur has run out into the rain and snow to avoid this duty, and now it is close of post, so Tussy will have to be patient until tomorrow. But she is certainly thinking more about O'Donovan Rossa in Chatham prison than about her own old chap, who has just come in cold and filthy and is also locked up like a convict in the back cellar.

Best greetings to all.

Your

F. E.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 389;

First published: Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902 and in full in Pisma Marksa h Kugelmanu (Letters of Marx to Kugelmann), Moscow-Leningrad, 1928.

London, 29 November 1869

Dear Kugelmann,

About 5 weeks ago Jennychen sent you a letter — in fact two letters, one to you and one to Madame the Countess [Mrs. Kugelmann]. With it she enclosed a portrait of G. Weerth — and as this is difficult to replace, and no second one can be sent, Jennychen would like to know as soon as possible whether you received the letter or not.

Some doubts about the inviolability and safety of the postal services have certainly been awakened here because a letter I wrote to Engels from Hanover was undoubtedly opened and then reclosed very clumsily. Engels retained the envelope, so that I could convince myself by ocular inspection.

My long and, to some extent, criminal silence may be explained by the fact that I had to catch up with a mass of work, not simply for my scientific studies, but also quoad International; in addition to have to grind at Russian, as the result of a book sent me from St Petersburg on the situation of the working classes (of course, peasants included) in Russia, and, finally, my state of health is by no means satisfactory.

You will probably have seen in the Volksstaat the resolutions I proposed regarding Gladstone on the Irish amnesty question. I have now attacked Gladstone — and this has attracted attention here — just as I attacked Palmerston earlier. The demagogic refugees here love to attack the continental despots from a safe distance. I find this only attractive if it is done vultu instantis tyranni [in the face of the tyrant].

Yet both my appearance on this Irish amnesty issue and, further, my proposal to the General Council that it should discuss the attitude of the English working class to Ireland and adopt a resolution on the subject, naturally had other grounds than simply to speak out loudly and decidedly for the oppressed Irish against their oppressors.

I have become more and more convinced — and the thing now is to drum this conviction into the English working class — that they will never be able to do anything decisive here in England before they separate their attitude towards Ireland quite definitely from that of the ruling classes, and not only make common cause with the Irish, but even take the initiative in dissolving the Union established in 1801, and substituting a free federal relationship for it. And this must be done not out of sympathy for Ireland, but as a demand based on the interests of the English proletariat. If not, the English people will remain bound to the leading-strings of the ruling classes, because they will be forced to make a common front with them against Ireland. Every movement of the working class in England itself is crippled by the dissension with the Irish, who form a very important section of the working class in England itself. The primary condition for emancipation here — the overthrow of the English landed oligarchy — remains unattainable, since its positions cannot be stormed here as long as it holds its strongly-entrenched outposts in Ireland. But over there, once affairs have been laid in the hands of the Irish people themselves, as soon as they have made themselves their own legislators and rulers, as soon as they have become autonomous, it will be infinitely easier there than here to abolish the landed aristocracy (to a large extent the same persons as the English landlords) since in Ireland it is not just merely an economic question, but also a national one, as the landlords there are not, as they are in England, traditional dignitaries and representatives, but the mortally-hated oppressors of the nationality. And not only does England’s internal social development remain crippled by the present relationship to Ireland, but also her foreign policy, in particular her policy with regard to Russia and the United States of America.

Since, however, the English working class undoubtedly throws the greatest weight on the scales of social emancipation generally, this is the point where the lever must be applied. It is a fact that the English Republic under Cromwell met shipwreck in — Ireland. Non bis in idem! [this shall not happen twice] The Irish have played a capital joke on the English government by electing the convict felon O'Donovan Rossa as member of Parliament. Government newspapers are already threatening a renewed suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, a renewed system of terror! In fact, England never has and never can rule Ireland any other way, as long as the present relationship continues — only with the most abominable reign of terror and the most reprehensible corruption.

In France things are going well so far. On the one hand, the outmoded demagogic and democratic bawlers of all shades are compromising themselves. On the other, Bonaparte has been driven along a path of concession on which he is bound to break his neck.

Yesterday’s Observer (this weekly belongs to the Ministry), referring to the Eulenburg scandal in the Prussian Chamber, remarks: ‘Napoleon said: “Grattez le Russe, et vous trouverez le Tartare'’ [scratch a Russian and you find a Tartar]. With regard to a Prussian it isn’t even necessary to scratch — to find a Russian.

Apropos. Reich, Dr Med., has the Christian name of Eduard, and appears, from the preface to his book, to live in Gotha.

My best wishes to Madame the Countess and Fränzchen.

Your

K. Marx

Couldn’t we have the Bielefeld Freiligrath-Fest-Broschure?

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 392;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

[London,] 4 December 1869

Dear Fred,

The resolutions unanimously carried despite Odger’s incessant verbal amendments. I gave in to him on only one point, to omit the word ‘deliberate’ before ‘insults’ in para. 1. I did this on pretence, that everything a Prime Minister publicly did, must be presumed eo ipso to be deliberate. The real reason was that I knew, as soon as the first para. was accepted in substance, all further opposition would be in vain. I'm sending you 2 National Reformers containing reports on the 2 first sessions, not yet on the latest. This report, too, is poor, and much is quite wrong (due to misunderstanding), but better than Eccarius’ reports in Reynolds’s. They are by Harris, whose currence panacea you will also find in the latest number of the National Reformer.

With the exception of Mottershead, who appeared as John Bull, and Odger, who as always acted the diplomat, the English delegates have behaved excellently. The general debate on the attitude of the English working class to the Irish question begins on Tuesday.

One has to struggle here not only against prejudices, but also against the stupidity and wretchedness of the Irish spokesmen in Dublin. The Irishman (Pigott) cannot know of the proceedings and resolutions solely from Reynolds’s, to which he subscribes and from which he often quotes. They (the resolutions) had already been sent him directly by an Irishman on 17 November. Till today, deliberately not a word. The jackass behaved in a similar way during our debate and petition for 3 Manchester men. The ‘Irish’ question must be treated as something quite distinct, excluding the outside world, and it must be concealed that English workers sympathise with the Irish! What a dumb ox! And this with regard to the International, which has press organs all over Europe and the United States! This week he has received the resolutions officially, signed by the Foreign Secretaries. The material has also been sent to the People. Nous verrons. Mottershead subscribes to The Irishman and will not fail to use this opportunity to poke fun at the high-souled Irishmen.

But I'll play a trick on Pigott. I'm writing to Eccarius today, asking him to send the Resolutions with the signatures, etc., to Isaac Butt, the President of the Irish Working Men’s Association. Butt is not Pigott.

The following explains to you the enclosed letter from Applegarth:

After the end of the last session, in which he behaved very well, he took me aside and told me the following: an eminent member of the House of Commons had written to him that he had been commissioned by an eminent member of the House of Lords (Lord Leachfield!) to ask him whether he had voted for the abolition of all private property at Basle. His answer was decisive for the attitude towards him of Applegarth’s parliamentary patrons. He (Applegarth) wanted to give the fellows a decisive answer, I should write down briefly the ‘reasons’, and this the following day. I was very busy, as well as still suffering under the arm; cold made worse by the frightful fog after the session on Tuesday evening. Thus, wrote to Applegarth on Wednesday that I had been prevented, but ready to support him when he received a reply. With English obstinacy he did not accept; wrote enclosed letter. So I was willy-nilly forced to write him 8 closely-written pages, which will give him a lot to pore over about landed property and the necessity of its abolition. The fellow is very important since, on the part of both Houses of Parliament he is the officially recognised representative of the English trades unions.

Enclosed, also, a letter from Bracke. I have nothing against Bonhorst; I had only told Kugelmann that I regarded him as a rather revolutionary character. Kugelmann, with his usual tact, informed Bracke of this in amplified form.

Tussy thanks Dido very much for his letter, and sends greetings to all.

Salut.

Your

Moor

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 394;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Manchester, 9 December 1869

Dear Moor,

In the reports in the National Reformer a certain amount of nonsense is, however, attributed to you. They can’t get along without something like that. I see the Bee-Hive is ignoring the whole debate. This is called publicity, just like the dear old Didaskalia für Geist, Gemüt und Publizität.

I half expected what happened with The Irishman. Ireland still remains the sacra insula, whose aspirations may not be lumped together with the profane class struggle of the rest of the sinful world. Partly, this is certainly an honest madness of these people, but equally certainly it is partly a calculated policy on the part of the spokesmen in order to maintain their domination over the peasants. In addition, a nation of peasants is always forced to take its literary representatives from among the bourgeoisie of the towns and its ideologists, and here Dublin (I mean Catholic Dublin) is approximately to Ireland what Copenhagen is to Denmark. For these gentry, however, the whole labour movement is pure heresy, and the Irish peasant must not be allowed to find out that the socialist workers are his sole allies in Europe.

In other respects, too, the Irishman is very scurvy this week. If it was ready to retreat in this way at the first threat of suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act then the sabre-rattling was absolutely misplaced from the start. And now even the fear that still more political prisoners might be elected! On the one hand, the Irish are warned, quite rightly, not to let themselves be inveigled into any illegalities; on the other, they should be held back from doing the only lawful thing that is opportune and revolutionary in character, the only thing that might successfully break with the established practice of electing place-hunting lawyers and might impress the English liberals. Pigott is obviously afraid that others could outstrip him here.

Of course you will remember how O'Connell, also, always incited the Irish against the Chartists, although — or just because — they had inscribed Repeal on their banner.

The question put to Applegarth is delicious. One sees how these trumpery lords and M.P.s imagine that the whole labour movement is already in their pockets because Odger and Potter flirt with them and the Bee-Hive has been sold. The gentlemen are in for a surprise. In the meantime, it’s a good thing that a new election is not, apparently, in the immediate offing; the gentlemen have to make fools of themselves first. Applegarth and Bracke returned enclosed.

From the enclosed query from Solingen you will see all the things I'm supposed to afford. What should be done in this case? If I send the people 50-100 thaler it will not help them, and I can’t risk more for them since, in the long run, it will certainly be throwing money away. What is your opinion?

The worthy gentlemen from tiers parti [third party] believe they already occupy the ministerial chairs, and have already made wonderful fools of themselves. They vote gaily for the vindication of the prefects of Monsieur de Forcade Laroquette. In this way I cannot see why any sort of ministerial change is necessary, if everything the present ministers have done is all right. On the other hand, Louis [Napoleon III] certainly believes that he has now once again so frightened the bourgeois with the red spectre that he can get away with phrases. The business is entangling itself quite nicely.

What scurvy knaves the Prussians are. Scarcely has an apparently constitutional wind begun to blow from Paris, when they immediately start making small concessions. Eulenherg takes over, in the state budget, the proxy costs of the deputies who are state officials, etc. And for this Camphausen diddles the Chamber out of 8 2/3 million annually, which previously, by law, had to be devoted to eliminating debts, and on the other hand he now abolishes the amortissement, except where the Government and the Chamber decree that there should be redemption. The stupid Liberals themselves demanded this earlier and must now vote for it.

China, with the steady expansion of her market, appears to wish to save the cotton trade once again, at least for a while. The reports from there are considerably better, though much has been consigned there, and since then there has again been a veering-round here, and once again work is going swingingly. This will naturally drive up the cotton price again, and the whole profit will go into the pockets of the importer. But at least they are working here without losses.

With Gottfried I am now completely in the clear. Yesterday he paid me the last remainder of my money, and we shall now probably more or less show each other our backsides.

Best greetings.

Your

F. E.

How anxious Bracke is not to give an opinion about people whom he should know very well. Also appears to have more good nature than resolution.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 396;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

London, 10 December 1869

Dear Fred,

D'abord, about the Solingen business. (Are £2 necessary here? I think only one.)

These people have bothered me, the General Council, the Basle Congress etc., with their appeals. They themselves admit that their productive cooperative is only of local interest. How can they expect foreign countries to contribute a single farthing to them, in view of the international sacrifices that the strikes, etc., cost, and of the tribulations of hundreds of French and English production cooperatives? They have seen what benefit they have gained from Becker’s enthusiastic appeals.

On the other hand: these Solingen people are supporters for you and me in the Rhine Province. They belonged (the leaders) to the League. Under Lassalle’s lordly sway, when Marquis Izzy [Lassalle] was in Cologne, the same Karl Klein announced a toast for us, the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, and Izzy was forced de faire bonne mine à mauvais jeu [grin and bear it]. Further, their cooperative was solid and maintained itself for years. The stupidity of the Prussian legislation forced them to fix their capital and thus reduce their working capital. Then the Rhenish bourgeois became irritable and decided to break them up, partly by selling their obligations, and partly by withdrawing all commercial advances (not based on obligations).

Thus, the business is of general importance and, for us, personal importance.

What I suggest is this:

You send the fellows 50 thaler for obligations, and tell them, at the same time, that they must themselves see you can do nothing for them among the English bourgeois in Manchester. Tell them as well — and this is a fact — that I in London have made all possible efforts on their behalf, but in vain. Finally, tell them — and I shall try this immediately — that I shall try to raise money for them among the German bourgeois I shall — naturally you will not tell them this — write immediately to Menke in Hamburg to this end. It is possible that Menke (who is a millionaire, and has read Capital from beginning to end, and furnished it with ‘correcting notes’, which he himself showed me) will do something. 2,000 thaler are nothing to such people. They would naturally, d'abord, send somebody to Solingen to look at how the thing works. If the business is not capable of surviving, it should not and may not receive support. If the contrary, then I am certain that these people (Menke et Co.) will provide the money.

Ad voce: Irish question. I did not attend the Central Council last Tuesday. My ‘family’ did not allow me to go in this fog and in my present state of health, although I had undertaken to open the debates.

With regard to the report in the National Reformer, not only has nonsense been attributed to me, but even what is rightly reported is incorrectly reported. But I didn’t want to complain. D’abord, I would, thereby, offend the reporter (Harris). Second, as long as I don’t interfere, all these reports are in no way official. If I correct something, I admit the rest is right — yet everything is wrong the way it is reproduced. Besides, I have reasons not to convert these reports into legal evidence against me, which happens the moment I correct details.

The way I shall express the matter next Tuesday is: that, quite apart from all ‘international’ and ‘humane’ phrases about Justice for Ireland — which are taken for granted on the International Council — it is in the direct and absolute interests of the English working class to get rid of their present connexion with Ireland. I am fully convinced of this, for reasons that, in part, I cannot tell the English workers themselves. For a long time I believed it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. I always took this viewpoint in the New-York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. This is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.

I have read a lot of Davies in extracts. The book itself I have only glanced through superficially in the Museum, so you would oblige me if you would copy out for me the passages relating to common property. You must get hold of Curran’s ‘Speeches’ edited by Davies (London: James Duffy, 22 Paternoster Row). I meant to give it to you when you were in London. It is now circulating among the English members of the Central Council, and God knows when I shall see it again. For the period 1779-1800 (Union) it is of decisive importance, not only because of Curran’s ‘Speeches’ (namely in court; I regard Curran as the sole great lawyer (people’s advocate) of the 18th century, and the noblest personality, while Grattan was a parliamentary rogue), but because you find all the sources about the United Irishmen. This period is of the greatest interest, scientifically and dramatically. First, the dirty infamies of the English in 1588-89 repeated (perhaps even intensified) in 1788-89. Second, class movement is easily shown in the Irish movement itself. Third, the infamous policy of Pitt. Fourth, which very much irks Messrs the English, the proof that Ireland came to grief because in fact, from a revolutionary standpoint, the Irish were too far advanced for the English King and Church mob, while, on the other hand, English reaction in England (as in Cromwell’s time) had its roots in the subjugation of Ireland. This period must be described in at least one chapter: a pillory for John Bull!

Enclosed something French — and, as a contrast, Freiligrath-ish!

I would be glad if you would send the money for the next quarter as soon as possible.

Apropos. Tussy has undertaken a foolish work, embroidering a sofa cushion for you for Christmas. I don’t believe she will be finished, before the New Year. She allows neither Mama, nor Jennychen, nor Lenchen to sew a single stitch, so she has done nothing else for weeks. This is, however, a great secret, and you must naturally not give the slightest hint that you know about it. Tussy would eat me alive.

Compliments to Mrs Lizzy.

Your

K. Moor

Of the French stuff I am sending you, Gaulois — half Bonapartist, half opposition — is stupid. Père Duchèsne will astonish you by its impudence. And in such a state of things the bitch Eugénie dares to push herself forward ... ? She really wants to get hanged.

Apropos. The translation of Capital goes on. Keller has now interrupted it, however. He wants to publish 18th Brumaire first, believing this possible under the present circumstances and important for France.

As for the current Irish movement, 3 important factors: 1. opposition to lawyers and trading politicians and Blarney; 2. opposition to the dictates of the priests who (the higher ones) are traitors, as in O'Connell’s time, just as in 1798-1800; 3. the emergence of the agricultural labouring class against the farming class on the last meetings. (Similar phenomenon from 1795 to 1800.)

The Irishman only made its way owing to the suppression of the Fenian Press. For a long time it stood in opposition to Fenianism. Luby, etc., of the Irish People were educated people who treated religion as a bagatelle. The government cast them into prison, and then came the Pigotts et Co. The Irishman will only continue to amount to anything until those people come out of prison. He knows this, though he is now squeezing political capital out of declarations on behalf of the ‘felon convicts’.

Marx To Engels

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

December 17, 1869

Our Irish resolutions have been sent to all trade unions that maintain ties with us. Only one has protested, a small branch of the curriers, saying they are political and not within the Council’s sphere of action. We are sending a deputation to enlighten them. Mr. Odger now understands how useful it was for him that he voted for the resolutions despite all sorts of diplomatic objections. As a result the 3,000-4,000 Irish electors in Southwark have promised him their votes.

1870

Marx to Hermann Jung. 8 January

Engels to Marx. 9 January

Engels to Marx. 11 January

Engels To Marx. January 19, 1870

Marx to Engels. 22 January

Marx to Cesar De Paepe. 24 January

Engels to Marx. 25 January

Marx to Engels. 26 January

Engels to Marx. 1 February

Engels to Karl Klein and Friedrich Moll. 8 February

Engels to Marx. 9 February

Marx to Engels. 10 February

Engels to Marx. 11 February

Marx to Engels. 12 February

Engels to Marx. 17 February

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 17 February

Marx to Engels. 19 February

Marx to Charles Dobson Collet. 19 February

Marx to Engels. 21 February

Engels to Marx. 22 February

Marx to Peter Imandt. 23 February

Marx to Engels. 5 March

Marx to Laura and Paul Lafargue. 5 March

Engels to Marx. 7 March

Engels to Rudolf Engels. 8 March

Marx to Engels. 9 March

Marx to Engels. 10 March

Engels to Marx. 13 March

Engels to Jenny Marx (daughter). 17 March

Marx to Engels. 19 March

Engels to Marx. 21 March

Marx to Engels. 24 March

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 24 March

Marx to Philippe Coenen. 24 March

Marx to Engels. 26 March

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 26 March

Engels to Marx. 27 March

Engels to Marx. 28 March

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 28 March

Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt. 9 April

Engels to Marx. 13 April

Marx to Engels. 14 April

Engels to Marx. 15 April

Marx to Paul Lafargue. 18 April

Engels to Marx. 19 April

Marx to Engels. 19 April

Marx to Paul Lafargue. 19 April

Engels to Marx. 21 April

Marx to Engels. 28 April

Engels to Willhelm Bracke. 8 April

Engels to Marx. 29 April

Marx to Engels. 29 April

Engels to Marx. 1 May

Marx to Engels. 7 May

Engels to Marx. 8 May

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. About 8 May

Marx to Engels. 10 May

Engels to Marx. 11 May

Marx to Engels. 11 May

Engels to Marx. 15 May

Marx to Engels. 16 May

Engels to Marx. 17 May

Marx to Engels. 18 May

Engels to Marx. 19 May

Marx to his Daughter Jenny. 31 May

Marx to Victor Le Lubez. 14 June

Marx to Kugelmann. 27 June

Marx to Engels. 5 July

Engels to Marx. 6 July

Marx to Hermann Lopatin. 6 July

Engels to Marx. 7 July

Marx to Engels. 8 July

Marx to Hermann Jung. 14 July

Marx to Engels. 20 July

Engels to Marx. 22 July

Marx to Eugen Oswald. 26 July

Marx to Engels. 28 July

Marx to Paul and Laura Lafargue. 28 July

Marx to Engels. 29 July

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 29 July

Engels to Marx. 31 July

Marx to Engels. 1 August

Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. 2 August

Marx to Eugen Oswald. 2 August

Engels to Marx. 3 August

Marx to Engels. 3 August

Marx to Eugen Oswald. 3 August

Marx to Engels. 4 August

Engels to Marx. 5 August

Marx to Eugen Oswald. 5 August

Marx to Hermann Jung. 6 August

Marx to Eugen Oswald. 7 August

Marx to Engels. 8 August

Engels to Marx. 10 August

Marx to Engels. 12 August

Marx to Hermann Jung. 12 August

Marx to Engels. 15 August

Engels to Marx. 15 August

Engels to Jenny Marx. 15 August

Marx to Engels. 17 August

Engels to Marx. 20 August

Marx to Engels. 22 August

Marx to Engels. 30 August

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 1 September

Marx and Engels to the Brunswick Committee of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, app. 1 September 1870

Marx to Engels. 2 September

Marx to Sigfried Meyer. 2 September

Engels to Marx. 4 September

Marx to Eugen Oswald. 4 September

Marx to Engels. 6 September

Engels to Marx. 7 September

Marx to Engels. 10 September

Engels to Marx. 12 September

Marx to Edward Spencer Beesly. 12 September

Engels to Marx. 13 September

Marx to Engels. 14 September

Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. 14 September

Marx to Cesar De Paepe. 14 September

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 14 September

Marx to Eugen Oswald. 14 September

Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. 15 September

Marx to Engels. 16 September

Marx to Edward Spencer Beesly. 16 September

Marx to Eugen Oswald. 23 September

Marx to Edward Spencer Beesly. 19 October

Marx to Peter Imandt. 11 November

Marx to the Dutch and Flemish Internationals. 5/9 December

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 13 December

Engels to Friederick Greenwood. 17 December

Engels to Natalie Liebknecht. 19 December

Engels To Marx

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

January 19, 1870

I have at last discovered a copy of Prendergast in a local library and hope that I shall be able to obtain it. To my good or bad fortune, the old Irish laws are also to appear soon, and I shall thus have to wade through those as well. The more I study the subject, the clearer it is to me that Ireland has been stunted in her development by the English invasion and thrown centuries back. And this ever since the 12th century; furthermore, it should be borne in mind, of course, that three centuries of Danish invasions and plunder had by then substantially drained the country. But these latter had ceased over a hundred years earlier.

In recent years, research on Ireland has become somewhat more critical, particularly as far as Petrie’s studies of antiquity are concerned; he impelled me also to read some Celtic-Irish (naturally with a parallel translation). It does not seem all that difficult, but I shall not delve deeper into the stuff, I have had enough philological nonsense. In the next few days, when I get the book, I'll see how the old laws have been dealt with.

Engels To Marx

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

January 25, 1870

I've at last received Prendergast and — as it always happens — two copies at once, namely, W. H. Smith and Sons have also got hold of one. I shall have finished with it tonight. The book is important because it contains many excerpts from imprinted Bills. No wonder it is out of print. Longman and Co. must have been furious at having to put their name on such a book, and since there certainly was little demand for it in England (Mudies have not a single copy) they shall sell the edition for pulping as soon as they can or, possibly, to a company of Irish landlords (for the same purpose) and certainly will not print a second. What Prendergast says about the Anglo-Norman period is correct inasmuch as the Irish and Anglo-Irish, who lived at some distance from the Pale, continued during that period the same lazy life as before the invasion, and inasmuch as the wars of that period too were more “easy-going” (with few exceptions), and did not have the distinctly devastating character they assumed in the 16th century and which afterwards became the rule. But his theory that the enormous amiability of the Irishmen, and especially the Irish women, immediately disarms even the most hostile immigrant, is just thoroughly Irish, since the Irish way of thinking lacks all sense of proportion.

A new edition of Giraldus Cambrensis has appeared: Giraldi Cambrensis Opera, ed. J. S. Brewer, London, Longman and Co., 1863, at least 3 volumes; could you find out the price for me and whether it would be possible to get cheaply, secondhand, the whole work or at least the volume containing “Topographia Hibernica” and perhaps also “Hibernia expugnata"?

In order not to make a fool of myself over Cromwell, I'll have to put in a lot more work on the English history of the period. That will do no harm, but it will take up a lot of time.

Letter from Engels to Marx

In London

Abstract

Written: February 1, 1870;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

It is a real mercy that in spite of G. Flourens, there was no outbreak at Noir's funeral. The fury of the "Pays" shows the bitter disappointment of the Bonapartists. Indeed what could be wished for better than to catch the whole of the revolutionary masses of Paris in flagrant delinquency in an open space outside Paris and even outside the walls of the fortifications, which have only a few entrances? Half a dozen cannons at the passages through the walls, a regiment of infantry in skirmishing formation and a brigade of cavalry to charge in and pursue--and in half an hour's time the whole unarmed crowd--the few revolvers that some of them may have in their pockets do not count--will be blown up, cut to pieces or taken prisoners. But as there are 60,000 troops at hand the crowd could even be allowed inside the fortifications, these could then be manned and the whole mass shot or ridden down in the open ground of the Champs Elysees and the Avenue de Neuilly. Mad! Paris, manned by 60,000 soldiers, is to be captured from the open fields by 200,000 unarmed workers!

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London] 10 February, 1870

I have read the first 150 pages of Flerovsky's book[a] (they are taken up by Siberia, North Russia and Astrakhan). This is the first work to tell the truth about Russian economic conditions. The man is a determined enemy of what he calls "Russian optimism." I never held very rosy views of this communistic Eldorado, but Flerovsky surpasses all expectations. In fact it is wonderful and undoubtedly a sign of change that such a thing could be printed in Petersburg at all.

"Our proletariat is small in number but the mass of our working class consists entirely of workers whose lot is worse than the lot of all other proletarians."[b]

The method of presentation is quite original, at times it reminds one most of Monteil[b]. One can see that the man has travelled around everywhere and seen everything for himself. A glowing hatred of landlords, capitalists and officials. No socialist doctrine, no mysticism about the land (although in favour of the communal form of ownership), no nihilistic extravagance. Here and there a certain amount or well-meaning twaddle, which, however, is suited to the stage of development reached by the people for whom the book is intended. In any case this is the most important book which has appeared since your Condition of the Working Class. The family life of the Russian peasants--the awful beating to death of wives, the vodka and the concubines--is also well described. It will therefore come quite opportunely if you would now send me the imaginative lies of Citizen Herzen.

a N. Flerovsky, The Condition of the Working Class in Russia.—Ed.

b In the letter the quotation is given in Russian.—Ed.

c Monteil, Amans Alexis (1769-1850) French historian who defended the ideas of the great French Revolution. His chief work was his Histoire des Francais des divers Etats. [History of the French in their Different Orders.)—Ed.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: February 12, 1870;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London] 12 February, 1870

Your introduction is very good. [Intro to Engels' Peasant War in Germany, 1870.] I know of nothing which should be altered or added. With your treatment of 1866 I agree word for word. The double thrust at Wilhelm [Liebknecht] with the People's Party and Schweitzer with his bodyguard of ruffians is very pretty!...

The title of N. Flerovsky's book is The Condition of the Working Class in Russia, Publishers, N. P. Polyakov, St. Petersburg, 1869.

What amuses me very much among other things in Flerovsky is his polemic against the direct dues paid by the peasantry. It is a regular reproduction of Marshal Vauban and Boisguillebert. He feels too that the situation of the country people has its analogy in the period of the old French monarchy (after Louis XIV). Like Monteil, he has a great feeling for national characteristics--"the honest Kalmuck," "the Mordwin, poetical despite his dirt" (he compares him to the Irish), the "agile, lively, epicurean Tartar," "the talented Little Russian," etc. Like a good Russian he teaches his fellow countrymen what they should do to turn the hatred which all these races have for them into its opposite. As an example of this hatred he instances among other things a genuinely Russian colony which has emigrated from Poland to Siberia. These people only know Russian and not a word of Polish, but they regard themselves as Poles and devote a Polish hatred to the Russians, etc.

From his book it follows irrefutably that the present conditions in Russia can no longer be maintained, that the emancipation of the serfs only, of course, hastened the process of disintegration and that a fearful social revolution is approaching. Here too one sees the real basis of the schoolboy nihilism which is at present the fashion among Russian students, etc. In Geneva, by the by, a new colony of exiled Russian students has been formed whose programme proclaims opposition to Pan-Slavism, which is to be replaced by the International.

In a special section Flerovsky shows that the "Russification" of the alien races is a sheer optimistic delusion, even in the East.

Engels To Marx

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

February 17, 1870

And thus the mountain Gladstone has successfully given birth to his Irish mouse. I really don’t know what the Tories could have against this Bill, which is so indulgent with the Irish landlords and finally places their interests in the tested hands of the Irish lawyers. Nevertheless, even this slight restriction of the eviction right will put an end to excessive emigration and the conversion of arable land into pastures. But it is very amusing if the brave Gladstone thinks he has settled the Irish question by means of this new prospect of endless lawsuits.

Is it possible to get a copy of the Bill? It would be important for me to follow the debates on the individual clauses.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 17 February 1870

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

Yesterday, for the first time for a long time, I went out into the fresh air.

First of all business. Be so kind as to send at once a copy of Vogt [1] to Ascher and Co, Unter den Linden 11, Berlin. I should be glad if, in despatching the book, you would get a receipt from the post office and send it on to me. You would also oblige me if you could let me know when, roughly, K Hirsch [2] wrote to you about the Vogt.

The pamphlet which you sent me is one of the plaidoyers [3] with which the privileged classes of the German-Russian-Baltic provinces are at the present time appealing to German sympathy. These canaille, [4] who have always distinguished themselves by their zeal in the service of the Russian diplomats, army and police and who, since the transference of the provinces from Poland to Russia, have willingly bartered their nationality for the legal authorisation to exploit the peasantry, are now crying out because they see their privileged position endangered. The old system of estates, orthodox Lutheranism and the exploitation of the peasants is what they call German culture, the protection of which Europe is now to take in hand. Hence, too, the last word of this pamphlet – landed property as the basis of civilisation, and landed property, moreover, as the wretched pamphleteer himself admits, mainly consisting of directly manorial estates or of peasant holdings subject to tribute.

In his quotations – in so far as they deal with Russian communal property – the fellow shows his ignorance as well as the cloven hoof. Schédo Ferroti [5] is one of the fellows who attribute (in the interest of landlordism, of course) the pitiful position of the Russian peasant to the existence of communal property, just as, formerly, the abolition of serfdom in Western Europe – instead of the serf’s loss of his land – was decried as the cause of pauperism. The Russian book Land and Freedom is of the same calibre. Its author is a Baltic cabbage-junker called Von Lilienthal. What impoverishes the Russian peasantry is what impoverished the French under Louis XIV, etc – state taxes and obrok [6] to the great landowners. Instead of causing misery, communal property has been the only factor mitigating it.

It is, moreover, historically false to say that communal property is Mongolian. As I have repeatedly indicated in my writings, it is of Indian origin and is therefore to be found among all civilised European peoples in the early stages of their development. The specifically Slavic (not Mongolian) form in Russia (which is also found among the non-Russian South Slavs) bears in fact greatest similarity, mutatis mutandis, [7] to the old German modification of Indian communal property.

That the Pole Duchinski [8] in Paris should declare the Great Russian race to be not Slavic, but Mongolian, and should have tried to prove this with a great show of erudition, was to be expected from the standpoint of a Pole. Nevertheless, his contention is not correct. It is not the Russian peasantry, but the Russian nobility, which is strongly alloyed with Mongolian-Tartar elements. Henri Martin, [9] the Frenchman, took the theory from Duchinski and ‘the inspired Gottfried Kinkel’ [10] has translated Martin and has thrust himself forward as an ardent friend of Poland, in order to make the democratic party forget his servile homage to Bismarck.

That, on the other hand, the Russian state, as against Europe and America, in its policy represents Mongolism, is of course a truth that has by now become a commonplace and therefore accessible even to people like Gottfried and the Baltic cabbage-junkers, philistines, priests and professors. The Baltic-German outcry must, therefore, in spite of everything, be exploited, because it puts the great German power, Prussia, in a ‘ticklish’ position. Everything that arouses antipathy on our part towards those ‘representatives of German culture’ is, precisely on that account, deemed worthy of protection in the eyes of Prussia. Another example of the crass ignorance of the pamphleteer: in his opinion the abandonment of Russian possessions in North America was merely a diplomatic trick on the part of the Russian government, which, be it remarked in passing, was very hard pressed for costs. But the main point is this: the American Congress has recently published the documents relating to the transaction. These include, among other things, a report of the American envoy in which he writes explicitly to Washington: the acquisition is in the meantime not worth a cent economically, but – but thereby England is cut off from the sea on one side through the Yankees and the reversion of the whole of British North America to the US is accelerated. That’s the secret of the whole affair!

I approved of the substance of your correspondence with Jacoby, but the exaggerated praises of my activities have really shocked me. Est modus in rebus! [11] If you must praise, then old Jacoby [12] himself is very praiseworthy. What other old radical in Europe possesses the sincerity and courage to place himself so decidedly on the side of the proletarian movement? That his transition measures and detailed proposals are of little value is an entirely unimportant matter. Between ourselves – take all in all – I expect more for the social movement from Germany than from France.

I have had a big row with that intriguer Bakunin. But more about that in my next letter.

My best compliments to Madame la Comtesse and Fränzchen.

Yours

KM

Notes

1. Karl Vogt (1817-1895) – German natural scientist, vulgar materialist and petty-bourgeois democrat. After the Revolution of 1848-49 he lived in Switzerland, an active member of the ‘League of Peace and Liberty’. In his book, Herr Vogt, Marx proved that during the Italian war Vogt acted as agent of Napoleon III (in 1870 it was proved by documentary evidence that he was in the pay of Napoleon) – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Karl Hirsch (1841-1900) – German publicist and Lassallean. Later joined Liebknecht and Bebel with whom he worked on the Volksstaat. In the 1860s and 1870s he stood close to Marx – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. Pleas – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

4. Riff-raff – MIA.

5. D K Schédo Ferroti – pseudonym of Baron Heinrich Erdmann Carl Friedrich Ernst Wilhelm von Fircks (1812-1872), a prolific writer on Russian and East European matters – MIA.

6. Quit rent – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

7. Having changed what must be changed – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

8. Francisque (Franciszek) Henryk Duchinski (1816-1893) – Polish patriot, historian and publicist. Author of the theory of the Mongolian origin of the Great Russians – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

9. Henri Martin (1810-1883) – French historian, Republican Nationalist – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

10. Gottfried Kinkel (1815-1882) – German publicist and writer; petty-bourgeois democrat. Later went over to Bismarck – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

11. There is a measure in all things – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

12. Johann Jacoby, on 20 January 1870, made a speech on the ‘aims of the workers’ movement’, in which he proclaimed his sympathy with it. Johann Jacoby (1805-1877) – German radical. ‘One of the very rare German bourgeois democrats who, after the lessons of 1870-71, went over not to chauvinism or German liberalism but to socialism.’ (Lenin) (Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute)

Marx To Engels

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

February 19, 1870

The best part of Gladstone’s speech is the long introduction, in which he says that even the “beneficent” laws of the English have always the reverse effect in practice. What better proof does that fellow need that England is not called upon to be the lawgiver and ruler of Ireland!

His measures are a pretty piece of patchwork. The main thing in them is to lure the lawyers with the prospect of lawsuits and the landlords with the prospect of “state assistance.”

Odger’s election scandal was doubly useful: the pig-Whigs saw for the first time that they must let the workers into Parliament, or else the Tories will get in. Secondly, it is a lesson to Mr. Odger and his accomplices, He would have got in despite Waterlow if some of the Irish workers had not abstained from voting, because he had behaved so trimming during the debate in the General Council, which they knew of from Reynolds’s.

You'll receive the Irish Bill next week.

Marx To Engels

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

March 5, 1870

All sorts of things have happened in Fenian affairs in the meantime. A letter I wrote to the Internationale in Brussels, and in which I censured the French Republicans for their narrow national aims, has been printed, and the editors have announced that they will publish their remarks this week. You must know that in the letter of the Central Council to the Genevans — which was conveyed also to the Brussels people and the main centres of the International in France — I developed in detail the importance of the Irish question for the working-class movement in general (owing to its repercussion in England).

Soon after, Jennychen was driven to anger by that disgusting article in the Daily News, the officious paper of the Gladstone Ministry, in which this bitchy publication turns to the “liberal” brothers in France and cautions them not to confuse the cases of Rochefort and O'Donovan Rossa. The Marseillaise has really fallen into the trap, it believes the Daily News and in addition has published a wretched article by that gossip-monger Talandier, in which this ex-procureur de la République, now a teacher of French at the military school in Woolwich (also ex-private tutor with Herzen, on whom he wrote a passionate obituary), attacks the Irish for their Catholic faith and accuses them of having brought about Odger’s failure — because of his participation in the Garibaldi committee. Besides, he adds, they support Mitchel despite his taking side with the slaveholders, as though Odger himself did not stick to Gladstone despite his even greater support for the slaveholders.

So Jennychen — ira facit poetam — besides a private letter, wrote an article to the Marseillaise which was printed. In addition, she received a letter from the redacteur de la redaction, a copy of which I am enclosing. Today she sends another letter to the Marseillaise, which, in connection with Gladstone’s reply (this week) to the interpellation about the treatment of the prisoners, contains excerpts from O'Donovan Rossa’s letter (see Irishman, Feb. 5, 70). In it Gladstone is presented to the French not only as a monster by Rossa’s letter, (inasmuch as Gladstone is in fact responsible for the entire treatment of the prisoners under the Tories too), but at the same time as a ridiculous hypocrite, being the author of the Prayers, The Propagation of the Gospel, The Functions of Laymen in the Church and Ecce Homo.

With these two papers — the Internationale and the Marseillaise — we shall now unmask the English to the Continent. If you should happen, one day or the other, to find something suitable for one of these papers, you too should participate in our good work.

Marx To Paul and Laura Lafargue

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

March 5, 1870

Here, at home, as you are fully aware, the Fenians’ sway is paramount. Tussy is one of their head centres. Jenny writes on their behalf in the “Marseillaise” under the pseudonym of J. Williams. I have not only treated the same theme in the Brussels “Internationale,” and caused resolutions of the Central Council to be passed against their gaolers. In a circular, addressed by the Council to our corresponding committees, I have explained the merits of the Irish Question.

You understand at once that I am not only acted upon by feelings of humanity. There is something besides. To accelerate the social development in Europe, you must push on the catastrophe of official England. To do so, you must attack her in Ireland. That’s her weakest point. Ireland lost, the British “Empire” is gone, and the class war in England, till now somnolent and chronic, will assume acute forms. But England is the metropolis of landlordism and capitalism all over the world.

Engels To Marx

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

March 7, 1870

When I read that story about the Marseillaise in the “Irishman in Paris” on Saturday afternoon, I knew immediately in what part of the world this Mr. Williams could be found, but, silly as it may be of me, I couldn’t account for the first name. It is a very good story, and the naive letter with Rochefort’s naive demand that O'Donovan Rossa be asked for a contribution to the Marseillaise gives Jenny an excellent opportunity to raise the question of the treatment of prisoners and to open the eyes of the bons hommes over there.

Why don’t you have the letter of the General Council to the Genevans published? The central sections in Geneva, Brussels, etc., read these things, but so long as they are not published they do not penetrate into the masses. They should also appear in German in the relevant organs. You are publishing far too little.

Please send me the relevant issues of the Marseillaise and Internationale for a few days. Jennychen’s success has been met with a universal hurrah here and the health of Mr. J. Williams has been drunk with all due honours. I am very eager to hear how that story develops. The stupid correspondent of the “Irishman in Paris” should try some time if he can get such things into the newspapers of his friend Ollivier.

A couple of days ago, my bookseller suddenly sent me the Senchus Mor, the old Irish laws, and what’s more, not the new edition but the first. So, with a lot of pushing I have succeeded in that. And such difficulties with a book having Longmans as its London firm on the title page and published by the government! I haven’t been able to look at the stuff yet, as I have in the meantime taken up various modern things (about the 19th century) and must finish with them first.

Marx To Engels

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

March 19, 1870

Enclosed is a Marseillaise, which should, however, be returned with the preceding one. I haven’t read it myself yet. The article was written jointly by Jennychen and myself because she didn’t have sufficient time. That is also why she hasn’t answered your letter and sends Mrs. Lizzy her thanks for the shamrock provisionally through me.

From the enclosed letter from Pigott to Jenny you’ll see that Mrs. O’Donovan, to whom Jenny sent a private letter together with 1 Marseillaise, took her for a gentleman, even though she signed it Jenny Marx. I answered Pigott today on behalf of Jennychen and took the opportunity to explain to him in short my views on the Irish question.

... The sensation caused by Jennychen’s second letter (which contained the condensed translation of O’Donovan’s letter) in Paris and London has robbed the loathsome and importunate (but very fluent with gab and pen) Talandier of his sleep. He had denounced the Irish as Catholic idiots in the Marseillaise. Now he espouses their cause no less fullmouthed in a review of what has been said in the Times, Daily Telegraph and Daily News about O’Donovan’s letter. Since Jennychen’s second letter was unsigned (by accident) he apparently flattered himself with the idea that he would be considered the secret sender. This has been frustrated by Jennychen’s third letter. This fellow is du reste a teacher of French at the military school of Sandhurst.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: March 24, 1870;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London,] 24 March 1870

I enclose a letter from the Russian colony in Geneva. We have admitted them and I have accepted their commission to be their representative in the General Council and have also sent them a short reply (official, with a private letter as well) and given them permission to publish it in their paper. A funny position for me to be functioning as the representative of young Russia! A man never knows what he may come to or what strange fellowship he may have to submit to. In the official reply I praise Flerovsky and emphasise the fact that the chief task of the Russian section is to work for Poland (i.e., to free Europe from Russia as a neighbour). I thought it safer to say nothing about Bakunin, either in the public or in the confidential letter. But what I will never forgive these fellows is that they turn me into a "vénérable." They obviously think I am between eighty and a hundred years old.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 26 March 1870

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

I am only writing a few lines today because just at the moment when I get ready to write to you again after so long a time, there is a Frenchman coming whom I shall not get rid of this afternoon, and the post goes at 5:30.

But tomorrow is Sunday and therefore a good Christian like myself is allowed to interrupt his work and to write you a long letter, particularly about the Russian case, which has taken a pretty turn.

Jennychen, our illustrious J Williams, has a very good edition of father Goethe. By the by, she was invited a short time ago to Madame Vivanti’s, the wife of a rich Italian merchant. There was a great assemblée, [1] including a number of English people. Jennychen had a brilliant success with Shakespearean recitation.

Will you please greet Madame la Comtesse from me and thank her for the kind words that she was good enough to write. She has not the least cause to regret having preferred Latin to French. That not only reveals a taste at once classic and highly cultivated, but also explains why Madame never reaches the end of her Latin.

Best greetings to Fränzchen.

Mohr [2]

Notes

1. Assembly – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Mohr – Moor, a nickname given to Marx because of his dark complexion – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 28 March 1870

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

As I have an abscess on the right thigh which makes sitting for any length of time impossible, I am sending you the enclosed letter [1] for the Brunswick Comité, [2] Bracke [3] and Co, instead of writing twice. It would be best if, after reading it through, you could hand the letter over personally and remind them again that the information is confidential, not intended for the public.

Notes

1. ‘Confidential Communication on Bakunin’.

2. Committee – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. Wilhelm Bracke (1842-1880) – Active member of the German Social-Democratic movement. At first a Lassallean, later an Eisenacher. Stood close to Marx – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx to Sigfrid Meyer and August Vogt

In New York

Source: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Selected correspondence Progress Publishers, 1975, pp. 220-224;

Written: 9 April 1870;

Transcribed: Rick Kuhn.

London, April 9, 1870

... The day after tomorrow (April 11) I shall send you whatever documents of the International I happen to have on hand. (It is too late to mail them today.) I shall likewise send some more of the Basle [reports].[a]

Among the material sent you will also find several copies of the resolutions of the General Council of November 30 on the Irish amnesty, resolutions which you already know and which were initiated by me; likewise an Irish pamphlet on the treatment of the Fenian convicts.

I had intended to submit further motions on the necessary transformation of the present Union (i.e., enslavement of Ireland into a free and equal federation with Great Britain. For the time being, further progress in this matter, as far as public resolutions go, has been suspended because of my enforced absence from the General Council. No other member of it has sufficient knowledge of Irish affairs and adequate prestige with the English members to be able to replace me in this respect.

However time has not been wasted and I ask you to pay particular attention to the following:

After studying the Irish question for many years I have come to the conclusion that the decisive blow against the English ruling classes (and it will be decisive for the workers’ movement all over the world) cannot be delivered in England but only in Ireland.

On January 1, 1870,[b] the General Council issued a confidential circulare drawn up by me in French (for only the French journals, not the German ones produce important repercussions in England) on the relation of the Irish national struggle to the emancipation of the working class, and therefore on the attitude which the International Association should take towards the Irish question.

I shall give you here only quite briefly the salient points.

Ireland is the bulwark of the English landed aristocracy. The exploitation of that country is not only one of the main sources of their material wealth; it is their greatest moral strength. They, in fact, represent the domination over Ireland. Ireland is therefore the cardinal means by which the English aristocracy maintain their domination in England itself.

If, on the other hand, the English army and police were to be withdrawn from Ireland tomorrow, you would at once have an agrarian revolution in Ireland. But the downfall of the English aristocracy in Ireland implies and has as a necessary consequence its downfall in England. And this would provide the preliminary condition for the proletarian revolution in England. The destruction of the English landed aristocracy in Ireland is an infinitely easier operation than in England herself, because in Ireland the land question has been up to now the exclusive form of the social question because it is a question of existence, of life and death, for the immense majority of the Irish people, and because it is at the same time inseparable from the national question. Quite apart from the fact that the Irish character is more passionate and revolutionary than that of the English.

As for the English bourgeoisie, it has in the first place a common interest with the English aristocracy in turning Ireland into mere pasture land which provides the English market with meat and wool at the cheapest possible prices. It is likewise interested in reducing the Irish population by eviction and forcible emigration, to such a small number that English capital (capital invested in land leased for farming) can function there with “security”. It has the same interest in clearing the estates of Ireland as it had in the clearing of the agricultural districts of England and Scotland. The £6,000-10,000 absentee-landlord and other Irish revenues which at present flow annually to London have also to be taken into account.

But the English bourgeoisie has also much more important interests in the present economy of Ireland. Owing to the constantly increasing concentration of leaseholds, Ireland constantly sends her own surplus to the English labour market, and thus forces down wages and lowers the material and moral position of the English working class.

And most important of all! Every industrial and commercial centre in England now possesses a working class divided into two hostile camps, English proletarians and Irish proletarians. The ordinary English worker hates the Irish worker as a competitor who lowers his standard of life. In relation to the Irish worker he regards himself as a member of the ruling nation and consequently he becomes a tool of the English aristocrats and capitalists against Ireland, thus strengthening their domination over himself. He cherishes religious, social, and national prejudices against the Irish worker. His attitude towards him is much the same as that of the “poor whites” to the Negroes in the former slave states of the U.S.A.. The Irishman pays him back with interest in his own money. He sees in the English worker both the accomplice and the stupid tool of the English rulers in Ireland.

This antagonism is artificially kept alive and intensified by the press, the pulpit, the comic papers, in short, by all the means at the disposal of the ruling classes. This antagonism is the secret of the impotence of the English working class, despite its organisation. It is the secret by which the capitalist class maintains its power. And the latter is quite aware of this.

But the evil does not stop here. It continues across the ocean. The antagonism between Englishmen and Irishmen is the hidden basis of the conflict between the United States and England. It makes any honest and serious co-operation between the working classes of the two countries impossible. It enables the governments of both countries, whenever they think fit, to break the edge off the social conflict by their mutual bullying, and, in case of need, by war between the two countries.

England, the metropolis of capital, the power which has up to now ruled the world market, is at present the most important country for the workers’ revolution, and moreover the only country in which the material conditions for this revolution have reached a certain degree of maturity. It is consequently the most important object of the International Working Men’s Association to hasten the social revolution in England. The sole means of hastening it is to make Ireland independent. Hence it is the task of the International everywhere to put the conflict between England and Ireland in the foreground, and everywhere to side openly with Ireland. It is the special task of the Central Council in London to make the English workers realise that for them the national emancipation of Ireland is not a question of abstract justice or humanitarian sentiment but the first condition of their own social emancipation.

These are roughly the main points of the circular letter, which thus at the same time give the raisons d’étre of the resolutions passed by the Central Council on the Irish amnesty. A little later I sent a strongly-worded anonymous article[d] on the treatment of the Fenians by the English, etc., attacking Gladstone, etc., to the Internationale (organ of our Belgian Central Committee[e] in Brussels). In this article I have also denounced the French Republicans (the Marseillaise had printed some nonsense on Ireland written here by the wretched Talandier) because in their national egoism they are saving all their wrath for the Empire.

That worked. My daughter Jenny wrote a series of articles to the Marseillaise, signing them J. Williams (she had called herself Jenny Williams in her private letter to the editorial board) and published, among other things, O’Donovan Rossa’s letter. Hence immense noise.

After many years of cynical refusal Gladstone was thereby finally compelled to agree to a parliamentary enquiry into the treatment of the Fenian prisoners. Jenny is now the regular correspondent on Irish affairs for the Marseillaise. (This is naturally to be a secret between us.) The British Government and press are furious because the Irish question has thus now been placed on the agenda in France and that these rogues are now being watched and exposed via Paris on the whole Continent.

We hit another bird with the same stone, we have forced the Irish leaders, journalists, etc., in Dublin to get into contact with us, which the General Council had been unable to achieve previously!

You have wide field in America for work along the same lines. A coalition of the German workers with the Irish workers (and of course also with the English and American workers who are prepared to accede to it) is the greatest achievement you could bring about now. This must be done in the name of the International. The social significance of the Irish question must be made clear.

Next time a few remarks dealing particularly with the position of the English workers.

Greetings and fraternity!

Karl Marx

Notes

a The reference is to the reports of the Basle Congress of the First International published by the General Council.—Ed.

b Marx wrote: “December 1, 1869”, apparently a slip of the pen.—Ed.

c Karl Marx, “Le Conseil Général au Conseil Fédéral de la Suisse Romande” (“The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland”).— Ed.

d “Le gouvernement anglais et les prisonniers fénians” (“The English Government and the Fenian Prisoners”) published on February 27, 1870.—Ed.

e Marx is referring to the Belgian Federal Council.—Ed.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 43, p. 478,

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1931.

Note that words in bold represent words in English in the original.

[London,] 14 April 1870

Dear Fred,

Enclosed, Wilhelm returned. From the attached letter from Borkheim, you will see what ill-mannered things Wilhelm says about me. I don’t like such churlish sentimentality, and since Wilhelm is a born Darmstadt man and so has not, at least, the excuse that he is a born Westphalian, I have sent him a rather blunt reply.

In your article he has intentionally overlooked the fact that the People’s Party and the ‘National Liberals’ are treated as the two poles of the same narrow-mindedness.

On Tuesday I was at the Central Council for the first time once again, and took the opportunity to muster Pfänder, who had entered as a member once more (re-elected), but had not yet presented himself. He informed me that he had been called a week before to Schapper, who is very dangerously ill. Schapper wanted to see me; Pfänder did not inform me of this, because I could not walk well as a result of the business on my thigh. But I would have driven there if he had notified me. On the same evening (Tuesday), Lessner reported that Schapper was in articulo mortis. I hope it is not as bad as that.

While I am on medical matters, just this: I regard the latest outbreak simply as after effects, which arrive with some regularity, and then disappear as the warm weather proceeds. I believe, therefore, that I am finished with it for this year. As always, however, the arrival of warmer weather has produced the liver complaint (or whatever it is), and for this I am gulping Gumpert’s medicine. Kugelmann claims that the only way to put me properly on my feet is to take the cure at Karlsbad at the end of the summer. The whole thing derives from poor nourishment, this from poor digestion, and this is connected with the fact that my liver doesn’t function properly. I would, therefore, ask you to question Gumpert about this. But it would be better if you said that the Karlsbad proposal came from my English doctor, for the very name Kugelmann might induce him not to judge the case objectively, contrary to his inclination and conscience. I feel that, in fact, some sort of decisive preventive measures must be taken, since one gets a year older every year, and this sort of infirmity is not helpful, either for one self or for ones outside effectiveness.

Did you know that Meyen had died?

The copies of Zukunft give, I must say, a fine picture of the Prussian-Liberal present. But the Future will convert itself into the Present. As Future the paper is really bankrupt. In its new form, it comes under the sway of Sonnemann in Frankfort (with Weiss, as previously, as editor en chef). It should represent, purely politically, the People’s Party in Berlin. Quelle imbécilité! By abandoning its flirtation with the ‘social question’, it will completely lose its little bit of influence and circulation among the workers, and it will certainly not win over the Prussian, and especially Berlin bourgeois by a stronger South German coloration.

I enclose for you 2 Vienna workers’ papers and 1 Égalité, and request the return of all three after reading.

In the Volskswille the ‘structure’ is ‘fine’ which the little Jew Leo Frankel (Schweitzer’s Paris correspondent, I don’t know whether still?) constructs from my explanation of the components of value. Par exemple: (labour power + wage labour — wage = independent worker)

From the Égalité you will gather that, at the Congress of the Suisse Romande in La Chaux-de-Fonds, it came to open warfare between the Bakuninists led by Guillaume (the brute calls himself professór, is editor of Progrès in Locle, Bakunin’s personal paper), and the Conseil Romand (Geneva). The presentation is very confused. On Tuesday evening Jung informed us of the official report of the Geneva Council, written by the Russian Utine, who holds the function of secretary of the Romance Congress. The anti-Bakuninists, 2,000 persons, were outflanked and thereby forced to secessio, by the Bakuninists, consisting of 600 persons, who, however, per fas et nefas, [by fair means or foul] including forged mandates, made sure of a larger number of delegates. There were stormy declarations about Bakunin’s activities, which were exposed by Utine, among others. The Council Romand now demands, on the basis of the resolution of the last (Basle) Congress, that the Central Council decide. We have replied: all facts, with the minutes of the meetings, must be sent here. Ditto, we have commissioned Jung to write to Guillaume, so that he may, ditto, submit his vouchers.

Recently also we had to rule on a dispute in Lyons. And finally, in Basle, one clique (under State Attorney Bruhin) has laid charges with us against the other (more proletarian one). We have, however, referred the latter case, as completely local, to J. Ph. Becker as arbitrator.

In Paris Lafargue got to know a very learned Russian lady (a friend of his friend Jaclard, an excellent young man). She told him: Flerovsky — although his book passed censorship at the time of the Liberal Fit — has been, if you please, banished to Siberia for the same. The translation of my book has been confiscated and prohibited before being published.

You will receive, this week or at the beginning of next: Landlord and Tenant Right in Ireland. Reports by Poor Law Inspectors. 1870, ditto Agricultural Holdings in Ireland. Returns. 1870.

The Reports of the Poor Law Inspectors are interesting. Like their Reports on Agricultural Wages, which are already in your hands, they show that the conflict between labourers on the one hand, farmers and Tenants on the other, began after the Famine. As regards the Reports on Wages — assuming the present figures on wages are correct, and that is probable, considering other sources — the former wage rates are either quoted too low, or those in the earlier Parliamentary Returns, which I'll look out for you in my Parliamentary papers, were too high. On the whole, however, what I stated in the section on Ireland is confirmed: that the rise in wages has been more than outweighed by that in food prices, and that, with the exception of the autumn period, etc., the Relative surplus of labourers is properly established despite emigration. Also important in the Landlord and Tenant Right Reports is the fact that the development of machinery has turned a, mass of handloom weavers into paupers.

You would oblige me if you would tell me, quite shortly, about the bogs, peats etc., of Ireland. In all the Blue Books I have read, the bog is sometimes situated on the mountain, that is on the mountain slope, but also sometimes on the plain. What is the situation? What do the Irish understand by Townlands?

It is clear from the two reports of the Poor Law Commissioners that

1. since the famine the clearing of the estates of labourers has begun as in England (not to be confused with the suppression of the 40s. Freeholders after 1829).

2. that the encumbered estates proceedings have put a mass of small usurers in the place of the turned out prodigal landlords (the charge of landlords 1/6 according to the same reports).

I would appreciate it if you and Moore could send me a few £s for Dupont. His wife is in hospital with consumption. He himself has been turned out of his old trade. The excuse: his political opinions; the real cause: he made all the inventions, which his manufacturer appropriated. For this reason, he has been persona ingrata or a long time for him (he thinks he has sucked him completely dry). But the Manufacturer has cut his own throat, so far as Dupont has made a quite new invention, which solves a problem that has existed for a long time in piano manufacture. I have already given Dupont a few £s; since, together with his 3 small girls, he had been condemned to just dry bread. It’s only a matter of helping for a few weeks until he finds a new position. Who can write the story of workingmen evicted because of inventions!

And, in addition, the poor devil is also being harassed by the jealousy of the Paris people, and the slanders of the French Branch, who naturally immediately cornered Flourens.

Salut.

Your

K. M.

Apropos. Stirling [J. H. Stirling, The Secret of Hegel: Being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter] (Edinburgh), the translator of Hegel’s Logic, and heading the British subscription for the Hegel monument — has written a small pamphlet against Huxley and his protoplasm. As a Scotsman, the fellow has naturally adopted Hegel’s false religion and Idealistic mysticism (so induced Carlyle to declare publicly his conversion to Hegelianism). But his knowledge of Hegel’s dialectic allows him to demonstrate Huxley’s weaknesses — where he indulges in philosophising. His business in the same pamphlet against Darwin comes to the same as what the Berliner Blutschulze Hegelian of the old school) said some years ago at the natural scientists’ meeting in Hanover.

Engels To Marx

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

April 15, 1870

Your conclusions from the Parliamentary Reports agree with my results. It should, however, be remembered that after 1846 the process of clearing 40-sh. freeholders was at first interspersed with clearing of labourers the reason being that, up to 1829, in order to produce freeholders, leases had to be made for 21 or 31 years and a life (if not longer), because a person became a freeholder only if he could not be turned out during his lifetime. These leases hardly ever excluded subdividing. These leases were partly still valid in 1846, resp. the consequences, that is, the peasants were still on the estate. The same was the case on the estates which were then in the hands of middlemen (who mostly held leases for 64 years and three lives or even for 99 years) and frequently their leases were revertible only between 1846 and 1860. Thus these processes were more or less interspersed so that the Irish landlord was never or seldom in a situation where he had to decide whether labourers in particular rather than other traditional small tenants should be ejected. Essentially it comes to the same thing in England and in Ireland: the land must be tilled by workers who live in other Poor Law Unions, so that the landlord and his tenant can remain exempted from the poor tax. This is also said by Senior or rather by his brother Edward, Poor Law Commissioner in Ireland: The great instrument which is clearing Ireland is the Poor Law.

Land sold since the Encumbered Estate Court amounts according to my notes to as much as 1/5 of the total, the buyers were indeed largely usurers, speculators, etc., mainly Irish Catholics. Partly also enriched stock-breeders. Yet even now there are only about 8,000-9,000 landowners in Ireland.

Marx To Paul Lafargue

In Paris

[London,] 18 April 1870

Source: MECW Volume 43. p. 485.

Dear Paul-Laurent[1],

I send enclosed credentials for Mr H. Verlet. Let him give to the new section he is about to establish no sectarian ‘name’, either Communistic or other. Il faut éviter les’étiquettes’ sectaires dans l’Association Internationale. [Sectarian ‘labels’ must be avoided in the International Association.] The general aspirations and tendencies of the working class emanate from the real conditions in which it finds itself placed. They are therefore common to the whole class although the movement reflects itself in their heads in the most diversified forms, more or less phantastical, more or less adequate. Those who interpret best the hidden sense of the class struggle going on before our eyes – the Communists are the last to commit the blunder of affecting or fostering sectarianism.

Mr Verlet would do well to put himself in communication with our friend Jules Johannard, 126 rue d’Aboukir.

One thing which ought to be done as quickly as possible, and which might be done by Paul-Laurent, is to publish in the Libre pensée a true and literal translation of the International Rules. The French current translation, emanating from our first Paris Committee, Tolain et Co., is full of intentional mistakes. They suppressed everything which they did riot like. If a true translation was made, it would be well to send it me before its publication.

In Germany people would much wonder at Verlet’s appreciation of Büchner. In our country he is only considered. and justly so, as a vulgarisateur.

You know how much I admire le ‘Roman de Conspiration’ [an article by Paul Lafargue]. I was, therefore, truly delighted to see it so well appreciated by Paul-Laurent.

I am now forced to say, a few words which Paul-Laurent will a little fret at, but I cannot help doing so.

Your father wrote me a letter to Hanover which I have not yet answered, because I did not know what to say.

I feel quite sure that Paul has discarded all notion of finishing [his degree], or occupying himself with, his medical studies. When at Paris I wrote to his father in a different sense, and 1 was warranted in doing so by Paul’s own promises. Thus I am placed in quite a false position towards M. Lafargue ainé. I cannot remain in that fix. I see no other prospect of getting out of it but by writing to him that I have as little influence with his beloved son as himself. If you see any other way of escape for me, any other means of my position, please communicate it to me.

In my opinion, which however I neither pretend nor hope to see accepted and acted upon, Paul-Laurent cum figlio ought to pay a visit to their parents at Bordeaux and try to coax them by the many means personal intercourse permits of.

Yours truly ...

1. Paul Laurent is a pen name for Paul Lafargue and Laura, Marx’s daughter.

Marx to P. and L. Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

April 19, 1870

But Bakunnine's programme was ‘the theory’. It consisted, in fact, of 3 points.

...

3) The working class must not occupy itself with politics. They must only organise themselves by trades-unions. One fine day, by means of the Internationale they will supplant the place of all existing states. You see what a caricature he [Bakunin] has made of my doctrines! As the transformation of the existing States into Associations is our last end, we must allow the governments, those great Trade-Unions of the ruling classes, to do as they like, because to occupy ourselves with them is to acknowledge them. Why! In the same way the old socialists said: You must not occupy yourselves with the wages question, because you want to abolish wages labour, and to struggle with the capitalist about the rate of wages is to acknowledge the wages system! The ass has not even seen that every class movement as a class movement, is necessarily and was always a political movement.

Engels To Marx

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

May 15, 1870

In what Parliamentary Paper could one find how much money is wasted every year on the Commissioners for the Publication of the Ancient Laws and Institutes of Ireland? This is a colossal job (in a small matter). It would also be important to know how much of that money is spent 1) as remuneration for idling commissioners, 2) as salaries for really working understrappers, printing costs, etc. This must surely be somewhere in a Parliamentary Paper. Those fellows have been drawing wages since 1852 and up to now only two volumes have been published! Three lords, three judges, three priests, one general, and one who professionally specialises on Ireland who died long ago.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: May 18, 1870;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence, International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London,] 18 May 1870

Our members in France are giving the French government ocular proof of the difference between a secret political society and a genuine workers' organisation. No sooner had the government jailed all the members of the Paris, Lyons, Rouen, Marseilles, etc., committees (some of them fled to Belgium and Switzerland) than twice the number of committees announced themselves as their successors with the most daring and provocative declarations in the newspapers (and as an additional precaution added their private addresses as well). At last the French government has done what we have so long wanted it to do and transformed the political question, Empire or Republic, into a question of life or death for the working-class.

* * *

In general the plebiscite [1] dealt the final blow to the empire. Because so many voted aye for the empire wreathed in constitutional phrases Boustrapa[2] believes he can now quite unceremoniously restore the empire sans phrase, that is to say, the December regime. According to all the information received privately the Society of 10 December[3] has been fully restored in Paris and is teeming with activity.

Greetings

Yours

KM

Notes

1. The plebiscite referred to was held by Napoleon III in May 1870 with the aim of consolidating the empire and foiling the republican agitation in the country. The government resorted to various demagogical devices during the plebiscite and exerted strong pressure on the voters – Progress Publishers.

2. Sobriquet of Louis Bonaparte consisting of the first syllables of Boulogne, Strasbourg and Paris. An allusion to Bonaparte’s attempts to carry out a Bonapartist putsch in Strasbourg on 30 October 1836, and at Boulogne on 6 August 1840, and to the coup d'état in Paris of 2 December 1851, which led to the establishment of a Bonapartist dictatorship in France – Progress Publishers.

3. Society of 10 December – a Bonapartist society set up in 1849 and consisting primarily of déclassed elements, political adventurers, army officers, and such like. The name was chosen in honour of the patron of the Society Louis Bonaparte, who was elected President of the French Republic on 10 December 1848. Although officially the Society was disbanded in November 1850, its members continued to conduct propaganda for Bonaparte and took an active part in the coup d'état of 2 December 1851 – Progress Publishers.

Karl Marx To Jenny Marx (His daughter)

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

May 31, 1870

Here things are going on pretty much in the old track. Fred is quite jolly since he has got rid of “Wen verfluchten Commerce.” His book on Ireland – which by the by costs him a little more time than he had at first supposed – will be highly interesting. The illustrious Doppelju who is so much up in the most recent Irish history and plays so prominent a part in it, will there find his archeological material ready cut.

Marx To Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: MECW, Volume 43, p. 529.

First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902 and in full in Pisma Marksa k Kugelmanu (Letters of Marx to Kugelmann), Moscow-Leningrad, 1928.

London, 27 June 1870

Dear King Wenceslaus,

I returned here this week after a stay of one month in Manchester, and found your letter waiting.

In fact I can give you no reply as to the date of my departure, and not even to the question — which you have not asked — namely, whether I shall travel at all.

Last year I anticipated that, after the Easter Fair, I would have a second edition of my book [Capital], and consequently the takings from the first edition. You will see, however, from the enclosed letter from Meissner, which arrived today, that all this is still a long way off. (Be so kind as to send me the letter back.)

Messieurs the German professors have recently found themselves obliged to take note of me now and then, even if in a very silly way; for example, A. Wagner in a pamphlet on landed property, and Held (Bonn) in a pamphlet about the rural loan banks in the Rhine Province.

Mr Lange (On the workers’ question, etc., 2nd edition) pays me great compliments, but with the object of increasing his own importance. Mr Lange, you see, has made a great discovery. All history may be subsumed in one single great natural law. This natural law is the phrase (— the Darwinian expression becomes, in this application, just a phrase —) ‘struggle for life’, and the content of this phrase is the Malthusian law of population, or rather over-population. Thus, instead of analysing this ‘struggle for life’ as it manifests itself historically in various specific forms of society, all that need be done is to transpose every given struggle into the phrase ‘struggle for life’, and then this phrase into the Malthusian ‘population fantasy’. It must be admitted that this is a very rewarding method — for stilted, mock-scientific, highfaluting ignorance and intellectual laziness.

And what this Lange has to say about the Hegelian method and my application of the same is simply childish. First, he understands rien [nothing] about Hegel’s method and, therefore, second, still less about my critical manner of applying it. In one respect he reminds me of Moses Mendelssohn. That prototype of a windbag once wrote to Lessing asking how he could possibly take ‘that dead dog Spinoza’ au sérieux! In the same way, Mr Lange expresses surprise that Engels, I, etc., take au sérieux the dead dog Hegel, after Büchner, Lange, Dr Dühring, Fechner, etc., had long agreed that they — poor dear — had long since buried him. Lange is naïve enough to say that I ‘move with rare freedom’ in empirical matter. He has not the slightest idea that this ‘free movement in matter’ is nothing but a paraphrase for the method of dealing with matter — that is, the dialectical method.

My best thanks to Madame la comtesse for her kind lines. This really does one good at a time ‘when more and more of the better ones are disappearing’. But, sérieusement parlant, I am always pleased when a few lines from your dear wife remind me of the happy times I spent in your circle.

Regarding Meissner’s pressure for the second volume, I was not only held up by illness throughout the winter. I found it necessary to mug up on my Russian, because, in dealing with the land question, it has become essential to study Russian landowning relationships from primary sources. In addition, in connection with the Irish land question, the English Government has published a series of Blue Books (soon concluding) about the land relations in all countries. Finally — entre nous — I would like the second edition of Vol. I first. It would simply be disturbing if this came in the middle of the ultimate finalisation of Vol. II.

Best compliments on Jenny’s part and my own to all the members of the Kugelmann family.

Your

K. M.

Marx to Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

July 5, 1870

Chernyshevsky, I learnt from Lopatin, was sentenced in 1864 to eight years’ travaux forcés in the Siberian mines; so he has another two years to serve. The first court was decent enough to declare that there was absolutely nothing against him and that the alleged secret conspiratorial letters were obvious forgeries (which, indeed, they were). But, by order of the Tsar, the Senate overruled this judgment and sent the cunning man, who is “so skilful,” as the sentence puts it, “that he keeps his works in a legally invulnerable form and yet openly pours out poison in them,” to Siberia. Voilà la justice russe.

Flerovsky is in a better position. He is simply in administrative exile in some miserable little place between Moscow and St. Petersburg.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: July 20, 1870;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London,] 20 July 1870

But the paper [Le Réveil, a democratic French newspaper] is also interesting on account of the leading article by old Delescluze. Despite his opposition to the government, the most complete expression of chauvinism--because France alone is the home of ideas--(of the ideas it has got about itself). The only thing that annoys these republican chauvinists is that the real expression of their idol--L. Bonaparte the long-nosed Stock Exchange shark--does not correspond to their fancy picture. The French need a thrashing. If the Prussians win, the centralisation of the state power will be useful for the centralisation of the German working class. German predominance would also transfer the centre of gravity of the workers' movement in Western Europe from France to Germany, and one has only to compare the movement in the two countries from 1866 till now to see that the German working class is superior to the French both theoretically and organisationally. Their predominance over the French on the world stage would also mean the predominance of our theory over Proudhon's, etc.

Finally, I am also enclosing the criticism of my book [Capital Vol I] in Hildebrand's Journal of Economy and Statistics. My physical state scarcely disposes me to merriment, but I have cried with laughter over this essay--bona fide tears of mirth. With the reaction and the downfall of the heroic age of philosophy in Germany the "petty bourgeois", inborn in every German citizen, has again asserted himself--in philosophic drivel worthy of Moses Mendelssohn, would-be clever and superior peevish nagging. And so now even political economy is to be dissolved into twaddle about "conceptions of justice!"

Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels in Manchester, 28 July 1870

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... Last Tuesday the General Council ordered a thousand copies of the Address [1] to be printed. Today I expect the proof-sheets.

The singing of the Marseillaise in France is a parody just like all the Second Empire. But that scoundrel [2] at least feels that ‘Going off to Syria’ [3] would not do. In Prussia, on the other hand, such buffoonery is not necessary. ‘Lord, in Thee is all my trust!’, sung by William I, with Bismarck on the right and Stieber [4] on the left, is the German Marseillaise. Like in 1812 seqq, the German philistine seems to be really delighted because he can now give free vent to his innate servility. Who would have thought it possible that twenty-two years after 1848 a national war in Germany would be given such theoretical expression!

It is fortunate that this whole demonstration originated with the middle class. The working class, with the exception of the direct adherents of Schweitzer, [5] takes no part in it. The war of classes in both countries, France and Germany, has fortunately reached such an extent that no war abroad can seriously turn back the wheels of history...

Notes

1. The reference is to the First Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association on the Franco-Prussian War (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Volume 2 (Moscow, 1973), pp 190-94) – Progress Publishers.

2. Napoleon III – Progress Publishers.

3. ‘Going off to Syria’ ('Partant pour la Syrie’) – a French song written at the beginning of the nineteenth century, which became a sort of Bonapartist anthem during the Second Empire – Progress Publishers.

4. Wilhelm Stieber (1818-1882) – Prussian police officer, Chief of Prussian Police (1850-60), an organiser of Cologne Communist Trial and principle witness at this trial (1852), head of Prussian intelligence service (1870-71) – Progress Publishers.

5. Johann Baptist Schweitzer (1833-1875) – one of Lassallean leaders in Germany, editor of Sozial-Demokrat (1864-67), President of General Association of German Workers (1867-71), gave support to Bismarck’s policy of unification of Germany ‘from above’ under hegemony of Prussia, prevented German workers’ affiliation to First International, fought against Social-Democratic Workers Party, expelled from Association in 1872 after his connections with Prussian authorities were exposed – Progress Publishers.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: August 8, 1870;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London,] 8 August 1870

The Empire is made, i.e., the German Empire. It seems as if all the trickery that has been perpetrated since the Second Empire has finally resulted in carrying out, by hook and crook, though neither by the path intended nor in the way imagined, the "national" aims of 1848--Hungary, Italy, Germany! It seems to me that this sort of movement will only come to an end as soon as the Prussians and the Russians come to blows. This is by no means improbable. The press of the Moscovite party (I have seen a lot of it at Borkheim's) has attacked the Russian government just as violently for its friendly attitude to Prussia as the French papers representing Thiers' point of view attacked Boustrapa [Napoleon III] in 1866 for his flirtation with Prussia. Only the tsar, the German-Russian party and the official St. Petersburg Journal sounded a note hostile to France. But the last thing they expected was such a decided Prussian-German success. Like Bonaparte in 1866, they thought that the belligerent powers would weaken each other by a long struggle so that Holy Russia could intervene as supreme arbiter and dictate to them.

But now! If Alexander does not want to be poisoned, something must be done to appease the national party. Russia's prestige will obviously be even more "injured" by a German-Prussian Empire than the prestige of the Second Empire was by the North German Confederation.

Russia therefore--just as Bonaparte did in 1866-70--will intrigue with Prussia in order to get concessions in relation to Turkey, and all this trickery, despite the Russian religion of the Hohenzollerns, will end in war between the tricksters. However silly German Michael may be, his newly fortified national sentiment will hardly allow him to be pressed into the service of Russia without any remaining reason whatever, or so much as a pretext (especially now when he can no longer be lectured into putting up with everything in order that German unity may first be achieved). Qui vivra.verra [who lives longest will see most]. If our Handsome William lives on for a bit we may yet witness his proclamations to the Poles. When God wants to do something especially great, says old Carlyle, he always chooses out the stupidest people for it.

What troubles me at the moment is the state of affairs in France itself. The next great battle can hardly fail to turn against the French. And then? If the defeated army retreats to Paris, under the leadership of Boustrapa, the result will be a peace of the most humiliating kind, perhaps with the restoration of the Orleans. If a revolution breaks out in Paris, the question is whether they have the means and the leadership to offer a serious resistance to the Prussians. One cannot conceal from oneself that twenty years of the Bonapartist farce have produced enormous demoralisation. One is hardly justified in reckoning on revolutionary heroism. What do you think about it?

Engels to Marx

In London

Abstracts

Written: August 15, 1870;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence, International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999.

August 15, 1870

Dear Moor

If one has been afflicted by an attack of severe stomach trouble for three days, like me, with slight fever from time to time, it’s no great pleasure at all, even when starting to feel better, to expatiate on Wilhelm’s [1] policy. But since you must get this stuff back, so be it.

How far Bracke, [2] certainly a very weak fellow, has allowed his national enthusiasm to run away with him I cannot tell and as I receive at most one issue of the Volksstaat [3] every fortnight I am also unable to judge the position of the Committee [4] in this regard except from Bonhorst’s [5] letter to Wilhelm, which on the whole is cool but betrays theoretical uncertainty. In contrast with this Liebknecht’s narrow-minded self-confidence based on dogmatism does indeed show off, very favourably as usual. ...

The position seems to me to be this: Germany has been driven by Badinguet [Napoleon III] into a war for her national existence. If Badinguet defeats her, Bonapartism will be strengthened for years to come and Germany broken for years, perhaps for generations. In that case there can be no more question of an independent German working-class movement either, the struggle to restore the national existence will absorb everything, and at best the German workers will be dragged in the wake of the French. If Germany wins, French Bonapartism will at any rate be smashed, the endless row about the establishment of German unity will at last be got rid of, the German workers will be able to organise themselves on a national scale quite different from that hitherto, and the French workers, whatever sort of government may succeed this one, are certain to have a freer field than under Bonapartism. The whole mass of the German people of every class have realised that this is first and foremost a question of national existence and have therefore at once flung themselves into It. That in these circumstances a German political party should preach total obstruction à la Wilhelm [Liebknecht] and place all sorts of secondary considerations before the main consideration, seems to me impossible.

Added to this is the fact that Badinguet would never have been able to conduct this war without the chauvinism of the mass of the French population: the bourgeoisie, the petty bourgeoisie, the peasants and the imperialistic, Haussmannist building workers’ proletariat derived from the peasants, which Bonaparte created in the big towns. Until this chauvinism is knocked on the head, and that properly, peace between Germany and France is impossible. One might have expected that a proletarian revolution would have undertaken this work, but since the war is already there, nothing remains for the Germans but to do it themselves and quickly.

Now come the secondary considerations. For the fact that this war was ordered by Lehmann [Wilhelm I] Bismarck & Co., and must minister to their temporary glorification if they conduct it successfully, we have to thank the miserable state of the German bourgeoisie. It is certainly very unpleasant but cannot be altered. But to magnify anti-Bismarckism into the sole guiding principle on this account would be absurd. In the first place, Bismarck, as in 1866, is at present doing a bit of our work for us, in his own way and without meaning to, but all the same he is doing it. He is clearing the ground for us better than before. And then we are no longer at the year 1815. The South Germans are bound now to enter the Reichstag and this will develop a counterpoise to Prussianism. Then there are the national duties which will fall to Prussia and which, as you wrote, will from the outset forbid the Russian alliance. In general to try à là Liebknecht to set the clock back on all that has happened since 1866 is senseless. But we know our model South Germans. There is nothing to be done with these fools.

I think our people can:

(1) Join the national movement – you can see from Kugelmann’s letter how strong it is – in so far as and for so long as it is limited to the defence of Germany (which does not exclude an offensive, in certain circumstances, before peace is arrived at).

(2) At the same time emphasise the difference between German-national and dynastic-Prussian interests.

(3) Work against any annexation of Alsace and Lorraine – Bismarck is now revealing the intention of annexing them to Bavaria and Baden.

(4) As soon as a non-chauvinistic republican government is at the helm in Paris, work for an honourable peace with it.

(5) Constantly stress the unity of interest between the German and French workers, who did not approve of the war and are also not making war on each other.

(6) Russia, as in the International Address.

Wilhelm’s assertion that because Bismarck is a former accomplice of Badinguet’s the correct position is to remain neutral, is amusing. If that were the general opinion in Germany, we should soon have the Confederation of the Rhine again and the noble Wilhelm should just see what sort of a part he would play in that, and what would happen to the workers’ movement. A people that gets nothing but kicks and blows is indeed the right one to make a social revolution, and in Wilhelm’s beloved X-petty states moreover!...

How nice that the poor little fellow seeks to call me to account for something that was ‘supposed’ to have been printed in the Elberfelder Zeitung! [6] Poor creature!

...The debacle in France seems to be awful. Everything squandered, sold, swindled away. The chassepots are badly made and fail when brought into action, there are no more there, the old flintlocks have got to be hunted out again. Nevertheless a revolutionary government, if it comes soon, need not despair. But it must leave Paris to its fate and carry on the war from the South. There would then still be a possibility of its holding out until arms have been bought and new armies organised with which the enemy would be gradually forced back again to the frontier. This would really be the true end of the war, both countries reciprocally furnishing proof that they are unconquerable. But if this does not happen quickly the game is up. Moltke’s operations are a model – old Wilhelm seems to give him a perfectly free hand – and the four battalions are already joining the main army, while the French ones are not yet in existence.

If Badinguet is not out of Metz yet it may go badly with him. ...

Wilhelm [Liebknecht] has obviously calculated on a victory for Bonaparte simply in order to get his Bismarck defeated. You remember how he was always threatening him with the French. You, of course, are on Wilhelm’s side too!

Notes

1. Wilhelm Liebknecht – Progress Publishers.

2. Wilhelm Bracke (1842-1880) – German Social-Democrat, a founder (1869) and leader of Social-Democratic Workers Party (Eisenachers), close associate of Marx and Engels, fought against Lassalleanism, opposed (though not consistently enough) opportunistic elements in Social-Democratic Party – Progress Publishers.

3. Der Volksstaat – the central organ of the Social-Democratic Workers Party of Germany (the Eisenachers). It was published in Leipzig under Liebknecht’s editorship from 1869 to 1876 – Progress Publishers.

4. The Committee of the German Social-Democratic Workers Party in Brunswick – Progress Publishers.

5. Leonhard Bonhorst (1840-?) – German Social-Democrat, technician, member of Brunswick Committee of Social-Democratic Workers Party (Eisenachers) – Progress Publishers.

6. In a letter to Marx dated 13 August 1870, Liebknecht had written that Engels was showing ‘patriotic sentiments’ – Progress Publishers.

Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstracts

Written: August 17, 1870;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence, International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[Ramsgate,] 17 August 1870

Dear Fred!

My best thanks (ditto from Mrs Marx for the letter to her) for the pains you took under such aggravating circumstances. Your letter tallies completely with the plan of the answer which I have already worked out in my mind. ...

I have not slept a wink the fourth night running because of the rheumatism, and all that time fantastic ideas about Paris, etc, occur to me. I shall have Gumpert’s sleeping potion prepared for me this evening. ...

...In such an important matter--it is not a question of Wilhelm [Liebknecht] but of instructions as to the line of the German workers--I did not want to act without first referring to you.

Wilhelm infers his agreement with me:

(1) From the Address of the International, which he has of course first translated into Wilhelm's own language.

(2) From the circumstance that I approved the declaration made by Bebel and himself in the Reichstag. That was a "moment" when Prinzipienreiterei [stickler for principle] was an act of courage, but from this it by no means follows that the moment is still continuing, much less that the attitude of the German proletariat to a war which has become national is expressed in Wilhelm's antipathy to Prussia. It would be just as if we, because at a suitable moment we had raised our voices against the "Bonapartist" liberation of Italy, were to wish to redress the relative independence which Italy received as a result of that war.

The lust for Alsace and Lorraine seems to predominate in two circles, the Prussian camarilla and the South German beer-patriots. It would be the greatest misfortune which could befall Europe and above all Germany. You will have seen that most of the Russian newspapers are already talking of the necessity of European diplomatic intervention in order to maintain the balance of power in Europe.

With the death knell of the Second Empire, that will end as it began, by a parody, I hit off my Bonaparte after all! Can one imagine a finer parody of Napoleon's 1814 campaign? I believe we two are the only people who grasped the whole mediocrity of Boustrapa from the beginning, regarded him as a mere showman and never allowed ourselves to be misled by momentary successes. ...

By the way, the bourgeois Peace Society [1] has sent the General Council of the International £20 for printing the Manifesto in the French and German languages.

Greetings

Yours

KM

Notes

1. The League of Peace and Freedom – a bourgeois pacifist organisation formed by petty-bourgeois republicans and liberals in Switzerland in 1867. Bakunin took part in the work of the League in 1867 and 1868. At first the League attempted to use the workers’ movement to achieve its aims. Its assertion that it was possible to prevent wars by creating ‘The United States of Europe’ spread false illusions among the masses and diverted the proletariat from the class struggle – Progress Publishers.

Marx to Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

August 22, 1870

Freiligrath. “Hurrah! Germania!” Neither “god” nor the “Gaul” are missing from this laboriously long-winded song.

I'd rather be a kitten and cry miaow

Than such a rhyming-balled-monger!

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Written: September 1, 1870;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 1 September 1870

The miserable behaviour of Paris during the war--still allowing itself to be ruled by the mamelukes of Louis Bonaparte and of the Spanish adventuress Eugenie after these appalling defeats--shows how greatly the French need a tragic lesson in order to regain their manhood.

What the Prussian fools do not see is that the present war is leading just as inevitably to a war between Germany and Russia as the war of 1866 led to the war between Prussia and France. That is the best result I expect from it for Germany. Typical "Prussianism" never has had and never can have any existence except in alliance with and subjection to Russia. And a war No. 2 of this kind will act as the midwife to the inevitable social revolution in Russia.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels to the Brunswick Committee of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany, approximately 1 September 1870 [1]

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... The military camarilla, the professors, burghers and pot-house politicians claim that this [2] is the means whereby Germany can be forever protected against war with France. Just the opposite. It is the best means of turning this war into a European institution. It is indeed the surest way of perpetuating military despotism in the rejuvenated Germany as essential to retaining possession of a western Poland – of Alsace and Lorraine. It is an infallible means of turning the coming peace into a mere armistice until France has recovered sufficiently to demand back her lost territories. It is the most infallible method of ruining both Germany and France by internecine strife.

The knaves and the fools who discovered these guarantees of eternal peace ought to know from Prussian history, and from the drastic treatment laid down by Napoleon in the Peace Treaties of Tilsit [3] that such violent measures of pacifying a viable people produce an effect exactly opposite to that intended. Compare France, even after the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, with Prussia after the Tilsit Peace!

If, as long as the old political conditions obtained, French chauvinism had a certain material justification in the fact that since 1815 a few lost battles meant that the capital, Paris, and with it France, were at the mercy of the invader, what new nourishment will chauvinism not imbibe when the boundary line will run along the Vosges in the East and at Metz in the North?

That the Lorrainers and Alsatians desire the blessings of German government even the... [4] Teuton does not dare to maintain. It is the principle of Pan-Germanism and of ‘secure’ frontiers that is being proclaimed, which, if it were practised by the Eastern side, would lead to fine results for Germany and Europe.

Anyone who has not been entirely overawed by the din and noise of the moment and has no interest in overawing the German people must realise that the War of 1870 will necessarily lead to a war between Germany and Russia just as the War of 1866 led to the War of 1870.

I say necessarily, inevitably, except in the improbable event of a prior outbreak of a revolution in Russia.

If this improbable case does not eventuate the war between Germany and Russia must already now be treated as an accomplished fact.

It depends entirely upon the present conduct of the German victors whether this war is going to be useful or harmful.

If they take Alsace and Lorraine France and Russia will make war upon Germany. Needless to point to the baneful consequences.

If they conclude an honourable peace with France that war will liberate Europe from the Muscovite dictatorship, will dissolve Prussia in Germany, allow the western part of the Continent to develop in peace and finally will help the Russian social revolution – the elements of which need only such an impetus from without for their development – to erupt, from which the Russian people too will benefit.

But I am afraid the knaves and the fools will continue their mad game unhindered unless the masses of the German working class raise their voice...

The present war ushers in a new era in world history by the proof which Germany has given that even with the exclusion of German Austria she is capable of going her own way independently of the other countries. That she finds her unity at first in the Prussian barracks is a punishment she has amply merited. But even under these circumstances one result has been immediately achieved. Such trifling matters as for instance the conflict between the National-Liberal North Germans and the People’s Party South Germans [5] will no longer uselessly obstruct the way. Relations will develop on a grand scale and become simpler. If the German working class does not then play the historical role it is entitled to it will be its own fault. This war has shifted the centre of gravity of the working-class movement on the Continent from France to Germany. This places greater responsibility upon the German working class...

Notes

1. Members of the Brunswick Committee had asked Marx to elucidate for them the position of the German working class with regard to the Franco-Prussian War. Marx took this opportunity to express his views, especially since the editors of the Volksstaat (including Liebknecht), though regarding matters on the whole from an internationalist point of view, had in the beginning given a one-sided evaluation of the war and had to a certain extent ignored the necessity of bringing about the unification of Germany. The text of the letter was worked out by Marx and Engels jointly and sent to Germany over Marx’s signature. Only part of the letter has been preserved, namely those passages that were incorporated in the Manifesto on the War issued as a leaflet on 5 September 1870, by the Committee of the Social-Democratic Workers Party – Progress Publishers.

2. The annexation of Alsace-Lorraine planned by Prussia – Progress Publishers.

3. Treaties of Tilsit – peace treaties signed on 7 and 9 July 1807, between Napoleonic France, and Russia and Prussia, members of the fourth anti-French coalition, which had been defeated in the war. The peace terms imposed on Prussia were extremely severe and deprived her of a considerable part of her territory. The treaty, therefore, caused great dissatisfaction among the German population, and thus prepared the soil for the liberation movement against Napoleon’s rule – Progress Publishers.

4. Note by Engels: ‘the most rabid’ – Progress Publishers.

5. The National-Liberal Party – the party of the German, and especially the Prussian, bourgeoisie, came into being in the autumn of 1866 following the split of the Progressive Party. The principal aim of the National-Liberals was the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership. The German People’s Party formed in 1865 consisted of petty-bourgeois democrats and to some extent of bourgeois democrats, mainly from the South German states. The People’s Party, as distinct from the National-Liberals, was opposed to the hegemony of Prussia in Germany and advocated the creation of a ‘Greater Germany’ which was to include both Prussia and Austria. It favoured the establishment of a federal German state and was against the creation of a united, centralised democratic republic – Progress Publishers.

Marx To Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

September 2, 1870

What have you to say about the family poet Freiligrath? Even historical catastrophes such as the present one merely serve him for the glorification of his own brats. What is more, the volunteer “medical orderly” is thereby turned into a “surgeon” for the English.

Engels to Marx

In London

Abstracts

Written: September 4, 1870;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence, International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan, 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

September 4, 1870

“Was schert mich Weib, was schert mich Kind,

Ich trage höhres Verlangen;

Lass sie betteln gehn, wenn sie hungrig sind-

Mein Kaiser, mein Kaiser gefangen!”

[What care I for wife or child,

I have higher yearnings;

if they are hungry let them go and beg –

My Emperor, my Emperor is a captive!]

World history is surely the greatest of poets, it has even succeeded in parodying Heine. My Emperor, my Emperor a captive! And of the “stinking Prussians,” what is more. And poor William stands by and assures everybody for the hundredth time that he is really quite innocent of the whole business and that it is a pure act of God. William appears just like the schoolboy: “Who created the world?” “Please teacher, I did – but indeed I will never do it again.”

And then the miserable Jules Favre comes along with the proposal that Palikao, Trochu and a few Arcadians shall form the government. There never was such a lousy crew. But all the same it is to be expected now that when this becomes known in Paris something or other will happen. I cannot believe that this douche of news, which must surely be known to-day or to-morrow, will produce no effect. Perhaps a government of the Left, which after some show of resistance will conclude peace.

The war is at an end. There is no more army in France. As soon as Bazaine has capitulated, which will no doubt happen this week, half the German army will move in front of Paris and the other half across the Loire to sweep the country of all armed detachments....

The Alsace swindle – apart from its purely Teutonic features – is mainly of a strategical nature and aims at getting the line of the Vosges and German Lorraine as border-country. (Language frontier: If you draw a straight line from Donon or Schirmeck in the Vosges to one hour east of Longwy, where the Belgian – Luxemberg and French frontiers meet, it is almost exactly the language frontier; and from Donon down the Vosges to the Swiss frontier.) Northwards from Donon the Vosges are not so high and steep as in the South. Only the asses of the Staatsanzeiger and Brass and Co. could suppose that France will be “throttled” by the snipping off of this narrow strip with its one and a quarter million or so inhabitants. The screams of the philistines for “guarantees” are altogether absurd, but they tell because they suit the rubbish of the Court people.... In Saarbrücken the French did as much damage as they could. Of course the bombardment only lasted a few hours and not as in Strasbourg day and night for weeks. ...

Herewith I return Cacadou’s[1] letter with thanks. Very interesting.

... The defence of Paris, if nothing extraordinary happens in the course of it, will be an entertaining episode. These perpetual little panics of the French – which all arise from fear of the moment when they will really have to learn the truth – give one a much better idea of the Reign of Terror. We think of this as the reign of people who inspire terror; on the contrary, it is the reign of people who are themselves terrified. Terror consists mostly of useless cruelties perpetrated by frightened people in order to reassure themselves. I am convinced that the blame for the Reign of Terror in 1793 lies almost exclusively with the over-nervous bourgeois, demeaning himself as a patriot, the small petty bourgeois beside themselves with fright and the mob of riff-raff who know how to profit from the terror. These are just the classes in the present minor terror too.

... Best regards to all of you from all of us, including Jollymeyer [2] and Moore. [3]

Yours

FE

Notes

1. A jocular nickname of Laura Lafargue – Progress Publishers.

2. A jocular nickname of Karl Schorlemmer (1834-1892), a prominent German chemist, adherent of dialectical materialism, professor at Manchester, member of German Social-Democratic Party, friend of Marx and Engels – Progress Publishers.

3. Samuel Moore (1830-1912) – English lawyer, member of First International, helped translate Capital into English, friend of Marx and Engels – Progress Publishers.

Engels to Marx

In London

Abstract

Written: September 12, 1870;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

September 12, 1870

If anything at all could be done in Paris, a rising of the workers before peace is concluded should be prevented. Bismarck will soon be in a position to make peace, either by taking Paris or because the European situation obliges him to put an end to the war. However the peace may turn out, it must be concluded before the workers can do anything at all. If they were victorious now--in the service of national defence--they would have to inherit the legacy of Bonaparte and of the present lousy Republic, and would be needlessly crushed by the German armies and thrown back another twenty years. They themselves can lose nothing by waiting. The possible changes of frontier are in any case only provisional and will be reversed again. To fight for the bourgeoisie against the Prussians would be madness. Whatever the government may be which concludes peace, the fact that it has done so will eventually make its existence impossible, and in internal conflicts there will not be much to fear from the army, returned home after imprisonment. After the peace all the chances will be more favourable to the workers than they ever were before. But will they not let themselves be carried away again under the pressure of the external attack, and proclaim the Social Republic on the eve of the storming of Paris? It would be appalling if as their last act of war the German armies had to fight out a battle with the Parisian workers at the barricades. It would throw us back fifty years and delay everything so much that everybody and everything would get into a false position--and the national hatred and the domination by phrases which would then arise among the French workers!

It is a damnably bad thing that in the present situation there are so few people in Paris who are ready to dare to see things as they really are. Where is one man there who even dares to think that France's active power of resistance is broken where this war is concerned, and that with it the prospects of repelling the invasion by a revolution fall to the ground too! Just because people do not want to hear the real truth I am afraid that things may still come to this. For the apathy of the workers before the fall of the Empire will no doubt have changed by now.

Engels to Marx

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

September 13, 1870

With the passing of time the war is assuming an unpleasant character. The French have not yet been thrashed enough, and the German asses have won far too many victories. Victor Hugo writes nonsense in French, and fair William abuses the German language:

“Nun lebe wobl mit bewegtem Herzen am Schluss eines solchen Briefes."

[And now farewell, with trembling heart at the close of such a letter]

This would be a king?! And of the most “cultured” nation in the world! And his wife has it printed!

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 14 September 1870

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Wenceslas

The Address [1] enclosed.

My time is so taken up with ‘International’ work that I do not get to bed before three in the morning. This to excuse my obstinate silence.

Best greetings to Madame la Comtesse and Fränzchen.

Yours

KM

Notes

1. The Second Address of the General Council of the First International on the Franco-Prussian War, dated 9 September 1870 – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx To E. Beesly

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

London, September 16, 1870

From the Continent, where people were and are used, even at Moscow and St. Petersburg, even in the French papers under the Bonapartist rule, even now at Berlin, to see the manifestoes of the International treated seriously and reproduced in full by some journal or other, we have been once and again taunted for our negligence in not using the “free” London press. They have, of course, no idea whatsoever, and will not believe in the utter corruption of that vile concern, long since branded by William Cobbett as “mercenary, infamous, and illiterate.”

Now I believe you would do the greatest possible service to the International, and I should take good care — to have your article reproduced in our journals in Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Belgium, Holland, Denmark, Hungary, Germany, France, and the United States — if you in the Fortnightly Review would publish something on the International, the manifestoes of the General Council on the war and the treatment we have to undergo at the hands of that paragon press, that “free” English press! Those fellows are in fact more enslaved to the Prussian police than the Berlin papers.

Marx to Edward Beesly

In London

Abstract

Written: October 19, 1870;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence, International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999.

London, October 19, 1870

My Dear Sir

Deák [2] is against the workmen. He is, in fact, a Hungarian edition of an English Whig.

... As to Lyons, I have received letters not fit for publication. At first everything went well. Under the pressure of the "International" section, the Republic was proclaimed before Paris had taken that step. A revolutionary government was at once established--La Commune--composed partly of workmen belonging to the "International," partly of Radical middle class Republicans. The octrois [internal customs dues] were at once abolished, and rightly so. The Bonapartist and Clerical intriguers were intimidated. Energetic means were taken to arm the whole people. The middle class began if not really to sympathise with, at least to quietly undergo, the new order of things. The action of Lyons was at once felt at Marseilles and Toulouse, where the "International" sections are strong.

But the asses, Bakunin and Cluseret, arrived at Lyons and spoiled everything. Belonging both to the "International," they had, unfortunately, influence enough to mislead our friends. The Hotel de Ville was seized for a short time--a most foolish decree on the abolition de l'etat [abolition of the state] and similar nonsense were issued. You understand that the very fact of a Russian--represented by the middle class papers as an agent of Bismarck--pretending to impose himself as the leader of a Comite de Salut de la France [Committee for the Safety of France] was quite sufficient to turn the balance of public opinion. As to Cluseret, he behaved both as a fool and a coward. These two men have left Lyons after their failure.

At Rouen, as in most industrial towns of France, the sections of the International, following the example of Lyons, have enforced the official admission into the "committees of defence" of the working-class element.

Still, I must tell you that according to all information I receive from France, the middle class on the whole prefers Prussian conquest to the victory of a Republic with Socialist tendencies. ...

Yours truly

Karl Marx

Notes

1. Edward Spencer Beesly (1831-1915) – English historian and political figure, bourgeois radical, positivist, professor at London University, known for his defence of First International and Paris Commune in the English press in 1870-71 – Progress Publishers.

2. Ferenc Deák (1803-1876) – Hungarian statesman, representative of liberal circles of Hungarian aristocracy, advocated compromise with Austrian monarchy – Progress Publishers.

Perhaps also add Progress f/ns on Lyons and ‘committees of defence’, mentioned in extract already on MIA:

a. The rising in Lyons began on 4 September 1870, after the news of the defeat at Sedan. Bakunin, who had arrived in Lyons on 15 September, tried to seize the leadership of the movement and to carry into effect his anarchist programme. The attempt of the Anarchists to stage a coup on 28 September completely failed.

b. Committees of defence were set up in many French cities at the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War, their main task was the organisation of the food supply for the army.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann in Hanover, 13 December 1870

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975), and Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

The explanation for my long silence is the fact that during this war, which has caused most of the foreign correspondents of the General Council to go to France, I have had to conduct practically the entire international correspondence, which is no trifle. Besides, with the ‘postal freedom’ now prevailing in Germany and particularly in the North German Confederation, and most ‘particularly’ in Hanover, it is dangerous – not for me, it is true, but for my German correspondents – if I write them my opinion on the war, and what else can one write about at the present moment?

For example, you ask me for our first Address on the war. I had sent it to you. It has obviously been confiscated. I am enclosing in this letter the two Addresses [1] issued as a pamphlet as well as Professor Beesly’s article [2] in the Fortnightly Review and today’s Daily News. Since this paper has a Prussian tinge, the things will probably get through. Professor Beesly is a Comtist and as such obliged to think up all sorts of crotchets, but otherwise he is a very capable and brave man. He is professor of history at London University.

It seems that Germany has not only captured Bonaparte, his generals and his army but that the whole of imperialism, with all its infirmities, has likewise been acclimatised in the land of the oak and the linden tree.

As to the German bourgeois, I am not at all surprised by his intoxication with conquest. First of all, rapacity is the vital principle of every bourgeoisie and to take foreign provinces is after all ‘taking’. The German middle classes moreover have most dutifully accepted so many kicks from their sovereigns, particularly the Hohenzollerns, that it must be a real pleasure to them when those kicks are administered for a change to a foreigner.

In any case this war has freed us from the ‘middle-class republicans’. It has put a horrible end to that crew. And that is an important result. It has given our professors the best opportunity of discrediting themselves in the eyes of the whole world for being servile pedants. The conditions which result from the war will be the best propaganda of our principles.

Here in England public opinion at the outbreak of war was ultra-Prussian; it has now turned into the opposite. In the cafés chantants, for example, German singers with their Wi-Wa-Wacht on the Rhine have been hissed off the floor while French singers with the Marseillaise have been accompanied in chorus. Apart from the decided sympathy of the popular masses for the Republic, from the vexation of the respectability at the alliance between Prussia and Russia, now clear as daylight, and from the shameless tone of Prussian diplomacy since Prussia’s military successes, the manner in which the war has been conducted – the requisitioning system, the burning down of villages, the shooting of francs-tireurs, the taking of hostages and similar acts reminiscent of the Thirty Years’ War – has aroused universal indignation in this country. Of course, the English have done the same in India, Jamaica, etc, but the French are neither Hindus, nor Chinese, nor Negroes, and the Prussians are not heaven-born Englishmen! It is a truly Hohenzollern idea that a people commits a crime in continuing to defend itself once its regular army has ceased to exist. In fact, the war of the Prussian people against Napoleon I was a real thorn in the side of good old Frederick William III, as one can see from Professor Pertz’s historical account of Gneisenau, [3] who transformed the war of francs-tireurs into a system through his Landsturm Ordnung. [4] The fact that the people fought on their own initiative and independently of orders from the highest quarters gave Frederick William III no peace.

However, the last word has not yet been spoken. The war in France can still take a very ‘unpleasant’ turn. The resistance put up by the Loire Army [5] was ‘beyond’ calculation, and the present scattering of the Prussian forces right and left is merely intended to instil fear, but in fact its only result is to call forth the defensive power at every point and weaken the offensive power. The threatened bombardment of Paris is likewise nothing but a trick. By all the rules of the theory of probability, it can have no serious effect on the city of Paris itself. If a few outworks are shot to pieces and a breach is made, what good is that when the besieged outnumber the besiegers? And if the besieged fought exceptionally well in the sorties when the enemy defended himself behind entrenchments, how much better will they fight when the roles are reversed?

To starve Paris out is the only real way. But if that is dragged out long enough to allow armies to be formed and a people’s war to develop in the provinces, nothing will be gained thereby except a shifting of the centre of gravity. Moreover, even after the surrender of Paris, which cannot be occupied and kept tranquil by a mere handful, would keep a large part of the invaders out of action.

But however the war may end, it has given the French proletariat practice in arms, and that is the best guarantee of the future.

The shameless tone which Russia and Prussia adopt towards England may have wholly unexpected and unpleasant results for them. The matter stands like this: by the Paris Peace Treaty of 1856 England disarmed herself. England is a sea power and can counterpose to the great Continental military powers only the weapon of naval warfare. The certain method is temporarily to destroy or bring to a standstill the overseas trade of the continental powers. This mainly depends on operating the principle of seizing enemy goods in neutral vessels. This maritime right (as well as other similar rights) was surrendered by England in the so-called Declaration attached to the Paris Treaty. Clarendon did this at the secret order of the Russian Palmerston. [6] The Declaration, however, is not an integral part of the treaty itself and has never been legally ratified in England. The Russian and Prussian gentlemen are reckoning without their host if they imagine that the influence of the Queen, who is Prussianised from family interest, and the bourgeois weak-mindedness of a Gladstone, would at a decisive moment keep John Bull from throwing this self-created ‘charming obstacle’ overboard. And he can always strangle Russian-German sea trade in a few weeks. We shall then have an opportunity of studying the long faces of the Petersburg and Berlin diplomats, and the still longer faces of the ‘power patriots’. Qui vivra verra. [7]

My best compliments to Madame la Comtesse and Fränzchen.

Yours

KM

À propos. Can you let me have Windthorst’s various Reichstag Speeches? [8]

Notes

1. The reference is to the First and the Second Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association on the Franco-Prussian War (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Volume 2 (Moscow, 1973), pp 190-201) – Progress Publishers. [First Address and Second Address.]

2. ES Beesly, ‘The International Working Men’s Association’. Edward Spencer Beesly (1831-1915) – English historian and political figure, bourgeois radical, positivist, professor at London University, known for his defence of First International and Paris Commune in the English press in 1870-71 – Progress Publishers.

3. Georg Heinrich Pertz, Das Leben des Feldmarschalls Grafen Neithardt von Gneisenau (The Life of Field-Marshal Count Neithardt von Gneisenau) – Progress Publishers.

4. Landsturm-Ordnung – ordinance on the landsturm of 21 April 1813, which was drawn up by Gneisenau, was designed to draw the whole population into the fight against the enemy and called upon the men to use all and every means to harass the intruder. Engels describes the ordinance in his article ‘Prussian Francs-Tireurs’ first published in The Pall-Mall Gazette of 9 December 1870 – Progress Publishers.

5. The Loire Army, which was formed on 15 November 1870 and placed under the command of General d'Aurelle de Paladines, fought in the Orleans district. Although it consisted of heterogeneous elements and most of its units were insufficiently trained, the army with the support of the local population was able to inflict several defeats on the Prussian troops – Progress Publishers.

6. Henry Temple, Viscount Palmerston (1784-1865) – British statesman and diplomat against whom Marx wrote a series of articles in the New York Tribune, later published in England as Political Flysheets – Progress Publishers.

7. He who lives will see – Progress Publishers.

8. Ludwig Windthorst (1812-1891) – leader of the Catholic Centre in the German Reichstag, led the opposition against Bismarck – Progress Publishers.

1871

Karl Marx to the Editor of the Daily News, 16 January 1871

Marx to Natalie Liebknecht. 13 January

Marx to Hermann Jung. 18 January

Marx to Julian Harney. 21 January

Marx to Sigfrid Meyer. 21 January

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 21 January

Marx to Johann Jacoby. 4 February

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 4 February

Friedrich Engels to the Spanish Federal Council of the International Working Men’s Association, 13 February 1871

Marx to Paul Lafargue. 4 February

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 27 February

Marx to Natalie Liebknecht. 2 March

Engels to Karl Klein and Friedrich Moll. 10 March

Engels to Rudolf Engels. 10 March

Marx to Paul Lafargue. 23 March

Marx to Peter Imandt. 30 March

Engels to Philippe Coenen. 5 April

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 5 April

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 6 April

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. c. 10 April

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 12 April

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 13 April

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 13 April

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 17 April

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 20 April

Engels to Francisco Mora. c. 20 April

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. c. 20 April

Marx to Leo Frankel. c. 26 April

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 28 April

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 4 May

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 4 May

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 5 May

Engels to Hermann Jung. 10 May

Marx to Leo Frankel and Louis Eugene Varlin. 13 May

Marx to Edward Spencer Beesly. 12 June

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 13 June

Marx to His Daughters Jenny, Laura and Eleanor. 13 June

Engels to Elisabeth Engels. 16 June

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 18 June

Marx to an Unknown Addressee. 19 June

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 22 June

Engels to Carlo Cafiero. 1-3 July

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 10 July

Marx to Leon Bigot. 11 July

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 12 July

Marx to A Rutson. 12 July

Engels to Carlo Cafiero. 16 July

Marx to Eugen Oswald. 21 July

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 22 July

Marx to Eugen Oswald. 24 July

Marx to Charles Caron. 26 July

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 27 July

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. c. 27 July

Marx to Nikolai Utin. 27 July

Engels to Carlo Cafiero. 28 July

Marx to Adolphe Hubert. 28 July

Engels to the Mother Superior of the Convent of the Sisters of Providence in Hampstead. Early August

Engels to Philippe Coenen. 4 August

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 9 August

Marx to Theodor Koll. 10 August

Marx to Adolphe Hubert. 10 August

Marx to Hermann lung. 14 August

Marx to Adolphe Hubert. c. 14 August

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. Mid-August

Engels to Marx. 18 August

Marx to Engels. 19 August

Marx to Engels. 21 August

Engels to Marx. 23 August

Marx to Engels. 24 August

Marx to Friedrich Bolte. 25 August

Marx to Jenny Marx. 25 August

Marx to Hermann Meyer. c. 25 August

Marx to Moncure Daniel Conway. 29 August

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 3 September

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 5 September

Marx to Collet Dobson Collet. 6 September

Marx to Engels. 8 September

Engels to Miller & Richard. c. 9 September

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 11 September

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 12 September

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 12 September

Marx to Hermann Jung. 13 September

Marx to Adolphe Hubert. 15 September

Marx to Jenny Marx. 23 September

Marx to Gustav Kwasniewski. 29 September

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 5 October

Marx to Hermann Jung. 11 October

Marx to Hermann Jung. 13 October

Marx to John Hales. 14 October

Marx to Edward Spencer Beesly. 19 October

Marx to Hermann Jung. 19 October

Marx to Hermann Jung. 20 October

Engels to Elisabeth Engels. 21 October

Marx to Edouard Vaillant. 22 October

Marx to Hermann Jung. c. 25 October

Marx to Hermann Jung. End of October

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 4 November

Marx to Hermann Jung. 4 November

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 6 November

Marx to Ferdinand Jozewicz. 6 November

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 9 November

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 9 November

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 9 November

Marx to Carl Speyer. 10 November

Engels to Theodor Cuno. 13 November

Marx to Hermann Jung. 16 November

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 17 November

Marx to Julius Johannard. 18 November

Marx to Hermann Jung. 18 November

Marx to Adolphe Hubert. 22 November

Marx to Friedrich Bolte. 23 November

Engels to Carmelo Palladino. 23 November

Marx to Cesar De Paepe. 24 November

Marx to Laura and Paul Lafargue. 24 November

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 25 November

Marx to Juliusz Balaszewicz-Potocki. 25 November

Marx to Juliusz Balaszewicz-Potocki. 29 November

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 29 November

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 29 November

Friedrich Engels to the Editorial Board of the Turin Newspaper Il Proletario Italiano, 29 November 1871

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 9 December

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 15 December

Marx to Laura Lafargue. 18 December

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 30 December

XXXVI

Source: The Pall Mall Gazette, January 19, 1871;

Transcribed: by Tony Brown.

Ever since, after Sedan, Paris was first seriously menaced by hostile attack, we have insisted upon the great strength of a fortified capital like Paris; but we have never omitted to add that, for the full development of its defensive powers, it required a large regular army to defend it'; an army too powerful to be shut up in the works of the place, or to be prevented from manoeuvring in the open around the fortress, which would serve as its pivot and partly as its base of operations.

Under normal conditions, this army would almost always be at hand, as a matter of course. The French armies, defeated near the frontier, would fall back upon Paris as their last and chief stronghold; they would under ordinary circumstances arrive here in sufficient strength, and find sufficient reinforcements to be able to fulfil the task assigned to them. But this time the strategy of the Second Empire had caused the whole of the French armies to disappear from the field. One of them it had managed to get shut up, to all appearance hopelessly, in Metz; the other had just surrendered at Sedan. When the Prussians arrived before Paris, a few half-filled depôts, a number of provincial Mobiles (just levied), and the local National Guard (not half formed), were all the forces ready for its defence.

Even under these circumstances the intrinsic strength of the place proved so formidable to the invaders, the task of attacking lege artis this immense city and its outworks appeared so gigantic to them, that they abandoned it at once, and chose to reduce the place by famine. At that time Henri Rochefort and others were formed into a “Commission of Barricades,” charged with the construction of a third interior line of defence, which should prepare the ground for that line of fighting so peculiarly Parisian — the defence of barricades and the struggle from house to house. The press at the time made great fun of this commission; but the semi-official publications of the Prussian staff leave no doubt that it was above all the certainty of having to encounter a determined struggle at the barricades which caused them to decide in favour of reduction by famine. The Prussians knew very well that the forts, and after them the enceinte, if defended by artillery alone, must fall within a certain time; but then would come a stage of the struggle in which new levies and even civilians would be a match for veterans; in which house after house, street after street, would have to be conquered, and, considering the great number of the defenders, with the certainty of an immense loss of life. Whoever will refer to the papers on the subject in the Prussian Staats-Anzeiger will find this reason to be stated as the decisive one against a regular siege.

The investment began on September 19, exactly four months ago to-day. On the following day General Ducrot, who commanded the regular troops in Paris, made a sortie with three divisions in the direction of Clamart, and lost seven guns and 3,000 prisoners. This was followed by similar sorties on the 23rd and 30th of September, 13th and 21st of October, all of which resulted in considerable loss to the French without other advantages than, perhaps, accustoming the young troops to the enemy’s fire. On the 28th another sortie was made against Le Bourget with better success. the village was taken and held 1()1 two days; but on the 30th the second division of the Prussian guards — thirteen battalions, then less than 10,000 men — retook the village. The French had evidently made very poor use of the two days, during which they might have converted the massively built village into a fortress, and neglected to keep reserves at hand to support the defenders in time, otherwise such a moderate force could not have wrested the place from them.

After this effort there followed a month of quietness. Trochu evidently intended to improve the drill and discipline of his men before again risking great sorties, and very properly so. But, at the same time, he neglected to carry on that war of outposts, reconnaissances and patrols, of ambushes and surprises, which is now the regular occupation of the men on the French front round Paris — a kind of warfare than which none is more adapted to give young troops confidence in their officers and in themselves, and the habit of meeting the enemy with composure. Troops which have found out that in small bodies, in single sections, half companies, or companies, they can surprise, defeat, or take prisoner similar small bodies of the enemy will soon learn to meet him battalion against battalion. Besides, they will thus learn what outpost duty really is, which many of them appeared to be ignorant of as late as December.

On the 28th of November, at last, was inaugurated that series of sorties which culminated in the grand sortie of the 30th of November across the Marne, and the advance of the whole eastern front of Paris. On the 2nd of December the Germans retook Briey and part of Champigny, and on the following day the French recrossed the Marne. As an attempt to break through the entrenched lines of circumvallation which the besiegers had thrown up, the attack completely failed; it had been carried out without the necessary energy. But it left in the hands of the French a considerable portion of hitherto debatable ground in front of their lines. A strip of ground about two miles in width. from Drancy to the Marne, near Neuilly, came into their possession; a country completely commanded by the fire of the forts, covered with massively built villages easy of defence, and possessing a fresh commanding position in the plateau of Avron. Here, then, was a chance of permanently enlarging the circle of defence; from this ground, once well secured, a further advance might have been attempted, and either the line of the besiegers so much “bulged in” that a successful attack on their lines became possible, or that, by concentrating a strong force here, they were compelled to weaken their line at other points, and thus facilitate a French attack. Well, this ground remained in the hands of the French for a full month. The Germans were compelled to erect siege batteries against Avron, and yet two days’ fire from these batteries sufficed to drive the French from it; and, Avron once lost, the other positions were also abandoned. Fresh attacks had indeed been made on the whole north-east and east front on the 21st; Le Bourget was half-carried, Maison Blanche and Ville-Evrard were taken; but all this vantage-ground was lost again the same night. The troops were left on the ground outside the forts, where they bivouacked at a temperature varying from nine to twenty-one degrees below freezing point, and were at last withdrawn under shelter because they naturally could not stand the exposure. The whole of this episode is more characteristic than any other of the want of decision and energy — the mollesse, we might almost say the drowsiness — with which this defence of Paris is conducted.

The Avron incident at last induced the Prussians to turn the investment into a real siege, and to make use of the siege artillery which, for unforeseen cases, had been provided. On the 30th of December the regular bombardment of the north-eastern and eastern forts commenced; on the 5th of January that of the southern forts. Both have been continued without interruption, and of late have been accompanied by a bombardment of the town itself, which is a wanton piece of cruelty. Nobody knows better than the staff at Versailles, and nobody has caused it oftener to be asserted in the press, that the bombardment of a town as extensive as Paris cannot hasten its surrender by one moment. The cannonade of the forts is being followed up by the opening of regular parallels, at least against Issy; we hear of the guns being moved into batteries nearer to the forts, and unless the defence acts on the offensive more unhesitatingly than hitherto, we may soon hear of actual damage being done to one or more forts.

Trochu, however. continues in his inactivity, masterly or otherwise. The few sorties made during the last few days appear to have been but too “platonic,” as Trochu’s accuser in the Siècle calls the whole of them. We are told the soldiers refused to follow their officers. If so, this proves nothing but that they have lost all confidence in the supreme direction. And, indeed, we cannot resist the conclusion that a change in the chief command in Paris has become a necessity. There is an indecision, a lethargy, a want of sustained energy in all the proceedings of this defence which cannot entirely be laid to the charge of the quality of the troops. That the positions, held for a month, during which there occurred only about ten days of severe frost, were not properly entrenched, cannot be blamed upon any one but Trochu, whose business it was to see to its being done. And that month, too, was the critical period of the siege; at its close the question was to be decided which party, besiegers or besieged, would gain ground. Inactivity and indecision, not of the troops but of the commander-in-chief, have turned the scale against the besieged.

And why is this inactivity and indecision continued even now? The forts are under the enemy’s fire, the besiegers’ batteries are being brought nearer and nearer; the French artillery, as is owned by Trochu himself, is inferior to that of the attack. Defended by artillery alone, the very day may be calculated when, under these circumstances, the ramparts — masonry and all — of the forts will give way. Inactivity and indecision cannot save them. Something must be done; and if Trochu cannot do it, he had better let some one else try.

Kinglake has preserved a transaction in which Trochu’s character appears in the same light as in this defence of Paris. When the advance to Varna had been resolved upon by both Lord Raglan and Saint-Arnaud, and the British Light Division had already been despatched, Colonel Trochu — “a cautious thinking man, well versed in strategic science,” of whom

“it was surmised that it was part of his mission to check anything like wildness in the movements of the French Marshal”

— Colonel Trochu called upon Lord Raglan, and entered upon negotiations, the upshot of which was that Saint-Arnaud declared he had resolved to send to

“Varna but one division, and to place the rest of his army in position, not in advance, but in the rear of the Balkan range,”

and invited Lord Raglan to follow his example. And that at a moment when the Turks were all but victorious on the Danube without foreign aid!

It may be said that the troops in Paris have lost heart, and are no longer fit for great sorties, that it is too late to sally forth against the Prussian siege works, that Trochu may save his troops for one great effort at the last moment, and so forth. But if the 500,000 armed men in Paris are to surrender to an enemy not half their number, placed moreover in a position most unfavourable for defence, they will surely not do so until their inferiority is brought home to all the world and to themselves. Surely they are not to sit down, eat up the last meal of their provisions, and then surrender! And if they have lost heart, is it because they acknowledge themselves hopelessly beaten, or because they have no longer any trust in Trochu? If it is too late to make sorties now, in another month they will be still more impracticable. And as to Trochu’s grand finale, the sooner it is made the better; at present the men are still tolerably fed and strong, and there is no telling what they will be in February.

Marx to Sigfrid Meyer

January 21, 1871

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

The Russian Language

I don’t know whether I told you that at the beginning of 1870 I began to study Russian, which I now read fairly fluently. This came about because Flerovsky’s very important work on The Condition of the Working Class (especially the peasants) in Russia, had been sent to me from Petersburg and because I also wanted to familiarise myself with the excellent economic works of Chernyshevsky (who was as a reward sentenced to the Siberian mines where he has been serving time for the past seven years). The result was worth the effort that a man of my age must make to master a language differing so greatly from the classical, Germanic, and Romance language groups. The intellectual movement now taking place in Russia testifies to the fact that fermentation is going on deep below the surface. Minds are always connected by invisible threads with the body of the people.

Freiligrath

The noble poet Freiligrath is at the moment staying here at his daughters’. He does not date to show himself to me. The 60,000 talers which the German Philistine gave him must be worked off by composing Tyrtaian songs like: “Germania, You Proud Woman,” etc.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann in Hanover, 4 February 1871

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975) ), and Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

I am sorry to learn from your last letter that your state of health has again got worse. In the autumn and winter months mine was tolerable, although the cough which I contracted during my last stay in Hanover is still troubling me.

I had sent you the Daily News containing my letter. [1] It was obviously confiscated, like the other things I sent you. Today I am enclosing the cutting, as well as the first Address of the General Council. [2] The letter actually contains nothing but facts, but was effective precisely because of that.

You know my opinion of the middle-class heroes. Monsieur Jules Favre [3] (notorious from the days of the Provisional Government and Cavaignac) [4] & Co have however surpassed my expectations. First of all they allowed the ‘sabre orthodox’, the ‘crétin militaire’, as Blanqui rightly dubs Trochu, [5] to carry out his ‘plan’. This plan consisted simply in prolonging the passive resistance of Paris to the utmost limit, that is, to the starvation point, while confining the offensive to sham manoeuvres, to ‘des sorties platoniques’. What I am saying is not just ‘supposition’. I know the contents of a letter which Jules Favre himself wrote to Gambetta [6] and in which he complains that he and other members of the part of the government cowering in Paris sought in vain to spur Trochu on to serious offensive measures. Trochu always answered that that would give the upper hand to Parisian demagogy. Gambetta replied: ‘You have pronounced your own condemnation.’ Trochu considered it much more important to keep down the Reds in Paris with the help of his Breton bodyguard – which rendered him the same services that the Corsicans rendered Louis Bonaparte – than to defeat the Prussians. This is the real secret of the defeats not only at Paris but throughout France, where the bourgeoisie, in agreement with the majority of the local authorities, has acted on the same principle.

After Trochu’s plan had been carried out to its climax – to the point where Paris had to surrender or starve – Jules Favre & Co could simply follow the example of the commander of the fortress of Toul. He did not surrender. He merely explained to the Prussians that he was compelled through lack of food to abandon the defence and open the gates of the fortress. They were now free to act as they chose.

But Jules Favre is not content with signing a formal capitulation. [7] Having declared himself, his associates in the government, and Paris prisoners of war of the King of Prussia, he has the audacity to act in the name of the whole of France. What did he know of the situation in France outside Paris? Absolutely nothing except what Bismarck was gracious enough to tell him.

More. These Messieurs les prisonniers du roi de Prusse go further and declare that the part of the French government still free in Bordeaux has forfeited its authority and can act only in agreement with them – the prisoners of war of the Prussian king. Since they, as prisoners of war, can themselves act only at the dictate of their warlord, they thereby proclaimed the King of Prussia de facto the highest authority in France.

Even Louis Bonaparte, after he surrendered and was taken prisoner at Sedan, was not so shameless. To Bismarck’s proposals he replied that he could not enter upon negotiations because as a Prussian prisoner he had ceased to exercise any authority in France.

At the most J Favre could have accepted a conditional armistice for the whole of France, namely, with the proviso that the agreement should be sanctioned by the Bordeaux government, [8] which alone was entitled and competent to agree with the Prussians upon the clauses of such an armistice. That government, at any rate, would not have allowed the latter to exclude the eastern theatre of war from the armistice. They would not have allowed them to round off their line of occupation so advantageously for themselves.

Rendered insolent by the usurpatory pretensions of his prisoners of war, who as such continue to play the part of the French government, Bismarck is now quite impudently interfering in internal French affairs. He protests, noble soul, against Gambetta’s decree concerning the general elections to the Assemblée, because the decree, according to him, is prejudicial to the freedom of elections. Indeed! Gambetta should answer with a protest against the state of siege and other conditions prevailing in Germany, which annihilate the freedom of elections to the Reichstag.

I hope that Bismarck sticks to his conditions of peace. Four hundred million pounds sterling as war indemnity – half the English national debt! Even the French bourgeoisie will understand that. It will perhaps at last realise that by continuing the war they could at the worst only gain.

The mob, high class and low, judges by appearances, the façade, the immediate result. During the last twenty years it has, all over the world, apotheosised Louis Bonaparte. I have always exposed him, even at his apogee, as a mediocre scoundrel. That is also my opinion of the Junker Bismarck. Nevertheless, I do not consider Bismarck so stupid as he would be if his diplomacy were voluntary. The man is caught by the Russian Chancellery in a net which only a lion could tear through, and he is no lion.

For example, Bismarck’s demand that France should hand over her twenty best ships and Pondicherry in India! Such an idea could not emanate from a really Prussian diplomat. He would know that a Prussian Pondicherry would be nothing but a Prussian hostage in English hands; that England, if she wanted to, could seize the twenty warships before they enter the Baltic Sea and that such demands could only have the object, absurd from the Prussian point of view, of making John Bull distrustful before the Prussians are out of the French wood.

But Russia is interested precisely in such a result, in order to secure still more firmly Prussia’s allegiance. In fact these demands have given rise to a complete change of feeling even in the peace-loving English middle class. Everybody is now calling for war. This provocative act and this danger to its interests are making even the bourgeois mad. It is more than probable that, thanks to the Prussian ‘wisdom’, Gladstone and Co will be kicked out of office and supplanted by a ministry declaring war against Prussia.

On the other hand things look pretty bad in Russia. Since Wilhelm became an Emperor, the old Muscovite, anti-German party, with the heir to the throne at its head, has again won the upper hand completely. And it is supported by the sentiments of the people. Gorchakov’s subtle policy is incomprehensible to them. It is therefore probable that the tsar will either have to change his foreign policy altogether, or be obliged to kick the bucket, like his predecessors Alexander I, Paul and Peter III.

With a simultaneous convulsion in the politics of England and Russia, where would Prussia be, at a moment when its northern and south-eastern frontiers are left defenceless against invasion and Germany’s defensive strength is exhausted? Not to forget that since the outbreak of war Prussia-Germany has sent 1,500,000 men to France, of whom only about 700,000 are still on their legs.

Despite all appearance to the contrary, Prussia’s position is anything but pleasant.

If France holds out, uses the armistice to reorganise her army and finally gives the war a really revolutionary character – and the artful Bismarck is doing his best to this end – the new German, Borussian [9] Empire may still get a quite unexpected thrashing as its baptism.

My best compliments to the Countess and Fränzchen.

Yours

KM

À propos: You wrote me once about a book by Haxthausen [10] on Westphalian (I think) conditions of landownership. I should be glad if you would send it to me.

Be so good as to forward the enclosure to Dr Jacoby [11] (Königsberg) but stamp it by way of precaution.

Get your wife to write on the enclosed letter the address of Dr Johann Jacoby, Königsberg.

Jennychen has just asked me to send her greetings to ‘Trautchen, Fränzchen and Wenzelchen’, which I hereby do. [12]

Notes

1. Karl Marx to the Editor of the Daily News, 16 January 1871 – Progress Publishers.

2. The reference is to the First Address of the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association on the Franco-Prussian War (see Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Volume 2 (Moscow, 1973), pp. 190-94) – Progress Publishers.

3. Jules Favre (1809-1880) – French lawyer and politician, in late 1850s became a leader of the bourgeois-republican opposition, Minister of Foreign Affairs (1870-71), hangman of Paris Commune and inspirer of struggle against International – Progress Publishers.

4. Louis Eugène Cavaignac (1802-1857) – French general and politician, bourgeois republican, War Minister May-June 1848, responsible for bloody suppression of June insurrection of Paris workers, vested with dictatorial powers June-December 1848 – Progress Publishers.

5. Louis-Jules Trochu (1815-1896) – French general and politician, Orleanist, head of Government of National Defence, Commander-in-Chief of Paris armed forces (September 1870 – January 1871), treacherously sabotaged defence of the city, deputy of National Assembly – Progress Publishers.

6. Léon Michel Gambetta (1838-1882) – French statesman, bourgeois republican, member of Government of National Defence (1870-71), organiser of military resistance to Prussia in provinces – Progress Publishers.

7. The reference is to the Convention on Armistice and the Capitulation of Paris signed by Bismarck and Favre on 28 January 1871. By signing this document the French bourgeoisie betrayed the national interests of France in order to suppress the revolutionary movement in the country – Progress Publishers.

8. Part of the Government of National Defence, which was formed in Paris on 4 September 1870, was sent to Tours to organise the resistance against the German invasion and to maintain relations with foreign countries. This part, headed by Gambetta from 9 October 1870, moved to Bordeaux on 6 December 1870 – Progress Publishers.

9. Borussia: old name for Prussia, frequently used in an ironical sense to indicate the feudal landlord nature of Prussia – Progress Publishers.

10. August von Haxthausen (1792-1866) – German economist; in his book On the Agrarian Structure of Russia, he was the first to acquaint Western Europe with the Russian village commune – Progress Publishers.

11. Johann Jacoby (1805-1877) – German radical. ‘One of the very rare German bourgeois democrats who, after the lessons of 1870-71, went over not to chauvinism or German liberalism but to socialism.’ (Lenin)

12. Enclosed with this letter was the following cutting from the Daily News, containing a letter from Marx, dated 16 January 1871, and published under the heading ‘Freedom of the Press and of Speech in Germany’ – Progress Publishers. [Available on the MIA at < >.] *** insert URL for letter above ***

Friedrich Engels to the Spanish Federal Council of the International Working Men’s Association, 13 February 1871

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Citizens

Your letter of 14 December has been received by the General Council with great pleasure. Your preceding letter dated 30 July has likewise reached us. It was passed on to Citizen Serraillier, [1] Secretary for Spain, with instructions to forward our reply to you. But Citizen Serraillier shortly afterwards left for France to fight for the republic and was in Paris when the city was encircled. If you have therefore not yet received a reply to your letter of 30 July, which is still in his hands, it is due to these circumstances. The General Council at its meeting of the 7th instant has for the time being entrusted the correspondence with Spain to the undersigned FE and has passed your last letter on to him.

We have regularly received the following Spanish working-class newspapers: the Barcelona La Federación, the Madrid La Solidaridad (until December 1870), the Palma El Obrero (until its suspension), and recently the Palma La Revolución Social (the first issue only). These newspapers have kept us posted on what is going on in the labour movement in Spain. We have seen with great satisfaction that the ideas of the social revolution are becoming more and more the common property of the working class of your country.

As you say, the attention of the people has undoubtedly been attracted to a very large extent by the empty declamations of the old political parties, which have thus greatly obstructed our propaganda. That happened everywhere during the first few years of the proletarian movement. In France, in England and in Germany, the Socialists were compelled, and are still compelled, to combat the influence and activity of the old political parties, whether they be aristocratic or bourgeois, monarchist or even republican. Experience has shown everywhere that the best way to emancipate the workers from this domination of the old parties is to form in each country a proletarian party with a policy of its own, a policy which is manifestly different from that of the other parties, because it must express the conditions necessary for the emancipation of the working class. This policy may vary in details according to the specific circumstances of each country; but as the fundamental relations between labour and capital are the same everywhere and the political domination of the possessing classes over the exploited classes is an existing fact everywhere, the principles and aims of proletarian policy will be identical, at least in all western countries. The possessing classes – the landed aristocracy and the bourgeoisie – keep the working people in servitude not only by the power of their wealth, by the simple exploitation of labour by capital, but also by the power of the state – by the army, the bureaucracy, the courts. To give up fighting our adversaries in the political field would mean to abandon one of the most powerful weapons, particularly in the sphere of organisation and propaganda. Universal suffrage provides us with an excellent means of struggle. In Germany, where the workers have a well organised political party, they have succeeded in sending six deputies to the so-called National Assembly; and the opposition which our friends Bebel and Liebknecht have been able to organise there against a war of conquest has worked more powerfully in the interest of our international propaganda than meetings and years of propaganda in the press would have. At present in France too workers’ representatives have been elected and will loudly proclaim our principles. At the next elections the same thing will happen in England.

We learn with pleasure that it is your kind intention to remit to us the dues collected by the branches in your country. We shall receive them gratefully. Please make the remittance by cheque on any London banker payable to John Weston, [2] our treasurer, or send it by registered letter addressed to the undersigned, either 256 High Holborn, London, the seat of our Council, or 122 Regent Park Road, his home address.

We are awaiting with great interest the statistics concerning your federation which you promised to send us.

As for the Congress of the International, it is useless to think of it while the present war lasts. But if peace, as it seems, is soon restored the Council will immediately take up this important question and consider your friendly invitation to convoke it in Barcelona.

We have no sections yet in Portugal; it might perhaps be easier for you than for us to initiate relations with the workers of that country. If that is so be good enough to write to us once more on the subject. We likewise believe that it would be better, at least in the beginning, if you started relations with the Buenos Aires printers, provided you inform us later of the results obtained. Meanwhile you would do us a kind service and one useful to the cause if you would mail us an issue of the Anales de la Sociedad tipográfica de Buenos Aires [3] to get acquainted with it.

As for the rest the international movement continues to march on in spite of all obstacles. In England the Central Trades Councils of Birmingham and Manchester, and through them the workers of the two most important manufacturing cities in the country, have just now directly affiliated to our Association. In Germany we are at present suffering government persecutions similar to those initiated by Louis Bonaparte in France a year ago. Our German friends, more than fifty of whom are in prison, are literally suffering for the international cause. They have been arrested and prosecuted because they opposed the policy of conquest with might and main and urged that the German people should fraternise with the French people. In Austria too many of our friends have been gaoled, but the movement is nevertheless making headway. In France our sections have everywhere been the soul of the resistance movement and constituted its strength against the invasion. They have seized power in the big cities of the South; and if Lyons, Marseilles, Bordeaux and Toulouse have acted with quite unprecedented energy, it was thanks to the efforts of the members of the International. Our organisation in Belgium is strong and our Belgian sections have just held their Sixth Regional Congress. In Switzerland the differences which arose some time ago among our sections seem to be on the wane. From America we have received the news of the affiliation of new French, German and Czech (Bohemian) sections and, besides, we continue to maintain fraternal relations with the Labour League, [4] the big organisation of American workers.

Hoping soon to receive further news from you we are sending you our fraternal greetings.

For the General Council of the International Working Men’s Association

FE

Notes

1. Auguste Serraillier (1840-?) – leading figure in French and international working-class movement, member of General Council of First International (1869-72) and of Paris Commune, associate of Marx and Engels – Progress Publishers.

2. John Weston – carpenter then entrepreneur, took part in British labour movement, Owenist, member of General Council of First International – Progress Publishers.

3. Engels had in mind the Anales de la Sociedad Tipográfica Bonaerense, an Argentine workers’ paper published in 1871-72 – Progress Publishers.

4. The reference is to the National Labor Union formed in the USA at the National Labor Congress which was held in Baltimore in August 1866. Soon after it came into being the union established contacts with the International Working Men’s Association. The National Labor Union, which existed until 1872, played an important part in the creation of an independent labour movement in America, it fought for solidarity between Negro and white workers, for an eight-hour working day, and for equal rights for women workers – Progress Publishers.

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht

In Leipzig

Abstract

Written: April 6, 1871;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, April 6 1871

It appears that the defeat of the Parisians was their own fault, but a fault which really arose from their too great honnêteté [decency]. The Central Committee and later the Commune gave the mischievous abortion Thiers time to centralise hostile forces, in the first place by their folly in trying not to start civil war--as if Thiers had not started it by his attempt at the forcible disarming of Paris, as if the National Assembly, which was only summoned to decide the question of war or peace with the Prussians, had not immediately declared war on the Republic! (2) In order that the appearance of having usurped power should not attach to them they lost precious moments--(they should immediately have advanced on Versailles after the defeat (Place Vendôme) of the reaction in Paris)--by the election of the Commune, the organisation of which, etc., cost yet more time.

You must not believe a word of all the stuff you may see in the papers about the internal events in Paris. It is all lies and deception. Never has the vileness of bourgeois journalism displayed itself more brilliantly.

It is highly characteristic that the German Unity-Emperor and Unity-Parliament in Berlin appear not to exist at all for the outside world. Every breath of wind that stirs in Paris excites more interest.

You must carefully follow what is happening in the Danubian Principalities. If the revolution in France is temporarily defeated--the movement there can only be suppressed for a short time--there will be a new business of war for Europe beginning in the East, and Rumania will offer the orthodox tsar the first pretext for it. So look out on that side.

Marx to Dr Kugelmann

Concerning the Paris Commune

Abstract

Written: April 12-17, 1871;

Transcribed: Zodiac;

HTML Markup: S. Ryan.

[London] April 12, 1871

Dear Kugelmann

Your ‘medical advice’ was effective in so far as I have consulted my Dr Maddison and have for the present put myself under his care. He says however that my lungs are in excellent condition and the cough is due to bronchitis, etc. It probably also affects the liver.

Yesterday we received the by no means soothing news that Lafargue (not Laura) was at present in Paris. [1]

If you look at the last chapter of my Eighteenth Brumaire you will find that I say that the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it, and this is essential for every real people's revolution on the Continent. And this is what our heroic Party comrades in Paris are attempting. What elasticity, what historical initiative, what a capacity for sacrifice in these Parisians! After six months of hunger and ruin, caused rather by internal treachery than by the external enemy, they rise, beneath Prussian bayonets, as if there had never been a war between France and Germany and the enemy were not at the gates of Paris. History has no like example of a like greatness. If they are defeated only their “good nature” will be to blame. They should have marched at once on Versailles, after first Vinoy and then the reactionary section of the Paris National Guard had themselves retreated. The right moment was missed because of conscientious scruples. They did not want to start the civil war, as if that mischievous abortion Thiers had not already started the civil war with his attempt to disarm Paris. Second mistake: The Central Committee surrendered its power too soon, to make way for the Commune. Again from a too “honorable” scrupulosity! However that may be, the present rising in Paris – even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society – is the most glorious deed of our Party since the June insurrection in Paris. Compare these Parisians, storming heaven, with the slave to heaven of the German-Prussian Holy Roman Empire, with its posthumous masquerades reeking of the barracks, the Church, cabbage-junkerdom and above all, of the philistine.

A propos. In the official publication of the list of those receiving direct subsidies from Louis Bonaparte's treasury there is a note that Vogt received 40,000 francs in August 1859. I have informed Liebknecht of the fait, for further use.

You can send me Haxthausen’s [2] book for lately I have been receiving undamaged various pamphlets, etc, not only from Germany but even from Petersburg.

Thanks for the various newspapers you sent me. (Please let me have more of them, for I want to write something about Germany, the Reichstag, etc.)

Best regards to the Countess and Käuzchen. [3]

Yours

KM

Notes

1. Paul Lafargue had come to Paris from Bordeaux, where he was then living, to obtain from the Commune full powers to organise an armed uprising in Bordeaux – Progress Publishers.

2. August Haxthausen (1792-1866) – Prussian official and writer, author of a book on survival of communal system in land relations in Russia, reactionary feudalist – Progress Publishers.

3. Gertrud and Franziska Kugelmann – Progress Publishers.

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Abstract

Written: April 17, 1871;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London] April 17, 1871

Dear Kugelmann

Your letter duly received. Just at present I have my hands full. Hence only a few words.

... How you can compare petty-bourgeois demonstrations à la 13 June[1], 1849, etc., with the present struggle in Paris is quite incomprehensible to me.

World history would indeed be very easy to make, if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favorable chances. It would, on the other hand, be a very mystical nature, if “accidents” played no part. These accidents themselves fall naturally into the general course of development and are compensated again by other accidents. But acceleration and delay are very dependent upon such “accidents,” which included the "accident" of the character of those who at first stand at the head of the movement.

The decisive, unfavorable “accident” this time is by no means to be found in the general conditions of French society, but in the presence of the Prussians in France and their position right before Paris. Of this the Parisians were well aware. But of this, the bourgeois canaille of Versailles were also well aware. Precisely for that reason they presented the Parisians with the alternative of taking up the fight of succumbing without a struggle. In the latter case, the demoralization of the working class against the capitalist class and its state has entered upon a new phase with the struggle in paris. Whatever the immediate results may be, a new point of departure of world-historic importance has been gained. ...

Adieu!

KM

Notes

1. On 13 June 1849, the petty-bourgeois party of the Montagne organised a peaceful demonstration in Paris as a protest against the infringements of the French constitution by the president and the majority of the Legislative Assembly. The demonstration was easily dispersed by troops thus confirming the complete bankruptcy of the petty-bourgeois democrats in France – Progress Publishers.

Marx to Leo Frankel and Louis Varlin[1]

In Paris

Abstracts

Written: May 13, 1871;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence, International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999.

[London,] May 13, 1871

Dear Citizens Fränkel and Varlin

I have had meetings with the bearer. [2]

... Would it not be useful to put the documents which compromise the Versailles canaille [blackguards] in a safe place? A precaution of this kind could not do any harm. I hear in a letter from Bordeaux that four Internationalists were elected at the last municipal elections. The ferment is beginning in the provinces. Unfortunately the action there is only local and "pacific." I have written several hundred letters on behalf of your cause to every corner of the world in which we have branches. The working class, for the rest, was on the side of the Commune from the beginning. Even the bourgeois papers in England have given up their first ferocity. I have succeeded in slipping some favourable paragraphs into them from time to time.

The Commune seems to me to be wasting too much time in trivialities and personal quarrels. One can see that there are other influences besides that of the workers. None of this would matter if you had time to make up for the time lost.

It is absolutely necessary that whatever you want to do outside Paris, in England or elsewhere, you should do quickly. The Prussians will not hand over the forts to the Versailles government, but after the final conclusion of peace (May 26[3]) will allow it to invest Paris with its gendarmes. Since Thiers and Co. had, as you know, stipulated for a large commission[4] for themselves in the treaty they concluded by Pouyer Quertier, they refused to accept the help from the German bankers which Bismarck offered them. Had they accepted it they would have lost their commission. The preliminary condition for the realisation of their treaty being the subjugation of Paris, they have asked Bismarck to postpone their payment of the first instalment until after the occupation of Paris. Bismarck has accepted this condition. Prussia, being herself in very urgent need of this money, will therefore give the Versailles government every possible facility for hastening the occupation of Paris. So take care!

Notes

1. Leo Fränkel (1844-1896) – prominent figure in Hungarian and international working-class movement, member of General Council of First International (1871-72), a founder of Workers Party of Hungary (1880), associate of Marx and Engels; Louis Eugène Varlin (1839-1871) – outstanding figure in French working-class movement, bookbinder, left Proudhonist, one of leaders of International’s sections in France, member of Central Committee of National Guard and Paris Commune, shot by Versaillists – Progress Publishers.

2. Probably N Eilau – Progress Publishers.

3. The final peace treaty concluding the Franco-Prussian War was signed in Frankfurt on 10 May 1871. Presumably a slip of the pen occurred in the date given by Marx – Progress Publishers.

4. Marx is referring to the internal loan which the government of Thiers intended to raise. Thiers and other members of the government were to receive over 300 million francs as a commission – Progress Publishers.

Marx to Edward Beesly

In London

Written: June 12, 1871;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, June 12, 1871

Despite my admiration for your article in the Beehive, I am almost sorry to see your name in that paper. (And, by the way, you will allow me to observe that as a Party man I have a thoroughly hostile attitude towards Comte's philosophy, while as a scientific man I have a very poor opinion of it, but I regard you as the only Comtist, either in England or France, who deals with historical turning-points (crises) not as a sectarian but as an historian in the best sense of the word.)

The Beehive calls itself a workers' paper but it is really the organ of the renegades, sold to Sam Morley and Co. During the last Franco-Prussian war the General Council of the International was obliged to sever all connection with this paper and publicly to declare that it was a sham workers' paper. The big London papers, however, with the exception of the London local paper, The Eastern Post, refused to print this declaration. In such circumstances your co-operation with the Beehive is a further sacrifice you are making to the good cause.

A woman friend of mine will be going to Paris in three or four days. I am giving her the proper passes for some members of the Commune, who are still living hidden in Paris. If you or one of your friends have any commissions there please write to me.

What comforts me is the nonsense which the Petite Presse publishes every day about my writings and my relations to the Commune; this is sent me each day from Paris. It shows that the Versailles police is very hard put to to get hold of genuine documents. My relations with the Commune were maintained through a German merchant who travels between Paris and London all the year round. Everything was settled verbally with the exception of two matters:

First, through the same intermediary, I sent the members of the Commune a letter in answer to a question from them as to how they could handle certain securities on the London Exchange.

Second, on May 11, ten days before the catastrophe, I sent them by the same method all the details of the secret agreement come to between Bismarck and Favre in Frankfort.

I had this information from Bismarck's right hand--a man who had formerly (from 1848-53) belonged to the secret society of which I was the leader. This man knows that I have still got all the reports which he sent me from and about Germany. He is dependent on my discretion. Hence his continual efforts to prove his good intentions towards me. It was the same man who gave me the warning I told you about that Bismarck had decided to have me arrested if I visited Dr. Kugelmann in Hanover again this year.

If only the Commune had listened to my warnings! I advised its members to fortify the northern side of the heights of Montmartre, the Prussian side, and they still had time to do this; I told them beforehand that they would otherwise be caught in a trap; I denounced Pyat, Grousset and Vesinier to them; I demanded that they should at once send to London all the documents compromising the members of the National Defence, so that by this means the savagery of the enemies of the Commune could to some extent be held in check--thus the plan of the Versailles people would have been brought to nothing.

If these documents had been discovered by the Versailles people they would not have published forged ones.

The address of the International [The Civil War in France, 1871] will not be published before Wednesday. I will then at once send you a copy. Material for four to five sheets has been compressed into two. Hence arose numerous corrections, revisions and misprints. Hence also the delay.

Marx To Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

Source: MECW Volume 44, p. 152;

First Published: in Russian, in Minuvshiye gody, No. 1, St Petersburg, 1908.

London, 13 June 1871

Dear Sir,

I shall be happy to see to the ‘first chapter’, but I cannot start work on it for another two weeks. A period of illness lasting eight weeks has piled up work which has to be dealt with first. I shall then also send you a list of minor corrections.

As to the continuation of my work, the report of our friend [Hermann Lopatin] is based on a misunderstanding. I have decided that a complete revision of the manuscript is necessary. Moreover, even now a number of essential documents are still outstanding, which will eventually arrive from the United States.

*Our friend must return to London from his commercial expedition. I have received news from the correspondents of the firm for which he travels, from Switzerland and elsewhere. The business will be ruined if he defers his return, and he himself will be disabled for all time to do any further service to the firm. The competitors of the firm are informed, are looking about for him and will ensnare him with their intrigues. *

My best thanks for the various Russian books which you were so kind as to send me. All arrived safely. The other economic writings of the author would be very welcome to me (the one of John Stuart Mill I already have).

Despite my illness I have just published an address [The Civil War in France] about 2 sheets long. How to send it to you?

Since I very often travel and hence am not at home, please send all letters, etc., to my friend A. Williams, [Marx’s pseudonym] Esq. (no second envelope necessary). He lives in my house, so use the same address: 1 Maitland Park Road, Chalk Farm, London, N. W.

Yours sincerely,

M.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 18 June 1871

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

You must forgive my silence, even now I have only time to write a few lines. You know that throughout the period of the last Paris revolution I was denounced continuously as the grand chef de l'Internationale by the Versailles papers (Stieber [1] collaborating) and par repercussion [2] by the press here in England.

And now the Address, which you will have received. [3] It is making the devil of a noise and I have the honour to be at this moment the best calumniated and the most menaced man of London. That really does one good after a tedious twenty years’ idyll in my den. The government paper – the Observer – threatens me with a legal prosecution. Qu'ils osent! Je me moque bien de ces canailles là! [4] I am enclosing a cutting from the Eastern Post, [5] because it has our answer to Jules Favre’s [6] circular. It appeared originally in the Times of 13 June. That honourable paper received a severe reprimand from Mr Bob Lowe [7] (Chancellor of the Exchequer and member of the Supervisory Committee of the Times) for this indiscretion.

My best thanks for the Reuters and my best compliments to Madame la Comtesse et ma chère Fränzchen.

KM

Notes

1. Wilhelm Stieber (1818-1882) – Chief of the political department of the Prussian police and organiser of the famous Communist trial at Cologne in 1852 – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. By repercussion – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. ‘The Civil War in France’, Address of the General Council of the First International – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

4. Let them dare! I laugh at these scoundrels! – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

5. Although signed by John Hales, this answer of the General Council was written by Marx.

6. Jules Favre (1809-1880) – French politician. Member of the Government of ‘National Defence’ in 1870-71. One of the bitterest enemies of the Commune – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

7. Robert Lowe (Viscount Sherbrooke) (1811-1892) – Liberal statesman and member of Palmerston’s cabinet – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Engels to Cafiero

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

July 16, 1871

The trade-union movement, among all the big, strong and rich trade unions, has become more an obstacle to the general movement than an instrument of its progress; and outside of the trade unions there are an immense mass of workers in London who have kept quite a distance away from the political movement for several years, and as a result are very ignorant. But on the other hand they are also free of the many traditional prejudices of the trade unions and the other old sects, and therefore form excellent material with which one can work.

Marx To Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

Source: MECW Volume 44, p. 174;

First published: in Russian, in Minuvshiye gody, St Petersburg, 1908.

[London,] 22 July [1871]

Dear Friend,

Excuse me for answering with such a delay. I have been so much overworked during this latter time that I got hardly to bed.

Hence I could not think of doing anything concerning The Capital. Next week, however, I shall commence and make the whole thing ready for you.

I had a packet ready for Berlin, but, unfortunately, it has, by some mistake, not been sent off. It is still here. So please send me a new address for Berlin, and I shall dispatch the packet at once.

As to our mutual friend [Hermann Lopatin] the most alarming news has arrived here, but, I hope, it is false, or at all events exaggerated.

If you were able to find me a correspondent in Berlin who might serve as an intermediary for some of the commercial business I have to transact with Petersburg, it would be a useful thing, and for some articles that circuitous way might prove shorter than the direct way. The straight line is not in all cases, as the mathematicians fancy, the shortest one.

Yours most faithfully,

A. Williams

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 27 July 1871

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

Be so good as to send the enclosed note at once to Liebknecht. [1]

I find your silence very strange. I cannot think that the various packages of printed matter have all failed to reach you.

On the other hand it would be very foolish, if you wanted to punish me in this way for not writing – on the old principle of an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. Remember, mon cher, that if the day had 48 hours, in the last few months I would still not have finished my day’s work.

The work for the International is immense, and in addition London is overrun with refugees, whom we have to look after. Moreover, I am overrun by other people – newspaper men and others of every description – who want to see the ‘monster’ with their own eyes.

Up till now it has been thought that the growth of the Christian myths during the Roman Empire was possible only because printing was not yet invented. Precisely the contrary. The daily press and the telegraph, which in a moment spreads inventions over the whole earth, fabricate more myths (and the bourgeois cattle believe and enlarge upon them) in one day than could have formerly been done in a century.

My daughters have been for some months in the Pyrenees. Jennychen, who was still suffering from the after-effects of pleurisy, is, she writes me, getting visibly better.

Best thanks for your Germanic despatches.

I hope that you, as well as your dear wife and Fränzchen – whom I ask you to greet cordially – are well.

À propos! You were probably astonished to see that I made references to a duel in my missive to the Pall Mall. [2] The matter was quite simple. Had I not given the editor this excuse for making a few cheap jokes, he would simply have suppressed the whole letter. As it was he fell into the trap and achieved my real purpose – he published word for word the accusations against Jules Favre [3] and Co contained in the Address.

Salut

Yours

KM

Notes

1. No indication is given as to the nature of the ‘enclosed note’ – MIA.

2. Marx’s letter was published in The Pall Mall Gazette, 3 July 1871.

3. Jules Favre (1809-1880) – French politician. Member of the Government of ‘National Defence’ in 1870-71. One of the bitterest enemies of the Commune – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Karl Marx to Adolphe Hübert in London, 10 August 1871 [1]

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... The public prosecutor of Versailles has drawn up a grotesque indictment against the International. [2] In the interest of the defence it may perhaps be useful to communicate the following facts to Mr Bigot. [3]

1) Enclosed herein (marked No 1) are the two Addresses of the General Council on the Franco-Prussian War. [4] In its first Address, dated 23 July 1870, the General Council declared that the war was not the handiwork of the people of France but of the Empire and that basically Bismarck was as guilty as Bonaparte. At the same time the General Council appealed to the German workers not to let the Prussian Government change the war of defence into a war of conquest.

2) The second Address, of 9 September 1870 (five days after the proclamation of the republic), is a very emphatic denunciation of the Prussian government’s plans of conquest. It is an appeal to the German and English workers to take the part of the French Republic.

As a matter of fact the workers in Germany belonging to the International Association opposed Bismarck’s policy so vigorously that he had the principal German representatives of the International illegally arrested and cast into Prussian fortresses on the trumped-up charge of ‘conspiring’ with the enemy.

In response to the appeal of the Council, the English workers held large meetings in London to force their government to recognise the French Republic and to oppose the dismemberment of France with all its strength.

3) Does the French government now ignore the support which the International gave France during the war? On the contrary. M Jules Favre’s [5] consul in Vienna, M Lefaivre, has even committed the indiscretion of publishing, in the name of the French government, a letter of thanks to Messrs Liebknecht and Bebel, the two representatives of the International in the German Reichstag. In that letter he said among other things (I shall retranslate it from a German version of Lefaivre’s letter): ‘You, gentlemen, and your party [that is to say, the International] have upheld the great German tradition [that is, the humanitarian spirit], etc.’

Well, this letter figures in the criminal proceedings for high treason which the Saxon government was forced by Bismarck to institute against Liebknecht and Bebel and which are still going on at this moment. It served Bismarck as a pretext for having Bebel arrested after the adjournment of the German Reichstag.

At the very time when the villainous press denounced me to Thiers as an agent of Bismarck, Bismarck imprisoned my friends for being guilty of high treason against Germany and gave orders to arrest me should I set foot on German soil.

4) Some time before the armistice [6] the worthy Jules Favre – as the General Council declared in a letter to the Times of 12 June, a reprint of which is hereby enclosed (No II) [7] – asked us through his private secretary, Dr Reitlinger, to arrange public demonstrations in London in favour of the ‘Government of Defence’. Reitlinger added, as the General Council said in its letter to the Times, that one should not speak of the ‘Republic’ but only of ‘France’. The General Council refused to give any assistance to demonstrations of this sort. But all this proves that the French Government itself considered the International an ally of the French Republic against the Prussian conqueror – and it was indeed the only ally France had during the war.

Fraternal greetings

KM

Notes

1. Adolphe Hübert – French emigrant in London, member of First International – Progress Publishers.

2. The reference is to the bill of indictment against a group of Paris Communards who were tried by the second military court. The indictment misrepresented the revolutionary actions of the Commune and sought to turn the trial of the Communards into an ordinary criminal case dealing with common ‘incendiaries’, ‘thieves’ and ‘murderers’ – Progress Publishers.

3. Léon Bigot (1826-1872) – French lawyer and publicist, Left Republican, after suppression of Paris Commune defended Communards at Versailles Court – Progress Publishers.

4. First Address andSecond Address.

5. Jules Favre (1809-1880) – French lawyer and politician, in late 1850s became a leader of the bourgeois-republican opposition, Minister of Foreign Affairs (1870-71), hangman of Paris Commune and inspirer of struggle against International – Progress Publishers.

6. The reference is to the Convention on Armistice and the Capitulation of Paris signed by Bismarck and Favre on 28 January 1871. By signing this document the French bourgeoisie betrayed the national interests of France in order to suppress the revolutionary movement in the country – Progress Publishers.

7. ‘Statement by the General Council on Jules Favre’s Circular’, The Times, 13 June 1871.

Marx To Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

Source: MECW Volume 44, p. 238;

First published: in Russian, in Minuvshiye gody, St Petersburg, 1908.

[London,] 9 November 1871

Dear Friend,

Enclosed are a few changes [to the Russian translation of Capital], some of them just printing errors. Of some importance, however, are the changes on p. 192, p. 201, p. 288, Note 205a, and p. 376, which affect the content.

It would be pointless to wait for the revision of Chapter I, since for months now my time has been so taken up that I have not been able to get to my theoretical work (and the foreseeable future holds out small prospect of an improvement in this respect).

* Certainly, I shall one fine morning put a stop to all this but there are circumstances where you are in duty bound to occupy yourselves with things much less attractive than theoretical study and research.

My warmest thanks for all the kindness I have met with on your part. The writings of Ehrlieb I am partly acquainted with. I compare him as a writer to Lessing and Diderot.

I have received some curious numbers of the Moscow Gazette.

Yours truly,*

A. W.

[two pages of corrected appended below]

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 9 November 1871

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

I still have my hands so overfull with work that I can only write you these few lines.

Document received. It is a worthy imitation of the Viennese model, which was later set aside by the Vienna cour de cassation. [1]

Enclosed one French and one English copy of the Resolutions.

Best greetings to Madame la Comtesse and Fränzchen.

Yours

KM

Notes

1. Court of Cassation – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx to Friedrich Bolte

In New York

Abstract

Written: November 23, 1871;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London,] November 23, 1871

And the history of the International was a continual struggle on the part of the General Council against the sects and amateur experiments which attempted to assert themselves within the International itself against the genuine movement of the working class. This struggle was conducted at the Congresses, but far more in the private dealings of the General Council with the individual sections.

In Paris, as the Proudhonists (Mutualists) were co-founders of the Association, they naturally had the reins in their hands there for the first years. Later, of course, collectivist, positivist, etc., groups were formed in opposition to them.

In Germany – the Lassalle clique. I myself went on corresponding for two years with the notorious Schweitzer and proved irrefutably to him that Lassalle's organisation is nothing but a sectarian organisation and as such hostile to the organisation of the genuine workers' movement striven for by the International. He had his "reasons" for not understanding this.

At the end of 1868 the Russian, Bakunin, entered the International with the aim of forming inside it a second International called the “Alliance of Social-Democracy,” with himself as leader. He – a man devoid of theoretical knowledge – put forward the pretension that this separate body was to represent the scientific propaganda of the International, which was to be made the special function of this second International within the International.

His programme was a superficially scraped together hash of Right and Left – EQUALITY Of CLASSES (!), abolition of the right of inheritance as the starting point of the social movement (St. Simonistic nonsense), atheism as a dogma to be dictated to the members, etc., and as the main dogma (Proudhonist), abstention from the political movement.

This infant's spelling-book found favour (and still has a certain hold) in Italy and Spain, where the real conditions of the workers' movement are as yet little developed, and among a few vain, ambitious and empty doctrinaires in French Switzerland and Belgium.

For Mr. Bakunin the theory (the assembled rubbish he has scraped together from Proudhon, St. Simon, etc.) is a secondary affair – merely a means to his personal self-assertion. If he is a nonentity as a theoretician he is in his element as an intriguer.

For years the General Council had to fight against this conspiracy (which was supported up to a certain point by the French Proudhonists, especially in the south of France). At last, by means of Conference resolutions I (2) and (3), IX, XVI, and XVII, it delivered its long prepared blow.

Obviously the General Council does not support in America what it combats in Europe. Resolutions I (2) and (3) and IX now give the New York committee legal weapons with which to put an end to all sectarian formations and amateur groups and if necessary to expel them.

The New York Committee will do well to express its full agreement with the decisions of the Conference in an official communication to the General Council.

Bakunin, personally threatened in addition by Resolution XIV (publication in Égalité of the Netchaev trial) which will bring to light his infamous doings in Russia, is making every possible effort to get a protest started against the Conference among the remnants of his followers.

For this purpose he has got into contact with the demoralised section of the French political refugees in Geneva and London (a numerically weak section, anyway). The slogan given out is that the Geneva Council is dominated by Pan-Germanism (especially Bismarckism). This refers to the unpardonable fact that I am by birth a German and do actually exercise a decisive intellectual influence on the German Council. (N.B. The German element on the Council is two-thirds weaker numerically than either the English or the French. The crime therefore consists in the fact that the English and French elements are dominated by the German element where theory is concerned (!) and find this domination, i.e., German science, very useful and indeed indispensable.)

In Geneva, under the patronage of the bourgeois Madame Andrée Léo (who at the Lausanne Congress was shameless enough to denounce Ferré to his executioners in Versailles), they have published a paper, La Révolution Sociale, which conducts arguments against us in almost literally the same words as the Journal de Genève, the most reactionary paper in Europe.

In London they attempted to establish a French section, of whose activities you will find an example in No. 42 of Qui Vive? which I enclose. (Also the number which contains the letter from our French Secretary, Seraillier). This section, consisting of twenty people (including a lot of spies), has not been recognised by the General Council, but another much more numerous section has been.

Actually, despite the intrigues of this bunch of scoundrels, we are carrying on great propaganda in France--and in Russia, where they know what value to place on Bakunin and where my book on capital is just being published in Russian....

N.B. as to political movement: The political movement of the working class has as its object, of course, the conquest of political power for the working class, and for this it is naturally necessary that a previous organisation of the working class, itself arising from their economic struggles, should have been developed up to a certain point.

On the other hand, however, every movement in which the working class comes out as a class against the ruling classes and attempts to force them by pressure from without is a political movement. For instance, the attempt in a particular factory or even a particular industry to force a shorter working day out of the capitalists by strikes, etc., is a purely economic movement. On the other hand the movement to force an eight-hour day, etc., law is a political movement. And in this way, out of the separate economic movements of the workers there grows up everywhere a political movement, that is to say a movement of the class, with the object of achieving its interests in a general form, in a form possessing a general social force of compulsion. If these movements presuppose a certain degree of previous organisation, they are themselves equally a means of the development of this organisation.

Where the working class is not yet far enough advanced in its organisation to undertake a decisive campaign against the collective power, i.e., the political power of the ruling classes, it must at any rate be trained for this by continual agitation against and a hostile attitude towards the policy of the ruling classes. Otherwise it will remain a plaything in their hands, as the September revolution in France showed, and as is also proved up to a certain point by the game Messrs. Gladstone & Co. are bringing off in England even up to the present time.

Marx To Friedrich Adolf Sorge

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

November 29, 1871

I come now to the question of MacDonnell.

Before admitting him, the Council instituted a most searching inquiry as to his integrity, he, like all other Irish politicians, being much calumniated by his own countrymen.

The Council — after most incontrovertible evidence on his private character — chose him because the mass of the Irish workmen in England have more confidence in him than in any other person. He is a man quite superior to religious prejudices and as to his general views, it is absurd to say that he has any “bourgeois” predilections. He is a proletarian, by his circumstances of life and by his ideas.

If any accusation is to be brought forward against him, let it be done in exact terms, and not by vague insinuation.

My opinion is that the Irishmen, removed for a long time by imprisonment, are not competent judges. The best proof is their relations with The Irishman whose editor, Pigott, is a mere speculator, and whose manager, Murphy, is a ruffian. That paper — despite the exertions of the General Council for the Irish cause — has always intrigued against us. MacDonnell was constantly attacked in that paper by an Irishman (O'Donnell) connected with Campbell (an officer of the London Police) and a habitual drunkard who for a glass of gin will tell the first constable all the secrets he may have to dispose of.

After the nomination of MacDonnell, Murphy attacked and calumniated the International (not only MacDonnell) in The Irishman, and, at the same time, secretly, asked us to nominate him secretary for Ireland.

As to O'Donovan Rossa, I wonder that you quote him still as an authority after what you have written me about him. If any man was obliged, personally, to the International and the French Communards, it was he, and you have seen what thanks we have received at his hands.

Let the Irish members of the New York Committee not forget that to be useful to them, we want above all influence on the Irish in England, and that for that purpose there exists, as far as we have been able to ascertain, no better man than MacDonnell.

Friedrich Engels to the Editorial Board of the Turin Newspaper Il Proletario Italiano, 29 November 1871 [1]

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Citizens

Your issue No 39 contains a declaration of Turin workers which states:

We publicly declare that the decision of the London General Council to put socialism after politics was communicated to us by the Editorial Board of the Proletario as soon as it was issued and that such decision did not bear an official character because it was withdrawn by the General Council, since many European associations would have completely rejected it, just as we would have done.

This assertion compels the General Council to declare:

1) That it has never passed any decision putting socialism after politics.

2) That accordingly it could not have withdrawn such a decision.

3) That no European or American association could have rejected such a decision nor was any other decision of the General Council rejected.

The position of the General Council in regard to political action by the proletariat is sufficiently clearly defined.

It has been defined:

1) By the General Rules, which state, in point 4 of the Preamble, ‘that the economical emancipation of the working classes is... the great end to which every political movement ought to be subordinate as a means’. [2]

2) By the text of the Inaugural Address of the Association (1864), the official and obligatory commentary of the Rules, which says:

Yet, the lords of land and the lords of capital will always use their political privileges for the defence and perpetuation of their economical monopolies. So far from promoting, they will continue to lay every possible impediment in the way of the emancipation of labour... To conquer political power has therefore become the great duty of the working classes. [3]

3) By the resolution of the Lausanne Congress (1867) to the following effect: ‘The social emancipation of the workers is inseparable from their political emancipation.’

4) By resolution IX of the London Conference (September 1871), which, in accordance with the aforesaid, reminds the members of the International that in the struggle of the working class its economic movement and its political action are indissolubly united. [4]

The Council has always followed and will continue to follow the line thus prescribed to it.

Hence it declares the above-mentioned communication sent by some unknown person to the editorial board of the Proletario to be false and calumnious.

By order and in the name of the General Council

FE

Secretary for Italy

PS: I have just received the Geneva Révolution Sociale [5] which says that a small Jura group has rejected the London Conference decisions. [6] No official communication was made to the General Council. As soon as it receives one it will take the necessary measures.

Notes

1. The letter was an answer to the publication of the declaration of Turin workers in Il Proletario Italiano of 23 November 1871, which repeated the attacks of the Bakuninists against the General Council of the International. Il Proletario Italiano – an Italian paper published twice a week in Turin in 1871; its editor was Carlo Terzaghi who turned out to be a secret police agent. The paper defended the Bakuninists against the General Council and the decisions of the London Conference of 1871. From 1872 to 1874 it was published under the title Il Proletario – Progress Publishers.

2. See The General Council of the First International: 1870-1871 (Moscow), p 451 – Progress Publishers.

3. See The General Council of the First International: 1864-1866 (Moscow), p 286 – Progress Publishers.

4. See The General Council of the First International: 1870-1871 (Moscow), pp 444-45 – Progress Publishers.

5. La Révolution Sociale – a daily paper which came out in Geneva from October 1871 to January 1872, from November 1871 it was the official organ of the Bakuninist Jura Federation – Progress Publishers.

6. A Congress of the Bakuninist Jura Federation held in Sonvillier on 12 November 1871, adopted the ‘Circular to all Federations of the International Working Men’s Association’, which was directed against the General Council and the London Conference of 1871. The Circular opposed anarchist dogmas to the decisions of the London Conference, made slanderous attacks on the General Council and called upon all federations to demand the immediate convocation of a congress to revise the Rules of the International and to censure the actions of the General Council – Progress Publishers.

1872

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 2 January

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 3 January

Marx to Maltman Barry. 7 January

Engels to Carlo Terzaghi - First Version. After 6 January

Engels to Carlo Terzaghi - Second Version. 14-15 January

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 18 January

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 19 January

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 19 January

Marx to Hermann Jung. 19 January

Engels to Theodor Cuno. 24 January

Engels to Carlo Terzaghi. 29 January

Marx to Ferdinand Jozewicz. 1 February

Marx to Hermann Jung. 1 February

Marx to Mauriee Laehatre and Juste Vernouillet. 9 February

Marx to Adolphe Hubert. 12 February

Marx to Asher & Co. 13 February

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 15 February

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 16 February

Engels to Giuseppe Benedetti. 18 February

Engels to William Burrs. 22 February

Marx to Ferdinand Jozewiez. 24 February

Marx to Hermann Jung. 26 February

Marx to Laura Lafargue. 28 February

Engels to Sigismund Borkheim. Early March

Engels to Louis Pio. 7 March

Marx to Hermann Jung. 7 March

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 8 March

Marx to Emile Eudes. 9 March

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 11 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 11 March

Engels to Louis Pio. Mid-March

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 15 March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 17 March

Marx to Maurice Lachatre. 18 March

Engels to Cesare Bert. 21 March

Marx to Paul Lafargue. 21 March

Engels to Carlo Terzaghi. 21 March

Marx to Edouard Vaillant. 4 April

Engels to Cennaro Bovio. 16 April

Engels to Theodor Cuno. 22-23 April

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 23 April

Marx to Johann Georg Eccarius. 3 May

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 7 May

Engels to Theodor Cuno. 7-8 May

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 9 May

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 15-22 May

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 23 May

Marx to Edouard Vaillant. 24 May

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 27 May

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 27-28 May

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 28 May

Marx to Cesar De Paepe. 28 May

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 29 May

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 5-6 June

Engels to Molesworth. After 5 June

Engels to Cesare Bert. 7 June

Engels to Theodor Cuno. 10 June

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 14 June

Engels to Carlo Cafiero. 14 June

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 21 June

Marx to Octave van Suetendael. 21 June

Engels to Adolf Hepner. 2 July

Engels to Th. Smart & Co. After 3 July

Engels to Theodor Cuno. 5 July

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 9 July

Engels to Adolf Hepner. 9 July

Engels to Ugo Bartorelli. 18 July

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 23 July

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 29 July

Marx to Hermann Jung. End of July

Engels to Adolf Hepner. 4 August

Engels to Theodor Cuno. 4 August

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 5 August

Engels to Walery Wroblewski. 7 August

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 15 August

Marx to Juste Vernouillet. 15 August

Engels to E Glaser de Willebrord. 19 August

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 24 August

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 26 August

Engels to Hermann Jung. c. 1 September

Engels to Maltman Barry. 15 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 21 September

Engels to Hermann Jung. 1 October

Marx to P van der Willigen. 4 October

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 5 October

Marx to Maurice Lachatre. 12 October

Marx to Hermann Jung. 14 October

Engels to Friedrich Lessner. 16 October

Engels to Theodor Cuno. 29 October

Engels to Jenny Longuet. 30 October

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 2 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 16 November

Engels to Jenny Longuet. 19 November

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 25 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 7 December

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 12 December

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 14 December

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 21 December

Marx to William Riley. 23 December

Engels to Adolf Hepner. 30 December

Letter from Engels to Theodore Cuno

Abstracts

Written: January 24, 1872;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence, International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999.

January 24, 1872

Dear Cuno

I have just received your letter through Becker [2] and gather from its contents that those blasted Mardocheans [3] intercepted my detailed letter to you dated 16 December. This is the more annoying since it contained all the necessary information on the Bakuninist intrigues and you would have been apprised of everything a whole month earlier; and also since, in view of the fact that you are a foreigner and liable to deportation, I asked you in that letter that you should rather try to be somewhat more cautious in your public agitation so that you can remain there and keep your job, which meanwhile unfortunately went to blazes...

Becker writes he will let you know about Bakunin’s intrigues. However I shall not rely on that and am telling you briefly the most necessary information.

state will fall away of itself. The difference is an essential one. Without a previous social revolution the abolition of the state is nonsense; the abolition of capital is in itself the social revolution and involves a change in the whole method of production. Further, however, as for Bakunin the state is the main evil, nothing must be done which can maintain the existence of any state, whether it be a republic, a monarchy or whatever it may be. Hence therefore complete abstention from all politics. To perpetrate a political action, and especially to take part in an election, would be a betrayal of principle. The thing to do is to conduct propaganda, abuse the state, organise, and when all the workers are won over, i.e., the majority, depose the authorities, abolish the state and replace it by the organisation of the International. This great act, with which the millennium begins, is called social liquidation.

All this sounds extremely radical, and is so simple that it can be learnt by heart in five minutes ; that is why this theory of Bakunin's has also speedily found favour in Spain and Italy, among young lawyers, doctors and other doctrinaires.

But the mass of the workers will never allow themselves to be persuaded that the public affairs of their country are not also their own affairs; they are by nature political and whoever tries to make out to them that they should leave politics alone will in the end get left in the lurch. To preach that the workers should in all circumstances abstain from politics is to drive them into the arms of the priests or the bourgeois republicans.

Now as, according to Bakunin, the International is not to be formed for political struggle but in order that it may at once replace the old state organisation as soon as social liquidation takes place, it follows that it must come as near as possible to the Bakunist ideal of the society of the future. In this society there will above all be no authority, for authority = state = an absolute evil. (How these people propose to run a factory, work a railway or steer a ship without having in the last resort one deciding will, without a unified direction, they do not indeed tell us.) The authority of the majority over the minority also ceases. Every individual and every community is autonomous, but as to how a society, even of only two people, is possible unless each gives up some of his autonomy, Bakunin again remains silent. The International, then, must also be reorganised according to this model. Every section, and in every section every individual, is autonomous. To hell with the Basle resolutions, which bestowed upon the General Council a pernicious authority demoralising even to itself!

Even if this authority is voluntarily bestowed it must cease simply because it is authority.

Here you have in brief the main points of the swindle.

... But who are the originators of the Basle resolutions? Well, Mr Bakunin himself and his associates!

When these gentlemen saw at the Basle Congress that their plan to remove the General Council to Geneva, that is, to get it into their hands, would not succeed, they followed a different tack. They founded the Alliance de la Démocratie Socialiste, an international Society within the big International, on a pretext which you will now encounter again in the Bakuninist Italian press, for instance, in the Proletario and Gazzettino Rosa: for the hot-blooded Latin races, it is claimed, a more outspoken programme is necessary than for the cool, slow-moving Northerners. This little scheme came to naught because of the resistance of the General Council, which of course could not tolerate any separate international organisation within the International. It has since reappeared in various shapes and forms in connection with the efforts of Bakunin and his crew to substitute the Bakunin programme for that of the International. On the other hand it was precisely Bakunin’s empty boastful phrases that were always seized upon by the reactionaries, from Jules Favre [4] and Bismarck to Mazzini, whenever it was a question of attacking the International. Hence the necessity of my statement of 5 December against Mazzini and Bakunin, which was also published in the Gazzettino Rosa.

The nucleus of the Bakunin crowd consists of a few dozen people in the Jura whose whole following amounts to scarcely 200 workers. Their vanguard is made up of young lawyers, doctors and journalists in Italy who everywhere now pretend to act as spokesmen of the Italian workers; a few of them are in Barcelona and Madrid and every now and then you will find one – hardly ever a worker – in Lyons or Brussels; in London there is a single specimen, Robin. [5]

The conference, [6] convoked under the pressure of circumstances in lieu of the congress that had become impossible, served them as a pretext; and since most of the French refugees in Switzerland went over to their side because they (being Proudhonists) found some kindred views among them and for personal reasons, they sallied forth on their campaign. They counted, and not without reason, on malcontent minorities and misunderstood geniuses, who may of course be found everywhere in the International.

At present their fighting strength is as follows:

1) Bakunin himself – the Napoleon of this campaign.

2) The 200 Jurassians and the 40-50 members of the French Section (refugees in Geneva).

3) In Brussels Hins, [7] editor of the Liberté, who however does not come out openly for them.

4) Here, the remnants of the French Section of 1871, [8] which we have never recognised and which has already split into three parts which are fighting with one another. Then there are about 20 Lassalleans of the type of Herr von Schweitzer, [9] who had all been expelled from the German Section (because of their proposal to withdraw from the International en masse) and who, being advocates of extreme centralisation and rigid organisation, fit to a T into the league of Anarchists and autonomists.

5) In Spain, a few personal friends and adherents of Bakunin, who have strongly influenced the workers, particularly in Barcelona, at least theoretically. The Spaniards, on the other hand, are very keen on organisation and quick to notice any lack of it in others. How far Bakunin can count on success there will not be seen until the Spanish Congress in April, and as workers will predominate there I have no grounds for anxiety.

6) Lastly, in Italy, the Turin, Bologna and Girgenti Sections have, as far as I know, declared in favour of convening the congress ahead of time.

The Bakuninist press claims that 20 Italian sections had joined; I don’t know them. At any rate, almost everywhere the leadership is in the hands of friends and adherents of Bakunin, and they are raising a terrific hubbub. But a closer examination will most likely disclose that their following is not numerous, for in the long run the bulk of the Italian workers are still Mazzinists and will remain so as long as the International is identified there with abstention from politics.

At any rate, in Italy, for the time being, it is the Bakuninist crowd that has the main say in the International. The General Council has no intention of complaining on that score; the Italians have the right to commit all the absurdities they choose and the General Council will counteract them only by way of peaceful debate. These people also have the right to declare for a congress in the Jurassian sense, although it is certainly exceedingly strange that sections which have only just affiliated and cannot be posted on anything should in such a matter at once take sides, especially before they have heard both parties to the dispute! I have told the Turin members the unvarnished truth about this matter and shall do the same with the other sections which have made similar declarations. For every such declaration of affiliation is indirectly an approval of the false accusations and lies made against the General Council in the Circular. [10] Incidentally, the General Council will shortly issue a circular [11] of its own about this matter. If you can prevent the Milanese from making a similar declaration until the circular appears you will be fulfilling all our desires.

The funniest thing is that the same people in Turin who declare in favour of the Jurassians and therefore reproach us here with authoritarianism, now suddenly demand that the General Council should take such authoritarian measures against the rival Federazione Operaia [12] of Turin as it had never taken before, should excommunicate Beghelli [13] of the Ficcanaso, who does not even belong to the International, etc. And all that before we have even heard what the Federazione Operaia has to say!

Last Monday [14] I sent you the Révolution Sociale [15] containing the Jura Circular, one issue of the Geneva Égalité (unfortunately I have no copies left of the issue containing the answer of the Geneva Comité Fédéral, which represents twenty times as many workers as the Jura people do) and one Volksstaat which will show you what the people in Germany think about the case. The Saxon Regional Meeting – 120 delegates from 60 localities – declared unanimously for the General Council.

The Belgian Congress (25-26 December) demands a revision of the Rules, but at the regular congress (in September). From France we are every day receiving statements expressing consent. Of course, none of these intrigues find any support here in England. And the General Council will certainly not call an extraordinary congress just to please a few intriguers and busy-bodies. So long as these gentlemen keep within legal bounds the General Council will gladly let them have their way. This coalition of the most diverse elements will soon fall apart; but as soon as they start anything against the Rules or the Congress resolutions the General Council will do its duty.

If one considers that these people have launched their conspiracy precisely at the moment when a general hue and cry is being raised against the International, one cannot help thinking that the international sleuths must have a hand in the game. And so it is. In Béziers the Geneva Bakuninists have picked the chief superintendent of police as their correspondent! Two prominent Bakuninists, Albert Richard [16] from Lyons and Blanc, [17] were here and told a worker named Scholl, also from Lyons, with whom they got in touch, that the only way to overthrow Thiers [18] was to restore Bonaparte to the throne; and for this very reason they were travelling about on Bonaparte money to conduct propaganda among the refugees in favour of a Bonapartist restoration! That is what these gentlemen call abstaining from politics! In Berlin the Neue Sozial-Demokrat, subsidised by Bismarck, pipes the same tune. How far the Russian police is involved in this I shall leave for the present undecided, but Bakunin was deeply embroiled in the Nechayev [19] affair (he denies it, of course, but we have the original Russian reports here and since Marx and I understand Russian he cannot put anything over on us). Nechayev is either a Russian agent provocateur or anyhow acted as if he were. There are moreover all kinds of suspicious characters among Bakunin’s Russian friends.

I am very sorry you lost your position. I had expressly written to you asking you to avoid anything that might lead to that, stating that your presence in Milan was much more important for the International than the small effect one could produce by public utterances, and that one can also accomplish much on the quiet, etc. If I can be of assistance to you by getting you translations, etc, I shall do so with the greatest of pleasure. But please tell me from which languages and into which languages you can translate and how I can be useful to you.

So those police swine have also intercepted my photograph. I am enclosing another one for you and would ask you to send me two of yours, one of which is to serve the purpose of inducing Miss Marx to let you have a photograph of her father (she is the only one who still has a couple of good ones left).

I would also ask you to be on your guard when dealing with any of the people connected with Bakunin. It is a characteristic feature of all sects to stick together and intrigue. You can be sure that any information you give them will immediately be passed on to Bakunin. It is one of his fundamental principles that keeping promises and the like are merely bourgeois prejudices, which a true revolutionary must treat with disdain when it benefits the cause. In Russia he says this openly, in Western Europe it is an esoteric doctrine.

Write to me as soon as possible. It would be very good if we could induce the Milan Section not to join in the chorus of the other Italian sections.

Fraternal greetings

Yours

F Engels

Notes

1. Friedrich Theodor Cuno (1847-1934) – leader of German and international working-class movement, socialist, active member of First International, in 1872 emigrated to USA, later one of founders of Knights of Labour – Progress Publishers.

2. Johann Philipp Becker (1809-1886) – prominent figure in German and international working-class movement, brush-maker, in 1830s and 1840s took part in democratic movement in Germany and Switzerland, was active in 1848-49 revolution, after defeat of Baden-Palatinate insurrection fled from Germany, in 1860s one of outstanding figures in First International, attended all its congresses, editor of Verbote, friend and close associate of Marx and Engels – Progress Publishers.

3. An allusion to the police – Progress Publishers.

4. Jules Favre (1809-1880) – French lawyer and politician, in late 1850s became a leader of the bourgeois-republican opposition, Minister of Foreign Affairs (1870-71), hangman of Paris Commune and inspirer of struggle against International – Progress Publishers.

5. Paul Robin (1837-?) – French teacher, Bakuninist, a leader of Social-Democratic Alliance, member of General Council of International (1870-71) – Progress Publishers.

6. Engels is referring to the Conference of the First International that took place in London in 1871 – Progress Publishers.

7. Eugène Hins (1839-1923) – an organiser of Belgian Sections of First International, member of Belgian Federal Council, Proudhonist, later Bakuninist – Progress Publishers.

8. The French Section of 1871 was formed by a group of French émigrés in London in September 1871. Its leadership established close contacts with the Bakuninists in Switzerland, and, acting in agreement with them, attacked the organisational principles of the International – Progress Publishers.

9. Johann Baptist Schweitzer (1833-1875) – one of Lassallean leaders in Germany, editor of Sozial-Demokrat (1864-67), President of General Association of German Workers (1867-71), gave support to Bismarck’s policy of unification of Germany ‘from above’ under hegemony of Prussia, prevented German workers’ affiliation to First International, fought against Social-Democratic Workers Party, expelled from Association in 1872 after his connections with Prussian authorities were exposed – Progress Publishers.

10. A Congress of the Bakuninist Jura Federation held in Sonvillier on 12 November 1871, adopted the ‘Circular to all Federations of the International Working Men’s Association’, which was directed against the General Council and the London Conference of 1871. The Circular opposed anarchist dogmas to the decisions of the London Conference, made slanderous attacks on the General Council and called upon all federations to demand the immediate convocation of a congress to revise the Rules of the International and to censure the actions of the General Council – Progress Publishers.

11. Engels is referring to Les prétendues scissions dans l'Internationale (Sham Splits in the International) – Progress Publishers. [Available on the MIA at < http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1872/03/fictitious-splits.htm >.]

12. Federazione Operaia (Workers Federation), set up in Turin in the autumn of 1871, was under the influence of the followers of Mazzini. The proletarian members left the Federation in January 1872 and formed a new society, called the Liberation of the Proletariat, which became a section of the International. Up to February 1872 the society was headed by Terzaghi, a secret police agent – Progress Publishers.

13. Giuseppe Beghelli (1847-1877) – Italian journalist, bourgeois democrat, participated in Garibaldi’s campaigns, editor of a number of republican newspapers – Progress Publishers.

14. 22 January 1872 – Progress Publishers.

15. La Révolution Sociale – a daily paper which came out in Geneva from October 1871 to January 1872, from November 1871 it was the official organ of the Bakuninist Jura Federation – Progress Publishers.

16. Albert Richard (1846-1925) – French journalist, one of leaders of Lyons Section of International, Bakuninist, Bonapartist after defeat of Paris Commune – Progress Publishers.

17. Gaspard Blanc – Progress Publishers.

18. Louis-Adolphe Thiers (1797-1877) – French historian and statesman, Prime Minister (1836, 1840), at the time of Second Republic deputy of Constituent and Legislative Assemblies, Orleanist, President of Republic (1871-73), executioner of Paris Commune – Progress Publishers.

19. Sergei Gennadyevich Nechayev (1847-1882) – Russian revolutionary, conspirator, during 1869-71 closely associated with Bakunin, founder of secret society Narodnaya Rasprava (People’s Revenge), extradited by Swiss authorities to Russia, died in Peter and Paul Fortress – Progress Publishers.

Engels To Sigismund Borkheim

Source: Marx and Engels on Ireland, Progress Publishers, 1971;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

Beginning of March 1872

Sorge is very naive to demand a book on Ireland written from our standpoint. For the last two years I have been intending to write one, but the war, the Commune and the International have brought everything to a standstill. Meanwhile I recommend the following books to Sorge:

1. The Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland by Prendergast. London, Longmans, Sec. Ed. 1870-71.

2. Memoir on Ireland by O'Connell. London — Duffy, 1869.

For the main historical events

3. The Irish People and the Irish Land by Isaac Butt. London-Ridgway.

This is all for the present.

However simple the Irish problem may be, it is nevertheless the result of a long historical struggle and hence has to be studied. A manual explaining it all in about two hours does not exist.

Karl Marx to Paul Lafargue in Madrid, 21 March 1872

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

My dear Toole [1]

I am sending you herewith an excerpt from our circular against the dissidents concerning the functions of the General Council. [2]

All the General Council can do to apply the General Rules and Congress resolutions to concrete cases is to make decisions like a court of arbitration. But their realisation depends in each country entirely on the International itself. From the moment, therefore, that the Council ceased to function as an instrument representing the general interests of the International it would become an utterly powerless cipher. On the other hand the General Council itself is one of the effective forces of the Association and it is indispensable for maintaining the unity of the Association and preventing its seizure by hostile elements. The moral influence which the present Council (notwithstanding all its shortcomings) has been able to gain in face of the common enemy has hurt the pride of those who only saw in the International an instrument for their personal ambition.

Above all one must remember that our Association is the militant organisation of the proletariat and by no means a society for the advancement of doctrinaire amateurs. To destroy our organisation at this moment would be tantamount to surrender. Neither the bourgeoisie nor the governments could ask for anything better. Read the report of the backwoodsman Sacaze on Dufaure’s draft. What does he admire and fear most in the Association? ‘Its organisation.’ [3]

We have made excellent progress since the London Conference.

New federations have been established in Denmark, New Zealand and Portugal. Our organisation has greatly expanded in the United States, in France (where Malon & Co [4] – as they themselves admit – do not have a single section), in Germany, in Hungary, and in Britain (since the formation of the British Federal Council). Irish sections were formed quite recently. In Italy the only important sections, those in Milan and Turin, belong to us; the others are led by lawyers, journalists and other doctrinaire bourgeois. (Incidentally, Bakunin has a personal grudge against me because he has lost all influence in Russia, where the revolutionary youth are on my side.)

The resolutions of the London Conference have already been accepted in France, America, Britain, Ireland, Denmark, Holland, Germany, Austria, Hungary, Switzerland (except in the Jura), [5] also by the genuinely working-class sections in Italy, and finally by the Russians and the Poles. Those who do not recognise this fact won’t alter anything thereby, but they will be forced to cut themselves off from the vast majority of the International.

I am so overwhelmed with work that I have not even found time to write to my sweet Cockatoo and to dear Schnappy [6] (about whom I would like to have more news). The International does indeed take up too much of my time, and if I had not been convinced that during this period of struggle my presence in the Council was still necessary, I would have retired long ago.

The British government has prevented our celebration of 18 March; I am therefore enclosing resolutions which have been adopted at a meeting of British workers and French refugees... [7]

Notes

1. A nickname of Paul Lafargue’s used in the family circle – Progress Publishers.

2. The excerpts are from the circular Les prétendues scissions dans l'Internationale (Sham Splits in the International) which was written by Marx and Engels from the middle of January to the beginning of March 1872. It was not yet published when the letter was sent – Progress Publishers.

3. The reference is to the report made by Sacaze on 5 February 1872, in the name of the commission that examined Dufaure’s draft law. According to this law, which was passed by the reactionary National Assembly of France on 14 March 1872, membership of the International was punishable by imprisonment. Jules-Armand Dufaure (1798-1881) – French statesman, a hangman of Paris Commune, in 1870s Minister of Justice, Chairman of Council of Ministers; François Sacaze (1808-1884) – French legal official, monarchist, from 1871 member of National Assembly – Progress Publishers.

4. Marx is referring to a group of former Communards, which included Malon, Lefrançais, Austine and others, who had emigrated to Switzerland and there joined up with the Bakuninists. Benôit Malon (1841-1893) – French socialist, member of First International and of Paris Commune, after its defeat took refuge in Italy and then in Switzerland where he drew close to anarchists, an ideologist and leader of Possibilists – Progress Publishers.

5. This refers to the Jura Federation, which comprised several small sections in the Swiss Jura, and was in fact a Bakuninist centre – Progress Publishers.

6. Cockatoo – nickname of Karl Marx’s daughter Laura; Schnappy – nickname of her son Charles Étienne (1868-1872) – Progress Publishers.

7. On 20 February 1872, the General Council decided to hold a mass meeting in London on 18 March to mark the first anniversary of the Paris Commune. Marx was appointed as one of the speakers. But the public meeting could not take place because at the last moment the owner refused to let the Council use the hall for this purpose. Members of the International and former Communards assembled in the cramped room of the Society of Communards, nevertheless, to celebrate the anniversary of the first proletarian revolution. Three resolutions (which had been prepared by Marx) were proposed by the Communards Theisz and Camélinat and a member of the General Council Milner and passed by the meeting – Progress Publishers.

Marx To Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

Source: MECW Volume 44, p. 385;

First published: in Russian, in Minuvshiye gody, St Petersburg, 1908.

London, 28 May 1872

My dear Sir,

My reply to you has been so delayed because I had kept on hoping that I would be able to send you, simultaneously with the letter, the first instalments of the 2nd German edition of ‘Capital’ as well as the French translation (Paris). But the German and French booksellers have dragged the business out for so long that I cannot postpone it any longer.

First of all, my best thanks for the beautifully bound copy. The translation is masterly. I would be grateful if you could let me have a second, unbound, copy — for the British Museum.

I regret that absolute [lack of time] (in the most strictest sense of the word) prevented me from making a start on the revision for the second edition before the end of December 1871. It would have been of great benefit for the Russian edition.

Although the French edition — (the translation is by Mr Roy, the translator of Feuerbach) — has been prepared by a great expert in both languages, he has often translated too literally. I have therefore found myself compelled to re-write whole passages in French, to make them palatable to the French public. It will be all the easier later on to translate the book from French into English and the Romance languages.

I am so *overworked, and in fact so much interfered with in my theoretical studies, that, after September, I shall withdraw from the commercial concern, which, at this moment, weighs principally upon my own shoulders, and which, as you know, has its ramifications all over the world.* Mais, est modus in rebus *and I can no longer afford — for some time at least — to combine two sorts of business of so very different a character.

The news you have communicated to me on our mutual friend has delighted both myself and my family. There are few people in the world of whom I am so fond and whom I esteem so much. *

You will much oblige me by delivering the enclosed letter to Dr W. Baranoff at this address: ‘Frau Baggohufudt-Gross, Theater Platz, Haus Baron Küster’.

In the hope of hearing from you soon.

Yours very sincerely,

A. W.

One of the barkers at present living in Switzerland — Mr Bakounine — is playing such strange tricks that I would be very grateful for any precise piece of information about the man — 1) as to the extent of his influence in Russia, 2) about his role in the trial of such notorious memory.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 9 July 1872

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

My best thanks for the gift of £15 for Jennychen. I have worked myself so hard that today (in two hours) I am leaving London with Engels for four or five days, and going to the sea (Ramsgate). From the date of my return until 2 September (the International Congress at the Hague) I shall have my hands more than full, but from then on I shall again be more free. But this freedom will only begin in the middle of September, because I shall myself go to the Hague.

Perhaps we could see each other later (that is, you could see me, for I would not be safe in Germany).

Adio

Yours

Karl Marx

As soon as the first instalments (German or French) are out, you will of course receive them. [1] I am highly dissatisfied with Meissner. [2] He has led me by the nose – first overworked me due to the sudden and unexpected haste with which he announced the second edition (end of November 1871); then lost months and let the best time slip by. He is a wretched little philistine.

To punish Meissner it would be good if you were to write him, on the pretext of wanting to know when the ‘first’ instalment will finally appear. You can then remark, quite in passing, that from my last letters it seemed to you that I am very embittered against Meissner and very dissatisfied with him; what is the reason for that? It is not my usual manner! The fellow has really annoyed me very much by his ‘if you don’t come today, come tomorrow’ manner.

Notes

1. The instalments of the second German and first French edition of Capital – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Otto Karl Meissner (1819-1902) – Hamburg publisher who brought out Marx’s Capital and a number of other works by Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 23 July 1872

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

If nothing happens in between, I shall be at the Hague on 2 September and shall be very glad to see you there. I had already sent you the Scissions, [1] etc, but it seems to have been confiscated. I am therefore enclosing a copy in this letter. You must excuse me for not writing more today. I have to send proofs to Paris and am in general overburdened with business.

Yours

KM

Notes

1. Les prétendues Scissions dans l'Internationale (The Alleged Scissions in the International), a pamphlet written by Marx (in French) for the General Council against the Bakuninists in the International – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 29 July 1872

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

At the International Congress (Hague, opening 2 September), it will be a matter of life or death for the International; and before I retire I want at least to protect it from disintegrating elements. Germany must therefore have as many representatives as possible. Since you are in any case coming, write to Hepner [1] that I ask him to get you a delegate’s mandate.

Yours

Karl Marx

Notes

1. Adolf Hepner (1846-1923) – A German Social-Democrat, co-editor of Volksstaat. On trial together with Liebknecht and Bebel in 1872 for high treason, but was acquitted – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Marx To Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

Source: MECW Volume 44, p. 421;

First published: in Russian, in Minuvshiye gody, St Petersburg, 1908.

[London,] 15 August 1872

Dear Sir,

I hope you have received the first part of the second German edition [of Volume I of Capital] which I have sent you a few days since. I shall also send you the first 6 livraisons of the French edition which will be out in a few days. It is necessary to compare both editions because I have added and changed here and there in the French edition.

Your interesting letter I have received and shall answer to it in a few days. I have also received the manuscript and the article of the Vestnik.

To-day I write in all haste, for one special purpose which is of the most urgent character.

Bakunin has worked secretly since years to undermine the International and has now been pushed by us so far as to throw away the mask and secede openly with the foolish people led by him — the same man who was the manager in the Nechayev affair. Now this Bakunin was once charged with the Russian translation of my book [of Volume I of Capital], received the money for it in advance, and instead of giving work, sent or had sent to Lubanin (I think) who transacted for the publisher with him the affair, a most infamous and compromising letter. It would be of the highest utility for me, if this letter was sent me immediately. As this is a mere commercial affair and as in the use to be made of the letter no names will be used, I hope you will procure me that letter. But no time is to be lost. If it is sent, it ought to be sent at once as I shall leave London for the Haag Congress at the end of this month.

Yours very truly,

A. Williams

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 26 August 1872

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

At the Hague the delegates will wear blue bands so that the people who come to meet them will recognise them.

In case of accidents:

Private address: Bruno Liebers, 148 Jacob-Catsstraat.

Public Congress Hall: Concordia, Lombardstraat.

In great haste

Yours

KM

Marx To Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

Source: MECW Volume 44, p. 455;

First published: in Russian, in Minuvshiye gody, St Petersburg, 1908.

[London,] 12 December 1872

Dear Friend,

From the enclosed you can see the results of the Hague Congress. I read out the letter to Lyubavin to the Commission d'enquête on the Alliance in the strictest confidence and without divulging the name of the addressee. Nevertheless, the secret was not kept, firstly because the Commission included Splingard, the Belgian lawyer, among its numbers, and he was in reality no more than an agent of the Alliancists; secondly, because Zhuhovsky, Guillaume et Co. had already earlier — as a preventive measure re-counted the story all over the place in their own way and with apologist interpretations. This was how it came about that, in its report to the Congress, the Commission was compelled to pass on the facts relative to Bakunin that were contained in the letter to Lyubavin (of course, I had not revealed his name, but Bakunin’s friends had already been informed on that score by Geneva). The question that presents itself now is whether the Commission appointed by the Congress to publish the minutes (of which I am a member) may make public use of that letter or not? That is for Lyubavin to decide. However, I may note that — ever since the Congress — the facts have been going the rounds of the European press, and this was none of our doing. I found the whole business all the more distasteful since I had reckoned on the strictest discretion and solemnly demanded it.

As a consequence of the expulsion of Bakunin and Guillaume, the Alliance, which had control of the Association in Spain and Italy, has unleashed a campaign of vilification, etc., against us everywhere. It is joining forces with all the disreputable elements and attempting to force a split into two camps. However, its ultimate defeat is assured. Indeed, the Alliance is only helping us to purge the Association of the unsavoury or feeble-minded elements who have pushed their way in here and there.

It is a fact that Bakunin’s friends in Zurich have tried to murder poor Outine. Outine himself is in a very critical state of health at the moment. This scurvy deed has already been reported in a number of papers belonging to the Association (including the Emancipación in Madrid) and will figure in detail in our official Compte rendu of the Hague Congress. The same scurvy gang has made two similar attempts on the lives of their opponents in Spain. Its misdeeds will soon be exposed to the view of the world at large.

The fate of our dear ‘mutual friend’ has been of the very greatest interest to my entire family. I have a plan to obtain help for him from Constantinople — through diplomatic channels. It may work.

I still have the manuscript you sent me, for Outine is not in a position to see to the printing, while Elpidin is just a scoundrel belonging to the gang. It is very interesting. I am eagerly looking forward to the promised review (in manuscript), as indeed to anything printed you have in this line. One of my friends wants to write something on the way my book [Volume I of Capital] was received in Russia.

The publication of the French translation [of Volume I of Capital] has been interrupted by unpleasant accidents, but will be resumed in a few days.

An Italian translation is in preparation.

Lastly, a request: My son-in-law, Dr Lafargue M.D. (a refugee), would — if possible — be happy to contribute to some Russian Review, etc.; he could supply articles either on the natural sciences or on the state of affairs in Spain and Portugal (as well as France). However, his circumstances would not permit him to do this gratis and he could only submit articles in French.

I should very much like to see a copy of the book by Prof. Sieber (Kiev) on Ricardo’s, etc., doctrines of value and capital, which also contains a discussion of my book.

Yours very sincerely,

A. Williams

In Volume II of Capital I shall, in the section on landed property, deal in great detail with the Russian form.

One last point. I would like to publish something on Chernyshevsky’s life and personality, etc., so as to create some interest in him in the West. But I need information for it.

1873

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 4 January

Engels to Rudolf Seiffert. 15/20 January

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 18 January

Engels to Eugen Oswald. 29 January

Marx to Aristide Fanton. 1 February

Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. 11 February

Marx to Friedrich Bolte. 12 February

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 12 February

Engels to Maurice Lachatre. After 14 February

Engels to Natalie Liebknecht. 11 March

Engels to Eugen Oswald. 18 March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 20 March

Engels to Maurice Lachatre. After 21 March

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 22 March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 22 March

Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. 7 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 3 May

Marx to Maurice Lachatre. 12 May

Marx to Engels. 23 May

Marx to Hugo Heller. 23 May

Engels to Marx. 24 May

Marx to Engels. 25 May

Engels to Marx. 26 May

Engels to Marx. 30 May

Marx to Engels. 31 May

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 14 June

Engels to August Bebel. 20 June

Engels to Walter Whitter. c. 24 June

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 1 July

Marx to Juste Vernouillet. 10 July

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 26 July

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 12 August

Marx to Engels. 29 August

Engels to Marx. 30 August

Marx to Engels. 30 August

Engels to Marx. 3 September

Marx to Benjamin Le Moussu. c. 3 September

Marx to Engels. 9 September

Engels to John De Morgan. 18 September

Marx to Eugen Oswald. 20 September

Marx to Eugen Oswald. 24 September

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 27 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 25 November

Engels to Marx. 29 November

Marx to Engels. 30 November [abstract]

Engels to Marx. 5 December

Marx to Engels. 7 December

Engels to Marx. 10 December

Marx to Engels. 11 December

Marx to Thomas Allsop. 23 December

Marx To Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

Source: MECW Volume 44, p. 469;

First published: in Russian, in Minuvshiye gody, St Petersburg, 1908.

[London,] 18 January 1873

Dear Friend,

I have received, together with your letter, Sieber, Golovachev, and 5 volumes of Skrebitsky. I find it almost embarrassing for you to be put to such expense on my account. My warmest thanks!

The operas also arrived duly and gave my daughter great pleasure. She believed, however, that they had been sent by a Russian lady she knows, and now asks me to convey her thanks to the unknown giver.

The Znaniye had approached me directly earlier on with a request for contributions, but I have no time for such things. As for Lafargue, he will send a trial piece through you.

As to Chernyshevsky, it entirely depends on you whether I confine myself wholly to his scientific work, or touch on his other activities as well. In the second volume of my book he will, of course, only appear as an economist. I am familiar with a major part of his writings.

* As to the mutual friend, you may be sure that if I take steps — and I am still waiting for some informations [sic] on that point from Constantinople — they will be of such a nature as not to compromise him or anybody else.

As to Lyubavin I should prefer suppressing that whole part of the enquiry to be published rather than expose him to the least danger. On the other hand, boldness is perhaps the best policy. According to something which Bakunin has published in Switzerland, not in his name, but in that of some of his Slavonian friends, they intend giving their own account of the transaction as soon as circumstances will permit them to do so. The indiscretion of their accomplices at The Hague was intentional and, I suppose, was meant as a sort of intimidation.

On the other hand, I cannot judge of the possible consequences of the publication, and, therefore, should wish our friend to communicate [to] me through you his resolution, after having again quietly reconsidered the case.*

The second fascicle of the French translation [of Volume I of Capital] will only appear in the course of the next few days. The délais have been caused by all sorts of incidents which, in view of the present state of siege in Paris, make every transaction more difficult. The toil involved in revising the translation is incredible. I would probably have had less trouble if I had done the whole thing myself from the start. And moreover, such patched-up jobs are always an amateur job.

The last numbers of the Paris Économiste of last year contain a review of my book by Block which demonstrates once again how completely bankrupt the theoretical representatives of the middle class are.

With best wishes for the New Year,

Yours very sincerely,

A. Williams [Marx]

Letter from Engels to Marx

In London

Written: May 30, 1873;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

In bed this morning the following dialectical ideas on the natural sciences came into my head:

The subject of natural science — moving matter, bodies. Bodies cannot be separated from motion, their forms and kinds can only be known through motion, of bodies apart from motion, apart from any relation to other bodies, nothing can be asserted. Only in motion does a body reveal what it is. Natural science therefore knows bodies by considering them in their relation to one another, in motion. The knowledge of the different forms of motion is the knowledge of bodies. The investigation of these different forms of motion is therefore the chief subject of natural science.

(1) The simplest form of motion is change of place (in time — to please old Hegel) — mechanical motion.

(a) There is no such thing as the movement of a single body, but relatively speaking, falling can be treated as such. Motion towards a centre common to many bodies. But as soon as an individual body moves in a direction other than towards the centre, while it is still subject to the laws of falling, these undergo modification;

(b) in the laws of orbits and lead directly to the reciprocal motion of several bodies — planetary etc., motion, astronomy, equilibrium — a modification temporarily or apparently in the motion itself. But the real result of this kind of motion is always ultimately — the contact of the moving bodies, they fall into one another.

(c) Mechanics of contact — bodies in contact, ordinary mechanics, levers, inclined planes, etc. But the effects of contact are not exhausted by these. Contact is directly manifested in two forms: friction and impact. Both have the property that at given degrees of intensity and under certain conditions they produce new, no longer merely mechanical effects: heat, light, electricity, magnetism.

(2) Physics proper, the science of these forms of movement, after investigation of each individuality, establishes the fact that under certain conditions they pass into one another, and ultimately discovers that all of them — at a given degree of intensity which varies according to the different bodies set in motion — produce effects which transcend physics, changes in the internal structure of bodies — chemical effects.

(3) Chemistry. For the investigation of the previous forms of movement it was more or less indifferent whether this was applied to animate or inanimate bodies. The inanimate bodies even displayed the phenomena in their greatest purity. Chemistry, on the other hand, can only distinguish the chemical nature of the most important bodies in substances which have arisen out of the process of life itself; its chief task becomes more and more to prepare these substances artificially. It forms the transition to the organic sciences, but the dialectical transition can only be accomplished when chemistry has either made the real transition or is on the point of doing so.

(4) Organism. Here I will not embark on any dialectic for the time being.

You being seated there at the centre of the natural sciences will be in the best position to judge if there is anything in it.

Marx To Engels

31 May 1873

Abstract

...

Enclosed a letter from Tussy. In the letter the child received from me I said to her that her last letter had greatly reassured me, etc.; her reproach that I was unjust towards Lissagaray was unfounded. I asked nothing of him but that he should provide proof instead of words that he was better than his reputation and that there was some good reason to rely on him. You can see from the reply how the homme fort proceeds. The damned nuisance is that I must be very circumspect and indulgent because of the child. I shall not answer until I have consulted you on my return. Keep the letter by you.

... Your

K.M.

Engels to August Bebel

In Hubertsburg

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence, International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

First Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers (1942);

Transcribed: Sally Ryan.

London, 20 June, 1873

Dear Bebel

I am answering your letter first because Liebknecht’s is still with Marx, who cannot locate it just now.

It was not Hepner [1] but Yorck’s [2] letter to him, signed by the Committee, which caused us here to be afraid that your imprisonment would be used by the Party authorities, which unfortunately are entirely Lassallean, to transform the Volksstaat into an ‘honest’ Neue-Sozial-Demokrat. Yorck plainly confessed to such an intention, and as the Committee claimed to have the right to appoint and remove the editors the danger was surely great enough. Hepner’s impending deportation [3] gave them another pretext for carrying out these plans. Under these circumstances it was absolutely necessary for us to know what the situation was; hence this correspondence. ...

... With regard to the attitude of the Party towards Lassalleanism, you can of course judge what tactics should be adopted better than we, especially in particular cases. But there is also this to be considered. When, as in your case, one is to a certain extent in the position of a competitor to the Allgemeine Deutsche Arbeiter Verein (General Association of German Workers) it is easy to pay too much attention to one's rival and to get into the habit of always thinking about him first. But both the General Association of German Workers and the Social-Democratic Workers' Party together still only form a very small minority of the German working class. Our view, which we have found confirmed by long practice, is that the correct tactic in propaganda is not to draw away a few individuals and members here and there from one's opponent, but to work on the great mass which still remains apathetic. The primitive force of a single individual whom we have ourselves attracted from the crude mass is worth more than ten Lassallean renegades, who always bring the seeds of their false tendencies into the Party with them. And if one could only get the masses without their local leaders it would still be all right. But one always has to take a whole crowd of these leaders into the bargain, and they are bound by their previous public utterances, if not by their previous views, and have above all things to prove that they have not deserted their principles but that on the contrary the Social-Democratic Workers' Party preaches true Lassalleanism. This was the unfortunate thing at Eisenach, not to be avoided at that time, perhaps, but there is no doubt at all that these elements have done harm to the Party and I am not sure that the Party would not have been at least as strong to-day without that addition. In any case, however, I should regard it as a misfortune if these elements were reinforced.

One must not allow oneself to be misled by the cry for “unity.” Those who have this word most often on their lips are those who sow the most dissension, just as at present the Jura Bakuninists in Switzerland, who have provoked all the splits, scream for nothing so much as for unity. Those unity fanatics are either the people of limited intelligence who want to stir everything up together into one nondescript brew, which, the moment it is left to settle, throws up the differences again in much more acute opposition because they are now all together in one pot (you have a fine example of this in Germany with the people who preach the reconciliation of the workers and the petty bourgeoisie)--or else they are people who consciously or unconsciously (like Mühlberger[*], for instance) want to adulterate the movement. For this reason the greatest sectarians and the biggest brawlers and rogues are at certain moments the loudest shouters for unity. Nobody in our lifetime has given us more trouble and been more treacherous than the unity shouters.

Naturally every party leadership wants to see successes and this is quite good too. But there are circumstances in which one must have the courage to sacrifice momentary success for more important things. Especially a party like ours, whose ultimate success is so absolutely certain, and which has developed so enormously in our own lifetime and under our own eyes, momentary success is by no means always and absolutely necessary. Take the International, for instance. After the Commune it had its colossal success. The bourgeoisie, struck all of a heap, ascribed omnipotence to it. The great mass of the membership believed things would stay like that for all eternity. We knew very well that the bubble must burst. All the riff-raff attached themselves to it. The sectarians within it began to flourish, and misused the International in the hope that the most stupid and mean actions would be permitted them. We did not allow that. Well knowing that the bubble must burst some time all the same, our concern was not to delay the catastrophe but to take care that the International emerged from it pure and unadulterated. The bubble burst at the Hague, and you know that the majority of Congress members went home sick with disappointment. And yet nearly all these disappointed people, who imagined they would find the ideal of universal brotherhood and reconciliation in the International, had far more bitter quarrels at home than those which broke out at the Hague! Now the sectarian quarrel-mongers are preaching conciliation and decrying us as the intolerant and the dictators. And if we had come out in a conciliatory way at the Hague, if we had hushed up the breaking out of the split--what would have been the result? The sectarians, especially the Bakuninists, would have got another year in which to perpetrate, in the name of the International, much greater stupidities and infamies even; the workers of the most developed countries would have turned away in disgust; the bubble would not have burst but, pierced by pinpricks, would have slowly collapsed, and the next Congress, which would have been bound to bring the crisis anyhow, would have turned into the lowest kind of personal row, because principles had already been sacrificed at the Hague. Then the International would indeed have gone to pieces---gone to pieces through "unity"! Instead of this we have now got rid of the rotten elements with honour to ourselves--the members of the Commune who were present at the last decisive session say that no session of the Commune left such a terrible impression upon them as this session of the tribunal which passed judgment on the traitors to the European proletariat--we have left them to expend all their forces in lying, slander and intrigue for ten months--and where are they? They, the alleged representatives of the great majority of the International, now announce that they do not dare to come to the next Congress (more details in an article which is being sent off for the Volksstaat with this letter). And if we had to do it again we should not, taking it all together, act any differently -- tactical mistakes are of course always committed.

In any case I think the efficient elements among the Lassalleans will fall to you of themselves in course of time and that it would therefore be unwise to break off the fruit before it is ripe, as the unity people want.

For the rest, old Hegel has already said: A party proves itself a victorious party by the fact that it splits and can stand the split. The movement of the proletariat necessarily passes through different stages of development; at every stage one section of people lags behind and does not join in the further advance; and this alone explains why it is that actually the "solidarity of the proletariat" is everywhere realised in different party groupings which carry on life and death feuds with one another, as the Christian sects in the Roman Empire did amidst the worst persecutions.

If the Neue Sozial-Demokrat for example has more subscribers than the Volksstaat, you ought not to forget either that each sect is necessarily fanatic and through this fanaticism obtains, particularly in regions where it is new (as for instance the General Association of German Workers is in Schleswig-Holstein), much greater momentary successes than the Party, which simply represents the real movement, without any sectarian oddities. But on the other hand, fanaticism does not last long.

I have to close my letter as the mail is about to be dispatched. Let me only add hurriedly: Marx cannot tackle Lassalle [4] until the French translation is finished (approx end of July), after which he will definitely need a rest as he has greatly overworked himself.

That you have been serving your jail sentence stoically and are studying is very good. We shall all be glad to see you here next year.

Cordial greetings to Liebknecht.

Sincerely yours

F Engels

Notes

* Mühlberger, Arthur. A physician, follower of Proudhon; anonymous author of a series of articles on the housing question (1872) to which Engels addressed in his book, The Housing Question.

1. Adolf Hepner (1846-1923) – German Social-Democrat, an editor of Volksstaat, delegate to Hague Congress of International (1872), later emigrated to USA – Progress Publishers.

2. Theodor Yorck (?-1875) – a leading member of German working-class movement, Lassallean, member of Executive of General Association of German Workers, in 1889 joined opposition against Schweitzer and took part in founding of Social-Democratic Workers Party, party Secretary (1871-74) – Progress Publishers.

3. Hepner, who was accused of ‘having worked for the International’ and having attended the Hague Congress, was sentenced to four weeks’ imprisonment at the end of 1872, and in the spring of 1873 he was deported from Leipzig – Progress Publishers.

4. During 1872 and 1873 Liebknecht and Hepner had asked Marx many times to write a critique of Lassalle’s views either as a pamphlet or a series of articles for the Volksstaat – Progress Publishers.

Marx To Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

Source: MECW Volume 44, p. 522;

First published: in Russian, in Minuvshiye gody, St Petersburg, 1908.

London, 12 August 1873

N. Danielson, Esq.

My dear Sir,

I have since months suffered severely, and found myself, for some time, even in a dangerous state of illness, consequent upon overwork. My head was so seriously affected, that a paralytic strike was to be apprehended, and even now I am not yet able to work more than a few hours. This is the only reason why I have not before acknowledged, and thanked you for, the precious collection of books you were so kind as to send me.

You will have received — at least I read your last letter in that sense — 3 copies of Das Kapital in one volume. I send you to-day the last livraison of the Heftedition.

We are publishing the Revelations on the Alliance, (you know the sect of teetotallers call themselves thus in England), and want to know the cheapest way to send you a somewhat large number of copies. A letter relative to the chief of that sanctimonious people is still held in reserve.

I thank you much for your last long letter and shall make proper use of it. It is of great commercial value for myself.

Yours most truly,

A. Williams

Karl Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge in Hoboken, 27 September 1873

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... As I view European conditions it is quite useful to let the formal organisation of the International recede into the background for the time being, but, if possible, not to relinquish control of the central point in New York so that no idiots like Perret [1] or adventurers like Cluseret [2] may seize the leadership and discredit the whole business. Events and the inevitable development and complication of things will of themselves see to it that the International shall rise again improved in form. For the present it suffices not to let the connection with the most capable people in the various countries slip altogether out of our hands and as for the rest not to give a hang for the Geneva local decisions, in fact simply to ignore them. The only good decision adopted there, to postpone the Congress for two years, facilitates this mode of action. Furthermore the fact that the spectre of the International cannot be used during the impending reactionary crusade, and that on the contrary the bourgeoisie everywhere believes that the spectre is laid for good upsets the calculations of the Continental governments...

Notes

1. Henri Perret – took part in Swiss working-class movement, active member of International in Switzerland, member of Social-Democratic Alliance (1868-69), General Secretary of Latin Federal Committee (1868-69), in 1869 broke with Bakuninists but following Hague Congress of International began to advocate reconciliation with them – Progress Publishers.

2. Gustav-Paul Cluseret (1823-1900) – French political figure, member of International, close to Bakuninists, participant in revolutionary uprisings in Lyons and Marseilles (1870), member of Paris Commune, emigrated after its defeat – Progress Publishers.

Marx to Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

November 30, 1873

For the rest, I read Saint-Beuve’s book on Chateaubriand, a writer whom I have always found repugnant. The man is celebrated in France, because in every respect he is the most classical incarnation of French vanité, a vanité clothed not in light, frivolous eighteenth-century garb, but draped in romanticism and prancing about in newly coined phrases. Such false profundity, Byzantine exaggeration, flirtation with emotion, motley Schillerism, word painting, theatrical sublime, or to put it concisely, such a hodge-podge of lies has never before been achieved, neither in form, nor in content.

Engels to Marx

Abstracts

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow 1976;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

December 10, 1873

Dear Moor

Enclosed you will find three halves of five-pound notes; please acknowledge receipt at once so that the rest can follow.

Heavy fog since yesterday morning from which I just escaped for a short hour by taking a walk to the [Hampstead] Heath. Up there blue sky and warm sunshine, an island of brightness in a sea of fog. ...

That scamp Roderich Benedix has left a bad odour behind in the shape of a thick tome against “Shakespearomania.” He proved in it to a nicety that Shakespeare can’t hold a candle to our great poets, not even to those of modern times. Shakespeare is presumably to be hurled down from his pedestal only in order that fatty Benedix is hoisted on to it. There is more life and reality in the first act of the Merry Wives alone than in all German literature, and Launce with his dog Crab is alone worth more than all the German comedies put together. By way of contrast, Benedix with the weighty posterior will indulge in argumentations as serious as they are cheap over the unceremonious manner in which Shakespeare often makes short work of his dénouements and thereby cuts short the tedious twaddle, although in real life it is unavoidable. Let him have his way. ...

Yesterday received a geological map of the Rhine province. The superficial conjectures I made on the spot mostly confirmed.

Best regards to Tussy.

Yours

FE

Marx to Thomas Allsop [752]

In Penzance

Source: MECW Volume 44, p. 550;

First published: in the original English, and in Japanese, in Keizai gakuronshu, Tokyo, 1969.

[London,] 23 December 1873, 1 Maitland Park Road, N.W.

My dear and honoured friend,

I felt very anxious about your protracted silence, Mr Leblanc being unable to inform me of your whereabouts and your doings. I am sorry to see from your letter that my apprehensions were not quite unfounded, but the mild climate of Penzance and your robust constitution will, I hope fervently so, soon rid you of the cough which, by the by, sways it now all over the country. It is, in the current phrase, quite a seasonable nuisance.

My youngest daughter and myself have for three weeks stayed at Harrogate whither our medical adviser had sent us. The quiet life, breezy air, mineral waters and pleasant walks of the place have gone far to restore the health of the two patients. When we arrived, the season had already gone, so that we occupied our hotel ‘in single blessedness’, being only disturbed and somewhat amused during the last days of our sojourn by the dropping in of a Church of England parson, a worldly wise old man, with no smack of cant about him, of fluent and trivial talk, with conventional varnish of manners and caring indeed for nothing save his belly. He was the true model of a modern Christian, using that word itself only with respect to the dishes our hotel-keeper provided and saying for instance: this is no Christian mutton chop, if that same chop happened to lack some virtue or other. The man had overrun most countries of Europe and was in himself a recording office of all the merits and demerits of its several hotels, always hunting in vain for that paragon of mankind — a perfect man-cook. At the same time he never tired of bitter sarcasms against the overstrained pretensions and the extravagant living of the miners of the black country, being himself an incumbent at Durham. This man gave me and Eleanor constant occasion to think and speak of you, because a more striking contrast could hardly be fancied — you, so to say an anticipation of what the men of the new society will be, and he, the parson, a stereotyped mould of what the men of the old society have contrived to become.

I send you to-day three further parts of the Capital which, on the whole, are less abstract than the preceding ones. If they contribute to enliven your hours of seclusion, I shall feel most happy. In general, I must say that my views commence to spread amongst the workmen of the Continent and that there the upper classes and the official representatives of political economy make much noise about them and feel rather annoyed at them.

In poor Spain things might still right themselves if French reaction gets not the upper hand. With all their shortcomings there is mettle in the Spaniards. The downbreak of the Spanish working class rising — which was unripe and senseless — will prove useful if its leaders have been taught by dearly bought experience to emancipate themselves from high-flown but hollow French phraseology and to apply themselves to the study of the real conditions of the movement. We have some excellent men at Madrid and Valencia. At Lisbon we have a nucleus of really superior workers.

In the United States our propaganda has been much accelerated by the crisis. It has acted as our recruiting officer.

In Germany we are pretty sure to send at the coming elections at least a dozen intelligent and energetic workmen to parliament. The sudden and mighty industrial development in that country is our best agent. Bismarck and the middle class intend striking a blow at the proletarian press, the ‘respectable’ press confessing its inability to cope with it, but the old king is rapidly sinking and his successor cannot dare inaugurate his regime by unpopular measures.

In Russia, what with the social disorganisation consequent upon the emancipation of the serfs and the awful growth of financial disease, what with the popular discontent at the loss of the Russian prestige through the Prussian achievements and the hesitations of a weak home-policy making half-concessions to-day to compensate them by ultra-reactionary measures to-morrow, the elements of a general convulsion are accumulating.

Thus, my dear friend, the world is moving with all that. What are the feeble efforts of upper class France at a moment where the foundations of the very stronghold of European reaction, of Russia, are shaking?

With my and Mrs Marx's kind regards to Mrs Allsop and our best wishes for the coming year, I remain, my dear and honoured friend,

Yours most sincerely,

Karl Marx

Engels sends you his compliments and will immediately write to you.

1874

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 19 January

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 27 January

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 14 February

Engels to Wilhelm Blos. 21 February

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 27 February

Marx to George Moore. 26 March

Marx to George Moore. 28 March

Marx to Jenny Marx. 19 April

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 20/24 April

Marx to Maurice Lachatre. 12 May

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 18 May

Engels to Gottfried Ermen. 1 June

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 24 June

Marx to Engels. 15 July

Engels to Marx. 21 July

Marx to Maurice Lachatre. 23 July

Engels to Jenny Longuet. 2 August

Marx to Engels. 4 August

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 4 August

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 4 August

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann. 10 August

Engels to Marx. 12 August

Marx to Engels. 14 August

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 14 August

Marx to Engels. 1 September

Engels to Marx. 5 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 12 September

Marx to Engels. 18 September

Marx to Max Oppenheim. 20 September

Engels to Marx. 21 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 15 October

Marx to Max Oppenheim. 17 October

Engels to Hermann Lopatin. c. 20 October

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 19 January 1874

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Wenceslas

Engels gave your letter to me. Hence these few lines. After my return a carbuncle broke out on the right cheek, which was operated on; then it had several smaller successors and I think that at the present moment I am suffering from the last of them.

For the rest, don’t worry at all about newspaper gossip; still less answer it. I myself allow the English papers to announce my death from time to time, without giving a sign of life. Nothing annoys me more than to appear to be supplying the public with reports of my state of health through my friends (you are the greatest sinner in this respect). I don’t give a farthing for the public, and, if my occasional illness is exaggerated, it at least has this advantage, that it keeps away all sorts of requests (theoretical and otherwise) from unknown people in every corner of the earth.

My best thanks for the kind words from the lady countess and Fränzchen.

I am very glad to receive the Frankfurter Zeitung and find many interesting things in it.

The relative victory of the ultramontanes [1] and social-democrats in the elections serves Mr Bismarck and his middle-class tail right. More another time.

Yours

KM

À propos: On the advice of my friend, Dr Gumpert [2] (Manchester), I now use quicksilver ointment at the first trace of carbuncle irritation and find that it works quite specifically.

What has happened to your friend, ‘Dr Freund’, of Breslau, who in your opinion was so promising? It seems, après tout, que c'est un fruit sec. [3]

Notes

1. Militant Catholics, referring here to the Catholic Centre Party. In the Reichstag elections of 1874, the Centre achieved a great victory, receiving 91 mandates (1,500,000 votes) in place of the 63 received in 1871. The Social-Democrats obtained 351,670 votes (nine mandates) compared with 101,927 in 1874 – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Edward Gumpert (?-1895) – German doctor in Manchester and friend of Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. After all, that this is a dry fruit – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 18 May 1874

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

I have received everything: your letters (including some friendly notes from your dear wife and Fränzchen), the ‘Meyer’ [1] (police-socialist, faiseur, [2] literary scribbler), the cuttings from the Frankfurter, etc, and finally a letter from Madame Tenge.

I am very grateful for your, your family’s and Madame Tenge’s friendly interest in my progress. But you do me an injustice if you ascribe my failure to write to any other cause than an uncertain state of health, which continually interrupts my work, then goads me on to make up for the time lost by neglecting all other duties (letters included), and finally puts a man out of humour and makes him disinclined for activity.

After my return from Harrogate I had an attack of carbuncles, then my headaches returned, insomnia, etc, so that I had to spend from the middle of April to 5 May at Ramsgate (seaside). Since then I have been feeling much better, but am far from being quite well. My specialist (Dr Gumpert [3] of Manchester) insists upon my going to Karlsbad and would like to make me travel there as soon as possible, but I must finally complete the French translation which has come to a full stop, and, apart from that, I should much prefer it if I could meet you there.

In the meantime, while I was unable to write, I worked through a lot of important new material for the second volume. But I cannot start on its final working out until the French edition is completed and my health fully restored.

So I have by no means yet decided how I shall spend the summer.

The progress of the German labour movement (ditto in Austria) is wholly satisfactory. In France the absence of a theoretical foundation and of practical common sense is very evident. In England at the moment only the rural labour movement shows any advance; the industrial workers have first of all to get rid of their present leaders. When I denounced them at the Hague Congress I knew that I was letting myself in for unpopularity, slander, etc, but such consequences have always been a matter of indifference to me. Here and there people are beginning to see that in making that denunciation I was only doing my duty.

In the United States our Party has to fight against great difficulties, partly economic, partly political, but it is making headway. The greatest obstacle there is the professional politicians, who immediately try to falsify every new movement and change it into a new ‘company-promoting business’.

Notwithstanding all diplomatic moves, a new war is inevitable au peu plus tôt, au peu plus tard, [4] and before the ending of this there will hardly be violent popular movements anywhere, or, at the most, they will remain local and unimportant.

The visit of the Russian emperor is giving the London police a great deal to do and the government here will be glad to get rid of the man as soon as possible. As a precautionary measure they requisitioned forty police (mouchards), with the notorious police commissioner Plocke at their head (Ali Baba and the forty thieves), from the French government, to watch the Poles and Russians here (during the tsar’s stay). The so-called amnesty petition of the London Poles is the work of the Russian embassy; in answer to it the Poles here issued an appeal, written and signed by Wróblewski, [5] which is addressed to the English and which has been distributed in large numbers at the Sunday meetings in Hyde Park. The English press (with very few exceptions) is obsequious – the tsar is after all ‘our guest’ – but for all that the real feeling against Russia is incomparably more hostile than it has been since the Crimean War, and the entry of a Russian princess into the royal family [6] has aroused rather than disarmed suspicion. The facts – the arbitrary abrogation of the decisions concerning the Black Sea in the Paris Treaty, the conquests and trickeries in Central Asia, etc, irritate John Bull, and Disraeli has no chance of remaining at the helm for any length of time if he continues Gladstone’s unctuous foreign policy.

With my warmest greetings to your dear family and Madame Tenge.

Yours

KM

Notes

1. Rudolph Meyer (1839-1899) – German conservative publicist. Opposed Bismarck from the Right and was therefore persecuted. Emigrated abroad. Author of the book The Emancipation Struggle of the Fourth Estate (1872-74). One of the founders of the Christian Socialist Party in Austria – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

2. Mountebank – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

3. Edward Gumpert (?-1895) – German doctor in Manchester and friend of Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

4. Sooner or later – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

5. Walerian Wróblewski (1836-1908) – Emigrant Polish revolutionary; one of the military leaders of the Commune – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

6. The betrothal of the Grand Duchess Maria to Prince Alfred, Duke of Edinburgh – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 24 June 1874

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

I have at last decided to go to Karlsbad in the middle of August with my youngest daughter Eleanor (called Tussy). You must therefore see about lodgings and inform me how much it will cost per week. What happens later will depend on circumstances.

My best greetings to the Lady Countess and Fränzchen.

Yours

KM

The Austrian government would be stupid enough to put difficulties in my way; it is therefore advisable to let nobody know anything of the intended journey.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 4 August 1874

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

About eight days ago I wrote your dear wife a few lines, telling her of the death of my only grandson and the severe illness of my youngest daughter. This was not an isolated but rather an acute outbreak of an illness from which she has long suffered. Eleanor is now up again, much sooner than her doctor (Madame Dr Anderson-Garrett) [1] had hoped. She is able to travel, though of course still delicate. Madame Anderson thinks the Karlsbad waters will help considerably to restore her health, just as Dr Gumpert [2] ordered rather than recommended me to go there. It is difficult for me to leave Jenny now (I mean in about two weeks). I am in this respect less stoical than in others and family afflictions always hit me hard. The more one lives, as I do, almost cut off from the outside world, the more one is caught in the emotional life of one’s own circle.

You must send me your exact Karlsbad address and, in particular, make my excuses to your wife and Fränzchen for not answering their friendly and affectionate letters.

Yours

KM

Notes

1. Dr Elizabeth Garrett Anderson (1836-1917) was a British physician and feminist. Although holding a licence from the Society of Apothecaries, as a woman she was forbidden to practice in a hospital, and so she opened her own dispensary, which became the New Hospital for Women and Children in 1872 – MIA.

2. Edward Gumpert (?-1895) – German doctor in Manchester and friend of Marx and Engels – Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute.

Karl Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann, 10 August 1874

Source: Karl Marx, Letters to Dr Kugelmann (Martin Lawrence, London, undated). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Kugelmann

I cannot start from here before 15 August (Saturday) and shall take about four days to get to our destination, since Tussy must not exert herself too much.

Salut

Yours

KM

Engels to Frierich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Written: September 12 (and 17), 1874;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 12[-17] September 1874

With your resignation the old International is entirely wound up and at an end. And that is well. It belonged to the period of the Second Empire, during which the oppression reigning throughout Europe entailed unity and abstention from all internal polemics upon the workers' movement, then just reawakening. It was the moment when the common, cosmopolitan interests of the proletariat could be put in the foreground: Germany, Spain, Italy, Denmark had only just come into the movement or were just coming into it. Actually in 1864 the theoretical character of the movement was still very confused everywhere in Europe, that is, among the masses. German Communism did not yet exist as a workers' party, Proudhonism was too weak to be able to insist on its particular fads, Bakunin's new trash had not so much as come into being in his own head, even the leaders of the English trade unions thought the programme laid down in the Preamble to the Statutes gave them a basis for entering the movement. The first great success was bound to explode this naive conjunction of all fractions. This success was the Commune, which was without any doubt the child of the International intellectually, although the International did not lift a finger to produce it, and for which the International — thus far with full justification — was held responsible.

When, thanks to the Commune, the International had become a moral force in Europe, the row at once began. Every fraction wanted to exploit the success for itself. The inevitable collapse arrived. Jealousy of the growing power of the only people who were really ready to work further along the lines of the old comprehensive programme — the German Communists — drove the Belgian Proudhonists into the arms of the Bakuninist adventurers. The Hague Congress was really the end — and for both parties. The only country where something could still be accomplished in the name of the old International was America, and by a happy instinct the executive was transferred there. Now its prestige is exhausted there too, and any further effort to galvanise it into new life would be folly and waste of energy. For ten years the International dominated one side of European history — the side on which the future lies — and can look back upon its work with pride. But in its old form it has outlived itself. In order to produce a new International after the fashion of the old one — an alliance of all the proletarian parties in every country — a general suppression of the workers' movement like that which predominated from 1849-64 would be necessary. But for this the proletarian world has become too big, too extensive. I think that the next International — after Marx's writings have had some years of influence — will be directly Communist and will openly proclaim our principles. ...

In Germany things are going splendidly in spite of all the persecution, and partly just because of the persecution. The Lassalleans have been so much discredited by their representatives in the Reichstag that the Government has had to start persecuting them in order to give this movement once more the appearance of being intended seriously. For the rest, since the elections the Lassalleans have found it necessary to come out in the wake of our people. It is a real piece of luck that Hasselmann and Hasenclever were elected to the Reichstag. They are discrediting themselves there visibly; they will either have to go with our people or else perpetrate tomfooleries on their own. Both will ruin them.

1875

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 7 January

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 9 January

Marx to Max Oppenheim. 20 January

Marx to Maurice Lachatre. 30 January

Marx to Juste Vernouillet. 3 February

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 11 February

Marx to Engels. Feb/March

Engels to Hermann Ramm. 18 March

Engels to August Bebel. 18-28 March

Engels to Rudolf Engels. 22 March

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 5 May

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 8 May

Engels to Eugen Oswald. 8 May

Marx to Jenny Marx. 10 May

Engels to Patrick John Coleman. 20 May

Engels to A Goopy. 14 June

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 18 June

Marx to Z. 12 July

Marx to Edwards. 14 July

Marx to Engels. 21 August

Marx to Max Oppenheim. 1 September

Marx to Max Oppenheim. 6 September

Marx to Engels. 8 September

Marx to Max Oppenheim. 9 September

Marx to Hermann Schumacher. 21 September

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 24 September

Marx to Peter Imandt. 27 September

Marx to Bernhard Kraus. 30 September

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 8 October

Engels to Wilhelm Bracke. 11 October

Engels to August Bebel. 12 October

Engels to August Bebel. 15 October

Marx to Bernhard Kraus. 20 October

Engels to Philipp Pauli. 8 November

Engels to Philipp Pauli. 9 November

Engels to Rudolf Engels. 9 November

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 12 November

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 17 November

Engels to Paul Kersten. 24 November

Marx to Morel. Autumn

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 3 December

Engels to Walery Wroblewski. 4 December

Engels to Friedrich Lessner. 16 December

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 17 December

Engels to August Bebel

In Zwickau

Written: London, March 18-28, 1875;

First Published: A. Bebel, Aus meinem Leben, Part 2, Stuttgart, 1911;

Translated: Peter and Betty Ross;

Transcribed: Zodiac;

HTML Markup: S. Ryan and B. Baggins.

London, March 18-28, 1875

Dear Bebel,

I have received your letter of February 23 and am glad to hear that you are in such good bodily health.

You ask me what we think of the unification affair. We are, unfortunately, in exactly the same boat as yourself. Neither Liebknecht nor anyone else has let us have any kind of information, and hence we too know only what is in the papers — not that there was anything in them until a week or so ago, when the draft programme appeared. That astonished us not a little, I must say.

Our party had so often held out a conciliatory hand to the Lassalleans, or at least proffered co-operation, only to be rebuffed so often and so contemptuously by the Hasenclevers, Hasselmanns and Tolckes as to lead any child to the conclusion that, should these gentlemen now come and themselves proffer conciliation, they must be in a hell of a dilemma. Knowing full well what these people are like, however, it behoves us to make the most of that dilemma and insist on every conceivable guarantee that might prevent these people from restoring, at our party’s expense, their shattered reputation in general working-class opinion. They should be given an exceedingly cool and cautious reception, and union be made dependent on the degree of their readiness to abandon their sectarian slogans and their state aid, [2] and to accept in its essentials the Eisenach Programme of 1869 [3] or an improved edition of it adapted to the present day. Our party has absolutely nothing to learn from the Lassalleans in the theoretical sphere, i.e. the crux of the matter where the programme is concerned, but the Lassalleans doubtless have something to learn from the party; the first prerequisite for union was that they cease to be sectarians, Lassalleans, i.e. that, first and foremost, they should, if not wholly relinquish the universal panacea of state aid, at least admit it to be a secondary provisional measure alongside and amongst many others recognised as possible. The draft programme shows that our people, while infinitely superior to the Lassallean leaders in matters of theory, are far from being a match for them where political guile is concerned; once again the “honest men” [4] have been cruelly done in the eye by the dishonest.

To begin with, they adopt the high-sounding but historically false Lassallean dictum: in relation to the working class all other classes are only one reactionary mass. This proposition is true only in certain exceptional instances, for example in the case of a revolution by the proletariat, e.g. the Commune, or in a country in which not only has the bourgeoisie constructed state and society after its own image but the democratic petty bourgeoisie, in its wake, has already carried that reconstruction to its logical conclusion. If, for instance, in Germany, the democratic petty bourgeoisie were part of this reactionary mass, then how could the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party have gone hand in hand with it, with the People’s Party, [5] for years on end? How could the Volksstaat derive virtually all its political content from the petty-bourgeois democratic Frankfurter Zeitung? And how can one explain the adoption in this same programme of no less than seven demands that coincide exactly and word for word with the programme of the People’s Party and of petty-bourgeois democracy? I mean the seven political demands, 1 to 5 and 1 to 2, of which there is not one that is not bourgeois-democratic. [6]

Secondly, the principle that the workers’ movement is an international one is, to all intents and purposes, utterly denied in respect of the present, and this by men who, for the space of five years and under the most difficult conditions, upheld that principle in the most laudable manner. The German workers’ position in the van of the European movement rests essentially on their genuinely international attitude during the war [7]; no other proletariat would have behaved so well. And now this principle is to be denied by them at a moment when, everywhere abroad, workers are stressing it all the more by reason of the efforts made by governments to suppress every attempt at its practical application in an organisation! And what is left of the internationalism of the workers’ movement? The dim prospect — not even of subsequent co-operation among European workers with a view to their liberation — nay, but of a future “international brotherhood of peoples” — of your Peace League bourgeois “United States of Europe"! [8]

There was, of course, no need whatever to mention the International as such. But at the very least there should have been no going back on the programme of 1869, and some sort of statement to the effect that, though first of all the German workers’ party is acting within the limits set by its political frontiers (it has no right to speak in the name of the European proletariat, especially when what it says is wrong), it is nevertheless conscious of its solidarity with the workers of all other countries and will, as before, always be ready to meet the obligations that solidarity entails. Such obligations, even if one does not definitely proclaim or regard oneself as part of the “International,” consist for example in aid, abstention from blacklegging during strikes, making sure that the party organs keep German workers informed of the movement abroad, agitation against impending or incipient dynastic wars and, during such wars, an attitude such as was exemplarily maintained in 1870 and 1871, etc.

Thirdly, our people have allowed themselves to be saddled with the Lassallean “iron law of wages” which is based on a completely outmoded economic view, namely that on average the workers receive only the minimum wage because, according to the Malthusian theory of population, there are always too many workers (such was Lassalle’s reasoning). Now in Capital Marx has amply demonstrated that the laws governing wages are very complex, that, according to circumstances, now this law, now that, holds sway, that they are therefore by no means iron but are, on the contrary, exceedingly elastic, and that the subject really cannot be dismissed in a few words, as Lassalle imagined. Malthus’ argument, upon which the law Lassalle derived from him and Ricardo (whom he misinterpreted) is based, as that argument appears, for instance, on p. 5 of the Arbeiterlesebuch, where it is quoted from another pamphlet of Lassalle’s, [9] is exhaustively refuted by Marx in the section on “Accumulation of Capital.” Thus, by adopting the Lassallean “iron law” one commits oneself to a false proposition and false reasoning in support of the same.

Fourthly, as its one and only social demand, the programme puts forward — Lassallean state aid in its starkest form, as stolen by Lassalle from Buchez. [10] And this, after Bracke has so ably demonstrated the sheer futility of that demand; after almost all if not all, of our party speakers have, in their struggle against the Lassalleans, been compelled to make a stand against this “state aid"! Our party could hardly demean itself further. Internationalism sunk to the level of Amand Goegg, socialism to that of the bourgeois republican Buchez, who confronted the socialists with this demand in order to supplant them!

But “state aid” in the Lassallean sense of the word is, after all, at most only one measure among many others for the attainment of an end here lamely described as “paving the way for the solution of the social question,” as though in our case there were still a social question that remained unsolved in theory! Thus, if you were to say: The German workers’ party strives to abolish wage labour and hence class distinctions by introducing co-operative production into industry and agriculture, and on a national scale; it is in favour of any measure calculated to attain that end! — then no Lassallean could possibly object.

Fifthly, there is absolutely no mention of the organisation of the working class as a class through the medium of trade unions. And that is a point of the utmost importance, this being the proletariat’s true class organisation in which it fights its daily battles with capital, in which it trains itself and which nowadays can no longer simply be smashed, even with reaction at its worst (as presently in Paris). Considering the importance this organisation is likewise assuming in Germany, it would in our view be indispensable to accord it some mention in the programme and, possibly, to leave some room for it in the organisation of the party.

All these things have been done by our people to oblige the Lassalleans. And what have the others conceded? That a host of somewhat muddled and purely democratic demands should figure in the programme, some of them being of a purely fashionable nature — for instance “legislation by the people” such as exists in Switzerland and does more harm than good, if it can be said to do anything at all. Administration by the people — that would at least be something. Similarly omitted is the first prerequisite of all liberty — that all officials be responsible for all their official actions to every citizen before the ordinary courts and in accordance with common law. That demands such as freedom of science and freedom of conscience figure in every liberal bourgeois programme and seem a trifle out of place here is something I shall not enlarge upon.

The free people’s state is transformed into the free state. Grammatically speaking, a free state is one in which the state is free vis-à-vis its citizens, a state, that is, with a despotic government. All the palaver about the state ought to be dropped, especially after the Commune, which had ceased to be a state in the true sense of the term. The people’s state has been flung in our teeth ad nauseam by the anarchists, although Marx’s anti-Proudhon piece and after it the Communist Manifesto declare outright that, with the introduction of the socialist order of society, the state will dissolve of itself and disappear. Now, since the state is merely a transitional institution of which use is made in the struggle, in the revolution, to keep down one’s enemies by force, it is utter nonsense to speak of a free people’s state; so long as the proletariat still makes use of the state, it makes use of it, not for the purpose of freedom, but of keeping down its enemies and, as soon as there can be any question of freedom, the state as such ceases to exist. We would therefore suggest that Gemeinwesen ["commonalty"] be universally substituted for state; it is a good old German word that can very well do service for the French “Commune.”

"The elimination of all social and political inequality,” rather than “the abolition of all class distinctions,” is similarly a most dubious expression. As between one country, one province and even one place and another, living conditions will always evince a certain inequality which may be reduced to a minimum but never wholly eliminated. The living conditions of Alpine dwellers will always be different from those of the plainsmen. The concept of a socialist society as a realm of equality is a one-sided French concept deriving from the old “liberty, equality, fraternity,” a concept which was justified in that, in its own time and place, it signified a phase of development, but which, like all the one-sided ideas of earlier socialist schools, ought now to be superseded, since they produce nothing but mental confusion, and more accurate ways of presenting the matter have been discovered.

I shall desist, although almost every word in this programme, a programme which is, moreover, insipidly written, lays itself open to criticism. It is such that, should it be adopted, Marx and I could never recognise a new party set up on that basis and shall have to consider most seriously what attitude — public as well as private — we should adopt towards it. [11] Remember that abroad we are held responsible for any and every statement and action of the German Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. E.g. by Bakunin in his work Statehood and Anarchy, in which we are made to answer for every injudicious word spoken or written by Liebknecht since the inception of the Demokratisches Wochenblatt. People imagine that we run the whole show from here, whereas you know as well as I do that we have hardly ever interfered in the least with internal party affairs, and then only in an attempt to make good, as far as possible, what we considered to have been blunders — and only theoretical blunders at that. But, as you yourself will realise, this programme marks a turning-point which may very well force us to renounce any kind of responsibility in regard to the party that adopts it.

Generally speaking, less importance attaches to the official programme of a party than to what it does. But a new programme is after all a banner planted in public, and the outside world judges the party by it. Hence, whatever happens there should be no going-back, as there is here, on the Eisenach programme. It should further be considered what the workers of other countries will think of this programme; what impression will be created by this genuflection on the part of the entire German socialist proletariat before Lassalleanism.

I am, moreover, convinced that a union on this basis would not last a year. Are the best minds of our party to descend to repeating, parrot-fashion, Lassallean maxims concerning the iron law of wages and state aid? I’d like to see you, for one, thus employed! And were they to do so, their audiences would hiss them off the stage. And I feel sure that it is precisely on these bits of the programme that the Lassalleans are insisting, like Shylock the Jew on his pound of flesh. The split will come; but we shall have “made honest men” again of Hasselmann, Hasenclever and Tolcke and Co.; we shall emerge from the split weaker and the Lassalleans stronger; our party will have lost its political virginity and will never again be able to come out whole-heartedly against the Lassallean maxims which for a time it inscribed on its own banner; and then, should the Lassalleans again declare themselves to be the sole and most genuine workers’ party and our people to be bourgeois, the programme would be there to prove it. All the socialist measures in it are theirs, and our party has introduced nothing save the demands of that petty-bourgeois democracy which it has itself described in that same programme as part of the “reactionary mass"!

I had held this letter back in view of the fact that you would only be released on April 1, in honour of Bismarck’s birthday, [12] not wanting to expose it to the risk of interception in the course of an attempt to smuggle it in. Well, I have just had a letter from Bracke, who has also felt grave doubts about the programme and asks for our opinion. I shall therefore send this letter to him for forwarding, so that he can read it without my having to write the whole thing over again. I have, by the way, also spoken my mind to Ramm; to Liebknecht I wrote but briefly. I cannot forgive his not having told us a single word about the whole business (whereas Ramm and others believed he had given us exact information) until it was, in a manner of speaking, too late. True, this has always been his wont — hence the large amount of disagreeable correspondence which we, both Marx and myself, have had with him, but this time it really is too bad, and we definitely shan’t act in concert with him.

Do see that you manage to come here in the summer; you would, of course, stay with me and, if the weather is fine, we might spend a day or two taking sea baths, which would really do you good after your long spell in jail.

Ever your friend,

F. E.

Marx has just moved house. He is living at 41 Maitland Park Crescent, NW London.

Footnotes

1. Engels’ letter to August Bebel written between March 18 and 28, 1875 is closely connected with Marx’s Critique of the Gotha Programme and is traditionally published together with the latter work. It conveyed the joint opinion of Marx and Engels concerning the fusion of two German workers’ parties, the Eisenachers and the Lassalleans, scheduled for early 1875. The immediate reason for the letter was the publication of the draft programme of the future united Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany (Programm der deutschen Arbeiterpartei) in Der Volksstaat (the organ of the Eisenachers) and the Neuer Social-Demokrat (the organ of the Lassalleans) on March 7, 1875. The draft programme was approved with slight changes by the unity congress at Gotha on May 22-27, 1875, and came to be known as the Gotha Programme.

This letter was first published by Bebel, after the lapse of 36 years, in his Aus meinem Leben, Zweiter Teil, Stuttgart, 1911. In the present edition the letter is printed according to this book.

It was published in English for the first time in: K. Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, Lawrence, London [1933], pp. 51-62.

2. A reference to one of Lassalle’s programme theses on the establishment of workers’ producer associations with the aid of the state. Lassalle and his followers repeatedly emphasised that what they had in mind was a state in which power would pass into the hands of the working people through universal suffrage.

3. Engels is referring to the Programm und Statuten der sozial-demokratischen Arbeiter-Partei, adopted at the general German workers’ congress in Eisenach in August 1869 and published in the Demokratisches Wochenblatt on August 14, 1869. The congress founded the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party of Germany. By and large the programme complied with the principles of the International Working Men’s Association.

4. The "honest men” — nickname of the members of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (the Eisenachers), as distinct from the members of the General Association of German Workers (the Lassalleans), the “dishonest men.”

5. The German People’s Party, established in September 1868, embraced the democratic section of the bourgeoisie, mostly in the South-German states. The party opposed the establishment of Prussian hegemony in Germany and advocated the idea of a federative German state.

6. A reference to the following articles of the draft Gotha Programme:

"The German workers’ party demands as the free basis of the state:

"1. Universal, equal and direct suffrage by secret ballot for all males who have reached the age of 21, for all elections in the state and in the community. 2. Direct legislation by the people with the right to initiate and to reject bills. 3. Universal military training. A people’s militia in place of the standing army. Decisions regarding war and peace to be taken by a representative assembly of the people. 4. Abolition of all exceptional laws, in particular the laws on the press, associations and assembly. 5. Jurisdiction by the people. Administration of justice without fees.

"The German workers’ party demands as the intellectual and moral basis of the state:

"1. Universal and equal education of the people by the state. Compulsory school attendance. Free instruction. 2. Freedom of science. Freedom of conscience."

7. The reference is to the Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71.

8. The League of Peace and Freedom — A pacifist organisation set up in Switzerland in 1867 with the active participation of Victor Hugo, Giuseppe Garibaldi and other democrats. The League asserted that it was possible to prevent wars by creating the “United States of Europe.” Its leaders did not disclose the social sources of wars and often confined anti-militarist activity to mere declarations. At the General Council meeting of August 13, 1867 Marx spoke against the International’s official participation in the League’s Inaugural Congress, since this would have meant solidarity with its bourgeois programme, but recommended that some members of the International should attend the Congress in their personal capacity in order to support revolutionary-democratic decisions (see Marx’s letter to Engels of September 4, 1867).

9. On page 5 of his Arbeiterlesebuch Lassalle quotes a passage about the “iron law of wages” from his pamphlet Offnes Antwortschreiben an das Central-Comite zur Berufung eines Allgemeinen Deutschen Arbeitercongresses zu Leipzig, Zurich, 1863, pp. 15-16.

10. Philippe Joseph Buchez, one of the first ideologists of the so-called Christian socialism, advanced a plan for the establishment of workers’ producer associations with the aid of the state.

11. On October 12, 1875 Engels wrote to Bebel concerning this programme that, since both workers and their political opponents “interpreted it communistically,” “it is this circumstance alone which has made it possible for Marx and myself not to disassociate ourselves publicly from a programme such as this. So long as our opponents as well as the workers continue to read our views into that programme, we are justified in saying nothing about it.”

12. In March 1872 August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht were sentenced to two years’ confinement in a fortress for their adhesion to the International Working Men’s Association and their socialist views. In April Bebel was sentenced, in addition, to nine months’ imprisonment and deprived of his mandate as a Reichstag member for “insulting His Majesty.” Liebknecht was released on April 15, 1874, while Bebel was freed on April 1, 1875.

Marx to W. Bracke

In Brunswick

Abstract

Written: May 5, 1875;

Source: Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume Three, p. 11 - 12;

Publisher: Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1970;

First Published: Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 1, No. 18, 1890-91;

Online Version: marxists.org 1999;

Transcription/Markup: Brian Baggins.

London, 5 May 1875

Dear Bracke,

When you have read the following critical marginal notes on the Unity Programme, would you be so good as to send them on to Geib and Auer, Bebel and Liebknecht for examination. I am exceedingly busy and have to overstep by far the limit of work allowed me by the doctors. Hence it was anything but a “pleasure” to write such a lengthy screed. It was, however, necessary so that the steps to be taken by me later on would not be misinterpreted by our friends in the Party for whom this communication is intended.

After the Unity Congress has been held, Engels and I will publish a short statement to the effect that our position is altogether remote from the said programme of principle and that we have nothing to do with it.

This is indispensable because the opinion – the entirely erroneous opinion – is held abroad and assiduously nurtured by enemies of the Party that we secretly guide from here the movement of the so-called Eisenach Party. In a Russian book [Statism and Anarchy] that has recently appeared, Bakunin still makes me responsible, for example, not only for all the programmes, etc., of that party but even for every step taken by Liebknecht from the day of his cooperation with the People's Party.

Apart from this, it is my duty not to give recognition, even by diplomatic silence, to what in my opinion is a thoroughly objectionable programme that demoralises the Party.

Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes. If, therefore, it was not possible – and the conditions of the item did not permit it – to go beyond the Eisenach programme, one should simply have concluded an agreement for action against the common enemy. But by drawing up a programme of principles (instead of postponing this until it has been prepared for by a considerable period of common activity) one sets up before the whole world landmarks by which it measures the level of the Party movement.

The Lassallean leaders came because circumstances forced them to. If they had been told in advance that there would be haggling about principles, they would have had to be content with a programme of action or a plan of organisation for common action. Instead of this, one permits them to arrive armed with mandates, recognises these mandates on one's part as binding, and thus surrenders unconditionally to those who are themselves in need of help. To crown the whole business, they are holding a congress before the Congress of Compromise, while one's own party is holding its congress post festum. One had obviously had a desire to stifle all criticism and to give one's own party no opportunity for reflection. One knows that the mere fact of unification is satisfying to the workers, but it is a mistake to believe that this momentary success is not bought too dearly.

For the rest, the programme is no good, even apart from its sanctification of the Lassallean articles of faith.

I shall be sending you in the near future the last parts of the French edition of Capital. The printing was held up for a considerable time by a ban of the French Government. The thing will be ready this week or the beginning of next week. Have you received the previous six parts? Please let me have the address of Bernhard Becker, to whom I must also send the final parts.

The bookshop of the Volksstaat has peculiar ways of doing things. Up to this moment, for example, I have not been sent a single copy of the Cologne Communist Trial.

With best regards,

Yours,

Karl Marx

Friedrich Engels to August Bebel in Leipzig, 12 October 1875

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Dear Bebel

Your letter fully confirms our view that the unification was precipitate on our part and bears within itself the germ of future disunion. It would be well if this disunion could be postponed until after the next Reichstag elections... [1]

The programme [2] as it is now, consists of three parts:

1) Of Lassallean propositions and slogans, the adoption of which remains a disgrace to our Party. When two factions want to agree on a joint programme they include the points on which they concur and do not touch upon those they are unable to agree. True, Lassallean state assistance was in the Eisenach programme, but as one of many transitional measures and, according to all I have heard, it would almost certainly have been thrown overboard, on Bracke’s [3] motion, at this year’s Congress had it not been for the unification. Now it figures as the sole and infallible panacea for all social ailments. It was an immense moral defeat for our Party to allow the ‘iron law of wages’ and other Lassallean phrases to be foisted upon it. It became converted to the Lassallean creed. That simply cannot be argued away. This part of the programme is the Caudine yoke [4] under which our Party crawled to the greater glory of the holy Lassalle.

2) Of democratic demands which have been drawn up wholly in the spirit and style of the People’s Party. [5]

3) Of demands made on the ‘present-day state’ (it is not clear on whom the other ‘demands’ are made), which are very confused and illogical.

4) Of general principles, mostly borrowed from the Communist Manifesto and the Rules of the International, but which have been so re-edited that they contain either utterly false propositions or pure nonsense, as Marx has shown in detail in the essay known to you. [6]

The whole thing is untidy, confused, disconnected, illogical and discreditable. If the bourgeois press possessed a single person of critical mind, he would have taken this programme apart phrase by phrase, investigated the real content of each phrase, demonstrated its nonsense with the utmost clarity, revealed its contradictions and economic howlers (for instance, that the instruments of labour are today ‘the monopoly of the capitalist class’, as if there were no owners of land; the talk about ‘the freeing of labour’ instead of the freeing of the working class, for labour itself is much too free nowadays!) and made our whole Party look frightfully ridiculous. Instead of that the asinine bourgeois papers took this programme quite seriously, read into it what it does not contain and interpreted it communistically. The workers seem to be doing the same. It is this circumstance alone that made it possible for Marx and me not to dissociate ourselves publicly from such a programme. So long as our opponents and likewise the workers view this programme as embodying our intentions we can afford to keep quiet about it.

If you are satisfied with the result achieved in the question of personal composition we must have greatly reduced our demands. Two of ours and three Lassalleans! So here too ours are not allies enjoying equal rights but the vanquished, who are outvoted from the very start. The activities of the Committee, [7] as far as we know them, are also not edifying: 1) Decision not to include in the list of Party literature two works on Lassalleanism by Bracke and B Becker; [8] if this decision has been revoked it is not due either to the Committee or to Liebknecht; 2) Instructions to Vahlteich [9] forbidding him to accept the post of correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung offered him by Sonnemann. [10] Sonnemann himself had told this to Marx, who met him when he passed through Frankfurt. What surprises me even more than the arrogance of the Committee and the readiness with which Vahlteich submitted instead of letting them go whistle is the enormous stupidity of this decision. The Committee should rather have seen to it that a paper like the Frankfurter Zeitung is served everywhere only by our people...

You are quite right when you say that the whole thing is an educational experiment which even under those circumstances promises to be very successful. The unification as such will be a great success if it lasts two years. But it undoubtedly was to be had much more cheaply.

Notes

1. Engels alludes to the elections that were to take place in January 1877. The German Socialist Workers Party received approximately half a million votes in these elections and twelve of its candidates were elected to the Reichstag – Progress Publishers.

2. The programme of the Socialist Workers Party of Germany adopted at the Gotha Unity Congress in May 1875 – Progress Publishers.

3. Wilhelm Bracke (1842-1880) – German Social-Democrat, a founder (1869) and leader of Social-Democratic Workers Party (Eisenachers), close associate of Marx and Engels, fought against Lassalleanism, opposed (though not consistently enough) opportunistic elements in Social-Democratic Party – Progress Publishers.

4. In 321BC when a Roman army was defeated by the Samnites in the Caudine Forks it was compelled to pass under the yoke, which was considered one of the greatest humiliations that could be imposed – Progress Publishers.

5. The National-Liberal Party – the party of the German, and especially the Prussian, bourgeoisie, came into being in the autumn of 1866 following the split of the Progressive Party. The principal aim of the National-Liberals was the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership. The German People’s Party formed in 1865 consisted of petty-bourgeois democrats and to some extent of bourgeois democrats, mainly from the South German states. The People’s Party, as distinct from the National-Liberals, was opposed to the hegemony of Prussia in Germany and advocated the creation of a ‘Greater Germany’ which was to include both Prussia and Austria. It favoured the establishment of a federal German state and was against the creation of a united, centralised democratic republic – Progress Publishers.

6. Engels refers to the Critique of the Gotha Programme – Progress Publishers.

7. The reference is to the Executive of the Socialist Workers Party of Germany – Progress Publishers.

8. Bracke had informed Engels in a letter written between 28 June and 7 July 1875, that the leadership of the Socialist Workers Party had decided to remove two anti-Lassallean works – W Bracke, Der Lassalle’sche Vorschlag (Lassalle’s Proposal, Braunschweig, 1873), and B Becker, Geschichte der Arbeiter-Agitation Ferdinand Lassalles (History of Ferdinand Lassalle’s Agitation Among the Workers, Braunschweig, 1874), which had both been printed in Bracke’s publishing house – from its list of party literature. After Bracke’s vigorous protests the decision was reversed. Bernhard Becker (1826-1882) – German publicist, Chairman of General Association of German Workers (1864-65) after Lassalle’s death, later joined the Eisenachers – Progress Publishers.

9. Karl Julius Vahlteich (1839-1915) – German right-wing Social-Democrat, shoemaker, one of founders and first Secretary of General Association of German Workers, later member of Eisenachers’ party, moved to USA where he took an active part in working-class movement – Progress Publishers.

10. Leopold Sonnemann (1831-1909) – German democrat, founder and editor of Frankfurter Zeitung – Progress Publishers.

Engels to Bebel

Abstracts

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

October 15, 1875

Marx seriously complained about the incomprehensible note in No. 104 to the passage in his Anti-Proudhon (“the Socialists as well as the economists condemned combinations”), saying that those were “Socialists of the Proudhon breed.” In the first place there was not a single Socialist of the Proudhon breed in existence at that time except Proudhon himself. In the second place Marx’s assertion is true of all Socialists who made their appearance up to that time (with the exception of us two, who were unknown in France) in so far as they had occasion to deal with combinations — with Robert Owen leading the procession. The same applies to the Owenists and among the French to Cabet. As there was no right of combination in France this question was little touched upon there. But since before Marx there existed only feudal, bourgeois, petty-bourgeois and utopian socialism, and socialism blended from various of these elements. It was clear that all these Socialists, each of whom claimed to possess a definite panacea and stood outside the real working-class movement, portrayed every form of the real movement, hence also combinations and strikes, as a false path which diverted the masses from the only way that leads to salvation, the way of the true faith. You see that the note was not only wrong but wholly absurd. ...

But it seems to be impossible for our people, at least a number of them, to confine themselves in their articles to what they have really grasped. In proof take the endless columns theoretically-socialist in content which have been penned by Kz, Symmachos [1] and all the rest of that crowd, whose economic blunders, erroneous views and ignorance of socialist literature furnish the best means of thoroughly destroying the theoretical superiority of the German movement up to now. Marx was on the point of issuing an explanation on account of this note.

But enough of complaints. I hope the aspirations and expectations cherished in connection with the imprudently precipitated unification will materialise, that it will be possible to bring the mass of the Lassalleans from their cult of Lassalle to a sensible conception of their real class position, and that the split, which will come as surely as 2 × 2 = 4, will take place under circumstances favourable to us. That I should also believe all this, would be asking too much.

Apart from Germany and Austria the country on which we should focus our attention remains Russia. The government there, just as in this country, is the chief ally of the movement. But a much better one than our Bismarck, Stieber and Tessendorf. [2] The Russian court party, which is now fairly firmly in the saddle, tries to take back all the concessions made during the years of the ‘new era’ that was ushered in in 1861, and with genuinely Russian methods at that. So now again only ‘sons of the upper classes’ are to be allowed to study, and in order to carry out this policy all others are made to fail in the graduation examinations. In 1873 alone this was the fate that awaited 24,000 young people whose entire careers were blocked, as they were expressly forbidden to become even elementary schoolteachers. And yet people are surprised at the spread of ‘nihilism’ in Russia. If Walster, who knows Russian, were to go through some of the pamphlets written by the liberal opposition and published by B Behr in Berlin [3] or if someone could be found with an adequate knowledge of Polish to read the Lemberg newspapers (for example, Dziennik Polski or the Gazeta Narodowa) and make excerpts of these things, the Volksstaat could become the best paper in Europe on Russian affairs. It almost looks as if the next dance is going to start in Russia. And if this happens while the inevitable war between the German-Prussian empire and Russia is in progress – which is very likely – repercussions in Germany are also inevitable.

Marx sends his best regards to you.

Sincerely yours

F Engels

Best regards to Liebknecht.

Notes

1. A pen-name used by Karl Kautsky – Progress Publishers.

2. Wilhelm Stieber (1818-1882) – Prussian police officer, Chief of Prussian Police (1850-60), an organiser of Cologne Communist Trial and principle witness at this trial (1852), head of Prussian intelligence service (1870-71); Hermann Ernst Christian Tessendorf (1831-1895) – Prussian Prosecutor, in 1873 became member of Berlin City Court, from 1885 President of Criminal Chamber of Supreme Court in Berlin, organised persecution of Social-Democrats – Progress Publishers.

3. August Otto-Walster – German Social-Democrat, journalist; Behr – Berlin publisher – Progress Publishers.

Engels to Lavrov

12 November 1875

Source: Labour Monthly, July 1936, pp. 437-442, “Engels and Darwin – Letter to Lavrov,” edited by Dona Torr;

Transcribed: by Ted Crawford.

The letter from Friedrich Engels to P.L. Lavrov, here published for the first time in English, has been specially translated and annotated from a facsimile of the original, kindly supplied to the LABOUR MONTHLY by the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute in Moscow.

London, 12th Nov., 1875.

My dear Monsieur Lavrov,[1]

Now that I have returned from a visit to Germany I have at last got to your article, which I have just read with much interest. Here are my observations upon it, written in German, as this enables me to be more concise.[2]

(1) Of the Darwinian theory I accept the theory of evolution but only take Darwin’s method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection)[3] as the first, provisional, and incomplete expression of a newly-discovered fact. Before Darwin, the very people (Vogt, Buchner, Moleschott, etc.) who now see nothing but the struggle for existence everywhere were stressing precisely the co-operation in organic nature – how the vegetable kingdom supplies the animal kingdom with oxygen and foodstuffs while the animal kingdom in turn supplies the vegetable kingdom with carbonic acid and manures, as Liebig, in particular, had emphasised. Both conceptions have a certain justification within certain limits, but each is as one-sided and narrow as the other. The interaction of natural bodies – whether animate or inanimate – includes alike harmony and collision, struggle and co-operation. If, therefore, a so-called natural scientist permits himself to subsume the whole manifold wealth of historical development under the one-sided and meagre phrase, “struggle for existence,” a phrase which even in the sphere of nature can only be taken with a grain of salt, such a proceeding is its own condemnation.

(2) Of the three convinced Darwinists cited, Hellwald alone seems to be worth mentioning. Seidlitz is only a lesser light at best, and Robert Byr is a novelist, whose novel Three Times is appearing at the moment in By Land and Sea – just the right place for his whole rodomontade too.

(3) Without disputing the merits of your method of attack, which I might call a psychological one, I should myself have chosen a different method. Each of us is more or less influenced by the intellectual medium in which he chiefly moves. For Russia, where you know your public better than I do, and for a propagandist journal appealing to the bond of sentiment, to moral feeling, your method is probably the better one. For Germany, where false sentimentality has done and is still doing such enormous harm, it would be unsuitable, and would be misunderstood and distorted sentimentally. What we need is hate rather than love – to begin with, at any rate – and, above all, to get rid of the last remnants of German idealism and instate material facts in their historic rights. I should, therefore, attack these bourgeois Darwinists something after this fashion (and shall perhaps do so in time):-

The whole Darwinian theory of the struggle for existence is simply the transference from society to animate nature of Hobbes’ theory of the war of every man against every man and the bourgeois economic theory of competition, along with the Malthusian theory of population. This feat having been accomplished – (as indicated under (1) I dispute its unqualified justification, especially where the Malthusian theory is concerned) – the same theories are next transferred back again from organic nature to history and their validity as eternal laws of human society declared to have been proved. The childishness of this procedure is obvious, it is not worth wasting words over. But if I wanted to go into it further I should do it in such a way that I exposed them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad natural scientists and philosophers.

(4) The essential difference between human and animal society is that animals are at most gatherers whilst men are producers. This single but cardinal distinction alone makes it impossible simply to transfer the laws of animal societies to human societies. It makes it possible that, as you justly remark, “Man waged a struggle not only for existence but for enjoyment and for the increase of his enjoyments ... he was ready to renounce the lower enjoyments for the sake of the higher.” Without contesting your further deductions from this, the further conclusions I should draw from my premises would be the following: – At a certain stage, therefore, human production reaches a level where not only essential necessities but also luxuries are produced, even if, for the time being, they are only produced for a minority. Hence the struggle for existence – if we allow this category as valid here for a moment – transforms itself into a struggle for enjoyments, a struggle no longer for the mere means of existence but for the means of development, socially produced means of development, and at this stage the categories of the animal kingdom are no longer applicable. But if, as has now come about, production in its capitalist form produces a far greater abundance of the means of existence and development than capitalist society can consume, because capitalist society keeps the great mass of the real producers artificially removed from the means of existence and development; if this society is forced, by the law of its own existence, continually to increase production already too great for it, and, therefore, periodically every ten years, reaches a point where it itself destroys a mass not only of products but of productive forces, what sense is there still left in the talk about the “struggle for existence?” The struggle for existence can then only consist in the producing class taking away the control of production and distribution from the class hitherto entrusted with it but now no longer capable of it; that, however, is the Socialist revolution.

Incidentally it is to be noted that the mere consideration of past history as a series of class struggles is enough to reveal all the superficiality of the conception of that same history as a slightly varied version of the “struggle for existence.” I should therefore never make that concession to these spurious natural scientists.

(5) For the same reason I should have given a different formulation to your statement, which is substantially quite correct, “that the idea of solidarity, as a means of lightening the struggle, could ultimately expand to a point at which it embraces all humanity, counterposing it as a solidarised society of brothers to the rest of the world of minerals, vegetables and animals.”

(6) On the other hand I cannot agree with you that the war of every man against every man was the first phase of human development. In my opinion the social instinct was one of the most essential levers in the development of man from the ape. The first men must have lived gregariously and so far back as we can see we find that this was the case.

* * *

17th November. I have been interrupted afresh and take up these lines again to-day in order to send them to you. You will see that my remarks apply rather to the form, the method, of your attack than to its basis. I hope you will find them clear enough I have written them hurriedly and on re-reading them should like to change many words, but I am afraid of making the manuscript too illegible.

With cordial greetings,

F. ENGELS.

* * *

1. Peter Lavrovitch Lavrov (1823-1900), artillery officer and Professor of Higher Mathematics at the School of Artillery in Petersburg, joined (1862) the early revolutionary organisation “Land and Freedom” of the Narodniki – who looked to the Mir (peasant village commune) as the basis of Russian emancipation. His famous Historical Letters (x168-9), which raised history and social progress to the same level of importance as natural science and emphasised the vast debt owed by the intelligentsia to the peasants and workers, had an immense influence on the “To the People” movement of the young intellectuals, whose concern hitherto had been mainly with natural science and utilitarian theory. Lavrov, banished in 1866, escaped to Paris (1870), joined the First International, put his military knowledge at the disposal of the Communards (1870), came to London to get help for them and so met Marx and Engels. He declared himself a Marxist, but never shed the “psychological method” to which Engels here mildly refers. His approach was always from the standpoint of the subjective individual and his ethical ideas; his Essay on the History of Thought (1875) treats evolution as the evolution of thought. At this period he was editing the journal Vperyod (Forward, 1873-78), and aimed at conciliation between his followers and the Bakunists (“Lavrov’s soft sawder” Marx called it); he estranged both sections, left the movement because he disapproved of terrorism, but returned (1881) to the Narodovoltsi and gave them active literary help from then onwards.

2. The first and last paragraphs of the letter are written in French; the rest is in German, excepting the two quotations from Lavrov’s article, and a few phrases, which are in Russian.

3. This parenthesis is written in English.

4. All references are to English editions unless otherwise indicated.

* * *

The substance of this letter, omitting minor criticisms of Lavrov’s article, will be found in one of the Notes in Dialektik und Natur (Marx-Engels Archiv. II., page 190 cf. page 282) the work on the dialectic of nature for which Engels was making preparatory studies from 1873 onwards and which the death of Marx (1883) prevented him from completing.

(1) Marx, Engels and Darwin. Marx and Engels fully appreciated Darwin’s great work. As Marx had discovered the law of development in human history so Darwin had discovered the law of development in organic nature, delivering the death-blow to teleology and mechanical determinism, furnishing proof of the dialectic of accident and necessity and giving the basis in natural science for the marxist theory of history. The three decisive 19th century discoveries which transformed natural science “from an empirical into a theoretical science .... a system of materialistic knowledge of nature” were the cell, the transformation of energy, and the theory of evolution called after Darwin. (Engels’ speech at the graveside of Marx, letters and notes in the Selected Correspondence, Ludwig Feuerbach, pp.39-37, Anti-Dühring, pp.79-87)[4] Marx wished to dedicate to Darwin chapters 12 and 13 of the English edition of Capital, Vol. I. (Kerr edition, chapters 14 and 15), but Darwin refused the dedication (for his letter see LABOUR MONTHLY, November, 1931). These chapters deal with the division of labour in manufacture and society and the development of machinery and modern industry: “Darwin has interested us in the history of nature’s technology, i.e., in the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which organs serve as instruments of production for sustaining life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man, of organs that are the material basis of all social organisations, deserve equal attention?” (Capital, Vol. I., page 406, note.)

What Marx and Engels criticised from the first was Darwin’s “crude English method” (Correspondence, pp. 125-126, Marx, Theorien über den Mehrwert (Dietz, 1905) Bd. II., 314, 315) in so naïvely adopting the Malthusian theory of “over-population” and the struggle for existence (see Darwin’s Introduction (1860) to The Origin of Species and his Autobiography, chap. 2). See, however, Engels on Darwin in Anti-Dühring (p.79-87) and the later passage in Natur and Dialektik (Marx-Engels Archiv, Vol. II., p.282). For a full discussion from the biological standpoint see V. L. Komarov’s essay in the symposium, Marxism and Modern Thought (Routledge, 1935).

(3) Hobbes, Malthus, Darwin. “It is remarkable how among beasts and plants Darwin recognises his English society with its division of labour, competition, opening up of new markets, ‘inventions’ and Malthusian ‘struggle for existence.’ It is Hobbes’ war of every man against every man and reminds one of Hegel’s Phenomenology where civil society figures as the ‘spiritual animal kingdom,’ whilst with Darwin the animal kingdom figures as civil society.” (Marx to Engels, June 18, 1862. Gesamtausgabe III., 3). See especially Engels’ letter to Lange and Note, Correspondence, pp. 198-202. For Hobbes (1588-1679) and the state of nature as “the war of every man against every man” – an argument for absolutist government reflecting the dual tendencies of the early bourgeois period – see Leviathan (1651), Engels’ Preface 1892 to Socialism Utopian and Scientific, and his letter to Schmidt, 27 October, 1890; also B. Hessen, “The Social and Economic Roots of Newton’s Principia” in Science at the Crossroads (1931). The main thesis of Parson Malthus’ Essay on Population (1798 and 1805), which reflected the trade crisis, high prices and heavy poor-rates of the Napoleonic war period, was “that the power of population is indefinitely greater than the power of the earth to produce subsistence for man”; hence war, famine and pestilence plus “moral restraint” as necessary checks, and “over-population” as the incentive to endeavour. The Malthusian corollary that the poor should be stopped from breeding, to which practical expression was given in the new Poor Law of 1834, is an extreme variant, appearing under various pseudo-scientific guises in times of economic crisis, of the more constant implicit theory that “the lower classes must be kept poor or they will never be industrious” (Young). Both forms flourish to-day, see the statistics of Sir John Orr and Dr. G. C. M. M’Gonigle. Is nature or human society to blame for economic misery? was, roughly, the question which divided Malthus and his disciples from Godwin, Owen and the early Radical economists. That the fault lay with the property system and not with “nature” was reiterated by Cobbett (e.g., Rural Rides, Political Register) and the Chartists (see any Chartist paper on Malthus or Lord Brougham in the early thirties); in 1843 the young Engels gave the scientific answer when he attacked the “laws” of “diminishing productivity” and “over-population” in his Outlines of a Criticism of Political Economy (Gesamtausgabe I., 2), see Correspondence, pp. 32-33, 198, and for Ricardo’s theory of rent in this connection, pp. 27-33, Marx, Capital, Vol. III., pp. 760-772 and Theorien über den Mehrwert (Bd. II. 304-317; cf III., 1-65). For facts see R.E. Prothero English Farming (1927), p.272, etc. The later combination of the free competition, self-help and survival of the fittest doctrine of the “free-traders” – of philosophic radicalism, utilitarianism and bourgeois Darwinism – composing the ideology of laissez-faire, though superficially familiar, has never been fully studied. As an introduction see references Marx-Engels Correspondence, pp. 34, 35, and for social illustration, Beatrice Webb, My Apprenticeship (1926).

(4) “The essential difference between human and animal society.” In Work as the Factor in the Development of Apes into Men (c.1876), Engels argues that the differentiation of the hand from the foot, accomplished after thousands of years of struggle, was the prerequisite of man’s development from the ape. Specialisation of the hand means the tool, and the tool means the specific activity of man, the transforming reaction of man to nature – production. (Not, of course, implying the “Yankee” definition of man as “a tool making animal” cf. Capital, Vol. I., p.358.) Contrast Huxley’s opposite valuation of the hand and foot, Man’s Place in Nature, (Collected Essays, Vol. VII., p.130.) See too J.D. Bernal, Engels and Science (LABOUR MONTHLY Pamphlets No. 6, 2d. Cf. also Komarov op. cit.) Engels’ fundamental dialectical conception is that expressed throughout Capital – that man the worker transforms himself in the process of transforming nature – work made man. The argument here is completed in par. 6 – “The social instinct,” etc. “The first men must have lived gregariously.” See Capital, Vol. I., p.386, and Engels’ Origin of the Family.

“Capitalist society produces more than it can consume.” Cf. Correspondence, pp. 198-202, and Capital Vol. I., ch. 32. “Periodically, every ten years” .... Marx and Engels studied the ten-year cyclic crises in England during the period of rising capitalism when Britain held the world trade monopoly. In 1886, Engels noted that since Britain had lost this monopoly “the period of crises as known hitherto is closed .... We have entered a period incomparably more dangerous to the existence of the old Society than the period of ten-year crises.” (Letter to Bebel, January 20-23.) The “great depression” which marked our transition to the epoch of imperialism was only in its earliest stage in 1875.

Dona Torr.

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov

In London

Abstract

Written: Nov. 12-17, 1875;

Transcription/Markup: Brian Baggins;

Online Version: Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.

London, Nov. 12-17, 1875

1) Of the Darwinian doctrine I accept the theory of evolution, but Darwin’s method of proof (struggle for life, natural selection) I consider only a first, provisional, imperfect expression of a newly discovered fact. Until Darwin’s time the very people who now see everywhere only struggle for existence (Vogt, Búchner, Moleschott, etc.) emphasized precisely cooperation in organic nature, the fact that the vegetable kingdom supplies oxygen and nutriment to the animal kingdom and conversely the animal kingdom supplies plants with carbonic acid and manure, which was particularly stressed by Liebig. Both conceptions are justified within certain limits, but the one is as one-sided and narrowminded as the other. The interaction of bodies in nature – inanimate as well as animate – includes both harmony and collision, struggle and cooperation. When therefore a self-styled natural scientist takes the liberty of reducing the whole of historical development with all its wealth and variety to the one-sided and meager phrase “struggle for existence,” a phrase which even in the sphere of nature can be accepted only cum grano salis, such a procedure really contains its own condemnation. [...]

3) I do not deny the advantages of your method of attack, which I would like to call psychological; but I would have chosen another method. Everyone of us is influenced more or less by the intellectual environment in which he mostly moves. For Russia, where you know your public better than I, and for a propaganda journal that appeals to the “restraining effect", [a quote from Lavrov’s article] the moral sense, your method is probably the better one. For Germany, where false sentimentality has done and still does so much damage, it would not fit; it would be misunderstood, sentimentality perverted. In our country it is hatred rather than love that is needed – at least in the immediate future – and more than anything else a shedding of the last remnants of German idealism, an establishment of the material facts in their historical rights. I should therefore attack – and perhaps will when the time comes – these bourgeois Darwinists in about the following manner:

The whole Darwinists teaching of the struggle for existence is simply a transference from society to living nature of Hobbes’s doctrine of bellum omnium contra omnes [from Hobbes’s De Cive and Leviathan, chapter 13-14] and of the bourgeois-economic doctrine of competition together with Malthus’s theory of population. When this conjurer’s trick has been performed (and I questioned its absolute permissibility, as I have indicated in point 1, particularly as far as the Malthusian theory is concerned), the same theories are transferred back again from organic nature into history and it is now claimed that their validity as eternal laws of human society has been proved. The puerility of this procedure is so obvious that not a word need be said about it. But if I wanted to go into the matter more thoroughly I should do so by depicting them in the first place as bad economists and only in the second place as bad naturalists and philosophers.

4) The essential difference between human and animal society consists in the fact that animals at most collect while men produce. This sole but cardinal difference alone makes it impossible simply to transfer laws of animal societies to human societies. It makes it possible, as you properly remark:

“for man to struggle not only for existence but also for pleasures and for the increase of his pleasures,... To be ready to renounce his lower pleasures for the highest pleasure.” [Engels’ italics – quoted from Lavrov’s Sierra article]

Without disputing your further conclusions from this I would, proceeding from my own premises, make the following inferences: At a certain stage the production of man attains such a high-level that not only necessaries but also luxuries, at first, true enough, only for a minority, are produced. The struggle for existence – if we permit this category for the moment to be valid – is thus transformed into a struggle for pleasures, no longer for mere means of subsistence but for means of development, socially produced means of development, and to this stage the categories derived from the animal kingdom are no longer applicable. But if, as has now happened, production in its capitalist form produces a far greater quantity of means of subsistence and development than capitalist society can consume because it keeps the great mass of real producers artificially away from these means of subsistence and development; if this society is forced by its own law of life constantly to increase this output which is already too big for it and therefore periodically, every 10 years, reaches the point where it destroys not only a mass of products but even productive forces – what sense is there left in all this talk of “struggle for existence”? The struggle for existence can then consist only in this: that the producing class takes over the management of production and distribution from the class that was hitherto entrusted with it but has now become incompetent to handle it, and there you have the socialist revolution.

Apropos. Even the mere contemplation of previous history as a series of class struggles suffices to make clear the utter shallowness of the conception of this history as a feeble variety of the “struggle for existence.” I would therefore never do this favor to these false naturalists.

5) For the same reason I would have changed accordingly the formulation of the following proposition of yours, which is essentially quite correct:

“that to facilitate the struggle the idea of solidarity could finally... grow to a point where it will embrace all mankind and oppose it, as a society of brothers living in solidarity, to the rest of the world – the world of minerals, plants, and animals.”

6) On the other hand I cannot agree with you that the “bellum omnium contra omnes” was the first phase of human development. In my opinion, the social instinct was one of the most essential levers of the evolution of man from the ape. The first man must have lived in bands and as far as we can peer into the past we find that this was the case....

[ ....]

1876

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 4 April

Engels to Philipp Pauli. 25 April

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 18 May

Engels to Marx. 24 May

Marx to Engels. 25 May

Engels to Marx. 28 May

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 14 June

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 14 June

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 14 June

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 15 June

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 16 June

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 30 June

Engels to Marx. 25 July

Marx to Engels. 26 July

Engels to Philipp Pauli. 11 August

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 15 August

Marx to Engels. 19 August

Engels to Jenny Marx. 20 August

Engels to Marx. 25 August

Engels to Ida Pauli. 27 August

Marx to Max Oppenheim. 30 August

Marx to Jenny Longuet. End August

Marx to Max Oppenheim. 1 September

Marx to Max Oppenheim. 6 September

Marx to Max Oppenheim. 9 September

Marx to Ida Pauli. 10 September

Marx to Max Oppenheim. 12 September

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 15 September

Marx to Ferdinand Fleckles. 21 September

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 23 September

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 30 September

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 7 October

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 7 October

Marx to Leo Frankel. 13 October

Engels to Ernst Dronke. 15 October

Marx to Thomas Allsop. 16 October

Engels to Emil Blank. 16 October

Engels to Thomas Allsop. 17 October

Engels to Ernst Dronke. 20 October

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 20 October

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 21 October

Engels to Ernst Dronke. 1 November

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 6 November

Marx to Collet Dobson Collet. 10 November

Engels to Ernst Dronke. 13 November

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 20 November

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 20 November

Engels to Gustav Rasch. End November

Marx to Collet Dobson Collet. 9 December

Marx to Engels. 11 December

Engels to Philipp Pauli. 16 December

Engels to Hermann Engels. 18 December

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 21 December

Letter from Engels to Marx

In London

Abstracts

Written: May 28, 1876;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence, International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999.

Ramsgate, May 28, 1876

It is all very well for you to talk. You can lie warm in bed and study ground rent in general and Russian agrarian conditions in particular with nothing to disturb you — but I am to sit on the hard bench, swill cold wine, suddenly interrupt everything again and get after the blood of the boring Dühring. However, there is doubtless nothing else for it, even if I involve myself in a controversy of which it is impossible to see the end; after all, I shall have no peace otherwise, and then friend Most's panegyric on Dühring's Course of Philosophy has shown me exactly where and how to direct the attack. This book will have to be included because on many decisive points it better exposes the weak sides and weak foundations of the arguments put forward in the Economy. I am ordering it at once. There is no actual philosophy in it whatever — formal logic, dialectics, metaphysics, etc. — it is supposed rather to represent a general theory of science in which nature, history, society, state, law, etc., are treated in alleged inner interconnection. So again there is a whole section in which the society of the future, the so-called "free" society, is described in its less economic aspects, and among other things the scheme of education for the primary and secondary schools is already laid down. Here, therefore, one gets the banality in an even simpler form than in the economic book and taking both works together can expose the fellow from this side at the same time.

For the noble gentleman's conception of history — that there was nothing but rubbish until Dühring arrived — this book also has the advantage that here one can quote his own crass words. Anyhow, I have him on the hip now. My plan is ready — J'ai mon plan. First of all I shall deal with the trash in a purely objective and apparently serious way, and then the treatment will become sharper according to the degree in which the proofs of the nonsense on the one hand and of the platitudes on the other begin to pile up, until at last we get to a regular hailstorm. In this fashion Most and Co. are deprived of their excuse about "unkindness" and Dühring gets his deserts all the same. These gentlemen must be shown that there is more than one way by which one can settle accounts with people of this kind.

I hope Wilhelm [Liebknecht] will publish Most's article in the Neue Welt, for which it was obviously written. As usual Most cannot copy and so makes Dühring responsible for the most comic imbecilities in the way of natural science, e.g., the breaking off of the rings (according to Kant's theory) — from the fixed stars!

With Wilhelm it is not merely the lack of manuscripts — that could be got over by other articles on questions of the day, etc., as was done in Hepner's and Blos's time. It is his passion for supplementing the deficiencies of our theory, for having an answer to every philistine's objection and a picture of the society of the future because after all the philistine asks questions about it; and, in addition, for being as independent of us theoretically as possible (in which, owing to his total lack of all theory, he has always succeeded far better than he himself knows). But by all this he puts me into a position in which I cannot but say to myself that Dühring is at any rate an educated man compared with the theoretical bunglers of the Volksstaat, and his works are at any rate better than those of these subjectively and objectively obscure gentlemen....

My re-reading of ancient history and my studies in natural science have been of great service to me for Dühring and make the thing much easier for me in many ways. Especially with natural science I find that the ground has become considerably more familiar to me and that, though I have to exercise great caution, I can nevertheless move on it with a certain amount of freedom and security. I am also beginning to see the end of this job too. The thing is beginning to take shape in my head, and bummelling here at the seaside where I can let the details go round in my mind has helped this on a good deal. In this enormous field it is absolutely necessary to interrupt one's regular grind from time to time and to digest what one has gulped down.

Herr Helmholz has never stopped chasing round the ‘thing-in-itself’ since 1853 and has still not got clear about it. The man is not ashamed of calmly allowing the nonsense he had printed before Darwin to be still reprinted over again. ...

Lizzie and I send our best regards to all of you. Friday we shall return to London. I am very glad Pumps has developed her style so well. I notice it of course too, but not so much.

Yours

FE

1877

Marx to Maxim Kovalevsky. 9 January

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 9 January

Engels to Hermann Engels. 9 January

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 21 January

Marx to Ferdinand Fleckles. 21 January

Marx to Wilhelm Alexander Freund. 21 January

Marx to Frederic Harrison. 21 January

Marx to Gabriel Deville. 23 January

Engels to Hermann Ramm. 25 January

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 14 February

Engels to Ida Pauli. 14 February

Engels to Marx. 23 February

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 24 February

Engels to Marx. 2 March

Marx to Engels. 3 March

Engels to Friedrich Lessner. 4 March

Marx to Engels. 5 March

Engels to Marx. 6 March

Marx to Engels. 7 March

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 16 March

Marx to Mrs Wollmann. 19 March

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 23 March

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 24 March

Engels to Philipp Pauli. 26 March

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 27 March

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 29 March

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 11 April

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 11 April

Marx to Philip Stephen King. 14 April

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 17 April

Marx to Thomas Allsop. 20 April

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 21 April

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 21 April

Engels to B Lindheimer. 21 April

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 23 April

Engels to Wilhelm Bracke. 24 April

Engels to B Lindheimer. 26 April

Engels to B Lindheimer. 3 or 4 May

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 26 July

Engels to Marx. 27 May

Marx to Engels. 31 May

Engels to Wilhelm Bracke. 25 June

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 2 July

Engels to Marx. 15 July

Marx to Engels. 18 July

Engels to Marx. 19 July

Marx to Engels. 23 July

Engels to Marx. 24 July

Marx to Engels. 25 July

Engels to Franz Wiede. 25 July

Engels to Marx. 31 July

Engels to Natalie Liebknecht. 31 July

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 31 July

Marx to Engels. 1 August

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 1 August

Marx to Engels. 8 August

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 8 August

Marx to Maltman Barry. 15 August

Marx to Engels. 17 August

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 18 August

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 24 August

Engels to Marx. 25 August

Marx to Nikolaus Delius. 25 August

Engels to Natalie Liebknecht. 4 September

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 27 September

Engels to Hermann Engels. 5 October

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 12 October

Engels to Hermann Engels. 13 October

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 19 October

Marx to Wilhelm Bracke. 23 October

Marx to Sibylle Hess. 25 October

Karl Marx to the Editorial Board of the Otechestvenniye Zapiski, November 1877.

Marx to Sigmund Schott. 3 November

Marx to Wilhelm Blos. 10 November

Engels to Ernst Dronke. 20 November

Marx to Sibylle Hess. 29 November

Engels to Marx. End of 1877

Marx To Gabriel Deville

In Paris

[Draft]

Source: MECW, Volume 45, p. 193-4 (translated from the French).

London, 23 January 1877

41 Maitland Park Road, N. W.

Dear Citizen,

On receiving your kind letter of 15 December, I wrote to our friend [Carl] Hirsch about my obligations, stipulated in the contract, to Mr Lachâtre, the publisher of Capital, which do not admit of my agreeing to your project without his authorisation. I then wrote to the latter, and from day to day vainly awaited his reply. Finally, a few days ago, I sent him a registered letter, the first having doubtless been intercepted – an everyday occurrence in the Prusso-German Empire. Pending Mr Lachâtre’s reply, I should further point out that, even should he give his consent, Mr A. Quêst would be quite capable of ordering the confiscation of every ‘summary’ of Capital. Since Mr Lachâtre had been convicted in absentia of ‘communard’ acts and was living abroad as a refugee, the judicial administration of Lachâtre’s booksellers was placed by the Broglie ministry in the hands of Mr Quêst who belongs to the dregs of the conservative party and who has done everything in his power first to hold up the printing of my book and then to prevent its distribution. He would be just the man to lay a trick on you, despite the authorisation from Mr Lachâtre, vis-à-vis whom I am myself bound by a private contract but who, vis-à-vis Mr Quêst, is entirely powerless, since this sequestrator is his legal trustee.

Under the circumstances I think that the best thing would be to put off for the moment ‘a summary’ of Capital, and in the meantime bring out a short review of Économistes) and Mr Laveleye (in the Revue des deux Mondes) have given the French public utterly false notions of Capital. Such a course had also been agreed at the outset by Mr Hirsch and myself.

Please accept my best thanks for your book which you were kind enough to send me and which is distinguished by great stylistic verve and a sound basis.

I trust the incident that has put us in touch with one another will be the starting point of a sustained correspondence.

Yours ever,

K. M.

Marx to Engels

In Ramsgate

Abstract

Written: July 18, 1877;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London,] 18 July 1877

It would certainly be very pleasant if a really scientific socialist journal were to be published. It would provide an opportunity for criticisms or counter-criticisms in which we could discuss theoretical points, expose the utter ignorance of professors and lecturers and at the same time enlighten the minds of the general public--working class or bourgeois. But Wiede's periodical cannot possible be anything but sham-scientific; the same half-educated Knoten and dilettante literary men who make the Neue Welt, Vorwärts, etc., unsafe, necessarily form the majority of his collaborators. Ruthlessness --the first condition of all criticism--is impossible in such company; besides which constant attention has to be paid to making things easily comprehensible, i.e., exposition for the ignorant. Imagine a journal of chemistry where the readers' ignorance of chemistry is constantly assumed as the fundamental presupposition. And apart from all that, the way the people who are necessarily Wiede's collaborators have behaved in the Dühring incident imposes the precaution of keeping oneself as separate from these gentlemen as political party conditions allow. Their motto seems to be: Whoever criticises his opponent by abusing him is a man of feeling, but whoever defames his opponent by genuine criticism is an unworthy character.

Marx to Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

July 25, 1877

What do you think of the workers in the United States? This first eruption against the oligarchy of associated capital which has arisen since the Civil War will of course be put down, but it could quite well form the starting point for the establishment of a serious labour party in the United States. There are moreover two favourable circumstances. The policy of the new President will turn the Negroes into allies of the workers, and the large expropriations of land (especially fertile land) in favour of railway, mining, etc., companies will convert the farmers of the West, who are already very disenchanted, into allies of the workers. Thus a fine mess is in the offing over there, and transferring the centre of the International to the United States might, post festum, turn out to have been a peculiarly opportune move.

Marx to Engels

In Ramsgate

Abstract

Written: August 1, 1877;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence and Marx & Engels on the Irish Question;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968) and Progress Publishers (1971);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London,] 1 August 1877

A few days ago the cheery little hunchback Wedde turned up – only to disappear again to Germany shortly after. He had a pressing commission from Geib to enlist you and me for the Zukunft. I made no secret to him whatever of our intentions of abstaining, to his great sorrow, and of our reasons for this, and explained to him at the same time that when our time allows or circumstances demand that we should again come forward as propagandists, we, as internationalists, are in no wise bound or pledged to attach ourselves to Germany, the beloved Fatherland.

In Hamburg he had seen Dr. Höchberg and ditto Wiede; the latter, he said, was rather tinged with Berlin superficiality and arrogance, but he liked Höchberg, who, however, was still suffering badly from “modern mythology.” For when the little chap (Wedde) was in London for the first time I used the expression “modern mythology” as a designation for the goddesses of “Justice, Freedom, Equality, etc.” who were now all the rage again; this made a deep impression on him, as he has himself done much in the service of these higher beings. He thought Höchberg rather Dühringised – and Wedde has a sharper nose than Liebknecht.

...

The Irish skirmishes in the House of Commons are very amusing. Parnell, etc., told Barry that the worst was the attitude of Butt, who hopes to be appointed judge and has threatened to resign his leadership; and that he could do them great harm in Ireland. Barry mentioned Butt’s letter to the General Council of the International. They would like to have this document to prove that his stand-offishness in relation to the intransigents is mere pretence. But how am I to find the thing now? [321]

Notes

321. Isaac Butt’s letter from Dublin was read at the meeting of the General Council of the First International on January 4, 1870. Butt offered his offices in bringing about a union between English and Irish workers.

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Written: September 27, 1877;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 27 September 1877

This crisis [Russo-Turkish war and Near Eastern crisis] is a new turning point in European history. Russia has long been standing on the threshold of an upheaval, all the elements of it are prepared--I have studied conditions there from the original Russian sources, unofficial and official (the latter only available to a few people but got for me through friends in Petersburg). The gallant Turks have hastened the explosion by years with the thrashing they have inflicted, not only upon the Russian army and Russian finances, but in a highly personal and individual manner on the dynasty commanding the army (the Tsar, the heir to the throne and six other Romanovs). The upheaval will begin secundum artem [according to the rules of the art] with some playing at constitutionalism and then there will be a fine row. If Mother Nature is not particularly unfavourable towards us we shall still live to see the fun! The stupid nonsense which the Russian students are perpetrating is only a symptom, worthless in itself. But it is a symptom. All sections of Russian society are in complete disintegration economically, morally and intellectually.

This time the revolution will begin in the East, hitherto the unbroken bulwark and reserve army of counter-revolution.

Herr Bismarck was pleased to see the thrashing, but it ought not to have gone so far. Russia too much weakened could not hold Austria in check again as she did in the Franco-Prussian War! And if it were even to come to revolution there, where would the last guarantee of the Hohenzollern dynasty be?

For the moment everything depends on the Poles (in the Kingdom of Poland) lying low. If only there are no risings there at the moment! Bismarck would at once intervene and Russian chauvinism would once more side with the Tsar. If on the other hand the Poles wait quietly till there is a conflagration in Petersburg and Moscow, and Bismarck then intervenes as a saviour, Prussia will find its--Mexico!

I have rammed this home again and again to any Poles I am in contact with who can influence their fellow-countrymen.

Compared with the crisis in the East, the French crisis is an altogether secondary affair. Still it is to be hoped that the bourgeois republic will be victorious or else the old game will begin all over again, and a nation can repeat the same stupidities once too often.

Marx to Frierich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Written: October 19, 1877;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 19 October 1877

A rotten spirit is making itself felt in our Party in Germany, not so much among the masses as among the leaders (upper class and “workers”).

The compromise with the Lassalleans has led to compromise with other half-way elements too; in Berlin (e.g., Most) with Dühring and his “admirers,” but also with a whole gang of half-mature students and super-wise doctors who want to give socialism a “higher ideal” orientation, that is to say, to replace its materialistic basis (which demands serious objective study from anyone who tries to use it) by modern mythology with its goddesses of Justice, Freedom, Equality and Fraternity. Dr. Hochberg, who publishes the Zukunft [Future] is a representative of this tendency and has “bought himself in” to the party – with the “noblest” intentions, I assume, but I do not give a damn for “intentions.” Anything more miserable than his programme of the “future” has seldom seen the light of day with more “modest” “presumption.”

The workers themselves when, like Mr. Most and Co. they give up work and become professional literary men, always set some theoretical mischief going and are always ready to attach themselves to muddleheads from the alleged “learned” caste. Utopian socialism especially, which for tens of years we have been clearing out of the German workers’ heads with so much toil and labour – their freedom from it making them theoretically, and therefore also practically, superior to the French and English – utopian socialism, playing with fancy pictures of the future structure of society, is now raging in a much more futile form, as compared not only with the great French and English utopians, but with – Weitling. Naturally utopianism, which before the time of materialistic-critical socialism concealed the germs of the latter within itself, coming now after the event can only be silly – silly, stale and basically reactionary.

Letter from Marx to Editor of the Otecestvenniye Zapisky

[Notes on the Fatherland]

Written: in French at the end of November 1877;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

The author of the article Karl Marx Before the Tribunal of M. Shukovsky is evidently a clever man and if, in my account of primitive accumulation, he had found a single passage to support his conclusions he would have quoted it. In the absence of any such passage he finds himself obliged to seize upon an hors d'oeuvre, a sort of polemic against a Russian “literary man,” published in the postscript of the first German edition of Capital. What is my complaint against this writer there? That he discovered the Russian commune not in Russia but in the book written by Haxthausen, Prussian Counsellor of State, and that in his hands the Russian commune only serves as an argument to prove that rotten old Europe will be regenerated by the victory of pan-Slavism. My estimate of this writer may be right or it may be wrong, but it cannot in any case furnish a clue to my views regarding the efforts “of Russians to find a path of development for their country which will be different from that which Western Europe pursued and still pursues,” etc.

In the postscript to the second German edition of Capital – which the author of the article on M. Shukovsky knows, because he quotes it – I speak of “a great Russian critic and man of learning” with the high consideration he deserves. In his remarkable articles this writer has dealt with the question whether, as her liberal economists maintain, Russia must begin by destroying la commune rurale (the village commune) in order to pass to the capitalist regime, or whether, on the contrary, she can without experiencing the tortures of this regime appropriate all its fruits by developing ses propres donnees historiques [the particular historic conditions already given her]. He pronounces in favour of this latter solution. And my honourable critic would have had at least as much reason for inferring from my consideration for this “great Russian critic and man of learning” that I shared his views on the question, as for concluding from my polemic against the “literary man” and Pan-Slavist that I rejected them.

To conclude, as I am not fond of leaving “something to be guessed,” I will come straight to the point. In order that I might be qualified to estimate the economic development in Russia to-day, I learnt Russian and then for many years studied the official publications and others bearing on this subject. I have arrived at this conclusion: If Russia continues to pursue the path she has followed since 1861, she will lose the finest chance ever offered by history to a nation, in order to undergo all the fatal vicissitudes of the capitalist regime.

II

The chapter on primitive accumulation does not pretend to do more than trace the path by which, in Western Europe, the capitalist order of economy emerged from the womb of the feudal order of economy. It therefore describes the historic movement which by divorcing the producers from their means of production converts them into wage earners (proletarians in the modern sense of the word) while it converts into capitalists those who hold the means of production in possession. In that history, “all revolutions are epoch-making which serve as levers for the advancement of the capitalist class in course of formation; above all those which, after stripping great masses of men of their traditional means of production and subsistence, suddenly fling them on to the labour market. But the basis of this whole development is the expropriation of the cultivators.

“This has not yet been radically accomplished except in England....but all the countries of Western Europe are going through the same movement,” etc. (Capital, French Edition, 1879, p. 315). At the end of the chapter the historic tendency of production is summed up thus: That it itself begets its own negation with the inexorability which governs the metamorphoses of nature; that it has itself created the elements of a new economic order, by giving the greatest impulse at once to the productive forces of social labour and to the integral development of every individual producer; that capitalist property, resting as it actually does already on a form of collective production, cannot do other than transform itself into social property. At this point I have not furnished any proof, for the good reason that this statement is itself nothing else than the short summary of long developments previously given in the chapters on capitalist production.

Now what application to Russia can my critic make of this historical sketch? Only this: If Russia is tending to become a capitalist nation after the example of the Western European countries, and during the last years she has been taking a lot of trouble in this direction – she will not succeed without having first transformed a good part of her peasants into proletarians; and after that, once taken to the bosom of the capitalist regime, she will experience its pitiless laws like other profane peoples. That is all. But that is not enough for my critic. He feels himself obliged to metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into an historico-philosophic theory of the marche generale [general path] imposed by fate upon every people, whatever the historic circumstances in which it finds itself, in order that it may ultimately arrive at the form of economy which will ensure, together with the greatest expansion of the productive powers of social labour, the most complete development of man. But I beg his pardon. (He is both honouring and shaming me too much.) Let us take an example.

In several parts of Capital I allude to the fate which overtook the plebeians of ancient Rome. They were originally free peasants, each cultivating his own piece of land on his own account. In the course of Roman history they were expropriated. The same movement which divorced them from their means of production and subsistence involved the formation not only of big landed property but also of big money capital. And so one fine morning there were to be found on the one hand free men, stripped of everything except their labour power, and on the other, in order to exploit this labour, those who held all the acquired wealth in possession. What happened? The Roman proletarians became, not wage labourers but a mob of do-nothings more abject than the former “poor whites” in the southern country of the United States, and alongside of them there developed a mode of production which was not capitalist but dependent upon slavery. Thus events strikingly analogous but taking place in different historic surroundings led to totally different results. By studying each of these forms of evolution separately and then comparing them one can easily find the clue to this phenomenon, but one will never arrive there by the universal passport of a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being super-historical.

Marx To Wilhelm Blos

In Hamburg

Source: MECW, Volume 45, p. 288;

First published: in Der wahre Jacob, Berlin, 17 March 1908.

Transcribed: Andy Blunden.

London, 10 November 1877

41 Maitland Park Road, N. W.

Dear Blos,

I was delighted to hear from you [Dir] again at last (that ‘Dir’ slipped naturally from my pen. So do drop the Sie in future). I had long since proposed that the abominable Isolde be dismissed, and fulminated against her in vain.

Whenever, in ‘la Place’, the word place is written with a capital P, it always means the Place Vendôme, that being the seat of the commander of the National Guard; in Paris at the time he was the equivalent of what we call ‘town-major’.

As regards the ‘suppression de 1’État’, an expression which Lissagaray himself will be altering in the 2nd French edition [of History of the Paris Commune of 1871], the sense is no different from that expounded in my pamphlet on the ‘Civil War’ in France. In short, you can translate it ‘abolition (or suppression) of the class state’.

I ‘bear no ill-will’ (as Heine says) and nor for that matter does Engels. Neither of us cares a straw for popularity. Let me cite one proof of this: such was my aversion to the personality cult that at the time of the International, when plagued by numerous moves — originating from various countries — to accord me public honour, I never allowed one of these to enter the domain of publicity, nor did I ever reply to them, save with an occasional snub. When Engels and I first joined the secret communist society, we did so only on condition that anything conducive to a superstitious belief in authority be eliminated from the Rules. (Lassalle subsequently operated in the reverse direction.)

But events such as occurred at the last party congress — they are being well and truly exploited by enemies of the party abroad — have in any case made it necessary for us to be circumspect in our relations with ‘party members in Germany’.

Apart from that, my state of health compels me to devote to the completion of my book [Capital] the time allotted to me for work by my doctor; and Engels, who is working on several longer books, is still sending contributions to the Vorwärts.

It would amuse me to hear more from time to time about my ‘combinations with Father Beckx’.

Engels will be writing to you shortly.

With warm regards from my wife and my daughter Eleanor.

Tous tuus,

Karl Marx

1878

Marx to Thomas Allsop. 1 January

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 11 January

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 4 February

Marx to Thomas Allsop. 4 February

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 11 February

Marx to Sigmund Schott. 29 March

Marx to Valerian Smirnov. 29 March

Engels to Carl Hirsch. 3 April

Engels to Hermann Lopatin. 3 April

Marx to Thomas Allsop. 28 April

Engels to Wilhelm Bracke. 30 April

Marx to Carl Hirsch. 26 June

Marx to Sigmund Schott. 13 July

Marx to Sigmund Schott. 15 July

Engels to Valerian Smirnov. 16 July

Engels to Oscar Schmidt. 19 July

Engels to Philipp Pauli. 30 July

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 10 August

Marx to George Rivers. 24 August

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 4 September

Engels to Friedrich Lessner. 12 September

Engels to Rudolf Engels. 12 September

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 16 September

Marx to Engels. 17 September

Marx to Jenny Marx. 17 September

Engels to Marx. 18 September

Marx to Engels. 18 September

Engels to Marx. 19 September

Engels to Marx. 21 September

Marx to Engels. 24 September

Marx to Moritz Kaufmann. 3 October

Marx to Moritz Kaufmann. 10 October

Engels to Hermann Arnoldt. 21 October

Marx to an Unknown Correspondent. 4 November

Marx to Alfred Talandier. About 10 November-

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 15 November

Engels to Ernst Dronke. 19 November

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 28 November

Engels to Ernst Dronke. 29 November

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 12 December

Marx to Wilhelm Liebknecht

In Leipzig

Abstract

Written: February 11, 1878;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London,] February 11, 1878

The Russians have achieved one good thing; they have exploded England's “great Liberal Party” and made it incapable of governing for a long time to come, whilst the trouble of committing suicide has been officially accomplished for the Tory Party through the traitors Derby and Salisbury (the latter the real driving force of Russia in the Cabinet).

The English working class had been gradually more and more deeply demoralised by the period of corruption since 1848 and had at last got to the point when they were nothing more than the tail of the great Liberal Party, i.e., henchmen of the capitalists. Their direction had gone completely over into the hands of the corrupt trade union leaders and professional agitators. These fellows shouted and howled behind Gladstone, Bright, Mundella, Morley and the whole gang of factory owners etc., in majorem gloriam [to the greater glory] of the Tsar as emancipator of nations, while they never raised a finger for their own brothers in South Wales, condemned to die of starvation by the mineowners. Wretches! To crown the whole affair worthily, in the last divisions in the House of Commons (on February 7 and 8, when the majority of the great dignitaries of the “great Liberal Party” – Forster, Lowe, Harcourt, Goschen, Hartington and even [on Feb. 7] the great John Bright himself – left their army in the lurch and bolted away from the division in order not to compromise themselves too much altogether by voting) – the only workers' representatives in the House of Commons and moreover, horribile dictu [horrible to relate] direct representatives of the miners, and themselves originally miners – Burt and the miserable Macdonald – voted with the rump of the “great Liberal Party,” the enthusiasts for the Tsar.

But the rapid development of Russia's plans suddenly broke the spell and shattered the “mechanical agitation” (fivepound notes were the main springs of the machinery); at the moment it would be “physically dangerous” for Mottershead, Howell, John Hales, Shipton, Osborne and the whole gang to let their voices be heard in a public meeting of workers; even their “corner and ticket meetings” are forcibly broken up and dispersed by the masses.

Marx To Sigmund Schott

In Frankfurt Am Main

Source: MECW Volume 45, p. 304;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, 2nd Russian Edition, Moscow, 1981.

London, 29 March 1878

41 Maitland Park Road, N. W.

Dear Sir,

I have, though somewhat belatedly, obtained Volume IV (Industrieactien) of the Saling, to which you so kindly drew my attention. I did not wish to reply to your letter until I had at length had time to run through the thing, and have found it very useful.

I have tried, without success, to obtain via the booksellers the second volume of Glagau (it has probably been banned), and also Rudolph Meyer’s book [Politische Gründer und die Corruption in Deutschland] on account of which he has been prosecuted. Since the said Meyer has cited me in court as a competent witness to the ‘scholarship’ of his work he ought, if only for decency’s sake, to have sent it me to look at.

Finally, I have one more thing to ask of you, namely to be so kind, provided it is not too time-consuming, as to let me have a list of the names of Perrot’s published writings on the subject of joint-stock companies, etc.

From Petersburg Mr Kaufman has sent me (Russian text) his bulky tome on the Theory and Practice of Banks, likewise his History of the Bank of England etc. So far I have only read the first-named. Written in a ‘high-falutin’ style, with considerable self-important pretensions to absolute ‘scholarship’, it is an enthusiastic apology for the economy of Gründung and swindling. Yet such writings are most beneficial, for the apology, in so far as it has any real content, and all unbeknown to its author, ends up by demonstrating for good or ill, and contrary to the moralising philistine, the correlation between the necessary product of the present system of production itself and what your philistine condemns as ‘abuse’, ‘malpractice’, etc.

I used to subscribe to the Frankfurter Zeitung, but do so no longer because of its ‘Swiss’ standpoint which alone can account for its lunatic flights of fancy on the subject of the oriental imbroglio. But now a friend of mine in Germany is persecuting me by occasionally sending me what he believes to be an interesting issue of the paper. From what little (but nevertheless still ‘over-much’) that has thus come my way, it seems to me that a marked change isoccurring in the line taken by the paper. Is this the case, or is it not? Has Mr Sonnemann shifted further to the ‘right’?

I trust that you are having better weather than we are. Since my return from Germany in mid-September I have suffered from a permanent cough, etc.

With kindest regards I am, Sir,

Yours sincerely,

Karl Marx

1879

Marx to Hugo Heller. 29 January

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 30 January

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 1 March

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 10 April

Marx to Rudolph Meyer. 28 May

Engels to J Gugenheim. 16 June

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 17 June

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 26 June

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 1 July

Marx to Carlo Cafiero. 29 July

Engels to August Bebel. 4 August

Marx to Rudolph Meyer. 7 August

Marx to Engels. 14 August [abstract]

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 19 August

Engels to Marx. 20 August

Engels to Marx. 25 August

Marx to Engels. 25 August

Engels to Marx. 26 August

Engels to Karl Hochberg. 26 August

Marx to Engels. 27 August

Marx to Engels. 28 August

Marx to Engels. 3 September

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 8 September

Marx to Engels. 9 September

Engels to Marx. 9 September

Marx to Engels. 10 September

Engels to Marx. 11 September

Marx to Engels. 11 September

Marx to Engels. 14 September

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 15 September

Marx and Engels to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and Others (Circular Letter). 17-18 September

Marx to Carl Hirsch. 18 September

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 19 September

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 19 September

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 24 September

Engels to Marx. c. 8 October

Marx to Bertha August. 25 October

Engels to August Bebel. 14 November

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 14 November

Engels to August Bebel. 24 November

Marx to Achille Loria. 3 December

Marx to an Unknown Correspondent. 11 December

Marx to Charles Walstone (Waldstein). 13 December

Engels to Thomas Allsop. 14 December

Engels to August Bebel. 16 December

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 19 December

Engels to Amelie Engels. c. 1879-1880

Letter from Marx to Nikolai Danielson [*]

In St. Petersburg

Abstracts

Written: April 10, 1879;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence, International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

April 10, 1879

... And now, primo, I am obliged to tell you (cela est tout-à-fait confidentiel) [1] that I have been informed from Germany, my second volume [2] could not be published so long as the present regime was maintained in its present severity. This news, considering the status quo, did not surprise me, and, I must confess, was far from annoying me – for these reasons:

Firstly: I should under no circumstances have published the second volume before the present English industrial crisis had reached its climax. The phenomena are this time singular, in many respects different from what they were in the past and this – quite apart from other modifying circumstances – is easily accounted for by the fact that never before was the English crisis preceded by tremendous crises now lasting already five years in the United States, South America, Germany, Austria, etc.

It is therefore necessary to watch the present course of things until their maturity before you can ‘consume’ them ‘productively’, I mean ‘theoretically’.

One of the singular aspects of the present state is this: There have, as you know, been crashes of banks in Scotland and in some of the English counties, principally the Western ones (Cornwall and Wales). Still the real centre of the money market – not only of the United Kingdom, but of the world – London has till now been little affected. On the contrary, save a few exceptions, the immense joint-stock bank companies, like the Bank of England, have as yet only profited of the general prostration. And what this prostration is, you may judge from the utter despair of the English commercial and industrial philistine of ever seeing better times again! I have not seen the like, I have never witnessed a similar moral dislocation although I was in London in 1857 and 1866! [3]

There is no doubt, one of the circumstances favourable to the London money market is the state of the Bank of France, which, since the recent development of the intercourse between the two countries, has become a succoursale [4] to the Bank of England. The Bank of France keeps an immense amount of bullion, the convertibility of its bank-notes being not yet re-established, and at the signal of any perturbation of the London Stock Exchange French money flows in to buy securities momentarily depreciated. If, during last autumn, the French money had been suddenly withdrawn, the Bank of England would certainly have had refuge to its last remedy in extremis, [5] the suspension of the Bank Act, [6] and in that case we would have had the monetary crash.

On the other hand, the quiet way in which the restoration of cash payments was effected in the United States, has removed all strain from that corner upon the resources of the Bank of England. But what till now mainly contributed to prevent an explosion within the London money market, is the apparently quiet state of the banks of Lancashire and the other industrial districts (saving the mining districts of the West), though it is sure and ascertained that these banks have not only invested great part of their resources in discounting of bills of, and advances upon, unprofitable transactions of the manufacturers, but have, as for instance at Oldham, sunk a great part of their capital in the foundation of new factories. At the same time stocks, mainly of cotton produce, are daily accumulating not only in Asia (India principally) whither they are sent on consignment, but at Manchester, etc, etc. How this state of things can pass away without a general crash among the manufactures, and, consequently, among the local banks reacting directly upon the London money market – is difficult to foresee.

Meanwhile strikes and disturbance are general.

I remark en passant that during the past year – so bad for all other business – the railways have been flourishing, but this was only due to extraordinary circumstances, like the Paris exhibition, [7] etc. In truth, the railways keep up an appearance of prosperity, by accumulating debts, increasing from day to day their capital account.

However the course of this crisis may develop – although most important to observe in its details for the student of capitalistic production and the professional théoricien – it will pass over, like its predecessors, and initiate a new ‘industrial cycle’ with all its diversified phases of prosperity, etc.

But under the cover of this ‘apparently’ solid English society, there lurks another crisis – the agricultural one which will work great and serious changes in its social structure. I shall recur to this subject on another occasion. It would lead me too far at present.

Secondly: The bulk of materials I have not only from Russia, but from the United States, etc, make it pleasant for me to have a ‘pretext’ of continuing my studies, instead of winding them up finally for the public.

Thirdly: My medical adviser has warned me to shorten considerably my ‘working day’ if I were not desirous to relapse into the state of 1874 and the following years where I got giddy and unable to proceed after a few hours of serious application. ...

In regard to your most remarkable letter I shall confine myself to a few observations.

The railways sprang up first as the couronnement de l'oeuvre in those countries where modern industry was most developed, England, United States, Belgium, France, etc. I call them the "couronnement de l'oeuvre" not only in the sense that they were at last (together with steamships for oceanic intercourse and the telegraphs) the means of communication adequate to the modern means of production, but also in so far as they were the basis of immense joint stock companies, forming at the same time a new starting point for all other sorts of joint stock companies, to commence by banking companies. They gave in one word, an impetus never before suspected to the concentration of capital, and also to the accelerated and immensely enlarged cosmopolitan activity of loanable capital, thus embracing the whole world in a network of financial swindling and mutual indebtedness, the capitalist form of "international" brotherhood.

On the other hand, the appearance of the railway system in the leading countries of capitalism allowed, and even forced, states where capitalism was confined to a few summits of society, to suddenly create and enlarge their capitalistic superstructure in dimensions altogether disproportionate to the bulk of the social body, carrying on the great work of production in the traditional modes. There is, therefore, not the least doubt that in those states the railway creation has accelerated the social and political disintegration, as in the more advanced states it hastened the final development and therefore the final change, of capitalistic production. In all states except England, the governments enriched and fostered the railway companies at the expense of the Public Exchequer. In the United States, to their profit, great part of the public land they received as a present, not only the land necessary for the construction of the lines but many miles of land along both sides the lines, covered with forests, etc. They become so the greatest landlords, the small immigrating farmers preferring of course land so situated as to ensure their produce ready means of transport.

The system inaugurated in France by Louis Philippe, of handing over the railways to a small band of financial aristocrats, endowing them with long terms of possession, guaranteeing the interest out of the public pocket, etc., etc., was pushed to the utmost limit by Louis Bonaparte, whose regime, in fact, was essentially based upon the traffick in railway concessions, to some of which he was so kind as to make presents of canals, etc.

And in Austria and Italy above all, the railways were a new source of unbearable state indebtedness and grinding of the masses.

Generally the railways gave of course an immense impulse to the development of foreign commerce, but the commerce in countries which export principally raw produce increased the misery of the masses. Not only that the new indebtedness, contracted by the government on account of the railways, increased the bulk of imposts weighing upon them, but from the moment every local production could be converted into cosmopolitan gold, many articles formerly cheap, because invendible to a great degree, such as fruit, wine, fish, deer, etc., became dear and were withdrawn from the consumption of the people, while on the other hand, the production itself, I mean the special sort of produce, was changed according to its greater or minor suitableness for exportation, while formerly it was principally adapted to its consumption in loco. Thus, for instance, in Schleswig-Holstein agricultural land was converted into pasture, because the export of cattle was more profitable, but at the same time the agricultural population was driven away. All the changes very useful indeed for the great landed proprietor, the usurer, the merchant, the railways, the bankers and so forth, but very dismal for the real producer!

It is, to conclude by this my letter (since the time for putting it to post draws nearer and nearer), impossible to find real analogies between the United States and Russia. In the former the expenses of the government diminish daily and its public debt is quickly and yearly reduced; in the latter public bankruptcy is a goal more and more appearing to become unavoidable. The former has freed itself (although in a most infamous way, for the advantage of the creditors and at the expense of the menu peuple) of its paper money, the latter has no more flourishing fabric than that of paper money. In the former the concentration of capital and the gradual expropriation of the masses is not only the vehicle, but also the natural offspring (though artificially accelerated by the civil war) of an unprecedented rapid industrial development, agricultural progress, etc.; the latter reminds you rather of the time of Louis XIV and Louis XV, where the financial, commercial, industrial superstructure, or rather the facades of the social edifices, looked (although they had a much more solid foundation than in Russia) like a satyre upon the stagnant state of the bulk of production (the agricultural one) and the famine of the producers. The United States have at present overtaken England in the rapidity of economical progress, though they lag still behind in the extent of acquired wealth; but at the same time the masses are quicker, and have greater political means in their hands, to resent the form of a progress accomplished at their expense. I need not prolong antitheses.

A propos. Which do you consider the best Russian work on credit and banking?

Mr Kaufmann [8] was so kind as to send me his book on ‘theory and practice of banking’, but I was rather astonished that my former intelligent critic in the Petersburg Messager de l'Europe, had converted himself into a sort of Pindar of modern stock exchange swindling. Besides, considered merely – and I expect generally nothing else of books of this kind – from Fachstandpunkt, [9] it is far from original in its details. The best part in it is the polemics against paper money.

It is said that certain foreign bankers with whom a certain government desired to contract new loans, have asked as a guarantee – a constitution. I am far from believing this, because their modern method of doing business was, till now at least, and would be, very indifferent as to forms of government.

Yours truly

A Williams

Notes

* Danielson (Nicolai-On) Nikolai Franzevich (1844-1918). Russian economist, Narodnik; translator of Capital; he completed the translation begun by G. A. Lopatin of the first volume, which was published in 1872. In this connection Danielson entered into correspondence with Marx. Danielson was one of the chief theoreticians of the Narodniki, who contested the necessity and possibility of the development of capitalism in Russia.

1. That is quite confidential – Progress Publishers.

2. Marx is referring to Kapital. The part of the work which was subsequently published as Volumes 2 and 3 is here called the second volume – Progress Publishers.

3. This refers to the world economic crises of 1857 and 1866, which seriously affected the British economy – Progress Publishers.

4.Branch – Progress Publishers.

5.In extreme emergencies – Progress Publishers.

6.Marx is referring to the Bank Act of 1844, which laid down that, except for the fiduciary issue limited to £14 million, notes issued by the Bank of England had to be covered by gold. But the government was several times forced by financial crises to suspend the Act and permit the Bank to increase the fiduciary issue – Progress Publishers.

7.This refers to the world exhibition held in Paris in 1878 – Progress Publishers.

8.Illarion Ignatyevich Kaufmann (1848-1916) – Russian bourgeois economist, professor at St Petersburg University, author of books on money circulation and credit – Progress Publishers.

9. From the point of view of an expert – Progress Publishers.

Marx To Rudolph Meyer

In London

Source: MECW Volume 45, p. 359;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Moscow, 1935.

[Draft]

[London,] 28 May 1879

41 Maitland Park Road, N. W.

Dear Sir,

I enclose the letter from Mr Reichenbach intended for yourself; at the same time I am sending you issue 10 per book-post.

I shall be pleased to make your personal acquaintance, having made sundry vain attempts to acquaint myself with your Politische Gründer If you are not already otherwise engaged, you will find me at home tomorrow at any time between 10 o'clock in the morning and 3 o'clock in the afternoon.

I am, Sir,

Your obedient Servant

Karl Marx

To R. Meyer, Esq.

Engels To Eduard Bernstein

Abstracts

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers (1975);

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

London, June 17, 1879

Replying respectfully to your lines of the 13th, which arrived only yesterday, I regret that I am not in a position to name anybody who would be capable of supplying you with the articles desired in a really competent manner. [1]

... For a number of years past (and at the present time) the English working-class movement has been hopelessly describing a narrow circle of strikes for higher wages and shorter hours, not, however, as an expedient or means of propaganda and organisation but as the ultimate aim. The Trade Unions even bar all political action on principle and in their charters, and thereby also ban participation in any general activity of the working-class as a class. The workers are divided politically into Conservatives and Liberal Radicals, into supporters of the Disraeli (Beaconsfield) ministry and supporters of the Gladstone ministry. One can speak here of a labour movement (proper) only in so far as strikes take place here which, whether they are won or not, do not get the movement one step further. To inflate such strikes — which often enough have been brought about purposely during the last few years of bad business by the capitalists to have a pretext for closing down their factories and mills, strikes in which the working-class movement does not make the slightest headway — into struggles of world importance, as is done, for instance, in the London Freiheit, can, in my opinion, only do harm. No attempt should be made to conceal the fact that at present no real labour movement in the continental sense exists here, and I therefore believe you will not lose much if for the time being you do not receive any reports on the doings of the Trade Unions here.

Notes

1. Bernstein had asked Engels whether he could recommend someone able to write a series of articles on the British labour movement for the Jahrbuch für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik (published in Zurich). He presumably hoped that Engels would offer to contribute the articles himself and did not like to ask outright – Progress Publishers.

Friedrich Engels to Johann Philipp Becker in Geneva, 1 July 1879 [1]

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... It is quite understandable that Liebknecht’s untimely meekness in the Reichstag [2] should have created a very unfavourable impression in Latin Europe as well as among Germans everywhere. And we expressed this immediately in our letter. The old comfortable way of leisurely agitation with an occasional six weeks’ to six months’ term in jail has come to an end in Germany once and for all. No matter how the present state of affairs may end, the new movement begins on a more or less revolutionary basis and must therefore be much more resolute in character than the first period of the movement, now past. The phrase about the peaceable attainment of the goal will either be no longer necessary or it will not be taken seriously any longer. By making this phrase impossible and thrusting the movement in the revolutionary direction Bismarck has rendered us a great service, outweighing the bit of damage occasioned by his interference with agitation.

On the other hand, as a result of the tame speech in the Reichstag the knights of the revolutionary phrase are again on their high horses and seek to disorganise the Party by cliquism and intrigues. The Workers Association here is the hub of all these machinations... [3]

Notes

1. Johann Philipp Becker (1809-1886) – prominent figure in German and international working-class movement, brush-maker, in 1830s and 1840s took part in democratic movement in Germany and Switzerland, was active in 1848-49 revolution, after defeat of Baden-Palatinate insurrection fled from Germany, in 1860s one of outstanding figures in First International, attended all its congresses, editor of Verbote, friend and close associate of Marx and Engels – Progress Publishers.

2. Engels is alluding to the speech which Liebknecht made in the Reichstag on 17 March 1879, when a minor state of siege was imposed on Berlin and environs. In the course of the speech Liebknecht said that the Socialist Workers Party would keep within the limits of the Anti-Socialist Law since it intended to attain its aim by reforms, adding that a ‘violent’ revolution was an absurdity. The speech reflected the uncertainty with which some of the German Social-Democratic leaders approached tactical questions in the first months following the introduction of the Anti-Socialist Law. The Anti-Socialist Law (Exceptional Law against the Socialists) was introduced by Bismarck and approved by the majority in the Reichstag on 21 October 1878. The law banned all organisations of the Socialist Workers Party of Germany and all working-class mass organisations as well as the socialist and workers’ press. But during the period the Anti-Socialist Law was in force the party, with the help of Marx and Engels, was able to overcome opportunist and leftist trends within its ranks, and succeeded in strengthening and extending its influence among the masses by combining underground work with a wide use of the legal opportunities. The growing workers’ movement compelled the government to repeal the Exceptional Law on 1 October 1890 – Progress Publishers.

3. The reference is to the London German Workers Educational Association founded in February 1840 by Schapper, Moll and other members of the League of the Just. When the First International was formed the Association became its German section – Progress Publishers.

Marx To Rudolph Meyer

In London

Source: MECW Volume 45, p. ;

First published: in Die Rote Fahne, Berlin, 14. Dezember 1928, Beilage.

[London,] 7 August 1879

Dear Mr Meyer,

I am today sending you your Grunder per book-post.

My departure was held up as a result of Longuet’s having fallen ill: he is feared to have gastric fever, and we shall probably hear today what the verdict is. If the thing’s serious I shall have to abandon the trip to jersey (which I wanted to visit because the place is new to my companion — my youngest daughter) and go to a seaside resort near London. I shall be going to one of these in any case, even after my return from jersey, along with Madame Lafargue and my grandson, and look forward to your visiting me there.

Should anything unforeseen happen to precipitate your departure, perhaps you would be so kind as to return the volumes of periodicals (the Leipzig and Paris ones), at the same time letting me know (all letters will be forwarded to me from my house) whether the January issue (1879) of the Österreichische Monatsschrift für Gesellschaftswissenschaften was followed by a second.

With best wishes for your future, and cordial regards from my wife and my daughter, Eleanor,

Yours very sincerely,

Karl Marx

Marx to Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

August 14, 1879

Since my arrival here I have not looked at any newspapers and have, in fact, read nothing apart from the first volume of Carleton’s Traits and Stories of the Irish Peasantry. It was labour enough to get through the first volume and I shall put the second aside until a better time. The work consists of unconnected tales, in which Irish peasant life is illustrated now from this side and now from that; so the book is not the sort one can swallow at one gulp. For this very reason it is a book which one must buy and possess in order au fur et à mesure [according to need] to regale oneself now with this dish, now with another. Carleton is neither a good stylist nor a master of composition; his originality lies in the truth of his descriptions. As the son of an Irish peasant he knows his subject better than the Levers and Lovers.

Marx To Engels

In London

Source: MECW Volume 45, p. 382;

First published: in MEGA, Berlin, 1931;

Ramsgate, 3 September 1879

62 Plains of Waterloo

Dear Engels,

Meyer (R.) wrote [on 29 August 1879] and announced his intention of visiting me, while at the same time saying, on the other hand, that I was to let him know, i.e. telegraph him, ‘Do not come’, should I be otherwise engaged. Firstly, therefore, I telegraphed him in the ‘negative’, secondly, however, proceeded to write him a letter *to this effect, that in consequence of Mrs Marx’s bad health my whole time is taken up ‘presently'*. I am telling you this in order that you may know how things stand, should he raise the matter with you. In fact my wife is improving only very slowly and hence by no means anxious to see Meyer here.

Jennychen had her first outing today, a fifteen minute walk; She progresses favourably.

Your

Moor

How is jolly getting on?

Marx To Engels

In London

Source: MECW Volume 45, p. ;

First published: in MEGA, Abt. III, Berlin, 1931;

[Ramsgate,] 11 September 1879

62 Plains of Waterloo

Dear Fred,

Letter and enclosure received with many thanks.

The Longuet family will be ‘making’ for London, as Lessner puts it, on Saturday (next). So far all has gone well with Jennychen, although she still has a bit of asthma, but she proposes — Obstinately, a la Lupus — to combine feeding her child with teaching.

Yesterday, to my intense surprise, Meyer suddenly materialised in front of me on the sands. To my relief, he immediately explained that he had taken lodgings for the day in Margate whither he would be returning in a few hours’ time, and that all he wanted was to inquire about ‘madame’s’ health, etc. I did the honours of the place for a while and then handed him over to Longuet so that he might speed him on his way. He — Meyer — is going to Edinburgh for the Trades Union Congress. I'm glad this ‘crisis’ was so short-lived. The good fellow’s tendency towards Ramsgate has been irrepressible. He told Longuet, by the by, that his liver had got much worse so that he could no longer ‘take’ the accustomed amount of ‘spirits’ without their going to his head. An attempt, no doubt, to gloss over his recent accidents at Maitland Park, etc.

The weather here is partly good and partly bad, the latter having a tendency to predominate.

Your

Moor

Marx and Engels to

August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others

Written: Mid September, 1879;

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

First Published: in Die Kommunistische Internationale, XII, Jahrg., Heft 23, June 15, 1931;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[Note: Engels wrote this letter in the name of himself and Marx to the members of the leading group of German Social-Democracy. It is among the most important documents in which the revolutionary proletarian line of Marx and Engels is revealed. Here we see that a consistent struggle was conducted by the founders of scientific Communism against opportunism in the German Social-Democratic movement. Marx and Engels had already long been following with growing mistrust the increasing influence of petty-bourgeois elements in the Party leadership and the insufficient fight put up by the Party against them. The open and organised emergence of the group around Höchberg, in connection with the foundation of the Sozial-Demokrat in Zürich, caused Marx and Engels to intervene. Especially the publication of the Zürich Yearbook for Socialist Science and Politics with the article “The Socialist Movement in Germany in Retrospect” (signed with three asterisks, as the disguise of Höchberg, Bernstein and Schramm) induced Marx and Engels to define their fundamental attitude to the opportunist danger in the German Party and to place before the Party leadership with the greatest sharpness the choice between a break with opportunism on their part or a break with the Party on the part of Marx and Engels. In his letter to Marx on September 9, 1879, Engels puts the question of the necessity for intervention: “I shall really have to answer Bebel at last... the Yearbook ...fortunately enables us simply to give these people definitely the reasons why it is absolutely impossible for us to co-operate with an organ in which Höchberg has anything whatever to say. ... I think you will also be of the opinion that after this business we should do well to define our standpoint at least to the Leipzigers [the Party Executive]. If the new Party organ sings Höchberg's tune it may become necessary to do this publicly. If you will send me the things ... I will draft a letter to Bebel and send it you.” Marx answered on September 10 and insisted that the most decided tone should be taken towards Leipzig. “Liebknecht has no judgment. The letters prove what they should refute, namely, our original view that the thing was given away in Leipzig, while the Zürichers proceeded according to the conditions laid down for them. ... I fully share your opinion that there is no more time to be lost in announcing bluntly and ruthlessly our view of the Yearbook drivel.... If they carry on in the same way with their Party organ we must publicly repudiate them. In these matters there is no longer any question of good nature.”]

(1) The negotiations with C. Hirsch.

Liebknecht asks Hirsch if he will take over the editorship of the Party organ which is to be newly established in Zürich. Hirsch wants information as to the finances of the paper: what funds are at its disposal and who provides them. The first, in order to know whether the paper will be bound to fade out after a few months. And then to make sure who holds the purse strings and with them the ultimate control over the line of the paper. Liebknecht’s answer to Hirsch : “Everything all right, you will hear the rest from Zürich “(Liebknecht to Hirsch, July 28) does not reach him. But from Zürich comes a letter to Hirsch from Bernstein (July 24) in which Bernstein announces that “we have been charged with the launching and supervision” (of the paper). A discussion had taken place “between Viereck and us” in which it had been felt “that your position, owing to the differences which you had with individual comrades when you were a Laterne [Lantern] man would be made rather difficult; but I do not attach much weight to this objection.” Not a word about the financing.

Hirsch replies by return on July 26, with the question as to the material position of the paper. What comrades have pledged themselves to cover the deficit? Up to what amount and for how long? The question of the editor’s salary plays no part at all here, all Hirsch wants to know is if “the means are ensured for guaranteeing the paper for at least a year.”

Bernstein answers on July 31: Any deficit will be covered by voluntary contributions, of which some (!) are already subscribed. To Hirsch’s remarks about the line he thought of giving to the paper, dealt with below, he replies with disapproving remarks and instructions: “On which the supervisory committee must insist all the more since it is itself in its turn under control, i.e., responsible. On these points you will therefore have to come to an understanding with the supervisory committee.” An early and if possible telegraphic reply desired.

Thus instead of an answer to his legitimate questions Hirsch receives the information that he is to edit the paper under a supervisory committee seated in Zürich, whose views differ very essentially from his own and whose members are not even named to him!

Justly indignant at this treatment, Hirsch prefers to come to an understanding with the Leipzig people. His letter of August 2 to Liebknecht must be known to you, as Hirsch expressly required that you and Viereck should be informed. Hirsch is even willing to submit to a supervisory committee in Zürich, up to the point of agreeing that it should have the right to make written observations to the editor and to appeal to the decision of the Leipzig control committee.

In the meantime Liebknecht writes on July 28 to Hirsch:

“Of course, the undertaking is financed, as the whole Party (including) Höchberg stands behind it. But I am not troubling myself about details.”

Liebknecht’s next letter again contains nothing about the finances, but the assurance instead that the Zürich committee is not an editorial committee at all but is only entrusted with the management and finances. Again on August 14 Liebknecht writes the same to me and demands that we persuade Hirsch to accept. Even on August 20 you yourself are so little informed of the true facts of the case that you write to me: “He (Höchberg) has no more voice in the editing of the paper than any other well-known Party comrade.”

At last on August 11 Hirsch gets a letter from Viereck in which it is admitted that “the three residing in Zürich are to take the foundation of the paper in hand as an editorial committee and with the agreement of the three Leipzig members to choose an editor.... So far as I recollect, the decisions communicated to us also stated that the (Zürich) organisation committee mentioned in (2) should take over the political as well as the financial responsibility in relation to the Party! ...From this position of affairs it seems to me to follow that...there can be no question of taking over the editorship without the co-operation of the three domiciled in Zürich who have been commissioned by the Party to start the paper.” Here at last Hirsch had at least something definite, if only regarding the relation of the editor to the Zürich people. They are an editorial committee; they also have the political responsibility; without their co-operation no one can take over the editorship. In short, an indication is simply given to Hirsch that he should come to an understanding with the three people in Zürich whose names are still not given him.

To complete the confusion, however, Liebknecht writes a postscript to Viereck’s letter: “S[inger] from B[erlin] has just been here and reported: the supervisory committee in Zürich is not, as Viereck thinks, an Editorial committee but essentially a management committee financially responsible to the party, i.e., to us, for the paper; naturally it is also the right and the duty of its members to discuss the editing with you (a right and a duty which belong, incidentally, to every Party member): they have not the authority to act as your guardians.”

The three Zürich and the one Leipzig committee members – the only one present at the negotiations – insist that Hirsch shall be under the official control of the Zürich people. A second Leipzig member directly denies this. And Hirsch is expected to come to a decision before the gentlemen are agreed among themselves? That Hirsch had the right to be informed of the decisions come to, which contained the conditions he was expected to submit to, was thought of all the less because it never once seems to have occurred to the Leipzigers to get authentic information themselves about these decisions. How else could the above contradiction have been possible?

If the Leipzigers cannot agree as to the powers conferred upon the Zürichers, the Zürichers themselves are perfectly clear about them.

Schramm to Hirsch, August 14: “If you had not written at the time that you would do just the same in a similar case (to the Kayser case) and thus indicated the prospect of a similar style of writing, we should not waste a word over it. But in view of your declaration we must reserve to ourselves the right of having a decisive vote in the acceptance of articles for the new paper.”

The letter to Bernstein in which Hirsch is stated to have said this was dated July 26, that is to say long after the conference in Zürich at which the plenary powers of the three Zürichers were established. But the Zürichers are already revelling so much in the sense of their absolute bureaucratic power that in answer to this later letter of Hirsch they already claim further authority to decide upon the acceptance of articles. The editorial committee is already a censorship committee.

It was not until Höchberg came to Paris that Hirsch learned from him the names of the members of the two committees. If therefore the negotiations with Hirsch fell through, what was the reason?

(a) The obstinate refusal both of the Leipzig and the Zürich people to give him any concrete information as to the financial basis of the paper and therefore as to the possibility of maintaining the paper in existence, if only for a year. He first learnt the amount of the sum subscribed from me here (after your communication to me). It was therefore hardly possible to draw any other conclusion from the information already given (the Party + Höchberg) than that the paper was either already mainly financed by Höchberg or else would soon be completely dependent on his subsidies. And this latter possibility is still far from being excluded. The sum of 800 marks, if I am reading correctly, is exactly the same as the Association here had to contribute to Freiheit in the first half year.

(b) The repeated assurances of Liebknecht, since proved totally false, that the Zürichers were to have no official control of the editing at all and the comedy of errors which arose from this.

(c) The certainty finally attained that the Zürichers were not only to control, but themselves to censor the editing and that the part allotted to Hirsch was that of a dummy.

When he thereupon refused the offer one can only say he was right. The Leipzig committee, as we heard from Höchberg, has been further strengthened by the addition of two members who do not live there; so it can only intervene rapidly if the three Leipzigers are unanimous. This completely transfers the real centre of gravity to Zürich, and in the long run Hirsch would no more have been able to work with the people there than would any other editor of really proletarian and revolutionary views. On this later.

(2) The proposed line of the paper.

Bernstein has already informed Hirsch on July 24 that the differences he had had as a Laterne man with individual comrades would make his position difficult.

Hirsch replies that in his opinion the general line of the paper must be the same as that of the Laterne, i.e., one which avoids prosecution in Switzerland and does not cause unnecessary alarm in Germany. He asks who the comrades are and continues: “I only know one, and I can promise you that in a similar case of breach of discipline I should treat him in exactly the same way.”

To which Bernstein, conscious of his new official dignity as censor, replies: As to the line of the paper, the view of the supervisory committee is in fact that the Laterne should not be its model; in our opinion the paper should not be so much taken up with political radicalism but rather kept socialist in principle. Cases like the attack on Kayser, which was disapproved of by every comrade without exception (!) must be avoided in all circumstances.”

And so on and so on. Liebknecht calls the attack on Kayser “a blunder” and Schramm considers it so dangerous that he thereupon puts Hirsch under censorship.

Hirsch again writes to Höchberg, saying that a case like that of Kayser “cannot occur if an official party organ is in existence whose clear statements and well-intentioned indications cannot be so brazenly thrown to the winds by a deputy.”

Viereck, too, writes that “a dispassionate attitude, and the ignoring so far as possible of any differences which have occurred... are laid down” for the new paper, it is not to be an “enlarged Laterne” and Bernstein “could at most be reproached for a too moderate tendency, if that is a reproach at a time when we cannot after all sail under our full colours.”

And what is this Kayser case, this unforgivable crime which Hirsch is supposed to have committed? Kayser is the only one among the Social-Democratic deputies who spoke and voted in the Reichstag for protective tariffs. Hirsch accuses him of having committed a breach of Party discipline because Kayser:

(1) Voted for indirect taxation, the abolition of which is expressly demanded in the Party programme;

(2) Voted supplies to Bismarck, thus breaking the first fundamental rule of all our Party tactics: not a farthing to this government.

On both points Hirsch is undeniably right. And after Kayser had trampled underfoot on the one hand the Party programme, to which the deputies are, so to speak, sworn by a Congress decision, and on the other hand the very first and most imperative fundamental rule of Party tactics, and voted money to Bismarck as thanks for the Socialist Law, Hirsch in our opinion was absolutely right to let fly at him as roughly as he did.

We have never been able to understand why this attack on Kayser could have aroused such violent wrath in Germany. Höchberg now informs me that the “fraction” gave Kayser permission to come out as he did and that this permission is considered to exonerate Kayser.

If this is the position of affairs it is really a bit strong. In the first place Hirsch could know no more of this secret decision than the rest of the world. Then the discredit for the Party, which previously could be diverted on to Kayser alone, is made all the greater by this business, as is also the service performed by Hirsch in openly exposing the disgusting phraseology and even more disgusting vote of Kayser to the whole world and thus saving the honour of the Party. Or is German Social-Democracy really infected by the parliamentary disease and does it believe that through election by the people the Holy Ghost is poured out upon the elected, fraction meetings are transformed into infallible Councils and fraction decisions into unassailable dogmas?

It is true that a blunder has been committed, not however by Hirsch, but by the deputies who covered Kayser by their resolution. If those whose special duty it is to pay attention to the maintenance of Party discipline themselves break Party discipline so glaringly by a decision of this kind, so much the worse. Still worse, however, when people advance to the belief that it was not Kayser by his speech and vote or the other deputies by their resolution who violated Party discipline, but Hirsch, because despite the decision, which, moreover, was still unknown to him, he attacked Kayser.

For the rest, it is clear that on the tariff question the Party took up the same confused and indecisive attitude as it had done hitherto on almost all economic questions which have become practical ones, e.g., the imperial railways. This is due to the fact that the Party organs, especially Vorwärts [Forward], instead of thoroughly discussing these questions have preferred to concern themselves with the construction of the future order of society. When, after the Socialist Law, the tariff question suddenly became a practical one, the most varied shades of opinion arose and there was not a single person on the spot who possessed the prerequisite for the formation of a clear and correct judgment: knowledge of the conditions of German industry and its position on the world market. Among the electorate it was inevitable that tendencies in favour of protection should appear here and there and there was a wish to take these into consideration too. The only way of getting out of this confusion, by taking the question in a purely political way (as was done in the Laterne), was not decisively adopted; thus it was inevitable that in this debate the Party should have come out for the first time in a hesitating, uncertain and confused manner and finally, with and through Kayser, thoroughly discredited itself.

The attack on Kayser is now made the occasion for preaching to Hirsch in every key that the new paper must on no account copy the “excesses” of the Laterne and should not be so much taken up with political radicalism as kept to a dispassionate line, socialist in principle. And this by Viereck as much as by Bernstein, who, just because he is too moderate, seems to the former to be the right man, because one cannot after all sail under one’s full colours at present.

But why emigrate at all, if not in order to be able to sail under one’s full colours? There is nothing to prevent this abroad. The German Press, Assembly and Penal Laws do not exist in Switzerland. It is therefore not only possible but a duty to say things there which could not be said at home, under the ordinary German laws, even before the Socialist Law. For here we stand not only before Germany but before Europe, and it is a duty, so far as the Swiss laws permit of it, to state to Europe the methods and aims of the German Party without concealment. Anyone who wants to bind himself by German laws in Switzerland would only prove that he was worthy of these German laws and in fact had nothing to say which was not permissible in Germany before the Exceptional Laws. Nor should any consideration be paid to the possibility that the editors will be temporarily cut off from a return to Germany. He who is not ready to risk this is not fit for such an exposed post of honour.

And further. The Exceptional Laws have banned and outlawed the German Party precisely because it was the only serious opposition party in Germany. If, in an organ published abroad, the Party shows its gratitude to Bismarck by giving up this role of the only serious opposition party, by coming out nice and docile and accepting the kick with a dispassionate attitude, it only proves that it deserved the kick. Of all the German papers produced in emigration abroad since 1830, the Laterne is certainly one of the most moderate. But if even the Laterne was too bold – then the new organ can only compromise the Party in the eyes of its sympathisers in non-German countries.

(3) The Manifesto of the three Zürichers.

In the meantime Höchberg’s Yearbook has reached us, containing an article “The Socialist Movement in Germany in Retrospect,” which, as Höchberg himself tells me, has been written by these same three members of the Zürich Commission. Here we have their authentic criticism of the movement up till now and with it their authentic programme for the line of the new organ, in so far as this depends on them.

Right at the beginning we read:

“The movement which Lassalle regarded as an eminently political one, to which he summoned not only the workers but all honest democrats, at the head of which were to march the independent representatives of science and all who were imbued with a true love for humanity, was diminished under the presidency of Johann Baptist Schweitzer into a one-sided struggle for the interests of the industrial workers.”

I will not examine whether or how far this is historically accurate. The special reproach here brought against Schweitzer is that he diminished Lassalleanism, which is here taken as a bourgeois democratic-philanthropic movement, into a one-sided struggle for the interests of the industrial workers, by deepening its character as a class struggle of the industrial workers against the bourgeoisie. He is further reproached with his “rejection of bourgeois democracy.” And what has bourgeois democracy to do with the Social-Democratic Party? If it consists of “honest men” it cannot wish for admittance, and if it does nevertheless wish to be admitted this can only be in order to start a row.

The Lassallean party “chose to conduct itself in the most one-sided way as a workers’ party.” The gentlemen who write that are themselves members of a Party which conducts itself in the most one-sided way as a workers’ Party, they are at present invested with offices and dignities in this Party. Here there is an absolute incompatibility. If they mean what they write they must leave the Party, or at least resign their offices and dignities. If they do not do so, they are admitting that they are proposing to utilise their official position in order to combat the proletarian character of the Party. If therefore the Party leaves them their offices and dignities it will be betraying itself.

In the opinion of these gentlemen, then, the Social-Democratic Party should not be a one-sided workers’ Party but an all-sided Party of “everyone imbued with a true love of humanity.” It must prove this above all by laying aside its crude proletarian passions and placing itself under the guidance of educated, philanthropic bourgeois in order to “cultivate good taste” and learn good form” (page 85). Then even the “disreputable behaviour” of many leaders will give way to a thoroughly respectable “bourgeois behaviour.” (As if the externally disreputable behaviour of those here referred to were not the least they can be reproached with!) Then, too, “numerous adherents from the circles of the educated and propertied classes will make their appearance. But these must first be won if the ... agitation conducted is to attain tangible successes.”

German Socialism has “attached too much importance to the winning of the masses and in so doing has neglected energetic (!) propaganda among the so-called upper strata of society.” And then “the Party still lacks men fitted to represent it in the Reichstag.” It is, however, “desirable and necessary to entrust the mandate to men who have the time and opportunity to make themselves thoroughly acquainted with the relevant materials. The simple worker and small self-employed man...has the necessary leisure for this only in rare and exceptional cases.” So elect bourgeois!

In short: the working class of itself is incapable of its own emancipation. For this purpose it must place itself under the leadership of “educated and propertied” bourgeois who alone possess the “time and opportunity” to acquaint themselves with what is good for the workers.

And secondly the bourgeoisie is on no account to be fought against but – to be won over by energetic propaganda.

But if one wants to win over the upper strata of society, or only its well-disposed elements, one must not frighten them on any account. And here the three Zürichers think they have made a reassuring discovery:

“Precisely at the present time, under the pressure of the Socialist Law, the Party is showing that it is not inclined to pursue the path of violent bloody revolution but is determined ... to follow the path of legality, i.e., of reform.” So if the 500,000 to 600,000 Social-Democratic voters – between a tenth and an eighth of the whole electorate and distributed over the whole width of the land – have the sense not to run their heads against a wall and to attempt a “bloody revolution” of one against ten, this proves that they also forbid themselves to take advantage at any future time of a tremendous external event, a sudden revolutionary upsurge arising from it, or even a victory of the people gained in a conflict resulting from it. If Berlin should ever again be so uneducated to have a March 18, the Social Democrats, instead of taking part in the fight as “riff-raff with a mania for barricades” (page 88), must rather “follow the path of legality,” act pacifically, clear away the barricades and if necessary march with the glorious army against the rough uneducated one-sided masses. Or if the gentlemen assert that this is not what they meant, what did they mean then?

But still better follows.

“The more quiet, objective and well-considered the Party is, therefore, in the way it comes out with criticism of existing conditions and proposals for changes in them, the less possible will a repetition become of the present successful strategy (when the Socialist Law was introduced) by which the conscious reaction has intimidated the bourgeoisie by fear of the Red bogey.” (Page 88.)

In order to relieve the bourgeoisie of the last trace of anxiety it must be clearly and convincingly proved to them that the Red bogey is really only a bogey, and does not exist. But what is the secret of the Red bogey if it is not the bourgeoisie’s dread of the inevitable life-and-death struggle between it and the proletariat? Dread of the inevitable decision of the modern class struggle? Do away with the class struggle and the bourgeoisie and “all independent people” will “not be afraid to go hand in hand with the proletariat.” And the ones to be cheated will be precisely the proletariat.

Let the Party therefore prove by its humble and repentant attitude that it has once and for all laid aside the “improprieties and excesses” which provoked the Socialist Law. If it voluntarily promises that it only intends to act within the limits of the Socialist Law, Bismarck and the bourgeoisie will surely have the kindness to repeal this then superfluous law!

"Let no one misunderstand us"; we do not want “to give up our Party and our programme, but think that for years hence we shall have enough to do if we concentrate our whole strength and energy upon the attainment of certain immediate aims which must in any case be achieved before the realisation of the more far-reaching ends can be thought of.” Then the bourgeois, petty bourgeois and workers who are “at present frightened away...by the far-reaching demands will join us in masses.”

The programme is not to be given up but only postponed – to an indefinite period. One accepts it, though not really for oneself and one’s own lifetime but posthumously as an heirloom to be handed down to one’s children and grandchildren. In the meantime one devotes one’s “whole strength and energy” to all sorts of petty rubbish and the patching up of the capitalist order of society, in order at least to produce the appearance of something happening without at the same time scaring the bourgeoisie. There I must really praise the Communist, Miquel, who proved his unshakable belief in the inevitable overthrow of capitalist society in the course of the next few hundred years by heartily carrying on swindles, contributing his honest best to the crash of 1873 and so really doing something to assist the collapse of the existing order.

Another offence against good form was also the “exaggerated attacks on the company promoters,” who were after all “only children of their time"; “the abuse of Strousberg and similar people ... would therefore have been better omitted.” Unfortunately everyone is only a “ child of his time” and if this is a sufficient excuse nobody ought ever to be attacked any more, all controversy, all struggle on our part ceases; we quietly accept all the kicks our adversaries give us because we, who are so wise, know that these adversaries are “only children of their time” and cannot act otherwise. Instead of repaying their kicks with interest we ought rather to pity these unfortunates.

Then again the Party’s support of the Commune had the disadvantage, nevertheless, “that people who were otherwise well disposed to us were alienated and in general the hatred of the bourgeoisie against us was increased.” And further, “the Party is not wholly without blame for the introduction of the October Law, for it had increased the hatred of the bourgeoisie In an unnecessary way.”

There you have the programme of the three censors of Zürich. In clarity it leaves nothing to be desired. Least of all to us, who are very familiar with the whole of this phraseology from the 1848 days. It is the representatives of the petty bourgeoisie who are here presenting themselves, full of anxiety that the proletariat, under the pressure of its revolutionary position, may “go too far.” Instead of decided political opposition, general compromise; instead of the struggle against the government and the bourgeoisie, an attempt to win and to persuade; instead of defiant resistance to ill-treatment from above, a humble submission and a confession that the punishment was deserved. Historically necessary conflicts are all re-interpreted as misunderstandings, and all discussion ends with the assurance that after all we are all agreed on the main point. The people who came out as bourgeois democrats in 1848 could just as well call themselves social-democrats now. To them the democratic republic was unattainably remote, and to these people the overthrow of the capitalist system is equally so, and therefore has absolutely no significance for practical present-day politics; one can mediate, compromise and philanthropise to one’s heart’s content. It is just the same with the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. It is recognised on paper because its existence can no longer be denied, but in practice it is hushed up, diluted, attenuated.

The Social-Democratic Party is not to be a workers’ party, is not to burden itself with the hatred of the bourgeoisie or of anyone else; should above all conduct energetic propaganda among the bourgeoisie: instead of laying stress on far-reaching aims which frighten the bourgeoisie and are not, after all, attainable in our generation, it should rather devote its whole strength and energy to those small petty-bourgeois patching-up reforms which by providing the old order of society with new props may perhaps transform the ultimate catastrophe into a gradual, piecemeal and, so far as is possible, peaceful process of dissolution. These are the same people who under the pretence of indefatigable activity not only do nothing themselves but also try to prevent anything happening at all except chatter; the same people whose fear of every form of action in 1848 and 1849 obstructed the movement at every step and finally brought about its downfall; the same people who see a reaction and are then quite astonished to find themselves at last in a blind alley where neither resistance nor flight is possible; the same people who want to confine history within their narrow petty-bourgeois horizon and over whose heads history invariably proceeds to the order of the day.

As to their socialist content this has been adequately criticised already in the [Communist] Manifesto, chapter X, “German or True Socialism.” When the class struggle is pushed on one side as a disagreeable “crude” phenomenon, nothing remains as a basis for socialism but “true love of humanity” and empty phraseology about “justice.”

It is an inevitable phenomenon, rooted in the course of development, that people from what have hitherto been the ruling classes should also join the militant proletariat and contribute cultural elements to it. We clearly stated this in the [Communist] Manifesto. But here there are two points to be noted:

First, in order to be of use to the proletarian movement these people must also bring real cultural elements to it. But with the great majority of the German bourgeois converts that is not the case. Neither the Zukunft [Future] nor the Neue Gesellschaft [New Society] have contributed anything which could advance the movement one step further. Here there is an absolute lack of real cultural material, whether concrete or theoretical. In its place we get attempts to bring superficially adopted socialist ideas into harmony with the most varied theoretical standpoints which these gentlemen have brought with them from the university or elsewhere, and of which, owing to the process of decomposition in which the remnants of German philosophy are at present involved, each is more confused than the last. Instead of thoroughly studying the new science themselves to begin with, each of them preferred to trim it to fit the point of view he had already, made a private science of his own without more ado and at once came forward with the claim that he was ready to teach it. Hence there are about as many points of view among these gentry as there are heads; instead of producing clarity in a single case they have only produced desperate confusion – fortunately almost exclusively among themselves. Cultural elements whose first principle is to teach what they have not learnt can be very well dispensed with by the Party.

Secondly. If people of this kind from other classes join the proletarian movement, the first condition is that they should not bring any remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices with them but should whole-heartedly adopt the proletarian point of view. But these gentlemen, as has been proved, are stuffed and crammed with bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideas. In such a petty-bourgeois country as Germany these ideas certainly have their own justification. But only outside the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party. If these gentlemen form themselves into a Social-Democratic Petty-Bourgeois Party they have a perfect right to do so; one could then negotiate with them, form a bloc according to circumstances, etc. But in a workers’ party they are an adulterating element. If reasons exist for tolerating them there for the moment, it is also a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them no influence in the Party leadership and to remain aware that a break with them is only a matter of time. The time, moreover, seems to have come. How the Party can tolerate the authors of this article in its midst any longer is to us incomprehensible. But if the leadership of the Party should fall more or less into the hands of such people then the Party will simply be castrated and proletarian energy will be at an end.

As for ourselves, in view of our whole past there is only one path open to us. For almost forty years we have stressed the class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and in particular the class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat as the great lever of the modern social revolution; it is therefore impossible for us to co-operate with people who wish to expunge this class struggle from the movement. When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle-cry: the emancipation of the working class must be achieved by the working class itself. We cannot therefore co-operate with people who say that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must first be freed from above by philanthropic bourgeois and petty bourgeois. If the new Party organ adopts a line corresponding to the views of these gentlemen, and is bourgeois and not proletarian, then nothing remains for us, much though we should regret it, but publicly to declare our opposition to it and to dissolve the solidarity with which we have hitherto represented the German Party abroad. But it is to be hoped that things will not come to that.

Karl Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge in Hoboken, 19 September 1879

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... Matters may indeed reach the point where Engels and I would be compelled to issue a ‘public statement’ against the Leipzigers and their Zurich allies.

This is the state of affairs: Bebel wrote us that they wanted to found a Party organ [1] in Zurich and he requested our names as collaborators. We were informed that Hirsch [2] would probably be the editor. Thereupon we accepted, and I wrote direct to Hirsch (then in Paris, from where he has since been banished, for the second time) to accept the editorial post, for he alone afforded us the certainty that a mob of doctors, students, etc, and a professorial socialist rabble, such as strut about in the Zukunft, etc, and have already begun to penetrate the Vorwärts, [3] would be kept out, and the Party line would be adhered to strictly... These fellows, nonentities in theory and incompetent in practice, want to draw the teeth of socialism (which they interpret in accordance with university recipes) and particularly of the Social-Democratic Party, to enlighten the workers or, as they put it, to supply them with ‘cultural elements’ from their confused half-knowledge, and above all to make the Party respectable in the eyes of the philistines. They are poor counter-revolutionary windbags...

Now if the weekly, [4] the Party journal, should actually proceed along the lines initiated by Höchberg’s [5] Jahrbuch, we should be compelled to take a public stand against such a debasement of Party and theory! Engels has drawn up a circular (letter) to Bebel, etc [6] (only for private circulation among the German Party leaders, of course), in which our standpoint is set forth without reserve. Thus the gentlemen have been warned in advance, and they know us well enough to understand that this means: either bending or breaking! If they want to compromise themselves, so much the worse for them! In no event will they be allowed to compromise us. You can see how low they have already been brought by parliamentarism for example from the fact that they are accusing Hirsch of having committed a great crime – why? Because he has handled the scoundrel Kayser somewhat roughly in the Laterne for the latter’s disgraceful speech on Bismarck’s tariff legislation. [7] But now they say the Party, that is, the handful of parliamentary representatives of the Party, had authorised Kayser to speak like that! All the more shame for this handful! But even that is a miserable excuse. In fact they were foolish enough to let Kayser speak for himself and on behalf of his constituents; but he spoke in the name of the Party. However that may be, they are already so far affected by parliamentary idiotism that they think they are above criticism, and they denounce criticism as a crime: lèse-majesté...

Notes

1. The reference is to Der Sozialdemokrat, the central organ of the German Socialist Workers Party, founded in Zurich in September 1879. After the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law in 1890 the paper ceased to appear and the Vorwärts again became the central organ of the party – Progress Publishers.

2. Karl Hirsch (1841-1900) – German Social-Democrat, journalist, edited with Wilhelm Liebknecht Demokratische Wochenblatt in Leipzig, after Bebel and Liebknecht’s arrest edited Social-Democratic newspaper Der Volksstaat, while Anti-Socialist Law was in force lived in France, Belgium, England, popularised ideas of scientific socialism – Progress Publishers.

3. Vorwärts – the central organ of the Socialist Workers Party of Germany, published in Leipzig from October 1876. The paper was closed down in October 1878 following the introduction of the Anti-Socialist Law – Progress Publishers.

4. Der Sozialdemokrat – Progress Publishers.

5. Karl Höchberg (1853-1885) – German social reformist, son of a wealthy merchant, in 1876 joined Social-Democratic Party, founded and financed a number of reformist newspapers and journals – Progress Publishers.

6. See Marx and Engels, Circular Letter to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others, September 1879 – Progress Publishers.

7. Marx is referring to the speech made by Kayser, a Social-Democratic member of the Reichstag, in defence of the protective tariffs bill tabled by the government in 1879. Marx and Engels sharply criticised Kayser for defending a bill that was designed to protect the interests of the big industrialists and landowners at the expense of the masses of the population and also condemned the leading Social-Democrats who sided with Kayser. Max Kayser (1853-1888) – German Social-Democrat, member of Reichstag from 1878, belonged to right-wing Social-Democratic group – Progress Publishers.

Friedrich Engels to August Bebel in Leipzig, 14 November 1879

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... And this brings me to the Report. [1] Although the beginning is very good and the treatment of the protective tariff debate – in these circumstances – is skilful the concessions made to the German philistines in the third part are unwelcome. Why that wholly superfluous passage about the ‘civil war’, why that kowtowing to ‘public opinion’ which in Germany will always be that of the beer-house philistine? Why here the total obliteration of the class character of the movement? Why give the Anarchists this ground for rejoicing? And all these concessions moreover are wholly useless. The German philistine is cowardice incarnate; he respects only those who inspire him with fear. But anyone who wants to get into his good graces he considers one of his own kind and respects him no more than his own kind, namely not at all. And now that the beer-house philistine’s ‘storm’ of indignation, called public opinion, has, as is generally admitted, subsided again and since heavy taxation has in any case knocked the spirit out of these people, why these honeyed speeches? If you only knew how they sound abroad! It is quite a good thing that Party organs must be edited by people who are in the thick of the Party and the struggle. But if you had been only six months abroad you would think quite differently of this entirely unnecessary self-debasement of the Party deputies before the philistines. The storm that broke over the heads of the French Socialists after the Commune was after all something quite different from the outcry raised in Germany on account of the Nobiling [2] affair. And how much more proud and dignified was the bearing of the French! Where do you find among them such weakness, such paying of compliments to one’s opponents? They kept silent when they could not speak freely; they let the philistines scream as much as they liked knowing that their time would surely come again; and now it has come...

As for the rest I only want to remark about Auer’s [3] insinuations that we here underestimate neither the difficulties with which the Party has to contend in Germany nor the significance of the successes achieved nevertheless and the quite exemplary conduct up to now of the Party masses. It naturally goes without saying that every victory gained in Germany gladdens our hearts as much as one gained elsewhere, and even more so because from the very beginning the development of the German Party was associated with our theoretical statements. But for that very reason we must be particularly interested to see that the practical conduct of the German Party and especially the public utterances of the Party leadership should be in harmony with the general theory. Our criticism is certainly not pleasant for some people. But it surely must be of greater value to the Party and its leadership than all uncritical compliments to have abroad a few people who, unbiased by confusing local conditions and details of the struggle, measure happenings and utterances from time to time by the theoretical propositions valid for all modern proletarian movements, and who convey to it the impression its actions create outside Germany.

Yours in friendship

F Engels

Notes

1. Engels refers to the ‘Rechenschaftsbericht der sozialdemokratischen Mitglieder des deutschen Reichstages’ (’the Report of the Social-Democratic Members of the German Reichstag’), published in Der Sozialdemokrat of 12, 19 and 26 October 1879 – Progress Publishers.

2. The allusion is to the attempts on the life of William I by Max Hödel on 11 May, and the anarchist Nobiling on 2 June 1878, which provided Bismarck with a convenient opportunity for introducing the Anti-Socialist Law – Progress Publishers.

3. Ignaz Auer (1846-1907) – German Social-Democrat, a leader of the Social-Democratic Party, was repeatedly elected deputy to Reichstag, later a reformist – Progress Publishers.

Engels to August Bebel

In Leipzig

Source: MECW Volume 45, p. 423;

First published: in A. Bebel, Aus meinem Leben Teil III, Stuttgart, 1914.

London, 24 November 1879

Dear Bebel,

I had good reasons for assuming that Auer was alluding to myself. The date proves nothing. He expressly excludes Most. So go and ask him yourself whom he meant; then we shall see what he says. I'm positive that the misunderstanding was not on my side.

Höchberg did, to be sure, make the statement in question.

I know that you were mostly away while the negotiations with Hirsch were going on and it never occurred to me to hold you personally responsible for what happened.

As regards the question of tariffs, your letter wholly corroborates what I have said. If feelings were divided, as was indeed the case, and if it was thought desirable to take those divided feelings into consideration, what was called for was, of course, abstention, no less. Otherwise it would have meant taking one side only into consideration. But why the protectionist section was more deserving of consideration than the free trade one is difficult to see. You say you cannot adopt a purely negative attitude in Parliament. But since everyone ultimately voted against the Bill, their attitude was, after all, purely negative. All I'm saying is, they ought to have known from the start how they intended to conduct themselves; they ought to have acted in conformity with the final vote.

Questions which enable Social-Democratic deputies to abandon a purely negative attitude are very narrowly circumscribed. All are questions which immediately involve the relation of workers to capitalists: factory legislation, the normal working-day, employer’s liability, payment in goods, etc. Perhaps also improvements in the purely bourgeois sense such as constitute a positive step forward: standardisation of coins and weights, freedom of movement, extension of personal freedom, etc. You're unlikely to be troubled with these for the time being. In the case of all other economic questions, such as protective tariffs, nationalisation of the railways, assurance companies, etc., Social-Democratic deputies must always uphold the vital principle of consenting to nothing that increases the power of the government vis-à-vis the people. And this is made all the easier in that feelings within the party itself will, of course, invariably be divided in such cases and hence abstention, a negative attitude, is automatically called for.

What you say about Kayser makes the matter even worse. If he speaks in favour of protective tariffs in general, why does he vote against them? If he intends voting against them why does he speak in favour of them? If, however, he has studied the subject with great diligence, how can he vote for tariffs on iron? Had his studies been worth a penny, he couldn’t fail to have discovered that there are two ironworks in Germany, the Dortmunder Union and the Königs- und Laurahütte, either of which is capable of meeting the entire domestic demand; besides these there are many smaller ones; hence that a protective tariff is utter nonsense in this case; that the only remedy in this case is the capture of the foreign market, hence unadulterated free trade or bankruptcy; also that the iron-masters themselves can only want a protective tariff if they have formed a ring, a conspiracy which imposes monopoly prices on the domestic market, so that they are better able to sell off their surplus products abroad at cut prices, which they are in fact already doing at this moment. It was in the interests of this ring, this conspiracy of monopolists that Kayser was speaking and, insofar as he voted in favour of tariffs on iron, was also voting, and Hansemann of the Dortmunder Union and Bleichröder of the Königs- und Laurahütte will be laughing in their sleeves at the stupid Social-Democrat who has, for good measure, studied the subject with diligence!

You must at all costs get hold of Rudolph Meyer’s Politische Gründer in Deutschland. Without a knowledge of the material assembled here on the swindles, the crash and the political corruption of recent years, it is impossible to form an opinion on present conditions in Germany. How is it that this store of riches was not exploited at the time for the benefit of our press? The book is banned, of course.

The passages in the report I particularly have in mind are 1. those in which so much emphasis is laid on winning over public opinion — to have this factor against you was to be hamstrung; it was a matter of life and death that ‘this hatred be turned into sympathy’, etc — sympathy! from people who just before, during the Terror had shown themselves to be dirty blackguards. There was no need to go to such lengths, especially as the Terror had long since ended; — 2. those to the effect that the party, which condemns war in any shape or form (hence also the one which it is forced to wage, which it wages notwithstanding) and whose goal is the universal fraternisation of all men (in terms of a slogan the goal of every party, in terms of immediate reality that of none, for not even we wish to fraternise with the bourgeois so long as they wish to remain bourgeois), cannot envisage civil war (hence not even in a case where civil war is the only means to the end). This proposition may also be construed as follows: that a party which condemns bloodshed in any shape or form cannot envisage either blood-letting or the amputation of gangrenous limbs, or scientific vivisection. Why all these empty phrases? I'm not asking that all your language should be ‘vigorous’, I am not reproaching the Report for saying too little — on the contrary, there is much that would have been better left unsaid. The next part is much better and so Hans Most has fortunately overlooked the few passages out of which he could have made capital.

But it was a blunder to insert a solemn announcement in the Sozialdemokrat to the effect that Liebknecht had taken the Saxon oath of allegiance. Hans won’t let that one pass by, and his anarchist friends will be sure to embroider on it. Marx and I don’t consider the matter itself to be as dangerous as, e.g., Hirsch took it to be in the heat of the moment. You people must know whether ‘Paris vaut bien une messe’, as Henri IV said when he became a Catholic, thus sparing France a thirty years’ war, and whether the advantages are of a kind to justify such inconsistency and the taking of an oath which, moreover, is the only one which cannot entail a prosecution for perjury. But once it had been taken, nothing ought to have been said about it until others had kicked up a fuss; that would have been time enough to go on to the defensive. But for the Sozialdemokrat, Hans wouldn’t have heard a word about it.

I was delighted at the lambasting you gave the notorious drunkard and wastrel. We shall see that this is spread about in Paris, though we are stumped for the French words that would convey the foregoing pithy expressions.

We are, by the way, fully aware that it is all very well, as they say, for us here to talk, and that your position is much more difficult than ours.

That the petty bourgeois and peasants should be joining us is, I grant you, a sign of the movement’s rapid progress, but it also constitutes a danger to the movement, once one forgets not only that these people have got to come, but also that they are coming simply because they have got to. Their joining us proves that the proletariat really has become the leading class. But since the ideas and ambitions they bring with them are those of the petty bourgeois and the peasant, it must not be forgotten that the proletariat would forfeit its leading historical role were it to make concessions to those ideas and ambitions.

Most cordially yours,

F. Engels

Herewith another loose postscript.

Engels to Thomas Allsop

In Limington

Source: MECW Volume 45, p. 428;

First published: in the language of the original (English) and in German, in Neues Deutschland, Berlin 19 April 1970.

London, 14 December 1879

122 Regent’s Park Road, N. W.

My dear Friend,

I am very sorry indeed to learn that you have been ill and are not yet completely restored to health. I hope your legs will soon be all right again so as to allow you to stir about-I know how you will miss your usual exercise.

We are all pretty well here so far, our patients and half-patients seem to come round gradually.

The man in The P.M.G. [Pall Mall Gazette] does indeed to some extent divine that there are breakers ahead, but as a true Philistine, he seems unable to distinguish appearances from reality. No doubt the crash in Russia is impending and may break out any time. And no doubt, the collapse of Russian despotism must re-act with immense force upon Germany and Austria. But whether an immediate outbreak there be probable or whether it even have chances of success, is more than I pretend to know. The man is quite right, too, in saying that the system of drilling the whole male population, as is now the rule all over the continent, will end in revolutionising these monster armies from within. But this is a process requiring some little time, and as far as Germany goes, it is only lately showing itself. This constant penetration of fresh revolutionary elements into the army, noticed with every new yearly batch of recruits, has been the principal motive for introducing the [Anti-]Socialist laws. And how little this Socialist Law, with all its terrorism, has effected, has again been shown last Thursday. At the last election in 1878, at Magdeburg, our candidate [Wilhelm Bracke] only got 1/3 of the votes given; now there was a fresh election there, and he very near got the full half of the votes, and stands a chance of passing at the second ballot. The joke of the thing is, that this candidate of ours is a natural son of old William, the emperor, by an actress, Miss Viereck, who was the old fellow’s mistress.

Anyhow, the outbreak in Russia must hasten the movement in Central and Western Europe. The governments of Vienna and Berlin will lose heart when they have no longer that unfailing mainstay of all reaction — the absolute Russian government. And the moral effect of a revolutionary successful movement in Russia upon the masses in Central Europe must be immense.

The worst would be, to us, if Russia, to avoid revolution, launched into foreign war. But so long as they have not the French Alliance, they scarcely venture.

Anyhow, by next spring this Russian crisis, which we think here is the most important one since 1848, must come to a head either one way or another, and I hope you will recover your full strength so as to envoy the stirring times which are, it appears, still in store for you.

Very faithfully yours

F. Engels

Friedrich Engels to August Bebel in Leipzig, 16 December 1879

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... There is no room for us in a paper in which it is possible virtually to bewail the Revolution of 1848 that for the first time opened wide the portals to Social-Democracy. It plainly appears from this article [1] and Höchberg’s [2] letter that the stellar trio claims the right to set forth in the Sozialdemokrat, alongside the proletarian views, its own petty-bourgeois socialist views first clearly enunciated in the Jahrbuch. And I fail to see how you in Leipzig can prevent this without a formal breach, once things have come to such a pass. You continue to regard these people as Party comrades. We cannot do so. The article in the Jahrbuch draws a sharp and absolutely distinct line between us. We cannot even negotiate with these people so long as they assert that they belong to the same party as we. The points in question are points that can no longer be discussed in any proletarian party. To make them a subject of discussion within the party would be to put in question the whole of proletarian socialism.

As a matter of fact it is better that under these circumstances we do not cooperate. We should have had to protest constantly and to announce publicly our withdrawal after a few weeks, which after all would not have helped matters.

We greatly regret that just at this time of suppression we are unable to support you unconditionally. As long as the Party in Germany remained true to its proletarian character we set aside all other considerations. But now, when the petty-bourgeois elements that have been admitted openly show their true colours, the situation has changed. Once they are permitted to smuggle their petty-bourgeois ideas piecemeal into the organ of the German Party, this fact simply closes that organ to us...

As for the rest, world history is taking its course, regardless of these wise and moderate philistines. In Russia matters must come to a head in a few months from now. Either absolutism is overthrown and then, after the downfall of the great reserve of reaction, a different atmosphere will at once pervade Europe. Or a European war will break out which will also bury the present German Party beneath the inevitable struggle of each people for its national existence. Such a war would be the greatest misfortune for us; it might set the movement back twenty years. But the new party that would ultimately have to emerge anyhow would in all European countries be free from a mass of objectionable and petty matters that now everywhere hamper the movement.

Yours in friendship

F Engels

Notes

1. This refers to an article under the title ‘Ruckblicke auf die sozialistische Bewegung in Deutschland’ (’the Socialist Movement in Germany in Retrospect’) written by Karl Höchberg, Eduard Bernstein and Karl Schramm and published in the Jahrbuch für Sozialwissenschaft und Sozialpolitik. See Marx and Engels, Circular Letter to August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Wilhelm Bracke and others, September 1879 – Progress Publishers.

2. Karl Höchberg (1853-1885) – German social reformist, son of a wealthy merchant, in 1876 joined Social-Democratic Party, founded and financed a number of reformist newspapers and journals – Progress Publishers.

1880

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 10 January

Marx to Charles Walstone (Waldstein). 26 January

Engels to Carl Hirsch. 17 February

Marx to Bernhard Kraus. 26 March

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 1 April

Engels to H Meyer. 3 April

Engels to August Bebel. After 27 April

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 4 May

Marx to Paul Lafargue. c. 4-5 May

Marx to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. 27 June

Engels to Minna Gorbunova. 22 July

Marx to Philip Stephen King. 27 July

Engels to Minna Gorbunova. 2 August

Engels to Minna Gorbunova. 5 August

Marx to John Swinton. 15 August

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 17 August

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 30 August..

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 3 September

Marx to Paul Lafargue. 3 September

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 9 September

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 12 September

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 12 September

Engels to Marx. 13 September

Marx to Ferdinand Fleckles. 29 September

Engels to Eugen Oswald and an Unknown Correspondent. 5 October

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 12 October

Engels to Harry Kaulitz. 28 October

Marx to John Swinton. 4 November

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 5 November

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 5 November

Marx to Ferdinand Fleckles. 12 November

Marx to Achille Loria. 13 November

Marx to Henry Mayers Hyndman. 8 December

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 24 December

Marx to Carl Hirsch. 29 December

Engels to J.P. Becker

In Geneva

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, April 1, 1880

Here things are just as they were in 1850 again. The Workers' Assoc. is splitting up into all sorts of parties--Most here, Rackow there--and we have trouble enough in preventing ourselves from being dragged into the whirl. It is all a storm in a teacup, which may in some ways have a very good influence on those who take part in it by contributing to their further education, but so far as the course of the world is concerned it is more or less indifferent whether a hundred German workers here declare themselves for one side or the other. If they could exercise any influence on the English--but there is absolutely no question of that. Most, in his confused anxiety to do something, can neither keep quiet nor accomplish anything whatever; the people in Germany simply will not see that because Most has been expelled from the country the moment for revolution is now here. Freiheit, by main force, is to become the most revolutionary paper in the world, but this is not achieved by just repeating the word revolution in every line. Fortunately it does not much matter what is in the paper or not. The same is true of the Zurich organ, which one day preaches revolution and the next declares that a revolution by force would be the greatest misfortune, which is afraid on the one hand of being outdone by Most's big words and on the other that the workers may take its own big words seriously. So it is a choice between the empty shrieking of Freiheit and the narrow philistinism of the Sozial Demokrat.

I am afraid our friends in Germany are mistaken about the kind of organisation which should be maintained under present conditions. I have nothing against the fact that the chief members of Parliament are taking the lead in the absence of any other leadership. But they can neither demand nor enforce the strict obedience which the old Party leadership--elected for this purpose--could insist upon. Least of all in the present circumstances, without a press, without mass meetings. The looser the organisation is now in appearance the stronger it will be in reality. But instead of this the old system is to be maintained, final decisions are in the hands of the party leadership (although there is no congress to correct it or if necessary to dismiss it), and anybody who attacks one of them is a heretic. And with it all the best of them know themselves that there are all sorts of incapable and in other ways not quite sound people among them, and they must surely be very limited if they do not realise that it is not they who have the command of their organ but Hochberg, thanks to his money-bags, and with him his fellow-philistines Schramm and Bernstein. In my opinion the old Party, together with its former organisation, has come to an end. If, as is to be expected, the European movement soon gets going again, the great mass of the German proletariat will enter it and then the 500,000 men of the year 1878 will join the trained and educated kernel of this mass; but then too the old "strict organisation" handed down by Lassallean tradition will become a brake which might hold back a cart but cannot be applied to an avalanche.

Moreover these people are doing nothing but things well-calculated to break up the Party. First the Party is supposed constantly to provide for the old agitators and editors, thanks to which it gets saddled with a whole crowd of papers with nothing whatever in them beyond what can be read in every bourgeois gossip rag. And the workers are expected to cooperate with this indefinitely! Secondly, they come out in the Reichstag and the Saxon Landtag in such a tame way, for the most part, that they discredit themselves and the Party before the whole world, making "positive proposals" to the existing government as to how to do things better in small questions of detail, etc. And the workers, who have been declared outside the law, who are delivered over bound hand and foot to the caprices of the police, are expected to regard this as proper representation! Thirdly, the philistine petty-bourgeois tone of the Sozial Demokrat, which they sanction. In every letter they tell us not on any account to believe reports of any division or differences of opinion having broken out in the Party, but everybody who comes from Germany assures one that the people are completely bewildered by this behaviour on the part of their leaders and by no means in agreement with it. Indeed, considering the character of our workers, which has so splendidly maintained itself, anything else would be impossible. It is the peculiar characteristic of the German movement that all the mistakes of the leadership are invariably made good again by the masses, and so it will no doubt be this time too.

Marx to Nikolai Danielson

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

Ramsgate, September 12, 1880

As to the agricultural crisis, it will gather strength, develop itself, and, by the bye, come to a head, carrying with it quite a revolution in the relations of landed property, — quite independent of the cycles of the commercial-industrial crises. Even such optimists as Mr. Caird have commenced “to smell a rat.” Most characteristic of English blockheadedness is this: since two years there have been published letters of farmers — in the Times — as well as in agricultural papers — giving the items of their expenses in cultivating their farms, comparing them with their returns at present prices, and winding up with a positive deficit. Would you believe that not one of the specialists — expatiating upon these accounts — has thought of considering how these accounts would stand if the item of rent was struck out in many cases or reduced “most feelingly” in many other cases? But this is a delicate point which must not be touched. The farmers themselves, though become unbelievers in the nostrums proposed by their landlords or the “plumitifs” of the latter, dare not yet assume attitudes of bold virility, considering that they, on their part, are denounced by the rustic “labouring class.” A nice pickle it is altogether.

Karl Marx To John Swinton

Written: November 4, 1880;

Source: Science and Society Volume II, No. 2, Spring 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins;

HTML Mark-up: Andy Blunden and Sally Ryan.

41, Maitland Park Road, London, N. W.

November 4, 1880.

My Dear Sir:

I have sent you today a copy of the French edition of Capital. I have at the same time to thank you for your friendly article in the Sun.

Apart Mr. Gladstone’s sensational failures abroad — political interest centers here at present in the Irish “Land Question.” And why? Mainly because it is the harbinger of the English “Land Question.”

Not only that the great landlords of England are also the largest landholders of Ireland, but having once broken down in what is ironically called the “sister” island, the English landed system will no longer be tenable at home. There are arraigned against it the British farmers, wincing under high rents, and — thanks to the American competition — low prices; the British agricultural laborers, at last impatient of their traditional position of ill-used beasts of burden, and that British party which styles itself “Radical.” The latter consists of two sets of men; first the ideologues of the party, eager to overthrow the political power of the aristocracy by mining its material basis, the semi-feudal landed property. But behind these principle-spouters, and hunting them on, looks another set of men — sharp, close-fisted, calculating capitalists, fully aware that the abolition of the old land laws, in the way proposed by the ideologues, cannot but convert land into a commercial article that must ultimately concentrate in the hands of capital.

On the other side, considered as a natural entity, John Bull has ugly misgivings lest the aristocratic English landed garrison in Ireland once gone — England’s political sway over Ireland will go, too!

Liebknecht has to enter prison for six months. The Anti-Socialists’ Law having failed to overthrow or even to weaken the German Social Democratic organization, Bismarck clings the more desperately to his panacea, and fancies that it must work, if only applied on a larger scale. Hence he has extended the state of siege to Hamburg, Altona, and three other Northern towns. Under these circumstances, the German friends have written me a letter of which one passage reads thus:

“The Socialist Law, though it could not break and never will break our organization, does impose pecuniary sacrifices almost impossible to bear. To support the families ruined by the police, to keep alive the few papers left to us, to keep up the necessary communications by secret messengers, to fight the battle on the whole line-all this requires money. We are nearly exhausted and forced to appeal to our friends and sympathizers in other countries.”

So far this extract.

Now we here at London, Paris, etc., will do our best. At the same time, I believe that a man of your influence might organize a subscription in the United States. Even if the monetary result were not important, denunciations of Bismarck’s new coup d'etat in public meetings held by you, reported in the American press, reproduced on the other side of the Atlantic, would sorely hit the Pomeranian hobereau and be welcomed by all the socialists of Europe. More information you might get from Mr. Sorge (Hoboken). Any money forthcoming to be sent over to Mr. Otto Freytag, Landtagsabgeordneter, Amtmannshof, Leipzig. His address ought, of course, not to be made public; otherwise the German police would simply-confiscate.

A propos. My youngest daughter — who was not with us at Ramsgate — just tells me that she has cut my portrait from the copy of the Capital I sent you, on the pretext that it was a mere caricature. Well, I shall make up for it by a photogram to be taken on the first fine day.

Mrs. Marx and the whole family send you their best wishes.

Yours most sincerely,

Karl Marx

Karl Marx To Sorge

Written: November 5, 1880;

Source: Science and Society Volume II, No. 2, Spring 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins;

HTML Mark-up: Andy Blunden and Sally Ryan.

41 Maitland Park Road, N. W.

November 5, 1880.

Dear Sorge:

You must attribute my long silence (1) to a very great pressure of work, and (2) to the grave illness of my wife, which has already lasted over a year. You have seen the heights to which John Most has developed, and, on the other hand, how miserably the so-called party organ, the Zurich Sozialdemokrat (not to mention the Jahrbuch there) has been managed, duce Dr. Hochberg. Engels and I have been engaged in constant correspondence with the Leipzigers in this connection, with sharp clashes occurring often. But we have avoided intervening publicly in any way. It is not fitting for those who sit quietly, comparativement parlant, abroad to make the position of those working within the country under the hardest conditions and with the greatest personal sacrifices more difficult, to the delight of the bourgeois and the government. Liebknecht was here a few weeks ago, and “improvement” has been promised in every respect. The party organization has been renewed, which could be done only in a secret manner, i.e., so far as “secret” means a secret to the police.

It is only recently that I fully discovered Most’s blackguardism — in a Russian socialist paper. He never dared to print in German what can be read here in the Russian vernacular. This is no longer an attack upon individual persons, but a dragging of the whole German labor movement through the mud. At the same time it grotesquely shows his absolute lack of understanding of the doctrine he formerly dealt in. It is babbling so silly, so illogical, so degenerate, that it finally dissolves into nothing, viz., Johann Most’s boundless personal vanity. As he was unable to accomplish anything in Germany in spite of all his ranting, except among a certain Berlin mob, he has allied himself with the younger generation of Bakuninists in Paris, the group that publishes the Revolution sociale (with a circle of readers = exactly 210), but which possesses Pyat’s Commune as its ally. The cowardly, melodramatic humbug Pyat — in whose Commune I figure as Bismarck’s right hand — has a grudge against me because I have always treated him with absolute contempt and thwarted all his attempts to use the International for his sensational tricks. In any event Most has performed the good service of having brought all the ranters — Andreas Scheu, Hasselmann, etc., etc. — together as a group.

As a result of Bismarck’s new state of siege decrees and the persecution of our party organs, it is absolutely necessary to raise money for the Party. I have therefore written to John Swinton (for a well-meaning bourgeois is best suited for this purpose), and told him to apply to you for detailed information regarding German conditions.

Aside from the trifles mentioned on the previous page — and how many of these have we seen burst and vanish again without a trace during the many years of our exile — things are going along splendidly on the whole (I mean by this the general developments in Europe), as well as within the circles of the really revolutionary party on the Continent.

You have probably noticed that the Egalité, in particular, (thanks en premiere instance to Guesde’s coming over to us and to the work of my son-in-law Lafargue) has for the first time offered us a French “workers’ paper” in the wider sense. Malon, too, in the Revue Socialiste, has had to espouse socialisme moderne scientifique, i.e., German socialism, even though with the inconsistencies inseparable from his eclectic nature (we were enemies, as he was originally one of the founders of the Alliance). I wrote the “Questionneur” for him, which was first printed in the Revue Socialiste and then distributed throughout France in a very large number of reprints. Shortly afterward Guesde came to London to draw up a workers’ election program together with us (myself, Engels, Lafargue) for the coming general elections. With the exception of some trivialities which Guesde found it necessary to throw to the French workers notwithstanding my protest, such as fixing the minimum wage by law, etc. (I told him: “If the French proletariat is still so childish as to require such bait, it is not worth while drawing up any program whatever”), the economic section of the very brief document consists solely of demands that have spontaneously arisen out of the labor movement itself, except for the introductory passages where the communist goal is defined in a few words. It was a tremendous step forward to pull the French workers down to earth from their fog of phraseology, and therefore it was a violent shock to all the French giddy-heads, who live by “fog-making.” After violent opposition by the anarchists, the program was first adopted in the Region centrale — i.e., Paris and its environs — and later in many other workers’ centers. The simultaneous formation of opposed groups of workers, which accepted, however, most of the “practical” demands of the program (sauf les anarchistes, who do not consist of actual workers, but of declasses with a few duped workers as their rank-and-file soldiers), and the fact that very divergent standpoints were expressed solely regarding other questions, prove to me that this is the first real labor movement in France. Up to the present time only sects existed there, which naturally received their mot d'ordre from the founder of the sect, whereas the mass of the proletariat followed the radical or pseudo-radical bourgeois and fought for them on the day of decision, only to be slaughtered, deported, etc., the very next day by the fellows they had put into power.

The Emancipation that was put out in Lyons a few days ago will be the organ of the Parti ouvrier that has sprung up on the basis of German socialism.

Meanwhile we also have had and have our champions in the camp of the enemy itself — i.e., in the radical camp. Theisz has taken up the labor problem in the Intransigeant, Rochefort’s organ; after the defeat of the Commune he came to London a Proudhonist, like all “thinking” French socialists, where he changed completely — through personal contact with me and conscientious study of Capital. On the other hand, my son-in-law gave up his professorship in King’s College, returned to Paris (his family is still here fortunately), and became one of the most influential editors of Justice, which belongs to Clemenceau, the leader of the Extreme Left. He has done such good work that Clemenceau, who publicly came out only last April against socialism and as the advocate of American-democratic-republican views, has swung over to us in his latest Marseilles speech against Gambetta, both in its general tendency and in its principal points, as contained in the minimum program. Whether he'll keep what he promises is wholly immaterial. In any event he has introduced our element into the Radical Party, whose organs, comically enough, regard what they had ignored or ridiculed as long as it was merely issued as the slogan of the Parti ouvrier as something wonderful now that it comes from the mouth of Clemenceau.

I need hardly tell you — for you know French chauvinism — that the secret threads by which the leaders, from Guesde-Malon to Clemenceau, have been set in motion are entre nous. Il n'en faut pas parler. Quand on veut agir pour Messieurs les Français, il faut le faire anonymement, pour ne pas choquer le sentiment “national.” As it is, the anarchists denounce our cooperators already as Prussian agents, under the dictatorship of the “notorious” Prussian agent — Karl Marx.

In Russia, where Capital is more read and appreciated than anywhere else, our success is even greater. On the one hand, we have the critics (mostly young university professors, some of them personal friends of mine, as well as some writers for the reviews), and on the other, the terrorist central committee, whose program secretly printed and issued in Petersburg recently, has provoked great fury among the anarchist Russians in Switzerland, who publish The Black Redistribution (this is the literal translation from the Russian) in Geneva. These persons — most (not all) of them people who left Russia voluntarily — constitute the so-called party of propaganda as opposed to the terrorists who risk their lives. (In order to carry on propaganda in Russia — they move to Geneva! What a quid pro quo!) These gentlemen are against all political-revolutionary action. Russia is to leap into the anarchist-communist-atheist millennium in one breakneck jump! In the meantime they are preparing for this leap by a tiresome doctrinairism whose so-called principes courent la rue depuis feu Bakounine.

And now enough for this time. Let me hear from you soon. Best regards from my wife.

Totus tuiu,

Karl Marx

I should be very much pleased if you could find me something good (meaty) on economic conditions in California, of course at my expense. California is very important for me because nowhere else has the upheaval most shamelessly caused by capitalist centralization taken place with such speed.

Karl Marx to Henry Mayer Hyndman

In London

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

8 December 1880

... If you say that you do not share the views of my party for England I can only reply that that party considers an English revolution not necessary, but – according to historic precedents – possible. If the unavoidable evolution turn into a revolution, it would not only be the fault of the ruling classes, but also of the working class. Every pacific concession of the former has been wrung from them by ‘pressure from without’. Their action kept pace with that pressure and if the latter has more and more weakened, it is only because the English working class know not how to wield their power and use their liberties, both of which they possess legally.

In Germany the working class were fully aware from the beginning of their movement that you cannot get rid of a military despotism but by a Revolution. At the same time they understood that such a Revolution, even if at first successful, would finally turn against them without previous organisation, acquirement of knowledge, propaganda, and ... [word illegible]. Hence they moved within strictly legal bounds. The illegality was all on the side of the government, which declared them en dehors la loi. [1] Their crimes were not deeds, but opinions unpleasant to their rulers. Fortunately, the same government – the working class having been pushed to the background with the help of the bourgeoisie – becomes now more and more unbearable to the latter, whom it hits on their most tender point – the pocket. This state of things cannot last long...

Notes

1. Outside the law – MIA.

1881

Marx to Charles Longuet. 4 January

Marx to an Unknown Correspondent. 31 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 1 February

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 2 February

Marx to Carl Pearson. 15 February

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 19 February

Marx to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. 22 February

Engels to Jenny Longuet. 24 February

Marx to Vera Zasulich. 8 March

Engels to S F Kaufmann. 11 March

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 12 March

Marx and Engels to the Chairman of the Slavonic Meeting. 21 March

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 28 March

Engels to August Bebel. 30 March

Engels to Gottlieb Lemcke. 2 April

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 4 April

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 11 April

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 14 April

Engels to August Bebel. 28 April

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 29 April

Engels to Jenny Longuet. 31 May

Marx to John Swinton. 2 June

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 2 June

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 2 June

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 6 June

Engels to Jenny Longuet. 17 June

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 20 June

Marx to Henry Mayers Hyndman. 2 July

Engels to Marx. 7 July

Engels to Norris A Clowes. 22 July

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 22 July

Marx to Engels. 27 July

Engels to Marx. 29 July

Marx to Engels. 3 August

Engels to Marx. 6 August

Marx to Carl Hirsch. 6 August

Marx to Engels. 9 August

Marx to Laura Lafargue. 9 August

Engels to George Shipton. 10 August

Engels To Marx. 10 August

Engels to Marx. 11 August

Engels to George Shipton. 15 August

Marx to Engels. 16 August

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 16 August

Engels to Marx. 17 August.

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 17 August

Engels to Marx. 18 August

Marx to Engels. 18 August

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 18 August

Marx to Engels. 19 August

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 20 August

Engels to August Bebel. 25 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 27 August

Marx to Karl Kautsky. 1 October

88 Marx to Minna Kautsky. 1 October

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 25 October

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 4 November

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 30 November

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 7 December

Marx to Johann Philipp Becker. 10 December

Marx to Nikolai Danielson. 13 December

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 15 December

Marx to Jenny Languet. 17 December

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 18 December

Engels to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. 29 December

Marx to Roland Daniels. 31 December

Engels to Lev Hartmann. end December

Friedrich Engels to Karl Kautsky

In Vienna

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

1 February 1881

... Even though the Katheder-Socialists [1] persistently call upon us proletarian Socialists to tell them how we can prevent overpopulation and the consequent threat to the existence of the new social order, I see no reason at all why I should do them the favour. I consider it a sheer waste of time to dispel all the scruples and doubts of these people which arise from their muddled superwisdom, or even to refute, for instance, the awful twaddle which Schäffle [2] alone has compiled in his numerous big volumes. It would require a fair-sized book merely to correct all the passages set in inverted commas which these gentlemen have misquoted from Capital. They should first learn to read and to copy before demanding that one should answer their questions...

There is of course the abstract possibility that the human population will become so numerous that its further increase will have to be checked. If it should become necessary for communist society to regulate the production of men, just as it will have already regulated the production of things, then it, and it alone, will be able to do this without difficulties. It seems to me that it should not be too difficult for such a society to achieve in a planned way what has already come about naturally, without planning, in France and Lower Austria. In any case it will be for those people to decide if, when and what they want to do about it, and what means to employ. I don’t feel qualified to offer them any advice or counsel in this matter. They will presumably be at least as clever as we are.

Incidentally, I wrote as early as 1844 (Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, page 109):

... even if Malthus were absolutely right, this (socialist) transformation would have to be undertaken on the spot; for only this transformation, and the education of the masses which it alone provides, makes it possible to place that moral restraint of the propagative instinct which Malthus himself presents as the most effective and easiest remedy for over-population. [3]

This is enough for now, the other points we can discuss when we meet...

Notes

1. Katheder Socialists – representatives of a trend in bourgeois economics and sociology which arose towards the end of the nineteenth century. They were in the main German professors who under the guise of socialism advocated bourgeois reformism from their university chairs (Katheder in German) – Progress Publishers.

2. Albert Eberhard Friedrich Schäffle (1831-1903) – German vulgar bourgeois economist and sociologist, after publication of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, advocated class peace and cooperation between bourgeoisie and proletariat – Progress Publishers.

3. Frederick Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy (see Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (Moscow, 1961), pp. 203-04) – Progress Publishers.

Marx to Nikolai Danielson

In St. Petersburg

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, February 19, 1881

I have read with the greatest interest your article, which is in the best sense of the word “original.” Hence the boycotting – if you break through the webs of routine thought, you are always sure to be “boycotted” in the first instance; it is the only arm of defence which in their first perplexity the routiniers know how to wield. I have been “boycotted” in Germany for many, many years, and am still so in England, with that little variation that from time to time something so absurd and asinine is launched against me that I would blush to take any public notice of it. But try on! The next thing to do – in my opinion – is to take up the wonderfully increasing indebtedness of the landlords, the upper-class representatives of agriculture, and show them how they are “crystallised” in the retort under the control of the “new pillars of society.”

I am very anxious to see your polemics with the “Slovo.” As soon as I shall sail in more quiet waters I shall enter more fully upon your Esquisse [sketch]. For the present I cannot omit one observation. The soil being exhausted and getting not the elements – by artificial and vegetable and animal manure, etc. – to supply its wants, will, with the changing favour of the seasons, of circumstances independent of human influence – still continue to yield harvests of very different amounts, though, summing up a period of years, as for instance, from 1870-80, the stagnant character of the production presents itself in the most striking character. Under such circumstances the favourable climatic conditions pave the way to a famine year by quickly consuming and setting free the mineral fertilisers still potent on the soil, while vice-versa, a famine-year, and still more a series of bad years following it, allow the soil-inherent minerals to accumulate anew, and to work efficiently with returning favour of the climatic conditions. Such a process goes, of course, everywhere on, but elsewhere it is checked by the modifying intervention of the agriculturist himself. It becomes the only regulating factor where man has ceased to be a “power” – for want of means.

So we have 1870 as an excellent harvest in your country, but that year is a climax year, and as such immediately followed by a very bad one; the year 1871, the very bad harvest, must be considered as the starting point for a new little cycle, till we come to the new climax year 1874, which is immediately followed by the famine year 1875; then the upwards movement begins again, ending in the still worse famine year 1880. The summing up of the years during the whole period proves that the average annual production remained the same and that the mere natural factors have alone produced the changes, comparing the single years and the smaller cycles of years.

I wrote you some time ago, that if the great industrial and commercial crisis England has passed through, went over without the culminating financial crash at London, this exceptional phenomenon was only due to French money. This is now seen and acknowledged even by English routiniers. Thus the Statist (January 19, 1881) says: “The money market has only be[en] so easy as it has been during the past years through an accident. The Bank of France in the early autumn permitted its stock of gold bullion to fall from £30 millions to £22 millions .... Last autumn undoubtedly there was a very narrow escape.” (!)

The English railway system rolls on the same inclined plane as the European Public Debt system. The ruling magnates amongst the different railway-nets directors contract not only – progressively – new loans in order to enlarge their network, i.e., the ” territory,” where they rule as absolute monarchs, but they enlarge their respective networks in order to have new pretexts for engaging in new loans which enable them to pay the interest due to the holders of obligations, preferential shares, etc., and also from time to time to throw a sop to the much ill-used common shareholders in the shape of somewhat increased dividends. This pleasant method must one day or another terminate in an ugly catastrophe.

In the United States the railway kings have become the butt of attacks, not only, as before this, on the part of the farmers and other industrial “entrepreneurs” of the West, but also on the part of the grand representative of commerce – the New York Chamber of Commerce. The Octopodus railway king and financial swindler Gould has, on his side, told the New York commercial magnates: You now attack the railways, because you think them most vulnerable considering their present unpopularity; but take heed: after the railways every sort of corporation (means in the Yankee dialect joint stock company) will have its turn; then, later on, all forms of associated capital; finally all forms of capital; you are thus paving the way to – Communism whose tendencies are already more and more spreading among the people. M. Gould “a le flair bon.”

In India serious complications, if not a general outbreak, is in store for the British government. What the English take from them annually in the form of rent, dividends for railways useless to the Hindus; pensions for military and civil service men, for Afghanistan and other wars, etc., etc. – what they take from them without any equivalent and quite apart from what they appropriate to themselves annually within India, speaking only of the value of the commodities the Indians have gratuitously and annually to send over to England – it amounts to more than the total sum of income of the sixty millions of agricultural and industrial labourers of India! This is a bleeding process, with a vengeance! The famine years are pressing each other and in dimensions till now not yet suspected in Europe! There is an actual conspiracy going on wherein Hindus and Mussulmans co-operate; the British government is aware that something is “brewing,” but this shallow people (I mean the governmental men), stultified by their own parliamentary ways of talking and thinking, do not even desire to see clear, to realise the whole extent of the imminent danger! To delude others and by deluding them to delude yourself – this is: parliamentary wisdom in a nutshell! Tant mieux!

Marx to Domela Nieuwenhuis

In The Hague

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, February 22, 1881

The "question" of the forthcoming Zürich Congress about which you inform me seems to me--a mistake. The thing to be done at any definite given moment of the future, the thing immediately to be done, depends of course entirely on the given historical conditions in which one has to act. But this question is in the clouds and therefore is really the statement of a phantom problem to which the only answer can be--the criticism of the question itself. No equation can be solved unless the elements of its solution are involved in its terms. Moreover the embarrassments of a government which has suddenly come into being through a people's victory have nothing specifically "socialist" about them. On the contrary. The victorious bourgeois politicians at once feel themselves embarrassed by their "victory" while the socialist can at least take action without any embarrassment. One thing you can at any rate be sure of: a socialist government does not come into power in a country unless conditions are so developed that it can above all take the necessary measures for intimidating the mass of the bourgeoisie sufficiently to gain time--the first desideratum [requisite]--for lasting action.

Perhaps you will point to the Paris Commune; but apart from the fact that this was merely the rising of a town under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was in no sense socialist, nor could it be. With a small amount of sound common sense, however, they could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people -- the only thing that could be reached at the time. The appropriation of the Bank of France alone would have been enough to dissolve all the pretensions of the Versailles people in terror, etc., etc.

The general demands of the French bourgeoisie laid down before 1789 were roughly just the same, mutatis mutandis [with corresponding alterations] as the first immediate demands of the proletariat are pretty uniformly to-day in all countries with capitalist production. But had any eighteenth-century Frenchman the faintest idea a priori beforehand of the way in which the demands of the French bourgeoisie would be accomplished? The doctrinaire and necessarily fantastic anticipations of the programme of action for a revolution of the future only divert us from the struggle of the present. The dream that the end of the world was at hand inspired the early Christians in their struggle with the Roman Empire and gave them confidence in victory. Scientific insight into the inevitable disintegration of the dominant order of society continually proceeding before our eyes, and the ever-growing passion into which the masses are scourged by the old ghosts of government--while at the same time the positive development of the means of production advances with gigantic strides--all this is a sufficient guarantee that with the moment of the outbreak of a real proletarian revolution there will also be given the conditions (though these are certain not to be idyllic) of its next immediate modus operandi [form of action].

It is my conviction that the critical juncture for a new International Workingmen's Association has not yet arrived and for this reason I regard all workers' congresses, particularly socialist congresses, in so far as they are not related to the immediate given conditions in this or that particular nation, as not merely useless but harmful. They will always fade away in innumerable stale generalised banalities.

Engels To Jenny Longuet

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, pp. 326-329;

Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan.

February 24, 1881

My dear Jenny,

Well may the illustrious Regnard recommend his factum to your “charity.” [322] This Jacobin defending English respectable Protestantism and English vulgar Liberalism with the historical appareil of that same vulgar Liberalism is indeed an object of deepest charity. But to his “facts

1) The 80,000 Protestants’ massacre of 1641. The Irish Catholics are here in the same position as the Commune de Paris. The Versaillais massacred 30,000 Communards and called that the horrors of the Commune. The English Protestants under Cromwell massacred at least 30,000 Irish and to cover their brutality, invented the tale that this was to avenge 30,000 Protestants murdered by the Irish Catholics.

The facts are these.

Ulster having been taken from its Irish owners who at that time 1600-1610 held the land in common, and handed over to Scotch Protestant military colonists, these colonists did not feel safe in their possessions in the troublous times after 1640. The Puritan English government officials in Dublin spread the rumour that a Scotch Army of Covenanters [323] was to land in Ulster and exterminate all Irish and Catholics. Sir W. Parsons, one of the two Chief Justices of Ireland, said that in a 12-month there would not be a Catholic left in Ireland. It was under these menaces, repeated in the English Parliament, that the Irish of Ulster rose on 23rd Oct. 1641. But no massacre took place. All contemporaneous sources ascribe to the Irish merely the intention of general massacre, and even the two Protestant Chief Justices[A] (proclam. 8th Febr. 1642) declare that “the chief part of their plot, and amongst them a general massacre, had been disappointed. The English and Scotch, however, 4th May 1642, threw Irish women naked into the river (Newry) and massacred Irishmen. (Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland, 1865.)

2) L’Irlande la Vendée de l’Angleterre. [324] Ireland was Catholic, Protestant England Republican, therefore Ireland-English Vendée. There is however this little difference that the French Revolution intended to give the land to the people, the English Commonwealth intended, in Ireland, to take the land from the people.

The whole Protestant reformation, as is well known to most students of history save Regnard, apart from its dogmatical squabbles and quibbles, was a vast plan for a confiscation of land. First the land was taken from the Church. Then the Catholics, in countries where Protestantism was in power, were declared rebels and their land confiscated.

Now in Ireland the case was peculiar.

“For the English,” says Prendergast, “seem to have thought that god made a mistake in giving such a fine country as Ireland to the Irish; and for near 700 years they have been trying to remedy it.”

The whole agrarian history of Ireland is a series of confiscations of Irish land to be handed over to English settlers. These settlers, in a very few generations, under the charm of Celtic society, turned more Irish than the aborigines. Then a new confiscation and new colonisation took place, and so in infinitum.

In the 17th century, the whole of Ireland except the newly Scotchified North, was ripe for a fresh confiscation. So much so, that when the British (Puritan) Parliament accorded to Charles I an army for the reduction of Ireland, it resolved that the money for this armament should be raised upon the security of 2,500,000 acres to be confiscated in Ireland. And the “adventurers” who advanced the money should also appoint the officers of that army. The land was to be divided amongst those adventurers: so that 1,000 acres should be given them, if in Ulster for £200 — advanced, in Connaught for £300, in Munster for £450, in Leinster for £600. And if the people rose against this beneficent plan they are Vendéens! If Regnard should ever sit in a National Convention, he may take a leaf out of the proceedings of the Long Parliament, and combat a possible Vendée with these means.

The abolition of the penal laws! [325] Why the greater part of them were repealed, not in 1793 but in 1778, when England was threatened by the rise of the American Republic, and the second repeal, 1793, was when the French Republic arose threatening and England required all the soldiers she could get to fight it!

The Grant to Maynooth by Pitt. [326] This pittance was soon repealed by the Tories and only renewed by Sir R. Peel in 1845. But not a word about the other cadeau que faisait à l’Irlande ce grand homme (c’est la première fois qu’il trouve grâce devant les yeux d’un Jacobin[B]), that other “dotation” not only “considérable” but actually lavish — the 3 Million £ by which the Union of Ireland with England was bought. The parliamentary documents will show that the one item of the purchase money of rotten and nomination boroughs [327] alone cost no less a sum than £1,245,000. (O’Connell memoir on Ireland addressed to the Queen.)

Lord Derby instituted le système des écoles nationales.[328] Very true but why did he? Consult Fitzgibbon, Ireland in 1868[C], the work of a staunch Protestant and Tory, or else the Official Report of Commissioners on Education in Ireland 1826. The Irish, neglected by the English government, had taken the education of their children into their own hands. At the time when English fathers and mothers insisted upon their right to send their children to the factory to earn money instead of to the school to learn, at that time in Ireland the peasants vied with each other in forming schools of their own. The schoolmaster was an ambulant teacher, spending a couple of months at each village. A cottage was found for him, each child paid him 2d. a week and a few sods of turf in winter. The schools were kept, on fine days in summer, in the fields, near a hedge, and then known by the name of hedge-schools. There were also ambulant scholars, who with their books under the arm, wandered from school to school, receiving lodging and food from the peasants without difficulty. In 1812 there were 4,600 such hedge-schools in Ireland and that year’s report of the Commissioners says that such education was “leading to evil rather than good,” “that such education the people are actually obtaining for themselves, and though we consider it practicable to correct it, to check its progress appears impossible: it may be improved but it cannot be impeded.”

So then, these truly national schools did not suit English purposes. To suppress them, the sham national schools were established. They are so little secular that the reading-book consists of extracts both from the Cath. and Prot. Bibles, agreed upon by the Cath. and Prot. Archbishops of Dublin. Compare with these Irish peasants the English who howl at compulsory school-attendance to this day!

Footnotes

A.. The second Chief Justice of Ireland was Borlase. — Ed.

B.. Present made to Ireland by that great man (this is the first time that he found grace in the eyes of a Jacobin). — Ed

C.. G. Fitzgibbon, Ireland in 1868, the Battle-field for English Party Strife, London, 1868. — Ed.

322. The fact that A. Regnard, a French petty-bourgeois journalist and historian, approached Marx’s daughter, Jenny Longuet, about his articles on Irish history, is explained by the popularity she had won by writing articles censuring Gladstone’s policy towards the Fenians for the French newspaper La Marseillaise.

323. The Scottish Covenanters — supporters of the National Covenant, the agreement signed in 1638 in Scotland after the successful uprising in 1637 against the absolutist government of Charles I. Under the banner of protection of the Presbyterian (Calvinist) religion against bishopry, the participants in the Covenant fought for Scotland’s national autonomy, against all attempts to implant absolutist ways in the country. The war accelerated the outbreak of the bourgeois revolution in England.

324. Vendée — a department in the west of France, where a counter-revolutionary uprising flared up in March 1793, during the French bourgeois revolution. The rebels were mostly backward peasants, incited and led by counter-revolutionary priests and noblemen.

The uprising was put down in 1795, but attempts to renew it were made in 1799 and in later years.

Vendée has become a synonym for reactionary uprisings and counter-revolutionary hotbeds.

325. Penal Code or penal laws — a set of laws passed by the English for Ireland at the end of the 17th and in the first, half oft. the 18th centuries on the pretext of struggle against Catholic conspiracies. These laws deprived the indigenous Irish, the majority of whom were Catholics, of all civil and political rights. They limited the right of Catholics to inheritance, to the acquisition and alienation of property, and introduced the practice of confiscating property for petty offences. The Penal Code was used as an instrument for the expropriation of the Irish who still owned land. It established unfavourable lease terms for Catholic peasants, promoting their dependence on the English landlords. The ban on Catholic schools, the stern punishment meted out to Catholic priests; and other measures were intended to stamp out Irish national traditions. The penal laws were abrogated, and then only in part, at the end of the 18th century under the influence of the growing national liberation struggle in Ireland.

326. In 1795, Pitt’s government helped to found the Irish Catholic college in the town of Maynooth and granted heavy subsidies to it. This policy was intended to draw the elite of Irish landowners, bourgeoisie and clergymen over to the English side and thereby split the Irish national liberation movement.

327. “Rotten boroughs” — the name given to the electoral districts in rural areas in England where there were very few voters (mainly because the rural population was moving to the towns), and where the local landowner arbitrarily disposed of the votes of people dependent on him.

328. A reference to the school system introduced in Ireland in 1831 by Stanley (Earl of Derby), the then Chief Secretary for Ireland. Joint schools were set up for Catholics and Protestants and only religious subjects were taught separately.

Engels To Eduard Bernstein

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, pp. 329-330; Transcribed by Einde O’Callaghan.

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

March 12, 1881

Now the newspaper can really encourage and cheer our people in Germany, which some of them very much need the so-called leaders, at least. I have again received a number of letters full of lamentations, which I have answered in the appropriate way. Viereck was also very low-spirited initially, but a couple of days in the free London air have been sufficient to give him back his buoyancy. The newspaper must carry this free air to Germany, an end which will be served, primarily, by treating the enemy with contempt and derision. When people again learn simply to laugh at Bismarck and Co., much will have been gained. One must not forget, however, that this is the first time something like this has happened, at least to the great majority of people, and that, in particular, a great many agitators and editors have been rudely shaken from their rather comfortable positions. That is why encouragement is needed just as much as the constant reminder that Bismarck and Co. are still the same asses, the same canailles, the same pathetic manikins, powerless against the march of history, that they were before the attempted assassinations. Therefore every joke at the expense of this rabble is valuable.

On Ireland I shall only say the following: the people are much too clever not to know that a revolt would spell their ruin; it could have a chance only in the event of a war between England and America. In the meantime, the Irish have forced Gladstone to introduce continental regulations[329] in Parliament and thereby to undermine the whole British parliamentary system. They have also forced Gladstone to disavow all his phrases and to become more Tory than even the worst Tories. The coercion bills have been passed, the Land Bill will be either rejected or castrated by the House of Lords[330], and then the fun will start, that is, the concealed disintegration of the parties will become public. Since Gladstone’s appointment, the Whigs and moderate Tories, that is, the big landowners as a whole, are uniting on the quiet into a big landowners’ party. As soon as this matures and family and personal interests are settled, or as soon as, perhaps as a result of the Land Bill, the new party is forced to appear in public, the Ministry and the present majority will immediately fall to pieces. The new conservative party will then be faced by the new bourgeois radical party, but without any backing other than the workers and Irish peasants. And so as to avoid any humbug and trickery from taking place here again, a proletarian radical party is now forming under the leadership of Joseph Cowen (M.P. for Newcastle), who is an old Chartist, half, if not entirely, Communist and a very worthy chap. Ireland is bringing all this about, Ireland is the driving force of the Empire. This is for your private information. More about this soon.

...

... It is simply a falsification perpetrated by the Manchester bourgeoisie in their own interests that they call ‘socialism’ every interference by the state in free competition – protective tariffs, guilds, tobacco monopoly, nationalisation of certain branches of industry, the Overseas Trade Society, and the royal porcelain factory. We should criticise this but not believe it. If we do the latter and develop a theory on the basis of this belief our theory will collapse together with its premises upon simple proof that this alleged socialism is nothing but, on the one hand, feudal reaction and, on the other, a pretext for squeezing out money, with the secondary object of turning as many proletarians as possible into civil servants and pensioners dependent upon the state, thus organising alongside of the disciplined army of soldiers and civil servants an army of workers as well. Compulsory voting brought about by superiors in the state apparatus instead of by factory overseers – a fine sort of socialism! But that’s where people get if they believe the bourgeoisie what it does not believe itself but only pretends to believe: that the state means socialism...

Notes

329. Apparently a reference to the resolution adopted by the Commons at Gladstone s proposal on February 3, 1881, to introduce a new procedure in the British Parliament. Since the obstruction tactics resorted to by the Irish opposition in the House of Commons prevented the passing by Parliament of a Bill introducing coercion laws in Ireland, Gladstone proposed according the Speaker the right to interrupt speeches of orators and in case of insubordination to evict them from the premises.

330. The spread of peasant action against English landlords moved Parliament to adopt, early in 1881, two bills on the introduction of coercion laws in Ireland. These laws suspended constitutional guarantees and introduced a state of siege in the country; troops were sent to help the landlords evict tenants refusing to leave.

The Land Bill for Ireland, proposed by Gladstone’s Liberal government at the end of 1880, was an attempt to divert the Irish peasants from the revolutionary struggle by somewhat restricting the arbitrary rule of the English landlords over the peasant tenants. It was finally passed on August 22, 1881. According to the Land Act of 1881 a landlord was not allowed to evict a tenant from the land if he paid rent in time, the size of the rent being stipulated for 15 years in advance. Although the Land Act gave the landlords the opportunity to sell their land profitably to the state and the size of the rent fixed by it continued to be extremely high, the English landlords obstructed its implementation because they wanted to preserve their unlimited power in Ireland.

Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels

To the Chairman of the Slavonic Meeting

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

21 March 1881,

in Celebration of the Anniversary of the Paris Commune [1]

Citizen!

With great regret we have to inform you that we are not able to attend your meeting.

When the Commune of Paris succumbed to the atrocious massacre organised by the defenders of ‘Order’, the victors little thought that ten years would not elapse before an event would happen in distant Petersburg [2] which, maybe after long and violent struggles, must ultimately and certainly lead to the establishment of a Russian Commune;

That the King of Prussia [3] who had prepared the Commune by besieging Paris and thus compelling the ruling bourgeoisie to arm the people – that that same King of Prussia, ten years after, besieged in his own capital by Socialists, would only be able to maintain his throne by declaring the state of siege in his capital Berlin. [4]

On the other hand, the Continental governments who after the fall of the Commune by their persecutions compelled the International Working Men’s Association to give up its formal, external organisation – these governments who believed they could crush the great international labour movement by decrees and special laws – little did they think that ten years later that same international labour movement, more powerful than ever, would embrace the working classes not only of Europe but of America also; that the common struggle for common interests against a common enemy would bind them together into a new and greater spontaneous International, outgrowing more and more all external forms of association.

Thus the Commune which the powers of the old world believed to be exterminated, lives stronger than ever, and thus we may join you in the cry: Vive la Commune!

Notes

1. The meeting, which took place in London under the chairmanship of the Russian Narodnik Leo Hartmann, was attended by representatives of Russian, Polish, Czech and Serbian Socialists. A revolutionary Slavonic club was formed at the meeting – Progress Publishers.

2. An allusion to the fact that, after being sentenced to death by the Executive Committee of the secret society Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), Emperor Alexander II was killed in St Petersburg on 1 March 1881 – Progress Publishers.

3. William I – Progress Publishers.

4. The reference is to the Anti-Socialist Law of 1878, which in the spring of 1880 was extended for another five years – Progress Publishers.

Marx to [daughter] Jenny Longuet

In Argenteuil

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London,] April 11, 1881

It is dull since you went away – without you and Johnny and Harra! and Mr. “Tea.” I often run to the window when I hear children’s voices that sound like our children’s voices, forgetting for the moment that the little chaps are across the Channel.

One comfort is that you have good living-quarters, suitable for the children; otherwise everything seems rather worse than in London – except of course the climate, the beneficial effect of which, on asthma too, you will by and by discover.

I have got another new doctor for mother, recommended to me by Professor Lankester – Dr. Donkin; he seems a bright and intelligent man but for mother’s trouble one man really seems to me as good, and perhaps better, than another man. However, the change of medical advisers is a distraction for her and for the first period – which does not as a rule last long – she is full of praise for the new Æsculapius. Longuet’s eyeglasses turned up directly after you left, they were in fact reposing in your bedroom. Hirsch has been selected to bring them across, but this gossipmonger seems unable to tear himself away from London at a time when there is a lot to pry out. The “great” Most affair alone is an inexhaustible spring of fresh (if by no means joyously sparkling) water for this Hirsch. He is threatening now not to leave until April 18. And then he has found a companion in Kautsky – at whom he scowled so darkly; Engels too has taken a much milder view of this Kauz since he has proved himself a very talented drinker. When this charmer first appeared at my place – I mean little Kauz – the first question which escaped me was: are you like your mother? Not in the very least, he assured me, and I silently congratulated his mother. He is a mediocrity with a small-minded outlook, superwise (only 26), very conceited, industrious in a certain sort of way, he busies himself a lot with statistics but does not read anything very clever out of them, belongs by nature to the tribe of the philistines but is otherwise a decent fellow in his own way. I turn him over to friend Engels as much as possible.

The day before yesterday the Dogberry Club was here; yesterday, in addition to the two Maitland girls – and for a moment Lankester and Dr. Donkin – an invasion from Hyndman and spouse, who both have too much staying power. I don’t dislike the wife, for she has a brusque, unconventional and decided way of thinking and speaking, but it is funny to see how admiringly her eyes fasten upon the lips of her self-satisfied garrulous husband. Mother was so tired (it was nearly 10.30 p.m.) that she withdrew. But she was amused by some byplay. For Tussy has discovered a new Wunderkind among the Dogberries, a certain Radford; this youth is already a barrister at law, but despises the jus [law] and is working in the same line as Waldhorn. He looks well, a cross between Irving and the late Lassalle (though he has nothing in common with the cynically oily, obtrusive, ducal manners of the latter) an intelligent and somewhat promising boy. Well this is the point of the story – Dolly Maitland pays fearful court to him so that mother and Tussy are signalling to each other all through supper. Finally Mr. Maitland arrived as well, fairly sober, and also had a wordy duel with his instructive table companion – Hyndman – about Gladstone, in whom the spiritualist Maitland believes. I – rather annoyed by a bad throat – felt glad when the whole lot vanished. It is a strange thing that one cannot well live altogether without company, and that when you get it, you try hard to rid yourself of itself.

Hartmann is working hard as a common workman in Woolwich; the difficulty of talking to him in any language at all increases. The Russian refugees in Geneva are demanding that he should repudiate Rochefort, and publicly. This he will not and cannot do, and it is also impossible, if only on account of the exaggerated letter which the Petersburg Committee wrote to Rochefort and which he on his side published in the Intransigeant. The Genevans have in fact long been trying to persuade Europe that it is really they who direct the movement in Russia; now when this lie, spread by themselves, is seized upon by Bismarck and Co. and becomes dangerous to them, they declare the opposite and vainly attempt to convince the world of their innocence. Actually they are mere doctrinaires, confused anarchist socialists, and their influence upon the Russian “theatre of war” is zero.

Have you been following the trial of the assassins in Petersburg? They are sterling people through and through, sans pose melodramatique [no melodramatic pose], simple, businesslike, heroic. Shouting and doing are irreconcilable opposites. The Petersburg Executive Committee, which acts so energetically, issues manifestos of refined “moderation.” It is far removed from the schoolboy way in which Most and other childish whimperers preach tyrannicide as a “theory” and “panacea” (that was done by such innocent Englishmen as Disraeli, [Waiter] Savage Lander, Macaulay and Stanfield the friend of Mazzini); on the contrary they try to teach Europe that their modus operandi [method of action] is a specifically Russian and historically inevitable method about which there is no more reason to moralise – for or against – than there is about the earthquake in Chios.

This affair was the occasion of a fine row in the House of Commons. (You know that to please Bismarck and Gortchakov these miserable Gladstonians have embarked on an attack upon the freedom of the press in England, in the person of the wretched Most, an attack in which they are scarcely likely to succeed.) Lord Churchill (a cheeky Tory youngster of the Marlborough family) questioned Sir Charles Dilke and Brassey, both understrappers in the Cabinet, regarding financial subsidies to the Freiheit. These were flatly denied and Churchill was obliged to name his authority. He then named the inevitable Mr. Maltman Barry! I am enclosing you a cutting about this affair from the Weekly Despatch (Dilke’s paper, edited by the “philosophical Radical,” Ashton Dilke, brother of the great “Dilke”) and a statement by Maltman Barry in the Daily News. Dilke is obviously lying; a miserable creature, this swaggerer who has nominated himself as the future “President of the British Republic” and who, for fear of losing his job, allows Bismarck to dictate to him which papers he is to favour with £1 and which not. If it were only known as well that immediately after Hartmann’s arrival in London Ashton Dilke invited him to a luncheon! But Hartmann refused; he would not allow himself to be “exhibited.”

About the Comtist renegade Maxse, by the way. Justice does him far too much honour and handles him with kid gloves. To this strange clique – of English Liberals and their even worse sub-species the so-called Radicals – it really seems a crime that, contrary to all tradition and in breach of agreement, Justice fails to treat these shams and humbugs in the traditional manner and to maintain the legend about them current in the Continental liberal press! When one considers the utterly shameless way in which the London press attacks the Socialist Party in every European country and how difficult it is, supposing one ever regards it as worth the trouble, to answer a word, to get even a few lines of reply into that press – then it is really going rather far to recognise the principle that if a Parisian paper entangles itself in a criticism of the “great” Gladstone, that arch hypocrite and casuist of an antiquated school, it is then obliged to put whole columns at the disposal of Herr Maxse and his prose in order that he may repay Gladstone in kind for the advancement received from him.

Assuming that the policy of Gladstone (the Coercion and Arms Acts man) with regard to Ireland were as correct as it is false, would this be a reason for talking about the “generosity” or “magnanimity” of this man? As if there were any question of this sort of thing between England and Ireland! It should really be explained to Maxse that Pecksniffian phrases of this kind have the rights of citizenship in London but not in Paris!

Let Longuet read Parnell’s speech in Cork in to-day’s Times; there he will find the heart of what there is to be said about Gladstone’s new Land Act; and here it should not be overlooked that by his shameful preliminary measures (including the annulment of freedom of speech for members of the House of Commons) Gladstone prepared the conditions under which the evictions in Ireland are now proceeding on a mass scale, while the Act is mere shadow boxing, since the Lords – who get everything they want from Gladstone and no longer need to tremble at the Land League – will doubtless either reject it or else castrate it so much that the Irish themselves will eventually vote against it.

Engels To Eduard Bernstein

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, pp. 330-331;

Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan.

April 14, 1881

Argyll’s retirement from the Ministry because the Irish Land Bill gives the tenants a certain co-ownership of the land is a bad omen for the fate of the Bill in the Upper House. In the meantime Parnell has successfully begun his agitation tour of England in Manchester. The position of the big liberal coalition is becoming more and more critical. Everything here seems to go slowly, but it is so much more thorough.

Marx To Jenny Longuet

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 331;

Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan.

April 29, 1881

It is a very fine trick of Gladstone — only the “stupid party” does not understand it — to offer at a moment when landed property in Ireland (as in England) will be depreciated by the import of corn and cattle from the U.St. — to offer them at that very moment the public Exchequer where they can sell that property at a price it does no longer possess!

The real intricacies of the Irish land problem — which indeed are not especially Irish — are so great that the only true way to solve it would be to give the Irish Home Rule and thus force them to solve it themselves. But John Bull is too stupid to understand this.

Karl Marx to John Swinton

Written: June 2, 1881;

Source: Science and Society Volume II, No. 2, Spring 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins;

HTML Mark-up: Andy Blunden and Sally Ryan.

41, Maitland Park Road

London N.W. June 2, 1881.

Dear Mr. Swinton:

I need hardly recommend you the bearer of these lines, my excellent friend Mr. Hartmann. I send you through him a photogram of mine; it is rather bad, but the only one left to me.

As to the book of Mr. Henry George, I consider it as a last attempt — to save the capitalistic regime. Of course, this is not the meaning of the author, but the older disciples of Ricardo — the radical ones — fancied already that by the public appropriation of the rent of land everything would be righted. I have referred to this doctrine in the Misère de la Philosophie (published in 1847, against Proudhon).

Mrs. Marx sends you her best compliments. Unfortunately her illness assumes more and more a fatal character.

Believe me, dear Sir,

Yours most sincerely,

Karl Marx

The “Viereck” was so stultified at his arrival in the U.S. that he confounded my friend Engels with myself, and transformed my compliments to you in those of Engels; he did the same with regard to another American friend of mind by whose letter I was informed of the quid pro quo.

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London,] 20 June, 1881

... Before your copy of Henry George [1] arrived I had already received two others, one from Swinton [2] and one from Willard Brown; [3] I therefore gave one to Engels and one to Lafargue. Today I must confine myself to a very brief formulation of my opinion of the book. Theoretically the man [Henry George][1] is utterly backward! He understands nothing about the nature of surplus value and so wanders about in speculations which follow the English model but have now been superseded even among the English, about the different portions of surplus value to which independent existence is attributed--about the relations of profit, rent, interest, etc. His fundamental dogma is that everything would be all right if ground rent were paid to the state. (You will find payment of this kind among the transitional measures included in The Communist Manifesto too.) This idea originally belonged to the bourgeois economists; it was first put forward (apart from a similar demand at the end of the eighteenth century) by the earliest radical followers of Ricardo, soon after his death. I said of it in 1847, in my work against Proudhon: “We can understand that economists like Mill” (the elder, not his son John Stuart, who also repeats this in a somewhat modified form) “Cherbuliez, Hilditch and others have demanded that rent should be paid to the state in order that it may serve as a substitute for taxes. This is a frank expression of the hatred which the industrial capitalist dedicates to the landed proprietor, who seems to him a useless and superfluous element in the general total of bourgeois production.”

We ourselves, as I have already mentioned, adopted this appropriation of ground rent by the state among numerous other transitional measures, which, as we also remarked in the Manifesto, are and must be contradictory in themselves.

But the first person to turn this desideratum [requirement] of the radical English bourgeois economists into a socialist panacea, to declare this procedure to be the solution of the antagonisms involved in the present method of production, was Colins, a former old Hussar officer of Napoleon’s, born in Belgium, who in the latter days of Guizot and the first of Napoleon the Less, favoured the world from Paris with some fat volumes about this “discovery” of his. Like another discovery he made, namely, that while there is no God there is an “immortal” human soul and that animals have “no feelings.” For if they had feelings, that is souls, we should be cannibals and a realm of righteousness could never be founded upon earth. His “anti-landownership” theory together with his theory of the soul, etc., have been preached every month for years in the Parisian Philosophie de l’Avenir [Philosophy of the Future] by his few remaining followers, mostly Belgians. They call themselves “rational collectivists” and have praised Henry George. After them and besides them, among other people, the Prussian banker and former lottery owner Samten from East Prussia, a shallow-brained fellow, has eked out this “socialism” into a thick volume.

All these “socialists” since Colins have this much in common that they leave wage labour and therefore capitalist production in existence and try to bamboozle themselves or the world into believing that if ground rent were transformed into a state tax all the evils of capitalist production would disappear of themselves. The whole thing is therefore simply an attempt, decked out with socialism, to save capitalist domination and indeed to establish it afresh on an even wider basis than its present one.

This cloven hoof (at the same time ass’s hoof) is also unmistakably revealed in the declamations of Henry George. And it is the more unpardonable in him because he ought to have put the question to himself in just the opposite way: How did it happen that in the United States, where, relatively, that is in comparison with civilised Europe, the land was accessible to the great mass of the people and to a certain degree (again relatively) still is, capitalist economy and the corresponding enslavement of the working class have developed more rapidly and shamelessly than in any other country!

On the other hand George’s book, like the sensation it has made with you, is significant because it is a first, if unsuccessful, attempt at emancipation from the orthodox political economy.

H. George does not seem, for the rest, to know anything about the history of the early American anti-renters,** who were rather practical men than theoretical. Otherwise he is a talented writer (with a talent for Yankee advertisement too) as his article on California in the Atlantic proves, for instance. He also has the repulsive presumption and arrogance which is displayed by all panacea-mongers without exception.

1. Marx is referring to Henry George, Progress and Poverty [available at Ludwig von Mises Institute — MIA].

2. John Swinton (1830-1901) — American journalist of Scottish descent, socialist, editor of several New York newspapers, friend of Marx.

3. Willard Brown — American journalist, socialist.

* GEORGE, HENRY (1839-97) American bourgeois economist, earlier a sailor, gold-digger and printer. He was the founder of the land reform movement.

** Settlers in New York State in the ’thirties and ’forties of the 19th century who refused to pay rent for their land and shot down the sheriffs’ officers who came to enforce payment. The no-renters numbered thousands and turned the scale at several elections.

Engels to the Editor of The (Augsburg) Allgemeine Zeitung

Abstract

First Published: the Allgemeine Zeitung;

Translated: from German by Jack Cohen;

Transcribed: zodiac@interlog.com;

HTML Markup: S. Ryan.

[Draft]

Bridlington Quay, 10 August 1881

Dear Mr Shipton,

I return the proof-sheet [1] altered as you wish. The first passage you seem to me to have misunderstood and the second alteration is merely formal. Anyhow, I do not see what good such alterations can do if asked for on Tuesday, received here on Wednesday, to arrive again in London on Thursday after the publication of the paper.

But there is another thing. If such very mild and innocent things as these begin to appear to you too strong, it must occur to me that this must be the case, in a far higher degree, with my own articles, which are generally far stronger. I must therefore take your remarks as a symptom, and conclude that it will be better for both of us if I discontinue sending you leading articles. It will be far better than going on until, upon some inevitable point, we come to an open rupture. Moreover my time will certainly not allow me to go on writing leaders regularly, [2] and on this ground alone I had come to some similar resolution to be executed, as I then thought, after the Trades Union Congress. [3] But the sooner I stop the better will be perhaps your position before that Congress.

There is another point: I consider you ought to have sent me before publication the copy or proof of the article on the Max Hirsch Trades Unions in Germany, as to the only man on your staff who knew anything of the matter and could make the necessary notes to it. Anyhow it will be impossible for me to remain on the staff of a paper which, without consulting me, lends itself to writing up these Trades Unions, comparable only to those worst English ones which allow themselves to be led by men openly sold to, or at least paid by the middle class.

I need not add that otherwise I wish every success to The Labour Standard and if desired shall now and then contribute occasional information from the continent.

Yours truly

F. E.

Footnotes

From the MECW

1. The reference is to Karl Kautsky's article "International Labour Laws" published anonymously in The Labour Standard, No. 15, 13 August 1881.

2. In May-August 1881, Engels contributed to the printed organ of the British labour unions The Labour Standard, which appeared in London and was edited by George Shipton. Engels' contributions were printed anonymously nearly every week as leaders.

3. The fourteenth annual British trades union congress took place in London on 12-17 September 1881.

Engels To Marx

In London

Source: Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts, New Park Publications, 1983;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

August 10, 1881

Dear Mohr,

Yesterday I found the courage at last to study your mathematical manuscripts even without reference books, and I was pleased to find that I did not need them. I compliment you on your work. The thing is as clear as daylight, so that we cannot wonder enough at the way the mathematicians insist on mystifying it. But this comes from the one-sided way these gentlemen think. To put dy/dx = 0/0, firmly and point-blank, does not enter their skulls. And yet it is clear that dy/dx can only be the pure expression of a completed process if the last trace of the quanta x and y has disappeared, leaving the expression of the preceding process of their change without any quantity.

You need not fear that any mathematician has preceded you here. This kind of differentiation is indeed much simpler than all others, so that just now I applied it myself to derive a formula I had suddenly lost, confirming it afterwards in the usual way. The procedure must have made the greatest sensation, especially, as is clearly proved, since the usual method of neglecting dxdy etc. is positively false. And that is the special beauty of it: only if dy/dx = 0/0 is the mathematical operation absolutely correct.

So old Hegel guessed quite correctly when he said that differentiation had for its basic condition that the variables must be raised to different powers, and at least one of them to at least the second, or ½ power. Now we also know why.

If we say that in y = f(x) the x and y are variables, then this claim has no further consequences, as long as we do not move on, and x and y are still, pro tempore, in fact constants. Only when they really change, i.e. inside the function, do they indeed become variables, and only then can the relation still hidden in the original equation reveal itself — not the relation of the two magnitudes but of their variability. The first derivative Dy/Dx shows this relation as it happens in the course of real change, i.e. in each given change; the completed derivative — dy/dx shows it in its generality, pure, and hence we can come from dy/dx to each Dy/Dx, while the latter itself only covers the special case. However, to pass from the special case to the general relationship, the special case must be abolished (aufgehoben) as such. Hence, after the function has passed through the process from x to x’ with all its consequences, x’ can be allowed calmly to become x again; it is no longer the old x, which was variable in name only; it has passed through actual change, and the result of the change remains, even if we again abolish (aufheben) it.

At last we see clearly what mathematicians have claimed for a long time, without being able to present rational grounds, that the differential-quotient is the original, the differentials dx and dy are derived: the derivation of the formulae demands that both so-called irrational factors stand at the same time on one side of the equation, and only if you put the equation back into this its first form dy/dx = f'(x) , as you can see, are you free of the irrationals and instead have their rational expression.

The thing has taken such a hold of me that it not only goes round my head all day, but last week in a dream I gave a chap my shirt — buttons to differentiate, and he ran off with them.

Yours

FE

Engels to Marx

In Argenteuil

First Published: Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels and K. Marx, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1913;

Translated: Peter and Betty Ross;

Transcribed: Ken Campbell;

HTML Markup: S. Ryan.

Bridlington Quay, Yorkshire

11 August 1881

1 Sea View

Dear Moor,

Your registered letter arrived yesterday evening but it, too, was open, this time completely. I enclose the envelope for you to see; it just wasn't stuck down.

I've this moment sent Tussy a cheque for £50, registered. If you want all or part of the remaining £20 (over and above the £30 you spoke about) sent to Paris, Tussy can arrange things more quickly than if payment was made by a cheque on London posted straight to you over there. She can easily get hold of a money order in Paris.

As regards the French elections I am entirely of your opinion. This Chamber won't continue sitting much longer anyway; once the scrutin de liste has come through, it will soon be dissolved again.

Yesterday morning I informed Mr Shipton that he wouldn't be getting any more leading articles from me. Kautsky had sent me an insipid thing on international factory legislation in a poor translation which I corrected and sent to Shipton. [1] Yesterday the proof and a letter arrived from Shipton who thought 2 of the passages ‘too strong’, having, what's more, misconstrued one of them; he asked me whether I would be prepared to tone them down. I did so and replied as follows:

What did he mean by submitting me the request for amendments on Tuesday – i.e. Wednesday up here – when my reply couldn't have reached London until Thursday, after the paper had come out.

If he thought this too strong, how much more so my own far stronger articles? Accordingly it would be better for us both if I gave up.

My time no longer permitted me to write a leading article regularly each week and I had already planned to inform him of this after the trade union congress (September). [2] Under the circumstances, however, it would no doubt improve his position vis-a-vis that congress were I to give up then and there.

He damned well ought to have shown me the Max Hirsch article before it was printed.[3] I couldn't remain on the staff of a paper which lends itself to writing up these German Trade Unions, comparable only to those very worst English ones which allow themselves to be led by men sold to, or at least paid by the middle class. Apart from that I wished him the best of luck, etc. He will get my letter this morning.

I didn't tell him the most vital reason of all, namely, the total ineffectiveness of my articles so far as the rest of the paper and its readers are concerned. Any effect there may be takes the form of an invisible response on the part of unavowed apostles of free trade. The paper remains the same old omnium-gatherum of probable and improbable crotchets; in matters of politics it is [more or less], but if anything more Gladstonian. The response, which once showed signs of awakening in one or 2 nos., has died away again. The British working man just doesn't want to advance; he has got to be galvanised by events, the loss of industrial monopoly. En attendant, habeat sibi. ["In the meantime let him do as he likes."]

We have been here for a fortnight now, weather changeable, mostly cold and often threatening, but not very often actually wet. We shall stay at least another week, perhaps a fortnight, but certainly no longer.

Since I've been here I have been taking The Daily News instead of the Standard. It is even more stupid, if that's possible. Preaches antivivisectionism! Also as deficient in news as the Standard.

Hirsch may suffer for his pleasure jaunt. But he can't help being what he is.

Best wishes to everyone.

Your

F. E.

Footnotes

From the MECW

1. The reference is to Karl Kautsky's article "International Labour Laws" published anonymously in The Labour Standard, No. 15, 13 August 1881.

2. The fourteenth annual British trades union congress took place in London on 12-17 September 1881.

3. The Labour Standard, No. 14, 6 August 1881, anonymously printed the article by Johann Georg Eccarius "A German Opinion of English Trade Unionism." Eccarius regarded highly the German trade unions founded in 1868 by Max Hirsch and Franz Duncker (the so-called Hirsch-Duncker trade unions).

Engels to George Shipton

In London

Abstract

First Published: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVII, Moscow, 1935;

Transcribed: zodiac@interlog.com;

HTML Markup: S. Ryan.

[Draft]

Bridlington Quay, 15 August 1881

Dear Mr. Shipton,

I cannot make it out, how you could so strangely misunderstand Mr Kautsky's article. [1] To the first passage you objected because State interference went against the grain of 'many prominent men in the Unions'. Of course it does, because they are at heart Manchester School [2] men and so long as their opinions of such are taken into account, no working-class paper is possible. But my addition to the passage in question must have convinced you, that the State interference here alluded to, was such, and such only, as has been in England the Law of the Land for years: factories and workshops' acts, [3] and nothing further: things not objected to by even your 'prominent men'.

As to the second passage, Mr Kautsky says: an international regulation of the war of competition is as necessary as that of open warfare; we demand a Geneva Convention [4] for the workpeople of the world. The 'Geneva Convention' is an agreement entered into by the various Governments for the protection of wounded and ambulances in battle. What therefore Mr Kautsky demands, is a similar agreement between the various Governments for the protection of the workpeople not of one state only, but of all, against overwork especially of women and children. How out of that you can make an appeal to the workpeople of the world to meet in a Convention of delegates at Geneva, I am utterly at a loss to understand. [5]

You will own that the occurrence of such misunderstanding on your part cannot at all encourage me to alter my resolution.

As to the Hirsch article, [6] I do know Mr. Eccarius and only too well for a traitor to the cause and it will be utterly impossible for me to write for a paper which opens its columns to him.

Moreover, I do not see any progress. The Labour Standard remains the same vehicle of the most various and mutually contradictory views on all political and social questions which it was, perhaps unavoidably, on the first day of its existence, but which it ought no longer to be by this time, if there was an undercurrent among the British working class tending towards emancipation from the liberal Capitalists. Such undercurrent not being shown itself up to now, I must conclude it does not exist. If there were unmistakable signs of its existence, I might make an extra effort to assist it. But I do not think that one column a week drowned as I might say amongst the remaining multifarious opinions represented in The Labour Standard could do anything towards producing it.

And as I told you, I had resolved to stop writing after the Trade Unions Congress, [7] because of want of time; so whether I write a few articles more till then, would make no difference.

So waiting and hoping for better times, I remain

Faithfully yours,

F. E.

Footnotes

From the MECW

1. The reference is to Karl Kautsky's article "International Labour Laws" published anonymously in The Labour Standard, No. 15, 13 August 1881.

2. Factories and Workshops Act – Laws regulating labour conditions in British industry. The emergence and advancement of factory legislation was a consequence of the workers' economic and political struggle against capitalist exploitation. The first laws adopted regulated the children’s adolescents’, and women’s labour conditions in the textile industry (early 19th century). Step by step, the operation of the Factories and Workshops Acts was extended to the other industries.

3. The Geneva Convention of the Red Cross of 1864 – An international document signed at the conference of 16 European states in Geneva. The Geneva Convention established principles for belligerents’ treatment of the wounded and the sick, and granted the right of neutrality to the medical personnel taking care of the wounded men.

4. The Labour Standard, No. 14, 6 August 1881, anonymously printed the article by Johann Georg Eccarius "A German Opinion of English Trade Unionism." Eccarius regarded highly the German trade unions founded in 1868 by Max Hirsch and Franz Duncker (the so-called Hirsch-Duncker trade unions).

5. In Engels' draft manuscript the following passage is crossed out here: 'If you had understood the drift of the article, you must have at once seen that here was a measure of an immediately practical nature, so easy of execution that one of the existing governments of Europe (the Swiss Government) had been induced to take it in hand, that the proposal to equalize the hours of labour in all manufacturing countries by making factory and workshop's legislation a matter of international state agreement, was one of the greatest immediate interest to the working people. Especially to those of England who, besides the Swiss, are the best protected of all against overworking and therefore are exposed to an unfair competition on the part of Belgian, French and German workpeople whose hours of work are much longer.

6. The Labour Standard, No. 14, 6 August 1881, anonymously printed the article by Johann Georg Eccarius "A German Opinion of English Trade Unionism." Eccarius regarded highly the German trade unions founded in 1868 by Max Hirsch and Franz Duncker (the so-called Hirsch-Duncker trade unions).

7. The fourteenth annual British trades union congress took place in London on 12-17 September 1881.

Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

25 October 1881

... But it is true that Guesde [1] came over when it was a question of framing the draft programme of the French Workers Party. Its preamble was dictated to him word for word by Marx in the presence of Lafargue and myself right here in my room: the worker is free only when he is the owner of his instruments of labour – this can be the case either in individual or in collective form; the individual form of ownership is made obsolete by the economic development, and more so with every day; hence there remains only that of collective ownership, etc – a masterpiece of cogent argumentation rarely encountered, clearly and succinctly written for the masses; I myself was astonished by this concise formulation. The rest of the programme’s contents was then discussed; here and there we put something in or took something out. But how little Guesde was the mouthpiece of Marx appears from Guesde’s insistence on putting in his foolish minimum wage demand, and since not we but the French must take the responsibility for this we finally let him have his way although he admitted that theoretically it was nonsense.

Brousse [2] was in London at that time and would gladly have participated. But Guesde was pressed for time and he thought, not without justification, that Brousse would start long-winded discussions about misunderstood anarchist phrases. Guesde therefore insisted that Brousse should not be present at this meeting. That was his business. But Brousse never forgave him that and his intrigues against Guesde date from that time.

The French afterwards discussed this programme and adopted it with a few amendments, of which those introduced by Malon [3] were by no means improvements.

Besides I wrote two articles for Égalité, no 2 on ‘Le socialisme de M Bismarck’ and there you have the sum total, as far as I know, of our active participation in the French movement.

But what is most vexing to the petty grumblers who are nobodies but would like to be somebodies is this: By theoretical and practical achievements Marx has gained for himself such a position that the best people in all the working-class movements in many countries have full confidence in him. At critical junctures they turn to him for advice and then usually find that his counsel is the best. This position he holds in Germany, in France, in Russia, not to mention the smaller countries. It is therefore not a case of Marx forcing his opinion, and still less his will, on people but of the people themselves coming to him. And it is upon this that Marx’s specific influence, so extremely important for the movement, reposes.

Malon also wanted to come here, but he sought to obtain a special invitation from Marx through Lafargue, which of course he did not get. One would gladly have negotiated with him as with anyone else, but invite him – why? Who had ever been thus invited?

Marx and in the second place I have adopted the same attitude towards the French as towards the other national movements. We maintain constant contact with them in so far as it is worth our while and there is the opportunity to do so. But any attempt to influence these people against their will would only do harm; it would destroy the old confidence dating back to the time of the International. We really have had too much experience of revolutionary matters for that...

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor.

1. Jules Guesde (1845-1922) – well-known leader of French and international working-class and socialist movement, a founder of French Workers Party (1879) and populariser of Marxism in France, for many years was leader of the revolutionary wing of French socialist movement; fought opportunism, during First World War – social-chauvinist.

2. Paul Brousse (1854-1912) – French petit-bourgeois socialist, participated in Paris Commune, after its suppression lived in emigration, joined anarchists. On his return to France at the beginning of 1880s joined Workers Party where he vehemently opposed the Marxist trend, an ideologist and leader of Possibilists, an opportunist trend in French socialism.

3. Benôit Malon (1841-1893) – French socialist, member of First International and of Paris Commune, after its defeat took refuge in Italy and then in Switzerland where he drew close to anarchists, an ideologist and leader of Possibilists.

Marx To Jenny Longuet

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 331;

Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan.

December 7, 1881

The ever faithful Engels has sent you a number of the Irish World at my request, containing a declaration against landownership (private) by an Irish bishop. This was the latest news that I passed on to your mamma and she thought you could perhaps insert it in a French paper to frighten the French clericals. In any case, it shows that these gentlemen can pipe any tune.

Marx to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[London,] 15 December, 1881

The English have recently begun to occupy themselves more with Capital, etc. Thus in the last October (or November, I am not quite sure) number of the Contemporary there is an article on socialism by John Rae. Very inadequate, full of mistakes, but “fair” as one of my English friends told me the day before yesterday. And why fair? Because John Rae does not suppose that for the forty years I am spreading my pernicious theories, I was being instigated by “bad” motives. “Seine Grossmuth muss ich loben.” The fairness of making yourself at least sufficiently acquainted with the subject of your criticism seems a thing quite unknown to the penmen of British philistinism.

Before this, in the beginning of June, there was published by a certain Hyndman (who had before intruded himself into my house) a little book: England for All. It pretends to be written as an exposé of the programme of the “Democratic Federation” – a recently formed association of different English and Scotch radical societies, half bourgeois, half proletaires. The chapters on Labour and Capital are only literal extracts from, or circumlocutions of, the Capital, but the fellow does neither quote the book, nor its author, but to shield himself from exposure remarks at the end of his preface: “For the ideas and much of the matter contained in Chapters II and III, I am indebted to the work of a great thinker and original writer, etc., etc.” Vis-à-vis myself, the fellow wrote stupid letters of excuse, for instance, that “the English don't like to be taught by foreigners,” that “my name was so much detested, etc.” With all that, his little book – so far as it pilfers the Capital – makes good propaganda, although the man is a “weak” vessel, and very far from having even the patience – the first condition of learning anything – of studying a matter thoroughly. All those amiable middle-class writers – if not specialists – have an itching to make money or name or political capital immediately out of any new thoughts they may have got at by any favourable windfall. Many evenings this fellow has pilfered from me, in order to take me out and to learn in the easiest way.

Lastly there was published on the first December last (I shall send you a copy of it) in the monthly review, Modern Thought, an article: “Leaders of Modern Thought"; No. XXIII – Karl Marx. By Ernest Belfort Bax.

Now this is the first English publication of the kind which is pervaded by a real enthusiasm for the new ideas themselves and boldly stands up against Brit. Philistinism. That does not prevent that the biographical notices the author gives of me are mostly wrong, etc. In the exposition of my economic principles and in his translations (i.e., quotations of the Capital) much is wrong and confused, but with all that the appearance of this article, announced in large letters by placards on the walls of West End London, has produced a great sensation. What was most important for me, I received the said number of Modern Thought already on the 30th of November, so that my dear wife had the last days of her life still cheered up. You know the passionate interest she took in all such affairs.

1882

Marx to Laura Lafargue. 4 January

Marx to Engels. 5 January

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 6 January

Engels to Marx. 8 January

Marx to Engels. 12 January

Engels to Emil Engels. 12 January

Marx to Amalie Daniels. 12 January

Engels to Marx. 13 January

Marx to Engels. 15 January

Marx to Pyotr Lavrov. 23 January

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 31 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 7 February

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 10 February

Marx to Engels. 17 February

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 18 February

Marx to Engels. 2 February

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 22 February

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 23 February

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 23 February

Marx to Engels. 1 March

Marx to Engels. 3 March

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 10 March

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 16 March

Marx to Paul Lafargue. 20 March

Marx to Engels. 23 March

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 27 March

Marx to Engels. 28-31 March

Engels to Henry Mayers Hyndman. c. 31 March

Marx to Engels. 4 April

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 7 April

Marx to Engels. 8 April

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 10 April

Engels to Berthold Sparr. 12 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 13 April

Marx to Laura Lafargue. 14 April

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 17 April

Marx to Engels. 18 April

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 21 April

Marx to Engels. 28 April

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 28 April

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 3 May

Marx to Laura Lafargue. 6 May

Marx to Engels. 8 May

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 8 May

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 10 May

Engels to August Bebel. 10 May

Marx to Engels. 20 May

Marx to Eleanor Marx. 21 May

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 26 May

Marx to Eleanor Marx. 28 May

Marx to Engels. 30 May

Marx to Jenny Longuet. 4 June

Marx to Engels. 5 June

Marx to Engels. 9 June

Marx to Engels. 16 June

Marx to Laura Lafargue. 17 June

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 20 June

Engels to August Bebel. 21 June

Marx to Engels. 22 June

Marx to Engels. 24 June

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 26 June

Marx to Engels. 4 July

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 15 July

Engels to Adolf Hepner. 25 July

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 31 July

Marx to Engels. 3 August

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 9 August

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 9 August (abstract)

Marx to Engels. 10 August

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 10 August

Engels to Marx. 20 August

Engels to Emil Engels Jun. 20 August

Marx to Engels. 21 August

Marx to Engels. 24 August

Engels to Marx. 25 August

Engels to Marx. 26 August

Engels to Jenny Longuet. 27 August

Marx to Engels. 4 September

Engels to Marx. 12 September

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 12 September

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 13 September

Marx to Engels. 16 September

Engels to Marx. 18 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 20 September

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 22 September

Engels to August Bebel. 23 September

Marx to Engels. 28 September

Marx to Engels. 30 September

Marx to Laura Lafargue. 9 October

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 20 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 21 October

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 27 October

Engels to August Bebel. 28 October

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 30 October

Engels to Marx. 1 November

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 3 November

Engels to Marx. 3 November

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 4 November

Engels to Marx. 6 November

Marx to Engels. 8 November

Marx to Philipp Stephen King. 9 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 9 November

Marx to Eleanor Marx. 10 November

Engels to Marx. 11 November

Marx to Engels. 11 November

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 15 November

Marx to Engels. 20 November

Engels to Marx. 21 November

Marx to Engels. 22 November

Engels to Marx. 22 November

Engels to Marx. 23 November

Marx to Engels. 27 November

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 28 November

Engels to Marx. 30 November

Marx to Engels. 4 December

Marx to Engels. 8 December

Engels to Marx. 8 December

Engels to Marx. 13 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 14 December

Marx to Laura Lafargue. 14 December

Engels to Marx. 15 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 15 December

Engels to Marx. 16 December

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 16 December

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 16 December

Marx to Engels. 18 December

Engels to Marx. 19 December

Engels to Marx. 22 December

Engels to August Bebel. 22 December

Marx to Eleanor Marx. 23 December

Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

25 January 1882

... We were greatly interested in the reports about the happenings among the ‘leaders’ in Germany. I never concealed the fact that in my opinion the masses in Germany are much better than the gentlemen in the leadership, especially since the party, thanks to the press and agitation, has become a milch cow for them, providing butter, and now Bismarck and the bourgeoisie have all of a sudden butchered that cow. The thousand people who thereby immediately lost their livelihoods had the personal misfortune of not being placed directly into the position of revolutionaries, that is, sent into exile. Otherwise very many of those who are now bemoaning their lot would have gone over to Most’s [1] camp or at any rate would find the Sozialdemokrat [2] much too tame. Most of those people remained in Germany and had to, went to rather reactionary places, remained socially ostracised, dependent for their living on philistines, and a great number of them were themselves contaminated by philistinism. Soon they pinned all their hopes on a repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law. No wonder that under pressure of philistinism the idea, which is really absurd, took hold of them that this could be attained by meekness. Germany is an execrable country for people with scant will-power. The narrowness and pettiness of civil as well as political relations, the small-town character of even the big cities, the small but constantly increasing vexations encountered in the struggle with police and bureaucracy – all this is exhausting and does not spur on to resistance, and thus in this great children’s nursery many become children themselves. Petty relations beget petty views, so that it takes great intelligence and energy for anyone living in Germany to be able to see beyond his immediate environment, to keep one’s eye upon the great interconnection of world events and not to lapse into that self-complacent ‘objectivity’ which sees no further than its nose and precisely for that reason amounts to the most narrow-minded subjectivity even when it is shared by thousands of such subjects.

But no matter how natural may be the rise of this trend, which covers up its lack of insight and power of resistance with ‘objective’ supersapience, it must be resolutely fought. And here the masses of workers furnish the best pillar of support. They alone live in Germany under more or less modern conditions; all their minor and major afflictions centre in the oppression emanating from capital, and whereas all other struggles in Germany, social as well as political, are petty and paltry and concern mere trifles which elsewhere have been settled long ago, their struggle is the only one being fought magnificently, the only one that is up to the mark of the times, the only one that does not exhaust the fighters but provides them with ever new energy...

Notes

1. Johann Most (1846-1906) – German anarchist, in 1860s joined working-class movement, emigrated to England after promulgation of Anti-Socialist Law (1878), in 1880 expelled from Social Democratic party for anarchist views, emigrated to America where he continued to advocate anarchism – Progress Publishers.

2. Der Sozialdemokrat – the central organ of the German Socialist Workers Party, founded in Zurich in September 1879. After the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law in 1890 the paper ceased to appear and the Vorwärts again became the central organ of the party – Progress Publishers.

Nationalism, Internationalism and the Polish Question

A letter to Karl Kautsky, 7 February 1882, originally published in Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Briefe an A Bebel, W Liebknecht, K Kautsky und andere (Moscow, 1933), and with a short introductory statement by Karl Kautsky in his book, Aus der Frühzeit des Marxismus (Prague, 1935), pp 66-72. From Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The Russian Menace to Europe, edited by Paul Blackstock and Bert Hoselitz, and published by George Allen and Unwin, London, 1953, pp 116-20. Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

Kautsky wrote in Aus der Frühzeit des Marxismus: ‘For a long time it had been self-evident among Polish revolutionaries of all shades that the reconstitution of Poland, or at least the establishment of a Polish national state, formed the first and most important article of their programme. But in 1877 a socialist movement arose among the Poles, which soon split in two factions, one more nationally oriented and clinging to the old nationalist revolutionary programme, and another which took on a more internationalist character and which demanded above all an international social revolution the success of which would also free the enslaved nationalities. The members of this last-named socialist faction did not speak of a special Polish national programme. In October 1879, they took over the journal Równosc (Equality) which appeared in Geneva. The battle between nationalists and internationalists among the Polish socialists continued to be fought without issue. Finally the Zurich Sozialdemokrat [the organ of the then exiled German Social-Democratic Party, of which Kautsky was one of the editors] had to take a position in this quarrel. I asked Engels for his current opinion on the Polish question. His reply was the letter of 7 February 1882.’

One of the real tasks of the Revolution of 1848 – and the real, and not illusory tasks of a revolution are always solved as a consequence of this revolution – was the constitution of the suppressed and scattered nationalities of Central Europe, provided they were at all viable and provided especially that they were ripe for independence. This task was accomplished by the executors of the revolution, Bonaparte, Cavour and Bismarck for Italy, Hungary and Germany in accordance with the then prevailing conditions. There remained Ireland and Poland. We may leave Ireland out of consideration here, since it affects the situation on the European continent only very indirectly. But Poland is situated in the centre of the continent, and the maintenance of its partition is the very tie which binds the Holy Alliance together again and again. We have, therefore, great interest in Poland.

It is historically impossible for a great people even to discuss internal problems of any kind seriously, as long as it lacks national independence. Before 1859, there was no question of socialism in Italy; even the number of Republicans was small, although they formed the most active element. Only after 1861 the Republicans increased in influence and later transferred their best elements to the Socialists. The same was true in Germany. Lassalle was at the point of giving up his work as a failure, when he had the fortune of being shot. Only when in the year 1866 the greater Prussian unity of petty Germany [die grosspreussische Einheit Kleindeutschlands – ed] had been actually decided, the Lassallean, as well as the so-called Eisenach parties assumed some importance. And only after 1870 when the Bonapartist appetite of intervention had been removed definitively the thing got really going. If we still had the old Bundestag, where would be our Party? The same happened in Hungary. Only after 1860 it was drawn into the modern movement: fraud on top, socialism below.

An international movement of the proletariat is possible only among independent nations. The little bit of republican internationalism between 1830 and 1848, was grouped around France which was destined to free Europe. Hence it increased French chauvinism in such a way as to cause the world-liberating mission of France and with it France’s native right to be in the lead to get in our way every day even now. (The Blanquists present a caricature of this view, but it is still very strong also among Malon and company.) Also in the International the Frenchmen considered this point of view as fairly obvious. Only historical events could teach them – and several others also – and still must teach them daily that international cooperation is possible only among equals, and even a primus inter pares can exist at best for immediate action.

So long as Poland is partitioned and subjugated, therefore, neither a strong socialist party can develop in the country itself, nor can there arise real international intercourse between the proletarian parties in Germany, etc, with other than émigré Poles. Every Polish peasant or worker who wakes up from the general gloom and participates in the common interest, encounters first the fact of national subjugation. This fact is in his way everywhere as the first barrier. To remove it is the basic condition of every healthy and free development. Polish socialists who do not place the liberation of their country at the head of their programme, appear to me as would German socialists who do not demand first and foremost repeal of the socialist law, freedom of the press, association and assembly. In order to be able to fight one needs first a soil to stand on, air, light and space. Otherwise all is idle chatter.

It is unimportant whether a reconstitution of Poland is possible before the next revolution. We have in no case the task to deter the Poles from their efforts to fight for the vital conditions of their future development, or to persuade them that national independence is a very secondary matter from the international point of view. On the contrary, independence is the basis of any common international action. Moreover in 1873 a war between Germany and Russia was at the point of breaking out, and the constitution of some kind of a Polish state, which could form the core of a later real one, very much within the realm of possibility. And if my lords, the Russians, do not stop soon their Panslavist intrigues and agitation in Herzegovina, they may be drawn into a war which will put to shame their own, Austria’s and Bismarck’s worst fears. Only the Russian Panslavist party and the Tsar have an interest to let the matter in Herzegovina become serious. We can have as little interest in the gang of Bosnian robbers as in the stupid Austrian ministers and bureaucrats who are now making so much noise there. Thus even without revolution, merely through a European collision the constitution of an independent Poland proper [Kleinpolen – ed] would not be so far from possible, just as the Prussian Germany proper [Kleindeutschland – ed] which was invented by the bourgeois was not reached by way of the revolutionary or parliamentary path of their dream, but as a result of war.

Thus I hold the view that there are two nations in Europe which do not only have the right but the duty to be nationalistic before they become internationalists: the Irish and the Poles. They are internationalists of the best kind if they are very nationalistic. The Poles have understood this in all crises and have proved it on the battlefields of all revolutions. Take away their expectation to re-establish Poland; or persuade them that the new Poland will soon fall into their laps by itself, and they are finished with their interest in the European Revolution.

We, in particular, have no reason whatever to block their irrefutable striving for independence. In the first place, they have invented and applied in 1863 the method of fighting which the Russians are now imitating with such great success (see Berlin und Petersburg, appendix 2); and secondly they were the only reliable and capable lieutenants in the Paris Commune.

Who are, by the way, the people who fight against the nationalist strivings of the Poles? Firstly the European bourgeois with whom the Poles have lost all credit since the insurrection of 1846 with its socialist tendencies; and secondly the Russian Panslavists and people influenced by them, such as Proudhon who looked through the coloured glasses of Herzen. Among the Russians, even the best, there are today only very few who are free from Panslavist leanings or memories. They are so firmly convinced of the Panslavist mission of Russia, as the French are of the innate revolutionary initiative of France. But in truth Panslavism is a smokescreen for world dominion, appearing in the cloak of a non-existent Slavic nationality, and therefore our, as well as the Russian people’s, worst enemy. This smokescreen will go up in thin air in its day, but in the meantime it may become very unpleasant for us. A Panslavist war, as the last sheet-anchor of Russian Tsarism and Russian reaction, is being prepared at this very moment. It is very questionable whether it will come off, but if war breaks out one thing is certain: the splendidly progressing development in a revolutionary direction in Germany, Austria and even Russia, will become totally deranged and will be pushed onto another, at first unpredictable, path. At best we lose three to ten years, a respite for a constitutional ‘new era’ in Germany, and perhaps also in Russia. The most probable outcome seems to be the establishment of a small Polish state [Kleinpolen – ed] under German hegemony, a war of revenge with France, a renewal of national antagonisms, and finally the establishment of a new Holy Alliance. Thus, Panslavism is now, more than ever before, our most deadly enemy, even though it is on the brink of its grave, or rather just because of this. For the Katkoff, Aksakoff, Ignatieff and company know this one thing: that their rule is forever finished, as soon as Tsarism is overthrown and the Russian people takes the centre of the stage. Hence this fiery zeal for war, at a time when the public exchequer is negative and when no banker is willing to loan even a penny to the Russian government.

This is the reason why all Panslavists carry such a deadly hatred for the Poles. They are the only anti-Panslavist Slavs. Hence they are traitors to the sacred cause of Slavdom and they must be fitted by force into the Greater Slavic realm of the Tsar, the future capital of which is Tsarigrad, that is, Constantinople.

Now you, may ask me, whether I have no sympathy whatever for the small Slavic peoples, and remnants of peoples, which have been severed asunder by the three wedges driven in the flesh of Slavdom: the Germans, Magyars and Turks? In fact I have damned little sympathy for them. The Czecho-Slovak cry of distress ‘Boze ak jus nikto nenj’ na zemi ktoby Slavom [sic] spraviedlivost cinil?’ ['Is there, oh God, no man on earth who will render the Slavs their due?’ – ed] is answered from Petersburg, and the entire Czech national movement tends in a direction in which the Tsar will spraviedlivost ciniti [render them their due – ed]. The same with the others, Serbs, Bulgarians, Slovenes, Galician Ruthenes (at least in part). But we cannot stand for these aims. Only when with the collapse of Tsarism the nationalist ambitions of these dwarfs of peoples will be freed from association with Panslavist tendencies of world domination, only then we can let them take their fate in their own hands. And I am certain that six months of independence will suffice for most Austro-Hungarian Slavs to bring them to a point where they will beg to be readmitted. But these tiny nations can never be granted the right, which they now assign to themselves in Serbia, Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia, to prevent the extension of the European railroad net to Constantinople.

As concerns the differences between the Poles in Switzerland, those are quarrels between émigrés, which are rarely of importance, and least so among an émigré group which in three years will celebrate its hundredth anniversary, and among which, with the impulse of all émigrés to do, or at least to plan something new, one plan has followed another, one allegedly new theory has replaced another. From what I have already said, it becomes clear that we do not share the views of the people associated with Równosc and we have told them this in a declaration on the occasion of the celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of 29 November 1830, which was read at the Geneva meeting. You find this declaration printed in Polish in the Report of the meeting (Sprawozdanie z miedzynarodowego zebrania zwolanego w 50 letnia rocznice listopadowego powstania przez redakcje Równosci w Genewie, Biblijoteka Równosc: Nr 1, Geneva, 1881, pp 30 ff). It appears that the Równosc group has been impressed by the radically sounding phrases of the Geneva Russians, and now want to prove also that the reproach of chauvinist nationalism does not touch them. This deviation founded on purely local and passing causes will play itself out without much effect in Poland itself and does not deserve to be refuted in detail.

By the way, we do not take any position at this time on any future settlement between the Poles and the Lithuanians, Byelorussians and Ukrainians of the old [greater] Poland, nor on the frontier settlement with Germany.

The splendid cooperation among German and Czech workers in Bohemia proves, moreover, how little the workers themselves in the allegedly ‘subjugated’ countries are infected by the Panslavist appetites of the professors and bourgeois.

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker

In Geneva

Abstract

Written: February 10 1882

First Published: F. Engels, Vergessene Briefe, (Briefe Friedrich Engels' and Johann Philipp Becker), Berlin, 1920;

Translated: Peter and Betty Ross;

Transcribed: zodiac@interlog.com;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, February 10 1882

Dear Old Man,

We had absolutely no idea that you were so seriously ill; all we knew was that you had been suffering from erysipelas and that's something that can be cleared up pretty easily. Had I had an inkling of how matters stood, I should have raised some money for you straight away, even though I myself was very short at the time and calls were being made on me from all sides. However, it's still not too late and I've therefore taken out a money order for you for four pounds = 100 frs 80 cts. of which you will doubtless have already been advised; because of an irregularity that cropped up here I wasn't able to write until today.

Between ourselves, one might almost count it a blessing that Marx should have been so preoccupied with his own illness during his wife's last days as to prevent him being unduly preoccupied with his loss, both when it was impending and when it actually happened. Even though we had known for 6 months or more how matters stood, the event itself still came as a terribly hard blow. Marx left yesterday for the South of France [1]; where he will go from there won't be definitely decided until he gets to Paris. Under no circumstances will he make for Italy first; at the start of his convalescence even the possibility of harassment by the police must be avoided.

We have thought about your proposal [2] and take the view that the time has not yet come, though it soon will, to put it into effect. Firstly, a new, formally reorganised International in Germany, Austria, Hungary, Italy and Spain would only give rise to fresh persecution and ultimately leave one with the choice either of giving the thing up, or of carrying on in secret. The latter option would be a calamity on account of the inevitable passion for coups and conspiracies and the no less inevitable admittance of mouchards ["informers"]. Even in France the renewed application of the law banning the International, [3] a law which has not been repealed – far from it – is by no means impossible. – Secondly, in view of the current wrangles between the Egalite and the Proletaire, there's absolutely no counting on the French; we would have to declare ourselves for one party or the other and that, too, has its disadvantages. As individuals we are on the side of the Egalite, but shall take good care not to support them publicly just now after the succession of tactical blunders they have made, despite our express warnings. – Thirdly, the English are proving more intractable than ever at present. For 5 whole months I tried, through The Labour Standard, for which I wrote leading articles, [4] to pick up the threads of the old Chartist movement and disseminate our ideas so as to see whether this might evoke some response. Absolutely nothing, and since the editor, a well-meaning but feeble milksop, ended up by taking fright even at the Continental heresies I introduced into the paper, I called it a day.

Thus, we should have been left with an International confined, apart from Belgium, exclusively to refugees, for with the possible exception of Geneva and its environs we couldn't even count on the Swiss – vide the Arbeiterstimme and Buerkli. It would, however, hardly be worth the trouble to set up a mere refugee association. For the Dutch, Portuguese and Danes wouldn't really improve matters either and the less one has to do with Serbs and Romanians the better.

On the other hand the International does indeed still exist. In so far as it can be effective, there is liaison between the revolutionary workers of all countries. Every socialist journal is an international centre; from Geneva, Zurich, London, Paris, Brussels and Milan the threads run criss-cross in all directions and I honestly don't see how at this juncture the grouping of these small centres round a large main centre could give added strength to the movement – it would probably only lead to greater friction. But once the moment comes for us to concentrate our forces, it will, for that very reason, be the work of a moment, nor will any lengthy preparation be called for. The names of the pioneers in one country are known in all the others and a manifesto signed and supported by them all would make a tremendous impact – something altogether different from the largely unknown names of the old General Council. But that is precisely why such a manifesto should be saved up for the moment when it can really strike home, i.e. when events in Europe provoke it. Otherwise you will detract from its future effect and will simply have put yourselves out for nothing. But such events are already taking shape in Russia where the avant-garde of the revolution will be going into battle. You should – or so we think – wait for this and its inevitable repercussions on Germany, and then the moment will also have come for a big manifesto and the establishment of an official, formal International, which can, however, no longer be a propaganda association but simply an association for action. For that reason we are firmly of the opinion that so splendid a weapon ought not to be dulled and blunted during the comparatively peaceful days on the very eve of the revolution.

I believe that if you think the matter over again you will come round to our view. Meanwhile we both wish you a good and speedy recovery and hope to hear before long that you are quite all right again.

Ever your old friend,

F. E.

Footnotes

From the MECW

1. In early February 1882, following medical advice, Marx took a trip to Algiers, where he stayed from 20 February to 2 May. On the way there, he stopped over in Argenteuil (a Paris suburb) to visit his daughter Jenny.

2. In his letter to Engels of 1 February 1882, Becker proposed setting up a new international workers' organization along the lines of the International Working Men's Association.

3. Under the law proposed by the Minister of Justice Dufaure, and passed by the French National Assembly on 14 March 1872, membership of the International was punished by imprisonment.

4. In May-August 1881, Engels contributed to the printed organ of the British labour unions The Labour Standard, which appeared in London and was edited by George Shipton. Engels' contributions were printed anonymously nearly every week as leaders.

Engels To Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

London, 22 February 1882

Source: MECW pp 203-211 Volume 46.

First published: in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Book I, Moscow, 1924;

Dear Mr Bernstein,

I am answering your letter straight away, 1. because of the increasing urgency of the pan-Slav business, and 2. because, now that Marx has left, I shall have to set seriously to work again and shall no longer have time for such lengthy dissertations.

The ‘short-hand reports’ will be returned today. Many thanks. Mostly rather dull, but I’m happy enough if it all passed off without any denial of principles or anything really discreditable happening. I should always be grateful if you could send me further consignments from time to time. I was much gratified to see that the shocking blunders perpetrated earlier in the Saxon Landtag had been retrieved. I imagine the Sozialdemokrat is quite satisfied with the result of its intervention. Signing the statement must have been a bitter pill for Blos. I am delighted that subscriptions should have passed the 4,000 mark and that the paper should find regular distribution in Germany, despite the police, etc. It is an incredible feat for a German paper that is banned. Before ‘48 such papers got in much more easily through having the support of the bourgeois and the booksellers, but no subscriptions were ever received. But in this case the workers actually pay – proof of their discipline and of the extent to which they live and have their being in the movement. I have no misgivings whatever about our German lads when things come to a head. They have stood the test splendidly on every occasion. And it’s not they who are behaving like philistines but only their leaders who, from the start, have been prompted by the masses, not the masses by them.

That my letter should have failed to convert you is quite understandable, since you were already in sympathy with the ‘oppressed’ southern Slavs. For after all, everyone of us, in so far as he has first gone through a liberal or radical phase, has emerged from it with these feelings of sympathy for all ‘oppressed’ nationalities, and I for one know how much time and study it took me to shake them off – but then it was for good and all.

Now, however, I must ask you not to ascribe to me opinions I have never expressed. I am in no way concerned with the official Austrian viewpoint represented for years by the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung. Where it was right, it’s out of date, and where it isn’t out of date, it’s wrong. I have absolutely no cause for complaint about the centrifugal movement in Austria. A ‘bulwark against Russia’ becomes superfluous the moment revolution breaks out in Russia, i.e. when some sort of representative assembly meets. As from that day, Russia will be busy with its own affairs, pan-Slavism will collapse like the nonentity it is and the Empire will begin to crumble. Pan-Slavism is simply an artificial product of the ‘educated classes’, of the towns and universities, the army and the civil service; it is unknown in the country and even the landed aristocracy is in such a fix that it would execrate any kind of war. From 1815-59, cowardly and foolish though its policy may have been, Austria was indeed a bulwark against Russia. To afford it yet another opportunity – now, on the eve of revolution in Russia – of setting itself up as a ‘bulwark’ would be tantamount to giving Austria a new lease of life, a new historical justification for its existence, and postponing the disintegration which inevitably awaits it. And in allowing the Slavs to come to power, Austria has, with true historical irony, itself declared that what has hitherto been its sole raison d’être has ceased to exist. Come to that, a war with Russia would, within 24 hours, put paid to Slav domination in Austria.

You say that, as soon as the Slav peoples (always excepting the Poles!) have no further grounds for looking to Russia as their only liberator, pan-Slavism will be checkmated. That’s easily said and it sounds plausible. But in the first place the danger of pan-Slavism, in so far as it exists, does not lie at the periphery but at the centre, not in the Balkans but in the 80 million slaves upon whom Tsarism draws for its army and its finances. Hence it is there that the greatest effort must be made and, indeed, has been made. And is it to be blighted by a war?

Again, I do not propose to go into the question of how the smaller Slav nations have come to look to the Tsar as their only liberator. Let it suffice that they do so; we cannot alter the fact and it will rest at that until Tsarism has been smashed; if there’s a war, all these interesting little nations will be on the side of Tsarism, the enemy of all bourgeois progress in the West. So long as this remains the case, I can take no interest in their immediate liberation here and now; they are as much our declared enemies as their ally and patron, the Tsar.

We must co-operate in the work of setting the West European proletariat free and subordinate everything else to that goal. No matter how interesting the Balkan Slavs, etc., might be, the moment their desire for liberation clashes with the interests of the proletariat they can go hang for all I care. The Alsatians, too, are oppressed, and I shall be glad when we are once more quit of them. But if, on what is patently the very eve of a revolution, they were to try and provoke a war between France and Germany, once more goading on those two countries and thereby postponing the revolution, I should tell them: Hold hard! Surely you can have as much patience as the European proletariat. When they have liberated themselves, ,Ion will automatically be free; but till then, we shan’t allow you to put a spoke in the wheel of the militant proletariat. The same applies to the Slavs. The victory of the proletariat will liberate them in reality and of necessity and not, like the Tsar, apparently and temporarily. And that’s why they, who have hitherto not only failed to contribute anything to Europe and European progress, but have actually retarded it, should have at least as much patience as our proletarians. To stir up a general war for the sake of a few Herzegovinians, which would cost a thousand times more lives than there are inhabitants in Herzegovina, isn’t my idea of proletarian politics.

And how does the Tsar ‘liberate’? Ask the peasants of Little Russia whom Catherine liberated from ‘Polish oppression’ (pretext – religion) only to annex them later on. And what does all this Russian pan-Slav imposture amount to? The capture of Constantinople, that’s all. Nothing else would act so powerfully on the religious traditions of the Russian peasant, inspire him to defend the holy city of Tsarigrad and give a new lease of life to Tsarism. And once the Russians are in Constantinople, farewell to Bulgarian and Serbian independence and liberty – the little brothers (bratanki) would soon realise how much better off they had been even under the Turks. It calls for the most colossal naïvété on the part of the said bratanki for them to believe that the Tsar is out for their good rather than his own.

You say that a Greater Serbia would be as good a bulwark against Russia as Austria. As I have already said, the ‘bulwark’ theory generally has ceased to hold any water for me since a revolutionary movement gained strength in Russia. I have also said that I look forward with pleasure to Austria’s disintegration. But this brings us to the quality of these exiguous nations which is, after all, a consideration when it comes to sympathising with them.

In 2-4 generations’ time and after general European upheavals, Greater Serbia will certainly be feasible; today, having regard to the cultural level of its elements, it as certainly is not.

1. The Serbs are divided into 3 denominations (the figures are taken from Šafařik, Slovanský Nádrodopis and are applicable to 1849): Greek Orthodox 2,880,000. Catholic, including the so-called Croats who, however, speak Serbian, 2,664,000, minus the Croats, 1,884,000; Mohammedans 550,000. Where these people are concerned, religion actually counts for more than nationality, and it is the aim of each denomination to predominate. So long as there’s no cultural advance such as would at any rate make toleration possible, a Greater Serbia would only spell civil war. See enclosed Standard.

2. The country has 3 political centres – Belgrade, Montenegro, Agram. Neither the Croats nor the Montenegrins wish to submit to the supremacy of Belgrade. On the contrary. The Montenegrins and your friends, the aborigines in Krivosíje and Herzegovina, would uphold their ‘independence’ vis-à-vis Belgrade or any other central government – Serbian or otherwise – just as much as they would vis-à-vis the Turks or the Austrians. That independence consists in demonstrating their hatred of the oppressor by stealing cattle and other valuable chattels from their own ‘oppressed’ Serb compatriots as they have done for the past 1,000 years, and any attack on their right of rapine is regarded as an attack on their independence. I am enough of an authoritarian to regard the existence of such aborigines in the heart of Europe as an anachronism. And even if these little folk had had a standing as high as Sir Walter Scott’s vaunted Highlanders, who were also really shocking cattle thieves, the most we could do is condemn the manner in which they are treated by present-day society. If we were at the helm, we too should have to put an end to the Rinaldo Rinaldini-Schinderhannes business which, by long tradition, these laddies indulge in. And so would the government of Greater Serbia. Here too, then, Greater Serbia would mean a revival of the struggle now being conducted by the Herzegovinians, and hence civil war involving all the highlanders of Montenegro, Cattaro and Herzegovina.

On closer consideration, then, Greater Serbia does not appear anything like as simple and straightforward a matter as pan-Slavs and liberals à la Rasch would have us believe.

Well, go on sympathising with these aborigines as much as you like; there’s certainly no denying them a sort of poetic radiance and, in fact, they do still produce folk songs that closely resemble the old Serbian ones (which are very fine); I shall even send you an article from The Standard by way of proof. But the fact remains that they are the tools of Tsardom, and there’s no room in politics for poetical feelings of sympathy. And if the rebellion of these laddies threatens to unleash a general war that would make a complete hash of our revolutionary situation, they and their right of cattle stealing will have to be mercilessly sacrificed to the interests of the European proletariat.

Come to that, if Greater Serbia were to materialise it would only be an enlarged version of the principality of Serbia. And what has the latter achieved? Set up an educated bureaucracy on the Austrian model, consisting of chaps from Belgrade and other towns who have been to university in the West, particularly Vienna, and, knowing nothing of the conditions governing communal ownership among the peasants, make laws after the Austrian pattern that fly in the face of those conditions so that masses of peasants are impoverished and expropriated, whereas in the days of the Turks they enjoyed full autonomy, grew rich and paid fewer taxes.

The Bulgarians have depicted themselves in their folk songs, a collection of which, made by a Frenchman, has recently appeared in Paris. Fire plays a major role here. A house burns down, the young woman is burnt to death because, instead of his wife, her husband chooses to save his black mare. Another time a young woman saves her jewellery and leaves her child to burn. If, by way of exception, there is a noble and courageous act, it is invariably performed by a Turk. In what other part of the world would you find such a beastly lot?

Incidentally, if you take a look at a passable philological map of the district (e.g. Šafařik’s, in the above-mentioned book, or Kiepert’s of Austria and the countries of the Lower Danube 1867) you will find that the liberation of these Balkan Slavs is not an altogether simple affair and that, with the exception of Serbian territory, there are pockets of Turks all over the place, and a Greek fringe along the coast, not to mention Salonika which is a Spanish Jewish town. True, the worthy Bulgarians are now rapidly dealing with the Turks in Bulgaria and East Rumelia by slaughtering them, driving them out and burning down their houses over their heads. Had the Turks adopted the same course, instead of allowing them more autonomy and fewer taxes than they have at present, the world would no longer be troubled with a Bulgarian question.

As regards war, you would seem to me to have le coeur un peu trop léger. If war breaks out, it will be easy for Bismarck to make it look as though Russia were the aggressor: he can wait, but the Russian pan-Slavs can’t. But Germany and Austria once committed in the East, one would have to be a poor judge of Frenchmen, and particularly Parisians, not to anticipate that there would instantly arise a chauvinistic clamour for retribution which would reduce to silence the peaceful majority of the people and cause France to appear yet again as the aggressor; or that the chauvinism then prevailing would very soon demand the left bank of the Rhine. That this would soon involve Germany in a struggle for survival so that there, too, patriotic chauvinism would completely regain the upper hand, seems to me self-evident. So far, all the prospects are against us. But once a war is under way, there is no knowing what will be the outcome of this, the first such European conflict since 1813-15, and I would be the last man to wish for it. If it does come, however, then it can’t be helped.

But now for the other side of the coin. In Germany we have a situation that is drifting ever more rapidly towards revolution and must before long push our party to the fore. We ourselves needn’t lift a finger, just let our opponents do the work for us. On top of which a new era is impending with a new, liberalising, highly irresolute and wavering Emperor , who is exactly cut out to be a Louis XVI. All that is wanting is a timely impulse from without. This will be afforded by the situation in Russia where the onset of the revolution is only a question of months. Our people in Russia have virtually taken the Tsar prisoner, have disorganised the government and shattered popular tradition. Even without any other major coup, a collapse must ensue in the very near future, and the process will go on for years, as it did between 1789 and ‘94. Hence it will allow ample time for repercussions in the West, more notably Germany, so that the movement will gradually gather momentum, unlike 1848, when reaction was already in full swing throughout Europe by 20 March. Never, in short, has there been so magnificent a revolutionary situation. Only one thing can spoil it: as Skobelev himself said in Paris, only war with another country could get Russia out of the morass into which it is sinking. That war would repair all the damage our people, at the cost of their lives, have done to Tsarism. It would be enough at any rate to rescue the Tsar from his captivity, to expose the social revolutionaries to the general fury of the mob, to deprive them of the support they now get from the Liberals and undo all they have achieved by their sacrifices; everything would have to be begun all over again under less favourable circumstances. But a play of this kind scarcely admits of a second performance and even in Germany – upon that you may depend – our people will either have to join in the patriotic ululations, or draw down upon their heads a furore by comparison with which the one that followed the assassination attempts was mere child’s play; and Bismarck’s riposte to the recent elections would be of quite a different order from the one he made then with his Anti-Socialist Law.

If peace is maintained, the Russian pan-Slavs will be bilked and will soon have to retreat. Whereupon the Emperor can at most try one last throw with the old bankrupt bureaucrats and generals who have already once been on the rocks. That could last for a month or two at the outside, after which there would be no recourse save to call on the Liberals – i.e., a National Assembly of some kind and that, if I know my Russia, would mean revolution à la 1789. And then you go and suggest I want war! Not on your life, even if it means the demise of 200 noble robber nations.

But enough of that. And now for Bürkli. I haven’t read his pamphlet and have mislaid it, but shall look and see if I can find it in Marx’s house or mine. So I can’t say exactly what he is after.

(25 February)

I have just been hunting high and low at Marx’s and couldn’t find it. With our division of labour, specialised questions of this kind fall to Marx’s share and, because of his illness, we haven’t even been able to discuss the matter.

I assume that Bürkli permits every Zurich real property owner to take out a mortgage of this kind on his property, and that the relevant certificate is supposed to circulate as money. In this way the amount of money in circulation is dictated by the amount which the real property in question is worth, and not by the far smaller amount that would suffice for circulation. So even at this stage:

1. Either they are non-redeemable certificates, in which case they depreciate in accordance with the law expounded by Marx;

2. Or they are redeemable, in which case the portion over and above what is needed for circulation returns to the bank for redemption and ceases to be money, which, of course, means that the bank must tie up capital.

Now a substitute for money which is interest-bearing and of which, therefore, the value fluctuates day by day is, if only for that reason, an unsuitable means of circulation; not only does one first have to agree the price of the commodity in real money, but also the price of the paper. The people of Zurich would have to be worse businessmen than I suppose if, the certificates being redeemable, they didn’t all promptly surrender them to the bank for redemption, and go back to using only the old, convenient, non-interest-bearing money. Which means that the cantonal bank would have tied up in mortgages its own capital as well as everything it could borrow and would have to cast round for new sources of working capital.

But, if non-redeemable, they simply cease to be money. Metallic or good paper money is drawn from the outside world which, luckily, is a little bit larger than the Canton of Zurich, and that’s what people use, for no one will accept these dreary certificates as money and in that case they are, as you rightly say, no better than Brandenburg mortgage bonds. And if the government insists on forcing the public to accept them as money, it is in for a surprise.

This between ourselves; if you make use of it, please don’t mention my name since, as I have said, I have not read the little pamphlet or had time to read up the subject in the classic economic texts; but if one tries to criticise such things out of one’s head, just like that, there’s no guaranteeing that one won’t make blunders. At all events, the thing is nonsensical.

Marx arrived in Algiers on Monday morning, a place I and the doctors had always wanted him to go to, though he himself wasn’t very keen. He has met a judge in the tribunal civil there, a former deportee of Bonaparte’s, who has made a close study of communal ownership among the Arabs and has offered to enlighten him on the subject.

Kindest regards both to yourself and Kautsky.

Yours,

F. E.

Marx To Laura Lafargue

In London

[Algiers,] Thursday, 13 April 1882

Source: MECW Volume 46, pp. 238-243;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, Vol. 35, Moscow, 1964;

Transcribed: by Tony Brown.

Darling Cacadou,

I reproach myself for not having written to you again until now, not that there’s anything special to report from here. How often do I not think of you – at Eastbourne, beside my Jenny’s sick-bed, and during your faithful daily visits so cheering to that crosspatch, Old Nick. But you should know, dear child, that this week and last were Fermé’s Easter vacation; he lives in the rue Michelet (as part of the route Mustapha supérieur is called) at the foot of the hill from which the Hotel Victoria looks down. It’s only a stone’s throw away for him, although he has to ‘clamber’ since there’s no proper path leading up to it. And in fact he has latterly been visiting me assiduously, thus frustrating the best of resolutions in regard to afternoon letter-writing. – Otherwise not an unwelcome guest, Mr. Fermé, nor devoid of humour. After I had given him some Citoyens and Égalités to read, he arrived chuckling not a little over Guesde’s ‘terrorism of the future’ [which is to go on] until – this anticipated in heavy type – the last bourgeois oppressor has been guillotined out of existence. Fermé is not fond of Algiers whose climate doesn’t suit either him or his family (often visited by fever, etc.) although its members are all of them ‘des indigenès’ à commencer par Madame l’épouse. Above all, however, his salary as a judge is hardly sufficient for even the most modest way of life. Living in a colonial capital is always expensive. But one thing he does admit – in no town elsewhere, which is at the same time the seat of the central government, is there such laisser faire, laisser passer; police reduced to a bare minimum; unprecedented public sans gêne; the Moorish element is responsible for this. For Mussulmans there is no such thing as subordination; they are neither ‘subjects’ nor ‘administrés’; no authority, save in politica, something which Europeans have totally failed to understand. Few police in Algiers, and such as there are for the most part indigenès. And yet, with such a medley of national elements and unscrupulous characters, frequent clashes are inevitable, and it is here that the Catalonians live up to their old reputation; the white or red belts they wear, like the Moors, etc., outside their coats and not, like the French, beneath their clothing, often conceal ‘bodkins’ – long stilettos which these sons of Catalonia are not slow to ‘employ’ with equal impartiality against Italians, Frenchmen, etc., and natives alike. Incidentally, a few days ago a gang of forgers was apprehended in the province of Oran, amongst them their chief, a former Spanish officer; their European agency, it now transpires, is in the capital of Catalonia – Barcelona! Some of the laddies were not arrested and escaped to Spain. This piece of news, and others of a similar kind, derives from Fermé. The latter has received 2 advantageous offers from the French government; firstly, a transfer to New Caledonia where he would, at the same time, be responsible for introducing a new legal system, salary 10,000 frs (he and family to travel there gratis and, on arrival, be given free official accommodation); or, secondly, to Tunis, where he would likewise occupy a higher magisterial rank than here, and under far more favourable conditions. He has been given a certain period in which to make up his mind; will accept one or the other.

From Mr Fermé to the weather is a natural transition, since he freely heaps imprecations on the same. – Since Easter Monday (incl.) I have not missed a single morning stroll, although only yesterday (12th) and today have been spared the caprices of April. Yesterday, bien que nous subissions le léger siroco et, par conséquent, quelques coups de vent, ce fut le maximum du beau temps: à 9 heures le matin (le 12) le temperature à l’ombre fut de 19.5°, et celle au soleil, de 35°. In spite of having gone for a walk in the morning (12 April), I visited Algiers in the afternoon in order to take a look at the Russian ironclad, Peter the Great, which had arrived in the harbour there a few days before.

The official meteorological office has forecast intense atmospheric disturbances for 15-16 April (when there’ll be orage), 19, 21, 25, 27, 29 and 30 April; nevertheless, the weather during the remainder of April will on the whole be fine at the same time it is feared that in May, to make up for the absence of a true Algerian spring (which did not begin till yesterday), summer will arrive all at once and with it unbearable heat. However that may be, I do not, as corpus vile feel inclined to serve as an experimental station for the weather. In view of the altogether abnormal character of the past 4½ months, God knows what Algeria may have in store. Large numbers of shrewd folk (amongst them l’illustre ‘Ranc’) departed from the African shore day before yesterday. I shall only stay until Dr Stephann has declared my left side to be in good order again, apart, of course, from the scar well known to the doctissimi Drs Donkin and Hume, left by an earlier attack of pleurisy. What has been tiresome here so far is the constant recurrence of my cough, even if within moderate limits; withal, much boredom.

Interruption of the most agreeable kind: knocks at the door; Entrez! Madame Rosalie (one of the serving spirits) brings me a letter from you, dear Cacadou, and, from the good Gasçon, a long letter of which the paper, like the envelope, already bears the official stamp: ‘L’Union Nationale’. This time he seems to have pulled it off! Ce n’est pas une de ces entreprises patronées par Mr Ch. Hirsch! On the other hand, to be sure, the prospect of my Cacadou’s departure looms closer! But not just yet, I trust. Also, I regard it as some compensation that Aunty Cacadou should represent so great a gain to Jennychen and her children; anyway, with Paris so close, there’s no need to spend the whole year in London. – Apropos. Has Lafargue sent the next instalment of the article to Petersburg? (I don’t know what became of the first consignment.) It’s most important not to lose the vantage point of Petersburg; it will gain in importance daily! Also for anyone who sends despatches there.

Second interruption: It is 1 o’clock p.m., and I have promised to visit the ‘Jardin du Hamma’ ou ‘Jardin d’Essai’ with Madame Casthelaz, son fils, and one of our other fellow pensionnaires, Madame Claude (of Neufchâtel). We have to be back before dinner (6 o’clock p.m.), later than which every effort at writing never as yet dared upon by me. So no more till tomorrow. Simply by way of a supplement * to the useful knowledge of Cacadou I allow myself to remark, that on that very Hamma took place the landing of 24,000 soldiers under the commandment of Charles V, emperor, (or Carlos I, according to the Spaniards) on 23 October 1541, 8 days later he had to ship the * beaux restes de son armée détruite sur les vaisseaux échappes à la tempete du 26, et ralliés a grand peine par Doria, à Matifou. Ce dernier lieu ou finit la baie d’Alger c. à. d.- le cap Matifou – opposite, on the East, to Algiers, is to be espied, par des bonnes lunettes, by myself from Hôtel Victorias Gallery.

Vendredi, 14 April

*I commence this letter at the moment when I have a few lines to be added to the foregoing, that is to say at about 1 o’clock p.m. The day ended yesterday as fine as that of the 12th. Both the evenings 12 and 13 (about 8 hours p. m.) were warm – quite exceptional this – but cool (relatively) at the same time, hence really delightful. This morning the warmth a little more ‘heavy’, and just since two hours the wind blows violently, probably the ‘orage’ predicted yesterday from 14-15.

Yesterday at 1 o’clock p. m. we went down to Inferior Mustapha whence the tram brought us to Jardin Hamma or Jardin d’Essai, which is used for ‘Promenade Publique’ with occasional military music, as ‘pépinière’ for the production and diffusion of the indigenous vegetables, at last for the purpose of scientific botanical experiments and as a garden of ‘acclimatation’. – This all encloses a very large ground, part of which is mountainous, the other belonging to the plain. In order to see more minutely, you would want at least a whole day, and beside being somebody with you a connaisseur, f. i. like M. Fermé’s friend and old Fourieriste, M. Durando, professor of botanics, who is the leader of a section of the ‘Club Alpin Français’ on its regular Sunday excursions. (I very much regretted that my bodily circumstances and the Dr. Stephann’s strict prohibition till now did not yet allow me to share in these excursions, having 3 times [been] invited thereto.)

Well, before entering the Jardin d’Essai’ we took coffee, of course in the free air, a Mauresque ‘café’. The Maure prepared it excellently, we were on a bank. On a rough table, in inclined positions, their legs crossed, half a dozen Maure visitors were delighted in their small ‘cafetières,’ (everyone gets one of his own) and together playing at cards (a conquest this on them of civilisation). Most striking this spectacle: Some of these Maures were dressed pretentiously, even richly, others in, for once I dare call it blouses, sometime of white woollen appearance, now in rags and tatters – but in the eyes of a true Musulman such accidents, good or bad luck, do not distinguish Mahomet’s children. Absolute equality in their social intercourse, not affected; on the contrary, only when demoralized, they become aware of it; as to the hatred against Christians and the hope of an ultimate victory over these infidels, their politicians justly consider this same feeling and practice of absolute equality (not of wealth or position but of personality) a guarantee of keeping up the one, of not giving up the latter.* (Nevertheless, they will go to rack and ruin without a revolutionary movement.)

*In regard to the plain part of the Jardin d’Essai I remark only: It is cut by three great longitudinal ‘allées’ of a wonderful beauty; opposite to the principal entry is the ‘allée’ of the platenes [platanes] ; then the ‘allée des palmiers’, ended by an oasis of immense 72 ‘palmiers’, limited by the railway and the sea; at last the ‘allée’ of the magnolia and a sort of figues (ficus roxburghi). These three great ‘allées’ are themselves cut by many others crossing them, such as the long ‘allée des bambous’ astonishing, the ‘allée’ of ‘palmiers à chanvre’, the ‘dragon[n]iers’, the ‘eucalyptus’ (blue gum of Tasmania), etc., (the latter are of an extraordinarily quick vegetation).

Of course, these sorts of* allées cannot be reproduced in European ‘Jardins d’acclimatation’.

During the afternoon there was a concert of military music in a large open space encircled by plane trees; the conductor, a noncommissioned officer, wore ordinary French uniform, whereas the musicians (common soldiers) wore red, baggy trousers (of oriental cut), white felt boots buttoning up to the bottom of the baggy trousers; on their heads a red fez.

While on the subject of the garden, I did not mention (though some of these were very pleasing to the nose) orange trees, lemon – ditto, almond trees, olive trees, etc.; nor, for that matter, cactuses and aloes which also grow wild (as do wild olives and almonds) in the rough country where we have our abode.

Much though this garden delighted me, I must observe that what is abominable about this and similar excursions is the ubiquitous chalky dust; though I felt well in the afternoon and after coming home and during the night, my cough was nonetheless rather troublesome, thanks to the irritation caused by the dust.

I am expecting Dr Stephann today, but as I cannot put off the despatch of this missive, I will send a report to Fred, later on.

Finally, as Mayer of Swabia used to say, let us take a little look at things from a higher historical perspective. Our nomadic Arabs (who have, in many respects, gone very much to seed while retaining, as a result of their struggle for existence, a number of sterling qualities) have memories of having once produced great philosophers, scholars, etc., which, they think, is why Europeans now despise them for their present ignorance. Hence the following little fable, typical of Arab folklore.

A ferryman is ready and waiting, with his small boat, on the tempestuous waters of a river. A philosopher, wishing to get to the other side, climbs aboard. There ensues the following dialogue:

Philosopher: Do you know anything of history, ferryman?

Ferryman: No!

Philosopher: Then you’ve wasted half your life!

And again: The Philosopher: Have you studied mathematics?

Ferryman: No!

Philosopher: Then you’ve wasted more than half your life.

Hardly were these words out of the philosopher’s mouth when the wind capsized the boat, precipitating both ferryman and philosopher into the water. Whereupon,

Ferryman shouts: Can you swim?

Philosopher: No!

Ferryman: Then you’ve wasted your whole life.

That will tickle your appetite for things Arabic.

With much love and many kisses.

Old Nick

(best compliments to all)

Engels To Eduard Bernstein

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p.333;

Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan.

May 3, 1882

Don’t let the Association[332] here deceive you about the Democratic Federation.[333] So far it is of no account whatever. It is headed by an ambitious candidate for Parliament by the name of Hyndman, an ex-Conservative, who can get together a big meeting only with the help of the Irish and for specifically Irish purposes. Even then he plays only a third-rate part, otherwise the Irish would give it to him.

Gladstone has discredited himself terribly. His whole Irish policy has suffered shipwreck. He has to drop Forster and the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, Cowper-Temple (whose stepfather is Palmerston), and must say a pater peccavi[A]:

The Irish M.P.s[B] have been set free, the Coercion Bill has not been extended, the back rents of the farmers are to be partly cancelled and partly taken over by the state against fair amortisation.[334] On the other hand the Tories have already reached the stage where they want to save whatever can still be saved: before the farmers take the land they should redeem the rents with the aid of the state, according to the Prussian model, so that the landowners may get at least something! The Irish are teaching our leisurely John Bull to get a move on. That’s what comes from shooting! [335]

Footnotes

A.. Father, I have sinned. — An error seems to have crept in since the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland at the time was not William Cowper-Temple but his nephew Francis Cowper. — Ed.

B.. Parnell, Dillon, O’Kelly. — Ed.

332. This refers to a draft conspectus for a report on the Irish question which Marx was to make at the meeting of the German Workers’ Educational Association in London on December 16, 1867. “Yesterday I read in our German Workers’ Association (but three other German workers’ associations were represented there, about 100 people in all) a one-and-a-half hour long report on Ireland,” Marx wrote in this connection to Engels on December 17, 1867. Some members of the General Council of the International also attended the meeting. Eccarius, a Council member, who attached great importance to this report, which explained the attitude of the General Council towards the Irish national liberation movement, took notes in order to prepare them for publication. A copy of these notes was sent to Johann Philipp Becker, the editor of Vorbote, a monthly magazine in Geneva, which was the mouthpiece of the German sections of the International Working Men’s Association in Switzerland; but it was not published.

The London German Workers’ Educational Association was founded in February 1840 by German revolutionary emigrants. After the founding of the Communist League — the first international communist organisation of the working class — the leading role in the Association was assumed by the local sections of the League. Marx and Engels took an active part in the Association a activities (except when sectarian elements temporarily gained the upper hand). At the end of the fifties, Friedrich Lessner, a pupil and comrade-in-arms of Marx and Engels, became one of the leaders of the Association. The Association, which was linked with English workers’ organisations, participated in the inauguration of the International Working Men’s Association in 1864 and began to act as its German section in London. The Association continued to exist up to 1918.

333. The Democratic Federation — an association of various British radical societies of a semi-bourgeois, semi-proletarian trend, set up on June 8, 1881, under the guidance of H.M. Hyndman. The Federation adopted a bourgeois-democratic programme containing 9 points: universal suffrage, a three-year Parliament, a system of equal electoral districts, the abolition of the House of Lords as a legislative body, independence for Ireland in the field of legislation, nationalisation of the land, etc.

At the inaugural conference of the Democratic Federation Hyndman’s pamphlet England for All was distributed among the participants. In its two chapters (Chapter II — “Labour,” and Chapter III — “Capital”) Hyndman included whole sections from the first volume of Capital as programme principles of the Federation. He made no reference to either the author or the book, and in many cases distorted Marx s propositions.

In 1884 the Democratic Federation was reorganised as the Social-Democratic Federation.

334. The mass action of the Irish peasants led by the Land League and various secret societies forced Gladstone to repeal the emergency measures introduced in 1881. On May 2, 1882, the Irish M.P.s, the leaders of the Land League Parnell, Davitt, Dillon and O’Kelly, were released from gaol. At the same time the champions of the emergency measures — F.T. Cowper, the Viceroy for Ireland, and W. Forster, Chief Secretary for Ireland — had to resign. Lord Cavendish was appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland.

335. Gladstone’s repressions in Ireland intensified the activities of various secret societies which resorted to terror against the landlords and their managers, and against government officials. As a result many estate owners left Ireland.

Engels to Sorge (Excerpt)

Written: June 20, 1882;

Source: Science and Society Volume II, No. 2, Spring 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins;

HTML Mark-up: Andy Blunden and Sally Ryan.

London,

June 20, 1882.

Dear Sorge:

... Marx was in Algiers for about two months, where he suffered a relapse of pleurisy, as I think I wrote you. After this was cured, he went to Monte Carlo in Monaco, and suffered another, but this time a mild one. From there he went to Paris about three weeks ago, and is now with his daughter, Mrs. Longuet, in Argenteuil near Paris, travelling to Enghien every day to take the sulphur springs there for his chronic bronchial catarrh and cough. His general health is very good; as for his further movements, they depend entirely upon the doctors.

The English translation of the Manifesto sent us is quite unprintable without complete revision. But you will understand that this is out of the question under the present circumstances.

I have heard nothing of Leo for months. He is a queer chap who must be allowed to go his own way. I haven’t even his address. Apropos, for some time past I have been receiving communications for Leo from Dr. Lilienthal in New York, which I can transmit only via Paris. Who is this Lilienthal?

The presumption of the Lassalleans after their arrival in America was inevitable. People who carried the only true gospel with them in their bag could not speak unpretentiously to the Americans, still languishing in spiritual darkness. What was at stake, moreover, was finding a new footing in America to take the place of the one that was disappearing more and more under their feet in Germany. To make up for it we are happily rid of them in Germany; in America, where everything proceeds ten times as fast, they will soon be disposed of.

I trust your eyes get better through your resting them. I also had trouble with them once and know what an infamous business it is.

In Germany things are going ahead excellently on the whole. To be sure, the literati of the party have tried to effect a turn towards the reactionary, tame-bourgeois, educated, but this failed utterly. The infamies to which the Social Democratic workers are subjected everywhere have made them much more revolutionary everywhere than they were even three years ago. You will have read the details in the Sozialdemokrat. Of the leaders, Bebel is the one who has behaved best in this affair again. Liebknecht wavered somewhat, since not only does he welcome every, even halfway so-called democratic, “eddicated man” with open arms and without looking him over carefully, but his son-in-law, the fat sleepyhead Bruno Geiser, is one of the biggest whiners. These people would like to beg off the Socialist Law at any price, by mildness, meekness, toadying and tameness, because it makes short work of their literary earnings. As soon as the law is abolished (even the bourgeois do not count upon its prolongation by the present Reichstag or any other possible Reichstag, because it has proved to be totally ineffective), the split will probably become an open one, and the Vierecks, Hochbergs, Geisers, Blos and Co. will form a separate Right wing, where we can negotiate with them from case to case until they finally collapse altogether. We said this immediately after the passage of the Socialist Law, when Hochberg and Schramm published in the Jahrbuch what was under the circumstances a quite infamous estimate of the party’s activity up to that time, and demanded of the party more “eddicated,” respectable, parlor-dress manners.

Regards to Adolph; he hasn’t let me hear from him.

Best regards,

Yours,

F. Engels

Tell Adolph that Pumps has a little girl.

Engels To Eduard Bernstein [336]

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, pp.333-337;

Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan.

June 26, 1882

In Ireland there are two trends in the movement. The first, the earlier, is the agrarian trend, which stems from the organised brigandage practised with support of the peasants by the clan chiefs, dispossessed by the English, and also by the big Catholic landowners (in the 17th century these brigands were called Tories, and the Tories of today have inherited their name directly from them). This trend gradually developed into natural resistance of the peasants to the intruding English landlords, organised according to localities and provinces. The names Ribbonmen, Whiteboys, Captain Rock, Captain Moonlight, etc., have changed, but the form of resistance — the shooting not only of hated landlords and agents (rent collectors of the landlords) but also of peasants who take over a farm from which another has been forcibly evicted, boycotting, threatening letters, night raids and intimidation, etc. — all this is as old as the present English landownership in Ireland, that is, dates back to the end of the 17th century at the latest. This form of resistance cannot be suppressed, force is useless against it, and it will disappear only with the causes responsible for it. But, as regards its nature, it is local, isolated, and can never become a general form of political struggle.

Soon after the establishment of the Union (1800), began the liberal-national opposition of the urban bourgeoisie which, as in every peasant country with dwindling townlets (for example, Denmark), finds its natural leaders in lawyers. These also need the peasants; they therefore had to find a slogan to attract the peasants. Thus O’Connell discovered such a slogan first in the Catholic emancipation, and then in the Repeal of the Union. Because of the infamy of the landowners, this trend has recently had to adopt a new course. While in the social field the Land League pursues more revolutionary aims (which are achievable in Ireland) — the total removal of the intruder landlords — it acts rather tamely in political respects and demands only Home Rule, that is, an Irish local Parliament side by side with the British Parliament and subordinated to it. This too can be achieved by constitutional means. The frightened landlords are already clamouring for the quickest possible redemption of the peasant land (suggested by the Tories themselves) in order to save what can still be saved. On the other hand, Gladstone declares that greater self-government for Ireland is quite admissible.

After the American Civil War, Fenianism took its place beside these two trends. The hundreds of thousands of Irish soldiers and officers, who fought in the war, did so with the ulterior motive of building up an army for the liberation of Ireland. The controversies between America and England after the war became the main lever of the Fenians. Had it come to a war, Ireland would in a few months have been part of the United States or at least a republic under its protection. The sum which England so willingly undertook to pay, and did indeed pay in accordance with Geneva arbitrators’ decision on the Alabama affair [337], was the price she paid to buy off American intervention in Ireland.

From this moment the main danger had been removed. The police was strong enough to deal with the Fenians. The treachery inevitable in any conspiracy also helped, and yet it was only leaders who were traitors and then became downright spies and false witnesses. The leaders who got away to America engaged there in emigrant revolution and most of them were reduced to beggary, like O’Donovan Rossa. For those who saw the European emigration of 1849-52 here, everything seems very familiar — only naturally on the exaggerated American scale.

Many Fenians have doubtless now returned and restored the old armed organisation. They form an important element in the movement and force the Liberals to more decisive action. But, apart from that, they cannot do anything but scare John Bull. Though he grows noticeably weaker on the outskirts of his Empire, he can still easily suppress any Irish rebellion so close to home. In the first place, in Ireland there are 14,000 men of the “Constabulary,” gendarmes, who are armed with rifles and bayonets and have undergone military training. Besides, there are about 80,000 regulars, who can easily be reinforced with an equal number of regulars and English militia. In addition, the Navy. And John Bull is known for his matchless brutality in suppressing rebellions. Without war or the threat of war from without, an Irish rebellion has not the slightest chance; and only two powers can become dangerous in this respect: France and, still far more, the United States. France is out of the question. In America the parties flirt with the Irish electorate, make promises but do not keep them. They have no intention of getting involved in a war because of Ireland. They are even interested in having conditions in Ireland that promote a massive Irish emigration to America. And it is understandable that a land which in twenty years will be the most populated, richest and most powerful in the world has no special desire to rush headlong into adventures which could and would hamper its enormous internal development. In twenty years it will speak in a very different way.

However, if there should be danger of war with America, England would grant the Irish open-handedly everything they asked for — only not complete independence, which is not at all desirable owing to the geographical position.

Therefore all that is left to Ireland is the constitutional way of gradually conquering one position after the other; and here the mysterious background of a Fenian armed conspiracy can remain a very effective element. But these Fenians are themselves increasingly being pushed into a sort of Bakuninism: the assassination of Burke and Cavendish[338] could only serve the purpose of making a compromise between the Land League and Gladstone impossible. However that compromise was the best thing that could have happened to Ireland under the circumstances. The landlords are evicting tens of thousands of tenants from their houses and homes because of rent arrears, and that under military protection. The primary need at the moment is to stop this systematic depopulation of Ireland (the evicted starve to death or have to emigrate to America). Gladstone is ready to table a bill according to which arrears would be paid in the same way as feudal taxes were settled in Austria in 1848: a third by the peasant and a third by the state, and the other third forfeited by the landlord. That suggestion was made by the Land League itself. Thus the “heroic deed” in Phoenix Park appears if not as pure stupidity, then at least as pure Bakuninist bragging, purposeless “propagande par le fait.” If it has not had the same consequences as the similar silly actions of Hödel and Nobiling[339], it is only because Ireland lies not quite in Prussia. It should therefore be left to the Bakuninists and Mostians to attach equal importance to this childishness and to the assassination of Alexander II, and to threaten with an “Irish revolution” which never comes.

One more thing should be thoroughly noted about Ireland: never praise a single Irishman — a politician — unreservedly, and never identify yourself with him before he is dead. Celtic blood and the customary exploitation of the peasant (all the “educated” social layers in Ireland, especially the lawyers, live by this alone) make Irish politicians very responsive to corruption. O’Connell let the peasants pay him as much as £80,000 a year for his agitation. In connection with the Union, for which England paid out £1,000,000 in bribes, one of those bribed was reproached: “You have sold your motherland.” Reply: “Yes, and I was damned glad to have a motherland to sell.”

Notes

336. Engels wrote this letter after reading “Die Situation in Irland,” an article by Eduard Bernstein signed “Leo,” in the May 18, 1882, issue of Sozialdemokrat. Bernstein gave Engels’s letter to W. Liebknecht, who published a large portion of it in the same newspaper on July 13, 1882, in the form of an article entitled “Zur irischen Frage,” in which he inserted his editorial comments. He also appended Engels’s text with an introduction and a conclusion by the editorial board. In his letter to Bernstein of August 9, 1882, Engels expresses his indignation with Liebknecht’s misrepresentation of his views on the Irish question (see p. 837).

337. The Alabama affair — a conflict between the U.S.A. and England due to the military help rendered by the latter to the Southern States during the Civil War of 1861-65. The English Government built and equipped cruisers for the Southern States, including the Alabama, which did considerable damage to the Northern States. After the war the U.S. Government demanded of the English Government full compensation for the losses inflicted by the Alabama and other vessels. The tribunal of arbitration in Geneva adjudged on September 14, 1872, that England should pay the United States $15,500,000 damages. England submitted to the tribunal’s decision because she wanted the U.S.A. to keep out of Irish affairs and to stop supporting the Irish revolutionaries.

338. Lord Cavendish, the newly appointed Chief Secretary for Ireland, and Thomas Henry Burke, the former Under-Secretary, were assassinated on May 6, 1882, in Phoenix Park in Dublin by members of the terrorist organisation “The Invincibles,” which incorporated some former Fenians. Marx and Engels did not approve of the terrorist tactics of these epigoni of Fenianism; in their view, such anarchistic acts could not in the least affect England’s colonial policy towards Ireland but only involved unnecessary sacrifices on the part of the Irish revolutionaries and disorganised the national liberation movement.

339. In 1878, attempts to assassinate Kaiser Wilhelm I were made by Max Hödel, an apprentice from Leipzig, and by Karl Nobiling, an anarchist. These attempts became the pretext for the institution of the Anti-Socialist Law, which was introduced by Bismarck’s government with the support of a majority in the Reichstag on October 21, 1878, for the purpose of fighting the socialist and working-class movement. The law deprived the Social-Democratic Party of Germany of its legal status; it prohibited all its organisations, workers’ mass organisations and the socialist and workers’ press, decreed confiscation of socialist literature, and subjected Social-Democrats to reprisals. The law was extended every 2-3 years. Despite this policy of reprisals the Social-Democratic Party increased its influence among the masses. Under pressure of the mass working-class movement the law was repealed on October 1, 1890.

Engels To Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

London, 9 August 1882

Source: MECW Volume 46.

First published: in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Book I, Moscow, 1924;

Dear Mr Bernstein,

Today just a few comments in great haste, as I shall be going to the seaside in a few days’ time and my hands are absolutely full.

1. A German edition of Socialisme utopique et socialisme scientifique is something I have long had in mind, particularly now that I have seen what a regular revolution the thing has wrought in the minds of many of the better people in France. I am glad that we see eye to eye here. The only thing is that the German text, because more concentrated, is appreciably more difficult than the French from which quite a lot is omitted. To popularise the work without prejudice to the substance. and in such a way as to make it fit for general use as a propaganda pamphlet is a difficult task; however, I shall do the best I can at the seaside. When shall you be able to start printing and how long will the impression take? I must, of course, be sent the proofs in duplicate, as in France, which has a number of advantages).

2. Naturally you would have thought that, in view of our old friendship, Liebknecht was really within his rights in asking you to hand over my letter, to him, and that you were under an obligation to put it at his disposal. I can find nothing to complain about in that. Nor could you know that, of the many differences I have had with Liebknecht, four-fifths were due to similar high-handed acts on his part, to the public misuse of private letters, to notes, etc., on my articles that were either silly or ran immediately counter to the sense of the passage. On this occasion, too, he has made unjustifiable use of my letter. That letter was written with specific reference to your article. Liebknecht treated it as though it were ‘my’ account of the Irish question as a whole. Frightfully easy and all the more so if one trots out in refutation Davitt’s speeches which had not as yet been made at all at the time the letter was written and, indeed, have no bearing at all on that letter, Davitt and his state ownership of land having hitherto been no more than a straw in the wind. But Liebknecht always takes this kind of easy way out when trying to come the top do. Now, I don’t begrudge him his fun, but he ought not to misuse my letters for the purpose and in this way he has compelled me to request you in future (let me try to make this sound as formally diplomatic as possible) de lui donner – tout au plus – lecture de mes lettres sans cependant lui abandonner l’original ni lui en laisser copie.

3. I have passed on to Marx, in as humorous a form as possible, the substance of the Hirsch-Mehringiad and I fear that, should little Carl see Marx, he will go through a not altogether agreeable quarter of an hour.

4. I should say that, in the Egyptian affair you take the so-called National Party rather too much under your Wing. We don’t know much about Arabi, but I’d wager 10 to 1 that he is a run-of-the-mill Pasha who begrudges the financial chaps their tax revenue because he would, in good oriental fashion, sooner pocket it himself. Here we have the same old story as in all agrarian countries. From Ireland to Russia, from Asia Minor to Egypt, the peasant of an agrarian country is there to be exploited. It has been the same since the time of the Assyrian and Persian empires. The satrap, alias pasha, is the eastern prototype of the exploiter, as are the business men and jurists in the west today. REPUDIATION of the Khedive’s debts may be all right, but the question is, what then? And we West European socialists ought not to allow ourselves to be so easily duped as the Egyptian fellaheen or as – all Latins. Strange. All Latin revolutionaries lament the fact that their revolutions invariably redound to someone else’s advantage – quite simply because they have always been taken in by the word ‘revolution’. And yet it’s hardly possible for a scrap to break out anywhere without revolutionary Latins raving about it with one voice – and quite uncritically. As I see it, we can perfectly well enter the arena on behalf of the oppressed fellaheen without sharing their current illusions (for a peasant population has to be fleeced for centuries before it learns from experience), and against the brutality of the English without, for all that, espousing the cause of those who are currently their military opponents. The utmost caution should be observed in making use of the politically emotional French and Italian party papers in all questions of international politics; we Germans, however, now we have attained superiority where theory is concerned, are duty bound to preserve it in this sphere also by the exercise of criticism.

But now, enough of criticism. Unfortunately I haven’t got sufficient time left today to send you a contribution for the feuilleton. I am particularly keen to prove to our good little Carl in black and white what tremendous piffle it was he fobbed off on Mehring about my relations with the Sozial-demokrat. However, you will get it before long and may then, if you like – it’s all the same to me – make some direct allusion to it in a note, without, of course, actually mentioning our little Carl, who must surely by now be panting for cooling streams.

Well, my kindest regards. If at all possible, I shall also send you a letter from the coast for ce brave Kautsky whose address, or such as I have, is of somewhat ancient date. The last one was that of some lassie with a French name – a genuine accommodation address, I trust.

Yours,

F. E.

Engels to Karl Kautsky

In Vienna

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 12 September, 1882

You ask me what the English workers think about colonial policy. Well, exactly the same as they think about politics in general: the same as what the bourgeois think. There is no workers' party here, there are only Conservatives and Liberal-Radicals, and the workers gaily share the feast of England's monopoly of the world market and the colonies. In my opinion the colonies proper, i.e., the countries occupied by a European population, Canada, the Cape, Australia, will all become independent; on the other hand the countries inhabited by a native population, which are simply subjugated, India, Algiers, the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions, must be taken over for the time being by the proletariat and led as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is difficult to say. India will perhaps, indeed very probably, produce a revolution, and as the proletariat emancipating itself cannot conduct any colonial wars, this would have to be given full scope; it would not pass off without all sorts of destruction, of course, but that sort of thing is inseparable from all revolutions. The same might also take place elsewhere, e.g., in Algiers and Egypt, and would certainly be the best thing for us. We shall have enough to do at home. Once Europe is reorganised, and North America, that will furnish such colossal power and such an example that the semi-civilised countries will follow in their wake of their own accord. Economic needs alone will be responsible for this. But as to what social and political phases these countries will then have to pass through before they likewise arrive at socialist organisation, we to-day can only advance rather idle hypotheses, I think. One thing alone is certain: the victorious proletariat can force no blessings of any kind upon any foreign nation without undermining its own victory by so doing. Which of course by no means excludes defensive wars of various kinds.

The business in Egypt has been contrived by Russian diplomacy. Gladstone is to take Egypt (which he has not got yet by a long way and if he had it he would still be a long way from keeping it) in order that Russia may take Armenia, which according to Gladstone would be a further liberation of a Christian country from the Mohammedan yoke. Everything else about the affair is a sham, humbug, pretext. Whether the humbug will succeed will soon be seen.

Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

20 October 1882

Dear Mr Bernstein

I have long been wanting to write to you about French affairs but have only now found time to do it. The good part about it is that now I can kill two birds with one stone.

1. St-Étienne: In spite of the well-meant advice of the Belgians the inevitable has happened, the irreconcilable elements have separated. [1] And that’s good. In the beginning, when the parti ouvrier was founded, all elements had to be admitted who accepted the programme, if they did so with secret reservations that was bound to show later on. We here were never mistaken about Malon and Brousse. [2] Both of them had been trained in the school of Bakuninist intrigues. Malon was even an accomplice of Bakunin’s in setting up the secret ‘Alliance’ (he was one of the 17 founder members). But after all they had to be given a chance to show whether they had shed the Bakuninist practice together with the Bakuninist theory. The course of events has shown that they adopted the programme (and adulterated it – Malon introduced several changes that made it worse) with the secret intention of disrupting it. What had been begun at Rheims and Paris was finished at St-Étienne. The programme has been shorn of its proletarian class character. The communist preamble of 1880 has been replaced by the Rules of the International of 1866, which had to be framed so broadly just because the French Proudhonists were so backward, and it was all the same necessary not to exclude them. The positive demands of the programme have been abolished as every locality is given the right to draw up a special programme for any special purpose any time it chooses. The so-called St-Étienne party is not only no workers’ party but no party whatever because in actual fact it has no programme. At most it is a Malon – Brousse party. The strongest objection which the two were able to make against the old programme was that it repelled more people than it attracted. This has now been remedied: neither Proudhonists nor Radicals have any longer any ground to remain outside, and if Malon & Co had their way the ‘revolutionary hash’, which Vollmar [3] complains about, would be the official pronouncement of the French proletariat.

In all Latin countries (and perhaps also elsewhere) great laxity has always prevailed with regard to credentials for Congressional seats. Many of them could hardly stand the light of day. So long as this was not overdone and as long as only matters of secondary importance were involved little damage resulted. But only the Bakuninists made this practice the rule (first in the Jura), they made a regular business out of the fraudulent procurement of seats and sought in that way to get to the top. The same thing has happened now in St-Étienne. In general all the old Bakuninist tactics, which justify any means – lies, calumniation, secret cliquishness – dominated the preparations for the Congress. That is the only trade in which Brousse is proficient. People forget that practices which may be successful in small sections and in a small area such as the Jura, are when applied to a real workers’ party of a big country bound to destroy those who apply such methods and stratagems. The sham victory at St-Étienne will not last long and the end of Malon and Brousse will certainly come soon.

It seems that every workers’ party of a big country can develop only through internal struggle, which accords with the laws of dialectical development in general. The German party became what it is in the struggle between the Eisenachers and Lassalleans where fighting played a major role. Unity became possible only when the bunch of scoundrels that had been deliberately trained by Lassalle to be his tools had outlived their day, and even then it was brought about by us much too hastily. In France the people who, although they have sacrificed the Bakuninist theory, continue to employ Bakuninist means of struggle, and who at the same time want to sacrifice the class character of the movement to further their special ends, must also first outlive their usefulness before unity is possible again. To preach unity under such circumstances would be sheer folly. Moral sermons avail nothing against infantile disorders, which are after all unavoidable under present-day circumstances.

By the way, the Roanne people too stand in need of constant and severe criticism. They are too often carried away by revolutionary phrases and an impotent urge for action...

Notes

1. The French Workers Party split into two factions at the St-Étienne Congress on 25 September 1882. The minority led by Guesde and Lafargue walked out and held its own congress at Roanne. The opportunist majority headed by Malon and Brousse formed a separate party, the so-called Possibilists. The party acquired this name because its leaders, who were opposed to revolutionary struggle, declared that they were only trying to achieve what was possible – Progress Publishers.

2. Paul Brousse (1854-1912) – French petit-bourgeois socialist, participated in Paris Commune, after its suppression lived in emigration, joined anarchists. On his return to France at the beginning of 1880s joined Workers Party where he vehemently opposed the Marxist trend, an ideologist and leader of Possibilists. Benôit Malon (1841-1893) – French socialist, member of First International and of Paris Commune, after its defeat took refuge in Italy and then in Switzerland where he drew close to anarchists, an ideologist and leader of Possibilists – Progress Publishers.

3. Georg Heinrich Vollmar (1850-1922) – German social democrat, a leader of opportunist wing of German Social Democracy, was repeatedly elected to Reichstag and Bavarian Landtag. In early 1890s one of ideologists of reformism and revisionism – Progress Publishers.

Engels to August Bebel

In Leipzig

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 28 October, 1882

I read [Vollmar's] second article rather hurriedly, with two or three people talking the whole time. Otherwise the way he represents the French Revolution to himself would have led me to detect the French influence and with it my Vollmar too, no doubt. You have perceived this side quite correctly. He at last is the dreamed-of realisation of the phrase about the "one reactionary mass." All the official parties united in one lump here, all the Socialists in one column there--great decisive battle. Victory all along the line at one blow. In real life things do not happen so simply. In real life, as you also remark, the revolution begins the other way round by the great majority of the people and also of the official parties massing themselves together against the government, which is thereby isolated, and overthrowing it; and it is only after those of the official parties whose existence is still possible have mutually and successively accomplished one another's destruction that Vollmar's great division takes place and with it the prospect of our rule. If, like Vollmar, we wanted to start straight off with the final act of the revolution we should be in a miserably bad way.

In France the long expected split has taken place. The original conjunction of Guesde and Lafargue with Malon and Brousse was no doubt unavoidable when the party was founded, but Marx and I never had any illusions that it could last. The issue is purely one of principle: is the struggle to be conducted as a class struggle of the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, or is it to be permitted that in good opportunist (or as it is called in the Socialist translation: possibilist) style the class character of the movement, together with the programme, are everywhere to be dropped where there is a chance of winning more votes, more adherents, by this means. Malon and Brousse, by declaring themselves in favour of the latter alternative, have sacrificed the proletarian class character of the movement and made separation inevitable. All the better. The development of the proletariat proceeds everywhere amidst internal struggles and France, which is now forming a workers' party for the first time, is no exception. We in Germany have got beyond the first phase of the internal struggle, other phases still lie before us. Unity is quite a good thing so long as it is possible, but there are things which stand higher than unity. And when, like Marx and myself, one has fought harder all one's life long against the alleged Socialists than against anyone else (for we only regarded the bourgeoisie as a class and hardly ever involved ourselves in conflicts with individual bourgeois), one cannot greatly grieve that the inevitable struggle has broken out.

...

I hope this will reach you before they put you behind the bars. Hearty greetings from Marx and Tussy. Marx is rapidly recovering and if his pleurisy does not come back he will be stronger next autumn than he has been for years. If you see Liebknecht in the Käfigturm [1] (as they say in Berne), give him the best regards from all of us.

Notes

1. Literally ‘cage tower’; here ‘prison’.

Engels Engels To Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

Source: MECW Volume 46, p. 353;

First published: in full, in Marx Engels Archives, Moscow, 1924;

Transcribed: Andy Blunden

London, 2-3 November 1882

Dear Mr Bernstein,

Have still received no proofs (just arrived 3/11). On the other hand, have had from Bebel the Accident and Health Insurance Bill of 1882, but not the earlier one which represents genuine Bismarckian socialism, unclouded by parliamentary divisions. This I would much like to have, along, perhaps, with other matter relating to the Accident Insurance Bank; without it I can do nothing.

Many thanks for Marquis Posener [Stock Exchange nickname for the Märkisch-Posener Railway Company]. I do not need all the details in respect of the remaining railways. The early or mid-1879 prices (before anything was known about nationalisation) would suffice. The difference between then and now would be proof enough of the way the state has bought up the bourgeoisie.

In many respects Lassalle was a good jurist and, moreover, had studied his Roman law of inheritance sufficiently to impress jurists by the extent of his knowledge. (Impress was a favourite expression of his; while contemplating the Rosetta Stone in the British Museum, he said to Marx: ‘Should I, do you think, set aside six months in order that I may impress the Egyptologists?’) In Germany all one has to do is elaborate some point in accordance with a particular theory, and the jurists of today have forgotten that the theory elaborated by Lassalle was lifted word for word from Hegel’s Philosophy of Law and History and, moreover, does not hold water if applied to the Roman law of inheritance; this did not evolve out of what Hegel called ‘the will'; rather, it evolved out of the history of the Roman gens, the tribal kinship group about which, indeed, few jurists know very much. I only said, by the way, that I should be obliged to demolish the legend of Lassalle as an original thinker, and that is absolutely essential.

I had not seen Lafargue’s letter in the Prolétaire and shall certainly ask for it to be sent me from Paris, though I am unlikely to get it. If you still have it, I should be glad if you could send it to me; you shall have it back. Incidentally, Malon had better be on his guard; Lafargue has a whole pile of compromising letters from him.

Picard’s absurd article has certainly been disclaimed in the Citoyen, as Marx saw with his own eyes. Come to that, the man who sent it to you, marked in blue, does not know French; he has underlined as a chauvinistic remark of the Citoyen’s a passage which Picard attributes to the exploiteurs bourgeois ... ligue des patriotes ... dont Gambetta est la tête! [bourgeois exploiters ... patriotic league ... of which Gambetta is the chief] I have marked it in red. Picard enjoys pitting himself against Guesde and, by way of playing a nasty prank on the latter, smuggled the article into the paper; if a proper editorial department were a possibility over there, this nonsense wouldn’t have occurred.

Now for the ‘nothing short of creditable performance put up by the editors of the Citoyen in the affaire Godard’. We happen to know all about this, Marx having often heard the tale when in Paris, both from those who had taken part and those who had had nothing whatever to do with it. Following an incident at a meeting Godard went to the editorial office of the Citoyen where he was accorded an amiable reception by Guesde who still has something of a soft spot — of a personal nature — for his erstwhile anarchist brothers. In the middle of a quiet conversation Godard, with no excuse whatsoever, suddenly dealt Guesde a violent blow in the face. The others sprang to their feet, whereupon Godard, like the cowardly anarchist he is, took refuge in a corner — surely they would not ill-treat him, a prisonnier. And, instead of beating him into pulp, the childlike Citoyen chaps conferred together and decided qu'en effet il fallait le lâcher parce qu'il — était prisonnier [that in fact he ought to be let go because he was a prisoner]!! Godard left in a hurry, sad to say, unchastised. But the following evening, when most of the editors were known to be absent, a dozen armed (with cudgels, etc.) anarchists forced their way into the office and, with threats, demanded satisfaction of some kind or other. Massard, however, stood firm, and they had to retire empty-handed. But now the fédération du centre was informed; for several evenings they placed working men on guard, and messieurs les anarchistes did not return.

But now I would ask you to give me some idea of the sort of thing the ‘nothing short of creditable’, etc., is supposed to have consisted in.

The whole gist of your letter points to the conclusion that you are not getting the Citoyen regularly and hence, apart from the Égalité and the Prolétaire, have to depend on the accounts provided by comrades in Paris who, in turn, exclusively rely on the services of Malon and Co., in regard to whom their credulity would seem to have assumed no mean proportions. In my view, however, the Party organ ought in no circumstances to allow its judgment of a workers’ movement in a foreign country to be unduly influenced by comrades in that country’s capital who are, after all, a shifting population. German associations abroad are unquestionably the worst sources of information on the movement abroad; they seldom command a bird’s eye view and generally have their own particular connections to the exclusion of any others, which means that they are unable to participate in the daily life and development of the movement around them; finally, they persist in the belief that, even today, they are still of more than passing significance to the masses actually inside Germany. What would have become of our freedom to form an opinion of the English movement or non-movement, had we paid the slightest heed to the changing majority in the London Society? And are not the German associations in New York equally uncritical in their attitude towards the American labour movement? Every association desires above all else to be thought important, and will therefore — in the absence of a very energetic and intelligent leadership — fall an easy prey to any foreigner who knows the ropes.

Nor have you any other source, i.e. other than Malon at second hand, for your reiterated assertion that in France ‘Marxism’ suffers from a marked lack of esteem. Now what is known as ‘Marxism’ in France is, indeed, an altogether peculiar product — so much so that Marx once said to Lafargue: ‘Ce qu'il y a de certain c'est que moi, je ne suis pas Marxiste.’ [If anything is certain, it is that I myself am not a Marxist] But if, last summer, the Citoyen was able to sell 25,000 copies and attain a standing such that Lissagaray hazarded his reputation in order to gain control of it, would not this seem somewhat incompatible with the lack of esteem you insist upon? Even more incompatible, however, is the fact that the said lack of esteem does not prevent these chaps from enjoying an esteem so great as to enable them, after being chucked out of the Citoyen, to start up an important new daily paper the self-same day and, supported almost exclusively by workers and petty bourgeois (ouvriers et petit industriels as Lafargue puts it), to keep it going for almost a fortnight despite harassment by the proprietors of the old Citoyen, and find a capitalist with whom they will be negotiating the paper’s fate — oui ou non tomorrow. The facts speak so clearly for themselves that Malon will doubtless have to swallow his ‘lack of esteem’. However, so great is the ‘esteem’ in which Mr Malon himself is held that, upon his applying to Rochefort for an increase in the fee he is paid for his Intransigeant articles, he received the reply: ‘Je vous paierai plus si vous écrivez moins.’ [I shall pay you more if you write less.] One of these days Malon ought to have a go at founding a daily paper in Paris without so much as a farthing in his pocket, and then he could show us just what the esteem he enjoys is capable of doing.

But enough. I have asked Lafargue to send the Égalité to the Sozialdemokrat by way of exchange, and today he writes to say he will do so, in return for which kindly send the Sozialdemokrat to the Égalité. Should the Égalité not arrive regularly, you need only drop a line on a postcard to P. Lafargue, 66 boulevard de Port-Royal, Paris.

As regards Vollmar’s articles the first in particular, levelled as it was directly against those people who, cost what it may, are clamouring for the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law, was very good and hit the nail on the head. The second I read rather cursorily before a journey, with 3 or 4 people chattering around me. Otherwise I would not have taken the lenient view I in fact did of the excessively fervent language which, in conclusion, he advocates for use by the Party. Bebel is right about this point which, however, I think he takes rather too seriously. The real weakness of the 2nd article (which I did note, but attached little importance to) lies in its childish idea of the coming revolution which is to begin by the whole world splitting itself ‘A Guelph! A Waibling!’, into 2 armies — on one side ourselves, on the other the whole of the ‘single reactionary mass’. I.e. the revolution is to start with the fifth act, not with the first, in which the masses of the opposition parties stand shoulder to shoulder against the government and its blunders and thus win through, whereupon one after the other of the individual parties amongst the victors loses its efficacy and puts itself out of the running, until finally the mass of the people are thereby forced onto our side, at which juncture the decisive battle so much vaunted by Vollmar can take place. However, in this context the point was a subsidiary one; what mattered was the demonstration that, if the gentlemen of the ‘right wing’ were to have their way, we should indeed be able to rid ourselves of the Anti-Socialist Law on conditions which, while more detrimental to the Party than the Anti-Socialist Law itself, would permit these gentlemen to publish sheets like the Hamburg Gerichts-Zeitung, etc., and pass them off as party organs. In this I agree entirely with Vollmar and have, indeed, written and told Bebel as much.

Yesterday I took out in your name, 137 alte Landstrasse, Riesbach, a money order for 12/- = 15.10 frs in payment of Marx’s and my subscription. Kindly remind me when this again falls due.

Congratulations on entering your seventh thousand.

Yours,

F. E.

In view of your amendment in the preface, there is no longer any call for an allusion to the Wyden Conference, and I shall therefore delete it. Kindly send me 2 fair proofs. Proof will go off today or tomorrow.

Engels To Marx

In Ventnor

Source: Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts, New Park Publications, 1983;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

London, November 21, 1882

Dear Mohr,

... Enclosed a mathematical essay by Moore. The conclusion that ‘the algebraic method is only the differential method disguised’ refers of course only to his own method of geometrical construction and is pretty correct there, too. 1 have written to him that you place no value on the way the thing is represented in geometrical construction, the application to the equations of curves being quite enough. Further, the fundamental difference between your method and the old one is that you make x change to x', thus making them really vary, while the other way starts from x + h, which is always only the sum of two magnitudes, but never the variation of a magnitude. Your x therefore, even when it has passed through x’ and again becomes the first x, is still other than it was; while x remains fixed the whole time, if h is first added to it and then taken away again. However, every graphical representation of the variation is necessarily the representation of the completed process, of the result, hence of a quantity which became constant, the line x; its supplement is represented as x + h, two pieces of a line. From this it already follows that a graphical representation of how x', and then again becomes x, is impossible ...

Engels to Marx

In Ventnor

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, December 8, 1882

In order finally to get clear about the parallel between the Germans of Tacitus and the American Redskins I have made some gentle extractions from the first volume of your Bancroft. [Hubert Howe Bancroft (1832-1918)--American historian.] The similarity is indeed all the more surprising because the method of production is so fundamentally different--here hunters and fishers without cattle-raising or agriculture, there nomadic cattle-raising passing into agriculture. It just proves how at this stage the type of production is less decisive than the degree in which the old blood bonds and the old mutual community of the sexes within the tribe have been dissolved. Otherwise the Thlinkeets in the former Russian America could not be the exact counterpart of the Germanic tribes--even more so really than your Iroquois. Another riddle solved there is how the fact that the women are burdened with the main mass of the work is quite consistent with great respect for women. Moreover I have found my suspicion confirmed that the Jus Primæ Noctis [right to the first night] originally found in Europe among the Celts and the Slavs, is a remnant of the old sexual community: it subsists in two tribes, widely separated and of different races, for the medicine-man as the representative of the tribe. I have learned a great deal from the book, and with regard to the Germanic tribes enough for the time being. Mexico and Peru I must reserve for later on. I have given back the Bancroft but have taken the rest of Maurer's things, which are therefore now all at my place. I had to look through them on account of my concluding note on the Mark, which will be rather long and with which I am still dissatisfied although I have rewritten it two or three times. After all it is no joke to summarise its rise, flourishing and decay in eight or ten pages. If I can possibly get the time I will send it to you in order to hear your opinion. And I myself would like to be quit of the stuff and get back to the natural sciences.

It is funny to see from the so-called primitive peoples how the conception of holiness arose. What is originally holy is what we have taken over from the animal kingdom--the bestial; "human laws" are as much of an abomination in relation to this as they are in the gospel to the divine law.

Engels to Marx

In Ventnor

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, December 15, 1882

Enclosed is the appendix on the Mark. Be so kind as to send it back on Sunday, so that I can revise it on Monday--I was not able to conclude the final revision to-day.

I consider the view expounded here regarding the conditions of the peasantry in the Middle Ages and the rise of a second serfdom after the middle of the fifteenth century is on the whole incontrovertible. I have been right through Maurer for all the relevant passages and find nearly all my assertions there, supported, moreover, with evidence, while alongside of them are exactly the opposite, but either unsupported by evidence or taken from a period which is not that in question at all. This particularly applies to Fronhöfe [lands liable to feudal dues], Volume 4, conclusion. These contradictions arise in Maurer: (1) from his habit of bringing in evidence and examples from all periods side by side and jumbled together; (2) from the remnants of his legalistic bias, which always gets in his way whenever it is a question of understanding a development; (3) from his great lack of regard for the part played by force; (4) from his enlightened prejudice that since the dark Middle Ages a steady progress to better things must surely have taken place--this prevents him from seeing not only the antagonistic character of real progress, but also the individual retrogressions.

You will find that my thing is by no means all of a piece but a regular patchwork. The first draft was all of one piece but unfortunately wrong. I only mastered the material by degrees and that is why there is so much patching together.

Incidentally the general re-introduction of serfdom was one of the reasons why no industry could develop in Germany in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the first place there was the reversed division of labour among the guilds--the opposite from that in manufacture: the work was divided among the guilds instead of inside the workshop. In England at this stage migration to the territory outside the guild took place, but in Germany this was prevented by the transformation of the country people and the inhabitants of the agricultural market towns into serfs. But this also caused the ultimate collapse of the trade guild as soon as the competition of foreign manufacture arose. The other reasons which combined with this in holding back German manufacture I will here omit.

...

Today again fog and gas light the whole day long. Hartmann’s battery probably a failure for lighting; can be used at best for telegraphy, etc. More about this as soon as something definite has been established.

Keep well. I hope you'll soon get weather you're allowed to go out in.

Engels to Marx

In Ventnor

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, December 16, 1882

The point about the almost total disappearance of serfdom--legally or actually--in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries is the most important to me, because formerly you expressed a divergent opinion on this. In the East Elbe region the colonisation proves that the German peasants were free; in Schleswig-Holstein Maurer admits that at that time "all" the peasants had regained their freedom (perhaps rather later than the fourteenth century). He also admits that in South Germany it was just at this period that the bondsmen were best treated. In Lower Saxony more or less the same (e.g., the new Meier [tenant farmers] who were in fact copyholders). He is only opposed to Kindlinger's view that serfdom first arose in the sixteenth century. But that it was newly reinforced after that, and appeared in a second edition, seems to me indubitable. Meitzen gives the dates at which serfs begin to be mentioned again in East Prussia, Brandenburg, Silesia: the middle of the sixteenth century; Hanssen gives the same for Schleswig-Holstein. When Maurer calls this a milder form of serfdom he is right in comparison with the ninth and eleventh centuries, when the old Germanic slavery still continued, and right too with regard to the legal powers which the lord also had then and later--according to the law books of the thirteenth century--over his serfs. But compared with the actual position of the peasants in the thirteenth, the fourteenth and, in North Germany, the fifteenth centuries, the new serfdom was anything but an alleviation. Especially after the Thirty Years' War! It is also significant that while in the Middle Ages the degrees of servitude and serfdom are innumerable, so that the Mirror of Saxony gives up any attempt to speak of egen lüde recht [rights over owned people--i.e., bondsmen] this becomes remarkably simple after the Thirty Years' War.

Engels to Marx

In Ventnor

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, December 19, 1882

My idea of the Podolinsky business is as follows. His real discovery is that human labour has the power of detaining solar energy on the earth's surface and permitting its activity longer than would be the case without it. All the economic conclusions he draws from this are wrong. I have not got the thing by me but recently read it in Italian in the Plebe. The question is: how can a given quantity of energy in a given quantity of food leave behind it a greater quantity of energy than itself? I solve it in this way. Assume that the amount of food daily necessary for one person represents an amount of energy expressed as 10,000 H.U. (heat units). These 10,000 H.U. remain for ever = 10,000 H.U. and in practice, as is well known, lose in the course of their transformation into other forms of energy, through friction, etc., a part of their availability. In the human body this is even considerable. The physical work performed in economic labour can never therefore = 10,000 H.U. but is always less.

But this does not mean that physical labour is economic labour; far from it. The economic labour performed by the 10,000 H.U. in nowise consists of the reproduction of the same 10,000 H.U., wholly or partially, in this or that form. On the contrary, most of these are lost in the increased heat and radiation of the body, etc., and what remains available of them are the fertilising potentialities of the excrements. The economic labour which a man performs by the employment of these 10,000 H.U. consists rather in the fixation for a greater or less time of new H.U. radiated to him from the sun, which have only this labour connection with the first 10,000 H.U. Whether, however, the new quantity of H.U. fixated by the application of the 10,000 H.U. of daily nourishment reaches 5,000, 10,000, 20,000 or 1,000,000 H.U., depends solely on the degree of development attained by the means of production.

This can only be represented arithmetically in the most primitive branches of production: hunting, fishing, cattle-raising, agriculture. In hunting and fishing new solar energy is not even fixated, only what has already been fixated is turned to use. At the same time it is obvious that, assuming the fisher or hunter to be normally nourished, the amount of albumen or fat he gets by hunting or fishing is independent of the amount of these foodstuffs which he consumes.

In cattle raising, energy is fixated in the sense that vegetable matter, which would otherwise rapidly wither, decay and decompose, is systematically transformed into animal albumen, fat, skin, bones, etc., and therefore fixated for a longer time. Here the calculation is already complicated.

Still more so in agriculture, where the energy value of the auxiliary materials, manures, etc., also enters into the calculation.

In industry all calculation comes to an end: in most cases the work added to the product can no longer be expressed in H.U. If, for instance, this is still possible with a pound of yarn because its toughness and capacity for resistance can just, with a lot of fuss and trouble, be reduced to a mechanical formula, here already this appears as an utterly useless piece of pedantry, and in the case of a piece of unbleached cloth, still more in the case of bleached, dyed and printed cloth, becomes absurd. The energy value of a hammer, a screw or a needle calculated according to the cost of production is an impossible quantity. In my opinion it is absolutely impossible to try and express economic relations in physical magnitudes.

What Podolinsky has entirely forgotten is that man as a worker is not merely a fixer of present solar heat but a still greater squanderer of past solar heat. The stores of energy, coal, ores, forests, etc., we succeed in squandering you know better than I. From this point of view even fishing and hunting appear not as the fixation of new sun heat but as the using up and incipient waste of solar energy already accumulated.

Further: what man does deliberately by work, the plant does unconsciously. Plants--and this is an old story already--are the great absorbers and depositors of sun heat in a changed form. By work, therefore, in so far as it fixates sun heat (which in industry and elsewhere is by no means always the case) man succeeds in uniting the natural functions of the energy-consuming animal with those of the energy-collecting plant.

Podolinsky has strayed away from his very valuable discovery into mistaken paths because he was trying to find in natural science a new proof of the truth of socialism, and has therefore confused physics and economics.

Engels to Marx

In Ventnor

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, December 22, 1882

To return once more to Podolinsky; I must make a correction, namely, that storage of energy through work really only takes place in agriculture; in cattle-raising the energy accumulated in the plants is simply transferred as a whole to the animals, and one can only speak of storage of energy in the sense that without cattle-raising, nutritious plants wither uselessly, whereas with it they are utilised. In all branches of industry, on the other hand, energy is only expended. The most that has to be taken into consideration is the fact that vegetable products, wood, straw, flax, etc., and animal products in which vegetable energy is stored up, are put to use by being worked upon and therefore preserved longer than when they are left to decay naturally. So that if one chooses one can translate into the physical world the old economic fact that all industrial producers have to live from the products of agriculture, cattle-raising, hunting, and fishing – but there is hardly much to be gained from doing so....

I am glad that on the history of serfdom we ‘proceed in agreement’, as they say in business. It is certain that serfdom and bondage are not a peculiarly medieval-feudal form, we find them everywhere or nearly everywhere where conquerors have the land cultivated for them by the old inhabitants – e.g., very early in Thessaly. This fact has even misled me and many other people about servitude in the Middle Ages; one was much too much inclined to base it simply on conquest, this made everything so neat and easy. See Thierry among others.

The position of the Christians in Turkey during the height of the old Turkish semi-feudal system was something similar.

Marx To Engels

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, pp. 331-332;

Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan.

January 5, 1882

A different picture is presented by the 8,000 landlords meeting at Dublin, duce[A] Abercorn[331] whose only purpose is “to maintain ... contracts and the freedom between man and man in this realm.” Those fellows’ rage over the Assistant Commissioners is funny. By the way, they are quite justified in their polemics against Gladstone, but it is only the coercive measures of the latter and his 50,000 soldiers, apart from the police, that enable these gentlemen to oppose him in such a critical and threatening manner. The whole uproar naturally is meant only to prepare John Bull for the payment of “compensation costs.” Serves him right.

Footnotes

A.. Under the leadership of. — Ed.

331. The meeting of English landlords was held in Dublin on January 3, 1882, with the Duke of Abercorn in the chair. It was called to discuss the activities of the assistant commissioners, officials appointed to implement measures connected with the 1881 Land Act for Ireland (see Note 330). Referring to the lack of proper qualifications and the inexperience of these officials and also to the absence of Parliamentary decisions defining their competency, the landlords accused the assistant commissioners of adopting biassed decisions on lowering the rents collected by the landlords. In an attempt to sabotage the Land Act, the landlords demanded that the government consider their appeals without delay and pass a law on compensation for losses they might incur if the government sanctioned a reduction of rents.

Marx To Engels

In London

Source: Marx’s Mathematical Manuscripts, New Park Publications, 1983;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

November 22, 1882

1, St Boniface Gardens,

Ventnor

Dear Fred,

... Sam, as you saw immediately, criticises the analytical method applied by me by just pushing it aside, and instead busies himself with the geometrical application, about which I said not one word. In the same way, I could get rid of the development of the proper so-called differential method — beginning with the mystical method of Newton and Leibnitz, then going on to the rationalistic method of d'Alembert and Euler, and finishing with the strictly algebraic method of Lagrange (which, however, always begins from the same original basic outlook as Newton — Leibnitz) — I could get rid of this whole historical development of analysis by saying that practically nothing essential has changed in the geometrical application of the differential calculus, i.e. in the geometrical representation.

The sun is now shining, so the moment for going for a walk has come, so no more pro nunc of mathematics, but I'll come back later to the different methods occasionally in detail ...

1883

Marx to James M Williamson. 6 January

Marx to Eleanor Marx. 8 January

Engels to Marx. 9 January

Marx to Eleanor Marx. 9 January

Marx to Engels. 10 January

Marx to Eleanor Marx. 10 January

Marx to Mrs James M Williamson. 11 January

Marx to James M Williamson. 13 January

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 18 January

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 8 February

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 10 February

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 10 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 17 February

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 27 February

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. l March

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 2 March

Engels to August Bebel. 7 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 10 March

Engels to Charles Longuet. 14 March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 14 March

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 14 March

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 14 March

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 15 March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 15 March

Engels to Friedrich Lessner. 15 March

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 24 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 25 March

Engels to Friedrich Theodor Cuno. 29 March

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 2 April

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 11 April

Engels to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. 11 April

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 14 April

Engels to Thomas James Knowles. 17 April

Engels to Philipp Van Patten. 18 April

Engels to Thomas James Knowles. 20 April

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 23 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 24 April

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 28 April

Engels to August Bebel. 30 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 1 May

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 10 May

Engels to August Bebel. 10-11 May

Engels to Achille Loria. 20 May

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 22 May

Engels to Ludwig Klopfer. 22 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 22 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 2 June

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 19 June

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 22 June

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 24 June

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 29 June

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 12-13 July

25: Engels to Gabriel Deville. 12 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 19 August

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 21 August

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 22 August

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 27 August

Engels to August Bebel. 30 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 18 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 19 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 3 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 15 October

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 8 November

Engels to Vera Zasulich. 13 November

Engels to Max Quarsk. 13 November

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 13 November

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 30 November

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 1 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 13 December

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 22 December

Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

18 January 1883

... We were very glad about the answers of Grillenberger and the Sozialdemokrat to Puttkamer’s hypocrisy. [1] That’s the way to do it. Not to twist and turn under the blows of the opponent, not to whine and moan and stammer excuses that you did not mean any harm – as so many still do. One must hit back, and return two or three blows for every one the enemy strikes. That has always been our tactic and so far I believe we have got the best of almost every one of our opponents. ‘Moreover the genius of our soldiers lies in their attack and that is a very good thing’, old Fritz [2] said in one of his instructions to his generals, and that’s the way our workers act in Germany. But when Kayser [3] for instance withdraws during the discussion of all the Exceptional Laws – provided the summary of џ[4] is correct – and wails that we are revolutionaries only in the Pickwickian sense, what then? It should have been said: that the entire Reichstag and the Bundesrat are sitting there only by virtue of a revolution; that when old William swallowed three crowns and one free city [5] he was also a revolutionary; that the whole idea of legitimacy, the whole so-called basis of legality, is nothing but the product of countless revolutions made against the will of the people and directed against the people. O, that accursed German flabbiness of thought and will which was brought into the party with so much effort together with the ‘eddicated'! When at last shall we be rid of it! ...

Notes

1. The reference is to the speech of Grillenberger, the Social-Democratic member of the Reichstag, and several articles printed in the Sozialdemokrat which dealt with the debate in the Reichstag on the proposed renewal of the Anti-Socialist Law. Karl Grillenberger (1848-1897) – German Social-Democrat, from 1881 member of Reichstag, in 1890s belonged to opportunist wing of German Social Democratic Party. Robert Victor Puttkamer (1828-1900) – German reactionary statesman, representative of Prussian aristocracy, German Interior Minister and Vice-President of Prussian government (1881-88), instituted legal proceedings against Social-Democrats under Anti-Socialist Law – Progress Publishers.

2. Frederick II, King of Prussia – Progress Publishers.

3. Max Kayser (1853-1888) – German Social-Democrat, member of Reichstag (from 1878), belonged to right-wing Social-Democratic group – Progress Publishers.

4. Of Louis Viereck (the German word Viereck means ‘square’) – Progress Publishers.

5. Engels is alluding to the annexation of the Kingdom of Hanover, the electorate of Hesse-Cassel, the grand duchy of Nassau and the free city Frankfort on the Main by Prussia after its victory in the Austro-Prussian War of 1866 – Progress Publishers.

Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

27 February [1 March] 1883

... We belong to the German party scarcely more than to the French, American or Russian party and can consider ourselves as little bound by the German programme as by the minimum programme. We lay stress upon this special status of ours as representatives of international socialism. But it also forbids us to belong to any particular national party until we return to Germany and take a direct part in the struggle there. It would be pointless now...

We have always done our utmost to combat the petty-bourgeois and philistine mentality within the party, because this mentality, developed since the time of the Thirty Years’ War, has infected all classes in Germany and become a hereditary German evil, sister to servility and submissiveness and to all the hereditary German vices. This is what has made us ridiculous and contemptible abroad. It is the main cause of the slackness and the weakness of character which predominate among us; it reigns on the throne as often as in the cobbler’s lodging. Only since a modern proletariat has been formed in Germany has a class developed there which is hardly affected at all by this hereditary German malady, a class which has demonstrated that it possesses clear insight, energy, humour, tenacity in struggle. And ought we not to fight against every attempt artificially to inculcate the old hereditary poison of philistine slackness and philistine narrow-mindedness in this healthy class, the only healthy class in Germany? But in their fright right after the criminal attempts [1] and the Anti-Socialist Law, the leaders exhibited so much anxiety which merely proved that they had lived much too long among philistines and were influenced by the views of the philistines. They intended at that time that the party should seem to be philistine if not actually become philistine. All this has now fortunately been overcome, but the philistine elements, which were drawn into the party shortly before the Anti-Socialist Law and prevail particularly among college graduates and undergraduates who did not get as far as the examinations, are still there and have to be carefully watched...

Notes

1. The allusion is to the attempts on the life of William I by Max Hödel on 11 May and the anarchist Nobiling on 2 June 1878, which provided Bismarck with a convenient opportunity for introducing the Anti-Socialist Law. The Anti-Socialist Law (exceptional Law against the Socialists) was approved by the majority in the Reichstag on 21 October 1878 – Progress Publishers.

Engels to Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

Abstract

Written:27 February - March 1, 1883;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, March 1, 1883

From the outset we have always fought to the very utmost against the petty-bourgeois and philistine disposition within the Party, because this disposition, developed since the time of the Thirty Years' War, has infected all classes in Germany and has become an hereditary German evil, sister to servility, abject subservience and all the hereditary German vices. This is what makes us ridiculous and despicable abroad. It is the main cause of the slackness and the weakness of character which pre-dominate among us; it reigns on the throne as often as in the cobbler's lodging. Only since a modern proletariat has been formed in Germany has a class developed there with hardly anything at all of this hereditary German disease about it, a class which has given evidence of a free outlook, energy, humour, tenacity in struggle. And are we not to fight against every attempt artificially to inoculate this healthy class--the only healthy class in Germany--with the old hereditary poison of philistine slackness and philistine narrow-mindedness?

Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

14 March 1883

Dear Bernstein

You will have received my telegram. It all happened terribly quickly. After the best prospects there was a sudden collapse of strength this morning, then he [1] simply fell asleep. In two minutes this genius had ceased to think, and exactly at the time when the physicians encouraged us to hope for the best. What this man was for us as regards theory, and at all decisive moments also with regard to practical matters, can be understood only by one who was constantly with him. His wide horizons will disappear with him from the scene for many years. These are matters we are not yet equal to. The movement will proceed along its course but it will miss his calm, timely and considered intervention, which hitherto saved it from many a wearisome erroneous path.

Further particulars soon. It is now 12 o'clock at night and I have had to write letters and attend to all kinds of things the whole afternoon and evening.

Yours

FE

Notes

1. Karl Marx – MIA.

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, March 15, 1883

It was not possible to keep you regularly informed about Marx's state of health because it was constantly changing. Here, briefly, are the main facts.

Shortly before his wife's death, in October of ’81, he had an attack of pleurisy. He recovered from this but when, in February '82, he was sent to Algiers, he came in for cold, wet weather on the journey and arrived with another attack of pleurisy. The atrocious weather continued, and then when he got better, he was sent to Monte Carlo (Monaco) to avoid the heat of the approaching summer. He arrived there with another, though this time a milder, attack of pleurisy. Again abominable weather. When he was at last better, he went to Argenteuil near Paris to stay with his daughter, Madame Longuet. He went to the sulphur springs near by at Enghien, in order to relieve the bronchitis from which he had suffered for so long. Here again the weather was awful, but the cure did some good. Then he went to Vevey for six weeks and came back in September, having apparently almost completely recovered his health. He was allowed to spend the winter on the south coast of England, and he himself was so tired of wandering about with nothing to do, that another period of exile to the south of Europe would probably have harmed him in spirit as much as it would have benefited him in health. When the foggy season commenced in London, he was sent to the Isle of Wight. There it did nothing but rain and he caught another cold. Schorlemmer and I were intending to pay him a visit at the New Year when news came which made it necessary for Tussy to join him at once. Then followed Jenny's death and he had another attack of bronchitis. After all that had gone before, and at his age, this was dangerous. A number of complications set in, the most serious being an abscess on the lung and a terribly rapid loss of strength. Despite this, however, the general course of the illness was proceeding favourably, and last Friday the chief doctor who was attending him, one of the foremost young doctors in London, specially recommended to him by Ray Lankester, gave us the most brilliant hope for his recovery. But anyone who has but once examined the lung tissue under the microscope, realises how great is the danger of a blood vessel being broken if the lung is purulent. And so every morning for the last six weeks I had a terrible feeling of dread that I might find the curtains down when I turned the corner of the street. Yesterday afternoon at 2.30 – which is the best time for visiting him – I arrived to find the house in tears. It seemed that the end was near. I asked what had happened, tried to get to the bottom of the matter, to offer comfort. There had been only a slight haemorrhage but suddenly he had begun to sink rapidly. Our good old Lenchen, who had looked after him better than a mother cares for her child, went upstairs to him and then came down. He was half asleep, she said, I might come in. When we entered the room he lay there asleep, but never to wake again. His pulse and breathing had stopped. In those two minutes he had passed away, peacefully and without pain.

All events which take place by natural necessity bring their own consolation with them, however dreadful they may be. So in this case. Medical skill might have been able to give him a few more years of vegetative existence, the life of a helpless being, dying – to the triumph of the doctors' art – not suddenly, but inch by inch. But our Marx could never have borne that. To have lived on with all his uncompleted works before him, tantalised by the desire to finish them and yet unable to do so, would have been a thousand times more bitter than the gentle death which overtook him. 𔄬Death is not a misfortune for him who dies, but for him who survives,” he used to say, quoting Epicurus. And to see that mighty genius lingering on as a physical wreck to the greater glory of medicine and to the scorn of the philistines whom in the prime of his strength he had so often put to rout – no, it is better, a thousand times better, as it is – a thousand times better that we shall in two days' time carry him to the grave where his wife lies at rest.

And after all that had gone before, about which the doctors do not know as much as I do, there was in my opinion no other alternative.

Be that as it may, mankind is shorter by a head, and the greatest head of our time at that. The proletarian movement goes on, but gone is its central figure to which Frenchmen, Russians, Americans and Germans spontaneously turned at critical moments, to receive always that clear incontestable counsel which only genius and a perfect understanding of the situation could give. Local lights and lesser minds, if not the humbugs, will now have a free hand. The final victory is certain, but circuitious paths, temporary and local errors – things which even now are so unavoidable – will become more common than ever. Well, we must see it through. What else are we here for?

And we are not near losing courage yet.

Engels to Philipp Van Patten[1]

In New York

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

[Note: This is a response from a communication from Phillipp van Patten, the Secretary of the Central Labour Union in New York.]

London, April 18, 1883

...

My statement in reply to your inquiry of 2 April as to Karl Marx’s position with regard to the Anarchists in general and Johann Most [2] in particular shall be short and clear.

Since 1845 Marx and I have held the view that one of the ultimate results of the future proletarian revolution will be the gradual dissolution of the political organisation known by the name of state. The main object of this organisation has always been to secure, by armed force, the economic oppression of the labouring majority by the minority which alone possesses wealth. With the disappearance of an exclusively wealth-possessing minority there also disappears the necessity for the power of armed oppression, or state power. At the same time, however, it was always our view that in order to attain this and the other far more important aims of the future social revolution, the working class must first take possession of the organised political power of the state and by its aid crush the resistance of the capitalist class and organise society anew. This is to be found already in The Communist Manifesto of 1847, Chapter II, conclusion.

The anarchists put the thing upside down. They declare that the proletarian revolution must begin by doing away with the political organisation of the state. But after its victory the sole organisation which the proletariat finds already in existence is precisely the state. This state may require very considerable alterations before it can fulfil its new functions. But to destroy it at such a moment would be to destroy the only organism by means of which the victorious proletariat can assert its newly-conquered power, hold down its capitalist adversaries and carry out that economic revolution of society without which the whole victory must end in a new defeat and in a mass slaughter of the workers similar to those after the Paris Commune.

Does it require my express assurance that Marx opposed this anarchist nonsense from the first day it was put forward in its present form by Bakunin? The whole internal history of the International Workingmen's Association is evidence of this. From 1867 onwards the anarchists were trying, by the most infamous methods, to conquer the leadership of the International; the main hindrance in their way was Marx. The five-year struggle ended, at the Hague Congress of September 1872, with the expulsion of the anarchists from the International; and the man who did most to achieve this expulsion was Marx. Our old friend, F. A. Sorge, in Hoboken, who was present as a delegate, can give you further details if you wish. And now for Johann Most.

If anyone asserts that Most, since he became an anarchist, has had any relations with Marx whatever or has received any kind of assistance from Marx, he has either been deceived or is deliberately lying. After the publication of the first number of the London Freiheit, Most did not visit Marx or me more than once, or at most twice. Equally little did we visit him--we did not even meet him by chance anywhere or at any time. In the end we did not even subscribe to his paper any more, because "there was really nothing" in it. We had the same contempt for his anarchism and his anarchistic tactics as for the people from whom he had learnt both.

While he was still in Germany Most published a "popular" account of Marx's Capital. Marx was asked to look through it for a second edition. I did this work in common with Marx. We found that it was impossible to do more than expunge Most's very worst blunders unless we were to rewrite the whole thing from beginning to end. Marx also allowed his corrections to be included only on the express condition that his name should never be brought into any connection even with this corrected edition of Johann Most's compilation.

. . .

You are perfectly at liberty to publish this letter in the Voice of the People, if you like to do so.

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor.

1. Phillip van Patten, the Secretary of the Central Labour Union in New York, informed Engels that during a meeting in honour of Marx, Joseph Most and his friends asserted that close relations had existed between Marx and Most, that Most had popularised Capital in Germany and that the propaganda he conducted was approved by Marx. Van Patten continues: ‘We have a very high opinion of the capacities and the activity of Kart Marx, but we cannot believe that he was in sympathy with the anarchistic and disorganising methods of Most and I should like to hear your opinion as to the attitude of Karl Marx on the question of anarchism versus social-democracy.’ Phillip van Patten (1852-1918) — American bourgeois, joined socialist movement, in 1876, became National Secretary of USA Workers Party, and in 1877 of Socialist Workers Party, in 1883 deserted his post and became government official.

2. Johann Most (1846-1906) — German anarchist, in 1860s joined working-class movement, emigrated to England after promulgation of Anti-Socialist Law (1878), in 1880 expelled from Social Democratic party for anarchist views, emigrated to America where he continued to advocate anarchism.

Engels to J.P. Becker

In Geneva

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 22 May, 1883

Our lads in Germany are really magnificent fellows, now that the Socialist Law* has freed them from the "educated " gentlemen who had tried before 1878 to schoolmaster the workers from the superior heights of their ignorant university-bred confusion, an attempt to which unfortunately only too many of the leaders lent themselves. That rotten trash has not been entirely got rid of as yet, but all the same the movement has come into a definitely revolutionary channel again. This is just the splendid thing about our boys, that the masses are far better than almost all their leaders, and now that the Socialist Law is forcing the masses to make the movement for themselves and the influence of the leaders is reduced to a minimum things are better than ever.

*Bismarck's Anti-Socialist law 1878-90

Engels to August Bebel

In Borsdorf near Leipzig

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Eastbourne, 30 August, 1883

The Manifesto of the Democratic Federation* in London has been issued by about twenty to thirty little societies which under different names (always the same people) have for the last twenty years at least been repeatedly trying, and always with the same lack of success, to make themselves important. All that is important is that now at last they are obliged openly to proclaim our theory, which during the period of the International seemed to them to be dictated from outside, as their own, and that a crowd of young bourgeois intelligentsia are emerging who, to the disgrace of the English workers it must be said, understand things better and take them up more passionately than the workers. For even in the Democratic Federation the workers for the most part only accept the new programme unwillingly and as a matter of form. The chief of the Democratic Federation, Hyndman, is an arch-conservative and an extremely chauvinistic but not stupid careerist, who behaved pretty shabbily to Marx (to whom he was introduced by Rudolf Meyer) and for this reason was dropped by us personally.

Do not on any account whatever let yourself be deluded into thinking there is a real proletarian movement going on here. I know Liebknecht tries to delude himself and all the world about this, but it is not the case. The elements at present active may become important since they have accepted our theoretical programme and so acquired a basis, but only if a spontaneous movement breaks out here among the workers and they succeed in getting control of it. Till then they will remain individual minds, with a hotch-potch of confused sects, remnants of the great movement of the 'forties, standing behind them and nothing more. And--apart from the unexpected--a really general workers' movement will only come into existence here when the workers are made to feel the fact that England's world monopoly is broken.

Participation in the domination of the world market was and is the basis of the political nullity of the English workers. The tail of the bourgeoisie in the economic exploitation of this monopoly but nevertheless sharing in its advantages, politically they are naturally the tail of the "great Liberal Party," which for its part pays them small attentions, recognises trade unions and strikes as legitimate factors, has relinquished the fight for an unlimited working day and has given the mass of better placed workers the vote. But once America and the united competition of the other industrial countries have made a decent breach in this monopoly (and in iron this is coming rapidly, in cotton unfortunately not as yet) you will see something here.

*The Manifesto of the Democratic Federation, "Socialism made Plain" (1883). The Democratic Federation (founded in 1881) took the name Social-Democratic Federation in 1881.

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

December 13, 1883

Paul’s article in Progress I read with much pleasure, it hits more than one nail on the head. Let us hope the Blé will come out soon after the period of étrennes [New Year gifts], and be followed soon by that novel which I am most anxious to see. Paul in Balzac’s slippers, it will be good! By the by I have been reading scarcely anything but Balzac while laid up, and enjoyed the grand old fellow thoroughly. There is the history of France from 1815 to 1848, far more than in all the Vaulabelles, Capefigues, Louis Blancs et tutti quanti. And what boldness! What a revolutionary dialectic in his poetical justice!

1884

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 1 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 9 January

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 14 January

Engels to August Bebel. 18 January

Engels to August Bebel. 23 January

Engels to Charles Fitzgerald. 27 January

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 28 January

Engels to Ludwig Krzywicki. 28 January

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 28 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 4 February

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 5 February

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 5 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 5 February

Engels to Heinrich Nonne. 21 February

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 14 February

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 14 February

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 16 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 16 February

Engels to John Darbyshire. c. 17 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 21 February

Engels to Heinrich Nonne. c. 26 February

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 3 March

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 3 March

Engels to Vera Zasulich. 6 March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 7 March

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 11-15 March

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 24 March

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 24 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 31 March

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 11 April

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 11 April

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 18 April

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 18 April

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 22 April

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 26 April

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 4 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 10 May

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 17 May

Engels to Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky. 22 May

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 23 May

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 23 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 26 May

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 5 June

Engels to August Bebel. 6 June

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 20 June

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 21-22 June

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 26 June

Engels to Evgenia Papritz. 26 June

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 29 June

Engels to Sarah Allen. About 6 July

Engels to Gabriel Deville. 8 July

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 11 July

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 19 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 22 July

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. c. 25 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 26 July

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 28 July

Engels to James Leigh Joynes. 30 July

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 31 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 1 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 1 August

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 6 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 6 August

Engels to Paul Lafargue. c. 11 August

Engels to Georg Heinrich von Vollmar. 13 August

Engels to Marya Jankowska (S Leonowicz). Mid-August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 22 August

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 22 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 30 August

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 13-15 Sept.

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 20 September

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 1 October

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 3 October

Engels to August Bebel. 11 October

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 13 October

Engels to Johann Philip Becker. 15 October

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 15 October

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 17 October

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 20 October

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 22 October

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 23 October

Engels to August Bebel. 29 October

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 8 November

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 8 November

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 11 November

Engels to Hermann Engels. 11 November

Engels to August Bebel. 18 November

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 23 November [abstract]

Engels to John Lincoln Mahon. 28 November

Engels to Charlotte Engels. 1 December

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 9 December

Engels to August Bebel. 11 December

Engels to Paul Lafargue. Mid-December

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 29 December

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 29 December

Engels to August Bebel. 30 December

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 30 December

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 31 December

Engels to Joseph Dietzgen. 31 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels on Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

January 14, 1884

Paul’s examples of victorious German “goût” are mostly as old as the hills. That German gravures pour enfants (Bilderbogen) are generally good, is simple enough. For more than 50 years they have been made chiefly at Dusseldorf, Munich, etc., and the designs are by young and often rising artists who do this work to earn a little money. 40 years ago, however, I recollect that French gravures of that sort came to Germany, a good many by Adam the horse-and-soldier-painter, and they were immensely superior to the German ones in chic and life. If that has not been continued by French artists, they must have found no market. — As to toys, the German superiority is 1) cheapness, domestic industry at starvation level (described lately by Dr. Emanuel Sax, die Hausindustrie in Thüringen, very good) and 2) in that they are invented by peasants; townspeople never will be fit to invent for children, least of all French townspeople who hate their own children. — For furniture Paul gives the reason himself: the stupid fiscal policy of the French Government. — Flowers similar: division of labour and low wages: who can compete against the East End of London and Germany in cheapness? Generally speaking, bourgeois taste is getting so much out of taste that even the Germans may hope to be able to satisfy it. And if any trade has become broken down enough to make “cheap and nasty” its market-rule, then you may be sure the Germans will step in and defeat all competition by starving their own work-people. And as this is the rule generally now for all trades, it explains the appearance of German goods in all trades and all markets.

Engels to August Bebel

In Borsdorf near Leipzig

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 18 January, 1884

Here too industry has taken on a different character. The ten-year cycle seems to have been broken down now that, since 1870, American and German competition have been putting an end to English monopoly in the world market. In the main branches of industry a depressed state of business has prevailed since 1868, while production has been slowly increasing, and now we seem both here and in America to be standing on the verge of a new crisis which in England has not been preceded by a period of prosperity. That is the secret of the sudden — though it has been slowly preparing for three years — but the present sudden emergence of a socialist movement here. So far the organised workers — trade unions — remain quite remote from it, the movement is proceeding among "educated" elements sprung from the bourgeoisie, who here and there seek contact with the masses and in places find it. These people are of very varying moral and intellectual value and it will take some time before they sort themselves out and the thing becomes clarified. But that it will all go entirely to sleep again is hardly likely.

Many thanks for your book, Die Frau. [1] I have read it with great interest, it contains much valuable material. Especially lucid and fine is what you say about the development of industry in Germany. I have also done some research on this subject recently, and if I had time I would write something about it for the Sozialdemokrat. [2] How strange that the philistines don’t understand that ‘the vagabond trouble’ they so lament is the necessary consequence of the rise of large-scale industry under the conditions obtaining in German agriculture and handicraft, and that the development of large-scale industry in Germany — because she arrives late everywhere — is bound to take place under the continuous pressure of adverse market conditions. For the Germans are able to compete only as a result of low wages, reduced to starvation level, and an ever increasing exploitation of the cottage industry which serves as a background to their factory production. The transformation of the handicrafts into cottage industry and the gradual transformation of the cottage industry, in so far as this is profitable, into factory and machine industry — that is the course taken in Germany. The only really big industry we have up to now is iron. The hand-loom still predominates in the textile industry, thanks to the starvation wages and the fact that the weavers have potato plots.

...

Henry George with his nationalisation of the land [3] is likely to play a meteoric role, because this point here is of importance traditionally, and also actually on account of the vast extent of big landed property. But in the long run attention will not be concentrated on this point alone in the foremost industrial country in the world. Henry George, moreover, is a genuine bourgeois and his plan of defraying all governmental expenditures out of rent of land is only a repetition of the plan of the Ricardo school, that is purely bourgeois.

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor.

1. Engels is referring to the second illegal edition of Bebel’s book Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman and Socialism) which was published by Schabelitz of Zurich and printed in Dietz’s printing works at Stuttgart. The book came out in 1883 under the title Die Frau in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft (Woman in the Past, Present and Future) Bebel Archive.

2. Der Sozialdemokrat — the central organ of the German Socialist Workers Party, founded in Zurich in September 1879. After the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law in 1890 the paper ceased to appear and the Vorwärts again became the central organ of the party.

3. The American economist Henry George came to England in 1882 and 1884 to conduct a propaganda campaign for his land nationalisation. For an evaluation of his theory see Marx’s letter to Sorge of 20 June 1881. Henry George (1839-1897) — American publicist, bourgeois economist, advocated bourgeois nationalisation of land as means to solve all social contradictions in capitalist society.

Engels to J.P. Becker

In Geneva

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 14 February 1884

Things are by no means so bad with the agitation in Germany, even if the bourgeois press suppresses most of what is happening and only now and then lets out an involuntary groan of terror that the Party is gaining ground at a tearing rate instead of losing it.

The police have opened up a really splendid field for our people: the ever-present and uninterrupted struggle with the police themselves. This is being carried on everywhere and always, with great success and, the best thing about it, with great humour. The police are defeated--and made to look foolish into the bargain. And I consider this struggle the most useful in the circumstances. Above all it keeps the contempt for the enemy alive among our lads. Worse troops could not be sent into the field against us than the German police; even where they have the upper hand they suffer a moral defeat, and confidence in victory is growing among our lads every day. This struggle will bring it about that as soon as the pressure is at last relaxed (and that will happen on the day the dance in Russia begins) we shall no longer count our numbers in hundreds of thousands but in millions. There is a lot of rotten stuff among the so-called leaders but I have unqualified confidence in our masses, and what they lack in revolutionary tradition they are gaining more and more from this little war with the police. And you can say what you like, but we have never seen a proletariat yet which has learnt to act collectively and to march together in so short a time. For this reason, even though nothing appears on the surface, we can, I think, calmly await the moment when the call to arms is given. You will see how they muster!

Friedrich Engels to Vera Ivanovna Zasulich

In Geneva

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

6 March 1884

Dear Citizen

It will be a great day for Marx’s daughters and me when the Russian version of Misère de la philosophie [1] comes out. It goes without saying that it will be a pleasure to me to place at your disposal all the material that may be useful to you for that purpose. [2] I propose to do the following:

Besides the German translation a new French edition is at present being printed in Paris. I am preparing some explanatory notes for these two editions and shall send you the text.

For the preface an article by Marx on Proudhon can be used which appeared in the Berlin Social-Demokrat (1865) [3] and contains almost all that is needed. It will head the two new editions, French and German. There is only one copy extant and that belongs to the archives of our party in Zurich. If no other copy is found among Marx’s papers or mine (I shall know this in a few weeks) you could easily get a transcript through Bernstein.

I shall have to write a special preface for the German edition in order to refute the absurd assertion of the reactionary Socialists that Marx plagiarised Rodbertus [4] in Capital and to prove that on the contrary Marx had criticised Rodbertus in The Poverty before Rodbertus wrote his Sociale Briefe. This seems to me to be of no interest to the Russian public as our pseudo-Socialists have not yet penetrated there. But judge of that for yourself. The preface is at your disposal if you want to use it.

What you tell me about the increasing study in Russia of books on socialist theory has given me great pleasure. Theoretical and critical thought, which has almost vanished from our German schools, seems to have taken refuge in Russia. You ask me to suggest books to you for translation. But you have already translated or promised to translate almost all the works of Marx. You have taken the cream of mine. The rest of our German books are either poor in theory or deal with questions confined more or less to Germany. Lately the French have produced a number of rather good things, but they are still only beginnings. Deville’s [5] summary of Capital is good so far as the theoretical part is concerned but the descriptive part was done too cursorily and is almost unintelligible for anyone who does not know the original. The book as a whole moreover is too bulky for a summary. Still I believe that if worked over a good thing could be made of it; and a summary of Capital is always useful in a country where it is difficult even to obtain the book.

When I spoke of the situation in Russia it was of course her financial position which, among other things, I had especially – but not exclusively – in mind. For a government that does not know which way to turn as that of Petersburg and for a tsar who is a prisoner as the hermit of Gatchina [6] is, the situation can only become more and more tense. Both the nobles and peasants are ruined, the chauvinist sentiments of the army offended and it itself scandalised by the daily spectacle of a sovereign in hiding; a war abroad has become a necessity in order to provide an outlet for ‘evil passions’ and the general discontent, and at the same time lack of money and of favourable political prospects make it impossible to start one; a powerful national intelligentsia burning with desire to break the fetters that hold it enchained – and added to all this the direst need of money and the knife of revolutionaries at the throat of the government – it seems to me that with each month the position must become worse and that if a constitutionally-minded and courageous grand duke could be found, Russian ‘society’ ought to see the best way out of this impasse in a palace revolution. Will Bismarck and Bleichröder [7] save their new friends now? I doubt it. I feel more like asking myself which of the two contracting parties will be robbed by the other.

Enclosed herewith is a manuscript (copy) by Marx of which please make such use as you deem best. I do not recall whether it was the Slovo or the Otechestvenniye Zapiski where he found the article ‘Karl Marx Before the Tribunal of Mr Zhukovsky’. He drew up this reply which bears the imprint of something written for publication in Russia, but he never sent it off to Petersburg for fear that his name alone would be sufficient to jeopardise the existence of the journal that would publish his reply. [8]

Yours very sincerely

F Engels

I find your translation of my pamphlet excellent. [9] How beautiful the Russian language is! It has all the good points of the German without its horrible coarseness.

Notes

1. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy – Progress Publishers.

2. On behalf of the Russian revolutionary émigrés in Switzerland Vera Zasulich wrote to Engels on 2 March 1884, asking for permission to translate into Russian and publish Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy: Answer to the Philosophy of Poverty by M Proudhon. She also enquired whether Engels would agree to send her the text of his preface to the first German edition of The Poverty of Philosophy, which was then in preparation, and whether he would be good enough to look through the proofs of the Russian edition and comment on them. The Russian edition of The Poverty of Philosophy was published in Geneva in 1886 – Progress Publishers.

3. See Engels’ Preface to the first German edition of The Poverty of Philosophy – Progress Publishers.

4. Johann Karl Rodbertus (1805-1875) – German vulgar economist and politician, ideologist of bourgeoisified Prussian Junkers, advocated reactionary ideas of Prussian ‘state socialism’ – Progress Publishers.

5. Gabriel Deville (1854-1940) – French socialist, active leader of French Workers Party, publicist, author of a popular exposition of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, and also of several books on philosophy, economy and history – Progress Publishers.

6. Following the assassination of Tsar Alexander II by members of the secret society Narodnaya Volya on 1 March 1881, Alexander III became emperor. Frightened by the revolutionary movement and possible new terrorist acts of Narodnaya Volya, Alexander III retired to Gatchina – Progress Publishers.

7. Gerson von Bleichröder (1822-1893) – German financier, head of a big banking firm in Berlin; Bismarck’s personal banker, his unofficial counsellor and mediator in various speculative machinations – Progress Publishers.

8. The letter to the editorial board of the Otechestvenniye Zapiski written by Marx in 1877 was first published in Vestnik Narodnoi Voli (Herald of People’s Will), Geneva, no 5, 1886 – Progress Publishers.

9. Engels’ work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific was translated by Vera Zasulich into Russian and published in Geneva in 1884 – Progress Publishers

Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

24 March 1884

... The March article was in spite of everything very good and the essential points are properly emphasised. The same applies to the article in the next issue [1] on the sermon to the peasants delivered by the member of the People’s Party; the only sore point there is that the ‘concept’ of democracy is invoked. That concept changes every time the Demos [2] changes and so does not get us one step further. In my opinion what should have been said is the following: The proletariat too needs democratic forms for the seizure of political power but they are for it, like all political forms, mere means. But if today democracy is wanted as an end it is necessary to rely on the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie, that is, on classes that are in process of dissolution and reactionary in relation to the proletariat when they try to maintain themselves artificially. Furthermore it must not be forgotten that it is precisely the democratic republic which is the logical form of bourgeois rule; a form however that has become too dangerous only because of the level of development the proletariat has already reached; but France and America show that it is still possible as purely bourgeois rule. The ‘principle’ of liberalism considered as something ‘definite, historically evolved’, is thus really only an inconsistency. The liberal constitutional monarchy is an adequate form of bourgeois rule: 1) at the beginning, when the bourgeoisie has not yet quite finished with the absolute monarchy, and 2) at the end, when the proletariat has already made the democratic republic too dangerous. And yet the democratic republic always remains the last form of bourgeois rule, that in which it goes to pieces. With this I conclude this rigmarole.

Nim [3] sends her regards. I did not see Tussy yesterday.

Yours

FE

Notes

1. Engels refers to two leading articles of the Sozialdemokrat, the first, which was written by Eduard Bernstein, was published on 13 May 1884, under the title ‘Zum Gedenktage der Märzkämpfe’ ('On the Anniversary of the March Fights’); the second published on 20 March 1884, was entitled ‘Zur Naturgeschichte der Volkspartei’ (‘A Natural History of the People’s Party’) – Progress Publishers.

2. The people – Progress Publishers.

3. Hélène Demuth (1823-1890) – maid at Marx’s house and close friend of the family – Progress Publishers.

Friedrich Engels to Karl Kautsky

In Zurich

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

26 April 1884

Dear Kautsky

I made up my mind, as I told everybody here, to play a trick on Bismarck and write something (Morgan) [1] that he simply could not prohibit. But it won’t work, in spite of all my efforts. I simply cannot word the chapter [2] on monogamy and the concluding chapter on private property as a source of class antagonisms and also as a lever for the disintegration of the ancient community system in a way to get them through under the Anti-Socialist Law. Let the devil take me, I can do no other, as Luther said.

There would be no point in writing it if I merely wanted to give an ‘objective’ report on Morgan without treating him critically, without utilising the new results and presenting them in connection with our views and the conclusions already reached. Our workers would gain nothing by this. Hence: either good but bound to be prohibited; or allowed but lousy. The latter I cannot do.

I shall probably finish it next week (Schorlemmer [3] is here again till Monday). There will be fully four printer’s sheets or more. If you people want to take the chance after reading it of printing it in the Neue Zeit, [4] you must assume responsibility for all the blood that will be shed and don’t blame me afterwards. But if you exercise prudence and will not risk the whole journal because of one article, then have the thing printed as a pamphlet, either in Zurich or like Die Frau. [5] That is for you to decide.

I believe that thing will be of special importance for our general world outlook. Morgan makes it possible for us to look at things from entirely new points of view by supplying us in his prehistory with a factual foundation that was missing hitherto. Whatever doubts you may still have about details in the history of primitive times and ‘savages’, the gens settles the case in the main and explains the history of ancient society. And that is why the thing wants to be worked out seriously, carefully considered, demonstrated in all its interconnections but also treated without paying any heed to the Anti-Socialist Law.

There is still another important point: I must show how Fourier’s [6] genius anticipated Morgan in very many things. It is Morgan’s work which throws into bold relief the whole brilliance of Fourier’s critique of civilisation. And that takes a lot of work...

Notes

1. Lewis Henry Morgan (1818-1881) – prominent American ethnologist, archaeologist and historian of primitive society, spontaneous materialist – Progress Publishers.

2. Engels is referring to his Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State – Progress Publishers.

3. Karl Schorlemmer (1834-1892) – prominent German chemist, adherent of dialectical materialism, professor at Manchester, member of German Social-Democratic Party, friend of Marx and Engels – Progress Publishers.

4. Die Neue Zeit – the theoretical journal of the German Social-Democratic Party, published in Stuttgart from 1883 to 1923. Until October 1917 it was edited by Karl Kautsky, then by Heinrich Cunow – Progress Publishers.

5. Engels is referring to the second illegal edition of Bebel’s book Die Frau und der Sozialismus (Woman and Socialism) which was published by Schabelitz of Zurich and printed in Dietz’s printing works at Stuttgart. The book came out in 1883 under the title Die Frau in der Vergangenheit, Gegenwart und Zukunft (Woman in the Past, Present and Future) < http://www.marxists.org/archive/bebel/1879/woman-socialism/index.htm"> – Progress Publishers.

6. François Fourier (1772-1837) – great French utopian socialist – Progress Publishers.

Friedrich Engels to Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

23 May 1884

... Actually I am rather glad that the Anti-Socialist Law [1] was left in force and not repealed. The liberal philistine would have won a great victory for the conservatives at the elections for he is prepared to go not only through fire and water but even through the deepest muck-pit to keep the Anti-Socialist Law in operation. And then a new and stricter law would have been the result. As it looks now it has been extended most likely for the last time, and if old Wilhelm should kick the bucket from his renal colic it will soon cease to exist in practice. That the German liberals [2] and the Centre [3] thoroughly disgraced themselves when the vote [4] was taken is also worth something, but still more Bismarck’s right to work. Ever since that muddlehead took hold of this there are prospects of our getting rid of wailers like Geiser. [5] Incidentally it takes a Bismarck to do such a stupid thing in face of a labour movement that cannot be held in check even with exceptional laws. In the meantime our people are quite justified in getting him more and more involved in this matter by pressing him for fulfilment. As soon as that fellow has committed himself a little more (which he is sure not to do so soon) the whole flimflam will resolve itself into Prussian police rule. Empty phrases will help him damned little as an election programme

The right to work was first advanced by Fourier, [6] but with him it is realised only in the phalanstery and therefore presupposes the adoption of the latter. The Fourierists – peace-loving philistines of the Démocratie pacifique, as their paper was called, disseminated that phrase precisely because it sounded innocuous. The Paris workers of 1848 – with their utter confusion in theoretical matters allowed this phrase to be palmed off on them because it looked so practical, so non-utopian, so readily realisable. The government put it into practice – in the only way capitalist society could put it into practice – by building nonsensical national workshops. In the same way the right to work was realised here in Lancashire during the cotton crisis of 1861-64 by building municipal workshops. And in Germany it is also put into operation by establishing starvation and flogging colonies for the workers, which are now arousing the enthusiasm of the philistines. Put forward as a separate demand the right to work cannot be realised in any other way. One demands that capitalist society should make that right effective but this society can do that only within the framework of its conditions of existence and if one demands the right to work in this society one demands it subject to these definite conditions; hence one demands national workshops, workhouses and colonies. But if the demand of the right to work is supposed to include indirectly the demand for the transformation of the capitalist mode of production, it is a cowardly regression in comparison with the present state of the movement, a concession to the Anti-Socialist Law, a phrase that can serve no other purpose than to confuse and muddle up the workers with regard to the aims they have to pursue and the sole conditions under which they can achieve their aims...

Notes

1. The Anti-Socialist Law (exceptional Law against the Socialists) was introduced by Bismarck and approved by the majority in the Reichstag on 21 October 1878 – Progress Publishers.

2. The Liberal Party (Freisinnige Partei) came into being in March 1884 as a result of the fusion of the Progressive Party (Fortschrittspartei) and the left wing of the National-Liberal Party. It represented the interests of the middle and lower middle class and opposed the policy of the Bismarck government – Progress Publishers.

3. The Centre – the party of the Roman Catholics in Germany, formed in 1870-71 by the amalgamation of the Catholic parties in the Parliament; the name is derived from the fact that the seats of the deputies were situated in the centre of the chamber. As a rule the party followed a middle course in the Reichstag manoeuvring between the parties supporting the government and the left-wing opposition. Under the banner of Catholicism the party united diverse social strata – Roman Catholic priests, landowners, bourgeois and a section of the peasants – chiefly in the western and south-western states of Germany, where it fanned separatist and anti-Prussian sentiments – Progress Publishers.

4. Engels is alluding to the fact that on 10 May 1884, a large group of Liberal deputies and approximately half the Centre Party in the Reichstag voted for the renewal of the Anti-Socialist Law despite their usual opposition to Bismarck’s government, thus showing their fear of the growing working-class and Social-Democratic movement – Progress Publishers.

5. Bruno Geiser (1846-1898) – German Social-Democrat, editor of journal Die Neue Welt, a leader of the party’s opportunist wing – Progress Publishers.

6. François Fourier (1772-1837) – great French utopian socialist – Progress Publishers.

Friedrich Engels to August Bebel

In Leipzig

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

6 June 1884

... We shall never be able to pry the masses loose from the liberal parties so long as the latter are not given an opportunity of discrediting themselves in practice, of getting at the helm of state and showing that they cannot do a thing. We are still, as we were in 1848, the opposition of the future and it is therefore necessary that the most extreme of the present parties shall be at the helm before we can become a present opposition in relation to it. Political stagnation, that is, aimless and purposeless struggle among the official parties, as now, cannot be of service to us in the long run. But a progressive struggle of these parties with a gradual shifting of the centre of gravity to the left can be so. That is what is now happening in France where the political struggle is being waged as always in classical form. The governments succeeding each other are moving more and more to the left and a Clemenceau [1] Cabinet is already in sight. It will not be the most extreme bourgeois one. At each shift leftward concessions come the way of the workers (cf the last strike in Denain where for the first time the military did not intervene) and, what is more important, the field is being swept clean with increasing energy for the decisive battle and the position of the parties is becoming clearer and more distinct. I consider this slow but incessant development of the French Republic to its necessary outcome – antithesis between radical, sham-socialist bourgeois and really revolutionary workers – one of the most important events and hope it will not be interrupted; and I am glad that our people are not yet strong enough in Paris (but all the stronger in the provinces) to be misled into making putsches with the aid of revolutionary phrases.

In confused Germany developments are naturally not following the classically pure lines exhibited in France. We are much too backward for that and experience everything only after it has become obsolete elsewhere. But although our official parties are so rotten political life of any sort is much more favourable to us than the present political lifelessness with nothing afoot except intrigues in the field of foreign politics...

Notes

1. Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) – French politician and publicist, leader of Radical Party from 1880s, Chairman of Council of Ministers 1906-09 and 1917-20, pursued imperialist policy – Progress Publishers.

Engels To Karl Kautsky

In Zurich

London, 26 June 1884

Source: MECW Volume 47. p. 155.

Dear Kautsky,

The anti-Rodbertus ms. goes back tomorrow by registered mall. 1 found little that called for comment and have made a few pencilled notes. Apart from these 1 would add the following:

1) Roman Law is the consummation of the law of simple, i.e. of precapitalist, commodity production, though the latter also embodies much of the legal system of the capitalist period. Exactly, that is, what our burghers needed at the time of their rise and, in accordance with local common law, did not get.

On p. 10 there are several things 1 object to: 1. Surplus value is the exception only in the case of production by slaves and serfs. It ought to read surplus product, most of which is directly consumed but not valorised.

2) As regards the means of production, the matter is not quite as you say. In all societies based on a division of labour that has evolved naturally, the product, and hence also to some extent the means of production, dominates the producer-on occasion at any rate-as did, in the Middle Ages, the soil the peasant who was simply an appurtenance of the land and the tool the guild handicraftsman. Division of labour is the direct domination of the instruments of labour over the worker, although not in the capitalist sense.

Much the same applies to the concluding bit on the means of production.

1) You should not separate agriculture any more than technology from political economy, as you do on pp. 21 and 22. Rotation of crops, artificial fertilisers, the steam engine, the power loom, cannot be separated from capitalist production any, more than the tools of the savage and the barbarian from his production. The tools of the savage condition his society just as much as do more modern ones capitalist society. What your view boils down to is that, while production does indeed determine the social institution today, it did not do so before capitalist production existed, because tools had not as yet been guilty, of original sin.

The moment you say means of production, you say society and a society determined by, amongst other things, those means of production. Means of production as such, extraneous to society and without influence over it, exist no more than does capital as such.

But how the means of production, which, at earlier periods, including that of simple commodity production, exercised only a very mild domination compared with now, came to exercise their present despotic domination, is something that calls for proof and yours strikes me as inadequate, since it fails to mention one pole, namely the creation of a class which no longer had any means of production of its own, or, therefore, any means of subsistence, and hence was compelled to sell itself piecemeal.

In the case of Rodbertus’ positive proposals, emphasis ought to be laid on his Proudhonism- after all he proclaimed himself Proudhon 1, the forerunner of the French Proudhon. Constituted value, invented by, Rodbertus as early, as 1842, is to be established. His proposals here are lamentably retrograde by comparison with Bray and with Proudhon’s exchange bank. The worker is to get only 1/4 of the product, but that is assured! We can discuss this later.

Repose (physical) is suiting me splendidly; I get better every day and this time the cure will be complete. The dictation of the 2nd book of Capital is going ahead splendidly. We’ have already reached Part II – but there are big gaps. The editing is only provisional, of course, but that too will get done. I can see my way ahead, cela suffit.

Ede’s letter received with thanks. You will have to be patient with my letter-writing; I mustn’t get run down again and a frightful amount of work and correspondence is piling up.

My regards to you both,

Your

F. E.

Wage Labour and Capital will go off as soon as the comparison is done, perhaps tomorrow.

Engels to Eugenie Papritz[1]

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

June 26, 1884

Dear Madam

The lithographed journal [2] you write to me about is already known to me by reputation although I have never had a chance of seeing a copy of it.

Are you not being somewhat unjust to your fellow-countrymen? The two of us, Marx and I, had no grounds for complaint against them. If certain schools were more notable for their revolutionary ardour than for their scientific study, if there was and still is a certain groping here and there, on the other hand a critical spirit has evinced itself there and a devotion to research even in pure theory worthy of the nation that produced a Dobrolyubov and a Chernyshevsky. I am not speaking only of active revolutionary Socialists but also of the historical and critical school in Russian literature, which is greatly surpassing anything produced in this line in Germany or France by official historical science.

...

And even among active revolutionaries our ideas and the science of political economy recast by Marx have always met with sympathetic understanding. You no doubt know that quite recently several of our works were translated into and published in Russian and that others are going to follow, particularly Marx’s Misère de la philosophie [3]. His smaller work, Lohnarbeit und Kapital [4], published before 1848, also belongs to that series and has been published under that title.

I feel extremely flattered by your belief that it would be useful to translate my Outlines etc. [5] Although I am still a bit proud of this my first work in social science I know only too well that it is now completely out of date and full not only of mistakes but of actual blunders. I am afraid it will cause more misunderstanding than do good.

I am sending you by mail a copy of Dühring’s Umwälzung etc.

As for our old newspaper articles, it would be difficult to find them after so long a time. The majority of them are not topical today. When the publication of the manuscripts left by Marx leaves me sufficient leisure I intend to publish them in the form of a collection with explanatory notes, etc. But that is a matter of the distant future.

I am not quite sure what Address to the English workers you speak of. Could it be The Civil War in France, [6] the Address of the International on the Paris Commune? I could send you that.

If my health allowed I would ask you for permission to visit you. Though I feel tolerably well when at home I am unfortunately forbidden to walk about in the city. If you should do me the honour of paying me a visit you will always find me at your disposal about seven or eight o'clock in the evening.

Yours respectfully

F Engels

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor and the MIA.

1. Yevgenia Eduardovna Papritz (1853-1919) — Russian singer, carried on research in Russian folk music, was connected with illegal Moscow Translators and Publishers Society (1882-84), which published Marx and Engels’ works in Russian.

2. The reference is to Sotsialisticheskoye Znaniye published in 1884 by the clandestine Society of Translators and Publishers in Moscow. The first issue contained Engels’ Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, and several chapters of his Condition of the Working Class in England.

3. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy [MIA].

4. Karl Marx, Wage Labour and Capital [MIA].

5. Friedrich Engels, Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy [MIA].

6. Karl Marx, The Civil War in France [MIA].

Engels to Karl Kautsky

In Zurich

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 19 July, 1884

That the Neue Zeit is to come to an end is no misfortune for the Party. It is becoming more and more apparent that the great majority of the literary Party people in Germany belong to the opportunists and cautious goers who, however disagreeable the Socialist Law may be to them from a pecuniary point of view, feel themselves quite in the right atmosphere under it from the literary point of view; they can express themselves quite openly--we are prevented from giving them one in the eye. Hence the mere task of filling a journal of this kind every month demands very great tolerance, which results in its being gradually overrun with philanthropy, humanitarianism, sentimentality and whatever all the anti-revolutionary vices of the Freiwalds, Quarcks, Schippels, Rosuses [note: collaborators in Neue Zeit], etc. are called. People who do not want to learn anything fundamentally and only make literature about literature and incidentally out of literature (nine-tenths of present-day German writing is writing about other writing), naturally achieve more printed pages per annum than those who grind at something and only want to write about other books when: (1) they have mastered these other books and (2) there is something in them worth the trouble. The preponderance of these former gentlemen which has been produced by the Socialist Law in the literature printed in Germany is inevitable while the Law lasts. Against it we have in the literature published abroad a weapon which strikes in a totally different manner.

Engels to Karl Kautsky

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976, Transcribed by Andy Blunden;

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

September 20, 1884

Marx’s Robinson is the genuine, original Robinson of Daniel Defoe, from which secondary features are also taken — the debris rescued from the shipwreck, etc. Later, he also had his own Friday, and was a shipwrecked merchant, who, if I am not mistaken, traded in slaves at one time. In a word, a true “bourgeois.”

...

Herewith I am returning the manuscripts [1] registered.

As far as economics is concerned your article on Rodbertus [2] is very good. What I object to again is apodictic assertions in fields where you do not feel yourself sure and where you have exposed your weak spots to Schramm who has been skilled enough to nail them.

This refers particularly to the ‘abstraction’ which you have certainly run down much too much in general. In this case the difference is as follows:

Marx summarises the actual content common to things and relations and reduces it to its general logical expression. His abstraction therefore only reflects, in rational form, the content already existing in the things.

Rodbertus on the contrary invents a more or less imperfect logical expression and measures things by this conception to which the things must conform. He is seeking a true, eternal content of things and of social relations whose content however is essentially transient. Hence true capital. This is not present-day capital, which is only an imperfect manifestation of the concept. Instead of deducing the concept capital from the present, the only really existing capital, he has recourse to isolated man in order to arrive from present-day capital at true capital and asks what could function as capital in the productive process of such a man. Of course, simple means of production. Thus true capital is lumped together unceremoniously with the means of production, which depending on circumstances may or may not be capital. Thereby all bad properties, that is, all real properties of capital are eliminated from capital. Now he can demand that real capital should conform to this concept, that is, it should function only as simple social means of production, should discard everything that makes it capital and still remain capital and even just on that account become true capital...

Notes

1. Karl August Schramm, the German economist, had sent an article entitled ‘Karl Kautsky und Rodbertus’ to the Neue Zeit, which was edited by Kautsky. In this article Schramm strongly attacked Kautsky’s article ‘Das “Kapital” von Rodbertus’ published in an earlier issue of the Neue Zeit. After writing a reply to Schramm’s criticism Kautsky sent it together with Schramm’s article to Engels and asked for his comments on both. ‘Karl Kautsky und Rodbertus’ and Kautsky’s reply were printed in Die Neue Zeit, no 11, 1884. Karl August Schramm (1830-1905) – German Social-Democrat, reformist, criticised Marxism, in 1880s retired from the party – Progress Publishers.

2. Johann Karl Rodbertus (1805-1875) – German vulgar economist and politician, ideologist of bourgeoisified Prussian Junkers, advocated reactionary ideas of Prussian ‘state socialism’ – Progress Publishers.

Marx-Engels Correspondence 1884

Engels To Johann Philipp Becker

In Geneva

London, 15 October 1884

First published: abridged in Prosveshcheniye, 7-8, St Petersburg, 1913 and in full in Der Kampf, Nr. 12, Wien, 1913;

Source: MECW, volume 47, p. 203-205.

Dear Old Man,

I sent off to you yesterday my little book on the origin of the family, etc., and have today taken out a money order for five pounds. I trust you will get both very shortly.

I was glad to hear from you that Bebel had visited you during the summer. Your opinion of him is exactly the same as mine. There is no more lucid mind in the whole of the German party, besides which he is utterly dependable and firm of purpose. What is unusual is that his great oratorical talents -all the philistines recognise these and do so readily, while Bismarck told Behrens, a partner in his paper mill, that Bebel was the only orator in the whole of the Reichstag -have not trivialised him in any way. Nothing of the kind has happened since Demosthenes. All other orators have been shallow-pated.

Don’t worry about my health; it is a localised and sometimes troublesome complaint but there are no general after-effects whatever and it is not even necessarily incurable; at worst it renders me unfit for active service though I may be able to mount a horse again in a few years’ time. Having been incapable of writing for the past 4 months I have dictated instead, and am now pretty well done with the 2nd book of Capital; have also gone through the English translation (as far as it has got – about 3/8ths of the whole) of the 1st book. Moreover I have now discovered a device which is helping me to get more or less back on my feet again and I hope to make still further progress before long. Rather, my misfortune is that since we lost Marx I have been supposed to represent him. I have spent a lifetime doing what I was fitted for, namely playing second fiddle, and indeed I believe I acquitted myself reasonably well. And I was happy to have so splendid a first fiddle as Marx. But now that I am suddenly expected to take Marx’s place in matters of theory and play first fiddle, there will inevitably be blunders and no one is more aware of that than I. And not until the times get somewhat more turbulent shall we really be aware of what we have lost in Marx. Not one of us possesses the breadth of vision that enabled him, at the very moment when rapid action was called for, invariably to hit upon the right solution and at once get to the heart of the matter. In more peaceful times it could happen that events proved me right and him wrong, but at a revolutionary juncture his judgment was virtually infallible.

Marx’s youngest daughter has married a really excellent Irishman, Dr Aveling; they come here every Sunday. The other daughter,’ whom you know, is also with me just now and sends you her kindest regards. She still talks a lot and fondly about the day she spent with you in Geneva.

I trust your health is still progressing satisfactorily. But if anything should happen to you again, you must let me know at once, on the last occasion a great deal of time elapsed before I knew the least thing about it and you must not err in that way again.

I shall hunt out your letters, etc., as soon as I can really get at the papers. Since May I have been physically incapable of doing so and just now there is so much urgent Work to be attended to that I can’t even consider it. There are over 6 large boxfuls to be sorted out and not even the books are arranged in such a way as to enable me to make full use of them.

Well, take care of your health (there’s no need to tell you to keep your chin up) and be assured of the good wishes

Of your old friend

F. Engels

Borkheim sends his regards. He wrote to me a week ago-it’s always the same old story with him. No change.

Engels to August Bebel

In Plauen near Dresden

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 18 November, 1884

The whole of the Liberal philistines have gained such a respect for us that they are screaming with one accord: Yes, if the Social-Democrats will put themselves on a legal basis and abjure revolution then we are in favour of the immediate repeal of the Socialist Law, There is no doubt, therefore, that this suggestion will at once be made to you in the Reichstag. The answer you give to it is important--not so much for Germany, where our gallant lads have given it in the elections, as for abroad. A tame answer would at once destroy the colossal impression produced by the elections.

In my opinion the case is like this :

Throughout the whole of Europe the existing political situation is the product of revolutions. The legal basis, historic right, legitimacy, have been everywhere riddled through and through a thousand times or entirely overthrown. But it is in the nature of all parties or classes which have come to power through revolution, to demand that the new basis of right created by the revolution should also be unconditionally recognised and regarded as holy. The right to revolution did exist--otherwise the present rulers would not be rightful--but from now onwards it is to exist no more.

In Germany the existing situation rests on the revolution which began in 1848 and ended in 1866. 1866 was a complete revolution. Just as Prussia only became anything by treachery and war against the German Empire, in alliance with foreign powers (1740, 1756, 1785), so it only achieved the German-Prussian Empire by the forcible overthrow of the German Confederation and by civil war. Its assertion that the others broke the Confederation makes no difference. The others say the opposite. There has never been a revolution yet which lacked a legal pretext--as in France in 1830 when both the king and the bourgeoisie asserted they were in the right. Enough, Prussia provoked the civil war and with it the revolution. After its victory it overthrew three thrones "by God's grace" and annexed their territories, together with those of the former free city of Frankfort. If that was not revolutionary I do not know the meaning of the word. And as this was not enough it confiscated the private property of the princes who had been driven out. That this was unlawful, revolutionary therefore, it admitted by getting the action endorsed later by an assembly--the Reichstag--which had as little right to dispose of these funds as the government.

The German-Prussian Empire, as the completion of the North German Confederation which 1866 forcibly created, is a thoroughly revolutionary creation. I make no complaint about that. What I reproach the people who made it with is that they were only poor-spirited revolutionaries who did not go much further and at once annex the whole of Germany to Prussia. But those who operate with blood and iron, swallow up whole states, overthrow thrones and confiscate private property, should not condemn other people as revolutionaries. If the Party only retains the right to be no more and no less revolutionary than the Imperial Government has been, it has got all it needs.

Recently it was officially stated that the Imperial Constitution was not a contract between the princes and the people but only one between the princes and free cities, which could at any time replace the constitution by another. The government organs which laid this down demanded, therefore, that the governments should have the right to overthrow the Imperial Constitution. No Exceptional Law was enacted against them, they were not persecuted. Very well, in the most extreme case we do not demand more for ourselves than is here demanded for the governments.

The Duke of Cumberland is the legitimate and unquestioned heir to the throne of Brunswick. The right claimed by Cumberland in Brunswick is no other than that by which the King of Prussia is seated in Berlin. Whatever else may be required of Cumberland can only be claimed after he has taken possession of his lawful and legitimate throne.

But the revolutionary German Imperial Government prevents him from doing so by force. A fresh revolutionary action. What is the position of the parties?

In November 1848 the Conservative Party broke through the new legal basis created in March 1848 without a tremor. In any case it only recognises the constitutional position as a provisional one and would hail any feudal-absolutist coup d'etat with delight.

The Liberal Parties of all shades co-operated in the revolution of 1848-1866, nor would they deny themselves the right to-day to counter any forcible overthrow of the constitution by force.

The Centre recognises the church as the highest power, above the state, a power which might in a given case, therefore, make revolution a duty.

And these are the parties which demand from us that we, we alone of them all, should declare that in no circumstances will we resort to force and that we will submit to every oppression, to every act of violence, not only as soon as it is merely formally legal--legal according to the judgment of our adversaries--but also when it is directly illegal.

Indeed no party has renounced the right to armed resistance, in certain circumstances, without lying. None has ever been able to relinquish this ultimate right.

But once it comes to the question of discussing the circumstances for which a party reserves to itself this right, then the game is won. Then one can talk nineteen to the dozen. And especially a party which has been declared to have no rights, a party therefore which has had revolution directly indicated to it from above. Such a declaration of outlawry can be daily repeated in the fashion it has once occurred. To require an unconditional declaration of this kind from such a party is sheer absurdity.

For the rest, the gentlemen can keep calm. With military conditions as they are at present we shall not start our attack so long as there is still an armed force against us. We can wait until the armed force itself ceases to be a force against us. Any earlier revolution, even if victorious, would not bring us to power, but the most radical of the bourgeoisie, and of the petty bourgeoisie.

Meanwhile the elections have shown that we have nothing to expect from yielding, i.e., from concessions to our adversaries. We have only won respect and become a power by defiant resistance. Only power is respected, and only so long as we are a power shall we be respected by the philistine. Anyone who makes him concessions can no longer be a power and is despised by him. The iron hand can make itself felt in a velvet glove but it must make itself felt. The German proletariat has become a mighty party; may its representatives be worthy of it.

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

November 23, 1884

Friday last the Social Democratic Federation had a benefit. Tussy and Edward played in a piece — I did not go, as I do not as yet see my way to sitting three hours consecutively in a stiff chair. Nim says they played very well — the piece was more or less, she says, their own history. Mother Wright read — very well — Bax played the piano — rather long — Morris who was here the other night and quite delighted to find the Old Norse Edda on my table — he is an Icelandic enthusiast — Morris read a piece of his poetry (a “refonte” of the eddaic Helreid Brynhildar (the description of Brynhild burning herself with Sigurd’s corpse), etc., etc., it went off very well — their art seems to be rather better than their literature and their poetry better than their prose.

Engels to August Bebel

In Berlin

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 11-12 December, 1884

About our proletarian masses I have never been deceived. This secure progress of their movement, confident of victory and for that very reason cheerful and humorous, is a model which cannot be surpassed. No European proletariat would have stood the test of the Socialist Law so brilliantly and have responded after six years of suppression with such a proof of increased strength and consolidated organisation; no nation would have achieved this organisation in the way it has been achieved without any conspiratorial humbug. And since I have seen the election manifestoes of Darmstadt and Hanover my fear that concessions might have become necessary in the new places (constituencies) has also vanished. If it was possible to speak in such a truly revolutionary and proletarian way in these two towns, then everything is won.

Our great advantage is that with us the industrial revolution is only just in full swing, while in France and England, so far as the main point is concerned, it is closed. There the division into town and country, industrial district and agricultural district is so far concluded that it only changes slowly. The great mass of the people grow up in the conditions in which they have later to live, are accustomed to them; even the fluctuations and crises have become something they take practically for granted. Added to this is the remembrance of the unsuccessful attempts of former movements. With us, on the other hand, everything is in full flow. Remnants of the old peasant industrial production for the satisfaction of personal needs are being supplanted by capitalistic domestic industry, while in other places capitalistic domestic industry is already succumbing in its turn to machinery. And the very nature of our industry, limping behind at the very end, makes the social upheaval all the more fundamental. As the great mass production articles, both mass commodities and articles of luxury, have already been appropriated by the French and English, all that remains for our export industry is chiefly small stuff, which, however, also runs into masses all the same, and is at first produced by domestic industry and only later, when the production is on a mass scale, by machines. Domestic industry (capitalistic) is introduced by this means into much wider regions and clears its way all the more thoroughly. If I except the East Elbe district of Prussia, that is to say East Prussia, Pomerania, Posen and the greater part of Brandenburg, and further Old Bavaria, there are few districts where the peasant has not been swept more and more into domestic industry. The region industrially revolutionised, therefore, becomes larger with us than anywhere else.

Furthermore. Since for the most part the worker in domestic industry carries on his little bit of agriculture, it becomes possible to depress wages in a fashion unequalled elsewhere. What formerly constituted the happiness of the small man, the combination of agriculture and industry, now becomes the most powerful means of capitalist exploitation. The potato patch, the cow, the little bit of agriculture make it possible for the labour power to be sold below its price; they oblige this to be so by tying the worker to his piece of land, which yet only partially supports him. Hence it becomes possible to put our industry on an export basis owing to the fact that the buyer is generally presented with the whole of the surplus value, while the capitalist's profit consists in a deduction from the normal wage. This is more or less the case with all rural domestic industry, but nowhere so much as with us.

Added to this is the fact that our industrial revolution, which was set in motion by the revolution of 1848 with its bourgeois progress (feeble though this was), was enormously speeded up (1) by getting rid of internal hindrances in 1866 to 1870, and (2) by the French milliards, which were ultimately to be invested capitalistically. So we achieved an industrial revolution which is more deep and thorough and spatially more extended and comprehensive than that of the other countries, and this with a perfectly fresh and intact proletariat, undemoralised by defeats and finally--thanks to Marx--with an insight into the causes of economic and political development and into the conditions of the impending revolution such as none of our predecessors possessed. But for that very reason it is our duty to be victorious.

As to pure democracy and its role in the future I do not share your opinion. Obviously it plays a far more subordinate part in Germany than in countries with an older industrial development. But that does not prevent the possibility, when the moment of revolution comes, of its acquiring a temporary importance as the most radical bourgeois party (it has already played itself off as such in Frankfort) and as the final sheet-anchor of the whole bourgeois and even feudal regime. At such a moment the whole reactionary mass falls in behind it and strengthens it; everything which used to be reactionary behaves as democratic. Thus between March and September 1848 the whole feudal-bureaucratic mass strengthened the liberals in order to hold down the revolutionary masses, and, once this was accomplished, in order, naturally, to kick out the liberals as well. Thus from May 1848 until Bonaparte's election in France in December, the purely republican party of the National, the weakest of all the parties, was in power, simply owing to the whole collective reaction organised behind it. This has happened in every revolution: the tamest party still remaining in any way capable of government comes to power with the others just because it is only in this party that the defeated see their last possibility of salvation. Now it cannot be expected that at the moment of crisis we shall already have the majority of the electorate and therefore of the nation behind us. The whole bourgeois class and the remnants of the feudal landowning class, a large section of the petty bourgeoisie and also of the rural population will then mass themselves around the most radical bourgeois party, which will then make the most extreme revolutionary gestures, and I consider it very possible that it will be represented in the provisional government and even temporarily form its majority. How, as a minority, one should not act in that case, was demonstrated by the social-democratic minority in the Paris revolution of February 1848. However, this is still an academic question at the moment.

Now of course the thing may take a different turn in Germany, and that for military reasons. As things are at present, an impulse from outside can scarcely come from anywhere but Russia. If it does not do so, if the impulse arises from Germany, then the revolution can only start from the army. From the military point of view an unarmed nation against an army of to-day is a purely vanishing quantity. In this case--if our twenty to twenty-five-year-old reserves which have no vote but are trained, came into action--pure democracy might be leapt over. But this question is still equally academic at present, although I, as a representative, so to speak, of the great general staff of the Party, am bound to take it into consideration. In any case our sole adversary on the day of the crisis and on the day after the crisis will be the whole collective reaction which will group itself around pure democracy, and this, I think, should not be lost sight of.

If you are bringing forward motions in the Reichstag, there is one which should not be forgotten. The state lands are mostly let out to big farmers; the smallest portion of them is sold to peasants, whose holdings are, however, so small that the new peasants have to resort to working as day labourers on the big farms. The demand should be made that the great demesnes which are not yet broken up should be let out to co-operative societies of agricultural labourers for joint farming. The Imperial Government has no state lands and will therefore no doubt find a pretext for shelving such a proposition put in the form of a motion. But I think this firebrand must be thrown among the agricultural day labourers. Which can indeed be done in one of the many debates on state socialism. This and this alone is the way to get hold of the agricultural workers this is the best method of drawing their attention to the fact that later on it is to he their task to cultivate the great estates of our present gracious gentlemen for the common account. And this will give friend Bismarck, who demands positive proposals from you, enough for some time.

Engels To Eduard Bernstein

In Zurich

Source: MECW Volume 47;

First published: in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Book I, Moscow, 1924.

London, 29 December 1884

Dear Ede,

From Kautsky I learn that you have lost not only your sister but also your father. Let me assure you of my warmest sympathy. It is one of the more sombre aspects of exile which I, too, have come to know. The fatherland as such is something one can easily dispense with, but —

Now for events over here. On Saturday the Social Democratic Federation happily disintegrated. The bubble burst somewhat sooner than I had expected, but it was bound to come.

Hyndman, a political adventurer with aspirations to a carrière in Parliament, had long since gained control of the whole business. When, a year ago, Bax launched To-Day, there was not enough literary talent to keep the little affair going, let alone a weekly, but a weekly Hyndman must needs have. Hence Justice was founded with money given by two enthusiasts, Morris and Carpenter, it was edited by Hyndman with the aid of a few young literati who were on the look-out for some new movement capable of paying them (Fitzgerald and Champion) and one Joynes, a teacher dismissed from Eton for agitation conducted in company with Henry George, and hence a socialist, willy-nilly. These men were paid, directly or indirectly — Hyndman is rich but tight-fisted — , the rest had to contribute gratis. All the Federation’s papers went to Hyndman, Fitzgerald and Champion, who placed before the Council only what they thought fit, and corresponded off their own bat in the Federation’s name; in short, Hyndman treated the Council as Bismarck treats the Reichstag. Loud complaints; they even reached me. I said: ‘Give the man his head. He’s a petty-minded chap and won’t last long, for he cannot wait.’ And he has come a cropper sooner than I thought he would.

Morris, who was in Scotland a fortnight ago, uncovered there such intrigues on Hyndman’s part that he said he could no longer continue to work with the fellow. He had long had his suspicions. An interview with Andreas Scheu in Edinburgh brought matters to a head. Hyndman had defamed Scheu by calling him an anarchist and dynamiter — Scheu was able to provide Morris not only with proof to the contrary, but also of the fact that Hyndman knew this. Similar machinations of Hyndman’s in Glasgow, where the branch had received letters from the secretary, Fitzgerald, bearing the Federation’s stamp but which had not only not been written at the behest of the Council, but actually in defiance of its resolutions. Furthermore, Hyndman had told several people that a somewhat mysterious letter to the Council in Paris was a forgery concocted by Mme Lafargue and Tussy with a view to laying a trap for him. However, he had withheld the actual letter from the Council. Finally, in addition to having repeatedly stirred up strife between members of the Council, he was shown to have fabricated a provincial branch which did not exist at all.

In short, last Tuesday things came to a head. Hyndman was attacked from every side, Scheu himself was there, documents in hand. Tussy had a letter from her sister about the alleged forgery. There was a row. Meeting adjourned till Saturday. Morris and Aveling came to see me beforehand, when I was able to give them some further advice. Big debate on the Saturday. None of the facts could be denied, either by Hyndman or by the supporters he had drummed up. Motion of censure on Hyndman adopted. Whereupon the majority resigned from the Federation. The grounds for this were, 1) that at a congress, Hyndman might fabricate a majority with the aid of his bogus branch, while they would be unable to prove the non-existence of that branch, or at any rate not until it was too late, 2) — and this was the main reason — because the entire Federation was, after all, no better than a racket.

Those who resigned were Aveling, Bax and Morris, the only honest ones amongst the literati, but also three as unpractical men — two poets and a philosopher — as it is possible to find. Also, the cream of the better-known working men. They intend to do the rounds of the London branches in the hope of winning over the majority, whereupon they will let Hyndman and his non-existent provincial branches go whistle. Their organ is to be a little monthly . At last they are going to operate modestly and in accordance with their powers, and not go on pretending that the English proletariat must instantly jump to it the moment the trumpet is sounded by a few literary converts to socialism. (In London, according to Morris’ admission, they were 400 strong at the outside and barely 100 in the provinces.) The circulation of Justice is about 3,500.

Hyndman is retaining Justice and To-Day, together with his speculative literati Fitzgerald, Champion, Burrows, Shaw and possibly also Sketchley who, as a former Chartist, presumably considers himself entitled to a pension. Add to that what remains of the old democratic or socialist sects. Whose prize the other remnants of the Federation will be, remains to be seen. But since Hyndman will no longer be getting any money either from Morris or from Carpenter for his unprofitable organs, he will either have to pay up himself, or sell himself, his organs and the remnants of his faction to the Christian Socialists or — to Lord Randolph Churchill and Tory Democracy. He'll have to look sharp if he wants to stand for Parliament in the elections next autumn.

I have the satisfaction of having seen through the whole racket from the outset, correctly sized up all the people concerned and foretold what the end would be, and similarly that the said racket would eventually do more harm than good.

Your

F. E.

1885

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 1 January

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 1 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 13 January

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 13 January

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 17 January

Engels to August Bebel. 19 January

Engels to Paul Lafargue. c. 25 January

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. 4 February

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 4 February

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. 10 February

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 11 February

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 12 February

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 14 February

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 22 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 8 March

Engels to Richard Stegemann. 26 March

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 2 April

Engels to August Bebel. 4 April

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 11 April

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 16 April

162 Engels to Laura Lafargue. 16-17 April

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. After 16 April

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 23 April

Engels to Vera Zasulich. 23 April

Engels to Richard Stegemann. 5 May

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 15 May

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 15 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 19 May

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 19 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 29 May

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 3 June

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 3 June

Engels to John Lincoln Mahon. 12 June

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 13 June

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 15 June

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 16 June

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 16 June

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 16 June

Engels to August Bebel. 24 June

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 1 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 4 July

Engels to Gertrud Guillaume-Schack. c. 5 July

Engels to John Lincoln Mahon. c. 11 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 23 July.

Engels to August Bebel. 24 July

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 24 July

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 8 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 8 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 16 August

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 25 August

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 26 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 6 September

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 9 September

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 10 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 22 September

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 23 September

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 8 October

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 9 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 13 October

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 14 October

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 20 October

Engels to Salo Faerber. 22 October

Engels to August Bebel. 28 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 7 November

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 11 November

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 13 November

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 14 November

Engels to August Bebel. November

Engels to Minna Kautsky. 26 November

Engels to Paul Lavigne. 1 December

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 1 December

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 2 December

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 5 December

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 5 December

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 7 December

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 7 December

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 7 December

Engels to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. 19 December

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 21 December

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 21 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 22 December

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 28 December

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 28 December

Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

122, Regents’ Park Road, N.W.

London, February 10, 1885.

Dear Madam: I herewith return Mr. Putnam’s letter — of course it would be a splendid success if we could secure publication by that firm — but I am afraid Mr. Putnam will stick to his objections, the great strength of which, from a publisher’s standpoint, I fully recognize. Perhaps the fact that a new German edition of my work is in actual preparation may shake him a little. My friends in Germany say that the book is important to them just now because it describes a state of things which is almost exactly reproduced at the present moment in Germany; and as the development of manufacturing industry, steam and machinery, and their social outcrop in the creation of a proletariat, in America corresponds at the present moment as nearly as possible to the English status of 1844 (though your go-ahead people are sure to outstrip the old world in the next 15-20 years altogether), the comparison of industrial England of 1841 with industrial America of 1885 might have its interest too.

Of course in the new preface to the English translation I shall refer as fully as space will permit to the change in the condition of the British working class which has taken place in the interval; to the improved position of a more or less privileged minority, to the certainly not alleviated misery of the great body, and especially to the impending change for the worse which must necessarily follow the breakdown of the industrial monopoly of England in consequence of the increasing competition, in the markets of the world, of Continental Europe and especially of America.

Very sincerely yours,

F. Engels

Engels to Vera Zasulich

In Geneva

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 23 April, 1885

Dear Citizen

I still owe you a reply to your letter of 14 February. The delay, certainly not to be ascribed to laziness on my part, was due to the following circumstances.

You asked for my judgment of Plekhanov's book, Nashi Raznoglassiya [Our Differences]. To deliver this I should have to read the book, and I can read Russian fairly easily when I have occupied myself with it for a week. But there are full half-years in which this is impossible for me; then I lose practice and am obliged to learn it over again, so to speak. This has been the case with me over Our Differences. Marx's manuscripts, which I am dictating to a secretary, keep me busy the whole day; in the evening come visitors whom one cannot after all turn out; there are proofs to be read and much correspondence to be dealt with, and finally there are the translations of my Origin, etc. (Italian, Danish, etc.) which I am asked to revise and the revision of which is at times neither superfluous nor easy. Well, all these interruptions have prevented me from getting further than to page 60 of Our Differences. If I had three days to myself the thing would be finished with and I should have refreshed my knowledge of Russian as well.

Meanwhile the piece of the book which I have read is enough, I think, to acquaint me more or less with the differences in question.

First of all I repeat to you that I am proud to know that there is a party among the youth of Russia which frankly and without ambiguity accepts the great economic and historic theories of Marx and which has decisively broken with all the anarchist and slightly Slavophil traditions of its predecessors. And Marx himself would have been equally proud of this had he lived a little longer. It is an advance which will be of great importance for the revolutionary development of Russia. To me the historic theory of Marx is the fundamental condition of all reasoned and consistent revolutionary tactics; to discover these tactics one has only to apply the theory to the economic and political conditions of the country in question.

But to do this one must know these conditions; and so far as I am concerned I know too little about the actual situation in Russia to presume myself competent to judge the details of the tactics demanded by this situation at a given moment. Moreover, the internal and intimate history of the Russian revolutionary party, especially that of the last years, is almost entirely unknown to me. My friends among the Narodovoltsy have never spoken to me about it. And this is an indispensable element towards forming one's opinion.

What I know or believe about the situation in Russia impels me to the opinion that the Russians are approaching their 1789. The revolution must break out there in a given time; it may break out there any day. In these circumstances the country is like a charged mine which only needs a fuse to be laid to it. Especially since March 13. This is one of the exceptional cases where it is possible for a handful of people to make a revolution, i.e., with one small push to cause a whole system, which (to use a metaphor of Plekhanov's) is in more than labile equilibrium, to come crashing down, and thus by one action, in itself insignificant, to release uncontrollable explosive forces. Well now, if ever Blanquism—the phantasy of overturning an entire society through the action of a small conspiracy—had a certain justification for its existence, that is certainly in Petersburg. Once the spark has been put to the powder, once the forces have been released and national energy has been transformed from potential into kinetic energy (another favourite image of Plekhanov's and a very good one)—the people who laid the spark to the mine will be swept away by the explosion, which will be a thousand times as strong as themselves and which will seek its vent where it can, according as the economic forces and resistances determine.

Supposing these people imagine they can seize power, what does it matter? Provided they make the hole which will shatter the dyke, the flood itself will soon rob them of their illusions. But if by chance these illusions resulted in giving them a superior force of will, why complain of that? People who boasted that they had made a revolution have always seen the next day that they had no idea what they were doing, that the revolution made did not in the least resemble the one they would have liked to make. That is what Hegel calls the irony of history, an irony which few historic personalities escape. Look at Bismarck, the revolutionary against his will, and Gladstone who has ended in quarrelling with his adored Tsar.

To me the most important thing is that the impulse should be given in Russia, that the revolution should break out. Whether this fraction or that fraction gives the signal, whether it happens under this flag or that flag matters little to me. If it were a palace conspiracy it would be swept away tomorrow. There where the position is so strained, where the revolutionary elements are accumulated to such a degree, where the economic situation of the enormous mass of the people becomes daily more impossible, where every stage of social development is represented, from the primitive commune to modern large-scale industry and high finance, and where all these contradictions are violently held together by an unexampled despotism, a despotism which is becoming more and more unbearable to the youth in whom the national worth and intelligence are united—there, when 1789 has once been launched, 1793 will not be long in following.

I shall now bid you farewell, dear Citizen. It is half past two at night and tomorrow I shall have no time to add anything before the mail leaves. If you prefer, write to me in Russian, but please do not forget that Russian script is something I do not get to read every day.

Yours sincerely

F Engels

Engels to Schlüter (Excerpt)

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

London, May 15, 1885.

Dear Schlüter:

... As for the poems:

The Marseillaise of the Peasant War was: Eine feste Burg ist unser Gott, and conscious of victory as the text and melody of this song are, it cannot nor need it be taken in this today. Other songs of the time are to be found in collections of folksongs, Des Knaben Wunderhorn, and the like. More may perhaps be found there. But the mercenary soldier largely pre-empted our folk poetry even at that time.

Of foreign songs I know only the pretty Danish song of Herr Tidmann, which I translated in the Berlin Sozialdemokrat in 1865.

There were all sorts of Chartist songs, but they aren’t to be had any more. One began:

Britannia’s sons, though slaves you be,

God your creator made you free;

To all he life and freedom gave,

But never, never made a slave.

I don’t know any others.

All that has vanished, nor was this poetry worth much. In 1848 there were two songs sung to the same melody: Schleswig-Holstein, The Hecker Song:

Hecker, hoch dein Name schalle

An dem ganzen deutschen Rhein.

Deine Grossmut, ja dein Auge

Flossen schon Vertrauen ein.

Hecker, der als deutscher Mann

Vor der Freiheit sterben kann.

I think that’s enough. Then the variant:

Hecker, Struve, Blenker, Zitz und Blum

Bringt die deitsche Ferschte um!

In general, the poetry of past revolutions (the Marseillaise always excepted) rarely has a revolutionary effect for later times because it must also reproduce the mass prejudices of the period in order to affect the masses. Hence the religious nonsense even among the Chartists ...

Engels to Guillaume-Schack

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

c. July 5, 1885

Dear Madam

In reply to your inquiry [1] I can only tell you that I have no right to give out information ultimately intended for publication on Marx’s and my confidential collaboration in certain political works. Nor can I assume any responsibility, either in Marx’s or my own name, for a French general programme on which in the nature of things we could at most have been asked our advice. However, I can tell you in confidence that the Preamble of the Programme of the Parti ouvrier of the Roanne trend [2] originated with Marx.

The French are less insistent than the Germans on limiting female labour for the reason that in France, and particularly in Paris, the work women do in factories plays only a comparatively minor role. Equal wages for equal work to either sex are, until abolished in general, demanded, as far as I know, by all Socialists. That the working woman needs special protection against capitalist exploitation because of her special physiological functions seems obvious to me. The English women who championed the formal right of members of their sex to permit themselves to be as thoroughly exploited by the capitalists as the men are mostly, directly or indirectly, interested in the capitalist exploitation of both sexes. I admit I am more interested in the health of the future generations than in the absolute formal equality of the sexes during the last years of the capitalist mode of production. It is my conviction that real equality of women and men can come true only when the exploitation of either by capital has been abolished and private housework has been transformed into a public industry.

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor.

1. Gertrude Guillaume-Schack, a German Socialist, who was writing an article on female labour asked Engels whether it was true that the programme of the French Workers Party, which demanded equal pay for equal work, was drawn up by him and Marx.

2. The term Workers Party (Parti ouvrier) of the Roanne trend is applied by Engels to the section of the French Workers Party headed by Guesde and Lafargue that dissociated itself from the Possibilists in 1882 and held a separate congress in Roanne.

Engels to August Bebel

In Zurich

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 24 July, 1885

You have exactly hit off Kautsky's decisive weakness. His youthful inclination towards hasty judgment has been still more intensified by the wretched method of teaching history in the universities--especially the Austrian ones. The students there are systematically taught to do historical work with materials which they know to be inadequate but which they are supposed to treat as adequate, that is, to write things which they themselves must know to be false but which they are supposed to consider correct. That has naturally made Kautsky thoroughly cocky. Then the literary life--writing for pay and writing a lot. So that he has absolutely no idea of what really scientific work means. There he has thoroughly burnt his fingers a few times, with his history of population and later with the articles on marriage in primitive times. In all friendship I rubbed that well into him too and spare him nothing in this respect: on this side I criticise all his things mercilessly. Fortunately, however, I can comfort him with the fact that I did exactly the same in my impudent youth and only first learnt the way one has got to work from Marx. It helps quite considerably, too.

Engels to August Bebel

In Plauen near Dresden

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 28 October, 1885

The chronic depression in all the decisive branches of industry also still continues unbroken here, in France and in America. Especially in iron and cotton. It is an unheard-of situation, though entirely the inevitable result of the capitalist system: such colossal over-production that it cannot even bring things to a crisis! The over-production of disposable capital seeking investment is so great that the rate of discount here actually fluctuates between 1 and 1½ percent. per annum, and for money invested in short term credits, which can be called in or paid off from day to day (money on call) one can hardly get ½ percent. per annum. But by choosing to invest his money in this way rather than in new industrial undertakings the money capitalist is admitting how rotten the whole business looks to him. And this fear of new investments and old enterprises, which had already manifested itself in the crisis of 1867, is the main reason why things are not brought to an acute crisis.

But it will have to come in the end, all the same, and then it will make an end of the old trade unions here, let us hope. These unions have peacefully retained the craft character which clung to them from the first and which is becoming more unbearable every day. No doubt you suppose that the engineers, joiners, bricklayers, etc., will admit any worker in their branch of industry without more ado? Not at all. Whoever wants admission must be attached as an apprentice for a period of years (usually seven) to some worker belonging to the union. This was intended to keep the number of workers limited, but had otherwise no point at all except that it brought in money to the apprentice's instructor, for which he did absolutely nothing in return. This was all right up to 1848. But since then the colossal growth of industry has produced a class of workers of whom there are as many or more as there are "skilled" workers in the trade unions and who can do all that the "skilled" workers can or more, but who can never become members. These people have been regularly penalised by the craft rules of the trade unions. But do you suppose the unions ever dreamt of doing away with this silly bunk? Not in the least. I can never remember reading of a single proposal of the kind at a Trade Union Congress. The fools want to reform society to suit themselves and not to reform themselves to suit the development of society. They cling to their traditional superstition, which does them nothing but harm themselves, instead of getting quit of the rubbish and thus doubling their numbers and their power and really becoming again what at present they daily become less – associations of all the workers in a trade against the capitalists. This will I think explain many things in the behaviour of these privileged workers to you.

What is most necessary of all here is that masses of the official labour leaders should get into Parliament. Then things will soon go finely; they will expose themselves quickly enough.

The elections in November will help a lot towards this. Ten or twelve of them are certain to get in, if their Liberal friends do not play them a trick at the last moment. The first elections under a new system are always a sort of lottery and only reveal the smallest part of the revolution they have introduced. But universal suffrage – and with the absence of a peasant class and the start England had in industrialisation the new franchise here gives the workers as much power as universal suffrage would give them in Germany – universal suffrage is the best lever for a proletarian movement at the present time and will prove to be so here. That is why it is so important to break up the Social Democratic Federation as quickly as possible, its leaders being nothing but careerists, adventurers and literary people. Hyndman, their head, is doing his very best in this way; he cannot wait for the clock to strike twelve, as it says in the folk song, and in his chase after successes discredits himself more every day. He is a wretched caricature of Lassalle.

Friedrich Engels to Nikolai Frantsevich Danielson

In St Petersburg

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

13 November 1885

Dear Sir

I received your two letters 6 (18) and 9 (21) August while I was in Jersey and immediately sent you the letter you desired for the Severny Vestnik. [1] Since then I have been prevented by press of work from replying more fully to these letters as well as that of the 25 August (5 September).

I had no doubt that the second volume [2] would afford you the same pleasure as it has done to me. The developments it contains are indeed of such a superior order that the vulgar reader will not take the trouble to fathom them and to follow them out. This is actually the case in Germany where all historical science, including political economy, has fallen so low that it can scarcely fall any lower. Our Katheder-Sozialisten [3] have never been much more, theoretically, than slightly philanthropic Vulgärökonomen, and now they have sunk to the level of simple apologists of Bismarck’s Staatssozialismus. To them, the second volume will always remain a sealed book. It is a fine piece of what Hegel calls die Ironie der Weltgeschichte, [4] that German historical science, by the fact of the elevation of Germany to the position of the first European power, should be again reduced to the same vile state to which it was reduced by the deepest political degradation of Germany, after the Thirty Years’ War. But such is the fact. And thus, German ‘science’ stares at this new volume without being able to understand it; only a wholesome fear of the consequences prevents them from criticising it in public, and so official economic literature observes a cautious silence with regard to it. The third volume will however compel them to speak out.

Of that third volume, I have completed the first transcript from the original into a legible manuscript. Three-fourths of it are almost fit for publication as they are; but the last fourth, or perhaps third, will require a great deal of work: the first section (relation of Mehrwertsrate to Profitrate) [5] and then the subsequent sections on Kredit and partly also on Grundrente; [6] besides certain portions of almost all the other sections. For the last two months I have been compelled to attend to a good deal of other work which had been neglected by my exclusive attention to the second and third volumes. This will continue for some time yet, and then, maybe, the revision of the English translation of Volume 1, which is nearly completed, will occupy me for a month longer, but then I shall start with the third volume and carry it out to the end. Maybe it will be published in two sections, as it will contain about 1000 pages.

I thank you very much for your extracts from the author’s letters [7] from 1879 to 1881. I could not read them without a sorrowful smile. Alas, we are so used to these excuses for the non-completion of the work! Whenever the state of his health made it impossible for him to go on with it, this impossibility preyed heavily upon his mind, and he was only too glad if he could only find out some theoretical excuse why the work should not then be completed. All these arguments he had at the time made use of vis-à-vis de moi; they seemed to ease his conscience.

After completing the third volume and selecting from the other MSs the portions fit for publication, I shall very likely try to collect such of the author’s correspondence as is scientifically important, and there his letters to you rank amongst the first. When that time comes, I shall therefore avail myself of your kind offer of placing at my disposal copies of these letters.

I am often in the case of forwarding to you pamphlets, etc – republications of the author’s and my own writings, etc, but do not know whether it would be safe to send them direct to you. I should be much obliged if you would tell me what to do.

I hope our mutual friend’s [8] health is improving, notwithstanding the bad prognosis of his doctors. Any news with regard to him will always be welcome.

That crisis of which the author speaks in his letter was indeed an exceptional one. [9] The fact is it continues still, all Europe and America suffer under it to this day. The absence of the financial crash is one cause of it. But the principal cause is undoubtedly the totally changed state of the Weltmarkt. [10] Since 1870, Germany and especially America have become England’s rivals in modern industry, while most other European countries have so far developed their own manufactures as to cease to be dependent on England. The consequence has been the spreading of the process of over-production over a far larger area than when it was mainly confined to England, and has taken – up to now – a chronic instead of an acute character. By thus delaying the thunderstorm which formerly cleared the atmosphere every ten years, this continued chronic depression must prepare a crash of a violence and extent such as we have never known before. And the more so as the agricultural crisis of which the author speaks has also continued up to now, has been extended to almost all European countries, and must continue while the virgin chernozem of the Western American prairies remains unexhausted.

Very faithfully yours

PW Rosher

Notes

1. Severny Vestnik (Northern Herald) – a liberal magazine containing articles on literature, science and politics, published in St Petersburg from 1885 to 1898 – Progress Publishers.

2. Of Marx’s Kapital – Progress Publishers.

3. Katheder Socialists – representatives of a trend in bourgeois economics and sociology which arose towards the end of the nineteenth century. They were in the main German professors who under the guise of socialism advocated bourgeois reformism from their university chairs (Katheder in German) – Progress Publishers.

4. Irony of world history – Progress Publishers.

5. Rate of surplus value to rate of profit – Progress Publishers.

6. Rent of land – Progress Publishers.

7. Engels alludes to Marx’s letters to Danielson, 10/04/1879, 12/09/1880, 19/02/1881.

8. Hermann Alexandrovich Lopatin (1845-1918) – Russian revolutionary, Narodnik, member of General Council of First International, one of the translators into Russian of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, friend of Marx and Engels – Progress Publishers.

9. See Marx’s letter to Danielson of 10 April 1879 – Progress Publishers.

10. World market – Progress Publishers.

Engels To Wilhelm Liebknecht

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 348;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

December 1, 1885

The elections here are proceeding very nicely. [350] It is the first time that the Irish in England have voted en masse for one side, and in fact for the Tories. They have thus shown the Liberals the extent to which they can decide the issue even in England. The 80 to 85 Home Rulers — Liverpool, too, has elected one — who occupy the same position here as the Centre Party does in the Reichstag [351] can wreck any government. Parnell must now show what he really is.

Incidentally, a victory has also been won by the new Manchester School [352], that is, the theory of aggressive tariffs, although it is here even more absurd than in Germany, but after eight years of commercial stagnation the idea has taken possession of the young manufacturers. Then there is Gladstone’s opportunist weakness and the clumsy manner of Chamberlain, who first throws his weight about and then draws in his horns; this has called forth the cry: the Church in danger! Finally, Gladstone’s lamentable foreign policy. The Liberals profess to believe that the new county voters will vote for them. There is, indeed, no telling how these voters will act, but in order to obtain an absolute majority the Liberals would have to win 180 of the 300 still outstanding districts, and that will hardly happen. Parnell will almost certainly wield dictatorial powers in Great Britain and Ireland.

Notes

350. The general election in England was held between November 23 and December 19, 1885. As a result of this first election after tile 1884 Parliamentary Reform, the Liberals obtained 331 seats, losing 20, the Conservatives — 249 and supporters of Home Rule for Ireland — 86.

351. Centre — a political party of the German Catholics founded in 1870-71. It generally held intermediate positions, manoeuvring between the parties supporting the government and the Left opposition factions in the Reichstag. Under the banner of Catholicism it united various sections of the Catholic clergy, landowners, bourgeoisie, some of the peasants, predominantly in the small and medium-sized states in West and South-West Germany — that is, people of very different social status — and supported their separatist trends. The Centre was in opposition to Bismarck’s government but voted for his measures directed against the labour and socialist movement.

352. “New Manchester School” — in the late seventies and early eighties, when England encountered growing competition from the U.S.A. and Germany on the world market, the English bourgeoisie who had hitherto supported the “Manchester School” began to change their attitude and press for the introduction of protective tariffs.

Engels To Johann Philipp Becker

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 349;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

December 5, 1885

The elections in France placed the Radicals next in the running for control, thereby improving our prospects a good deal, too. The elections here have temporarily made the Irish masters of England and Scotland, for not one of the two parties can rule without them. Though the results in nearly 100 seats are not yet known they will change little. Thus the Irish problem will at last be settled, if not immediately then in the near future, and then the way will have been cleared there, too. At the same time some eight to ten workers have been elected — some are bought by the bourgeoisie, others are strict trade-unionists. They will probably make fools of themselves and hence greatly advance the formation of an independent labour party by destroying the traditional self-deception of the workers. Here history moves slowly, but it moves.

1886

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 2 January

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. 7 January

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 7 January

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 17 January

Engels to August Bebel. 20-23 January

Engels to Edward Pease. 27 January

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 29 January

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. 3 February

Engels to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. 4 February

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 7 February

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 3 February

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 9 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 9 February

Engels to August Bebel. 15 February

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 16 February

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 24 February

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. 25 February

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 25 February

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 3 March

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. 12 March

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 12 March

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 12 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 15-16 March

Engels to August Bebel. 18 March

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 20 March

Engels to Eleanor Marx-Aveling. 25 March

Engels to Vera Zasulich. 31 March

Engels to August Bebel. 12 April

Engels to Philipp Victor Pauli. 12 April

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 26 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 29 April

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 7 May

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 12 May

Engels to F H Nestler & Melle's Verlag. 13 May

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 22 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 23 May

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. 3 June

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 3 June

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 2 July

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 4 July

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 8 July

Engels to Johann Philipp Becker. 9 July

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 26 July

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 31 July

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 3 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 6 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 11 August

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. 13-14 August

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 14 August

Engels to August Bebel. 18 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 20 August

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 20 August

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 20 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 23 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 24 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 24 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 25 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 26 August

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 6 September

Engels to F H Nestier & Melle's Verlag. 11 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 13 September

Engels to August Bebel. 14 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 16 September

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 17 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 24 September

Engels to Natalie Liebknecht. 25 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 2 October

Engels to August Bebel. 8 October

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 9 October

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 22 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 23 October

Engels to August Bebel. 23 October

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 26 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 2 November

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 9 November

Engels to E T. 13 November

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 23 November

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 24 November

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 26 November

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 29 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 29 November

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 7 December

Engels to Halliday Sparling. 7 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 13 December

Engels to Emil Engels. 22 December

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. 28 December

Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky

In Zurich

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, January 7, 1886

As to those wise Americans who think their country exempt from the consequences of fully expanded Capitalist production, they seem to live in blissful ignorance of the fact that sundry states, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, etc., have such an institution as a Labour Bureau from the reports of which they might learn something to the contrary.

Engels to August Bebel

In Berlin

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 20-23 January, 1886

The disintegration of the German free thinkers in the economic sphere quite corresponds to what is going on among the English Radicals. The people of the old Manchester school a la John Bright are dying out and the younger generation, just like the Berliners, goes in for social patching-up reforms. Only that here the bourgeois does not want to help the industrial worker so much as the agricultural worker, who has just done him excellent service at the elections, and that in English fashion it is not so much the state as the municipality which is to intervene. For the agricultural workers, little gardens and potato plots, for the town workers sanitary improvements and the like--this is their programme. An excellent sign is that the bourgeoisie are already obliged to sacrifice their own classical economic theory, partly from political considerations but partly because they themselves, owing to the practical consequences of this theory, have begun to doubt it.

The same thing is proved by the growth of Kathedersozialismus [professorial socialism] which in one form or another is more and more supplanting classical economy in the professorial chairs both here and in France. The actual contradictions engendered by the method of production have become so crass that no theory can indeed conceal them any longer, unless it were this professorial socialist mish-mash, which however is no longer a theory but drivel.

Six weeks ago symptoms of an improvement in trade were said to be showing themselves. Now this has all faded away again, the distress is greater than ever and the lack of prospect too, added to an unusually severe winter. This is now already the eighth year of the pressure of overproduction upon the markets and instead of getting better it is always getting worse. There is no longer any doubt that the situation has essentially changed from what it was formerly; since England has got important rivals on the world market the period of crises, in the sense known hitherto, is closed. If the crises change from acute into chronic ones but at the same time lose nothing in intensity, what will be the end? A period of prosperity, even if a short one, must after all return sometime, when the accumulation of commodities has been exhausted; but how all this will occur I am eager to see. But two things are certain: we have entered upon a period incomparably more dangerous to the existence of the old society than the period of ten-yearly crises; and secondly, when prosperity returns, England will be much less affected by it than formerly, when she alone skimmed the cream off the world market. The day this becomes clear here, and not before, the socialist movement here will seriously begin.

Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

London, February 3, 1886.

My dear Mrs. Wischnewetzky:

Today I forwarded to you, registered, the first portion of the Ms. up to your page 70, inclusive. I am sorry I could not possibly send it sooner. But I had a job on my hand which must be finished before I could start with your Ms. Now I shall go on swimmingly; as I proceed I find we get better acquainted with each other, you with my peculiar old-fashioned German, I with your American. And indeed, I learn a good deal at it. Never before did the difference between British and American English strike me so vividly as in this experimentum in proprio corpore vili. What a splendid future must there be in store for a language which gets enriched and developed on two sides of an ocean, and which may expect further additions from Australia and India!

I do not know whether this portion of the Ms. will arrive in time to reach Miss Foster before her sailing, but I hope you will not be put to any particular inconvenience through my delay, which was indeed unavoidable. I cannot be grateful enough to all the friends who wish to translate both Marx’s and my writings into the various civilized languages and who show their confidence in me by asking me to look over their translations. And I am willing enough to do it, but for me as well as for others the day has but 24 hours, and so I cannot possibly always arrange to please everybody and to chime in with all arrangements made.

If I am not too often interrupted in the evenings, I hope to be able to send you the remainder of the Ms. and possibly also the introduction in a fortnight. This latter may be printed either as a preface or as an appendix. As to the length of it I am utterly incapable of giving you any idea. I shall try to make it as short as possible, especially as it will be useless for me to try to combat arguments of the American press with which I am not even superficially acquainted. Of course, if American workingmen will not read their own states’ Labor Reports, but trust to politicians' extracts, nobody can help them. But it strikes me that the present chronic depression, which seems endless so far, will tell its tale in America as well as in England. America will smash up England’s industrial monopoly — whatever there is left of it — but America cannot herself succeed to that monopoly. And unless one country has the monopoly of the markets of the world, at least in the decisive branches of trade, the conditions — relatively favorable — which existed here in England from 1848 to 1870 cannot anywhere be reproduced, and even in America the condition of the working class must gradually sink lower and lower. For if there are three countries (say England, America and Germany) competing on comparatively equal terms for the possession of the Weltmarkt, there is no chance but chronic overproduction, one of the three being capable of supplying the whole quantity required. That is the reason why I am watching the development of the present crisis with greater interest than ever and why I believe it will mark an epoch in the mental and political history of the American and English working classes — the very two whose assistance is as absolutely necessary as it is desirable.

Yours very truly,

F. Engels

Engels to August Bebel

In Berlin

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 15 February, 1886

The Social Democratic Federation which, despite all self-advertising reports, is an extremely weak organisation--containing good elements but led by literary and political adventurers--was brought to the verge of dissolution at the November elections by a stroke of genius on the part of these same leaders. Hyndman (pronounced Heindman) the head of the society, had taken money from the Tories (Conservatives) at the time, and with it put up two Social-Democratic candidates in two districts of London. As they had not even got any members in these two constituencies the way they would discredit themselves was to be foreseen (one got 27, the other 32 votes out of 4000--5000 respectively!). Hyndman, however, had no sooner got the Tory money than his head began violently to swell and he immediately set off to Birmingham, to Chamberlain, the present Minister, and offered him his "support" (which does not total 1000 votes in all England) if Chamberlain would guarantee him a seat in Birmingham by the help of the Liberals and would bring in an Eight Hour Bill. Chamberlain is no fool and showed him the door. Despite all attempts to hush it up, a great row about this in the Federation and threatened dissolution. So now something had to happen in order to get the thing going again.

In the meantime unemployment was increasing more and more. The collapse of England's monopoly on the world market has caused the crisis to continue unbroken since 1878 and to get worse rather than better. The distress, especially in the East End of the city, is appalling. The exceptionally hard winter, since January, added to the boundless indifference of the possessing classes, produced a considerable movement among the unemployed masses. As usual, political wirepullers tried to exploit this movement for their own ends. The Conservatives, who had just been superseded in the Government, put the responsibility for unemployment on to foreign competition (rightly) and foreign tariffs (for the most part wrongly) and preached "fair-trade," i.e., retaliatory tariffs. A workers' organisation also exists which believes mainly in retaliatory tariffs. This organisation summoned the meeting in Trafalgar Square on February 8. In the meantime the S.D.F. had not been idle either, had already held some small demonstrations and now wanted to utilise this meeting. Two meetings accordingly took place; the "fair traders" were round the Nelson Column while the S.D.F. people spoke at the north end of the Square, from the street opposite the National Gallery, which is about 25 feet above the square. Kautsky, who was there and went away before the row began, told me that the mass of the real workers had been around the "fair traders," whilst Hyndman and Co. had a mixed audience of people looking for a lark, some of them already merry. If Kautsky, who has hardly been here a year, noticed this, the gentlemen of the Federation must have seen it still more clearly. Nevertheless, when everybody already seemed to be scattering, they proceeded to carry out a favourite old idea of Hyndman's, namely a procession of "unemployed" through Pall Mall, the street of the big political, aristocratic and high-capitalist clubs, the centres of English political intrigue. The employed who followed them in order to hold a fresh meeting in Hyde Park, were mostly the types who do not want work anyhow, hawkers, loafers, police spies, pickpockets. When the aristocrats at the club windows sneered at them they broke the said windows, ditto the shop windows; they looted the wine dealers' shops and immediately set up a consumers' association for the contents in the street, so that in Hyde Park Hyndman and Co. had hastily to pocket their blood-thirsty phrases and go in for pacification. But the thing had now got going. During the procession, during this second little meeting and afterwards, the masses of the Lumpenproletariat, whom Hyndman had taken for the unemployed, streamed through some fashionable streets nearby, looted jewellers' and other shops, used the loaves and legs of mutton which they had looted solely to break windows with, and dispersed without meeting with any resistance. Only a remnant of them were broken up in Oxford Street by four, say four, policemen.

Otherwise the police were nowhere to be seen and their absence was so marked that we were not alone in being compelled to think it intentional. The chiefs of the police seem to be Conservatives who had no objection to seeing a bit of a row in this period of Liberal Government. However the Government at once set up a Commission of Inquiry and it may cost more than one of these gentlemen his job.

Engels To Laura Lafargue

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 47;

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, Vol. 36, Moscow, 1964.

London, 28 April 1886

My dear Laura,

The English translation of Capital is awful work. First they [Samuel Moore and Edward Aveling] translate. Then I revise and enter suggestions in pencil. Then it goes back to them. Then conference for settlement of doubtful points. Then I have to go through the whole again, to see that everything is made ready for the press, stylistically and technically, and all the quotations, which Tussy has looked up in the English originals, fitted in properly. So far I have finished 300 pages of the German, and shall soon have about 100 more. But then there is another hitch. Edward has missed translating some 50 pages of his share, and these I hope to get by the end of the week. As soon as I have got these, I shall stir up Kegan Paul’s drowsiness. The wily Scot who still fancies that we do not know our favourable position in the market, plays a waiting game, but will find himself awfully mistaken one fine morning. It is we that can afford to wait, and we intend to wait until we are quite ready to begin to print, say in a week. And as we have a written offer from another firm, we can stick to our terms.

This must serve as an excuse for my last short letter and the delay that has taken place since. The fact is we must begin to print by middle of May so as to be ready to publish by end of September. And that we can, though it will keep me hard at work till far into June at least.

Your billet-doux to Bismarck is making great stir in Germany. Bebel writes:

‘Laura and Eleanor Marx’s statement is excellent. The greater part of the German press have published notices about it but understandably take care not to reprint it. Otto [Bismarck] will be furious, for he is sensitive to such attacks.’

The effect of the new departure in France is plainly visible in the debate on the Socialist Law in Berlin. Library [Wilhelm Liebknecht’s] would hardly have ventured to come out so strongly again in his best old manner, had it not been that events in Paris and Decazeville had stirred him up again a bit. This competition is invaluable for our people in Germany. The split and dissensions in Paris gave the philistine section amongst them a pretext for looking down, de haul en bas, upon the French, as if they, themselves, had not wallowed for years in splits, quarrels and dissensions; and they began to talk as if they, the German kleinbürgerliche section of the party, were the leaders of the universal movement. That precious bit of chauvinism has now been effectually knocked on the head. Unfortunately the Socialist Law has this one effect that it excludes pretty effectually the circulation of such papers as the Socialiste and Cri du Peuple, and that the daily, current information about France has to be taken from the vile bourgeois papers. I have sent on the Crisis and Intransigeants you sent me, to Bebel and Liebknecht but that does not go much further and may not always reach them.

It strikes me as very curious that I see nothing of the Villefranche judgment being appealed against. As far as I know there is a double appeal 1) on account of the alleged incompetency of the court, 2) against the judgment as such; and then a final pourvoi en cassation on both these issues. It seems to me well worth while to go in for that, if only to expose the infamy of the courts and keep the thing before the public.

I scarcely dare hope that Roche will get in next Sunday. Not having read any Cris for about a week, I do not know what other candidates besides Gaulier are in the field. But anyhow the poll will show a great progress and be enough to frighten the Radicals still more.

Here all is muddle. Bax and Morris are getting deeper and deeper into the hands of a few anarchist phraseurs, and write nonsense with increasing intensity. The turning of The Commonweal into a ‘weekly’ — absurd in every respect — has given Edward a chance of getting out of his responsibility for this now incalculable organ. Bax à la recherché, by means of half-digested Hegelian dialectic, of extreme and paradox propositions, and Morris going head foremost, bull fashion, against ‘parliamentarism’, will have to learn by experience what sort of people their anarchist friends are. It would be ridiculous to expect the working class to take the slightest notice of these various vagaries of what is by courtesy called English Socialism, and it is very fortunate that it is so: These gentlemen have quite enough to do to set their own brains in order.

Schorlemmer who is here, and Nim have taken little Lily to the Zoo, Pumps is going to Manchester for a few days. In our evening chats we talk a good deal of your promised coming over to London. When is that to be? Schorlemmer says you had mentioned something about Paul coming over at the same time. That would be all the better. Anyhow it is getting time that these good intentions set about developing into more or less tangible plans and projects, the season for execution is not too long in this blessed climate.

Did you see in last Sozialdemokrat the affair about Kalle and the Wezbergemeinschaft? That fellow was nicely caught. He is a great light among the National Liberals and has large chemical (dye-stuff) works at Wiesbaden.

Love from Schorlemmer and Nim and yours affectionately,

F. Engels

Paul I hope will excuse if I do not write to him as often as I should like.

Engels to Sorge

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

London, April 29, 1886.

Dear Sorge:

Your letters of February 15th and 28th and March 8th, and postcard of March 21st received.

The manuscript [of Capital] contains largely the same things that Marx noted in his copy for the third edition. In other passages, which provide for more insertions from the French, I am not binding myself to these unconditionally, (1) because the work for the third edition was done much later, and hence is decisive for me, and (2) because, for a translation to be made in America, far away from him, Marx would rather a have had many a difficult passage correctly translated from the French simplification than incorrectly from the German, and this consideration now vanishes. Nevertheless, it has given me many very useful hints which will, in time, find application for the German edition too. As soon as I am through with it I shall return it to you by registered mail....

The Broadhouse-Hyndman translation of Capital is nothing but a farce. The first chapter was translated from the German, full of mistakes to the point of ridiculousness. Now it is being translated from the French — the mistakes are the same. At the present rate of speed the thing won’t be finished by 1900.

Thanks for the calendar. I had, it is true, not suspected that Douais is so terribly underrated as a great man. Let him take the consciousness of his greatness, together with all of its underrating, with him into the grave without having it lessened in a pastry mold. But he was the right man for America, and if he had remained an ordinary democrat, I would have wished him the best of luck. But, as it is, he got into the wrong pew. As for the purist who declaims against our style and punctuation: he knows neither German nor English, else he wouldn’t find Anglicisms where there aren’t any. The German he admires, which was drilled into us in school, with its horrible periodic structure and the verb at the very end — separated from the subject by ten miles of intervening matter — it took me thirty years to unlearn that German again. That bureaucratic schoolmaster’s German, for which Lessing doesn’t exist at all, is on the decline even in Germany. What would this good fellow say if he heard the deputies speaking in the Reichstag, who have abolished this horrible construction because they always got tangled up in it, and spoke like the Jews: “Als der Bismarck ist gekommen vor die Zwangswahl, hat er lieber den Papst gekusst auf den Hintern als die Revolution auf den Mund.” This advance was first introduced by little Lasker; it is the only good thing he did. If Mr. Purist comes to Germany with his schoolmaster’s German, they will tell him he talks American. “You know how petty the learned German philistine is” — he seems to be particularly so in America. German sentence structure together with its punctuation as taught in the schools forty or fifty years ago deserves only to be thrown on the scrap-heap, and that is happening to it in Germany at last.

I think I have already written you that an American lady, married to a Russian, has gotten it into her head to translate my old book. I looked over the translation, which required considerable work. But she wrote that publication was assured and it had to be done at once, and so I had to do it. Now it turns out that she turned the negotiations over to a Miss Foster, the secretary of a women’s rights society, and the latter committed the blunder of giving it to the Socialist Labor Party. I told the translator what I thought of this, but it was too late. Moreover, I am glad that the gentlemen over there do not translate anything of mine; it would turn out beautifully. Their German is enough, and then their English!

The gentlemen of the Volkszeitung must be satisfied. They have gained control of the whole movement among the Germans and their business must be flourishing. It is a matter of course that a man like Dietzgen is pushed to the rear there. Playing with the boycott and with little strikes is, of course, much more important than theoretical enlightenment. But with all that the cause is moving ahead mightily in America. A real mass movement exists among the English-speaking workers for the first time. That it proceeds gropingly at first, clumsy, unclear, unknowing, is unavoidable. All that will be cleared up; the movement will and must develop through its own mistakes. Theoretical ignorance is a characteristic of all young peoples, but so is practical rapidity of development, too. As in England, all the preaching is of no use in America until the actual necessity exists. And this is present in America now, and they are becoming conscious of it. The entrance of the masses of native-born workers into the movement in America is for me one of the greatest events of 1886. As for the Germans over there, let the sort flourishing now join the Americans gradually; they will still be somewhat ahead of them. And lastly, there still is a central core among the Germans over there which retains theoretical insight into the nature and the course of the whole movement, keeps the process of fermentation going, and finally rises to the top again.

The second great event of 1886 is the formation of a workers party in the French Chamber by Basly and Camelinat, two handpicked “worker” deputies nominated and elected by the Radicals, who, contrary to all the regulations, did not become servants of their Radical masters, but spoke as workers. The Decazeville strike brought the split between them and the Radicals to a head — five other deputies joined them. The Radicals had to come out in the open with their policy towards the workers, and, as the government exists only with the Radicals’ support, that was dreadful, for they were justifiably held accountable by the workers for each of the government’s acts. In short, the Radicals: Clemenceau and all the others, behaved wretchedly; and then there took place what no preacher had succeeded in accomplishing up to then: the French workers’ defection from the Radicals. And the second result was: the union of all the socialist fractions for joint action. Only the miserable Possibilists kept apart, and consequently they are falling asunder more and more every day. The government helped this new departure tremendously by its blunders. For it wants to float a loan of 90,000,000 francs and needs high finance for this purpose, but the latter is also a stockholder in Decazeville and refuses to lend the money unless the government breaks the strike. Hence the arrest of Duc and Roche. The workers’ reply is: Roche’s candidacy in Paris for next Sunday (elections to the Chamber) and Due’s (Quercy’s) candidacy for the Municipal Council, where he is certain of election. In brief, a splendid movement is merrily under way in France again, and the best thing about it is that our people, Guesde, Lafargue, Deville, are the theoretical leaders.

The reaction upon Germany did not fail to make its appearance. The revolutionary speech and action of the Frenchmen made the whining of Geiser, Viereck, Auer and Co. appear more feeble than ever, and thus only Bebel and Liebknecht spoke in the Last debate on the Socialist Law, both of them very good. With this debate we can show our faces in respectable society again, which was by no means the case with all of them. In general it is good for the Germans to have their leadership disputed somewhat, especially since they have elected so many philistine elements (which was unavoidable, to be sure). In Germany everything becomes philistine in quiet periods; the spur of French competition then becomes absolutely necessary, nor will it be lacking. French socialism has suddenly grown from a sect into a party, and only now and only thereby is the mass affiliation of the workers possible, for the latter are sick and tired of sectarianism, and that was the secret of their following the extremist bourgeois party, the Radicals. Next Sunday will show considerable progress in the elections, though it is scarcely to be expected that Roche will win.

I think the printing of the English translation of Capital, Volume I, will begin in two to three weeks. I am far from through with revision, but 300 pages are ready for the printer and another hundred almost ready. Another thing. A Mr. J. T. McEnnis interviewed me a few days ago under the pretext of getting advice on labor legislation for, the State of Missouri. I soon discovered that newspaper business was behind it, and he confessed that he was working for the leading democratic paper of St. Louis, but gave me his word of honor that he would submit, every word to me in advance for revision. The man was sent to me by the Russian Stepniak. Nearly two weeks have passed, and I am afraid he did not keep his promise. I have forgotten the name of the St. Louis paper. Therefore, if anything is printed regarding the interview, please have the enclosed statement printed in the Sozialist, Volkszeitung, and anywhere else you think necessary. If the man does come and keep his promise, I shall of course, let you know at once, and you can then tear up the statement. Here the movement is not progressing at all, luckily enough. Hyndman and Co. are political careerists who spoil everything, while the anarchists are making rapid progress in the Socialist League. Morris and Bax — one as an emotional socialist and the other as a chaser after philosophical paradoxes — are wholly under their control for the present and must now undergo this experience in corpere vili. You will note from the Commonweal that Aveling, largely thanks to Tussy’s energy, no longer shares the responsibility for this swindle, and that is good. And these muddleheads want to lead the British working class! Fortunately the latter wants to have absolutely nothing to do with them.

Best regards,

Yours,

F. Engels

Engels To Eduard Bernstein

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 349-50;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

May 22, 1886

I am sending you Thursday’s Parliamentary debates (Daily News) on the Irish Arms Bill, which restricts the right of the Irish to own and carry arms. Hitherto it was directed only against the nationalists, but now it is to be turned also against the Protestant braggarts of Ulster, who threaten to rebel. [353] There is a remarkable speech by Lord Randolph Churchill, the brother of the Duke of Marlborough, a democratising Tory; in the last Tory cabinet he was Secretary for India and is thus a member of the Privy Council for life. In face of the feeble and cowardly protestations and assurances made by our petty-bourgeois socialists regarding the peaceful attainment of the goal under any circumstances, it is indeed very timely to show that English ministers, Althorp, Peel, Morley and even Gladstone, proclaim the right to revolution as a part of constitutional theory — though only so long as they form the opposition, as Gladstone’s subsequent twaddle proves, but even then he does not dare to deny the right as such — especially because it comes from England, the country of legality par excellence. A more telling repudiation could hardly be found for our Vierecks.

Notes

353. The debates on the Irish Arms Bill mentioned by Engels were held during its second reading in the House of Commons on May 20, 1886. The Bill was to prolong the ban established by the 1881 law on the sale, import and carrying of arms in some districts of Ireland. John Morley, the Secretary for Ireland, in bringing the Bill before Parliament, said that it was particularly important for Northern Ireland (Ulster), where open agitation was being conducted among the Protestant population for the organisation of armed resistance against the introduction of self-government in Ireland on a Home Rule basis. Randolph Churchill said in his speech that these actions were legitimate and referred to Althorp and Robert Peel, who in 1883 had said that civil war could be morally justified in the face of a threat to the integrity of the British Empire. In his reply Gladstone reproached Churchill for supporting resistance to government measures. The Bill was passed in the House of Commons by 353 votes to 89.

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

May 23, 1886

So I do believe, too, that the anarchist follies of Chicago will do much good. If the present American movement — which so far as it is not exclusively German, is still in the Trades Union stage — had got a great victory on the 8 hours question, Trades Unionism would have become a fixed and final dogma. While a mixed result will help to show them that it is necessary to go beyond “high wages and short hours.”

Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky

In Zurich

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, June 3, 1886

Whatever the mistakes and the Borniertheit [narrow-mindedness] of the leaders of the movement, and partly of the newly-awakening masses too, one thing is certain: the American working class is moving, and no mistake. And after a few false starts, they will get into the right track soon enough. This appearance of the Americans upon the scene I consider one of the greatest events of the year.

What the breakdown of Russian Czarism would be for the great military monarchies of Europe – the snapping of their mainstay – that is for the bourgeois of the whole world the breaking out of class war in America. For America after all was the ideal of all bourgeois; a country rich, vast, expanding, with purely bourgeois institutions unleavened by feudal remnants or monarchical traditions and without a permanent and hereditary proletariat. Here everyone could become, if not a capitalist, at all events an independent man, producing or trading, with his own means, for his own account. And because there were not, as yet, classes with opposing interests, our – and your – bourgeois thought that America stood above class antagonisms and struggles. That delusion has now broken down, the last bourgeois paradise on earth is fast changing into a Purgatorio, and can only be prevented from becoming, like Europe, an Inferno by the go-ahead pace at which the development of the newly fledged proletariat of America will take place. The way in which they have made their appearance on the scene is quite extraordinary: six months ago nobody suspected anything, and now they appear all of a sudden in such organised masses as to strike terror into the whole capitalist class. I only wish Marx could have lived to see it!

Engels To August Bebel

In Plauen near Dresden

Source: MECW Volume 47;

First published: in Marx-Engels Archives, Vol. I (VI), Moscow, 1932.

Eastbourne, 18 August 1886

4 Cavendish Place

Dear Bebel,

It is a long time since I sent you word of myself, but on the one hand nothing in particular had happened that seemed to call for an exchange of opinions and, on the other, the ms. of the translation of Capital was giving me such an immense amount of work that I had, quite literally and on principle, to let slide all correspondence that did not require immediate attention for about 10 weeks. Now that, too, has been dealt with, so that all that is pursuing me down to the seaside here are the very troublesome proofs and this means that I shall at last be able to make good my omissions, especially since various things have happened that are worth writing about.

First and foremost the Freiberg verdicts. It would seem that your German, and notably Saxon, magistrate still deems himself insufficiently depraved. His case is like that of Eccarius in the days of the International, of whom Pfänder once said: ‘You have absolutely no idea what Eccarius is like; he intends to become far worse than he already is.’ And the Saxons are no exception. In Germany everything official is corrupt, but a petty state gives rise to a particular brand of corruption. For its semi or wholly hereditary official class is so small and at the same time so jealous of its caste privileges that its judiciary, police, administration and army, all brothers and relatives, come to one another’s aid and play into one another’s hands, and to such good purpose that the legal norms, indispensable in larger countries, are completely lost to view, and what is utterly impossible becomes possible. I myself have seen what can happen in this way, not only in Germany but also in Luxembourg and, quite recently, in Jersey, not to mention Switzerland in the bad old Bonapartist days. And I am convinced that Bismarck could have achieved the same end in any other petty German state as soon as the Court, the chief of the robber band, ceased to oppose him. In the largest of the petty states, in Prussia itself, this mutual aid society is formed by the military and official elite and is capable of any infamy in the real or purported interest of the caste.

Just now the ruling clique has more than enough to do. The death of old William [I] will usher in a period of uncertainty and indecision for them — hence, or so they believe, the need to consolidate their position as much as possible beforehand. Hence, too, the sudden furious hue and cry which is raised to an even higher pitch by their fury over the complete failure of all their previous machinations against us, and their hope of [provoking] minor disturbances which would make it possible to tighten up the law. And that is why you people have got to spend nine months in jug.

I hope you will return from your travels this summer so fortified that those 9 months will not be deleterious to your health. This, your enforced retirement, will prove extremely deleterious to the party; true, the tractable members will at last be made to realise that mildness is no safeguard against imprisonment, yet they are unlikely to change their spots and their endeavour to pass themselves off as the genuine representatives of the party will be facilitated by everything that impedes the organisation, and hence the organised expression of opinion, of our masses. And once they know you're safely under lock and key, they'll really start to give themselves airs. Much will then depend on Liebknecht, but upon what will he depend? He will be coming over here in a fortnight’s time and will pass on to me a vast amount of party gossip, or as much of it as he thinks fit. But of one thing you may be sure — my view of the German movement as a whole, of the tactics it should adopt, and of its individual members including Liebknecht himself, will remain what it has always been. Come to that, I am greatly looking forward to seeing him again, although I know from experience that reasoning with him is a complete waste of time — at most he may take some account of my opinion while in America, where Tussy Aveling will be able to give him an occasional nudge and so keep him on the straight and narrow. As regards the fund-raising success of the tour, I have my doubts. Now that the American movement is acquiring reality, it is bound to become an ever less productive source of funds for Germany. This it could only be while still a completely academic proposition. But now that the Anglo-American workers have been roused from their lethargy, it is essential that in speeches and the press they be helped to take their first, still tentative steps, that a truly socialist nucleus be formed in their midst, and this costs money. Nevertheless, this time there may still be some pickings to be had.

The entry of the Americans into the movement and the revival of the French movement by the three labour deputies and by Decazeville — these are the two events of world historic importance this year. In America there’s all sorts of tomfoolery going on — here the anarchists, there the Knight of Labour — but no matter; the thing has got going and will make rapid progress. There are still many disappointments in store — the wire-pullers of the old political parties are preparing covertly to take over the leadership of the budding workers’ party — and colossal blunders will be made, but nevertheless, things will go faster there than anywhere else.

In France the 108,000 votes obtained by Roche prove that the Radicals’ spell is broken and the Paris workers are beginning to disown them, and to do so on a massive scale. To consolidate this victory, this new-won position, our men have managed to transform the temporary organisation set up for Roche’s election into a permanent one and in this way have become the theoretical teachers of the working men who are turning away from the Radicals. Though they all describe themselves as socialists, these people are learning from bitter experience that the threadbare remnants they have inherited from Proudhon and Louis Blanc are mere bourgeois and petty-bourgeois dross; hence they are proving quite accessible to Marx’s theory. This is a consequence of the Radicals being partially at the helm; once wholly so, they will lose their entire working-class following and I maintain that the victory of Radicalism, i.e. of old, threadbare French socialism, in the Chamber will spell victory for Marxism, to begin with in the Paris municipal council. Oh, had Marx but lived to see his thesis vindicated in France and America, — his thesis that today’s democratic republic is no more than the battleground upon which the decisive struggle between bourgeoisie and proletariat will be fought out!

For all that, practically nothing is yet happening in this country.

In the original ‘trotz alledem und alledem’ — a line from a poem by Ferdinand Freiligrath Trotz alledem!

Not even a socialist sect, as in Owen’s day, can be said to exist. There are as many sects as there are heads. The Social Democratic Federation does at least have a programme and a certain amount of discipline, but no backing whatever from the masses. Its bosses are political adventurers of the most ambitious kind, and their paper, Justice, is one long lie about the historic power and importance of the Federation. Even the worthy Ede occasionally forgets this and inopportunely cites the paper, thus doing the genuine movement over here more harm than he can make good; from where he is it is difficult for him to assess the way in which Justice exploits this. The League is going through a crisis. Morris, a sentimental dreamer pure and simple, the personification of good will with so good an opinion of itself that it turns into ill will if ever there’s a question of learning anything, has been taken in by the catchword ‘Revolution’ and fallen victim to the anarchists. Bax is very talented and no fool but, philosopher-fashion, has concocted his own brand of socialism which he regards as true Marxian theory and with which he does a great deal of harm. However, in his case these are merely teething troubles and will soon disappear; only it’s a pity the process should have to take place in public. Nor can Aveling learn very much, taken up as he is with working for his livelihood; he is the only one I see regularly. However, the publication of Capital in English will clear the air enormously over here.

And with that I must close if I want to finish this letter. It is 6.45, tea is about to be served and the last post goes at 8. So take care of yourself and mind you don’t pay my long silence back in kind. And above all, let me assure you that any gossip that might perhaps concern you yourself will make no impression on me whatever.

Your old friend,

F. E.

I am sure to be here until the 28th of this month, after which you had better write to London.

Engels To Laura Lafargue

In Paris

Source: MECW Volume 47;

First published: in the original English, in F. Engels, P. et L. Lafargue, Correspondance, t. I, Paris, 1956.

London, 13 September 1886

My dear Laura,

Here we are again in London — it’s the same thing over and over again, jobs of all sorts. The last week I had to revise a German extract of the Kapital by Kautsky, and it wanted revising very much. Two other mss. are in my desk and have been there for more than six months. Hope to clear them off this week. Fortunately for me, proof-sheets [of the English translation of the first volume of Capital] have been few and far between, else it would have been but a poor holiday for me. Anyhow I shall now cut this sort of work completely, else I should never get to my chief work.

Tussy and Edward’s ship the City of Chicago arrived in New York on the 10th, and Liebknecht’s, the Servia, must be there by this time too, as she sailed 4th September. They will have a severe job to go through with travelling and speechifying. Liebknecht was four days with us at Eastbourne, he is quite fat and carries a deal of weight in front of himself, no doubt the Yankees will take some of that out of him. Otherwise he was very jolly and confident as usual: ‘alles geht famos’.

I wrote to you that I had a postcard from Schorlemmer about 18th August from the Lake of Como, since then I have not heard from him. Anyhow he is now soon due in Paris whence he has sworn to bring you, and if possible Paul too, over to London. I sincerely trust that he will succeed, Nim is already busying her mind with the few necessary arrangements which indeed will not require great exertions. Paul’s trial will not I hope prevent him from coming over, the old shop where he likes to buy drawers at 1/6d. a pair is still there if that is an inducement. And if he cannot get off, surely you are bound to take a holiday too and see your old friends in London once more. You know what Meyer said: ‘wenn sie im Zimmer kommt, ist es als wenn die Sonne aufginge’ [when she comes into the room, it is as if the sun rises] — so do let the sun rise once more over London!

Nim has had her photograph taken in Eastbourne, it was very good and is paid for, this is perhaps the reason why the copies are not yet sent.

Please thank Paul for his letter on the wine manufacture — it not only confirmed, but also completed what I had heard from other sources. It is very satisfactory to know that in these latter days of capitalist production the phylloxera has smashed up the Château Laffite, Lagrange and other grands crus, as we that know how to appreciate them, do not get them, and the Jews and parvenus that get them, do not know [how] to appreciate them. Having thus no longer a mission to fulfil, they may as well go to smash, our successors will soon restore them when they are wanted for grand popular holidays.

What Mohr said in the Circular to the International in 1870, that the annexation of Alsace, etc., had made Russia l’arbitre de l’Europe, is now at last becoming evident. Bismarck has had to cave in completely, and the will of Russia has to be done. The dream of the German Empire, the guardian of European peace, without whose leave not a cannon-shot can be fired, is dispelled, and the German philistine finds he is as much the slave of the Czar as when Prussia was ‘der fünfte Rad am europäischen Wagen’. And now he falls foul of Bismarck who after all does only what he is compelled to do. The rage is great in Germany, not only among the philistines, but also in the army. Liebknecht says since 1866 there has not been such an outcry against an act of the government. But there it will not stop. If the Balkan drama enters its second act, a war between Russia and Austria will break out and then vogue la galère — all Europe may burst out in flames. I should be rather sorry — no doubt it would be the last war, and no doubt this as anything else must turn out ultimately to our advantage. But it may after all delay our victory and the other road is safer. For that however there is scarcely another road than a revolution in Russia, and as long as Alexander follows the lead of the Pan-slavists, that is a very unlikely event. In fact, the decisive argument of Giers with Bismarck was this: we are between Pan-slavists and Nihilists, if we keep the peace they will unite and the palace revolution will be a fait accompli — so we must go on towards Constantinople, and this will be less harmful to you, Bismarck and William, than a Russian revolution. This winter will decide matters, so I am bound to get the 3rd volume ready by next spring.

Had several visits from Bax and one from Morris lately — Bax sees the impasse he has got himself into, and would get out if he could do so without a direct recantation, and no doubt will find some way or other. Morris is a settled sentimental socialist, he would be easily managed if one saw him regularly a couple of times a week, but who has the time to do it, and if you drop him for a month, he is sure to lose himself again. And is he worth all that trouble even if one had the time? In the meantime Hyndman fortifies his position more and more, because he has a definite programme and a definite line of political action, to both of which Morris seems to object, his ideal is a debating club uniting all shades. In all this confusion I expect the principal help from the English Kapital. 23 sheets are printed and revised, but there is something wrong with the printer, I do not receive any fresh proofs and cannot get any information as Sonnenschein is away for his holiday and nobody can or will tell where the hitch lies.

Splendid weather to-day — hope it will last while you come.

Yours affectionately,

F. Engels

Engels to Sorge

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

London, September 16, 1886.

Dear Sorge:

I am taking an hour off by main force in order to write you. After the (triple) proofs of the Capital translation kept me in such suspense for weeks that I was prevented from doing other work, they are now coming in heaps. Six sheets are to be delivered each week (that means 18 sheets to correct weekly), and everything is to be finished in a month. Let’s wait and see. But this makes for a lively time for me, since old man Becker is coming from Geneva to visit me tomorrow, next week Schorlemmer is coming and probably the Lafargues, while other people also want to come here from Switzerland. So if I don’t get a letter off today I know I won’t be able to do so later.

Many thanks for your efforts with regards to the interviewer. He was the last one. Now that he broke his word of honor I have a reason to let them cool their heels, unless we ourselves are interested in spreading something through such a liar. You are right — on the whole I cannot complain. The man tries to be personally decent at least, and not he, but the American bourgeoisie is responsible for his stupidity.

A fine gang seems to be at the head of the party in New York; the Sozialist is a model of what a paper should not be. But neither can I support Dietzgen in his article on the anarchists — he has a peculiar way of dealing with things. If someone has a perhaps somewhat narrow opinion on a certain point, Dietzgen cannot emphasize enough, and often too much, that the thing has two sides. But now, because the New Yorkers are behaving contemptibly, he suddenly takes the other side and wants to picture us all as anarchists. The moment may excuse this, but he shouldn’t forget all his dialectics at the decisive moment. However, he has gotten over it by now, no doubt, and is certainly back on the right track; I have no worries on that score.

In a country as primitive as America, which has developed in a purely bourgeois fashion without any feudal past, but has unwittingly taken over from England a whole store of ideology from feudal times, such as the English common law, religion, and sectarianism, and where the exigencies of practical labor and the concentrating of capital have produced a contempt for all theory, which is only now disappearing in the educated circles of scholars — in such a country the people must become conscious of their own social interests by making blunder upon blunder. Nor will that be spared the workers; the confusion of the trade unions, socialists, Knights of Labor, etc., will persist for some time to come, and they will learn only by their own mistakes. But the main thing is that they have started moving, that things are going ahead generally, that the spell is broken; and they will go fast, too, faster than anywhere else, even though on a singular road, which seems, from the theoretical standpoint, to be an almost insane road.

Your letter came too late for me to be able to speak to Aveling about Brooks — I saw him for only a couple of hours on August 30th and had left your letter behind in Eastbourne. In any event you have since seen him in New York together with Liebknecht....

I hope your health is better; I am apparently still robust enough, but because of an internal ailment I have constantly suffered for the past three years from a somewhat limited freedom of movement, which now and then is very limited indeed, so that I am no longer fit for military service, unfortunately.

As soon as the translation is finished, I must first of all get rid of the minor work imposed upon me — revision of the work of others, particularly translations — and not let any others be forced on me so that I can at last tackle Volume III. It lies ready in dictated form, but there is a full six months’ work still to be done on it. This damned English translation cost me almost a year. But it was absolutely necessary, and I do not regret it.

September 17th. The printed sheets were sent off yesterday; the Commonweals until September to follow today; I must first look for the To-Days.

The movement here remains in the hands of adventurers (Democratic Federation) on the one hand, and of faddists and emotional socialists (Socialist League) on the other. The masses still stand aloof, though the beginning of a movement is also noticeable. But it will still take some time before the masses get under way, and that is good, in order that time be left to develop real leaders. In Germany the bourgeoisie, whose cowardly stagnation is beginning to harm us, will again start moving somewhat at last; on the one hand, the impending change of sovereigns will start everything tottering, and on the other, Bismarck’s obeisance to the Tsar is arousing even the drowsiest sleepyheads. In France the situation is excellent. The people are learning discipline, through the strikes in the provinces, and through opposition to the Radicals in Paris.

Best regards,

Yours,

F. E.

Friedrich Engels to Laura Lafargue

In Paris

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

2 October 1886

... I am afraid Paul exaggerates the significance of the Paris verdict [1] in so far as it is a symptom of the accessibility of the industrial bourgeoisie for socialist ideas. The struggle between usurer and industrial capitalist is one within the bourgeoisie itself, and though no doubt a certain number of petty bourgeois will be driven over to us by the certainty of their impending expropriation de la part des boursiers, [2] yet we can never hope to get the mass of them over to our side. Moreover, this is not desirable, as they bring their narrow class prejudices along with them. In Germany we have too many of them, and it is they who form the dead weight which trammels the march of the party. It will ever be the lot of the petty bourgeois – as a mass – to float undecidedly between the two great classes, one part to be crushed by the centralisation of capital, the other by the victory of the proletariat. On the decisive day, they will as usual be tottering, wavering and helpless, se laisseront faire, [3] and that is all we want. Even if they come round to our views they will say: of course communism is the ultimate solution, but it is far off, maybe 100 years before it can be realised – in other words: we do not mean to work for its realisation neither in our, nor in our children’s lifetime. Such is our experience in Germany.

Otherwise the verdict is a grand victory and marks a decided step in advance. The bourgeoisie, from the moment it is faced by a conscious and organised proletariat, becomes entangled in hopeless contradictions between its liberal and democratic general tendencies here, and the repressive necessities of its defensive struggle against the proletariat there. A cowardly bourgeoisie, like the German and Russian, sacrifices its general class tendencies to the momentary advantages of brutal repression. But a bourgeoisie with a revolutionary history of its own, such as the English and particularly the French, cannot do that so easily. Hence that struggle, within the bourgeoisie itself, which in spite of occasional fits of violence and oppression, on the whole drives it forward – see the various electoral reforms of Gladstone in England, and the advance of radicalism in France. This verdict is a new étape. [4] And so the bourgeoisie, in doing its own work, is doing ours... .

Notes

1. Engels refers to the acquittal of Guesde, Lafargue and Susini by the Assize Court jury on 24 September 1886, when they appealed against the verdict of the previous sitting of the court which had imposed sentences of from four to six months’ imprisonment and a fine of 100 francs for alleged incitement to pillage. The charge was based on speeches they had made at a meeting held at Chateau d'Eau on 3 June 1886. In his letter to Engels of 30 September 1886, Paul Lafargue wrote that the acquittal showed to a certain extent that the bourgeoisie was ready for some of the socialist theories – Progress Publishers.

2. By the money-bags – Progress Publishers.

3. They will not interfere – Progress Publishers

4. Stage – Progress Publishers.

Engels to August Bebel

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

October 8, 1886

Dear Bebel,

I am writing this letter on account of my conversation with old Johann Philipp Becker, who stayed with me here for ten days and will now have returned to Geneva via Paris (where he unexpectedly found his daughter dead!). I was very pleased to see the old giant again; although he has aged physically, he is still cheerful and in good fighting spirit. He is a figure out of our Rhine-Frankish saga personified in the Nibelungenlied-Volker the Fiddler, his very self.

I asked him years ago to write down his reminiscences and experiences, and now he tells me that you and others also encouraged him in this, that he himself longed to do so and even began to write on several occasions, but met little real encouragement with fragmentary publication (such was the case with the Neue Welt, to which he sent several quite splendid things some years ago; these, however, were found to be not sufficiently “novelistic,” as Liebknecht informed him through Motteler).

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, November 29, 1886

Dear Sorge

This morning I carried the last corrected proofs of the Preface [1] to the publisher and now I am at last rid of this nightmare. I expect to be able to send you a copy of the translation in a fortnight. The day after tomorrow Mrs Liebknecht is coming here to wait for her husband who only left New York the day before yesterday.

...

The Henry George boom has of course brought to light a colossal mass of fraud and I am glad I was not there. But despite it all it has been an epoch-making day. The Germans have not understood how to use their theory as a lever which could set the American masses in motion; they do not understand the theory themselves for the most part and treat it in a doctrinaire and dogmatic way, as something which has got to be learnt off by heart but which will then supply all needs without more ado. To them it is a credo [creed] and not a guide to action. Added to which they learn no English on principle. Hence the American masses had to seek out their own way and seem to have found it for the time being in the K(nights) of L(abour), whose confused principles and ludicrous organisation appear to correspond to their own confusion. But according to all I hear the K. of L. are a real power, especially in New England and the West, and are becoming more so every day owing to the brutal opposition of the capitalists. I think it is necessary to work inside them, to form within this still quite plastic mass a core of people who understand the movement and its aims and will therefore themselves take over the leadership, at least of a section, when the inevitably impending break-up of the present "order" takes place. The rottenest side of the K. of L. was their political neutrality, which resulted in sheer trickery on the part of the Powderlys, etc. ; but this has had its edge taken off by the behaviour of the masses at the November elections, especially in New York. The first great step of importance for every country newly entering into the movement is always the organisation of the workers as an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is a distinct workers' party. And this step has been taken, far more rapidly than we had a right to hope, and that is the main thing. That the first programme of this party is still confused and highly deficient, that it has set up the banner of Henry George, these are inevitable evils but also only transitory ones. The masses must have time and opportunity to develop and they can only have the opportunity when they have their own movement--no matter in what form so long as it is only their own movement--in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn wisdom by hurting themselves. The movement in America is in the same position as it was with us before 1848; the really intelligent people there will first of all have the same part to play as that played by the Communist League among the workers' associations before 1848. Except that in America now things will go infinitely more quickly; for the movement to have attained such election successes after scarcely eight months of existence is absolutely unheard of. And what is still lacking will be set going by the bourgeoisie; nowhere in the whole world do they come out so shamelessly and tyrannically as here, and your judges have got Bismarck's smart practitioners in the German Reich brilliantly driven off the field. Where the bourgeoisie conducts the struggle by methods of this kind, things come rapidly to a decision, and if we in Europe do not hurry up the Americans will soon be ahead of us. But it is just now that it is doubly necessary to have a few people there from our side with a firm seat in their saddles where theory and long-proved tactics are concerned, and who can also write and speak English; for, from good historical reasons, the Americans are worlds behind in all theoretical things, and while they did not bring over any medieval institutions from Europe they did bring over masses of medieval traditions, religion, English common (feudal) law, superstition, spiritualism, in short every kind of imbecility which was not directly harmful to business and which is now very serviceable for making the masses stupid. And if there are people at hand there whose minds are theoretically clear, who can tell them the consequences of their own mistakes beforehand and make it clear to them that every movement which does not keep the destruction of the wage system in view the whole time as its final aim is bound to go astray and fail--then many a piece of nonsense may be avoided and the process considerably shortened. But it must take place in the English way, the specific German character must be cut out and for that the gentlemen of the Sozialist have hardly the qualifications, while those of the Volkszeitung are only more intelligent where business is concerned.

...

In Europe the effect of the American elections in November was tremendous. That England and America in particular had no labour movement up to now was the big trump card of the radical republicans everywhere, especially in France. Now these gentlemen are dumbfounded; Mr Clemenceau [2] in particular saw the whole foundation of his policy collapse on 2 November. ‘Look at America’, was his eternal motto; ‘where there is a real republic, there is no poverty and no labour movement!’ And the same thing is happening to the Progressives and ‘democrats’ in Germany and here — where they are also witnessing the beginnings of their own movement. The very fact that the movement is so sharply accentuated as a labour movement and has sprung up so suddenly and forcefully has stunned these people completely.

Here the lack of any competition, on the one hand, and the government’s stupidity, on the other, have enabled the gentlemen of the Social-Democratic Federation [3] to occupy a position which they did not dare to dream of three months ago. The hubbub about the plan — never intended to be taken seriously — of a parade behind the Lord Mayor’s procession on 9 November, and later the same hubbub about the Trafalgar Square meeting on 21 November, when the mounting of artillery was talked of and the government finally backed down — all this forced the gentlemen of the SDF to hold a very ordinary meeting at last on the 21st, without empty rodomontades and pseudo-revolutionary demonstrations with obbligato mob accompaniment — and the philistines suddenly gained respect for the people who had stirred up such a fuss and yet behaved so respectably. And since, except for the SDF, nobody takes any notice of the unemployed, who constitute a fairly numerous group each winter during the chronic stagnation of business and suffer very acute hardships, the SDF is winning the game hands down. The labour movement is beginning here and no mistake, and if the SDF is the first to reap the harvest that is the result of the cowardice of the radicals and the stupidity of the Socialist League, [4] which is squabbling with the Anarchists and cannot get rid of them, and hence has no time to concern itself with the living movement that is taking place outside under its very nose. Incidentally, how long Hyndman [5] & Co will persist in their present comparatively rational mode of action is uncertain. Anyhow I expect that they will soon commit colossal blunders again; they're in too much of a hurry. And then they will see that this can’t be done in a serious movement.

Things are getting prettier all the time in Germany. In Leipzig sentences of as much as four years penal servitude for ‘sedition'! They want to provoke a riot at all costs.

At present I still have seven small jobs in my desk — Italian and French translations, prefaces, new editions, etc — and then I shall start working unflaggingly on Volume 3.

Your old

FE

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor.

1. The Preface to the first English edition of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1, published in 1886.

2. Georges Clemenceau (1841-1929) — French politician and publicist, leader of Radical Party from 1880s, Chairman of Council of Ministers in 1906-09 and 1917-20, pursued imperialist policy.

3. The Social-Democratic Federation which was created in August 1884 on the basis of the Democratic Federation (founded by HM Hyndman in June 1881), comprised various heterogeneous socialist elements. It was led by a group of reformists headed by Hyndman. In contradistinction to the course followed by Hyndman, the revolutionary Marxists in the Federation (Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Edward Aveling, Tom Mann and others) fought for the establishment of close links with the mass organisations of the labour movement. In the autumn of 1884 the left-wing members broke away and formed a separate organisation — the Socialist League.

4. The Socialist League was formed in December 1884 by a group of Socialists who had left the Social-Democratic Federation. Among them were the Avelings, E Belfort Bax and William Morris. In the beginning the League played an active part in the labour movement but soon an anarchist clique began to dominate the organisation and many of the foundation members, including the Avelings, left. In 1889 it fell to pieces.

5. Henry Meyers Hyndman (1842-1921) — English socialist, founder and leader of Democratic Federation (reorganised in 1884 into Social-Democratic Federation), pursued opportunist and sectarian policy in labour movement, later one of the leaders of British Socialist Party, from which he was expelled for supporting imperialist war.

Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky

In Zurich

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000.

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, December 28, 1886

My preface will of course turn entirely on the immense stride made by the American working man in the last ten months, and naturally also touch H.G. [Henry George] and his land scheme. But it cannot pretend to deal exhaustively with it. Nor do I think the time has come for that. It is far more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously, take root and embrace as much as possible the whole American proletariat, than that it should start and proceed from the beginning on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no better road to theoretical clearness of comprehension than "durch Schaden klug werden" [to learn by one's own mistakes]. And for a whole large class, there is no other road, especially for a nation so eminently practical as the Americans. The great thing is to get the working class to move as a class; that once obtained, they will soon find the right direction, and all who resist, H.G. or Powderly, will be left out in the cold with small sects of their own. Therefore I think also the K[nights] of L[abour] a most important factor in the movement which ought not to be pooh-poohed from without but to be revolutionised from within, and I consider that many of the Germans there have made a grievous mistake when they tried, in face of a mighty and glorious movement not of their creation, to make of their imported and not always understood theory a kind of alleinseligmachendes dogma and to keep aloof from any movement which did not accept that dogma. Our theory is not a dogma but the exposition of a process of evolution, and that process involves successive phases. To expect that the Americans will start with the full consciousness of the theory worked out in older industrial countries is to expect the impossible. What the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory --if they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848--to go in for any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische starting points as such and work it gradually up to the theoretical level by pointing out how every mistake made, every reverse suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken theoretical views in the original programme; they ought, in the words of The Communist Manifesto, to represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present. But above all give the movement time to consolidate, do not make the inevitable confusion of the first start worse confounded by forcing down people's throats things which at present they cannot properly understand, but which they soon will learn. A million or two of workingmen's votes next November for a bona fide workingmen's party is worth infinitely more at present than a hundred thousand votes for a doctrinally perfect platform. The very first attempt--soon to be made if the movement progresses--to consolidate the moving masses on a national basis will bring them all face to face, Georgites, K. of L., Trade Unionists, and all; and if our German friends by that time have learnt enough of the language of the country to go in for a discussion, then will be the time for them to criticise the views of the others and thus, by showing up the inconsistencies of the various standpoints, to bring them gradually to understand their own actual position, the position made for them by the correlation of capital and wage labour. But anything that might delay or prevent that national consolidation of the workingmen's party--no matter what platform--I should consider a great mistake, and therefore I do not think the time has arrived to speak out fully and exhaustively either with regard to H.G. or the K. of L.

1887

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 11 January

Engels to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuls. 11 January

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 18 January

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 26 January

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 27 January

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 28 January

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 2 February

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 9 February

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 12 February

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 16 February

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 19 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 24 February

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 3 March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 10 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 10 March

Engels to Julie Bebel. 12 March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 16 March

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 19 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 21 March

Engels to Gerson Trier. 23 March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 6 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 9 April

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 11 April

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 13 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 23 April

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 24 April

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 26 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 4 May

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 5 May

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 7 May

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 7 May

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 21 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 21 May

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 27 May

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 28 May

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 28 May

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 31 May

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 4 June

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 7 June

Engels to Jules Guesde. 11 June

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 11 June

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 15 June

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 18 June

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 20 June

Engels to John Lincoln Mahon. 22 June

Engels to John Lincoln Mahon. 23 June

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 30 June

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 15 July

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 20 July

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 22 July

Engels to John Lincoln Mahon. 26 July

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 1 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 5 August

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 8 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 9 August

Engels to August Bebel. 13 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 17 August

Engels to Bruno Schoenlank. 29 August

Engels to August Bebel. 30 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 3 September

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 3 September

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 15 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 16 September

Engels to Hugo Koeh. 22 September

Engels to Johannes Weiss. 10 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 11 October

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 29 October

Engels to Paul Lafargue. end October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 12 November

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 16 November

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 22 November

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 23 November

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 26 November

Engels to Natalle Liebknecht. 29 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. November

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 3 December

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 5 December

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 7 December

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 20 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 24 December

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 29 December

Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetsky

In Zurich

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, January 27, 1887

The movement in America, just at this moment, is I believe best seen from across the ocean. On the spot personal bickerings and local disputes must obscure most of the grandeur of it. And the only thing that could really delay its march would be a consolidation of these differences into established acts. To some extent that will be unavoidable, but the less of it the better. And the Germans have most to guard against this. Our theory is a theory of evolution, not a dogma to be learned by heart and to be repeated mechanically. The less it is drilled into the Americans from outside and the more they test it with their own experience--with the help of the Germans--the deeper will it pass into their flesh and blood. When we returned to Germany, in spring 1848, we joined the Democratic Party as the only possible means of getting the ear of the working class; we were the most advanced wing of that party, but still a wing of it. When Marx founded the International, he drew up the General Rules in such a way that all working-class socialists of that period could join it -- Proudhonists, Pierre Lerouxists and even the more advanced section of the English Trades Unions; and it was only through this latitude that the International became what it was, the means of gradually dissolving and absorbing all these minor sects, with the exception of the Anarchists, whose sudden appearance in various countries was but the effect of the violent bourgeois reaction after the Commune and could therefore safely be left by us to die out of itself, as it did. Had we from 1864, to 1873 insisted on working together only with those who openly adopted our platform where should we be to-day? I think that all our practice has shown that it is possible to work along with the general movement of the working class at every one of its stages without giving up or hiding our own distinct position and even organisation, and I am afraid that if the German Americans choose a different line they will commit a great mistake.

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

Written in English;

February 2, 1887

I had finished Bel Ami on Monday night... and was ruminating over the picture of Parisian journalism exhibited in it, thinking it must be exaggerated, when lo — on Tuesday morning your letter and Paul’s unroll to me a scene — from life — of Bel Ami, and so I must take off my hat to Guy de Maupassant. Well, this will do. Faut-il donc être canaille pour avoir un journal quotidien à Paris! [Must one really be a villain to publish a daily newspaper in Paris!]

Engels to Florence Kelley Wischnewetzky (Excerpt)

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

London, February 9, 1887.

Dear Mrs. Wischnewetzky:

... Your fear as to my being unduly influenced by Aveling in my view of the American movement is groundless. As soon as there was a national American working-class movement, independent of the Germans, my standpoint was clearly indicated by the facts of the case. That great national movement, no matter what its first form, is the real starting point of American working-class development. If the Germans join it, in order to help it or to hasten its development in the right direction, they may do a great deal of good and play a decisive part in it. If they stand aloof, they will dwindle down into a dogmatic sect and be brushed aside as people who do not understand their own principles. Mrs. Aveling, who has seen her father at work, understood this quite as well from the beginning, and if Aveling saw it too, all the better. And all my letters to America, to Sorge, to yourself, to the Avelings, from the very beginning, have repeated this view over and over again. Still I was glad to see the Avelings before writing my preface, because they gave me some new facts about the inner mysteries of the German party in New York....

In the early hole-and-corner stages of the working-class movement, when the workingmen are still under the influence of traditional prejudices, woe be to the man who, being of bourgeois origin or superior education, goes into the movement and is rash enough to enter into money relations with the working-class element. There is sure to be a dispute upon the cash account and this is at once enlarged into an attempt at exploitation. Especially so if the “bourgeois” happens to have views on theoretical or tactical points that disagree with those of the majority or even of a minority. This I have constantly seen for more than forty years. The worst of all were the Germans; in Germany the growth of the movement has long since swept that failing away, but it has not died out with the Germans out of Germany. For that reason Marx and I have always tried to avoid having any money dealings with the party, no matter in what country....

Engels to Nikolai Danielson

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Written in English;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

February 19, 1887

I thank you very much for the Tales of Scedrin which I shall take in hand as soon as ever possible; a slight conjunctivitis of the left eye prevents me reading it at present, as the Russian type very much strains my eyesight.

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

June 15, 1887

I was obliged to give a card of introduction (to Paul [Lafargue]) to a young Dr. Conrad Schmidt of Konigsberg, who dabbles in question sociale. He is about the greenest youth I ever saw, he was here about 3 months, seems a decent fellow, as decent fellows go nowadays, frisst keine Schuhnägel und säuft keine Tinte. [eats no boot nails and drinks no ink] If Paul deposits him rue Richelieu, Bibliotéque nationale, he will not trouble him much. He admires Zola in whom he has discovered the “materialistische Geschichtsanschauung.” [materialist conception of history]

Engels To Friedrich Adolph Sorge

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 350;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

June 18, 1887

Yesterday evening the Irish Coercion Bill was clause by clause hurried through the House of Commons in two minutes. [354] It is a worthy counterpart of the Anti-Socialist Law and opens the door to completely arbitrary action by the police. Things regarded as fundamental rights in England are forbidden in Ireland and become crimes. This Bill is the tombstone of today’s Tories, whom I did not consider so stupid, and of the Liberal Unionists [355], whom I hardly thought so contemptible. It is moreover intended, not to last for a limited period, but indefinitely. The British Parliament has been reduced to the level of the German Reichstag. Though certainly not for long.

Notes

354. During the first half of April 1887, the House of Commons discussed the draft Crimes Bill for Ireland, which provided for the introduction there of a simplified judicial procedure with a view to quelling the growing peasant disturbances. The executive organs were to be granted the right to outlaw various societies, and sentences on charges of conspiracy, illegal meetings, insubordination, etc., could be passed by the judiciary without a jury. Mass meetings in protest against the Bill, held on April 11, 1887, in Hyde Park, were attended by 100,000-150,000 people. The meetings called by various organisations were addressed by speakers from the Liberal Party (Gladstone and others), the Social-Democratic Federation (Bateman, Williams, Burns and others), the Socialist League (Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Edward Aveling and others) and from other organisations.

In its report on the meeting entitled “Irish Crimes Bill, Great Demonstration in Hyde Park, Processions and Speeches” the Daily Telegraph said on April 12, 1887, that Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s speech had evoked lively interest and had been greeted enthusiastically.

355. Engels is referring to differences within the Liberal Party. In 1886, the wing opposed to the granting of self-government to Ireland split away to form the Liberal Unionist Party under J. Chamberlain. On most issues the Liberal Unionists supported the Conservatives.

Engels to J.L. Mahon

London, June 23, 1887

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

What you say about the leaders of the Trades Unions is quite trite. We have had to fight them from the beginning of the International. From them have sprung the MacDonalds, Burts, Cremers and Howells, and their success in the parliamentary line encourages the minor leaders to imitate their conduct. If you can get the Trades Unionists of the North to consider their Unions as a valuable means of organisation and of obtaining minor results, but no longer to regard “a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work” as the ultimate end, then the occupation of the leaders will be gone.

Engels to Sorge (Excerpt)

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

4 Cavendish Place, Eastbourne, August 8, 1887.

Dear Sorge:

...Affairs are on the move over there at last, and I must know my Americans badly if they do not astonish us all by the vastness of their movement, but also by the gigantic nature of the mistakes they make, through which they will finally work out their way to clarity. Ahead of everyone else in practice and still in swaddling-clothes in theory — that’s how they are, nor can it be otherwise. But it is a land without tradition (except for the religious), which has begun with the democratic republic, and a people full of energy as no other. The course of the movement will by no means follow the classic straight line, but travel in tremendous zigzags and seem to be moving backward at times, but that is of much less importance there than with us. Henry George was an unavoidable evil, but he will soon be obliterated, like Powderly or even McGlynn, whose popularity at the moment is quite understandable in that God-fearing country. In Autumn much will be — I won’t say cleared up, but more and more complicated, and the crisis will come closer. The annual elections, which force the masses to unite over and over again, are really most fortunate....

Yours,

F. Engels

Engels to Sorge (Excerpt)

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

London, September 16, 1887.

Dear Sorge:

... I am having a dreadful amount of commotion this summer: visits from all countries, which will keep on until the middle of October as I expect Bebel in about two weeks. I shall be able to look for and find Marx’s letter on George only when I begin putting things in order, that is, as soon as some new bookcases I have ordered to give me more room arrive. Then you'll get a translation at once. There’s no hurry — George must still compromise himself some more. His repudiation of the socialists is the greatest good fortune that could happen to us. Making him the standard-bearer last November was an unavoidable mistake for which we had to suffer. For the masses are only to be set in motion along the road that corresponds to each country and to the prevailing circumstances, which is usually a roundabout road. Everything else is of subordinate importance, if only the actual arousing takes place. But the mistakes unavoidably made in doing this are paid for every time. And in this case it was to be feared that making the founder of a sect the standard-bearer would burden the movement with the follies of the sect for years to come. By expelling the founders of the movement, establishing his sect as the special, orthodox, George sect, and proclaiming his narrow-mindedness as the borne of the whole movement, George saves the latter and ruins himself.

The movement itself will, of course, still go through many and disagreeable phases, disagreeable particularly for those who live in the country and have to suffer them. But I am firmly convinced that things are now going ahead over there, and perhaps more rapidly than with us, notwithstanding the fact that the Americans will learn almost exclusively in practice for the time being, and not so much from theory.

Yours,

F. E.

1888

Engels to Ion Nadejde. 4 January

Engels to Nikolal Danielson. 5 January

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 7 January

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 10 January

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 10 January

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 10 January

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 23 January

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 7 February

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 12 February

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 19 February,

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 22 February

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wlschnewetsky. 22 February

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 23 February

Engels to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuls. 23 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 25 February

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 29 February

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 17 March

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 19 March

Engels to Margaret Harkness. c. 1 April

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 10-11 April

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 11 April

Engels to August Bebel. 12 April

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 16 April

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 20 April

Engels to Gabriel Deville. 27 April

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 29 April

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 2 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 9 May

Engels to Eleanor Marx-Aveling. 10 May

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 10 May

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 16 May

Engels to Amand Goegg. 2 June

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 3 June

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 15 June

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 30 June

Engels to Karl Kautsky. before 6 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 6 July

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 11 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 15 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 23 July

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 28 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 30 July

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 4 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 6 August

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 9 August

Engels to Hermann Engels. 9 August

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 28 August

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 31 August

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 31 August

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 4 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 5 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 10 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 11 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 12 September

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 18 September

Engels to The Editor of The New Yorker Volkszeitung. 18 September

Engels to The Editor of The Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung. 18 September

Engels to Hermann Engels. 28 September

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 8 October

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 10 October

Engels to Louise Kautsky. 11 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 13 October

Engels to Nikolal Danielson. 15 October

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 17 October

Engels to August Bebel. 25 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 24 November

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 4 December

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 15 December

Engels to E Walter. 21 December

Engels To Ion Nadejde

In Jassy

London, 4 January 1888

122 Regent’s Park Road, N. W.

Source: MECW Volume 48, pp 132-135;

First published: in the language of the original (Romanian), in Contemporanul, No. 6, 1888;

Written in French.

Dear Citizen,

My friend Karl Kautsky, editor of the Neue Zeit, has sent me several consecutive numbers of La Revista Sociala and of Contemporanul containing, amongst other things, your translations of some of my works, in particular my Origin of the Family, etc. Allow me to proffer my sincere thanks for the trouble you have been so good as to take in making these writings accessible to the Romanian public. In addition to the honour you have thus done me, you have also rendered me, personally, the service of enabling me at long last to learn something of your language. I say at long last because, almost fifty years ago, I tried to do this, if in vain, with the help of the Grammaire comparée des langues romanes by Diez. Recently I succeeded in getting hold of Cionca’s little grammar but, having no texts to read and no dictionary, I did not get on very well. But with your translation I have been able to make some progress, the original text and the Latin and Slav etymology having taken the place of the dictionary and now, thanks to you, I can say that Romanian is no longer, for me, a completely unknown language. However, if you could tell me of a passable dictionary, whether Romanian-German or Romanian-French or -Italian, you would be doing me another signal service; for it would help me the better to understand your original articles and the pamphlets Ce vor socialistii romîni? and Karl Marx si economistii nostri, which Kautsky likewise sent me.

From these I have, with much pleasure, gained the conviction that the socialists of your country have adopted in their programme the fundamental principles of the theory formulated by my late friend Karl Marx – a theory which has succeeded in welding together into a single fighting force the vast majority of European and American socialists. At the time of that great thinker’s death, the social and political situation, and the progress being made by our Party in all civilised countries, enabled him to close his eyes in the conviction that his efforts to unite the proletarians of the two worlds into one big army and under the same flag would ultimately be crowned with success. But if only he had been able to catch a glimpse of the immense strides we have since made in America no less than in Europe!

So great have been those strides that, for the European party at any rate, a common international policy has become imperative. In this regard, I again have the satisfaction of seeing that you agree, in principle, with ourselves and with the large majority of western socialists. Your translation of my article ‘The Political Situation in Europe’, as also your letter to the Editor of the Neue Zeit, are proof enough of this.

Indeed we are all confronted by the same great obstacle that is hampering the free development of all the nations and of each individual nation; in the absence of that development we could not embark upon, still less accomplish, social revolution in the various countries merely by means of mutual cooperation. That obstacle is the old Holy Alliance between the three assassins of Poland, led since 1815 by Russian Tsarism and surviving until today despite occasional domestic squabbles. It was founded in 1815 to combat the revolutionary spirit of the French people; in 1871 it was ratified by the annexation of Alsace, which turned Germany into the slave of Tsarism and the Tsar into the arbiter of Europe; in 1888 it is maintained for the purpose of crushing the revolutionary spirit within the three empires – the national aspirations no less than the political and social movements of the working classes. Since Russia enjoys a virtually impregnable strategic position, Russian Tsarism forms the nub of that alliance, great repository of all European reaction. To topple Tsarism, to destroy that incubus which lies heavy on the whole of Europe, such, in my eyes, is the first condition for the emancipation of the nationalities of central and eastern Europe. Once Tsarism has been crushed, the nefarious power represented today by Bismarck will in turn crumble. Austria will fall to pieces, having lost its only raison d’etre, that of preventing by its very existence the annexation by conquering Tsarism of the scattered nations in the Carpathians and the Balkans. Poland will be reborn, Little Russia will be free to choose its political position, the Romanians, the Magyars and the South Slavs will be able to settle their own affairs and their new boundaries amongst themselves, unhampered by any foreign meddling and, finally, the noble nation of Great Russia, no longer engaged in pursuing chimerical conquest for the benefit of Tsarism, will be free to carry out its true civilising mission in Asia and to develop its vast intellectual resources in exchanges with the West, instead of squandering the best of its blood on the scaffold or in the katorga.

You in Romania must know what Tsarism is, having had more than enough experience of it through Kiselev’s ‘réglement organique’, through the intervention of 1848, through the theft-perpetrated not once, but twice – of Bessarabia, through the innumerable invasions of your country, a mere Russian staging-post, no more, on the way to the Bosphorus, and through the sure knowledge that your independent existence will cease on the day the Tsar fulfils his dream-the conquest of Constantinople.

At this moment the alliance appears to have disintegrated and war to be imminent. But even if war does come, it will be merely in order to make recalcitrant Prussia and Austria toe the line. I hope that peace will be maintained: in such a war it would be impossible to sympathise with any of the combatants; rather, were such a thing possible, one would wish that all should be beaten. It would be a terrible war – but, come what may, everything will eventually turn to the advantage of the socialist movement and bring nearer the accession of the working class.

Pray excuse these elucidations, but just now I could not well write to a Romanian without expressing an opinion on these burning questions. What it boils down to is this: revolution in Russia at this moment would save Europe from the horrors of a general war and would usher in universal social revolution.

Since your relations with the German socialists, newspaper exchange, etc., leave something to be desired, I would gladly do for you whatever can.

With fraternal greetings,

E Engels

Engels To Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

London, 5 January 1888

Source: MECW Volume 48, pp 135-137;

First published: in Russian, in the magazine Minuvshiye gody, No. 2, St Petersburg, 1908;.

Dear Sir,

I have removed and my new address is: Mrs Rosher, Cottesloe, Burton Road, Kilburn, London N. W. There is no number, Cottesloe being the name of the house.

I have at once ordered from my bookseller here the work of Dr Keussler. Even if the first volumes are based on imperfect materials I have seen enough of the work of your Zemstvos to know that the resume of them must contain immensely valuable material and, being written in German, prove a perfect revelation to Occidentals. I shall take good care that these materials are made use of.

I am afraid your land-bank for the nobility will have about the same effect as the Prussian land-banks have had. There the nobility took up loans under pretext of improving their estates, but really spent most of the money in keeping up their habitual style of living, in gambling, trips to Berlin and the provincial chefs-lieux etc. For the nobility considered it their first duty standesgemass zu leben, and the first duty of the state seemed to them to enable them to do so. And so, in spite of all banks, of all the enormous direct and indirect money-presents made to them by the state, the Prussian nobles are over head and ears indebted to the Jews, and no raising of the import duties on agricultural produce will save them. And I remember one well-known half-German Russian, attached illegitimately to the Russian nobility, finding these Prussian nobles still too stingy. When, on arriving from one shore to another, he saw them at home he exclaimed: why these people try to save money while with us a man would be considered the meanest of the mean unless he spent half as much again as his income! If this be really the principle of the Russian nobility, then I wish them joy of their banks.

The peasants’ bank too seems similar to the Prussian peasants’ banks, and it is almost inconceivable how difficult it is for some people to see that all fresh sources of credit opened up to landed proprietors (small or large) must result in enslaving them to the victorious capitalist.

My eyes still require des ménagements, but anyhow I hope in a short time, say next month, to be able to resume my work on the 3rd volume; unfortunately I cannot as yet make any promises as to the time of finishing it.

The English translation has sold and is selling very well, indeed surprisingly well for a book of that size and class; the publisher is enchanted with his speculation. The critics are on the other hand very, very much below the average low level. Only one good article in the Athenaeum ; the rest either merely give extracts from the preface or, if trying to tackle the book itself, are unutterably poor. The fashionable theory just now here is that of Stanley Jevons according to which value is determined by utility, i.e. Tauschwert-Gebrauchswert and on the other hand by the limit of supply (i.e. the cost of production), which is merely a confused and circuitous way of saying that value is determined by supply and demand. Vulgar Economy everywhere! The second great literary organ here, the Academy, has not yet spoken.

The sale of the German edition of I and II volumes goes on very well. There are a great many articles written about the book and its theories, an extract, or rather independent reproduction in: Karl Marx’s Ökonomische Lehren von K. Kautsky, not bad, though not always quite correct, I will send it you. Then a miserable apostate Jew Georg Adler, Privatdozent in Breslau, has written a big book, the title of which I forget, to prove Marx wrong, but it is simply a scurrilous and ridiculous pamphlet by which the author wants to call attention – the attention of the ministry and bourgeoisie – on himself and his importance. I have asked all my friends not to notice it. Indeed if any miserable impotent fellow wants to faire de la réclame for himself, he attacks our author.

Friends in Paris have doubted the accuracy of your very sad news about Mr Mutual. Could you give me in some way or other any particulars of this event?’

I enclose a little thing published some years ago.

Yours sincerely,

P. W Rosher

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

In Rochester

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, January 7, 1888

A war, on the other hand, would throw us back for years. Chauvinism would swamp everything, for it would be a fight for existence. Germany would put about five million armed men into the field, or ten per cent. of the population, the others about four to five per cent., Russia relatively less. But there would be from ten to fifteen million combatants. I should like to see how they are to be fed; it would be a devastation like the Thirty Years' War. And no quick decision could be arrived at, despite the colossal fighting forces. For France is protected on the north-eastern and south-eastern frontiers by very extensive fortifications and the new constructions in Paris are a model. So it will last a long time, and Russia cannot be taken by storm either. If, therefore, everything goes according to Bismarck's desires, more will be demanded of the nation than ever before and it is possible enough that partial defeats and the dragging out of the decisive war would produce an internal upheaval. But if the Germans were defeated from the first or forced into a prolonged defensive, then the thing would certainly start.

If the war was fought out to the end without internal disturbances a state of exhaustion would supervene such as Europe has not experienced for two hundred years. American industry would then conquer all along the line and would force us all up against the alternatives: either retrogression to nothing but agriculture for home consumption (American corn forbids anything else) or -- social transformation. I imagine, therefore, that the plan is not to push things to extremities, to more than a sham war. But once the first shot is fired, control ceases, the horse can take the bit between its teeth.

Engels To Florence Kelly-Wischnewetzky

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 350;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

February 22, 1888

The stupidity of the present Tory government is appalling — if old Disraeli was alive, he would box their ears right and left. But this stupidity helps on matters wonderfully. Home Rule for Ireland and for London is now the cry here; the latter a thing which the Liberals fear even more than the Tories do. The working class element is getting more and more exasperated, through the stupid Tory provocations, is getting daily more. conscious of its strength at the ballot-box, and more penetrated by the socialist leaven.

Engels To Wilhelm Liebknecht

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 350-51;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

February 29, 1888

Have heard nothing of the Irish tricolour to which you refer. Irish flags in Ireland and here are simply green with a golden harp, but without a crown (in the British coat-of-arms the harp wears a crown). In the Fenian days, 1865-67, many were green and orange to show the Orangemen of the North [356] that they would not be destroyed, but accepted as brothers. However, no question of that any more.

Notes

356. Orange Lodges or Orangemen (the Orangeist Order), named after William III, Prince of Orange — a terrorist organisation, set up by the landlords and Protestant clergy in Ireland in 1795 to fight against the national liberation movement of the Irish people. The Order united ultra-reactionary English and Irish elements from all layers of society and systematically incited Protestants against the Irish Catholics. The Orangemen had a particularly great influence in Northern Ireland, where the majority of the population were Protestants.

Engels to Sorge

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

Boston, August 3l, 1888.

Dear Sorge: Received the newspaper the day before yesterday and your letters today. Thanks! But I am sorry that your throat is not in shape yet, and, it seems, has even taken over my cough. If our visit has made us well and you sick, it is a very unpleasant business.

Yesterday we were in Concord, visiting the reformatory and the town. We liked both of them very much. A prison in which the prisoners read novels and scientific books, establish clubs, assemble and discuss without warders present, eat meat and fish twice daily with bread ad libitum, with ice-water in every workroom and fresh running water in every cell, the cells decorated with pictures, etc., where the inmates, dressed like ordinary workers, look one straight in the eye without the hangdog look of the usual criminal prisoner – that isn’t to be seen in all Europe; for that the Europeans, as I told the superintendent, are not bold enough. And he answered in true American fashion, “Well, we try to make it pay, and it does pay.” I gained great respect for the Americans there.

Concord is exceedingly beautiful, graceful, as one wouldn’t have expected after New York and even after Boston; it’s a splendid hamlet to be buried in, but not alive! In four weeks there I should perish or go crazy.

My nephew, Willie Burns, is a splendid fellow, clever, energetic, in the movement body and soul. He is getting along well; he works on the Boston and Providence R.R. (now the Old Colony), earns $12.00 a week, and has a nice wife (brought along from Manchester) and three children. He wouldn’t go back to England for any money; he is exactly the youngster for a country like America.

Rosenberg’s resignation and the strange debate on the Sozialist in the Volkszeitung seem to be symptoms of collapse.

We hear but little and seldom of Europe here, merely through the New York World and Herald.

Today Aveling will have finished all his work in America. The rest of the time is his own. Whether we'll go to Chicago is still uncertain; we have plenty of time for the rest of the program.

Cordial greetings to your wife and to you from all of us, and especially from your

F. Engels

Engels to Sorge

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

Montreal, September 10, 1888.

Dear Sorge:

We arrived here yesterday, after having had to turn about between Toronto and Kingston because of a storm (it was merely a trifling breeze) and tie up in Port Hope. Thus the two days from Toronto to here turned into three. The St. Lawrence and the rapids are very pretty. Canada is richer in ruined houses than any other country but Ireland. We are trying here to understand the Canadian French — that language beats Yankee English hollow. This evening we leave for Plattsburg and then into the Adirondacks and possibly to the Catskills, so that we can hardly be back in New York by Sunday. Since we must board our ship Tuesday evening and still have to see various sights in New York, while we must all be together during these last few days more than would otherwise be necessary, Schorlemmer and I will not be able to move out to you in Hoboken, much as we regret it, but must go to the St. Nicholas with the Avelings. In any event we are coming out to visit you as soon as we get there. It is a strange transition from the States to Canada. First one imagines that one is in Europe again, and then one thinks one is in a positively retrogressing and decaying country. Here one sees how necessary the feverish speculative spirit of the Americans is for the rapid development of a new country (if capitalist production is taken as a basis); and in ten years this sleepy Canada will be ripe for annexation — the farmers in Manitoba, etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half-annexed already socially — hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all on the American pattern. And they may tug and resist as much as they like; the economic necessity of an infusion of Yankee blood will have its way and abolish this ridiculous boundary line — and when the time comes, John Bull will say “Amen” to the matter.

Yours,

F. E.

Engels To Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

London, 15 October 1888

Source: MECW Volume 48, pp 228-230;

First published: in Russian, in Minuvshiye gody, No. 2, 1908.

Dear Sir,

I was prevented from replying to your kind letters of 8/20 January and 3/15 June – as also to a great many other letters – first by a weakness of my eyes which made it impossible for me to write at my desk for more than two hours a day, and thus necessitated an almost complete neglect of work and correspondence, and second by a journey to America during August and September from which I am only just returned. My eyes are better but as I now shall take in hand Volume III and finish it, I must still be careful not to overwork them, and consequently my friends must excuse me if my letters are not too long and not too frequent.

The disquisitions in your first letter on the relation between rate of surplus value and rate of profits are highly interesting and no doubt of great value for grouping statistics; but it is not in this way that our author attacks the problem. You suppose, in your formula, that every manufacturer keeps all the surplus value, which he, in the first hand, appropriates. Now upon that supposition, merchant’s capital and banker’s capital would be impossible, because they would not make any profit. The profit of a manufacturer therefore cannot represent all the surplus value he has extracted from his workmen.

On the other hand, your formula may serve to calculate, approximately, the composition of different capitals in different industries, under the rule of a common and equal rate of profit. I say may, because I have not at this moment materials at hand from which to verify the theoretical formula established by you.

You wonder why in England political economy is in such a pitiful state. It is the same everywhere; even classical economy, nay, even the most vulgar Free Trade Hausierburschen are looked upon with contempt by the still more vulgar ‘superior’ beings who fill the university chairs of economy. That is the fault of our author, to a great extent; he has taught people to see the dangerous consequences of classical economy; they find that no science at all, on this field at least, is the safe side of the question. And they have so well succeeded in blinding the ordinary philistine, that there are at the present moment four people in London, calling themselves ‘Socialist’ who claim to have refuted our author completely by opposing to his theory that of – Stanley Jevons!

Paris friends insist upon saying that Mr Mutual is not dead; I have no means of testing their information.

I have read with great interest your physiological observations upon exhaustion by prolonged labour time and the quantity of potential energy in the shape of food required to replace the exhaustion. To the statement of Ranke quoted by you I have to make a slight exception: if the 1,000,000 kgmetres in food merely replaced the amount of heat and mechanical work done, it will still be insufficient, for it does not then replace the wear and tear of muscle and nerve; for that not only heat-producing food is required but albumen and this cannot be measured in kgmetres alone, as the animal body is incapable of building it up from the elements.

I do not know the two books of Ed. Young and Phil. Bevan, but there must be some mistake in the statement that spinners and weavers in the Cotton Industry in America receive $90-120 a year. That represents $2 a week, – 8/- sterling, but in reality equals, in purchasing power, less than 5/- in England. From all I have heard, the wages of spinners and weavers in America are nominally higher but in reality only fully equal to those in England; that would make them about $5-6 a week, corresponding to 12/- to 16/- in England. Remember that spinners and weavers now are all women or boys of 15-18 years. As to Kautsky’s statement, he made the mistake of treating dollars as if they were pounds sterling; in order to reduce them to marks, he multiplied by 20 instead of by 5, thus obtaining fourfold the correct amount. The figures from the Census (Compendium of the 10th census of the United States, 1880, Washington, 1883;1 p. 1125, specific Cotton Manufacture) are:

Operatives and officers 174,659

Deduct clerks, managers etc. 2,115

172,544 operatives

(Men 59,685 (over 16 years)

boys 16,107 (under 16 years)

women 84,539 (over 15 years)

girls 13,213 (under 15 years))

172,544, total wages $42,040,510 or $243.06 per head per annum, which agrees with my estimate given above, as what the men get more will be made up by what girls and boys get less.

To prove to you to what depths of degradation economical science has fallen, Lujo Brentano has published a lecture on Die Klassische Nationalokonomie (Leipzig, 1888), in which he proclaims: general or theoretical economy is worth noting, but special or practical economy is everything. Like natural science (!), we must limit ourselves to the description of facts; such descriptions are of infinitely higher value than all a priori deductions. ‘Like natural science’! That is impayable in the century of Darwin, of Mayer, Joule and Clausius, of evolution and the transformation of energy!

Thanks for the No. of Russkiye Vedomosti with the interesting article on the interference with the statistical work of the Zemstvos. It is a great pity that this valuable work should be interrupted.

Very sincerely yours,

P. W Rosher

Engels to Margaret Harkness

In London

Abstract

Written: April, 1888;

Source: Selected Correspondence;

Publisher: (unknown);

First Published: Moscow : 1953;

Transcribed: Dougal McNeill in 2000;

HTML Markup: Nate Schmolze.

London, early April

Dear Miss Harkness,

I thank you very much for sending me your “City Girl” through Messrs Vizetelly. I have read it with the greatest pleasure and avidity. It is indeed, as my friend Eichhoff your translator calls it, ein kleines Kunstwerk... [a small work of art. DM]

If I have anything to criticize, it would be that perhaps, after all, the tale is not quite realistic enough. Realism, to my mind, implies, besides truth of detail, the truthful reproduction of typical characters under typical circumstances. Now your characters are typical enough, as far as they go; but perhaps the circumstances which surround them and make them act, are not perhaps equally so. In the “City Girl” the working class figures are a passive mass, unable to help itself and not even showing (making) any attempt at striving to help itself. All attempts to drag it out of its torpid misery come from without, from above. Now if this was a correct description about 1800 or 1810, in the days of Saint-Simon and Robert Owen, it cannot appear so in 1887 to a man who for nearly fifty years has had the honour of sharing in most of the fights of the militant proletariat. The rebellious reaction of the working class against the oppressive medium which surrounds them, their attempts - convulsive, half conscious or conscious - at recovering their status as human beings, belong to history and must therefore lay claim to a place in the domain of realism.

I am far from finding fault with your not having written a point-blank socialist novel, a “Tendenzroman” [social-problem novel. DM], as we Germans call it, to glorify the social and political views of the authors. This is not at all what I mean. The more the opinions of the author remain hidden, the better for the work of art. The realism I allude to may crop out even in spite of the author’s opinions. Let me refer to an example. Balzac, whom I consider a far greater master of realism than all the Zolas passés, présents et a venir [past, present and future], in “La Comédie humaine” gives us a most wonderfully realistic history of French ‘Society’, especially of le monde parisien [the Parisian social world], describing, chronicle-fashion, almost year by year from 1816 to 1848 the progressive inroads of the rising bourgeoisie upon the society of nobles, that reconstituted itself after 1815 and that set up again, as far as it could, the standard of la viellie politesse française [French refinement]. He describes how the last remnants of this, to him, model society gradually succumbed before the intrusion of the vulgar monied upstart, or were corrupted by him; how the grand dame whose conjugal infidelities were but a mode of asserting herself in perfect accordance with the way she had been disposed of in marriage, gave way to the bourgeoisie, who horned her husband for cash or cashmere; and around this central picture he groups a complete history of French Society from which, even in economic details (for instance the rearrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together. Well, Balzac was politically a Legitimist; his great work is a constant elegy on the inevitable decay of good society, his sympathies are all with the class doomed to extinction. But for all that his satire is never keener, his irony never bitterer, than when he sets in motion the very men and women with whom he sympathizes most deeply - the nobles. And the only men of whom he always speaks with undisguised admiration, are his bitterest political antagonists, the republican heroes of the Cloître Saint-Méry, the men, who at that time (1830-6) were indeed the representatives of the popular masses. That Balzac thus was compelled to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices, that he saw the necessity of the downfall of his favourite nobles, and described them as people deserving no better fate; and that he saw the real men of the future where, for the time being, they alone were to be found - that I consider one of the greatest triumphs of Realism, and one of the grandest features in old Balzac.

I must own, in your defence, that nowhere in the civilized world are the working people less actively resistant, more passively submitting to fate, more hébétés [bewildered] than in the East End of London. And how do I know whether you have not had very good reasons for contenting yourself, for once, with a picture of the passive side of working-class life, reserving the active side for another work?

Engels to Sorge

Written: June 29, 1888;

Source: Science and Society Volume II, No. 2, Spring 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins;

HTML Mark-up: Andy Blunden and Sally Ryan.

London,

June 29, 1888.

Dear Sorge:

My evening at work has been ruined by visitors, and that gives me some free time to write you.

The criticism of Henry George that Marx sent you is such a masterpiece in content and so homogeneous in style that it would be a pity to weaken it by adding the desultory marginal notes written in English in Marx’s copy. These will always remain for eventual use later. The whole letter to you was written with a view to subsequent publication verbatim, as Marx usually did in such cases. Thus you are not committing any indiscretion in having it printed. If it is to be printed in English, I'll translate it for you, since the translation of the Manifesto again shows that there doesn’t seem to be anyone over there who can translate our German, at least, into literary, grammatical English. That requires training as a writer in both languages, and training not merely in the daily press. It is dreadfully hard to translate the Manifesto; the Russian translations are still by far the best I have seen.

The third edition of Capital is giving me a tremendous amount of work. We have a copy in which Marx notes the changes and additions to be made according to the French edition, but all the detail work is yet to be done. I have completed it as far as “Accumulation,” but here an almost total reworking of the whole theoretical section is involved. Then there is the responsibility. For the French translation is in part a simplification of the German, and Marx would never have written like that in German. Moreover, the bookseller is pressing me.

Before I finish with it I cannot think of undertaking Volume II. There exist at least four versions of the beginning; that is how often Marx began it, always being interrupted in editing the definitive text by illness. I cannot say as yet how the arrangement and the conclusion of the last one, dated 1878, will agree with the first, dating from 1870.

Almost everything dating from the period before 1848 has been saved. Not only the manuscripts finished by him and me at the time are almost complete (except for those gnawed away by mice), but so is the correspondence. Everything since 1849 is complete, of course, and the material after 1862 is even classified to some degree. There is also very extensive written material on the International, enough, I think, for its whole history, but I haven’t been able to look it over more closely.

There are three or four mathematical manuscripts, too. I once showed your Adolf an example of Marx’s new foundation of the differential calculus.

If not for the voluminous American and Russian material (more than two cubic meters of books on Russian statistics alone), Volume II would have been printed long ago. These detailed studies detained him for years. As always, everything was to be complete down to the present day, and now all that has come to nought, with the exception of his excerpts, which I hope will contain, as was his custom, many critical remarks that can he used for the notes of Volume II....

I have already read five sheets of the final proofs of the third edition; the man promises to deliver three sheets a week.

Yours,

F. E.

I simply haven’t the time to answer the many long letters sent me by little Hepner. His reports always interest me, though mixed with much personal gossip and written with the superiority of one who has just landed. You must therefore convey my excuses to him.

Schevitsch has replied to me “dignifiedly,” regretting my “pettiness.” Dignity sits well on him. He'll get no answer.

Nor will Most, who must confirm everything I assert, and for that very reason is furious. I believe he will find support in that sectarian land, America, and cause trouble for some time. But that is precisely the character of the American movement: that all mistakes must be experienced in practice. If American energy and vitality were backed by European theoretical clarity, the business would be finished over there in ten years. But that is impossible historically.

1889

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 2 January

Engels to August Bebel. 5 January

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 10 January

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 11 January

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 12 January

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky. 12 January

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 14 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 18 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 28 January

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 31 January

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 4 February

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 7 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 11 February

Engels to John Lincoln Mahon. 14 February

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 20 February

Engels to John Lincoln Mahon. 21 February

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 23 February

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 12 March

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 12 March

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 21 March

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 23 March

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 25 March

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 27 March

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 1 April

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 4 April

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 5 April

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 10 April

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 17 April

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 20 April

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 30 April

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 1 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 1 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 2 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 7 May

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 11 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 11 May

Engels to Eleanor Marx-Aveling. 13 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 14 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 16 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 17 May

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 21 May

Engels to A F Robinson. 21 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 24 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 25 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 27 May

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 8 June

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 11 June

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 12 June

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 15 June

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 28 June

Engels to Nikolal Danielson. 4 July

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 5 July

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 9 July

Engels to Nikolal Danielson. 15 July

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 17 July

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 20 July

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 20 July

Engels to Valerian Smirnov. 25 July

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 17 August

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 17 August

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 22 August

Engels to Hermann Engels. 22 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 27 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 1 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 9 September

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 15 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 26 September

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 3 October

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 3 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 8 October

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 12 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 17 October

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 17 October

Engels to Max Hildebrand. 22 October

Engels to 0 A Ellissen. 22 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 29 October

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 29 October

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 9 November

Engels to August Bebel. 15 November

Engels to J H Johnson, J Johnson and G B Ellis. 15 November

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 16 November

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 16 November

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 18 November

Engels to Jules Guesde. 20 November

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 30 November

Engels to Victor Adler. 4 December

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 5 December

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 7 December

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 9 December

Engels to Gerson Trier. 18 December

Engels to Natalie Liebknecht. 24 December

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 30 December

Engels To Karl Kautsky

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953, pp. 481-86;

Transcribed: by Daniel Gaido.

Note by the Transcriber: This letter by Engels is a review of Karl Kautsky’s Class Antagonisms in the Year 1789: A Contribution to the Centenary of the Great Revolution, originally published as a series of articles in the journal Die Neue Zeit. In that work, Kautsky described the sans culottes’ policy of 1793-1794 as one of “Revolution in Permanenz.” Kautsky’s work was then separately published as a brochure under the title Die Klassengegensätze von 1789: Zum hundertjährigen Gedenktag der großen Revolution. Stuttgart: Dietz, 1889. A French translation is available, which was recently republished by the CERMTRI: Karl Kautsky, La Lutte des classes en France en 1789 Paris: G. Jacques, 1901, traduit par Édouard Berth, Bibliothèque d’études socialistes, No. 3; reprinted in: Les cahiers du CERMTRI, No. 95, Paris: Centre d’Études et de Recherches sur les Mouvements Trotskyste et Révolutionnaires Internationaux, 1999.

London, February 20, 1889

Dear Kautsky,

I am returning herewith the Neue Zeit article with cursory marginal comments. Main shortcoming: lack of good material – Taine and Tocqueville, idolized by the philistines, are inadequate here. If you had done the job here you would have found quite different material – a better kind second-hand and loads of it first-hand. Besides, the best work on the peasants is by N. Kareyev [The Peasants and the Peasant Question in France during the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century – Ed.] in Russian.

However if you can get there Moreau de Jonnès, “The Economic and Social System of France from Henry IV to Louis XIV,” Paris 1868, you will find it useful reading.

Section II, p. 3. Here there is missing a lucid exposition of how the absolute monarchy came into existence as a naturally evolved compromise between nobility and bourgeoisie and how it therefore had to protect certain interests of both sides and distribute favours to them. In this process the nobility – retired politically – got as its share the plundering of the peasantry and of the state treasury and indirect political influence through the court, the army, the church, and the higher administrative authorities, while the bourgeoisie received protection through tariffs, monopolies and a relatively orderly administration of public affairs and justice. If you start with these things much will become clearer and easier.

Another thing missing in this section is mention of the judicial nobility (noblesse de robe) and the jurists – la robe – in general, who actually also formed a privileged estate and possessed great power in the parliaments – vis-à-vis the Crown. In their political capacity they acted as the defenders of the institutions that limited the authority of the Crown, hence sided with the people, but in their judicial capacity they were corruption incarnate (cf. the Mémoirs of Beaumarchais). What you say later on about this gang is not enough.

III. p. 49. Cf. Note I from Kareyev enclosed.

On p. 50 “this kind of bourgeois” suddenly transforms himself into “the” bourgeois par excellence, which sharply contravenes the stratification of the bourgeois class, the subject under discussion. You generalize altogether too much, on account of which you often become absolute where the greatest relativity is imperative.

IV. p. 54. Here it would all the same be proper to make some mention of how these outlawed plebeians, who are excluded from any society based on class estates and therefore relatively shorn of rights, gradually arrived only during the revolution at what you call sansculottism (one more ism!) and what part they played. Then you will be able to surmount the difficulties you are bombarding on p. 53 with vague expressions and mysterious hints about new modes of production. Then it will be plain that the bourgeoisie was too cowardly in this case as always to uphold its own interests; that starting with the Bastille events the plebs had to do all the work for it; that without the intervention of the plebs on July 14, October 5-6, August 10, September 2, etc., the bourgeoisie would have succumbed to the ancien régime each time; that the Coalition leagued with the Court would have suffocated the revolution and that it was therefore these plebeians alone who carried out the revolution; but that this could not have been done without these plebeians attributing to the revolutionary demands of the bourgeoisie a meaning which they did not have, without their pushing equality and fraternity to such extremes that the bourgeois meaning of these slogans was turned completely upside down, because this meaning, driven to its extreme, changed into its opposite; that this plebeian equality and fraternity was necessarily a sheer dream at a time when it was a question of doing the exact opposite, and that as always – the irony of history – this plebeian conception of the revolutionary watchwords became the most powerful lever for carrying into reality this opposite: bourgeois equality – before the law, and fraternity – in exploitation.

I would say much less about the new mode of production. An enormous gulf always separates it from the facts you speak of, and presented in this direct form it appears as a pure abstraction which does not make the thing clearer but rather more obscure.

As for the terror it was essentially a war measure so long as there was any sense to it. The class or the factional group of the class which alone could safeguard the victory of the revolution not only maintained itself in power by this means (that was the least after victory over the revolts) but ensured itself freedom of motion, elbow-room, the possibility of concentrating forces at the decisive spot, the border. At the end of 1793 that was already fairly secure; 1794 started well. French armies scored progress almost everywhere. The Commune with its extreme course became superfluous. Its propagation of revolution became a hindrance to Robespierre as well as to Danton both of whom, but each in his own way, wanted peace. From this conflict of three elements Robespierre emerged victorious, but now terror became in his hands a means of self-preservation and thus absurd. On June 26 Jourdan at Fleurus laid the whole of Belgium at the feet of the republic. Thereby terror became untenable. On July 27 Robespierre fell and the bourgeois orgy began.

“Well-being for all on the basis of labour” still expresses much too definitely the aspirations of the plebeian fraternité of that time. No one could tell what they wanted until long after the fall of the Commune Babeuf gave the thing definite shape. Whereas the Commune with its aspirations for fraternity came too early, Babeuf in his turn came too late.

P. 100. Beggars. See Note II from Kareyev.

The section on the peasantry suffers most because of the lack of all but the most ordinary sources.

The blunders made by Ranke you showed up well. [In the above article Kautsky criticized Ranke’s work Epochs of Modern History. – Ed.] Unfortunately you did not make use of the Austrian publications with their objections, which are given by Sybel. Much relating to the second partition of Poland, etc. could still be dug up out of them and as they are based on archive material they are absolutely fit to use....

Note I. Fourth estate.

The conception of a fourth estate alongside the first, second, and third arose very early in the revolution. At the very beginning appeared Dufourny de Villiers, “Mandate of the 4th estate, that of poor day labourers, invalids, indigents, etc., the estate of the disinherited,” April 25, 1789. But the fourth estate is mostly taken to mean the peasants. For example Noilliac, “The strongest of the pamphlets. The estate of the peasants in the States General, February 26, 1789,” p. 9: “Let us take the four estates from the Swedish constitution.”

Vertout, “Letter of a peasant to his priest on a new way of summoning the States General.” Sartrouville, 1789, p. 7: “I heard it said that in a certain northern country ... the estate of the peasantry is admitted to the States-Assembled.”

One also comes across other interpretations of the fourth estate. One pamphlet argues for a fourth estate of the merchants, another pleads for one of the judiciary, etc.

Kareyev, The Peasants and the Peasant Question in France in the Last Quarter of the Eighteenth Century, Moscow 1879, p. 327.

Note II. Beggars.

It is significant that the number of impoverished persons (nischich, nischyi means poorest of the poor) was greatest in the provinces which were considered the most fertile, because in these localities there were very few peasants who owned land.

But let the figures speak for themselves. In Argentré (Brittany) more than half of the population of 2,300 not earning a living in industry or trade can hardly keep the wolf from the door and over 500 people have been reduced to mendicancy. In Dainville (Artois) 60 out of 130 families are impoverished.

Normandy: In Saint Patrice 400 out of 1,500 members of the population and in Saint Laurent three-fourths of the 500 inhabitants live on alms (Taine). From the mandates of the Douai bailiwick we learn for instance that half of the 332 families in a village belonging to the Bouvignies parish live on charity alone and that in another village, of the Aix parish, 65 of the 143 families have been beggared, while in a third (Landus parish) about 100 out of 413 are indigent in the extreme, and so on. In the seneschalship of Puy en Vélay, according to the text of the mandate of the local clergy, 58,897 out of a total population of 120,000 are totally unable to pay any taxes of any kind whatsoever (Parliamentary Archive of 1787 to 1860. Vol. V, p. 467). In the villages of Carhaix District the picture was as follows: Frerogan – 10 well-to-do (doststochny), 10 impoverished, and 10 pauperized families. Motref – 47 families of means, 74 less substantial, 64 poor and day labourers.

Paule – 200 farms, most of which should by rights be called refuges for beggars (National Archives, Vol. IV, p. 17). The mandate of Marboeuf parish bewails the fact that of the 500 inhabitants about 100 are beggars (Boivin-Champeaux, Historical Notes on the Revolution in the Eure Department, 1872, p. 83). The peasants of the village of Harville relate that on account of unemployment a full third of them are utterly destitute (Petition of the inhabitants of the Harville commune, National Archives).

Nor were things any better in the towns. In 1787 Lyons had 30,000 pauperized workers. In Paris the population of 650,000 included 118,784 indigents (Taine, Vol. I, p. 507). In Rennes one out of three begged alms for a living and another third was constantly threatened with pauperization (Du Chatellier, Agriculture in Brittany, Paris 1863, p. 178). The little Jura town of Lons-de-Saunier was so pauperized that when the Constituent Assembly introduced qualifications for voters only 728 of its 6,518 inhabitants could be listed as active citizens (Sommier, History of the Revolution in the Jura, Paris 1846, p. 33). No wonder then that at the time of revolution charity cases were counted by the million. Thus a clerical pamphlet of 1791 stated that there were 6 million paupers in France (“Counsel to the Poor on the Present Revolution and on the Property of the Clergy,” p. 15), which however is somewhat exaggerated; but the figure of 1,200,000 paupers given for 1774 is perhaps not underrated (Duval, Mandates of the Marche, Paris 1873, p. 116).

(I thought you might like to have a few real illustrations.)

Kareyev, pp. 211-214.

If my remarks sound curt please consider that as being due solely to lack of time and marginal space on the paper. I had no time to compare sources, had to rely in everything on my memory – hence many things are not as definite as I would have liked them to be.

Engels To Paul Lafargue

At Le Perreux

London, 11 May 1889

First published: in English, in: F. Engels, P. et L. Lafargue, Correspondance, t II, Paris, 1956;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

My dear Lafargue,

We have never called you anything but ‘the so-called Marxists’ and I would not know how else to describe you. Should you have some other, equally succinct name, let us know and we shall duly and gladly apply it to you. But we cannot say ‘aggregate’, which no one here would understand, or anti-Possibilists, which you would find just as objectionable and which would not be accurate, being too all-embracing.

Tussy must have returned you your letter to the Star yesterday. Since Tussy’s translation of the Convocation had already been in the hands of the Star the day before that, your paraphrase of the said document stood no earthly chance of being inserted.

What we need are letters from Paris, sent direct to the Star, bearing the Paris postmark and refuting the Possibilist calumnies which appeared in Saturday’s and Tuesday’s editions, namely, that Boulé’s election campaign was run on Boulangist money, that Vaillant had acted as an ally of the Boulangists, etc. I should say that you could do this perfectly well without ruffling your newly-found dignity as the one and only Catholic Church in matters connected with French Socialism.

No other daily is so widely read by working men as the Star — the only one to which we have a measure of free access. In Paris, Massingham had Adolphe Smith for his guide and interpreter and was steered by him into the arms of Brousse and Co., who took possession of him, refused to let him go, made him tipsy with absinthe and vermouth, and thus succeeded in winning over the Star to the cause of their congress and making it swallow their lies. If you wish us to be of use to you over here, you must help us regain some influence over the Star by demonstrating that the course which it has been led to embark upon is a dangerous one and that, in fact, Brousse and Co. have been feeding it with lies. And here nothing will serve but letters of complaint about such articles, sent direct from Paris. Otherwise we shall be told as before that no one in Paris has complained, hence these things must be true.

Aside from the Star we have only the Labour Elector, a very obscure and distinctly shady paper which depends on money from unavowed sources and is therefore highly suspect. You could most assuredly do with a bit of publicity here in England, so bombard the Star with complaints — you, Vaillant, Longuet, Deville, Guesde and tutti quanti. But if you leave us in the lurch, you can’t complain if your congress is passed over in silence by the press and if the Possibilists are regarded over here as the only French Socialists and yourselves as a worthless clique of intriguers and nincompoops.

For the past three months Tussy and I have done virtually nothing but labour on your behalf; we had won the first battle with Bernstein’s pamphlet, when Liebknecht’s inertia and irresolution lost us in rapid succession all the positions we had previously gained. Now that we are back on the defensive and threatened with the loss of even those positions we originally held, it is very hard to find ourselves similarly abandoned by the French when a few letters, however short, arriving at the right moment, could prove so very effective. But if you are bent on losing all means of publicity in England at the very time when it could be of greatest moment to you, there’s nothing we can do about it; I, for one will certainly have learnt my lesson; I shall go back to Volume 3, abandoned for the past three months, and shall not be unduly upset if the congress comes to nothing.

To organise lodgings and eating-places for the delegates is an excellent idea — Bebel wrote and told me about it and, since Paris in July will be positively swarming with people, this is of the utmost importance.

We shall have Laura’s English translation printed. As for the German translation, one has appeared in the Sozialdemokrat of which one sentence towards the end was amended by Bernstein (No. 3 in your invitation) as being too dangerous for the Germans. Send the French text of the Convocation which is to be signed by everyone to Bebel and Liebknecht so that they can let you know what passages they cannot sign without compromising themselves in the eyes of the law, for otherwise you will run the risk of not getting any German signatures. I shall wait until I have heard from Bebel before printing the German translation here, and shall first submit to you the changes he suggests.

It is some time since Labusquière’s name has appeared in the Possibilist press — can he, too, have joined the ranks of the malcontents? The incipient disorganisation of the Possibilists is undoubtedly agreeable to ourselves, but our onslaughts upon them, combined with the congress, may well bring about a return to unity. In any case, the disintegration is not yet so far advanced as to make any impact on the Possibilists’ allies abroad.

Herewith cheque for £20. — As for Ferry’s coup d'état, it might well fall, for in 1889 the foot-slogger is much more of a Boulangist than he was a Republican when he disrupted MacMahon’s coup. The worthy Boulanger would not be so stupid as to evoke a call to arms over the High Court affair, but the same might not apply if there were to be a direct violation of the Constitution. That Ferry will not surrender power, direct or indirect, without a struggle, I can readily believe. But there is a risk.

Yours ever,

F. E.

Engels to Paul Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

May 17, 1889

Aveling’s play went off better than I had expected — it is a sketch, very well done, but ends — in Ibsen’s manner — without a solution and the public here is not accustomed to that. This piece was followed by another — by Baby Rose and someone else — a very free English version of Echegaray’s Conflictos entre dos deberes. [The Conflict of Two Duties] This one, being highly spiced with sensationalism, was very well received, although it is heavy and vulgar and to the English taste.

Engels To Laura Lafargue

At Le Perreux

London, 11 June 1889

Written: in English;

First published: in F. Engels, P. et L. Lafargue, Correspondance, t. II, Paris, 1956;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

My dear Laura,

At last, I can find a few minutes for a quiet chat with you. And first of all let me thank you for your charming invitation to Le Perreux for the Congress. But I am afraid I shall have as yet to delay accepting it. There are two things which I avoid visiting on principle, and only go to on compulsion: congresses and exhibitions. The din and throng of your ‘world’s fair’, to speak the slang of the respectable Britisher, is anything but an attraction for me, and from the Congress I must keep away in any case; that would launch me in a new agitation campaign, and I should come back here with a load of tasks, for the benefit of a variety of nationalities, that would keep me busy for a couple of years. Those things one cannot decline at a congress, and yet I must, if the 3rd volume is to see the light of day. For more than 3 months I have not been able to look at it, and it is too late now to begin before the holidays I intend taking; nor am I sure that my congress troubles are quite over. So if I do not come over to Le Perreux this year, aufgeschoben ist nicht aufgehoben, but this summer I shall take a little rest in a quiet seaside place and try to put myself in condition again to be able to smoke a cigar which I have not done for more than two months, about a gramme of tobacco every other day being as much as I can stand — but I sleep again, and a moderate drink does no longer affect me unpleasantly.

Here is a bit of news for Paul; Sam Moore gives us tonight a parting dinner, he sails on Saturday for the Niger, where, at Asába, in the interior of Africa, he will be Chief Justice of the Territories of the Royal Niger Company, Chartered and Limited, with six months’ leave to Europe every other year, good pay, and the expectation of returning in 8 years or so an independent man. It was chiefly in honour of Paul that he consented to become Lord Chief Justice of the Niger Niggers, the very cream of Nigrition Niger Nigerdom. We are all very sorry to lose him, but he has been looking out for something of the sort for more than a year and this is an excellent place. He owes his appointment not only to his legal qualifications, but very much, also, to his being an accomplished geologist and botanist and ex-volunteer officer — all qualities very valuable in a new country. He will have a botanical garden, and make a meteorological station; his judicial duties will mainly consist in punishing German smugglers of Bismarck’s potato spirit and of arms and ammunition. The climate is far better than its reputation, and his medical examination was highly satisfactory, the doctor telling him he would have a better chance than young men who kill themselves — out of pure ennui — with whisky and black harems. Thus when the 3rd volume comes out, a portion, at least, of it will be translated in Africa as I shall send him the advance sheets.

To return to our beloved congress. I consider these congresses to be unavoidable evils in the movement; people will insist on playing at congresses, and though they have their useful demonstrative side, and do good in bringing people of different countries together, it is doubtful whether le jeu vaut la chandelle when there are serious differences. But the persistent efforts of the Possibilists and Hyndmanites to sneak into the leadership of a new International, by means of their congresses, made a struggle unavoidable for us, and here is the only point in which I agree with Brousse: that it is the old split in the International over again, which now drives people into two opposite camps. On one side the disciples of Bakunin, with a different flag but with all the old equipment and tactics, a set of intriguers and humbugs who try to ‘boss’ the working class movement for their own private ends; on the other side the real working-class movement. And it was this, and this alone that made me take the matter up in such good earnest. Debates about details of legislation do not interest me to such a degree. But the position reconquered upon the Anarchists after 1873 was now attacked by their successors, and so I had no choice. Now we have been victorious, we have proved to the world that almost all Socialists in Europe are ‘Marxists’ (they will be mad they gave us that name!) and they are left alone in the cold with Hyndman to console them. And now I hope my services are no longer required.

As they have nobody to come to them, they fall back upon non-Socialist or half-Socialist Trades Unions and thus their congress will have a quite distinct character from ours. That makes the question of fusion a secondary one; two such congresses may sit side by side, without scandal.

My dear Laura, I was going to write a lot more, but I cannot see hardly, it is so foggy, and thus I had to interrupt for brighter intervals, until now it is post-time. So I can but enclose the cheque £10. — about which Paul writes.

As to money for Congress, the Germans ought to do something — if I can, will write to Paul about that tomorrow.

Ever yours

F. Engels

Engels To Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

London, 4 July 1889

First published: in: Minuvshiye gody, No. 2,1908;

Source: MECW, volume 48, p. 346-8.

My dear Sir,

I communicated to Mr Lafargue and to Mr Kautsky what you were kind enough to say as to their articles published in the Northern Review. Mr Lafargue, in consequence of this, has sent me an article on the Evolution of Property which he wishes me to forward to you and to request you to be good enough to offer it to the Editor of the Northern Review on the usual terms as to honorarium etc. I forward it to you today by Book Post, registered.

The news you are enabled to give us about the state of Mr M[utual]’s health are very cheering, and in full agreement with what we heard from other sources. A man with such a tremendous constitution is sure to pull through and one fine morning we may hope to see him here again restored to full youthful health.

The third volume has lain fallow for the last three months in consequence of various unavoidable circumstances, and as the summer season is always a very idle time, I am afraid I shall not be able to do much at it before September or October. The section on Banks and Credit offers considerable difficulties. The leading principles are announced clearly enough, but the whole context is such that it presupposes the reader to be well acquainted with the chief works of literature on the subject such as Tooke and Fullerton, and as this is not the case generally, it will require a deal of explanatory notes, etc.

By the way I have a second copy of Fullerton’s Regulation of Currencies, the chief work on the question; if you have not got the book I shall be most happy if you will allow me to send it to you.

The last section ‘on rent of land’ will, as far as I recollect, require but formal revision, so that, the Bank and Credit section once finished (it is 1/3 of the whole), the last third (Rent, and the different classes of revenue) will not take long. But as this crowning volume is such a splendid and’ totally unanswerable work, I consider myself bound to bring it out in a shape in which the whole line of argument stands forth clearly and in bold relief. And with the state of this Ms. – a mere first sketch, often interrupted, and left incomplete-that is not so very easy.

I am trying to make arrangements to have two competent gentlemen to copy out for me the elements of the fourth volume from the Ms. which my eyes will hardly allow me to dictate. If I succeed in this, I shall also have trained them to the deciphering of these manuscripts which at present are a sealed book to everyone except myself who am used to the handwriting and abbreviations, and thus the author’s other manuscripts will remain available, quite independent of my life and death. I expect that these arrangements too may be concluded this next autumn.

Yours very faithfully

P. W Rosher

The English translator of the greater part of Volume I Mr Moore has just left for Africa, having been appointed Chief justice of the Territories of the Niger Company. Thus the 3rd volume will be translated, in part at least, at the banks of the Niger!

Engels To Eduard Bernstein

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

Eastbourne, August 22, 1889

In your next issue you ought to take up the dock labourers’ strike. It is a matter of paramount importance to us here. Hitherto the East End was bogged down in passive poverty. Lack of resistance on the part of those broken by starvation, of those who had given up all hope was its salient feature. Anyone who got into it was physically and morally lost. Then last year came the successful strike of the match girls. And now this gigantic strike of the lowest of the outcasts, the dock labourers — not of the steady, strong, experienced, comparatively well-paid and regularly employed ones, but of those whom chance has dumped on the docks, those who are always down on their luck, who have not managed to get along in any other trade, people who have become professional starvelings, a mass of broken-down humanity who are drifting toward total ruination, for whom one might inscribe on the gates of the docks the words of Dante: Lasciate ogni speranza voi che entrate! [1] And this host of utterly despondent men, who every morning when the dock gates open fight a regular battle among themselves to get the closest to the fellow who does the hiring, literally a battle waged in the competitive struggle among the much too numerous workers — this motley crowd thrown together by chance and changing daily in composition has managed to unite 40,000 strong, to maintain discipline and to strike fear into the hearts of the mighty dock companies. How glad I am to have lived to see this day! If this stratum can be organised, that is a fact of great import. However the strike may end — I am never sanguine beforehand in this regard — with the dock labourers the lowest stratum of East End workers enters the movement and then the upper strata must follow their example. The East End contains the greatest number of common labourers in England, of people whose work requires no skill or almost none. If these sections of the proletariat, which until now have been treated with contempt by the Trade Unions of the skilled workers, organise in London, this will serve as an example for the provinces.

Furthermore, for lack of organisation and because of the passive vegetative existence of the real workers in the East End, the gutter proletariat has had the main say there so far. It has behaved like and has been considered the typical representative of the million of starving East Enders. That will now cease. The huckster and those like him will be forced into the background, the East End worker will be able to develop his own type and make it count by means of organisation. This is of enormous value for the movement. Scenes like those which occurred during Hyndman’s procession through Pall Mall and Piccadilly will then become impossible and the rowdy who will want to provoke a riot will simply be knocked dead.

In brief, it is an event. You can tell the stunning effect this thing has had by the way even the dastardly Daily News handles it. It’s the same as the miners’ strike was for us: a new section enters the movement, a new corps of workers. And the bourgeois who only five years ago would have cursed and sworn must now applaud, albeit dejectedly, while and because his heart is palpitating with fear and trepidation. Hurrah!

Notes

1. Dante: “Leave, ye that enter in, all hope behind!”

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

August 27, 1889

Another great fact is the Dock Labourers’ strike. They are, as you know, the most miserable of all the miserable of the East End, the broken down ones of all trades, the lowest stratum above the Lumpenproletariat. That these poor famished broken down creatures who bodily fight amongst each other every morning for admission to work, should organise for resistance, turn out 40-50,000 strong, draw after them into the strike all and every trade of the East End in any way connected with shipping, hold out above a week, and terrify the wealthy and powerful dock companies — that is a revival I am proud erlebt zu haben. And they have even bourgeois opinion on their side: the merchants, who suffer severely from this interruption of traffic, do not blame the workmen, but the obstinate Dock companies. So that if they hold out another week they are almost sure of victory.

And all this strike is worked and led by our people, by Burns and Mann, and the Hyndmanites are nowhere in it.

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

September 1, 1889

Cannot write much being Sunday and our people always in and out; moreover have to write to Tussy about the strike which was in an important crisis yesterday. As the dock directors kept stubborn, our people were led to a very foolish resolution. They had outstripped their means of relief and had to announce that on Saturday no relief could be dealt out to strikers. In order to make this go down — that is the way at least I take it — they declared that if the dock directors had not caved in by Saturday noon, on Monday there would be a general strike — reckoning chiefly on the supposition that the Gas works for want of coal or of workmen or both would come to a stand and London be in darkness — and this threat was to terrify all into submission to the demands of the men.

Now this was playing va banque, staking £1,000 — to win, possibly, £10—; it was threatening more than they could carry out; it was creating millions of hungry mouths for no reason but because they had some tens of thousands on hand which they could not feed; it was casting away willfully all the sympathies of the shopkeepers and even of the great mass of the bourgeoisie who all hated the dock monopolists, but who now would at once turn against the workmen. In fact it was such a declaration of despair and such a desperate game that I wrote to Tussy at once; if this is persisted in, the Dock Co.’s have only to hold out till Wednesday and they will be victorious.

Fortunately they have thought better of it. Not only has the threat been “provisionally” withdrawn but they have even acceded to the demands of the wharfingers (in some respect competitors of the docks), have reduced their demands for an increase of wages, and this has again been rejected by the Dock Companies. This I think will secure them the victory. The threat with the general strike will now have a salutary effect, and the generosity of the workmen, both in withdrawing it and in acceding to a compromise, will secure them fresh sympathy and help.

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

October 17, 1889

Since the Dock Strike Tussy has become quite an East Ender, organising Trades Unions and supporting strikes — last Sunday we did not see her at all, as she had to speechify both morning and night. These new Trades Unions of unskilled men and women are totally different from the old organisations of the working-class aristocracy and cannot fall into the same conservative ways; they are too poor, too shaky and too much composed of unstable elements, for anyone of these unskilled people may change his trade any day. And they are organised under quite different circumstances — all the leading men and women are Socialists, and socialist agitators too. In them I see the real beginning of the movement here.

Engels To Jules Guesde

In Paris

First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, Vol. 37, Moscow, 1965;

Translated: from the French for MECW.

London, 20 November 1889,

122 Regent’s Park Road, N. W.

Dear Citizen Guesde,

I have just had a letter from Mrs Aveling who asks me to write to you if I should happen to have your address. Luckily it had been given me by Bonnier and hence I am doing so without delay. The case is as follows:

In Silvertown, a London suburb, Mrs Aveling is conducting a strike... in Messrs Silver’s works where rubber goods, etc., are produced. The strike, in which three thousand working men and women are involved, has been going on for ten weeks and has every prospect of success. That it should succeed is important, for its failure would mean the interruption of the long series of successes scored by the workers since the dock strike, and would spell victory for the English employers whose rapidly dwindling confidence would thus be restored.

A few days ago, the Silver company received very urgent orders they would not possibly be able to carry out with 3,000 out of their 3,500 work people on strike. Furthermore, there was an order for a considerable quantity of submarine cables, which was to be shared out between four factories, among them Silver’s. They will miss their chance, if the strike continues. They made tempting offers to some of the strikers, but to no avail. They then played their last card.

Messrs Silver (a joint stock company which operates under that name) owns a similar establishment at Beaumont-Persan near Paris, where Frenchmen work under English foremen. Some of them were brought over to England. It is known for certain that 70 working men and women from Beaumont have arrived at the docks, but whether they have been introduced into the Silvertown factory is not yet known. It is now imperative that a stop be put to this. They were probably induced to come over under false pretences, without having been told that it was because of a strike.

Mrs Aveling at once telegraphed to Lafargue and Vaillant but, the matter being urgent, we are also addressing ourselves to you, with the request that you do everything in your power to prevent the French workers from coming to replace the Silvertown strikers, and that you make known the true situation, thus calling upon the class feeling of your workers. It would be frightful were the strikers’ resistance to be broken by the arrival of a number of French Blacklegs. There would be a revival of old national animosities and no means of suppressing them. For the past four months the workers of London’s East End have not only given themselves to the movement body and soul; they have also provided, for their comrades in all other countries, an example of discipline, self-sacrifice, courage and perseverance equaled only by the Parisians when under siege from the Prussians. Just imagine what the effect would be if now, in the midst of the struggle, they were to find French workers fighting under the standard of the English bourgeoisie! No, that is unthinkable! Only let the true situation be known in France and it will, on the contrary, be thanks to the action of the French proletariat that the English strikers will achieve victory.

When, during the dock strike, we sent Anseele a telegram informing him that the employers were bringing in Belgian workmen, he immediately took the necessary action and his letters and telegrams went a long way towards reviving the sometimes flagging spirits of the combatants.

If you feel able to offer similar encouragement to the people of Silvertown, you should write direct to Mrs Aveling, 65 Chancery Lane, London, W. C., which would create an excellent impression.

I hear from Bonnier that your health has greatly improved and that the Marseilles campaign has strengthened your constitution instead of weakening it. I am delighted, for we need every ounce of your energy. It is good news that your slogan ‘Neither Ferry nor Boulanger’ should have excluded the renegades and traitors of both these camps from the Socialist Workers’ Party in the Chamber.

With cordial and fraternal greetings,

F Engels

Engels to Victor Adler

In Vienna

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, December 4, 1889

I recommended you to revise Avenel's Cloots for the following reasons:

In my opinion (and that of Marx) the book contains the first specific and correct account, based on a study of the archives, of the critical Period of the French Revolution, namely from 10 August to 9 Thermidor.

Cloots and the Commune of Paris were for the propagandist war as the only means of salvation, whereas the Committee of Public Safety behaved like regular statesmen, were frightened of the European coalition and tried to get peace by dividing the allied powers. Danton wanted peace with England, that is with Fox and the English opposition, who hoped to come into power at the elections; Robespierre intrigued with Austria and Prussia at Basle in the hope of coming to an understanding with them. Both united against the Commune in order above all to overthrow the people who wanted the propagandist war and the republicanisation of Europe. They succeeded. The Commune (Hébert, Cloots, etc.) was beheaded. But from that time onwards agreement became impossible between those who wanted to conclude peace only with England and those who wanted to conclude it only with the German powers. The English elections turned in favour of Pitt, Fox was shut out of the government for years, this ruined Danton's position, Robespierre was victorious and beheaded him. But – and Avenel has not sufficiently stressed this – while the reign of terror was now intensified to a pitch of insanity, because it was necessary in order to keep Robespierre in power under the existing internal conditions, it was rendered entirely superfluous by the victory of Fleurus on 24 June, 1794, which freed not only the frontiers but Belgium, and indirectly delivered over the left bank of the Rhine to France. Thus Robespierre also became superfluous and fell on July 27.

The whole French Revolution is dominated by the War of Coalition, all its pulsations depend upon it. If the allied army penetrates into France – predominant activity of the vagus nerves, violent heartbeat, revolutionary crisis. If it is driven back – predominance of the sympathetic nerves, the heartbeat becomes slower, the reactionary elements again push themselves into the foreground; the plebeians, the beginning of the later proletariat, whose energy alone has saved the revolution, are brought to reason and order.

The tragedy is that the party supporting war to the bitter end, war for the emancipation of the nations, is proved in the right, and that the Republic gets the better of all Europe, but only after that party itself has long been beheaded; while in place of the propagandist war comes the Peace of Basle and the bourgeois orgy of the Directory.

The book must be completely revised and shortened – the rhetoric cut out, the facts taken from the ordinary histories supplemented and clearly emphasised. Cloots, meanwhile, can be put quite into the background, the most important things from the Lundis révolut can be inserted and we may get a work on the revolution such as has never existed up till now.

...

An explanation of how the battle of Fleurus put an end to the reign of terror was published in the (first) Rheinische Zeitung in 1842 by KF Koppen in an excellent criticism of H Leo’s Geschichte der französischen Revolution [History of the French Revolution].

Best regards to your wife and Louise Kautsky

Yours

FE

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Written: December 7, 1889;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence and Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 351;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, December 7, 1889

Dear Sorge

Letters of 8 and 29 October received. Thanks.

Things won’t turn out so well that the Socialist Labor Party [1] will go into liquidation. Rosenberg [2] has a lot of heirs besides Schewitsch, [3] and the conceited doctrinaire Germans over there certainly have no desire to give up the position they have arrogated to themselves to teach the ‘immature’ Americans. Otherwise they would be nobodies.

...

Here in England one can see that it is impossible simply to drill a theory in an abstract dogmatic way into a great nation, even if one has the best of theories, developed out of their own conditions of life, and even if the tutors are relatively better than the S.L.P. [Socialist Labour Party of North America.] The movement has now got going at last and I believe for good. But it is not directly Socialist, and those English who have understood our theory best remain outside it: Hyndman because he is incurably jealous and intriguing, Bax because he is only a bookworm. Formally the movement is at the moment a trade union movement, but utterly different from that of the old trade unions, the skilled labourers, the aristocracy of labour.

The people are throwing themselves into the job in quite a different way, are leading far more colossal masses into the fight, are shaking society much more deeply, are putting forward much more far-reaching demands: eight-hour day, general federation of all organisations, complete solidarity. Thanks to Tussy [Eleanor Marx Aveling] women’s branches have been formed for the first time – in the Gas Workers and General Labourers’ Union. Moreover, the people only regard their immediate demands themselves as provisional, although they themselves do not know as yet what final aim they are working for. But this dim idea is strongly enough rooted to make them choose only openly declared Socialists as their leaders. Like everyone else they will have to learn by their own experiences and the consequences of their own mistakes. But as, unlike the old trade unions, they greet every suggestion of an identity of interest between capital and labour with scorn and ridicule this will not take very long.

I hope the next general election will be deferred for another three years — 1. So that during the period of the greatest war danger Gladstone, the lackey of the Russians, should not be at the head of affairs; this might already be a sufficient reason for the Tsar [Alexander III] to provoke a war. 2. So that the anti-Conservative majority becomes so large that real Home Rule for Ireland becomes a necessity, otherwise Gladstone will cheat the Irish again, and this obstacle — the Irish question — will not be cleared away. 3. However, so that the labour movement may develop further and perhaps mature more rapidly as a result of the set-back caused by the business recession which will certainly follow the present period of prosperity. The next parliament may then comprise 20 to 40 labour deputies, and moreover of a very different kind from the Potters, Cremers and Co.

The most repulsive thing here is the bourgeois “respectability” which has grown deep into the bones of the workers. The division of society into a scale of innumerable degrees, each recognised without question, each with its own pride but also its native respect for its “betters” and “superiors,” is so old and firmly established that the bourgeois still find it pretty easy to get their bait accepted. I am not at all sure, for instance, that John Burns is not secretly prouder of his popularity with Cardinal Manning, the Lord Mayor and the bourgeoisie in general than of his popularity with his own class. And Champion — an ex-lieutenant — has intrigued for years with bourgeois and especially with conservative elements, preached Socialism at the parsons’ Church Congress, etc. Even Tom Mann, whom I regard as the finest of them, is fond of mentioning that he will be lunching with the Lord Mayor. If one compares this with the French, one can see what a revolution is good for after all. However, it will not help the bourgeoisie much if they do succeed in enticing some of the leaders into their toils. The movement has been far enough strengthened for this sort of thing to be overcome.

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor.

1. The Socialist Labour Party of North America came into being at the Unity Congress at Philadelphia in 1876, as a result of the merging of the American Sections of the First International, the Social-Democratic Workers Party and other socialist organisations in the USA. Most of the members of the party had emigrated to the United States comparatively recently, chiefly from Germany, and had little contact with the native American workers. The party declared that its aim was the fight for socialism, it did not however become a truly revolutionary Marxist mass party, because its sectarian leadership failed to realise the necessity of working in the mass organisations of the American proletariat.

2. Wilhelm Ludwig Rosenberg (1850-?) — German journalist, until 1889 Secretary of National Committee of Socialist Labor Party in the USA.

3. Sergei Schewitsch — editor of New-Yorker Volkszeitung.

Engels to Konrad Schmidt

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

December 9, 1889

Aveling seems to be making progress in his dramatic attempts; the latest play – a fortnight ago – was a great success.

Engels To Gerson Trier

In Copenhagen

London, 18 December 1889 [Draft]

Source: MECW, Volume 48 pp 423-5;

First published: in Russian in Bolshevik, No. 21, 1932.

Dear Mr Trier,

Many thanks for your interesting communication of the 8th.

Since you ask my opinion about the recent dramatic events in Copenhagen to which you fell victim, let me begin with one point upon which I am not of one mind with you.

You reject on principle any kind of collaboration, however transient, with other parties. I am revolutionary enough not to deprive myself even of this recourse in circumstances in which it would be more to our advantage or at any rate do us least harm.

That the proletariat cannot seize political power, which alone will open the doors to the new society, without violent revolution is something upon which we are both agreed. If the proletariat is to be strong enough to win on the crucial day, it is essential – and Marx and I have been advocating this ever since 1847 – for it to constitute a party in its own right, distinct from and opposed to all the rest, one that is conscious of itself as a class party.

This does not mean, however, that the said party cannot occasionally make use of other parties for its own ends. Nor does it mean that it cannot temporarily support other parties in promoting measures which are either of immediate advantage to the proletariat or spell progress in the direction of economic development or political freedom. I would support anyone in Germany who genuinely fought for the abolition of primogeniture and other feudal relics, of bureaucracy, protective tariffs, and Anti – Socialist Law and restrictions on the right of assembly and of association. If our German Party of Progress or your Danish Venstre were genuine radical-bourgeois parties and not just a miserable bunch of windbags who creep into their holes at the first threat uttered by Bismarck or Estrup, I would by no means unreservedly reject any kind of temporary collaboration with them having a specific end in view. When our deputies vote for a motion tabled by a different party – as they all too often have to do – even this could be described as a form of collaboration. But I would be in favour of it only if its immediate advantage to ourselves or to the country’s historical progress towards economic and political revolution was instantly apparent and worth the effort. And provided the proletarian class character of the party were not jeopardised thereby. Thus far and no further I am prepared to go. You will find this policy propounded as early as 1847 in the Communist Manifesto; we pursued it in 1848 in the International, everywhere.

Disregarding the question of morality – a point I am not concerned with here and shall therefore not discuss – I would, as a revolutionary, countenance any means, the most violent but also what may seem the most moderate, that were conducive to the ends.

Such a policy demands insight and strength of character, but what policy does not? It exposes us to the dangers of corruption, or so say the anarchists and friend Morris. Very well, if the working class is an assortment of blockheads and weaklings and downright venal blackguards, then we might as well pack up at once, for in that case neither the proletariat nor any of the rest of us would have an business to be in the political arena at all. Like all other parties, the proletariat will be best taught by its own mistakes, and from those mistake no one can wholly save it.

In my opinion, therefore, you are wrong on when you elevate what is primarily a question of tactics to the level of a question of principle. And so far as I'm concerned, the only question that confronts us at the start is a tactical one. A tactical error, however, may in certain circumstances, lead to an infringement of principle.

And here, so far as I can judge, you are right in criticising the tactics of the Hovedbestyrelsen. For years the Danish Left has been acting out an undignified comedy of opposition, nor does it ever tire of demonstrating its own impotence to the world at large. It has long since missed the opportunity – if ever it had one – of avenging the infringement of the Constitution by force or arms; indeed, an ever increasing proportion of the Left would seem to be yearning for reconciliation with Estrup. A genuinely proletarian party could not, or so it seems to me, collaborate with a party of that kind without in the long run forfeiting its class character as a working men’s party. Hence, in so far as you stress the class character of the movement as arguing against this policy, I can only agree with you.

Now as regards the methods adopted towards you and your friends by the Hovedbestyrelsen, such summary expulsion of an opposition from the party certainly occurred in the secret societies of 1840-51; the very secrecy of the organisation made this inevitable. It also occurred – not infrequently – among the English Physical Force Chartists under the dictatorship of O'Connor. But the Chartists, being a party specifically organised for the use of force as their very name implies, were subject to dictatorship, and expulsion was an act of military discipline. On the other hand I have heard of no such high handed procedure in time of peace save in the case of the Lassalleans in J. B. von Schweitzer’s ‘rigid organisation'; von Schweitzer had to make use of it because of his suspect dealings with the Berlin police, and in doing so only precipitated the disorganisation of the General German Workers’ Association. It would be most unlikely to occur to any of the socialist labour parties presently in existence – now that Mr Rosenberg has happily made himself scarce in America – to treat along Danish lines an opposition it had nurtured in its own bosom. No party can live and prosper unless moderate and extreme tendencies grow up and even combat one another within its ranks, and one which expels the more extreme tendencies out of hand will merely promote their growth. The labour movement depends on mercilessly criticising existing society, criticism is the breath of life to it, so how can it itself avoid being criticised or try and forbid discussion? Are we then asking that others concede us the right of free speech merely so that we may abolish it again within our own ranks?

If you should wish to publish the whole of this letter, I should have no objection.

1890

Engels to Mrs Zadek. c. 1 January

Engels to Sergey Stepniak. 3 January

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 8 January

Engels to Hermann Engels. 9 January

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 11 January

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 13 January

Engels to Eleanor Marx-Aveling. 14 January

Engels to Hermann Schlüter. 15 January

Engels to Charles Rosher. 19 January

Engels to August Bebel. 23 January

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 8 February

Engels to August Bebel. 17 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 26 February

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 7 March

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 9 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 14 March

Engels to Antonio Labriola. 30 March

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 30 March

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 1 April

Engels to Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz. 1 April

Engels to Vera Zasulich. 3 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 4 April

Engels to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. 9 April

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 11 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 12 April

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 12 April

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 16 April

Engels to Vera Zasulich. 17 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 19 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 30 April

Engels to August Bebel. 9 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 10 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 21 May

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 24 May

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 29 May

Engels to Paul Ernst. 5 June

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 10 June

Engels to Hermann Schluter. 14 June

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 19 June

Engels to Natalie Liebknecht. 19 June

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 30 June

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 30 June

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 4 July

Engels to Hermann Engels. 8 July

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 22 July

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 30 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 30 July

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 1 August

Engels to Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz. 5 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 5 August

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 5 August

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 9 August

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 10 August

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 15 August

Engels to Otto von Boenigk. 21 August

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 27 August

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 27 August

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 15 September

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 18 September

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 19 September

Engels to Charles Caron. 20 September

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 20 September

Engels to Joseph Bloch. 21 September [alt]

Engels to Hermann Engels. 22 September

Engels to Jakins. 23 September

Engels to Strutt and Parker. 23 September

Engels to Jules Guesde. 25 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 25 September

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 25 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 26 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 27 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 4 October

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 5 October

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 7 October

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 18 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 19 October

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 20 October

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 25 October

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 27 October [alt]

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 2 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 5 November

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 5 November

Engels to Louise Kautsky. 9 November

Engels to Adolf Riefer. 12 November

Engels to Victor Adler. 15 November

Engels to Victor Adler. 17 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 26 November

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 1 December

Engels to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis. 3 December

Engels to Amand Goegg. 4 December

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer. 4 December

Engels to Edouard Vaillant. 5 December

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov. 5 December

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 8 December

Engels to Mohrhenn. 9 December

Engels to Victor Adler. 12 December

Engels to Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz. 13 December

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 13 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 17 December

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht. 18 December

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 20 December

Engels to Leo Frankel. 25 December

Engels to G Blume. 27 December

Engels to Georg Schumacher. December

Engels to H Schlüter

In New York

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, January 11, 1890

The stormy tide of the movement last summer has somewhat abated. And the best of it is that the unthinking sympathy of the bourgeois gang for the workers' movement, which broke out in the dock strike, has also abated, and is beginning to make way for the far more natural feeling of suspicion and nervousness. In the South London gas strike, which was forcibly imposed on the workers by the gas company, the workers are once more standing entirely deserted by all the philistines. This is very good and I only hope Burns will some time go through this experience himself, in a strike led by himself – he cherishes all sorts of illusions in that respect.

Meanwhile there is all kinds of friction, as was only to be expected, between the gas workers and the dockers, for instance. But despite it all the masses are on the move and there is no holding them any more. The longer the stream is dammed up the more powerfully will it break through when the moment comes. And these unskilled are very different chaps from the fossilised brothers of the old trade unions; not a trace of the old formalist spirit, of the craft exclusiveness of the engineers, for instance; on the contrary, a general cry for the organisation of all trade unions in one fraternity and for a direct struggle against capital. In the dock strike, for instance, there were three engineers at the Commercial Dock who kept the steam engine going. Burns and Mann, both engineers themselves and Burns a member of the Amalgamated Eng. Trade Union Executive, were summoned to persuade these men to go away, as then none of the cranes would have worked and the dock company would have had to climb down. The three engineers refused, the Engineers' Executive did not intervene and hence the length of the strike! At the Silvertown Rubber Works, moreover, where there was a twelve-weeks' strike, the strike was broken by the engineers, who did not join in and even did labourers' work against their own union rules! And why? These fools, in order to keep the supply of workers low, have a rule that nobody who has not been through the correct period of apprenticeship may be admitted to their union. By this means they have created an army of rivals, so-called blacklegs, who are just as skilled as they are themselves and who would gladly come into the union, but who are forced to remain blacklegs because they are kept outside by this pedantry which has no sense at all nowadays. And because they knew that both in the Commercial Dock and in Silvertown these blacklegs would immediately have stepped into their place, they stayed in and so became blacklegs themselves against the strikers. There you see the difference: the new unions hold together; in the present gas strike, sailors (steamer) and firemen, lightermen and coal carters are all together, but of course not the engineers again, they are still working!

However, these arrogant old great trade unions will soon be made to look small; their chief support, the London Trades Council, is being more and more subjugated by the new ones, and in two or three years at most the Trade Union Congress will also be revolutionised. Even at the next Congress the Broadhursts will get the shock of their lives.

The fact that you have got rid of Rosenberg and Co. is the main point about the revolution in your American socialist teacup. The German party over there must be smashed up as such, it is the worst obstacle. The American workers are coming along already, but just like the English they go their own way. One cannot drum the theory into them beforehand, but their own experience and their own blunders and the evil consequences of them will soon bump their noses up against theory – and then all right. Independent nations go their own way, and of them all the English and their offspring are surely the most independent. Their insular stiff-necked obstinacy annoys one often enough, but it also guarantees that once a thing gets started what is begun will be carried out.

Engels To August Bebel

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 351-52;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

January 23, 1890

I see no reason why we should not repay the Progressists for their infamous behaviour of 1887 [357] and bring it home to them that they exist by our grace only. Parnell’s decision of 1886 that the Irish in England should all vote against the Liberals, for the Tories, that is, for the first time since 1800 stop being a herd voting for the Liberals, transformed Gladstone and the Liberal chiefs into Home Rulers in a matter of six weeks. [358] If anything can still be made out of the Progressists, then only by showing them in the by-elections ad oculos that they are dependent on us.

Notes

357. A reference to the stand of the Progressist Party in the Reichstag elections in February 1887. During the second ballot the supporters of the Progressist Party voted for the candidates of the “cartel” — the bloc of both conservative parties and the National-Liberals — against the Social-Democrats, thereby helping that bloc, which supported Bismarck’s government, to victory.

358. In April 1886, hoping to win the support of the Irish M.P.s, Gladstone tabled the Home Rule Bill providing for self-government for Ireland within the framework of the British Empire. This Bill led to a split in the Liberal Party and the break away of the Liberal Unionists (see Note 355). The Bill was defeated.

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

February 8, 1890

In my opinion we hardly lose anything worth counting by the going-over of the official Socialists there to the Nationalists. [Followers of Edward Bellamy, U.S.] If the whole German Socialist Labour Party went to pieces as a result it would be a gain, but we can hardly expect anything so good as that. The really serviceable elements will come together again in the end all the same, and the sooner the waste matter has separated itself the sooner this will happen; when the moment comes in which events themselves drive the American proletariat forward there will be enough fitted by their superior theoretical insight and experience to take the part of leaders, and then you will find that your years of work have not been wasted.

The movement there, just like the one here and in the mining districts of Germany now as well, cannot be made by preaching alone. Facts must hammer the thing into people's heads, but then it will go quickly too, quickest, of course, where there is already an organised and theoretically educated section of the proletariat at hand, as in Germany. The miners are ours to-day potentially and necessarily: in the Ruhr district the process is proceeding rapidly, Aix la Chapelle and the Saar basin will follow, then Saxony, then Lower Silesia, finally the Polish bargemen of Upper Silesia. With the position of our party in Germany all that was needed in order to call the irresistible movement into being was the impulse arising from the miners' own conditions of life.

Here it is going in a similar way. The movement, which I now consider irrepressible, arose from the dockers' strike, purely out of the absolute necessity of defence. But here too the ground had been so far prepared by various forms of agitation during the last eight years that the people without being Socialists themselves still only wanted to have Socialists as their leaders. Now, without noticing it themselves, they are coming on to the right theoretical track, they drift into it, and the movement is so strong that I think it will survive the inevitable blunders and their consequences and the friction between the various trade unions and leaders without serious damage. ...

I think it will be the same with you in America too. The Schleswig-Holsteiners [Anglo-Saxons] and their descendants in England and America are not to be converted by lecturing, this pig-headed and conceited lot have got to experience it on their own bodies. And this they are doing more and more every year, but they are born conservatives – just because America is so purely bourgeois, so entirely without a feudal past and therefore proud of its purely bourgeois organisation – and so they will only get quit of the old traditional mental rubbish by practical experience. Hence the trade unions, etc., are the thing to begin with if there is to be a mass movement, and every further step must be forced upon them by a defeat. But once the first step beyond the bourgeois point of view has been taken things will move quickly, like everything in America, where, driven by natural necessity, the growing speed of the movement sets some requisite fire going under the backsides of the Schleswig-Holstein Anglo-Saxons, who are usually so slow; and then too the foreign elements in the nation will assert themselves by greater mobility. I consider the decay of the specifically German party, with its absurd theoretical confusion, its corresponding arrogance and its Lassalleanism, a real piece of good fortune. Not until these separatists are out of the way will the fruits of your work come to light again. The Socialist Laws were a misfortune, not for Germany, but for America to which they consigned the last Knoten. I often used to marvel at the many Knoten faces one met with over there; these have died out in Germany but are flourishing over yonder.

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

April 19, 1890

Dear Sorge

I receive the Nationalist regularly, but unfortunately it contains very little of interest. They are a poor imitation of the Fabians in this country. Superficial and shallow as the Dismal Swamp, but proud of the noble magnanimity with which they, the ‘educated’ bourgeois, condescend to emancipate the workers; in return however the workers must keep quiet and obediently carry out the orders of the ‘educated’ cranks and their isms. Let them amuse themselves for a little while, but one fine day the movement will efface all this. We continentals, who have felt the influence of the French Revolution in quite a different way, have the advantage that such things are quite impossible here...

In a country with such an old political and labour movement there is always a colossal heap of traditionally inherited rubbish which has to be got rid of by degrees. There are the prejudices of the skilled Unions – Engineers, Bricklayers, Carpenters and Joiners, Type Compositors, etc. – which have all to be broken down; the petty jealousies of the particular trades, which become intensified in the hands and heads of the leaders to direct hostility and secret struggle; there are the mutually obstructive ambitions and intrigues of the leaders: one wants to get into Parliament and so does somebody else, another wants to get on to the County Council or School Board, another wants to organise a general centralisation of all the workers, another to start a paper, another a club, etc., etc. In short, there is friction upon friction. And among them all the Socialist League, which looks down on everything which is not directly revolutionary (which means here in England, as with you, everything which does not limit itself to making phrases and otherwise doing nothing) and the Federation, who still behave as if everyone except themselves were asses and bunglers, although it is only due to the new force of the movement that they have succeeded in getting some following again. In short, anyone who only looks at the surface would say it was all confusion and personal quarrels. But under the surface the movement is going on, it is seizing ever wider sections of the workers and mostly just among the hitherto stagnant lowest masses, and the day is no longer far off when this mass will suddenly find itself, when the fact that it is this colossal self-impelled mass will dawn upon it, and when that day comes short work will be made of all the rascality and wrangling.

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

May 10, 1890

I also send you The People’s Press with report of Sunday last. It was tremendous. England at last is stirring, and no mistake. And it was a great victory for us specially, for Tussy and Aveling who with the help of the Gas Workers (by far the best Union out amongst the new ones) have done it all. In their naivete they had called in the Trades Council without ensuring to themselves the possession of the Park first.

The Trades Council allying itself with Hyndman and Co., stole a march on them, and applied for platforms for Sunday at the office of Works and got them, thus hoping to shut us out and being able to command; they attempted at once to bully us down, but Edward went to the Office of Works and got us 7 platforms — had the Liberals been in, we should never have got them. That brought the other side down at once, and they became as amiable as you please. They have seen they have to do with different people from what they expected. I can assure you I looked a couple of inches taller when I got down from that old lumbering waggon that served as a platform — after having heard again, for the first time since 40 years, the unmistakeable voice of the English Proletariat. That voice has been heard by the bourgeois too, the whole press of London and the provinces bears witness to that.

Paul spoke very well — a slight indication of the universal strike dream in it, which nonsense Guesde has retained from his anarchist days — (whenever we are in a position to try the universal strike, we shall be able to get what we want for the mere asking for it, without the roundabout way of the universal strike). But he spoke very well, and in remarkably grammatical English too, far more so than in his conversation. He was received best of all, and got a more enthusiastic cheer at the end than any one else. And his presence was very opportune as we had on our platform two or three philistine speakers qui faisaient dormir debout leurs auditeurs so that Paul had to waken them up again.

The progress made in England these last 10-15 months is immense. Last May the 8 hours working day would not have brought as many thousands into Hyde Park as we had hundreds of thousands. And the best of it is that the struggle preceding the demonstration has brought to life a representative body which will serve as the nucleus for the movement, regardless of sect; the Central Committee consisting of delegates of the Gas Workers and numerous other Unions — mostly small, unskilled Unions and therefore despised by the haughty Trades Council of the aristocracy of labour — and of the Radical clubs worked for the last two years by Tussy. Edward is chairman of this Committee. This Committee will continue to act and invite all other trade, political and Socialist societies to send delegates, and gradually expand into a central body not only for the 8 hours Bill but for all other demands — say, to begin with, the rest of the Paris resolutions and so on. The Committee is strong enough numerically not to be swamped by any fresh accessions, and thus the sects will soon be put before the dilemma either to merge in it and in the general movement or to die out. It is the East End which now commands the movement and these fresh elements, unspoiled by the “Great Liberal Party,” show an intelligence such as — well, I cannot say better than such as we find in the equally unspoiled German workman. They will not have any but Socialist leaders.

Engels to Paul Ernst

Written: June 5, 1890;

Source: Ibsen ed. Angel Flores, Critics Group, New York, 1937;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Unfortunately I cannot comply with your request to write you a letter that you could use against Herr Bahr. This would involve me in an open polemic against him, and for that I would literally have to rob myself of the time. What I write here, therefore, is intended only for you personally.

Furthermore, I am not at all acquainted with what you call the feminist movement in Scandinavia; I only know some of Ibsen’s dramas and have not the slightest idea whether or to what extent Ibsen can be considered responsible for the more or less hysterical effusions of bourgeois and petty bourgeois women careerists.

On the other hand the field covered by what is generally designated as the woman question is so vast that one cannot, within the confines of a letter, treat this subject thoroughly or say anything half-way satisfactory about it. This much is certain, that Marx could never have "adopted the attitude" ascribed to him by Herr Bahr; after all, he was not crazy.

As for your attempt to explain this matter from the materialist viewpoint, I must tell you from the very first that the materialist method is converted into its direct opposite if instead of being used as a guiding thread in historical research it is made to serve as a ready-cut pattern on which to tailor historical facts. And if Herr Bahr thinks he has caught you in a mistake, it seems to me that he is somewhat justified.

You classify all Norway, and everything happening there, as petty bourgeois, and then, without the slightest hesitation, you apply to this Norwegian petty bourgeoisie your ideas about the German petty bourgeoisie.

Now two facts stand in the way here.

In the first place: at a time when throughout all Europe the victory over Napoleon spelled a victory of reaction over revolution, when only in its homeland, France, was the revolution still capable of inspiring enough fear to wrest from the re-established Bourbons a bourgeois liberal constitution, Norway was able to secure a constitution far more democratic than any constitution in Europe at that time.

In the second place, during the course of the last twenty years Norway has had a literary renaissance unlike that of any other country of this period, except Russia. Petty bourgeois or not, these people are creating more than anywhere else, and stamping their imprint upon the literature of other countries, including Germany.

If you study these facts carefully you will surely agree that they are incompatible with the fashion of ranking the Norwegians in a class with the petty bourgeoisie, particularly the German variety these facts demand, in my opinion, that we analyze the specific characteristics of the Norwegian petty bourgeoisie.

You will no doubt then perceive that we are here faced with a very important difference. In Germany the petty bourgeoisie is the product of an abortive revolution, of an arrested, thwarted development; it owes its peculiar and very marked characteristics of cowardice, narrowness, impotence and ineffectuality to the Thirty Years War and the ensuing period during which almost all of the other great nations were, on the contrary, developing rapidly. These traits remained with the German petty bourgeoisie even after Germany had again been carried into the stream of historical development; they were pronounced enough to engrave themselves upon all the other German social classes as more or less typically German, until the day when our working class broke through these narrow boundaries. The German workers are with justification all the more violently “without a country” in that they are entirely free of German petty bourgeois narrowness. Thus the German petty bourgeoisie does not constitute a normal historical phase, but an extremely exaggerated caricature, a phenomenon of degeneration. The German petty bourgeoisie is classic only because of the extreme exaggeration of its petty bourgeois characteristics. The petty bourgeoisie of England, France, etc., are on an altogether different level than the German petty bourgeoisie.

In Norway, on the other hand, the small peasantry and the petty bourgeoisie, together with a limited section of the middle class – just as in England and France in the seventeenth century, for example – have for several centuries represented the normal state of society. Here there can be no question of a violent return to outdated conditions as a consequence of some great defeated movement or a Thirty Years War. The country has lagged behind the times because of its isolation and natural conditions, but its situation has always corresponded to its conditions of production, and, therefore, been normal. Only very recently have manifestations of large scale industry sporadically made their appearance in the country, but that mighty lever of the concentration of capital, the Bourse, is lacking, and furthermore the powerful shipping industry also exerts a conservative influence, for while throughout the rest of the world steamboats are superseding sailing vessels, Norway is expanding considerably her sailing vessel navigation, and possesses, if not the greatest, then at all events the second greatest fleet of sailing ships in the world, belonging mostly to small shipowners, just as in England around 1720. Nevertheless this circumstance has infused new vitality into the old lethargic existence, and this vitality has made itself felt also in the literary revival.

The Norwegian peasant has never known serfdom, and this fact gives an altogether different background to the whole development of the country, as it did in Castile. The Norwegian petty bourgeois is the son of a free peasant and for this reason he is a man compared to the miserable German philistine. Likewise the Norwegian petty bourgeois woman is infinitely superior to the wife of a German philistine. And whatever the weaknesses of Ibsen’s dramas, for instance, they undoubtedly reflect the world of the petty and the middle bourgeoisie, but a world totally different from the German world, a world where men are still possessed of character and initiative and the capacity for independent action, even though their behavior may seem odd to a foreign observer.

Engels To Nikolai Frantsevich Danielson

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 352;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

June 10, 1890

Here in England, Rent is applied as well to the payment of the English capitalist farmer to his landlord, as to that of the Irish pauper farmer, who pays a complete tribute composed chiefly of a deduction from his fund of maintenance, earned by his own labour, and only to the smallest extent consisting of true rent. So the English in India transformed the land-tax paid by the ryot (peasant) to the State into “rent,” and consequently have, in Bengal at least, actually transformed the zemindar (tax-gatherer of the former Indian prince) into a landlord holding a nominal feudal tenure from the Crown exactly as in England, where the Crown is nominal proprietor of all the land, and the great nobles, the real owners, are by juridical fiction supposed to be feudal tenants of the Crown. Similarly when in the beginning of the 17th century the North of Ireland was subjected to direct English dominion, and the English lawyer Sir John Davies found there a rural community with common possession of the land, which was periodically divided amongst the members of the clan who paid a tribute to the chief, Davies <transformed> declared that tribute at once <into> to be “rent.” Thus the Scotch lairds-chiefs of clans profited, since the insurrection of 1745, of this juridical confusion, of the tribute paid to them by the clansmen, with a “rent” for the lands held by them, in order to transform the whole of the <common> clan-land, the common property of the clan, into their, the lairds, private property; for — said the lawyers, if they were not the landlords, how could they receive rent for that land? And thus this confusion of tribute and rent was the basis of the confiscation of all the lands of the Scottish Highlands for the benefit of a few chiefs of clan who very soon after drove out the old clansmen and replaced them by sheep as described in C[apital] chapter 24,3/ (p.754, 3rd edition).

....

We had heard here of the death of Н.Г.Ч. [Cherneshevsky], and with much sorrow and sympathy. But perhaps it is better so.

Engels to C. Schmidt

In Berlin

Abstract

Transcription/Markup: Brian Baggins;

Online Version: Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.

London, August 5, 1890

[ ....]

I saw a review of Paul Barth's book [Die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegels und der Hegelianer bis auf Marx und Hartmann] by that bird of ill omen, Moritz Wirth, in the Vienna Deutsche Worte, and this book itself, as well. I will have a look at it, but I must say that if "little Moritz" is right when he quotes Barth as stating that the sole example of the dependence of philosophy, etc., on the material conditions of existence which he can find in all Marx's works is that Descartes declares animals to the machines, then I am sorry for the man who can write such a thing. And if this man has not yet discovered that while the material mode of existence is the primum agens [primary agent, prime cause] this does not preclude the ideological spheres from reacting upon it in their turn, though with a secondary effect, he cannot possibly have understood the subject he is writing about. However, as I said, all this is secondhand and little Moritz is a dangerous friend. The materialist conception of history has a lot of them nowadays, to whom it serves as an excuse for not studying history. Just as Marx used to say, commenting on the French "Marxists" of the late [18]70s: "All I know is that I am not a Marxist."

There has also been a discussion in the Volks-Tribune about the distribution of products in future society, whether this will take place according to the amount of work done or otherwise. The question has been approached very "materialistically" in opposition to certain idealistic phraseology about justice. But strangely enough it has not struck anyone that, after all, the method of distribution essentially depends on how much there is to distribute, and that this must surely change with the progress of production and social organization, so that the method of distribution may also change. But everyone who took part in the discussion, "socialist society" appeared not as something undergoing continuous change and progress but as a stable affair fixed once for all, which must, therefore, have a method of distribution fixed once for all. All one can reasonably do, however, is 1) to try and discover the method of distribution to be used at the beginning, and 2) to try and find the general tendency of the further development. But about this I do not find a single word in the whole debate.

In general, the word "materialistic" serves many of the younger writers in Germany as a mere phrase with which anything and everything is labeled without further study, that is, they stick on this label and then consider the question disposed of. But our conception of history is above all a guide to study, not a lever for construction after the manner of the Hegelian. All history must be studied afresh, the conditions of existence of the different formations of society must be examined individually before the attempt is made to deduce them from the political, civil law, aesthetic, philosophic, religious, etc., views corresponding to them. Up to now but little has been done here because only a few people have got down to it seriously. In this field we can utilize heaps of help, it is immensely big, anyone who will work seriously can achieve much and distinguish himself. But instead of this too many of the younger Germans simply make use of the phrase historical materialism (and everything can be turned into a phrase) only in order to get their own relatively scanty historical knowledge — for economic history is still as yet in its swaddling clothes! — constructed into a neat system as quickly as possible, and they then deem themselves something very tremendous. And after that a Barth can come along and attack the thing itself, which in his circle has indeed been degraded to a mere phrase.

However, all this will right itself. We're strong enough in Germany now to stand a lot. One of the greatest services which the Anti-Socialist Law did us was to free us from the obtuseness of the German intellectual who had got tinged with socialism. We are now strong enough to digest the German intellectual too, who is giving himself great airs again. You, who have really done something, must have noticed yourself how few of the young literary men who fasten themselves on to the party give themselves in the trouble to study economics, the history of economics, the history of trade, of industry, of agriculture, of the formations of society. How many know anything of Maurer except his name! The self-sufficiency of the journalist must serve for everything here and the result looks like it. It often seems as if these gentlemen think anything is good enough for the workers. If these gentlemen only knew that Marx thought his best things were still not good enough for the workers, how he regarded it as a crime to offer the workers anything but the very best!

[ ....]

Engels to Otto Von Boenigk

In Breslau

Abstract

Transcription/Markup: Brian Baggins;

Online Version: Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000;

Folkestone, near Dover

August 21, 1890

... I can reply only briefly and in general terms to your inquiries [A], for as concerns the first question I should otherwise have to write a treatise.

Ad. 1. To my mind, the so-called “socialist society” is not anything immutable. Like all other social formations, it should be conceived in a state of constant flux and change. Its crucial difference from the present order consists naturally in production organized on the basis of common ownership by the nation of all means of production. To begin this reorganization tomorrow, but performing it gradually, seems to me quite feasible. That our workers are capable of it is borne out by their many producer and consumer cooperatives which, whenever they're not deliberately ruined by the police, are equally well and far more honestly run than the bourgeois stock companies. I cannot see how you can speak of the ignorance of the masses in Germany after the brilliant evidence of political maturity shown by the workers in their victorious struggle against the Anti-Socialist Law. The patronizing and errant lecturing of our so-called intellectuals seems to me a far greater impediment. We are still in need of technicians, agronomists, engineers, chemists, architects, etc., it is true, but if the worst comes to the worst we can always buy them just as well as the capitalists buy them, and if a severe example is made of a few of the traders among them — for traders there are sure to be — they will find it to their own advantage to deal fairly with us. But apart from the specialists, among whom I also include schoolteachers, we can get along perfectly well without the other “intellectuals.” The present influx of literati and students into the party, for example, may be quite damaging if these gentlemen are not properly kept in check.

The Junker latifundia east of the Elbe could be easily leased under the due technical management to the present day-laborers and other retinue, who work the estates jointly. If any disturbances occur, the Junkers, who have brutalized people by flouting all the existing school legislation, will alone be to blame.

The biggest obstacles are the small peasants and the importunate super-clever intellectuals who always think they know everything so much the better, the less they understand it.

Once we have a sufficient number of followers among the masses, the big industries and the large-scale latifundia farming can be quickly socialized, provided we hold the political power. The rest will follow shortly, sooner or later. And we shall have it all our own way in large-scale production.

You speak of an absence of uniform insight. This exists — but on the part of the intellectuals to stem from the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie and who do not suspect how much they still have to learn from the workers...

[A] Boenigk asked Engels whether it was possible and advisable to effect socialist transformations considering the differences in education, level of consciousness, etc., among the various classes of society.

Engels to J. Bloch

In Königsberg

Abstract

Source: Historical Materialism (Marx, Engels, Lenin), p. 294 - 296;

Publisher: Progress Publishers, 1972;

First Published: by Der sozialistische Akademiker, Berlin, October 1, 1895;

Translated: from German;

Online Version: marxists.org 1999;

Transcription/Markup: Brian Baggins;

London, September 21, 1890

[....]

According to the materialist conception of history, the ultimately determining element in history is the production and reproduction of real life. Other than this neither Marx nor I have ever asserted. Hence if somebody twists this into saying that the economic element is the only determining one, he transforms that proposition into a meaningless, abstract, senseless phrase. The economic situation is the basis, but the various elements of the superstructure — political forms of the class struggle and its results, to wit: constitutions established by the victorious class after a successful battle, etc., juridical forms, and even the reflexes of all these actual struggles in the brains of the participants, political, juristic, philosophical theories, religious views and their further development into systems of dogmas — also exercise their influence upon the course of the historical struggles and in many cases preponderate in determining their form. There is an interaction of all these elements in which, amid all the endless host of accidents (that is, of things and events whose inner interconnection is so remote or so impossible of proof that we can regard it as non-existent, as negligible), the economic movement finally asserts itself as necessary. Otherwise the application of the theory to any period of history would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.

We make our history ourselves, but, in the first place, under very definite assumptions and conditions. Among these the economic ones are ultimately decisive. But the political ones, etc., and indeed even the traditions which haunt human minds also play a part, although not the decisive one. The Prussian state also arose and developed from historical, ultimately economic, causes. But it could scarcely be maintained without pedantry that among the many small states of North Germany, Brandenburg was specifically determined by economic necessity to become the great power embodying the economic, linguistic and, after the Reformation, also the religious difference between North and South, and not by other elements as well (above all by its entanglement with Poland, owing to the possession of Prussia, and hence with international political relations — which were indeed also decisive in the formation of the Austrian dynastic power). Without making oneself ridiculous it would be a difficult thing to explain in terms of economics the existence of every small state in Germany, past and present, or the origin of the High German consonant permutations, which widened the geographic partition wall formed by the mountains from the Sudetic range to the Taunus to form a regular fissure across all Germany.

In the second place, however, history is made in such a way that the final result always arises from conflicts between many individual wills, of which each in turn has been made what it is by a host of particular conditions of life. Thus there are innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite series of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant — the historical event. This may again itself be viewed as the product of a power which works as a whole unconsciously and without volition. For what each individual wills is obstructed by everyone else, and what emerges is something that no one willed. Thus history has proceeded hitherto in the manner of a natural process and is essentially subject to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals — each of whom desires what he is impelled to by his physical constitution and external, in the last resort economic, circumstances (either his own personal circumstances or those of society in general) — do not attain what they want, but are merged into an aggregate mean, a common resultant, it must not be concluded that they are equal to zero. On the contrary, each contributes to the resultant and is to this extent included in it.

I would furthermore ask you to study this theory from its original sources and not at second-hand; it is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote anything in which it did not play a part. But especially The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte is a most excellent example of its application. There are also many allusions to it in Capital. Then may I also direct you to my writings: Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy, in which I have given the most detailed account of historical materialism which, as far as I know, exists. [The German Ideology was not published in Marx or Engels lifetime]

Marx and I are ourselves partly to blame for the fact that the younger people sometimes lay more stress on the economic side than is due to it. We had to emphasise the main principle vis-à-vis our adversaries, who denied it, and we had not always the time, the place or the opportunity to give their due to the other elements involved in the interaction. But when it came to presenting a section of history, that is, to making a practical application, it was a different matter and there no error was permissible. Unfortunately, however, it happens only too often that people think they have fully understood a new theory and can apply it without more ado from the moment they have assimilated its main principles, and even those not always correctly. And I cannot exempt many of the more recent "Marxists" from this reproach, for the most amazing rubbish has been produced in this quarter, too....

[....]

Engels to Conrad Schmidt

In Berlin

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, October 27, 1890

I think you would do very well to take the post in Zürich. [Editor of the Zürich Post.] You could always learn a good deal about economics there, especially if you bear in mind that Zürich is still only a third-rate money and speculation market, so that the impressions which make themselves felt there are weakened or deliberately distorted by twofold or threefold reflection. But you will get a practical knowledge of the mechanism and be obliged to follow the stock exchange reports from London, New York, Paris, Berlin and Vienna at first hand, and in this way the world market, in its reflex as money and stock market, will reveal itself to you. Economic, political and other reflections are just like those in the human eye, they pass through a condensing lens and therefore appear upside down, standing on their heads. Only the nervous system which would put them on their feet again for representation is lacking. The money market man only sees the movement of industry and of the world market in the inverted reflection of the money and stock market and so effect becomes cause to him. I noticed that in the 'forties already in Manchester: the London Stock Exchange reports were utterly useless for the course of industry and its periodical maxima and minima because these gentry tried to explain everything from crises on the money market, which were generally only symptoms. At that time the object was to explain away the origin of industrial crises as temporary overproduction, so that the thing had in addition its tendentious side, provocative of distortion. This point has now gone (for us, at any rate, for good and all), added to which it is indeed a fact that the money market can also have its own crises, in which direct disturbances of industry only play a subordinate part or no part at all – here there is still much, especially in the history of the last twenty years, to be examined and established.

Where there is division of labour on a social scale there is also mutual independence among the different sections of work. In the last instance production is the decisive factor. But when the trade in products becomes independent of production itself, it follows a movement of its own, which, while it is governed as a whole by production, still in particular cases and within this general dependence follows particular laws contained in the nature of this new factor; this movement has phases of its own and in its turn reacts on the movement of production. The discovery of America was due to the thirst for gold which had previously driven the Portuguese to Africa (compare Soetbeer's Production of Precious Metals), because the enormously extended European industry of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and the trade corresponding to it demanded more means of exchange than Germany, the great silver country from 1450 to 1550, could provide. The conquest of India by the Portuguese, Dutch and English between 1500 and 1800 had imports from India as its object – nobody dreamt of exporting anything there. And yet what a colossal reaction these discoveries and conquests, solely conditioned by the interests of trade, had upon industry: they first created the need for exports to these countries and developed large-scale industry.

So it is too with the money market. As soon as trading in money becomes separate from trade in commodities it has (under certain conditions imposed by production and commodity trade and within these limits) a development of its own, special laws and separate phases determined by its own nature. If, in this further development, trade in money extends in addition to trade in securities and these securities are not only government securities but also industrial and transport stocks and shares, so that money trade conquers the direct control over a portion of the production by which, taken as a whole, it is itself controlled, then the reaction of money trading on production becomes still stronger and more complicated. The money traders have become the owners of railways, mines, iron works, etc. These means of production take on a double aspect if their working has to be directed sometimes in the immediate interests of production but sometimes also according to the requirements of the shareholders, in so far as they are money traders. The most striking example of this is the American railways, whose working is entirely dependent on the stock exchange operations of a Jay Gould or a Vanderbilt, etc., these having nothing whatever to do with the particular railway concerned and its interests as a means of communication. And even here in England we have seen struggles lasting for tens of years between different railway companies over the boundaries of their respective territories – struggles in which an enormous amount of money was thrown away, not in the interests of production and communications but simply because of a rivalry which usually only had the object of facilitating the stock exchange dealings of the shareholding money traders.

With these few indications of my conception of the relation of production to commodity trade and of both to money trading, I have already also answered, in essence, your questions about "historical materialism" generally. The thing is easiest to grasp from the point of view of the division of labour. Society gives rise to certain common functions which it cannot dispense with. The persons selected for these functions form a new branch of the division of labour within society. This gives them particular interests, distinct too from the interests of those who gave them their office; they make themselves independent of the latter and – the state is in being. And now the development is the same as it was with commodity trade and later with money trade; the new independent power, while having in the main to follow the movement of production, also, owing to its inward independence (the relative independence originally transferred to it and gradually further developed) reacts in its turn upon the conditions and course of production. It is the interaction of two unequal forces: on one hand the economic movement, on the other the new political power, which strives for as much independence as possible, and which, having once been established, is also endowed with a movement of its own. On the whole, the economic movement gets its way, but it has also to suffer reactions from the political movement which it established and endowed with relative independence itself, from the movement of the state power on the one hand and of the opposition simultaneously engendered on the other. Just as the movement of the industrial market is, in the main and with the reservations already indicated, reflected in the money market and, of course, in inverted form, so the struggle between the classes already existing and already in conflict with one another is reflected in the struggle between government and opposition, but also in inverted form, no longer directly but indirectly, not as a class struggle but as a fight for political principles, and so distorted that it has taken us thousands of years to get behind it again.

The reaction of the state power upon economic development can be one of three kinds: it can run in the same direction, and then development is more rapid; it can oppose the line of development, in which case nowadays state power in every great nation will go to pieces in the long run; or it can cut off the economic development from certain paths, and impose on it certain others. This case ultimately reduces itself to one of the two previous ones. But it is obvious that in cases two and three the political power can do great damage to the economic development and result in the squandering of great masses of energy and material.

Then there is also the case of the conquest and brutal destruction of economic resources, by which, in certain circumstances, a whole local or national economic development could formerly be ruined. Nowadays such a case usually has the opposite effect, at least among great nations: in the long run the defeated power often gains more economically, politically and morally than the victor.

It is similar with law. As soon as the new division of labour which creates professional lawyers becomes necessary, another new and independent sphere is opened up which, for all its general dependence on production and trade, still has its own capacity for reacting upon these spheres as well. In a modern state, law must not only correspond to the general economic position and be its expression, but must also be an expression which is consistent in itself, and which does not, owing to inner contradictions, look glaringly inconsistent. And in order to achieve this, the faithful reflection of economic conditions is more and more infringed upon. All the more so the more rarely it happens that a code of law is the blunt, unmitigated, unadulterated expression of the domination of a class – this in itself would already offend the “conception of justice.” Even in the Code Napoleon the pure logical conception of justice held by the revolutionary bourgeoisie of 1792-96 is already adulterated in many ways, and in so far as it is embodied there has daily to undergo all sorts of attenuation owing to the rising power of the proletariat. Which does not prevent the Code Napoleon from being the statute book which serves as a basis for every new code of law in every part of the world. Thus to a great extent the course of the “development of law” only consists: first in the attempt to do away with the contradictions arising from the direct translation of economic relations into legal principles, and to establish a harmonious system of law, and then in the repeated breaches made in this system by the influence and pressure of further economic development, which involves it in further contradictions (I am only speaking here of civil law for the moment).

The reflection of economic relations as legal principles is necessarily also a topsy turvy one: it happens without the person who is acting being conscious of it; the jurist imagines he is operating with a priori principles, whereas they are really only economic reflexes; so everything is upside down. And it seems to me obvious that this inversion, which, so long as it remains unrecognised, forms what we call ideological conception, reacts in its turn upon the economic basis and may, within certain limits, modify it. The basis of the law of inheritance – assuming that the stages reached in the development of the family are equal – is an economic one. But it would be difficult to prove, for instance, that the absolute liberty of the testator in England and the severe restrictions imposed upon him in France are only due in every detail to economic causes. Both react back, however, on the economic sphere to a very considerable extent, because they influence the division of property.

As to the realms of ideology which soar still higher in the air, religion, philosophy, etc., these have a prehistoric stock, found already in existence and taken over in the historic period, of what we should to-day call bunk. These various false conceptions of nature, of man's own being, of spirits, magic forces, etc., have for the most part only a negative economic basis; but the low economic development of the prehistoric period is supplemented and also partially conditioned and even caused by the false conceptions of nature. And even though economic necessity was the main driving force of the progressive knowledge of nature and becomes ever more so, it would surely be pedantic to try and find economic causes for all this primitive nonsense. The history of science is the history of the gradual clearing away of this nonsense or of its replacement by fresh but already less absurd nonsense. The people who deal with this belong in their turn to special spheres in the division of labour and appear to themselves to be working in an independent field. And in so far as they form an independent group within the social division of labour, in so far do their productions, including their errors, react back as an influence upon the whole development of society, even on its economic development. But all the same they themselves remain under the dominating influence of economic development. In philosophy, for instance, this can be most readily proved in the bourgeois period. Hobbes was the first modern materialist (in the eighteenth century sense) but he was an absolutist in a period when absolute monarchy was at its height throughout the whole of Europe and when the fight of absolute monarchy versus the people was beginning in England. Locke, both in religion and politics, was the child of the class compromise of 1688. The English deists and their more consistent successors, the French materialists, were the true philosophers of the bourgeoisie, the French even of the bourgeois revolution. The German petty bourgeois runs through German philosophy from Kant to Hegel, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively. But the philosophy of every epoch, since it is a definite sphere in the division of labour, has as its presupposition certain definite intellectual material handed down to it by its predecessors, from which it takes its start. And that is why economically backward countries can still play first fiddle in philosophy: France in the eighteenth century compared with England, on whose philosophy the French based themselves, and later Germany in comparison with both. But the philosophy both of France and Germany and the general blossoming of literature at that time were also the result of a rising economic development. I consider the ultimate supremacy of economic development established in these spheres too, but it comes to pass within conditions imposed by the particular sphere itself: in philosophy, for instance, through the operation of economic influences (which again generally only act under political, etc., disguises) upon the existing philosophic material handed down by predecessors. Here economy creates nothing absolutely new (a novo), but it determines the way in which the existing material of thought is altered and further developed, and that too for the most part indirectly, for it is the political, legal and moral reflexes which exercise the greatest direct influence upon philosophy.

About religion I have said the most necessary things in the last section on Feuerbach.

If therefore Barth supposes that we deny any and every reaction of the political, etc., reflexes of the economic movement upon the movement itself, he is simply tilting at windmills. He has only got to look at Marx's Eighteenth Brumaire, which deals almost exclusively with the particular part played by political struggles and events; of course, within their general dependence upon economic conditions. Or Capital, the section on the working day, for instance, where legislation, which is surely a political act, has such a trenchant effect. Or the section on the history of the bourgeoisie. (Chapter XXIV.) Or why do we fight for the political dictatorship of the proletariat if political power is economically impotent? Force (that is state power) is also an economic power.

But I have no time to criticise the book now. I must first get Vol. III out and besides I think too that Bernstein, for instance, could deal with it quite effectively.

What these gentlemen all lack is dialectic. They never see anything but here cause and there effect. That this is a hollow abstraction, that such metaphysical polar opposites only exist in the real world during crises, while the whole vast process proceeds in the form of interaction (though of very unequal forces, the economic movement being by far the strongest, most elemental and most decisive) and that here everything is relative and nothing is absolute – this they never begin to see. Hegel has never existed for them.

1891

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 3 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 7 January

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 9 January

Engels to Stanislaw Mendelson. 13 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 15 January

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 17 January

Engels to Stanislaw Mendelson. 18 January

Engels to Carl Schorlemmer. 27 January

Engels to Heinrich Scheu. 27 January

Engels to Hermann Schlüter. 29 January

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 31 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 3 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 5 February

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 6 February

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 10 February

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 11 February

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 11 February

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 21 February

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 23 February

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 23 February

Engels to Antonio Labriola. 27 February

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 4 March

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 6 March

Engels to Henri Ravé. 6 March

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 6 March

Engels to Filippo Turati. 7 March

Engels to Henri Ravé. Mid-March

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 17 March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 21 March

Engels to Hermann Schlüter. 21 March

Engels to Max Oppenheim. 24 March

Engels to José Mesa. 24 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 30 March

Engels to Stanislaw Mendelson. 31 March

Engels to August Bebel. c. 1 April

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 2 April

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 2 April

Engels to Romualdo Fantuzzi. 2 April

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 3 April

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 7 April

Engels to Henri Ravé. 7 April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 8 April

Engels to Walery Wróblewski. 9 April

Engels to Heinrich Scheu. 10 April

Engels to Leo Frankel. 24 April

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 30 April

Engels to August Bebel. 1-2 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 4 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 19 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 29 May

Engels to Franz Mehring. 5 June

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 10 June

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 13 June

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 13 June

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 16 June

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 19 June

Engels to Victor Adler. 26 June

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 28 June

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 29 June

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 1 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 7 July

Engels to Johann Gustav Vogt. 8 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 12 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 20 July

Engels to Victor Adler. 22 July

Engels to Emma Adler. 22 July

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 9-11 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 17 August

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 2 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 2 September

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 2 September

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 14 September

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 28 September

Engels to August Bebel. 29 Sep/1 Oct

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 30 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 2 October

Engels to August Bebel. 6 October

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 13 October

Engels to August Bebel. 13 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 13 October

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 14 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 22 October

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 24 October

Engels to August Bebel. 24/26 October

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 25-26 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 27 October

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 29 October

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 29-31 October

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 31 October

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 1 November

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 9 November

Engels to August Bebel. 10 November

Engels to Oscar Heidfeld. 12 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 14 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 21 November

Engels to August Bebel. 25 November

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 27 November

Engels to August Bebel. 1 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 1 December

Engels to Natalie Liebknecht. 2 December

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 3 December

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 3 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 19 December

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 23 December

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 27 December

Engels to Anna and Hermann Schlüter. 30 December

Engels to Schlüter

Abstract

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

London, January 29, 1891.

Dear Schlüter:

... Unfortunately I cannot accept Serge’s invitation. I am rooted with so many fibres here in Europe and have so infinitely much to do that a retreat to America can be considered only in the most extremely desperate situation. Moreover, my household is fully in order again ever since Louise Kautsky is with me.

Many thanks for the calendar.

The articles in the Cyclopedia are partly by Marx and partly by me, viz., entirely or almost entirely on military subjects: biographies of military leaders, the articles on Artillery, Cavalry, Fortifications, etc. Purely commercial work, nothing else; they can safely remain buried.

I see clearly enough that things are going downhill with the S.L.P. from its fraternization with the Nationalists, compared to whom the Fabians here — likewise bourgeois — are radicals. I should have thought that the Sozialist would scarcely be able to beget extra boredom by cohabitating with the Nationalist. Serge sends me the Nationalist, but despite all my efforts I cannot find anyone who is willing to read it.

Nor do I understand the quarrel with Gompers. His Federation is, as far as I know, an association of trade-unions and nothing but trade-unions. Hence they have the formal right to reject anyone coming as the representative of a labor organization that is not a trade-union, or to reject delegates of an association to which such organizations are admitted. I cannot judge from here, of course, whether it was propagandistically advisable to expose oneself to such a rejection. But it was beyond question that it had to come, and I, for one, cannot blame Gompers for it.

But when I think of next year’s international congress in Brussels, I should think it would have been well to keep on good terms with Gompers, who has more workers behind him, at any rate, than the S.L.P., and to ensure as big a delegation from America as possible there, including his people. They would see many things there that will disconcert them in their narrowminded trade-union standpoint — and besides, where do you want to find a recruiting ground if not in the trade unions?

Many thanks for the silver material. If you could find something for me containing material on the present silver production of the U. S., I should be grateful. The European double-standard currency jackasses are sheer dupes of the American silver producers and are quite ready to pull the latter’s chestnuts out of the fire for them. See my footnote on the precious metals in the fourth edition of Capital.

Please give me fuller details of Marx’s speech on free trade you refer to. I recall merely that when debate grew slack in the Brussels German Workers Society, Marx and I agreed to stage a sham debate in which he defended free trade and I protective tariffs, and I still see the astounded faces of the people when they saw the two of us suddenly attacking each other. It is possible that this speech was printed in the Deutsche Brusseler Zeitung. I can’t recall any other one.

You will probably be unable to come to Germany for the first year or two. Tauscher has been released, it is true, but only because there was no evidence against him. It was disclosed, on the other hand, that the provisions of the statute of limitations have been regularly interrupted for the rest of you.

Cordial regards to your wife and yourself from Louise Kautsky and

Your,

F. Engels

Engels to Paul Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

January 31, 1891

My dear Lafargue

Like nine-tenths of the news published in Paris about Germany, that which alarmed you is nothing but a false report.

The leading Committee of the German Party has not budged where May 1st is concerned. The parliamentary group (the socialist members of the Reichstag) passed a resolution, unanimous save for one vote, that in Germany (and nowhere else) it would be desirable to celebrate May Day on Sunday, May 3rd, and not on May 1st. That is all. As the Party constitution does not give the “group” any official standing, there is nothing more to it than the simple expression of a desire, which, however, will probably receive general sanction.

As for the idea of suggesting to other nationalities that they should similarly change the date of the demonstration, our papers do not say a word. Nevertheless, it may be that individually this or that deputy thought of it; as Bebel is in Zurich for his daughter’s wedding I shall write to Fischer to stop any such foolishness should anyone still have it in mind.

You and Bonnier, from whom I have a long letter on the matter in my pocket, can say whatever you please — the English will probably do like the Germans and celebrate on the Sunday. As for the Germans, it is pretty well an absolute necessity. Last year you found their behaviour “flabby.” Very well, but in Hamburg, the town where we are best organised and have the greatest strength relative to the rest of the population, and where we had very considerable funds (Party as well as trade union) — in Hamburg May 1st was celebrated in defiance of the employers. But business was rather poor, so the latter took advantage of the one-day stoppage to close their factories and to announce that they would reopen them only to workers who should have left their trade unions and who promised never to rejoin a union. The fight lasted throughout the summer and until the autumn; in the end, the employers gave up their demands; but our trade union organisation in Hamburg was badly shaken, funds were exhausted there and elsewhere, owing to contributions to the lock-outs, and there is not the smallest desire to go through all this again in the spring, the industrial situation having grown worse.

It’s all very well for you to talk about hesitations and flabbiness. You have a republic, and the bourgeois republicans, to defeat the royalists, have been forced to grant you political rights which we are far from having in Germany. Moreover, for the time being, split as you are with the Broussists in tow to the government, you are not too dangerous; on the contrary, Constans would like to see you “demonstrate” and frighten the Radicals a bit. In Germany, our people are a genuine force, one and a half to two million voters, the only disciplined and growing party. If the government wishes the Socialists to hold demonstrations, it is because it wants to draw them into a riot so that they could crush them and be done with them for a decade. The German Socialists’ best demonstration is their existence and their slow, steady, irresistible progress. We are still far from being able to withstand an open fight, and we have the duty, in relation to the whole of Europe and America, of not suffering a defeat, but of winning, when the time comes, the first great battle. To that consideration I subordinate every other.

Naturally it would be very fine to see all the socialist workmen in the Old and New World down tools on the same day, May 1st. But it would not be a simultaneous and uniform stoppage. You in Paris would strike, let us say from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m.. When the New Yorkers start at 8 a.m. it will be 1 p.m. in Paris, and the Californians will start three hours later still. The demonstration lost nothing last year by being spread over two days, and that will be still less the case this year. The Austrians are in a totally different situation: regular agitation and organisation are made so difficult for them that a one-day stoppage is their only means of making a demonstration, as Adler has shown very clearly.

So console yourself. The movement will not suffer from this lack of “unity,” and such purely formal unity would not be worth the price we should have to pay for it in Germany and possibly in England too.

...

I find your behaviour in relation to the anti-Broussists [1] capital. To conclude a treaty of practical cooperation, to put aside any attempt at merging for the moment, to leave everything until the proper time comes and, in the last resort, until the International Congress [2] — there is no better way of benefiting from the situation. than you have done. It is what Marx proposed to Liebknecht at the time of the fusion with the Lassalleans, but our friend was in too much of a hurry.

Guesde [3] has played a fine trick on him in his reports for the Vorwärts. Liebknecht has always defended the bourgeois republic to annoy the Prussians; people like Constans, Rouvier, etc, were almost perfect according to him. And now Guesde comes and destroys this illusion. It’s delightful, and also very good for Germany.

Kiss Laura for me. My compliments to Doctor Z on his article on the Toulon affair. [4] Louise is particularly grateful for it. She wishes to be remembered kindly to you and to Laura.

Ever yours

FE

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor.

1. Those in the French Workers Party opposed to Paul Brousse (1854-1912), a French petit-bourgeois socialist in the Workers Party who vehemently opposed the Marxist trend as an ideologist and leader of Possibilists, an opportunist trend in French socialism.

2. Engels refers to the Second International Congress, which was to be held in Brussels in August 1891.

3. Jules Guesde (1845-1922) — well-known leader of French and international working-class and socialist movement; a founder of French Workers Party (1879) and populariser of Marxism in France, for many years was leader of the revolutionary wing of French socialist movement; fought opportunism, during First World War — social-chauvinist.

4. This refers to an abortion scandal in which the radical Mayor of Toulon, Fouroux, and his mistress, Mme de Jonquières, were involved and as a result of which he was removed from office and sentenced. We have not had access to the Socialiste containing the article.

Engels To Friedrich Adolph Sorge

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 353;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

February 11, 1891

The gasworkers now have the most powerful organisation in Ireland [359] and will put up their own candidates in the next election, unconcerned over either Parnell or MacCarthy. That Parnell is now so friendly with the workers, he owes to encounters with these same gasworkers, who had no compunctions about telling him the truth. Michael Davitt, too, who had at first wanted independent Irish Trades Unions, has learned from them: their constitution secures them perfectly free home rule. To them the credit for giving impetus to the labour movement in Ireland. Many of their branches consist of agricultural labourers.

Notes

359. The National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers of Great Britain and Ireland, founded in April 1889, had over 100,000 members. It was the first trade union in the English and Irish labour movements to organise unskilled workers. Its chief demand was the introduction of an eight-hour working day. Eleanor Marx-Aveling played a major role in its organisation and leadership.

The active dissemination of socialist ideas among the trade union members by Eleanor Marx and her comrades helped the Union exert a major influence on Ireland’s working-class movement. Its example promoted the formation of the dockers’, agricultural workers’ and other trade unions.

Engels To Kautsky

In Stuttgart

London, 23 February 1891

Source: MECW, Volume 49, p. 133;

First published: in Russian, in Bolshevik, Moscow, 1931.

Transcribed: Andy Blunden.

Dear Kautsky,

You will have got my hasty congratulations of the day before yesterday. So let us now return to the matter in hand, namely Marx’s letter.

The fear that it would place a weapon in the hands of our opponents was unfounded. Malicious insinuations are, of course, made about anything and everything, but by and large the impression gained by our opponents was nevertheless one of utter stupefaction at this ruthless self-criticism, stupefaction combined with the feeling that a party must be possessed of great inner strength if it could treat itself to that sort of thing. This much is apparent from the opposition newspapers I have been getting from you (very many thanks) and elsewhere. And I frankly admit that this was what I had in mind when I published the document. That it was bound at first to give grave offence in certain quarters I was aware, but it couldn’t be helped and in my view this consideration was more than outweighed by its factual content. And I knew that the party was amply strong enough to stand it and I reckoned that today it would even tolerate the forthright language used 15 years ago, that it would point with justifiable pride to this test of its strength and say: Show us another party that would dare do the same. In the meantime this has been left to the Saxon and the Vienna Arbeiter-Zeitung and the Züricher Post.

To have assumed, in No. 21 of the Neue Zeit, responsibility for its publication is most courageous of you, but don’t forget that it was I, after all, who first instigated the thing and, in addition, presented you, as it were, with Hobson’s choice. Accordingly I consider the main responsibility to be mine. As to details, one can of course always hold differing views about such things. I deleted or altered everything that you and Dietz took exception to and, even if Dietz had made more deletions, I should still have been coulant wherever possible; at no time have I failed to give the two of you proof of this. As to the main issue, however, it was my duty to publish the thing the moment the programme came up for discussion. And especially after Liebknecht’s speech at Halle, in which he coolly quotes parts of it as though they were his own, while contesting others without naming their source, Marx would unquestionably have confronted this version with the original and in place of him I was duty bound to do the same. Unfortunately the document was not immediately to hand and I only found it much later after a long search.

You mention that Bebel has written to you saying that Marx’s treatment of Lassalle has caused bad blood amongst the old Lassalleans. That may be. Those people don’t, of course, know the true story and nobody seems to have done anything to enlighten them on the subject. If they don’t know that Lassalle’s reputation as a great man is solely attributable to the fact that for years Marx allowed him to flaunt as his own the fruits of Marx’s research and, what’s more, to distort them because of his inadequate grounding in political economy, that is no fault of mine. But I am Marx’s literary executor and as such I also have my obligations.

For the past 26 years Lassalle has been part of history. If, while the Exceptional Law was in force, he has been exempt from historical criticism, it is now high time that such criticism came into its own and that light be thrown on Lassalle’s position in regard to Marx. The legend which veils the true image of Lassalle and deifies him cannot, after all, become an article of faith for the party. However highly one may rate Lassalle’s services on behalf of the movement, his historical role inside it remains an equivocal one. Everywhere Lassalle the socialist goes hand in hand with Lassalle the demagogue. In Lassalle the agitator and organiser, the Lassalle who conducted the Hatzfeldt lawsuit is everywhere apparent: the same cynicism in the choice of methods, the same predilection for consorting with corrupt and shady people who may be used simply as tools and then be discarded. Up till 1862 a specifically Prussian vulgar democrat in practice with marked Bonapartist tendencies (I have just been looking through his letters to Marx), he made a sudden volte-face for purely personal reasons and began to engage in agitation. And before 2 years had gone by he was demanding that the workers side with the monarchy against the bourgeoisie and had begun intriguing with his kindred spirit Bismarck in a manner that could only have led to the actual betrayal of the movement had he not, luckily for him, been shot in the nick of time. In his propagandist writings the correct arguments he borrowed from Marx are so interwoven with his own invariably false ones that it is virtually impossible to separate the two. Such workers as have been offended by Marx’s judgment know nothing of Lassalle save for his 2 years of agitation and, furthermore, see the latter only through rose-tinted spectacles. But historical criticism cannot forever remain standing hat in hand before such prejudices. It was my duty to settle accounts once and for all between Marx and Lassalle. That has been done. With this I can content myself for the time being. Besides, I have other things to do. And the publication of Marx’s ruthless judgment of Lassalle will undoubtedly prove effective on its own and put heart into others. But if I were forced to do so, there'd be no alternative: I should have to dispose of the Lassallean legend once and for all.

That voices should have been raised in the parliamentary group demanding that the Neue Zeit be subject to censorship is truly delectable. Is the spectre of the parliamentary group’s dictatorship at the time of the Anti-Socialist Law (a dictatorship that was, of course, essential and excellently managed) still at large or is it a harking back to the sometime close-knit organisation of von Schweitzer? After the liberation of German socialist science from Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law, what more brilliant idea than to subject it to a new Anti-Socialist Law to be thought up and implemented by the officials of the Social-Democratic Party. However, we've taken care that they don’t get too big for their boots.

I have lost no sleep over the Vorwärts article. I shall await Liebknecht’s account of the affair and then reply to both in as amicable tones as possible. There are only a few inaccuracies to put right in the Vorwärts article (e.g. that we hadn’t wanted unification, that events had given Marx the lie, etc.) and some obvious points to confirm. I intend that this reply should conclude the debate so far as I am concerned, provided I am not compelled to resume it as a result of fresh attacks or inaccurate statements.

Tell Dietz that I am revising the Origin. However I have today also heard from Fischer who writes to say that he wants three new prefaces!

Your

F. E.

Friedrich Engels to José Mesa

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

24 March 1891 [1]

My dear Mesa

We have learned with great pleasure from your letter of the 2nd inst that your Spanish translation of Marx’s Misère de la Philosophie [2] is about to be published. Of course we readily approve of this enterprise. It will certainly have a most favourable effect on the development of socialism in Spain.

The Proudhonian theory, whose foundations were demolished by Marx’s book, disappeared from the scene after the fall of the Paris Commune. But it is still the great arsenal from which the middle-class radicals and pseudo-socialists of Western Europe procure the phrases with which they lull the workers to sleep. And as the workers of these countries have inherited similar Proudhonist phrases from their predecessors the phraseology of the radicals still strikes a responsive chord among many of them. That is the case in France where the only Proudhonists still in existence are the middle-class radicals or republicans who call themselves Socialists. And if I am not mistaken you too have in your Cortés and in your press republicans of this type who call themselves Socialists because they see in the Proudhonian ideas a quite suitable means of opposing an adulterated middle-class socialism to true socialism, the rational and valid expression of the aspirations of the proletariat.

Fraternal greetings

F Engels

Notes

1. José Mesa y Leompart (1840-1904) – Spanish printing worker, prominent figure in working-class and socialist movement of Spain, one of organisers of First International’s Section in Spain, active fighter against anarchism, one of founders of Spanish Socialist Workers Party (1879), translated a number of Marx and Engels’ works into Spanish – Progress Publishers.

2. Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy.

Engels to Bebel

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

May 1-2, 1891

The coal strike in the Ruhr is certainly awkward for you, but what gives? The ill-advised strike of angry passion is, as matters stand, the usual way that large new strata of workers are brought in our direction. These facts seem to me to have been given too little consideration in the treatment by Vorwärts. Liebknecht knows no shadings, he is either all black or all white; and if he thought he was duty-bound to prove to the world that our party did not egg on this strike, and even calmed it down, then God have mercy on the poor strikers — for them less than a desirable amount of concern has been shown, to see that they come to us soon.

Engels to Kautsky

In Stuttgart

29 June 1891

Source: MECW, Volume 49, pp. 209-212;

Transcribed: by Tony Brown.

Dear Kautsky,

I have come down here to take refuge with Pumps for a few days, having been inundated with an intolerable amount of work. No sooner had I become happily engrossed in group marriage than I was landed with the party programme, which had to be attended to[note]. I mean at first to try rewriting the preamble in rather more succinct form but want of time prevented my doing so, besides which I thought it more important to point out the shortcomings, some avoidable, others not, of the political part, as this would provide me with an opportunity to lash out at the conciliatory opportunism of the Vorwärts and the clean-devout-joyous-free ‘ingrowing’ of the old canker ‘into socialist society’. I have since heard of your proposal that there should be a new preamble; so much the better.

The party is going to print Lassalle’s letters to Marx and myself, annotated by me 260 (thus precluding all censorship by the party). I can attend to this in the autumn, alongside Volume III. (This between ourselves.)

I have taken refuge here in order to finish off part of my correspondence; on Thursday I go home, when work on group marriage will be resumed. I was getting along so nicely – confound these interruptions!

Poverty of Philosophy – the position is that Dietz is to buy himself out for 450 marks, whereupon negotiations will be restricted to the four of us, so all is well and we shall be able to sort things out all right. But there can be no question of you two refusing to take any remuneration for the 2nd edition.

Dietz’s plan for a volume of Marx’s minor works won’t do. Long ago Liebknecht cherished a pet project of this sort; it was to be put into effect by his latest protégé, Paul Ernst, who was also to publish other things of Marx’s and, in fact, to be sent to me for a few months so that I could help him in this. The idea was for the thing to be published by the Berlin bookseller under the party’s imprint – i.e. an edition of Marx alongside an edition of Lassalle. I turned this down categorically, which means that I can do no less where Dietz is concerned. I have Permitted the party to publish a few minor things of Marx’s in pamphlet form and as individual items, without notes or preface. Nor can I go any further than that. I cannot allow them to steal a march on me by bringing out in this piecemeal fashion the complete edition to whose ultimate publication I am committed.

Nor, for that matter, can I now contemplate a new edition of the Condition, etc., not, at any rate, until Volume III is completed. I am perfectly prepared to negotiate this with Dietz in due course, but the chaps have simply got to realise that I can take on absolutely nothing more until Volume III has gone to press. While it is in printing, arrangements can be made for something else. But until then I shall resist all incitements and pet projects, whether they emanate from Dietz or anyone else. After all, the chaps ought to have sense enough to exempt me till then from this sort of thing since it could only involve me in useless, time-consuming correspondence. As soon as I have finished revising the Origin I shall set to work on Volume III and then, come rain or shine, I’ll carry on regardless.

Vollmar’s speech with its quite unnecessary concessions to the present Establishment and its still more unnecessary, and, what’s more, unauthorised assurances that Social-Democrats would play their part if the Fatherland were attacked – i.e. would help defend the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine -has caused unmitigated glee amongst our opponents over here and in France. If it is allowed to pass, our chaps will have to pay very dearly for it in Brussels. The Possibilists and the Hyndmen are quarrying it for notes, after their usual fashion, nor can we over here do anything about it in the absence of an authentic statement denying Vollmar the right to speak in the name of the party. Now, as Hyndman’s man of straw, Bax has recently written on the subject in Justice; I haven’t seen it yet.

The meeting of women in labour in Hyde Park has caused considerable merriment here and in London – the English version even more than the German because of the play on words in demanding a reduction of the hours of labour which, more specifically, can mean travail: a woman in labour.

Ravé’s address is Faubourg Rochereuil, Poitiers, France.

Pumps now lives down here; Percy has taken on an agency for his brothers. Their little house, The Firs, is in Brading Road, exactly one English mile outside the town. It’s small but pretty and has a garden with vegetables and fruit. Old Harney spent four weeks at Ventnor where he had a recurrence of gout and rheumatism. We fetched him over here on Saturday; he will probably travel back with me on Thursday and return to his headquarters in Richmond. He is terribly lame and out of sorts.

Schorlemmer will probably soon be with us. As you know, he’s a very uncommunicative correspondent. While over here, Sam Moore has suffered from African malarial fever but is now better again. In August or September he will be returning to the Niger. In his heart of hearts, I believe, he yearns after the beautiful climatedespite the bouts of fever which recur with menstrual regularity.

How could you possibly imagine I cared a rap about whether or not I’m given pride of place in the Neue Zeit? Simply suit yourself.

Many regards from everyone here.

Yours truly,

F.E.

As can be seen from the letters of August Bebel and Richard Fischer of 18 June 1891, the following items relating to the drafting of a new programme of German Social-Democracy to be adopted by the party congress in Erfurt had been sent to Engels for consideration: the draft programme compiled by Wilhelm Liebknecht; a copy of it with amendments in Bebel’s hand, Liebknecht’s second draft, taking into account Bebel’s amendments; and the draft proper as endorsed by the party Executive. At the Executive’s decision, copies of the draft were sent to Engels and other working-class and socialist leaders and also to the Social-Democratic Reichstag deputies.

Engels gave a detailed analysis of the document in ‘A Critique of the Draft Social-Democratic Programme of 1891’ (see MECW Vol. 27, pp. 217-34). For a long time the copy of the draft sent to Engels had been considered lost. It was first published in the journal Beitrage zur Geschichte der Arbeiterbewegung (Berlin), 1968, Sonderheft, pp. 173-74. In the present edition it will be found in Volume 27, Note 184. The extent to which Engels’ criticisms on the version of the draft programme sent him were taken into account can be seen from the draft programme published by the party Executive in Vorwärts on 4 July 1891, soon after the receipt of Engels’ comments (see present edition, Vol. 27, Note 184), and from Bebel’s letter of 12 July 189 1. Another draft programme, written by Karl Kautsky, was put forward by the editorial board of Neue Zeit. These documents show that account had been taken of Engels’ criticism pertaining to the general theoretical propositions and to the section stating the economic demands. No changes of substance were made in the political demands section. The draft contained no mention of the conquest of political power by the proletariat, of the democratic republic, of remodelling Germany’s political system or of the need to combat the survivals of feudalism and absolutism.

Engels to Conrad Schmidt

In Zurich

Abstract

Written: July 1, 1891

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Ryde, Isle of Wight, July 1, 1891

I am very much disappointed with Barth's book. I had expected something rather less shallow and slap-dash. A man who judges every philosopher not by the enduring and progressive part of his activity but by what is necessarily transitory and reactionary – by the system – would have done better to remain silent. According to him, in fact, the whole history of philosophy is nothing but a pile of the "ruins" of broken-down systems. How high old Hegel stands above this alleged critic of his! And then to imagine he is criticising Hegel because here and there he gets on the track of one of the false connections by means of which Hegel, like every other systematiser, has to get his system neatly constructed! The colossal discovery that Hegel sometimes lumps contrary and contradictory oppositions together! I could show him some more tricks very different from that if it was worth the trouble. The man is what we call on the Rhine a Korinthenscheisser – he turns everything into petty trash – and until he has got rid of this habit, he will, to use Hegel's language, “come from nothing through nothing to nothing.”

His criticism of Marx is really funny. First he makes up a materialist theory of history for himself, which Marx is supposed, in his opinion, to have held, and then he finds something quite different in Marx's works. But from this he does not conclude that he, Barth, has foisted something distorted on to Marx: no, on the contrary, Marx contradicts himself and cannot apply his own theory! “Yes, if people could only read!” as Marx used to exclaim at criticisms of this kind.

I have not got the book here; if I had time I would show you hundreds more absurdities one by one. It is a pity: one sees that the man could accomplish something if he were not so hasty in passing his judgments. It is to be hoped that he will soon write something which will be attacked more; a regular dose of knocking about would do him a lot of good.

Engels To Friedrich Adolph Sorge

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides and Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 353;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden and Einde O'Callaghan.

August 9-11 1891

I am very grateful for the information regarding the Journal of the Knights of Labor — I have to look through such a pile of papers that it is often very hard for me to get my bearings without such reports. Likewise, regarding Gompers and Sanial; very important, should I see them in London? ...

Tussy, Aveling, Thorne, and others of the Gas Workers, Sanders (John Burns’ secretary), and several other Englishmen of our side are going to Brussels. I don’t know as yet how matters stand with the old trade unions.

The dockers are on the verge of collapse. Their strike was won solely as a result of the £30,000 blindly contributed from Australia; but they think they did it themselves. Hence they are making one mistake after another — the last one was closing their lists, not accepting any more new members, and so breeding their own scabs. Then they refused to conclude a cartel with the gas workers. Many workers are dockers in summer, and gas workers in winter; the gas workers proposed that the ticket of one union should hold good for both with this alternating employment — rejected! Up to now the gas workers have respected the dockers’ ticket nevertheless — one can’t say how much longer. Then the dockers are raising an outcry against the immigration of foreign paupers (Russian Jews). Of their leaders, Tom Mann is upright but boundlessly weak, and he has been made half-crazy by his appointment as a member of the Royal Commission on Labor; Ben Tillett is an ambitious intriguer. They have no money, their members are dropping out in droves, and discipline has vanished.

August 11, 1891

Tussy’s report to the Brussels Congress on behalf of the gasworkers and others, is very good. I shall send it to you. Tussy is going to Brussels with a mandate from the Dublin Congress of Gasworkers and General Labourers, thus representing 100,000. [360] Aveling, too, has 3 or 4 mandates. To all appearances, the old Trades Unions will be poorly represented. So much the better this time!

Notes

360. The Second Congress of the National Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers of Great Britain and Ireland was held on May 17, 1891, in Dublin. The Congress adopted a decision on the participation of the Union in the forthcoming International Socialist Workers’ Congress in Brussels: and Eleanor Marx-Aveling and William Thorne were elected delegates

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Helensburgh, Scotland, 14 September, 1891

The Newcastle Trade Union Congress is also a victory. The old unions, with the textile workers at their head, and the whole of the reactionary party among the workers, had exerted all their strength towards overthrowing the eight-hour decision of 1890. They came to grief and have only achieved a very small temporary concession. This is decisive. The confusion is still great, but the thing is in irresistible motion and the bourgeois papers recognise the defeat of the bourgeois Labour Party completely and with terror, howling and gnashing of teeth. The Scottish Liberals especially, the most intelligent and the most classic bourgeoisie in the kingdom, are unanimous in their outcry at the great misfortune and hopeless wrongheadedness of the workers.

Engels to August Bebel

In Berlin

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 29 September, 1891

You are right; if it comes to war we must demand the general arming of the people. But in conjunction with the already existing organisation or that specially prepared in case of war. Enlistment, therefore, of the hitherto untrained in supplementary reserves and Landsturm and above all immediate emergency training besides arming and organisation into fixed cadres.

The proclamation to the French will have to come out rather differently in form. The Russian diplomats are not so stupid as to provoke a war in face of the whole of Europe. On the contrary, things will be so operated that either France appears as the provoking party or – one of the Triple Alliance countries. Russia always has dozens of casus belli [occasions for war] of this kind to hand; the special answer to be given depends on the pretext for war put forward. In any case we must declare that since 1871 we have always been ready for a peaceful understanding with France, that as soon as our Party comes to power it will be unable to exercise that power unless Alsace-Lorraine freely determines its own future, but that if war is forced upon us, and moreover a war in alliance with Russia, we must regard this as an attack on our existence and defend ourselves by every method, utilising all positions at our disposal and therefore Metz and Strasbourg also.

As to the conduct of the war itself, two aspects are immediately decisive: Russia is weak in attack but strong in defensive man-power. A stab in the heart is impossible. France is strong in attack but rendered incapable of attack, innocuous, after a few defeats. I do not give much either for Austrians as generals or for Italians as soldiers, so our army will have to lead and sustain the main push. The war will have to begin with the holding back of the Russians but the defeat of the French. When the French offensive has been rendered innocuous things may get as far as the conquest of Poland up to the Dvina and Dnieper, but hardly before. This must be carried out by revolutionary methods and if necessary by giving up a piece of Prussian Poland and the whole of Galicia to the Poland to be established. If this goes well revolution will doubtless follow in France. At the same time we must press for at least Metz and Lorraine to be offered as a peace offering to France.

Probably, however, it will not go so well. The French will not allow themselves to be so easily defeated, their army is very good and better armed than ours, and what we achieve in the way of generalship does not look as if very much would come of it either. That the French have learnt how to mobilise has been shown this summer. And also that they have enough officers for their first field army – which is stronger than ours. Our superiority in officers will only be proved with the troops brought up later into the line. Moreover the direct line between Berlin and Paris is strongly defended by fortifications on both sides. In short, in the most favourable case it will probably turn out a fluctuating war which will be carried on with constant drawing in of fresh reinforcements by both sides until one party is exhausted, or until the active intervention of England, who, by simply blockading corn imports can, under the then existing conditions, starve out whichever party she decides against, Germany or France, and force it to make peace. In the meantime what happens on the Russian frontier mainly depends on the way the Austrians conduct the war and is therefore incalculable.

So much seems certain to me: if we are beaten, every barrier to chauvinism and a war of revenge in Europe will be thrown down for years hence. If we are victorious our Party will come into power. The victory of Germany is therefore the victory of the revolution, and if it comes to war we must not only desire victory but further it by every means....

What should have been categorically stated [by Bernstein] was that if France formally represents the revolution in relation to Germany, Germany, through its workers' Party, stands materially at the head of the revolution, and this is bound to come to light in the war – in which we, and with us the revolution, will either be crushed or else come to power.

Friedrich Engels to Karl Kautsky

In Stuttgart

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

14 October 1891

Dear Kautsky

To my great astonishment I found unexpectedly cropping up in the Vorwärts text of your draft [1] the term ‘one reactionary mass’. I am writing to you at once about it although I am almost afraid it is too late. This propaganda phrase spoils, like a shrill discordant note, the whole harmonious array of tersely and precisely worded scientific propositions. For it is a propaganda phrase and extremely one-sided at that and hence entirely wrong in the apodictically absolute form in which alone it seems convincing.

Wrong because it enunciates an historical tendency, which is, correct as such, as an accomplished fact. The moment the socialist revolution starts all other parties appear to be a reactionary mass vis-à-vis us. They may possibly be it already, and have lost all capacity for any progressive action whatsoever, although this is not inevitable. But at the present moment we cannot say that, at least not with the certainty with which we proclaim the other programmatic principles. Even in Germany conditions may arise under which the Left parties, despite their wretchedness, may be forced to sweep away part of the colossal anti-bourgeois, bureaucratic and feudal rubbish that is still lying there. And in that event they are by no means a reactionary mass.

So long as we are not strong enough to seize the helm of state ourselves and realise our principles there can be no talk, strictly speaking, of one reactionary mass vis-à-vis us. Otherwise the whole nation would be divided into a reactionary majority and an impotent minority.

Did the people who broke up the system of small states in Germany, who gave the bourgeoisie elbow-room to make the industrial revolution, who introduced a unified communications system, both for persons and things, and who thereby were bound to give us greater freedom of movement – did they do that as a ‘reactionary mass'?

Did the French bourgeois republicans, who in 1871-78 definitely vanquished the monarchy and the rule of the clergy and secured freedom of the press, of association and of assembly to an extent previously unheard-of in France in non-revolutionary times, who introduced compulsory education and made instruction general and improved it to such an extent that we in Germany could profit by their example – did they act as a reactionary mass?

The Englishmen belonging to either of the official parties, who have enormously extended the suffrage, quintupled the number of voters, equalised the election districts, introduced compulsory education and improved instruction, who at each session vote not only for bourgeois reforms but also for ever new concessions to the workers – they proceed slowly and listlessly but nobody can condemn them offhand as ‘one reactionary mass’.

In brief, we have no right to represent a tendency gradually becoming a reality as an already accomplished fact, and particularly not since in England for instance this tendency will never become an absolute fact. When the turning point comes here the bourgeoisie will still be ready to introduce various small reforms. But at that time it will be completely pointless to insist on introducing small reforms in a system that is being overthrown.

The Lassallean phrase is justified under certain circumstances in agitation, although our people too have greatly misused it, for example since 1 October 1890 [2] in the Vorwärts. But it does not belong in the Programme, for there it would be absolutely wrong and misleading. There it would look like banker Bethmann’s wife on the balcony they wanted to build for his house: ‘If you build me a balcony my wife will squat down on it and spoil the whole façade!’

I cannot mention any other changes in the Vorwärts text for I have mislaid the paper and the letter must be mailed.

The Party Congress started on a glorious day; 14 October is the anniversary of the battles of Jena and Auerstedt [3] where old, pre-revolutionary Prussia collapsed. May 14 October 1891 inaugurate for Prussianised Germany the ‘internal Jena’ predicted by Marx.

Yours

F Engels

Notes

1. The draft programme of the German Social-Democratic Party – Progress Publishers.

2. On 1 October 1890 the Anti-Socialist Law was abrogated in Germany – Progress Publishers.

3. Engels refers to the crushing defeat which Napoleon inflicted on the Prussian armies at Jena and Auerstedt on 14 October 1806 – Progress Publishers.

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

In Hoboken

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

October 24, 1891

... I can very well believe that the movement in the USA is again at a low ebb. Over there everything is liable to big ups and downs. But in each of the ups new ground is definitely gained and so one makes progress in the long run. Thus the powerful surge of the Knights of Labor [1] and of the strike movement of 1886 to 1888 despite all the set-backs has on the whole advanced our cause. There is now quite a different spirit among the masses. Still more ground will be gained next time. But the living standard of the native American worker is nevertheless considerably higher than even that of the English worker, and this alone is sufficient to relegate him to a back seat for some time. Besides there is the competition of the emigrants and some other reasons. When the time is ripe things will move there with enormous speed and energy, but it may take a little while till that point is reached. Miracles don’t happen anywhere. Add to this moreover the unfortunate business with the supercilious Germans who want to play the schoolmaster and at the same time the commander and who have thus made the natives dislike learning even the best things from them...

Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus [2] will be published here in a translation prepared by Aveling and edited by me (in Sonnenschein’s Social Series). In face of this authorised translation the American pirate edition [3] with its miserable English will be rather innocuous. It is moreover not even complete, whatever they found too difficult they have left out...

...

Despite the famine in Russia the danger of war is becoming greater. The Russians want to exploit the new French alliance rapidly and thoroughly, and although I am convinced that Russian diplomacy does not want a war, and the famine would make it look ridiculous, nevertheless military and pan-Slav tendencies (now supported by the very strong industrial bourgeoisie in the interest of extended markets) may get the upper hand and it is equally likely that some stupidity may be perpetrated in Vienna, Berlin or Paris which will cause war to break out. Bebel and I have been in correspondence on this point and we are of the opinion that if the Russians start war against us, German Socialists must go for the Russians and their allies, whoever they may be, a l'outrance [in a fight to the death]. If Germany is crushed, then we shall be too, while in the most favourable case the struggle will be such a violent one that Germany will only be able to maintain herself by revolutionary means, so that very possibly we shall be forced to come into power and play the part of 1793. Bebel has made a speech about this in Berlin which has aroused a lot of attention in the French press. I shall try to make this clear to the French in their own language, which is not easy. But although I think it would be a great misfortune if it came to war and if this brought us prematurely into power, still one has got to be armed for this eventuality and I am glad that here I have Bebel, who is by far the most capable of our people, on my side.

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor and the MIA.

1. The Order of the Knights of Labor, which was founded by American workers in Philadelphia in 1869, was a secret society up to 1878. The Order consisted mainly of unskilled workers, including many Negroes, and had as its aim the creation of cooperative societies and the organisation of mutual aid. But the leadership of the Order was in fact against the participation of the workers in the political struggle and advocated class collaboration. In 1886 it opposed a nation-wide strike and forbade its members to take part in it, the rank and file however disregarded these injunctions. Owing to the opportunist policy pursued by the leaders the influence of the organisation decreased and it disintegrated towards the end of the 1890s.

2. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific [MIA].

3. Engels refers to a translation by de Leon and Vogt which was published by the Socialist Workers Party of America.

Engels to August Bebel

In Berlin

Abstract

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, 24-26 October, 1891

As I considered it necessary to tell the French the unvarnished truth about our position if it comes to war – a damned difficult task, certainly – I wrote a French article and sent it to Laura [Lafargue]. She writes to me to-day that both she and Paul [Lafargue] are quite enchanted with the article, that it is just what the French need, etc. If Guesde shares this opinion – he is still in Lille, where he is representing Lafargue with the electors – the article is to be published. It was originally written for the French Socialist Calendar but is possibly (I should say probably) too strong for the mishmash people who have to do with that, in which case it will be put in the Socialiste, which I hope you see. I say to the people: we have the almost absolute certainty of coming to power within ten years; we could neither seize power nor retain it without making good the crimes committed by our predecessors towards other nationalities and therefore (1) opening the way for the reconstitution of Poland, (2) putting the North Schleswig population and Alsace-Lorraine in a position freely to decide where they shall belong. Between a Socialist France and a ditto Germany an Alsace-Lorraine problem has no existence at all. Hence there is no reason whatever for a war on account of Alsace-Lorraine. If, however, the French bourgeoisie begin such a war nevertheless, and for this purpose place themselves in the service of the Russian tsar, who is also the enemy of the bourgeoisie of the whole of Western Europe, this will be the renunciation of France's revolutionary mission. We German Socialists, on the other hand, who if peace is preserved will come to power in ten years, have the duty of maintaining the position won by us in the van of the workers' movement, not only against the internal but against the external foe. If Russia is victorious we shall be crushed. Therefore if Russia begins war – Go for her! go for the Russians and their allies, whoever they may be. Then we have to see to it that the war is conducted by every revolutionary method and that things are made impossible for any government which refuses to adopt such methods; also at a given moment to take the lead ourselves. We have not yet forgotten the glorious example of the French in 1793 and, if we are driven to it, it may come about that we celebrate the centenary of 1793 by showing that the German workers of 1893 are not unworthy of the Sans culottes of those days and that if French soldiers cross our frontiers then they will be greeted with the cry:

Quoi ces cohortes étrangères

Feraient le loi dans nos foyers? [Marseillaise]

This is the general sequence of thought. As soon as the text is finally settled (I am of course expecting proposals for small alterations of detail) and the printing taken in hand I will translate the article into German and then we will see what can be done with it. I am not sure if your press conditions will allow of its being printed in Germany; perhaps if you make some reservations it can be all the same – this will be seen. My articles do not in any case tie the Party – very fortunate for us both, although Liebknecht imagines I regard it as unfortunate for myself, which never occurs to me.

According to the reports, you said that I had prophesied the collapse of bourgeois society in 1898. There is a slight error there somewhere. All I said was that we might possibly come to power by 1898. If this does not happen, the old bourgeois society might still vegetate on for a while, so long as a shove from outside does not bring the whole ramshackle old building crashing down. A rotten old casing like this can survive its inner essential death for a few decades, if the atmosphere is undisturbed. So I should be very cautious about prophesying such a thing. Our arrival at the possibility of power, on the other hand, is a pure calculation of probability according to mathematical laws.

For all that, I hope peace remains unbroken. In our present position we do not need to risk everything – -but war would force us to do so. And then in another ten years we shall be quite differently prepared. And for the following reason.

In order to take possession of and set in motion the means of production, we need people with technical training, and masses of them. These we have not got, and up till now we have even been rather glad that we have been largely spared the "educated" people. Now things are different. Now we are strong enough to stand any quantity of educated Quarcks and to digest them, and I foresee that in the next eight or ten years we shall recruit enough young technicians, doctors, lawyers and schoolmasters to enable us to have the factories and big estates administered on behalf of the nation by Party comrades. Then, therefore, our entry into power will be quite natural and will be settled up quickly – relatively, if, on the other hand, a war brings us to power prematurely, the technicians will be our chief enemies; they will deceive and betray us wherever they can and we shall have to use terror against them but shall get cheated all the same. It is what always happened, on a small scale, to the French revolutionaries; even in the ordinary administration they had to leave the subordinate posts, where real work is done, in the possession of old reactionaries who obstructed and paralysed everything. Therefore I hope and desire that our splendid and secure development, which is advancing with the calm and inevitability of a process of nature, may remain on its natural lines.

Engels to Nikolai Danielson

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

October 29-31, 1891

Dear Sir

When your letter of 21 September arrived I was travelling in Scotland and Ireland; only today I find time and leisure to reply to it.

Your letter of 20 January was indeed lost, which I regret doubly, first because the interesting information it contained was kept from me for so long, and second because it put you to the trouble of working it out again for me. Many thanks!

The ‘Züchtung von Millionären’, [1] as Bismarck puts it, seems indeed to go on in your country with giant steps. Such profits as your official statistics show are unheard-of nowadays in English, French or German textile manufactories. Ten, 15, at the outside 20 per cent, average profits, and 25–30 per cent in very very exceptional years of prosperity, are considered good. It was only in the childhood of modern industry that establishments with the very latest and best machinery, producing their goods with considerably less labour than was at the time socially necessary, were able to secure such rates of profit. At present, such profits are made only on lucky speculative undertakings with new inventions, that is to say on one undertaking out of a hundred, the rest mostly being dead failures.

The only country where similar, or approximately similar profits are nowadays possible in staple industries, is the United States, America. There the protective tariff after the civil war, and now the McKinley tariff, have had similar results, and the profits must be, and are, enormous. The fact that this state of things depends entirely on tariff legislation, which may be altered from one day to another, is sufficient to prevent any large investment of foreign capital (large in proportion to the quantity of domestic capital invested) in these industries, and thus to keep out the principal source of competition and lowering of profits.

Your description of the changes produced by this extension of modern industry in the life of the mass of the people, of the ruin of their home industry for the direct consumption of the producers, and by and by also of the home industry carried on for the capitalist purchaser, reminds me vividly of the chapter of our author [2] on the Herstellung des innern Markts, [3] and of what took place in most places of Central and Western Europe from 1820 to 1840. This change, of course, with you has different effects to some extent. The French and German peasant proprietor dies hard, he lingers for two or three generations in the hands of the usurer before he is perfectly ripe for being sold out of his land and house; at least in the districts where modern industry has not penetrated. In Germany the peasantry are kept above water by all sorts of domestic industries — pipes, toys, baskets, etc — carried on for account of capitalists, their spare time being of no value to them after they have tilled their little fields; they consider every kopek they receive for extra work as so much gain; hence the ruinously low wages and the inconceivable cheapness of such industrial products in Germany.

With you, there is the resistance of the obshchina to be overcome (although I should say that that must be giving way considerably in the constant struggle with modern capitalism), there is the resource of farming land from the large proprietors which you describe, in your letter of 1 May — a means of securing surplus value to the proprietor but also of continuing a lingering existence to the peasant as a peasant; and the kulaki, too, as far as I can see, on the whole prefer keeping the peasant in their clutches as a sujet à exploitation, to ruining him once for all and getting his land transferred to them. So that it strikes me, the Russian peasant, where he is not wanted as a workman for the factory or the town, will also die hard, will take a deal of killing before he does die.

The enormous profits secured by the youthful bourgeoisie in Russia, and the dependence of these profits on a good crop (harvest) so well exposed by you, explain many things otherwise obscure. Thus what should I make out of this morning’s statement in the Odessa correspondence of a London paper: the Russian commercial classes seem to be possessed of the one idea, that war is the only real panacea for the ever increasing depression and distrust from which all Russian industries are now suffering — what should I make of it and how explain it but for this complete dependence of a tariff-made industry on the home market and on the harvest of the agricultural districts on which depends the purchasing power of its only customers! And if this market fails, what seems more natural to naive people than its extension by a successful war?

...

Very interesting are your notes on the apparent contradiction that, with you, a good harvest does not necessarily mean a lowering of the price of corn. When we study the real economic relations in various countries and at various stages of civilisation, how singularly erroneous and deficient appear the rationalistic generalisations of the 18th century — good old Adam Smith who took the conditions of Edinburgh and the Lothians as the normal ones of the universe! Well, Pushkin already knew that:

“Of gold what has he

any use

Whose wealth consists

of nature’s produce?

His son the father failed to understand

And mortgaged every acre of his land.”

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor.

1. ‘Breeding of millionaires.’

2. Karl Marx.

3. Creation of a home market.

Engels to Conrad Schmidt

In Zurich

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, November 1, 1891

It is impossible, of course, to dispense with Hegel and the man also takes some time to digest. The shorter Logic in the Encyclopedia makes quite a good beginning. But you must take the edition in the sixth volume of the Works, not the separate edition by Rosenkranz (1845), because there are far more explanatory additions from the lectures in the former, even if that ass Henning has often not understood them himself.

In the Introduction you have the criticism, first (Par. 26, etc.) of Wolf's version of Leibnitz (metaphysics in the historical sense), then of English-French empiricism (par. 37, etc.) then Kant (par. 40, seq.) and finally (par. 61) of Jacoby's mysticism. In the first section (Being) do not spend too long over Being and Nothing; the last paragraphs on Quality and then Quantity and Measure are much finer, but the theory of Essence is the main thing: the resolution of the abstract contradictions into their own instability, where one no sooner tries to hold on to one side alone than it is transformed unnoticed into the other, etc. At the same time you can always make the thing clear to yourself by concrete examples; for instance, you, as a bridegroom, have a striking example of the inseparability of identity and difference in yourself and your bride. It is absolutely impossible to decide whether sexual love is pleasure in the identity in difference or in the difference in identity. Take away the difference (in this case of sex) or the identity (the human nature of both) and what have you got left? I remember how much this very inseparability of identity and difference worried me at first, although we can never take a step without stumbling upon it.

But you ought on no account to read Hegel as Herr Barth has done, namely in order to discover the bad syllogisms and rotten dodges which served him as levers in construction. That is pure schoolboy's work. It is much more important to discover the truth and the genius which lie beneath the false form and within the artificial connections. Thus the transitions from one category or from one contradiction to the next are nearly always arbitrary – often made through a pun, as when Positive and Negative (Par. 120) "zugrunde gehen" [perish] in order that Hegel may arrive at the category of "Grund" [reason, ground]. To ponder over this much is waste of time.

Since with Hegel every category represents a stage in the history of philosophy (as he generally indicates), you would do well to compare the lectures on the history of philosophy (one of his most brilliant works). As relaxation, I can recommend the Æsthetic. When you have worked yourself into that a bit you will be amazed.

Hegel's dialectic is upside down because it is supposed to be the "self-development of thought," of which the dialectic of facts therefore is only a reflection, whereas really the dialectic in our heads is only the reflection of the actual development which is fulfilled in the world of nature and of human history in obedience to dialectical forms.

If you just compare the development of the commodity into capital in Marx with the development from Being to Essence in Hegel, you will get quite a good parallel for the concrete development which results from facts; there you have the abstract construction, in which the most brilliant ideas and often very important transmutations, like that of quality into quantity and vice versa, are reduced to the apparent self-development of one concept from another – one could have manufactured a dozen more of the same kind.

Engels To Frau Liebknecht

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 353-54;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

December 2, 1891

Nothing particularly new; Tussy has the not entirely undeserved reputation of being the leader of the Union of Gasworkers and General Labourers, and was away to agitate eight days in Northern Ireland the week before last. These gasworkers are fine fellows, their Union by far the most progressive; they are so good at “legal” agitation that eighteen months ago in Leeds they won two real battles — first against the police and then against the police and dragoons — forcing the municipality, which owns the gasworks, to capitulate. [361] As an old soldier, I can certify that I find no fault either in the strategic or tactical dispositions of Will Thorne, the General Secretary of the Union, who was in command in these battles.

Notes

361. The gasworks owners in Leeds demanded that workers should be hired for a term of four months and not be entitled to strike during that period. They also demanded that the volume of work done during an 8-hour shift be 25 per cent greater than it was when the working day was longer. These conditions were tantamount to the destruction of the gasworkers’ trade union in Leeds and the abolition of the 8-hour working day. They caused a storm of indignation among the workers and were rejected by them. Early in July 1890 clashes occurred between the strikers and strike-breakers, who were supported by troops. The staunch resistance of the strikers forced the strike-breakers and the troops to retreat, and the bosses were compelled to waive their conditions.

1892

Engels to the Liebknecht family. 1 January

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 6 January

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 6 January

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 20 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 26 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 28 January

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. 28 January

Engels to Hermann Engels. 28 January

Engels to Hermann Engels. 29 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 1 February

Engels to August Bebel. 2 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 3 February

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 4 February

Engels to Hermann Engels. 4 February

Engels to Filippo Turati. 6 February

Engels to Stanislaw Mendelson. 11 February

Engels to Filippo Turati. 13 February

Engels to Edward Aveling. First half of February

Engels to Hermann Engels. 17 February

Engels to Victor Adler. 19 February

Engels to August Bebel. 19 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 5 March

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 5 March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 5 March

Engels to August Bebel. 8 March

Engels to Julie Bebel. 8 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 14 March

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 15 March

Engels to August Bebel. 16 March

Engels to Filippo Turati. 18 March

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 30 March

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 30 March

Engels to Hermann Schlüter. 30 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 4 April

Engels to Henri Brissac. After 7 April

Engels to August Bebel. 16 April

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 19 April

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 20 April

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 21 April

Engels to Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz. 23 April

Engels to Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz. 23 April

Engels to Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz. 27 April

Engels to Nikolai Petersen. 3 May

Engels to Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz. 5 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 5 May

Engels to August Bebel. 7 May

Engels to Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Dietz. 12 May

Engels to Stanislaw Mendelson. 14 May

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 17 May

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer. 17 May

Engels to Victor Adler. 19 May

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 19 May

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer. 19 May

Engels to Paul and Laura Lafargue. 27 May

Engels to August Siegel. 28 May

Engels to Sir Henry Enfield Roscoe. 28 May

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer. 28 May

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer. 5 June

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 9 ]une

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 11 June

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer. 16 June

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 18 June

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 18 June

Engels to August Bebel. 20 June

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 25 June

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 27 June

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer. 30 June

Engels to Ludwig Schortemmer. 1 June

Engels to Stanislaw Mendelson. 4 July

Engels to August Bebel. 5 July

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 5 July

Engels to August Bebel. 5 July

Engels to John Burns. 6 July

Engels to August Bebel. 7 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 7 July

Engels to Panayottis Argyriades. Beginning of July

Engels to Hermann Engels. 12 July

Engels to Eduard Bernstein. 14 July

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 22 July

Engels to August Bebel. 23,yuly

Engels to Regina Bernstein. 25 July

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 25 July

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer. 25 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 26 July

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer. 28 July

Engels to Hermann Engels. 28 July

Engels to August Bebel. 8 August

Engels to Hermann Engels. 8 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 12 August

Engels to August Bebel. 14 August

Engels to Regina Bernstein. 15 August

Engels to Victor Adler. 19 August

Engels to August Bebel. 20 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 22 August

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti. 22 August

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge. 23 August

Engels to August Bebel. 25 August

Engels to Victor Adler. 30 August

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 4 September

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 5 September

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann. 5 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue. 11 September

Engels to August Bebel. 11 September

Engels to Conrad Schmidt. 12 September

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 16 September

Engels to Regina and Eduard Bernstein. 17 September

Engels to Paul Lafargue. 17 September

Engels to Nikolai Danielson. 22 September

Engels to Victor Adler. 25 September

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 26 September

Engels to August Bebel. 26 September

Engels to Victor Adler. 27 September

Engels to Franz Mehring. 28 September

Engels to Karl Kautsky. 29 September

Engels to August Bebel 7 October

Engels to Ludwig Kugelman 10 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue 14 October

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti 18 October

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer 18 October

Engels to Charles Bonnier mid-October

Engels to Victor Adler 23 October

Engels to Charles Bonnier 24 October

Engels to Paul Lafargue 3 November

Engels to Laura Lafargue 4 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 5 November

Engels to Sergei Kravchinsky (Stepniak) 5 November

Engels to August Bebel 6 November

Engels to Paul Lafargue 12 November

Engels to August Bebel 15 November

Engels to Sergei Kravchinsky 15 November

Engels to August Bebel 19 November

Engels to Paul Lafargue 22 November

Engels to Julie Bebel 29 November

Engels to August Bebel 29 November

Engels to An Unknown Correspondent 29 November

Engels to The SPD Secretariat 29 November

Engels to Paul Stumpf 30 November

Engels to Natalie and Wilhelm Liebknecht 1 December

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer 1 December

Engels to Charles Bonnier 3 December

Engels to August Bebel 3 December

Engels to Karl Kautsky 4 December

Engels to Paul Lafargue 5 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue 5 December

Engels to Mrs Stepniak (Kravchinsky) 6 December

Engels to Wilhelm Ellenbogen 7 December

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov 14 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue 20 December

Engels to August Bebel 22 December

Engels to Karl Kautsky 24 December

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht 28 December

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 31 December

Engels to Karl Henckell end of 1892

Engels to Sorge

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

London, January 6, 1892.

Dear Sorge:

You received our New Year’s card of greeting, I hope. Today I am answering your letters of November 20th and 23rd, and December 9th.

I have safely passed my seventy-first birthday, and all in all, I am healthier and stronger than five or six years ago. If I should live on to 1900 — I don’t know, to be sure, whether this would be good fortune or hard luck — I think I shall live through very much indeed. You in America have a movement that moves in ups and downs, continually produces disappointments, and hence can easily lead to pessimism. Here I have the European movement right in front of my eyes, making gigantic strides on the whole, at its center the German movement calmly progressing with irresistible natural strength, and therefore I tend to the other extreme. I have written something about this in the French calendar, which I shall send you as soon as I have a second copy.

Fortunately, war with Russia has been postponed for three or four years if no acts of madness happen anywhere. As peaceful development in Germany promises us victory under the most favorable conditions, all the more surely though somewhat later, we have no reason to stake everything on one card in such a war.

There is no place yet in America for a third party, I believe. The divergence of interests even in the same class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties, depending on the locality, and almost each particular section of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land — the public lands — is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls prey to gouging — only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation, and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any more will we have a solid foothold in America. But, of course, who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic jumps over there, like the political ones in France — to be sure, they produce the same momentary retrogressions.

The small farmer and the petty bourgeois will hardly ever succeed in forming a strong party; they consist of elements that change too rapidly — the farmer is often a migratory farmer, farming two, three, and four farms in succession in different states and territories, immigration and bankruptcy promote the change in personnel, and economic dependence upon the creditor also hampers independence — but to make up for it they are a splendid element for politicians, who speculate on their discontent in order to sell them out to one of the big parties afterward.

The tenacity of the Yankees, who are even rehashing the Greenback humbug, is a result of their theoretical backwardness and their Anglo-Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished for this by a superstitious belief in every philosophical and economic absurdity, by religious sectarianism, and by idiotic economic experiments, out of which, however, certain bourgeois cliques profit.

Louise asks you to send her only the Woman’s Journal (Boston) and even this only until March 31st, unless we do not write otherwise before then. She needed it for the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung (she, Laura, and Tussy are the chief contributors) and she says that it could never occur to her to force the drivel of the American swell-mob ladies upon the working women. What you have so kindly sent her has enabled her to become well-posted again and has convinced her that these ladies are still as supercilious and narrowminded as ever; she merely wants to give this one magazine a couple of months’ trial. In the interim she thanks you most sincerely for your kindness.

The first time Lafargue spoke in the Chamber he let himself be put out of countenance somewhat by the heckling and shouting. This will iron itself out, however. The Frenchmen always improve in actual battle.

The story of Gompers is as follows: He wrote me and sent me detailed papers of his organization. I was out of town much at the time — in summer — and tremendously busy in-between. Nor was I at all clear about the matter; I thought Iliacos extra peccatur muros et intra. Then it was said that Gompers would come to Brussels or over here, and so I thought I would settle the matter orally. Afterward, when he didn’t come, I forgot about the matter. But I shall look up the documents and write him that I decline the role with thanks.

I wrote K. Kautsky a few days ago and instructed him to inquire of Dietz regarding the reprinting of your articles in a separate book; I am still waiting for a reply. Haste makes waste is the motto in Germany, especially in Stuttgart on the banks of the Neckar.

Blatchford is out of the Workman’s Times, which is a great gain. What is more, the paper exhibits the defects that a private enterprise of this sort must always have as long as there is no party behind it strong enough to control it.

I now have: (1) to read proofs of the reprint of the Condition of the Working Class in England in 1841; (2) to look over Aveling’s translation of Socialism: Utopian and Scientific; (3) some other minor things; and then (4) I return to Volume III, where I have the hardest chapters ahead of me. But I think that with the energetic rejection of all interludes, it will move ahead. What is left after that will, I think, offer me merely formal difficulties.

Cordial greetings to your wife and you from Louise Kautsky and

Your

F. Engels

Friedrich Engels to August Bebel

In Berlin

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

19 February 1892

... The situation in Germany is indeed becoming acute. Things must have gone far if oppositional tendencies repeatedly appear among the National Liberals [1] and Richter [2] can dream of a German ‘great Liberal Party’. Capitalist society, which formally has not yet subordinated the state to itself, is compelled to leave the actual rule to a hereditary monarchist-bureaucratic-squirearchal caste and content itself with the idea that by and large its own interests decide matters in the end. This society, in view of its situation in Germany, wobbles between two trends. On the one hand an alliance of all official and possessing strata of society against the proletariat. This trend leads in the long run to ‘one reactionary mass’ and, in a tranquil development, finally retains the upper hand. On the other hand there is a trend which continually places on the agenda that old conflict which out of cowardice has never been fought out, the conflict between the monarchy with its absolutist relics, the landed aristocracy, and the bureaucracy, which deems itself superior to all parties, and, opposed to all of them, the industrial bourgeoisie, whose material interests are suffering every day and hour at the hands of these obsolete elements. Such contingencies as personality, locality and the like determine which of these trends has the upper hand at any given moment. At the present moment the ascendency of the second one seems about to start, in which event the industrial barons à la Stumm [3] and the shareholders of the industrial companies will naturally side in the main with the decrepit reaction. But this rehash of the old conflict of 1848 that has been dished up an infinite number of times can become very serious only if the government and the landed aristocracy, flushed with their successes so far, should commit some monstrous imbecilities. I do not consider that impossible as the strange personal desires in top quarters are finding support in the increasing conviction of the Junkers that in the end industry will be unable to stand the taxes on raw materials and foodstuffs. What point this conflict will reach depends, as I have said, on the fortuitousness of the personal element.

A characteristic feature in this context is that the old way of doing things is being used. They hit the bag but mean to hit the donkey (or rather both). They give it to the Social-Democracy but incidentally the bourgeoisie gets a good dose too; at first politically, with regard to its liberal principles, which it has been lavishly displaying for the past sixty years, and with regard to the tiny share it has directly in the government; but later on, if things fare well, also economically, sacrificing its interests to those of landed property.

A sharp turn to the right seems therefore to be in preparation, its pretext being the need to halt our advance...

Notes

1. The National Liberal Party – the party of the German, and especially the Prussian, bourgeoisie, came into being in the autumn of 1866 following the split of the Progressive Party. The principle aim of the National Liberals was the unification of Germany under Prussian leadership – Progress Publishers.

2. Eugen Richter (1838-1906) – a leader of the German ‘party of free thinkers’, expressing views of liberal bourgeoisie, advocated possibility of reconciling class interests of proletariat and bourgeoisie – Progress Publishers.

3. Karl Stumm (1836-1901) – big German manufacturer, Conservative, rabid enemy of working-class movement – Progress Publishers.

Friedrich Engels to August Bebel

In Berlin

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

8 March 1892

... I am very glad that the disturbances in Berlin have blown over and that our people have so firmly kept out of them. There was always the possibility that some shooting might occur, and that would have served as a sufficient reason to cause us all sorts of trouble. If shooting had taken place in Berlin the National-Liberals might have gladly voted the elementary-school law and finally turn against us the sporadic fits of anger of certain people. The one reactionary mass which is gradually coming into being is from our point of view at present undesirable; as long as we are unable to participate actively in the making of history it is not in our interest that historical development should cease and to that end the brawls between the bourgeois parties come in useful. In this respect the present regime is priceless, for it helps to create this situation. If, however, shooting starts too early, that is before the old parties are tightly locked in combat with one another, they will be induced to come to terms and form a united front against us. That is as certain as twice two is four. If this happens when we are twice as strong as now, it won’t do us any harm. And even if it were to happen now, the personal regime would surely see to it that squabbles start again among our opponents. But it is best to be on the safe side. At present things are going so well that we can only hope that nothing will interfere with their further progress.

As regards unemployment, it is indeed possible that this will become worse next year. Protectionism has had exactly the same consequences as Free Trade, namely to glut individual national markets – and in fact it has done so almost everywhere – except that it is so far not as bad here as in your parts. But even here, where since 1867 we have experienced two or three lingering minor crises, it seems that an acute crisis is in the offing. The colossal cotton harvests of the last two or three years, reaching over nine million bales per year, have brought down prices to as low a level as during the worst period of the 1846 crisis and are, moreover, exerting an enormous pressure on industry so that the manufacturers here must over-produce because the American planters have produced too much. In doing so they constantly lose money, because, as a result of the falling prices of raw material, their products that are being made from expensive cotton depreciate before they reach the market. This is also the cause of the cries of distress uttered by the German and Alsatian spinners; but this is passed over in silence in the Imperial Diet. Other branches of industry too are no longer in a particularly good state; railway revenues and the export of industrial commodities have been certainly declining during the past 15 months, so that next winter things may become rather difficult here as well. An improvement in the continental protectionist states can hardly be expected, trade agreements may bring some temporary relief, but their effect will be counterbalanced within a year. If next winter a similar row, on a larger scale, begins in Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Rome, Madrid, and is re-echoed from London and New York it can become serious. In that case it is good that at least Paris and London have town councillors who know only too well their dependence on the workers’ votes, and who will therefore not be inclined to offer serious resistance to demands that can be put into operation immediately, such as employment on public works, short working hours, wages in accordance with trade-union demands – since they realise this is the best and only way of saving the masses from worse socialist – really socialist – heresies. We will then see whether the town councillors in Vienna and Berlin, elected on the basis of a system of class voting and of electoral qualification, will have to follow them willy-nilly...

Engels To Hermann Schlüter

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 354;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

March 30, 1892

Your great obstacle in America, it seems to me, lies in the exceptional position of the native workers. Up to 1848 one could only speak of the permanent native working class as an exception: the small beginnings of it in the cities in the East always had still the hope of becoming farmers or bourgeois. Now a working class has developed and has also to a great extent organised itself on trade union lines. But it still takes up an aristocratic attitude and wherever possible leaves the ordinary badly paid occupations to the immigrants, of whom only a small section enter the aristocratic trades. But these immigrants are divided into different nationalities and understand neither one another nor, for the most part, the language of the country. And your bourgeoisie knows much better even than the Austrian Government how to play off one nationality against the other:

Jews, Italians, Bohemians, etc., against Germans and Irish, and each one against the other, so that differences in the standard of life of different workers exist, I believe, in New York to an extent unheard-of elsewhere. And added to this is the total indifference of a society which has grown up on a purely capitalist basis, without any comfortable feudal background, towards the human beings who succumb in the competitive struggle: “there will be plenty more, and more than we want, of these damned Dutchmen[A], Irishmen, Italians, Jews and Hungarians”; and, to cap it all, John Chinaman[B] stands in the background who far surpasses them all in his ability to live on next to nothing.

...

In such a country, continually renewed waves of advance, followed by equally certain setbacks, are inevitable. But the advancing waves are always becoming more powerful, the setbacks less paralysing, and on the whole things are nevertheless moving forward. But this I consider certain: the purely bourgeois basis, with no pre-bourgeois humbug behind it, the corresponding colossal energy of the development, which manifests itself even in the mad excesses of the present protective tariff system, will one day bring about a change that will astound the whole world. Once the Americans get started it will be with an energy and vehemence compared with which we in Europe shall be mere children.

Notes

A. In the U.S.A. this was applied to the Germans. — Ed.

B. A nickname for the Chinese used in the U.S.A. — Ed.

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

May 3, 1892

A few lines in a hurry. What was intended as a defeat for us here, has ended in a veritable triumph. We had only two platforms on Sunday, but they were the only ones that drew both public and press. You will have seen our involuntary caricatures in the D[aily] Graphic I sent you. Platform No. 14, the international platform, was the great success of the day. ...

The demonstration itself was immense, even compared with the two previous ones and showed that things are moving here, though they move in that peculiar roundabout way in which the English delight. ...

Anyhow I am glad the thing passed off quietly everywhere. The idea that the 1st of May is to be a day of rows and riots is a mere trap set by the bourgeois and we have no interest whatever to fall into that trap. We want to show our strength, that’s all; as to when we are to use that strength, that’s our business, not that of our opponents, if we can help it.

Engels To Nikolai Danielson

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 355;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

June 18, 1892

... Could Russia, in the year 1890, have existed and held its own in the world, as a purely agricultural country, living upon the export of her corn and buying foreign industrial products with it? And there I believe we can safely reply: no. A nation of 100 million that plays an important part in the history of the world, could not, under the present economic and industrial conditions, continue in the state in which Russia was up to the Crimean war. The introduction of steam engines and working machinery, the attempt to manufacture textile and metal products by modern means of production, at least for home consumption, must have been made sooner or later, but at all events at some period between 1856 and 1880. Had it not been made, your domestic patriarchal industry would have been destroyed all the same by English machine competition, and the end would have been — India, a country economically subject to the great Central Workshop, England. And even India has reacted by protective duties against English cotton-goods; and all the rest of the British colonies, no sooner had they obtained self-government, than they protected their home manufactures against the overwhelming competition of the mother country. English interested writers cannot make it out that their own Free Trade example should be repudiated everywhere, and protective duties set up in return. Of course, they dare not see that this, now almost universal, protective system is a — more or less intelligent and in some cases absolutely stupid — means of self-defence against this very English Free Trade, which brought the English manufacturing monopoly to its greatest height. (Stupid for instance in the case of Germany, which had become a great industrial country under Free Trade and where protection is extended to agricultural produce and raw materials, thus raising cost of industrial production!) I do not consider this universal recurrence to protection as a mere accident, but as a reaction against the unbearable industrial monopoly of England; the form of this reaction as I said, may be inadequate and even worse, but the historical necessity of such a reaction seems to me clear and evident.

All governments, be they ever so absolute, are en dernier lieu [1] but the executors of the economic necessities of the national situation. They may do this in various ways, good, bad and indifferent; they may accelerate or retard the economic development and its political and juridical consequences, but in the long run they must follow it. Whether the means by which the industrial revolution has been carried out in Russia have been the best for the purpose, is a question by itself which it would lead too far to discuss. For my purpose it is sufficient if I can prove that this industrial revolution, in itself, was unavoidable...

...

Everything necessary to keep farm labourers just alive during the winter is frequently earned by women and children working in some new branch of domestic industry (see Capital, Vol. I, Chapter XV, Section 8, d). This is the case in southern and western England and among the small farmers of Ireland and Germany. The devastating consequences of the separation of agriculture from domestic industry carried on in the patriarchal manner are particularly marked during the transition period, and this is happening just now in your country.

Notes

Note provided by the Moscow Editor.

1. In the final analysis.

Engels to Bebel

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

London, June 20, 1892

Electioneering is already in full swing here and money in plenty is being offered by Tories and Liberal Unionists to equip working-class candidates financially for them to draw votes away from the Liberals. Champion, one of the Tories’ chief agents in this respect, has offered Aveling the means of running against Labouchere in Northampton, but Aveling of course declined. Tremendous excitement prevails among the leaders of the workers on account of these money baits. These good fellows, who believe they can snap up something, are having a hard time trying to convince their consciences that perhaps there really is an honest way of accepting Tory money without having to blush — with most of them the blushing being naturally due to their fear that in the end it may do them more harm than good. One who knows how deeply parliamentary corruption has penetrated political life here can only feel surprised that people still retain this minimum sense of shame.

Engels to Bebel

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

London, July 5, 1892

The England of the Vorwärts exists only in the imagination of the author. The opinion that the Tories to-day are more favourable to the workers than the Liberals is in contradiction to the facts. Quite the contrary is true. All the Manchester prejudices of the Liberals of 1850 are to-day articles of faith only with the Tories, while the Liberals know full well that for them it is a question of catching the labour vote if they intend to continue their existence as a party. The Tories, because they are asses, can be induced by some outstanding personality, like Disraeli, to strike out boldly from time to time, which the Liberals are incapable of doing. But when no outstanding personality is available they fall under the sway of asses, as is the case just now. The Tories are no longer the mere tail of the big landowners as they were until 1850; the sons of the Cobdens, Brights, etc., of the big bourgeoisie and anti-Corn Law people all went over to the Tory camp between 1855 and 1870, and the Liberals derive their strength now from the non-conformist petty- and middle-bourgeoisie. And since Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill of 1886 the last remnants also of the Whigs and the old Liberals (bourgeois and intellectuals) have gone over to the Tory camp (as dissentient or Unionist Liberals).

Hence the need of the Liberals to make sham or real concessions to the workers, especially the former. Despite all this they are too stupid to know where to begin and many are still too strongly committed by their antecedents.

So far the elections are proceeding as if made to our order. The Liberals are getting a slight majority; in many constituencies they are even losing votes in comparison with the last elections so that the tremendous Liberal landslide that was to overwhelm England has as yet not been noticeable. To-day is very important as its results will probably be decisive. If the Liberals are conspicuously victorious to-day the vacillating philistines — a very populous herd — will be driven to side with them, and then they will be on top. What we need is a moderate Liberal majority (including the Irish) so that Gladstone will be dependent here on the Irish, because if he can get along without them he is sure to cheat them.

What is very fine, however, is that in West Ham, in the East End of London, Keir Hardie, the workers’ candidate — one of the few who did not accept any Liberal money and gave no pledges to the Liberals — is so far the only one who has succeeded in changing a Conservative majority (of over 300 in the last elections) into an anti-Conservative one (of over 1,200). It is also very good that elsewhere, too, as for instance in Aberdeen, etc., workers’ candidates who come out against both the Liberals and Conservatives have received as many as 1,000 votes. An independent labour party is casting its shadow before.

There are three kinds of workers’ candidates here:

1. Those paid by the Tories to draw votes away from the Liberals. Most of these lose and know it.

2. Those who take money from the Liberals and must show obedience to them. These are mostly put up in places where there is no chance of winning. People who, like the miners’ candidates, are Liberal by nature must also be included here.

3. The real working-class candidates who are campaigning on their own account and do not ask themselves whether they are coming out against Liberals or Tories. Of these the Liberals accept those that they must (Keir Hardie and Burns) and work against the others. In Scotland there are many such candidates. What chances they have it is hard to say.

Engels To August Bebel

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 355;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

July 7, 1892

In brief, the Labour Party has declared itself clearly and unequivocally [362], meaning that in the next election the two old parties will offer it alliance. The Tories are out of the question so long as they are led by the present dolts. But the Liberals must be considered, and likewise the Irish. Since the public outcry for that ridiculous business with adultery [363], Parnell has suddenly become friendly to the workers, and the Irish gentlemen in Parliament will follow suit once they see that only the workers can get them Home Rule. Then there will be compromises, and the Fabians [364], conspicuous by their absence in this election, will come forward again. But that is unavoidable in the circumstances. There is headway, as you see, and that is what matters.

Notes

362. Engels is referring to the success of the workers and socialists in the Parliamentary elections in England in the summer of 1892. The English workers’ and socialist organisations nominated a large number of candidates, three of whom — Keir Hardie, John Burns and J. H. Wilson — were elected to Parliament. The elections were won by the Liberals.

363. Engels is referring to the persecution by English and Irish reactionaries of C.S. Parnell, the leader of the Irish national movement. At the end of 1889, the Liberal Unionists (former members of the Liberal Party, who left it in 1886 because they opposed Home Rule) had Parnell brought to court on a charge of adultery. The court (November 1890) found Parnell guilty and this let loose a smear campaign against him. Both Liberal and Conservative M.P.s demanded that he be removed from the post of leader of the Irish Parliamentary faction. The attacks against Parnell, which played on bourgeois hypocrisy in questions of morals, pursued the aim of removing him from the political scene and weakening the Irish national movement. The smear campaign against Parnell was supported by the Right wing of the Irish faction and the Irish Catholic clergy, who feared his influence and did not share his aspirations for Home Rule. All this led to a split of the Irish Parliamentary faction and weakened the Irish national movement. The campaign was largely responsible for Parnell’s early death in 1891.

364. The Fabian Society was founded in 1884. The name was derived from Quintus Fabius Maximus, a Roman general of the 3rd century B.C., nicknamed the “Cunctator” (or Delayer) because he achieved success in the second Punic war against Hannibal by avoiding direct battle and using dilatory tactics. Most of the Fabians were bourgeois intellectuals, chief among whom were Sidney and Beatrice Webb. They rejected Marx’s teaching on the class struggle of the proletariat and the socialist revolution and maintained that a transition from capitalism to socialism could be effected by petty reforms and the gradual transformation of society, through so-called municipal socialism. The Fabian Society diffused bourgeois influence among the working class and propagated reformist ideas in the English labour movement. Lenin defined Fabianism as “the most consummate expression of opportunism and of liberal-labour policy.” In 1900 the Fabian Society was incorporated in the Labour Party. “Fabian socialism” is still one of the sources of the ideology of class conciliation.

Engels to Karl Kautsky

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

Ryde, August 12, 1892

It’s too bad that the passages about the Social-Democratic Federation and the Fabians, as well as about Naylor’s candidature, didn’t get into Tussy’s article.[1] I read them afterwards in the manuscript. They are an almost essential supplement to the election picture. The complete collapse of the S.D.F. as soon as it came to a real test was significant after its boasting for years that it was the “only” Social-Democratic organisation, the only salvation-bringing church. I don’t know whether you saw Bax in Zurich, but Bax is a poor authority on the S.D.F. He was editor of Justice for six weeks, removed all the many improprieties but was absolutely incapable of giving the sheet any other than a sectarian character (for if he could he would certainly have done so). After all, the S.D.F. is purely a sect. It has ossified Marxism into a dogma and, by rejecting every labour movement which is not orthodox Marxism (and that a Marxism which contains much that is erroneous), that is, by pursuing the exact opposite of the policy recommended in the Manifesto, it renders itself incapable of ever becoming anything else but a sect. Bax for many reasons has renewed contact with these people, but if they do not change it will certainly not he long before he finds out that they want to exploit him politically and financially and that he cannot assume responsibility for them. But he must learn this by personal experience. In the meantime he has become so deeply involved that he has to take them partly under his protection. For the rest, Bax has no contact whatever with the workers.

The Fabians have become a real obstacle: the tail of the “great” Liberal Party, on the pretext of wanting to force its candidates on that party. In this they may be successful for a while in the case of the County Council where possibilist programmes of municipal reforms can be drawn up, but even there the pious fraud will work only until the bourgeoisie sees through it. In elections to Parliament it does not work; there the Liberals give the Fabians, like all other so-called labour candidates, only hopeless constituencies. If you want to force labour candidates on the Liberals you have to go about it the way Burns and Keir Hardie do: by keeping them at the point of the sword, and not, like the Fabians, by fawning upon them under false pretences. Fortunately the call for an independent labour party is already so loud and general that the gentle blandishments of Fabian flattery and Fabian money will surely be overcome.

Notes

1. The reference is to an article on the English elections written by Marx’s daughter Eleanor [Tussy] and E. Aveling, her husband, for the Social-Democratic journal Neue Zeit. As editor of this journal Kautsky arbitrarily deleted all passages in which the authors denounced the sectarianism and opportunism of the socialist movement in England.

Engels to Victor Adler

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

August 19, 1892

I am studying early Christianity here, reading Renan and the Bible. Renan is terribly shallow but, as a man of the world, has a wider view than the German University theologians. Otherwise, his book is a novel, to which his comment on Philostratus can equally be applied: one can use it as an historical source just as one would use, say, the novels of Alexandre Dumas père on the Fronde period. On individual points I have caught him out in dreadful mistakes. Moreover he cribs from the Germans with unbounded impudence.

Engels to Karl Kautsky

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

Ryde, September 4, 1892

If you had been here during the last elections you would talk differently about the Fabians. In our tactics one thing is thoroughly established for all modern countries and times: to bring the workers to the point of forming their own party, independent and opposed to all bourgeois parties. During the last elections the English workers, for the first time and perhaps still only instinctively, pressed by the course of events, took a decided step in this direction; and this step has been surprisingly successful and has contributed more to the development of the minds of the workers than any other event of the last twenty years. And what did the Fabians do, not just this or that Fabian but the society as a whole? It preached and practised: affiliation of the workers to the Liberals, and what was to be expected happened: the Liberals assigned them four seats that it was impossible to win and the Fabian candidates conspicuously failed. The paradoxical belletrist Shaw — very talented and witty as a belletrist but absolutely useless as an economist and politician, although honest and not a careerist — wrote to Bebel that if they did not follow this policy of forcing their candidates on the Liberals they would reap nothing but defeat and disgrace (as if defeat were not often more honourable than victory) and now they have pursued their policy and have reaped both.

That is the crux of the whole matter. At a time when the workers for the first time come out independently the Fabian Society advises them to remain the tail of the Liberals. And the Socialists on the Continent must be told openly that to gloss this over would be to share the blame. That’s why I was sorry that the final portion of Aveling’s article did not appear. It was not post festum, not an afterthought. It had simply been overlooked in the rush to get the article off. The article is not complete without a description of the attitude of both socialist organisations towards the elections, and the readers of the Neue Zeit have a right to know about this.

I believe I told you myself in my last [letter] that both in the, S[ocial]-D[emocratic] F[ederation] and in the F[abian] S[ociety] the provincial members were better than the central body. But that is of no avail as long as the attitude of the central body determines that of the Society. I don’t know any of the other fine chaps except Banner. Curiously enough Banner has never come to see me since he joined the F[abian] S[ociety]. I suppose his action was determined by his disgust with the S.D.F. and the need for some kind of organisation, perhaps also some illusions. But this one swallow makes no summer.

You see something unfinished in the F[abian] S[ociety]. On the contrary, this crowd is only too finished: a clique of bourgeois-Socialists of diverse calibres, from careerists to sentimental Socialists and philanthropists, united only by their fear of the threatening rule of the workers and doing all in their power to spike this danger by making their own leadership secure, the leadership exercised by the “eddicated.” If afterwards they admit a few workers into their central board in order that they may play there the role of the worker Albert of 1848, the role of a constantly outvoted minority, this should not deceive anyone.

The means employed by the F[abian] S[ociety] are just the same as those of the corrupt parliamentary politicians: money, intrigues, careerism. That is, English careerism, according to which it is self-understood that every political party (only among the workers it is supposed to be different!) pays its agents in some way or other or rewards them with posts. These people are immersed up to their necks in the intrigues of the Liberal Party, hold Liberal Party jobs, as for instance Sidney Webb. who in general is a genuine British politician. These gentry do everything that the workers have to be warned against.

In spite of all this I do not ask you to treat these people as enemies. But in my opinion you should not shield them from criticism either, just as you don’t shield anybody else. And that is precisely what the omission of the passages concerning them in the article by the Avelings looked like. [1] But if you would like the Avelings to give you an article on the history and attitude of the different English socialist organisations, you only have to say so and I'll propose it to them...

One must now give the rotten elements time to become so rotten that they defect virtually of their own accord. The discipline of a party numb4red in millions is quite different from that of a sect numbered in hundreds. ...

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor.

1. The reference is to the article ‘Die Wahlen in Grossbritanien’ (‘Elections in Great Britain’) by Eleanor and Edward Aveling published in the Neue Zeit.

Engels To Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

September 11, 1892

Here we have had a very important event which will occupy all the Socialist parties of the Continent. As you will see from enclosed report, the Trades Unions Congress deliberately rejected the invitation to the Zurich Congress and resolved to call together “immediately” an Eight Hours Congress of its own — and an International one too! This requires action on our part, and if possible, concerted action of the whole Continent.

The English workmen are so deeply infected with the Parliamentary spirit of compromise that they cannot do a step in advance without at the same time taking 3/4 or 7/8 of a step backwards. Thus the sudden awakening of the Eight Hours enthusiasm (3 years ago considered an impossibility, you know, by the very people who now clamour loudest after it) has almost succeeded in giving a reactionary character to that cry. It is to be the universal panacea, the one thing to be thought of. In their exultation at having secured so soon such a large and unexpected majority, the mass of the 8 hours men now sacrifice everything that goes further, to the newly-converted “Old” Unionists. This massacre of the Socialist Innocents is submitted to all the easier as the “New” elements are divided, without general organisation, personally unknown to each other, and have not as yet had the time to develop men enjoying the confidence of all; as you know, this can only be obtained here in Britain by what Ruge... called the force of constant appearance, the effect of hawking your own person constantly for years before the public, teste Shipton, Cremer, Howell, etc.

Engels To Conrad Schmidt

In Zurich

London, 12 September 1892

Source: MECW Volume 49, pp 525-528;

First published: in Sozialislische Monatshefte, Nr. 24, Berlin, 1920.

Dear Schmidt,

A few days ago I came back from Ryde where I had been paying an involuntary six-week visit to Pumps. A tiresome but otherwise insignificant complaint ruined both my holiday and a continental tour in the course of which you might otherwise have very possibly, seen me in Zurich.

I look forward to seeing your other papers on the rate of profit. Fireman didn’t send me his article – can one get hold of that particular number? If so, I shall order it, provided you can tell me exactly which number it was, and also the title of the article. To print the section on the rate of profit separately and in advance is quite out of the question, for you should know that in Marx everything is so interrelated that nothing can be torn out of context. In any case always provided my health holds out and I am left in peace I shall be done with Volume III this winter (but please don’t breathe a word about this; I know how often something has intervened), whereupon the poor professorial soul will be set at rest upon that count, only to be plunged instantly into an even worse state of agitation.

As regards Marx’s view of history, you will find an article of mine about it in the next number of the Neue Zeit – it has already appeared over here in English.

The Germans are utterly useless on the subject of money and credit. Many years ago Marx himself mercilessly ridiculed Knies. The most useful things in English are Tooke’s An Inquiry into the Currency Principle, 1844 and Fullarton’s On the Regulation of Currencies, 2nd ed., 1845, both of which are only to be had second-hand. Everything there is to be said about money qua money may be found in the first volume of Capital. In the third there will, of course, be a great deal about credit and credit money; it is that particular section that is giving me most trouble.

Roger’s Economic Interpretation of History is in many respects a very instructive book, if exceedingly superficial, theoretically speaking. There is, of course, no question of an interpretation à la Marx.

Your essay in the Neue Zeit gave me great pleasure. It’s as if cut out for this country, since the Fabian Society positively pullulates with Jevons-Mengerians who look down with infinite contempt on a Marx they have long since outdistanced. If there were a review over here that would take it, I would, with your permission, get Aveling to translate it under my supervision. But just now nothing is likely to come of this, there being no such review.

As regards the worthy Independents, their fate is of their own making. For years the party has endured their yapping with truly angelic patience and even at Erfurt it gave them ample opportunity to substantiate their mendacious tittle-tattle, but a million people cannot go on forever putting up with the obstructionism of fifty young whippersnappers who reserve the right to cast aspersions without having to substantiate them. Now that they’ve been chucked out, now that they have the chance of showing what they are capable of, all we get is endless lies and vituperation. And what, may I ask, has been achieved by those who showed some promise – the Kampff-meyers, Ernsts, Müllers et al. – now that they are no longer under the thumb of the party leadership? Their paper is utterly without substance and apart from that they produce nothing. If these gentlemen believe they are capable of something, why don’t they do it? Nor is the case in any way altered by the fact that, in polemicising against them, as in so much else, the Vorwärts is sometimes clumsy and all too often overshoots the mark. Did not these gentlemen, even before the split, treat the parliamentary group and the party leadership to language no less intemperate than that used by the Vorwärts against themselves? In addition they are by and large completely harmless. In Germany they are as moribund as anyone else who detaches himself from the big movement. Now that the movement has grown strong actually inside Germany and is directed from within that country, the societies abroad are the only favourable breeding ground for the kind of wrangles I have had to endure for 45 years in the society, over here. Up till 1860 the best chaps were, as a rule, abroad; now the position is reversed. The societies abroad consist of very impermanent elements who very seldom attain the average level of those at home, stand outside the movement in Germany to which they are merely extraneous appendages, and, since they rarely have any genuine occupation, are bored and hence far more susceptible to petty squabbling.

I am aware that you have many childhood and university friends amongst the Jungen, but it’s something you must come to terms with. Indeed it’s perfectly possible to remain good friends despite political differences. But we’ve all had to go through the same thing, in my case, in my own pious ultra-reactionary family. And then there is always the possibility of exerting a beneficial influence on your old friends by guiding their footsteps towards study rather than rodomontade. If the gentlemen would only go on with their studies, the more serviceable amongst them would soon come to their senses. But I’m afraid that the chronic megalomania so rampant among these people will prevent them from so doing. And as for provocation and embitterment, these are things that are unavoidable in the circumstances. ‘I came not to send peace but a sword.’

In the next few days I shall let you have the Condition of the Working-Class.

With kind regards

Your

F. Engels

Engels to Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

September 22, 1892

So far, then, we agree upon this one point, that Russia, in 1892, could not exist as a purely agricultural country, that her agricultural population must be complemented by industrial production.

Now I maintain, that industrial production nowadays means grande industrie, steam, electricity, self-acting mules, powerlooms, finally machines that produce machinery. From the day Russia introduced railways, the introduction of these modern means of production was a foregone conclusion. You must be able to repair your own locomotives, waggons, railways, and that can only be done cheaply if you are able to construct those things at home, that you intend to repair. From the moment warfare became a branch of the grande industrie (ironclad ships, rifled artillery, quickfiring and repeating cannons, repeating rifles, steel covered bullets, smokeless powder, etc.), la grande industrie, without which all these things cannot be made, became a political necessity. All these things cannot be had without a highly developed metal manufacture. And that manufacture cannot be had without a corresponding development in all other branches of manufacture, especially textile.

I quite agree with you in fixing the beginning of the new industrial era of your country about 1861. It was the hopeless struggle of a nation with primitive forms of production, against nations with modern production, which characterised the American War. The Russian people understood this perfectly; hence their transition to modern forms, a transition rendered irrevocable by the emancipation act of 1861.

This necessity of the transition from the primitive methods of production that prevailed in 1854, to the modern methods that are now beginning to prevail – this necessity once conceded, it becomes a secondary question whether the hothouse process of fostering the industrial revolution by protective and prohibitive duties was advantageous or even necessary, or otherwise.

This industrial hothouse atmosphere renders the process acute, which otherwise might have retained a more chronic form. It crams into twenty years a development which otherwise might have taken sixty or more years. But it does not affect the nature of the process itself, which, as you say, dates from 1861.

One thing is certain: if Russia really required, and was determined to have, a grande industrie of her own, she could not have it at all except under some degree of protection, and this you admit. From this point of view, too, then, the question of protection is one of degree only, not of principle; the principle was unavoidable.

Another thing is certain: if Russia required after the Crimean War a grande industrie of her own, she could have it in one form only: the capitalistic form. And along with that form, she was obliged to take over all the consequences which accompany capitalistic grande industrie in all other countries.

Now I cannot see that the results of the industrial revolution which is taking place in Russia under our eyes, are in any way different from what they are, or have been, in England, Germany, America. In America the conditions of agriculture and landed property are different, and this does make some difference.

You complain of the slow increase of hands employed in textile industry, when compared with the increase of quantity of product. The same is taking place everywhere else. Otherwise, whence our redundant "industrial reserve"? (Capital, C. 23, Sect. 3 and 4.) [Kerr edition, Vol. I, Chap. 25.]

You prove the gradual replacing of men's work by that of women and children – Capital, C. 13 (Sect. gal. [Ibid, Chap. 15.])

You complain that the machine-made goods supersede the products of domestic industry and thus destroy a supplementary production, without which the peasant cannot live. But we have here an absolutely necessary consequence of capitalistic grande industrie: the creation of the home market (Capital, C. 24, Sect. 5), which has taken place in Germany during my lifetime and under my eyes. Even what you say, that the introduction of cotton goods destroys not only the domestic spinning and weaving of the peasants, but also their flax culture, has been seen in Germany between 1820 and now. And as far as this side of the question: the destruction of home industry and the branches of agriculture subservient to it – as far as this is concerned, the real question for you seems to me this: that the Russians had to decide whether their own grande industrie was to destroy their domestic manufacture, or whether the import of English goods was to accomplish this. With protection, the Russians effected it, without protection, the English. That seems to me perfectly evident.

Your calculation that the sum of the textile products of grande industrie and of domestic industry does not increase, but remains the same and even diminishes, is not only quite correct, but would not be correct if it came to another result. So long as Russian manufacture is confined to the home market, its product can only cover home consumption. And that can only slowly increase, and, as it seems to me, ought even to decrease under present Russian conditions.

For it is one of the necessary corollaries of grande industrie that it destroys its own home market by the very process by which it creates it. It creates it by destroying the basis of the domestic industry of the peasantry. But without domestic industry the peasantry cannot live. They are ruined as peasants; their purchasing power is reduced to a minimum; and until they, as proletarians, have settled down into new conditions of existence, they will furnish a very poor market for the newly-arisen factories.

Capitalist production being a transitory economical phase, is full of internal contradictions which develop and become evident in proportion as it develops. This tendency to destroy its own market at the same time it creates it, is one of them. Another one is the insoluble situation to which it leads, and which is developed sooner in a country without a foreign market, like Russia, than in countries which are more or less capable of competing on the open world market. This situation without an apparent issue finds its issue, for the latter countries, in commercial revulsions, in the forcible opening of new markets. But even then the cul-de-sac stares one in the face. Look at England. The last new market which could bring on a temporary revival of prosperity by its being thrown open to English commerce is China. Therefore English capital insists upon constructing Chinese railways. But Chinese railways mean the destruction of the whole basis of Chinese small agriculture and domestic industry, and as there will not even be the counterpoise of a Chinese grande industrie, hundreds of millions of people will be placed in the impossibility of living. The consequence will be a wholesale emigration such as the world has not yet seen, a flooding of America, Asia and Europe by the hated Chinaman, a competition for work with the American, Australian and European workman on the basis of the Chinese standard of life, the lowest of all – and if the system of production has not been changed in Europe before that time, it will have to be changed then.

Capitalistic production works its own ruin, and you may be sure it will do so in Russia too. It may, and if it lasts long enough, it will surely produce a fundamental agrarian revolution – I mean a revolution in the condition of landed property, which will ruin both the pomeshchik and the muzhik [the landlord and the peasant], and replace them by a new class of large landed proprietors drawn from the kulaki [kulaks] of the villages and the bourgeois speculators of the towns. At all events, I am sure the conservative people who have introduced capitalism into Russia will be one day terribly astonished at the consequences of their own doings.

Friedrich Engels to Franz Mehring

In Berlin

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

28 September 1892

Dear Mr Mehring

Kautsky sent me a part of one of your letters with a query addressed to me. If you believe you cannot very well write to me because many years ago I once left two of your letters unanswered, I have no right to complain on that score. At that time however we were in different camps, the Anti-Socialist Law was in force and this compelled us to act according to the rule: he who is not for us is against us. Besides, if I remember rightly, you yourself said in one of the letters that you could not expect an answer. But that was a long time ago. Since then we have come to be in the same camp and you have published excellent works in the Neue Zeit and I have been by no means stingy in my appreciation of them, in letters to Bebel for instance. It is therefore with pleasure that I take the opportunity of answering you direct.

The claim that the discovery of the materialist outlook in history should be attributed to the Prussian romanticists of the historical school is indeed something new to me. I have Marwitz’s [1] Nachlass myself and read the book through a few years ago but I discovered nothing in it except superb things about cavalry and an unshakeable belief in the miraculous power of five blows of the whip when administered by nobleman to plebeian. Apart from that I have remained an entire stranger to this literature since 1841-42 – I have only very superficially glanced over it – and I certainly owe absolutely nothing to it in the field in question. In his Bonn and Berlin days Marx had read Adam Müller and Mr von Haller’s [2] Restauration, etc; he spoke only with considerable contempt of this insipid, bombastic, verbose imitation of the French romanticists Joseph de Maistre and Cardinal Bonald. [3] But even if he had come across passages like the one cited from Lavergne-Peguilhen [4] they could not have made the slightest impression upon him at that time if he understood at all what those people wanted to say. Marx was then a Hegelian and that passage was pure heresy to him. He knew nothing whatever about political economy and could not have had any idea about the meaning of a term like ‘economic form’. Hence the passage in question, even if he had known it, would have gone in one ear and come out the other without leaving a perceptible trace in his memory. But I greatly doubt whether traces of such views could have been found in the works of the romantic historians which Marx read between 1837 and 1842.

The passage is of course very remarkable but I would like to have the quotation verified. I do not know the book, but its author is familiar to me as an adherent of the Historical School. The passage deviates in two points from the modern conception: 1) in deducing production and distribution from the form of economy instead of conversely deducing the form of economy from production; and 2) in the role which it assigns to the ‘appropriate utilisation’ of the form of economy, which one may take to mean anything conceivable until one learns from the book itself what the author has in mind.

However the most peculiar thing is that the correct conception of history is to be found in abstracto among the very people who have been distorting history most in concreto, theoretically as well as practically. These people might have seen in the case of feudalism how there the form of state evolves from the form of economy because things are as it were quite plain and obvious there. I say they ‘might’ because apart from the above unverified passage – you say yourself it was given to you – I have never been able to discover more about it than that the theoreticians of feudalism are of course less abstract than the bourgeois liberals. If now one of these goes further and generalises this conception of the interconnection between the spread of culture and the form of state on the one hand and the form of economy within feudal society on the other by extending it to all forms of economy and state, how explain after that the total blindness of the same romanticist as soon as other forms of economy are at issue, for instance, the bourgeois form of economy and the forms of state corresponding to its various stages of development: mediaeval guild commune, absolute monarchy, constitutional monarchy, republic? It is certainly difficult to explain this. And the man who regards the economic form as the basis of the entire social and political organisation belongs to a school to which the absolute monarchy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries already signifies the fall of man, a betrayal of the true political doctrine.

But it also says that the political form results just as inevitably from the economic form and its appropriate utilisation as the child from the sexual union of man and woman. In consideration of the universally-known doctrine of the school to which the author belongs I can explain this only as follows: the true economic form is the feudal one. But since the malice of man conspires against it, it must be ‘appropriately utilised’ in such a way that its existence is protected from these attacks and preserved for all eternity and that the ‘political form’, etc, always corresponds to it, accordingly it must as far as possible be brought back to the form it had in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Then the best of all worlds and the finest of historical theories would equally be realised and the Lavergne-Peguilhenian generalisation would be reduced again to its true content: that feudal society produces a feudal political system.

For the present I can only assume that Lavergne-Peguilhen did not know what he wrote. Proverbially certain animals also find pearls occasionally and these animals are strongly represented among Prussian romanticists. Incidentally, their French prototypes should also be compared to see whether this is not borrowed, too.

To you I can only express thanks for having called my attention to this point, which unfortunately I cannot go into further at the present moment.

Yours sincerely

F Engels

Notes

1. Friedrich August Ludwig Marwitz (1777-1837) – Prussian general and politician, author of military-historical memoirs – Progress Publishers.

2. Adam Heinrich Müller (1779-1829) – German publicist and economist, representative of so-called romantic school in German economic science, which reflected feudal aristocracy’s interests, opponent of Adam Smith’s economic doctrines. Karl Ludwig von Haller (1768-1854) – Swiss lawyer and historian, apologist of serfdom and absolutism – Progress Publishers.

3. Joseph Marie de Maistre (1753-1821) – French writer, monarchist, ideologist of aristocratic and clerical reaction, rabid enemy of French Revolution. Louis Gabriel Ambroise Bonald (1754-1840) – French statesman and publicist, monarchist, ideologist of aristocratic and clerical reaction during Restoration – Progress Publishers.

4. Engels refers to Lavergne-Peguilhen, Grundzüge der Gesellschaftswissenschaft (Elements of Sociology). Moritz von Lavergne-Peguilhen (1801-1870) – German historian and economist, representative of reactionary romantic school of history – Progress Publishers.

Engels to Paul Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden;

December 5, 1892

That “unfathomable” and extremely chaotic Germany which has never existed outside Victor Hugo’s imagination. The Germany which was supposed to be interested only in music, dreams and clouds, and which left the care of matters here below to the French bourgeois and journalists.

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

December 31, 1892

Dear Sorge

A few lines before the year ends. I have received your letters of 18 November and 16 December. Many thanks. Did you get the parcel of books that I mailed you in September containing Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse [1], new edition, and Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, [2] translated by Aveling with an introduction by me? If not I'll send you another parcel registered.

...

Here in old Europe things are rather more lively than in your “youthful” country, which still refuses to get quite out of its hobbledehoy stage. It is remarkable, but quite natural, that in such a young country, which has never known feudalism and has grown up on a bourgeois basis from the first, bourgeois prejudices should also be so strongly rooted in the working class. Out of his very opposition to the mother country — which is still clothed in its feudal disguise — the American worker also imagines that the bourgeois regime as traditionally inherited is something progressive and superior by nature and for all time, a non plus ultra [not to be surpassed]. Just as in New England, Puritanism, the reason for the whole colony's existence, has become precisely on this account a traditional inheritance, almost inseparable from local patriotism. The Americans can strain and struggle as much as they like, but they cannot realise their future — colossally great as it is — all at once like a bill of exchange; they must wait for the date on which it becomes due; and just because their future is so great their present must mainly occupy itself with preparatory work for the future, and this work, as in every young country, is of a predominantly material nature and determines a certain backwardness of thought, a clinging to traditions connected with the foundation of the new nationality. The Anglo-Saxon race — those damned Schleswig-Holsteiners, as Marx always called them—is slow-witted anyhow and their history both in Europe and America (economic success and predominantly peaceful political development) has encouraged this still more. Only great events can be of use here and if added to the more or less completed transition of the national property in land into private ownership, there comes the expansion of industry under a less crazy tariff policy and the conquest of foreign markets, then it may go well with you too. The class-struggles here in England too were more violent during the period in which large scale industry was developing and were enfeebled just in the period of England's unquestioned industrial domination of the world. In Germany, too, the development of large-scale industry since 1850 coincides with the rise of the Socialist movement, and it will be no different, probably, with America. It is the revolutionising of all traditional relations through industry as it develops which also revolutionises people's minds.

For the rest, Americans have for some time been providing the European world with the proof that a bourgeois republic is a republic of capitalist business men in which politics are only a business deal, like any other; and the French, whose ruling bourgeois politicians have long known this and practised it in secret, are now at last also learning this truth on a national scale through the Panama scandal. In order, however, that the constitutional monarchies should not be able to give themselves virtuous airs, every one of them has his little Panama: England the scandal of the building-societies, one of which, the Liberator, has thoroughly "liberated" a mass of small depositors from some £8,000,000 of their savings; Germany the Baare scandals and Löwe Jüdenflinten (which have proved that the Prussian officer steals as he always did, but very, very little—the one thing he is modest about), Italy the Banca Romana, which already approaches the Panama scale, about 150 deputies and senators having been bought up; I am informed that documents about this will shortly be published in Switzerland-Schlüter should look out for everything which appears in the papers about the Banca Romana. And in holy Russia the old Russian Prince Meshchersky is indignant at the indifference with which the Panama revelations are received in Russia and can only explain it to himself by the fact that Russian virtue has been corrupted by French examples, and "we ourselves have more than one Panama at home."

But all the same the Panama business is the beginning of the end of the bourgeois republic and may soon bring us into very responsible positions. The whole of the opportunist and the majority of the radical gang are shamefully compromised, the government is trying to hush it up but that is no longer possible; the documents containing the evidence are in the hands of people who want to overthrow the present rulers: (1) the Orleanists; (2) the fallen minister Constans, whose career has been ended by revelations about his scandalous past; (3) Rochefort and the Boulangists; (4) Cornelius Herz who, himself deeply involved in every sort of fraud, has obviously only fled to London in order to buy himself out by getting the others into a hole. All these have more than enough evidence against the gang of thieves, but are holding back, first in order not to use up all their ammunition at once, and secondly in order to give both the government and the courts time to compromise themselves beyond any hope of salvation. This can only suit us well; enough stuff is coming to light by degrees to keep up the excitement and compromise the dirigeants more and more while it also gives time for the scandal and the revelations to make their effect felt in the most remote corner of the country before the inevitable dissolution of the chamber and new elections, which however ought not to come too soon. It is clear that this business brings the moment considerably nearer when our people will become the only possible leaders of the state in France. Only things ought not to move too quickly, our people in France are not ripe for power by a long way. But as things are at present it is absolutely impossible to say what intermediate stages will fill this gap. The old Republican parties are compromised to the last man, the Royalists and Clericals dealt in the Panama lottery bonds on a mass scale and identified themselves with them—if that ass Boulanger had not shot himself he would now be master of the situation. I am eager to know if the old unconscious logic of French history will assert itself again this time too. There will be plenty of surprises. If only some general or other does not swing himself to the top during the interval of clarification and start war—that is the one danger.

In Germany the steady irresistible progress of the Party goes quietly on. Small successes in every hole and corner, which prove the advance. If the essential part of the military Bill is accepted, new masses of the discontented will stream to us; if it is rejected there will be dissolution and new elections in which we shall get at least fifty seats in the Reichstag, which in cases of conflict may often give us the decisive vote. In any case the struggle, even if, as is possible, it also breaks out in France, can only be fought out in Germany. But it is good that the third volume [of Capital] will now at last be finished — when? Indeed I cannot yet say; the times are becoming disturbed and the waves are beginning to rise high.

Notes

Notes provided by the MIA.

1. Friedrich Engels, The Condition of the Working Class in England.

2. Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.

1893

Engels to Filippo Turati 7 January

Engels to Maria Mendelson 10 January

Engels to Philipp Pauli 11 January

Engels to Maria Mendelson 16 January

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 18 January

Engels to Louis Heritier 20 January

Engels to August Bebel 24 January

Engels to Maria Mendelson 24 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky 26 January

Engels to Hermann Engels 26 January

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht 29 January

Engels to Filippo Turati 30 January

Engels to Filippo Turati 1 February

Engels to Maria Mendelson 7 February

Engels to Vladimir Shmuilov 7 February

Engels to August Bebel 9 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue 12 February

Engels to August Bebel 24 February

Engels to Nikolai Danielson 24 February

Engels to Paul Lafargue 25 February

Engels to Laura Lafargue 25 February

Engels to Thomas Cook and Son 3 March

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht 7 March

Engels to Filippo Turati 12 March

Engels to F. Wiesen 14 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue 14 March

Engels to Maria Mendelson 15 March

Engels to Henry Demarest Lloyd [mid] March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 18 March

Engels to Karl Kautsky 20 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue 21 March

Engels to August Radimsky 21 March

Engels to Julie Bebel 31 March

Engels to M. R. Cotar 8 April

Engels to George William Lamplugh 11 April

Engels to Franz Mehring 11 April

Engels to Jules Guesde 14 April

Engels to Laura Lafargue 25 April

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer 29 April

Engels to Pablo Iglesias April

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 17 May

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov 21 May

Engels to Isaac A. Hourwich 27 May

Engels to Henry Demarest Lloyd 27 May

Engels to Karl Kautsky 1 June

Engels to Hermann Bahr [early] June

Engels to Filippo Turati 6 June

Engels to Giovanni Domanico 7 June

Engels to Stojan Nokoff 9 June

Engels to Editorial Board of Bulgarian Social Democrat 9 June

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov 13 June

Engels to Laura Lafargue 20 June

Engels to Paul Lafargue 27 June

Engels to Paul Lafargue 29 June

Engels to Filippo Turati 12 July

Engels to Franz Mehring 14 July [alt]

Engels to Rudolph Meyer 19 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue 20 July

Engels to Filippo Turati 20 July

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht 27 July

Engels to Natalie Liebknecht 27 July

Engels to Nicolas Petersen 31 July

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer 31 July

Engels to Hermann Engels 16 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue 21 August

Engels to Emma Engels 23 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue 31 August

Engels to Laura Lafargue 18 September

Engels to Karl Kautsky 25 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue 30 September

Engels to Engels to Julie Bebel 3 Oct

Engels to Hermann Blocher 3 October

Engels to John B. Shipley 3 October

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 7 October

Engels to Victor Adler 11 October

Engels to August Bebel 12 October

Engels to Paul Lafargue 13 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue 14 October

Engels to Nikolai Danielson 17 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue 18 October

Engels to August Bebel 18 October

Engels to Laura Lafargue 27 October

Engels to Ferdinand Wolff [end] October

Engels to Karl Kautsky 3 November

Engels to Victor Adler 10 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 11 November

Engels to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetsky 11 November

Engels to Paul Lafargue 19 November

Engels to Natalie Liebknecht 1 December

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 2 December

Engels to Hermann Schluter 2 December

Engels to Hermann Schluter 2 December

Engels to Karl Kautsky 4 December

Engels to Paul Arndt 5 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue 19 December

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer 19 December

Engels to Adelheid Dworak 21 December

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht 21 December

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 30 December

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

January 18, 1893

Here there has been a Conference in Bradford of the Independent Labour Party, which you know from the Workman's Times. The S.D.F. on the one hand and the Fabians on the other have not been able, with their sectarian attitudes, to absorb the mass pressure for socialism in the provinces, so the foundation of a third Party was quite good. But the pressure has now become so great, especially in the industrial districts of the north, that the new Party came out already at this first Congress stronger than the S.D.F. or the Fabians, if not stronger than both put together. And as the mass of the membership is certainly very good, as the centre of gravity lies in the provinces and not in London, the home of cliques, and as the main point of the programme is ours, Aveling was right to join and to accept a seat on the Executive. If the petty private ambitions and intrigues of the London would-be-greats are slightly held in check here and the tactics do not turn out too wrong-headed, the Independent Labour Party may succeed in detaching the masses from the Social-Democratic Federation and in the provinces from the Fabians too, and thus forcing unity.

The Fabians are an ambitious group here in London who have understanding enough to realise the inevitability of the social revolution, but who could not possibly entrust this gigantic task to the rough proletariat alone and are therefore kind enough to set themselves at the head. Fear of the revolution is their fundamental principle. They are the "educated" par excellence. Their socialism is municipal socialism; not the nation but the municipality is to become the owner of the means of production, at any rate for the time being. This socialism of theirs is then represented as an extreme but inevitable consequence of bourgeois Liberalism, and hence follow their tactics of not decisively opposing the Liberals as adversaries but of pushing them on towards socialist conclusions and therefore of intriguing with them, of permeating Liberalism with Socialism, of not putting up Socialist candidates against the Liberals but of fastening them on to the Liberals, forcing them upon them, or deceiving them into taking them. That in the course of this process they are either lied to and deceived themselves or else betray socialism, they do not of course realise.

With great industry they have produced amid all sorts of rubbish some good propagandist writings as well, in fact the best of the kind which the English have produced. But as soon as they get on to their specific tactics of hushing up the class struggle it all turns putrid. Hence too their fanatical hatred of Marx and all of us – because of the class struggle.

These people have of course many bourgeois followers and therefore money, and have many active workers in the provinces who will have nothing to do with the S.D.F. But five-sixths of the provincial members agree more or less with our point of view and at the critical moment will certainly fall away. In Bradford, where they were represented, they several times decisively declared themselves against the London Executive of the Fabians.

You see that it is a critical moment for the movement here and something may come of this new organisation. There was a moment when it nearly fell into the clutches of Champion-who consciously or unconsciously works just as much for the Tories as the Fabians do for the Liberals – and of his ally Maltman Barry, whom you knew at the Hague (Barry is now an acknowledged and permanent paid Tory agent and manager of the Socialist wing of the Conservatives!) – see the Workman's Times for November and December. But in the end Champion preferred to start publishing his Labour Elector again and has thus placed himself in opposition to the Workman's Times and the new Party.

Hardie brought off a clever stroke by putting himself at the head of this new Party, while John Burns, whose complete inactivity outside his constituency has already done him a lot of harm, committed a fresh piece of stupidity by holding back here too. I am afraid he is heading straight for an impossible position.

The fact that here too people like Keir Hardie, Shaw, Maxwell and others are pursuing all sorts of secondary aims of personal ambition is of course obvious. But the danger arising from this becomes less according to the degree in which the Party itself becomes stronger and gets more of a mass character, and it is already diminished by the necessity for exposing the weakness of the competing sects. Socialism has penetrated the masses in the industrial districts enormously in the last years and I am counting on these masses to keep the leaders in order. Of course, there will be stupidities enough, and cliques of every kind too, but so long as it is possible to keep them within decent limits – – .

At the worst, the foundation of the new organisation has this advantage that unity will be more easily brought about between these competing sects than between two which are diametrically opposed.

Engels To August Bebel

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 355-56;

Transcribed: by Einde O'Callaghan.

January 24, 1893

What Aveling told me confirms the suspicion I already had, namely, that Keir Hardie secretly cherishes the wish to lead the new party in a dictatorial way, just as Parnell led the Irish, and that moreover he tends to sympathise with the Conservative Party rather than the Liberal opposition. He publicly declares that Parnell’s experiment, which compelled Gladstone to give in, ought to be repeated at the next election and where it is impossible to nominate a Labour candidate one should vote for the Conservatives, in order to show the Liberals the power of the party. Now this is a policy which under definite circumstances I myself recommended to the English; however, if at the very outset one does not announce it as a possible tactical move but proclaims it as tactics to be followed under any circumstances, then it smells strongly of Champion.

...

... I am very anxious to see the stenographic copy of Singer’s [1] speech on the stock exchange; it read very well indeed in the Vorwärts. But one point of this topic is easily overlooked by all our people: the stock exchange is an institution where the bourgeoisie exploit not the workers but one another. The surplus value which changes hands on the Exchange is surplus value already in existence, the product of past exploitation of labour. Only when that process is finished can the surplus value serve the ends of stock exchange swindling. The stock exchange interests us in the first place only indirectly just as its influence, its repercussion on the capitalist exploitation of the workers, is felt only indirectly, and in a roundabout way. To ask that the workers should take a direct interest and wax indignant over the way the landlords, manufacturers and petty bourgeois are fleeced on the stock exchange means demanding that the workers should take to arms in order to protect their direct exploiters so that they can remain in possession of the surplus value which they had filched from these self-same workers. No, thank you. But as the finest fruit of bourgeois society, as the hearth of extreme corruption, as the hothouse of the Panama [2] and other scandals — and therefore also as an excellent medium for the concentration of capitals, the disintegration and dissolution of the last remnants of naturally formed interconnections in bourgeois society and at the same time for the annihilation of all orthodox moral concepts and their perversion into their opposites, as an incomparable means of destruction and as a most powerful accelerator of the impending revolution — in this historical sense the stock exchange is also of direct interest to us...

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor.

1. Paul Singer (1844-1911) — prominent leader of German working-class movement, from 1887 member of Executive, from 1890 Chairman of Executive of Social-Democratic Party of Germany, waged active struggle against opportunism and revisionism.

2. The limited company formed in France in 1879 to build a canal across the Panama isthmus failed in 1888, ruining numerous small shareholders and causing many bankruptcies. The public was scandalised when, in the course of the ensuing legal proceedings, it became known that a large number of journalists, Members of Parliament and leading French politicians were involved in the underhand dealings and financial speculations and that many of them had accepted bribes.

Engels to Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

February 24, 1893

We seem to be agreed upon all points except one, which you tackle in both your letters of 3rd October and 27 January, though in each from a different point of view.

In the first you ask: was the economic change which after 1854 had become unavoidable, of such a nature that it must, instead of developing the historical institutions of Russia, on the contrary attack them in their root? In other words, could not the rural commune be taken for the basis of the new economic development?

And, Jan. 27th, you express the same idea in this form: the grande industrie had become a necessity for Russia, but was it unavoidable that it was developed in a capitalistic form?

Well, in, or about, 1854 Russia started with the commune on the one hand, and the necessity of the grande industrie on the other. Now, if you take the whole state of your country into account, as it was at that date, do you see any possibility of the grande industrie being grafted on the peasants' commune in a form which would, on the one hand, make the development of that grande industrie possible, and on the other hand raise the primitive commune to the rank of a social institution superior to anything the world has yet seen? And that while the whole Occident was still living under the capitalist regime? It strikes me that such an evolution, which would have surpassed anything known in history required other economical, political and intellectual conditions than were present at that time in Russia.

No doubt the commune and to a certain extent the artel, contained germs which under certain conditions might have developed and saved Russia the necessity of passing through the torments of the capitalistic regime. I fully subscribe to our author's letter about Shukovsky. But in his, as well as in my opinion, the first condition required to bring this about was the impulse from without, the change of economic system in the Occident of Europe, the destruction of the capitalist system in the countries where it had originated. Our author said in a certain preface to a certain old manifesto, in January 1882, replying to the question whether the Russian commune might not be the starting point of a higher social development: if the change of economic system in Russia coincides with a change of economic system in the West, so that both supplement each other, then contemporary Russian landownership may become as the starting point of a new social development.

If we in the West had been quicker in our own economic development, if we had been able to upset the capitalistic regime some ten or twenty years ago, there might have been time yet for Russia to cut short the tendency of her own evolution towards capitalism. Unfortunately we are too slow, and those economic consequences of the capitalistic system which must bring it up to the critical point, are only just now developing in the various countries about us: while England is fast losing her industrial monopoly, France and Germany are approaching the industrial level of England, and America bids fair to drive them all out of the world's market both for industrial and for agricultural produce. The introduction of an, at least relative, free trade policy in America, is sure to complete the ruin of England's industrial monopoly, and to destroy, at the same time, the industrial export trade of Germany and France; then the crisis must come, tout ce qu'il a de plus fin de siècle. But in the meantime, with you, the commune fades away, and we can only hope that the change to a better system, with us, may come soon enough to save, at least in some of the remoter portions of your country, institutions which may, under those circumstances, be called upon to fulfil a great future. But facts are facts, and we must not forget that these chances are getting less and less every year.

For the rest I grant you that the circumstance of Russia being the last country seized upon by the capitalist grande industrie, and at the same time the country with by far the largest peasant population, are such as must render the bouleversement caused by this economic change more acute than it has been anywhere else. The process of replacing some 500,000 pomeshchiki (landowners) and some eighty million peasants by a new class of bourgeois landed proprietors cannot be carried out but under fearful sufferings and convulsions. But history is about the most cruel of all goddesses, and she leads her triumphal car over heaps of corpses, not only in war, but also in "peaceful" economic development. And we men and women are unfortunately so stupid that we never can pluck up courage to a real progress unless urged to it by sufferings that seem almost out of proportion.

Friedrich Engels to Paul Lafargue

At Le Perreux

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

25 February 1893

My dear Lafargue

How time passes! Old Harney [1] has reminded me this morning that yesterday was the anniversary of the February revolution. ‘Long Live the Republic!’ Lord, we have so many other anniversaries to celebrate now that one forgets these semi-bourgeois occasions. And to think that in five years it will be a half century since that one took place. At the time we were all enthusiasm for the republic – with a small r; since it has been written with a capital R, it seems worthless, save as an almost obsolete historical stage.

Your speech was very good and I regret only one thing: that it was not delivered two months ago. But better late than never. It doesn’t surprise me that the Chamber and the press found it ill-timed; if we were to wait upon their placet we should never open our mouths. As for the Radical Socialists à la Millerand & Co, [2] it is absolutely essential that the alliance with them should be based on the fact that our party is a separate party, and that they recognise that. Which in no way rules out joint action in the forthcoming elections, provided that the distribution of seats to be jointly contested is made in accordance with the actual state of the respective forces; those gentlemen are in the habit of claiming the lion’s share.

Do not let the fact that your speeches do not create as much stir as formerly discourage you. Look at our people in Germany: they were booed for years on end, and now the 36 dominate the Reichstag. Bebel writes saying: if we were 80 or a hundred (out of 400 members), the Reichstag would become an impossibility. There is not a debate, no matter what the subject, in which we do not intervene and we are listened to by all the parties. The debate on the socialist organisation of the future lasted five days, and Bebel’s speech was wanted in three and a half million copies. Now they are having the whole debate published in pamphlets at five sous, and the effect, already tremendous, will be doubled!

You are absolutely right to make preparations for the elections. We ought to capture at least 20 seats. You have the immense advantage of knowing, from the municipal elections, [3] the minimum extent of your strength in each locality; for I am sure that, since last May, you have appreciably increased it. That will help you greatly in apportioning candidatures between yourselves and the Radical Socialists. But possibly you would prefer to put up your candidates wherever you stand a chance, with the proviso to withdraw them, if necessary, in favour of the Radicals, for the second ballot, in the event of the latter having polled more votes.

The most important thing in the elections is to establish once and for all that it is our party which represents socialism in France, and that all the other more or less socialist factions – Broussists, Allemanists, [4] and pure or impure Blanquists – have been able to play a part beside us only by virtue of the temporary dissensions, incidental to the more or less infantile phase of the proletarian movement; but that now the stage of infantile disorders is over, and the French proletariat has reached full consciousness of its historic role. Should we win 20 seats, all the others combined will not have as many, since they are more likely to lose some than to gain any. In which case things will go forward. In the meantime, nurse your re-election: I have a feeling that your absences from the Chamber have not contributed any too much to ensure it.

Panama is not finished, not by a long chalk. [5] And it is a disgrace that the trouble and honour of making disclosures should be left to the Royalists and their dubious allies. They could not have a better battle-cry than ‘Down with the robbers’, and if the great mass of the stupid countryside takes their part against the Republicans, it is to the cowardice of the Radical Republicans that they will owe this triumph. You say that the republic is not in danger, that the deputies have returned from the recess with this certainty; well, then, they should strike for all they are worth and not let themselves be confused with the robbers by their silence. You are quite right: the political ineptitude of the whole bourgeoisie defies the imagination.

The only country where the bourgeoisie still has a little common sense is England. Here the formation of the Independent Labour Party [6] (though still in embryo) and its conduct in the Lancashire and Yorkshire elections have put a match to the government’s backside; it is stirring itself, doing things unheard-of for a Liberal Government. [7] The Registration Bill 1) unifies the suffrage for all parliamentary, municipal, etc, elections, 2) adds at least 20 to 30 per cent to the working-class vote, 3) removes the cost of election expenses from the candidates’ shoulders and places it on those of the government. The payment of an honorarium to MPs is promised for the next session; and there are also a whole number of juridical and economic measures for the benefit of workers. Finally, the Liberals recognise that, to make sure of governing at the present time, there is nothing for it but to increase the political power of the working class who will naturally kick them out afterwards. The Tories, on the other hand, are behaving at the moment with unbounded stupidity. But once Home Rule is on the Statute Book, they will realise that there is nothing for it but to enter the lists to gain power, and to that end there remains but one means: to win the working-class vote by political or economic concessions; thus Liberals and Conservatives cannot help extending the power of the working class, and hastening the time which will eliminate both the one and the other.

Amongst the workers here, things are going well. They begin to realise their strength more and more, and that there is only one way of using it, namely, by forming an independent party.

At the same time international feeling gains ground. In short, things are going well everywhere.

In Germany the dissolution of the Reichstag is still a possibility; but it becomes less and less likely; everyone, apart from us, is afraid of it. We should win 50 to 60 seats.

On 26 March there will be an international conference at Brussels which is to make preparations for the Zurich Congress. Shall you go to it? [8]

Good riddance to your taenia, and look after your bowels; I was going to make an Irish bull by saying: they are the sinews of war!

Ever yours

F Engels

Notes

1. George Julian Harney (1817-1897) – prominent figure in English labour movement, one of left-wing leaders of Chartist movement, founder of Society of Fraternal Democrats, editor of The Northern Star, Red Republican (weekly) and other Chartist journals – Progress Publishers.

2. Alexandre Étienne Millerand (1859-1943) – French politician and statesman, in 1880s petty-bourgeois radical, in 1890s joined socialists and became leader of opportunist trend in French socialist movement, entered reactionary bourgeois government in 1899 – Progress Publishers.

3. Paul Brousse (1854-1912) – French petit-bourgeois socialist, participated in Paris Commune, after its suppression lived in emigration, joined anarchists. On his return to France at the beginning of 1880s joined Workers Party where he vehemently opposed the Marxist trend, an ideologist and leader of Possibilists, an opportunist trend in French socialism. Jean Allemane (1843-1935) – French petit-bourgeois socialist, member of Paris Commune, after its suppression was sentenced to penal servitude, amnestied in 1880, a Possibilist in 1880s, in 1890 headed Workers Social-Revolutionary Party of a semi-anarchist trend which broke from Possibilists, later withdrew from active political life – Progress Publishers.

4. In 1892, a scandal arose when French monarchists accused a number of French cabinet ministers and over 500 parliamentary deputies of taking bribes in order to conceal the grave financial condition of the Panama Canal Company – MIA.

5. Engels refers to the municipal elections held on 1 and 8 May 1892, when the Socialists received 160 000 votes and captured 27 municipalities – Progress Publishers.

6. The Independent Labour Party, a reformist organisation which was formed at a conference at Bradford in January 1893, was headed by Keir Hardie – Progress Publishers.

7. At the House of Commons session on 20 February 1893, a First Reading was given to two Bills dealing with modifications of the electoral law. The government proposed in these Bills that as far as possible inequalities hindering the free expression of the elector’s views should be abolished. Among other things it contemplated the abolition of all property qualifications; the introduction of returning officers, nominated and paid by municipal councils, to be responsible for drawing up the electoral register; and the establishment of a single register of voters for all elections (parliamentary, municipal, etc) – Progress Publishers.

8. Ferroul represented the National Council of the French Workers Party at the Brussels Conference – Progress Publishers.

Engels to Sorge

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

London, March 18, 1893.

Dear Sorge:

We were at the seashore for two weeks, in Eastbourne; we had splendid weather, and came back very much refreshed. Now we can get back to work. But now, to be sure, visiting time starts. Next Sunday (a week from tomorrow) there is the Brussels Conference regarding the Zurich Congress, so Bebel will drop in for a few days on his way back, and the Lafargues will come at about the same time. I am glad to have that youngster here again in order to talk over French affairs thoroughly with him. Still, enough time is left me to finish Volume III, as the chief difficulties are now behind me.

The matter of the Socialiste has been settled.

The silver business in America does not seem to be able to settle down otherwise than through a crash. Nor does Cleveland seem to have the power and courage to break the necks of this bribery ring. And it would be really good if things came to a head.

A nation — a young nation — so conceited about its “practice” and so frightfully dense theoretically as the Americans are, gets thoroughly rid of so deep-rooted a fixed idea only through its own sufferings. The plausible idea of imagining that there isn’t enough money in the world because one hasn’t any when one needs it — this childish idea common to the paper currency swindle à la Kellogg and to the silver swindle is most surely cured by experiment and bankruptcy, which may also take a course that is very favorable for us. If only some sort of tariff reform is effected this fall, you may be quite satisfied. The rest will follow; the main thing is that American industry is enabled to compete in the world market.

Here things are going very well. The masses are unmistakably in motion; you are getting the details from Aveling’s somewhat longwinded reports in the Volkszeitung. The best evidence is that the old sects are losing ground and must fall into line. The Social-Democratic Federation has actually deposed Mr. Hyndman; he is allowed to grumble and complain a bit about international politics here and there in Justice, but he is finished — his own people have found him out. The man provoked me personally and politically wherever he could for ten years; I never did him the honor of answering him, in the conviction that he was man enough to ruin himself, and in the end I have been justified. After all the ten years’ persecution they have recently asked Tussy to write reports on the international movement for Justice, which she refused to do, of course, as long as the infamous slanders that Justice has heaped on Aveling and her for years are not publicly withdrawn.

The same thing is happening to the Fabians. The branches in the provinces are outgrowing these people, as well as the S.D.F. Lancashire and Yorkshire are again taking the lead in this movement, too, as in the Chartist movement.

People like Sidney Webb, Bernard Shaw, and the like, who wanted to permeate the Liberals with Socialism, must now allow themselves to be permeated by the spirit of the workingmen members of their own society. They are resisting with might and main, but it’s no use; either they remain alone, officers without soldiers, or they must go along. The former is more likely and also more desirable.

The Independent Labour Party — as the most recent arrival — has brought with it fixed prejudices; it has good elements — the workers of the North in particular — and so far is the most genuine expression of the present movement. To be sure, there are all sorts of funny people among the leaders, and most of the best of them, even have the annoying clique habits of the parliamentary regime, just as with you in America, but the masses are behind them and will either teach them manners or throw them overboard. There are still blunders enough, but the main danger has been weathered, and I now expect rapid progress, which will also react upon America.

In Germany the situation is coming to a crisis. A compromise is hardly possible after the recent reports of the military commission’s sessions; the government is making it impossible for the gentlemen of the Center and the Liberals to change sides, and without forty to fifty of them no majority is feasible. Hence dissolution and new elections. I expect 2,500,000 votes for us, if things go well, as we have grown at a great rate. Bebel expects fifty to sixty seats, as we have the election district gerrymander against us and all the others are combining against us, so that we cannot convert even big minorities into’ majorities on the second ballots. I should prefer the thing to proceed peacefully until 1895, when we would create an altogether different effect, but whatever happens; everything must help us along, from the judge to Little Wilhelm.

F. Wiesen, a young man of Baird, Texas, has asked me for a statement against the putting up of candidates “for President,” as we want to abolish the President and that is a denial of revolutionary principle. I have sent him the enclosed reply; if it be published in curtailed form, please have it printed in the Volkeszeitung.

I trust your health and that of your wife are better now; cordial regards to both of you from Frau K. and your

F. Engels

We have sent you the debate on the future state. The newspapers were sent somewhat irregularly while we were away, but they should be complete.

(ENCLOSURE)

Mr. F. Wiesen,

Baird, Texas, U. S. A.

Dear Comrade:

London, March 14, 1893.

Accumulated work prevented me from answering your lines of January 29th any earlier.

I do not see what violation of the social-democratic principle is necessarily involved in putting up candidates for any elective political office or in voting for these candidates, even if we are aiming at the abolition of this office itself.

One may be of the opinion that the best way to abolish the Presidency and the Senate in America is to elect men to these offices who are pledged to effect their abolition, and then one will consistently act accordingly. Others may think that this method is inappropriate; that’s a matter of opinion. There may be circumstances under which the former mode of action would also involve a violation of revolutionary principle; I fail to see why that should always and everywhere be the case.

For the immediate goal of the labor movement is the conquest of political power for and by the working class. If we agree on that, the difference of opinion regarding the ways and means of struggle to be employed therein can scarcely lead to differences of principle among sincere people who have their wits about them. In my opinion those tactics are the best in each country that lead to the goal most certainly and in the shortest time. But we are yet very far from this goal precisely in America, and I believe I am not making a mistake in explaining the importance still attributed sometimes to such academic questions over there by this very circumstance.

You may publish these remarks — unabridged.

Yours very sincerely,

F. Engels

Engels to Sorge

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

May 17, 1893

The May First demonstration here was very nice; but is already becoming somewhat of an everyday or rather an annual matter; the first fresh bloom is gone. The narrow-mindedness of the Trades Council and of the Socialist sects — Fabians and the S.D.F. — again compelled us to hold two demonstrations, but everything went off as we desired and we — the Eight-Hour Committee — had many more people than the united opposition. In particular, our international platform had a very good audience. I figure that there was a total of 240,000 in the park, of which we had 140,000 and the opposition at most 100,000.

Friedrich Engels to the Editorial Board of the Bulgarian Symposium Social-Democrat

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

9 June 1893

Dear Party Comrades

I cordially thank you for sending me No 2 of your Social-Democrat [1] and am endeavouring to show you by the superscription of this letter that I am at least beginning to understand your language. The requirements of internationalism are growing with each year. Up to 1848 one believed one had done enough if one had a smattering of the main languages of Western and Central Europe, but now a point has been reached where I must in my old age learn even Rumanian and Bulgarian if I want to follow the progress of socialism eastward and south-eastward. However for all that we in the West rejoice no less over these our south-eastern vanguards on the Asian frontier, who are carrying as far as the Black Sea and the Aegean Sea the banner of the modern proletariat that Marx has unfurled – if only he had lived to see this! – and who answer the enticements and threats of Russian Tsarism by countering the tsarist proclamations with socialist works written by the Russian champions of the proletariat. It has given me great pleasure to see Plekhanov’s works translated into Bulgarian.

Long Live International Socialism!

Yours

F Engels

Notes

1. The Social-Democrat – a Bulgarian political and literary quarterly, published in Sevlievo in 1892 and 1893 – Progress Publishers.

Engels to Franz Mehring

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, July 14, 1893

Today is my first opportunity to thank you for the Lessing Legend you were kind enough to send me. I did not want to reply with a bare formal acknowledgment of receipt of the book but intended at the same time to tell you something about it, about its contents. Hence the delay.

I shall begin at the end — the appendix on historical materialism, in which you have described the main things excellently and for any unprejudiced person convincingly. If I find anything to object to it is that you attribute more credit to me than I deserve, even if I count in everything which I might possibly have found out for myself – in time – but which Marx with his more rapid coup d’oeil (grasp) and wider vision discovered much more quickly. When one has the good fortune to work for forty years with a man like Marx, one does not usually get the recognition one thinks one deserves during his lifetime. Then if the greater man dies, the lesser easily gets overrated, and this seems to me to be just my case at present; history will set all this right in the end and by that time one will be safely round the corner and know nothing more about anything.

Otherwise there is only one other point lacking, which, however, Marx and I always failed to stress enough in our writings and in regard to which we are all equally guilty. That is to say, we all laid, and were bound to lay, the main emphasis, in the first place, on the derivation of political, juridical and other ideological notions, and of actions arising through the medium of these notions, from basic economic facts. But in so doing we neglected the formal side — the ways and means by which these notions, etc., come about — for the sake of the content. This has given our adversaries a welcome opportunity for misunderstandings, of which Paul Barth is a striking example.

Ideology is a process accomplished by the so-called thinker consciously, indeed, but with a false consciousness. The real motives impelling him remain unknown to him, otherwise it would not be an ideological process at all. Hence he imagines false or apparent motives. Because it is a process of thought he derives both its form and its content from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with mere thought material which he accepts without examination as the product of thought, he does not investigate further for a more remote process independent of thought; indeed its origin seems obvious to him, because as all action is produced through the medium of thought it also appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought. The ideologist who deals with history (history is here simply meant to comprise all the spheres – political, juridical, philosophical, theological – belonging to society and not only to nature), the ideologist dealing with history then, possesses in every sphere of science material which has formed itself independently out of the thought of previous generations and has gone through an independent series of developments in the brains of these successive generations. True, external facts belonging to its own or other spheres may have exercised a co-determining influence on this development, but the tacit pre-supposition is that these facts themselves are also only the fruits of a process of thought, and so we still remain within that realm of pure thought which has successfully digested the hardest facts.

It is above all this appearance of an independent history of state constitutions, of systems of law, of ideological conceptions in every separate domain, which dazzles most people. If Luther and Calvin “overcome” the official Catholic religion, or Hegel “overcomes” Fichte and Kant, or if the constitutional Montesquieu is indirectly “overcome” by Rousseau with his “Social Contract,” each of these events remains within the sphere of theology, philosophy or political science, represents a stage in the history of these particular spheres of thought and never passes outside the sphere of thought. And since the bourgeois illusion of the eternity and the finality of capitalist production has been added as well, even the victory of the physiocrats and Adam Smith over the mercantilists is accounted as a sheer victory of thought; not as the reflection in thought of changed economic facts but as the finally achieved correct understanding of actual conditions subsisting always and everywhere – in fact if Richard Coeur-de-Lion and Philip Augustus had introduced free trade instead of getting mixed up in the crusades we should have been spared five hundred years of misery and stupidity.

This side of the matter, which I can only indicate here, we have all, I think, neglected more than it deserves. It is the old story: form is always neglected at first for content. As I say, I have done that too, and the mistake has always only struck me later. So I am not only far from reproaching you with this in any way, but as the older of the guilty parties I have no right to do so, on the contrary; but I would like all the same to draw your attention to this point for the future.

Hanging together with this too is the fatuous notion of the ideologists that because we deny an independent historical development to the various ideological spheres which play a part in history we also deny them any effect upon history. The basis of this is the common undialectical conception of cause and effect as rigidly opposite poles, the total disregarding of interaction; these gentlemen often almost deliberately forget that once an historic element has been brought into the world by other elements, ultimately by economic facts, it also reacts in its turn and may react on its environment and even on its own causes. For instance, Barth on the priesthood and religion on your page 475. I was very glad to see how you settled this fellow, whose banality exceeds all expectations; and him they make a professor of history in Leipzig! I must say that old man Wachsmuth — also rather a bonehead but greatly appreciative of facts — was quite a different chap.

As for the rest, I can only repeat about the book what I repeatedly said about the articles when they appeared in the Neue Zeit; it is by far the best presentation in existence of the genesis of the Prussian state. Indeed, I may well say that it is the only good presentation, correctly developing in most matters their interconnections down to the very details. One regrets only that you were unable to include the entire further development down to Bismarck and one cannot help hoping that you will do this another time and present a complete coherent picture, from the Elector Frederick William down to old William. For you have already made the preliminary investigations and, in the main at least, they are as good as finished. The thing has to be done sometime anyhow before the shaky old shanty comes tumbling down. The dissipation of the monarchical-patriotic legends, although not really a necessary precondition for the abolition of the monarchy which screens class domination (for a pure, bourgeois republic in Germany has been made obsolete by events before it has come into existence) is nevertheless one of the most effective levers for that purpose.

Then you will also have more space and opportunity to depict the local history of Prussia as part of Germany’s general misery. This is the point where I occasionally depart somewhat from your view, especially in the conception of the preliminary conditions for the dismemberment of Germany and of the failure of the bourgeois revolution in Germany during the sixteenth century. If I get down to reworking the historical introduction to my Peasant War, which I hope I shall do next winter, I shall be able to develop there the points in question. Not that I consider those you indicated incorrect, but I put others alongside them and group them somewhat differently.

In studying German history — the story of a continuous state of wretchedness — I have always found that only a comparison with the corresponding French periods produces a correct idea of proportions, because what happens there is the direct opposite of what happens in our country. There, the establishment of a national state from the scattered parts of the feudal state, just when we pass through the period of our greatest decline. There, a rare objective logic, during the whole course of the process; with us, increasingly dreary desultoriness. There, during the Middle Ages, the English conqueror, who intervenes in favour of the Provencal nationality against the Northern French nationality, represents foreign intervention, and the wars with England represent, in a way, the Thirty Years’ War, which there, however, ends in the ejection of the foreign invaders and the subjugation of the South by the North. Then comes the struggle between the central power and Burgundy, the vassal, which relies on its foreign possessions, and plays the part of Brandenburg-Prussia, a struggle which ends, however, in the victory of the central power and conclusively establishes the national state. And precisely at that moment the national state completely collapses in our country (in so far as the “German kingdom” within the Holy Roman Empire can be called a national state) and the plundering of German territory on a large scale sets in. This comparison is most humiliating for Germans but for that very reason the more instructive; and since our workers have put Germany back again in the forefront of the historical movement it has become somewhat easier for us to swallow the ignominy of the past.

Another especially significant feature of the development of Germany is the fact that not one of the two member states which in the end partitioned Germany between them was purely German — both were colonies on conquered Slav territory: Austria a Bavarian and Brandenburg a Saxon colony — and that they acquired power within Germany only by relying upon the support of foreign, non-German possessions: Austria upon that of Hungary (not to mention Bohemia) and Brandenburg upon that of Prussia. On the Western border, the one in greatest jeopardy, nothing of the kind took place; on the Northern border it was left to the Danes to protect Germany against the Danes; and in the South there was so little to protect that the frontier guard, the Swiss, even succeeded in tearing themselves loose from Germany!

But I am speaking of all kinds of extraneous matter, let this palaver at least serve you as proof of how stimulating an effect your work has upon me.

Once more cordial thanks and greetings from

Yours,

F. Engels

Engels to Nikolai Danielson

In St Petersburg

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

October 17, 1893

When I received your letter of July 18, announcing your return home, I was on the point myself of going abroad for two months and am only just returned. This is the reason of my long silence.

Many thanks for the copies of the Ocherki three of which I have forwarded to appreciative friends. The book, I am glad to see, has caused considerable stir and indeed sensation, as it well merited. Among the Russians I have met, it was the chief subject of conversation. Only yesterday one of them writes: "With us in Russia a controversy is going on about the 'fate of capitalism in Russia'."

In the Berlin Sozial-Politische Zentralblatt a Mr. B. V. Struve has a long article on your book; I must agree with him in this one point, that for me, too, the present capitalistic phase of development in Russia appears an unavoidable consequence of the historical conditions as created by the Crimean War, the way in which the change of 1861 in agrarian conditions was accomplished, and the political stagnation in Europe generally. Where he is decidedly wrong is in comparing the present state of Russia with that of the United States in order to refute what he calls your pessimistic views of the future. He says the evil consequences of modern capitalism in Russia will be as easily overcome as they are in the United States. There he quite forgets, that the U.S. are modern bourgeois from the very origin; that they were founded by petits bourgeois and peasants who ran away from European feudalism to establish a purely bourgeois society. Whereas in Russia we have a groundwork of a primitive communistic character, a precivilisation Gentilgesellschaft, crumbling to ruins, it is true, but still serving as the groundwork, the material upon which the capitalistic revolution (for it is a real social revolution) acts and operates. In America, Geldwirtschaft has been fully established for more than a century in Russia Naturalwirtschaft was all but exclusively the rule. Therefore it stands to reason that the change, in Russia, must be far more violent, far more incisive, and accompanied by immensely greater sufferings than it can be in America.

But for all that it still seems to me that you take a gloomier view of the case than the facts justify. No doubt the passage from primitive agrarian communism to capitalistic industrialism cannot take place without terrible dislocation of society, without the disappearance of whole classes and their transformation into other classes; and what enormous suffering, and waste of human lives and productive forces that necessarily implies, we have seen – on a smaller scale – in Western Europe. But from that to the complete ruin of a great and highly gifted nation there is still a long way. The rapid increase of population to which you have been accustomed may be checked; the reckless deforestation combined with the expropriation of the old landlords as well as the peasants may cause a colossal waste of productive forces; but after all, a population of more than a hundred millions will finally furnish a very considerable home market for a very respectable grande industrie, and with you as elsewhere, things will end by finding their own level – if capitalism lasts long enough in Western Europe.

You yourself admit that "the social conditions in Russia after the Crimean War were not favourable to the development of the form of production inherited by us from our past history." I would go further, and say, that no more in Russia than anywhere else would it have been possible to develop a higher social form out of primitive agrarian communism unless – that higher form was already in existence in another country, so as to serve as a model. That higher form being, wherever it is historically possible, the necessary consequence of the capitalistic form of production and of the social dualistic antagonism created by it, it could not be developed directly out of the agrarian commune, unless in imitation of an example already in existence somewhere else. Had the West of Europe been ripe, 1860-70, for such a transformation, had that transformation then been taken in hand in England, France, etc., then the Russians would have been called upon to show what could have been made out of their commune, which was then more or less intact. But the West remained stagnant, no such transformation was attempted, and capitalism was more and more rapidly developed. And as Russia had no choice but this: either to develop the commune into a form of production from which it was separated by a number of historical stages, and for which not even in the West the conditions were then ripe – evidently an impossible task – or else to develop into capitalism; what remained to her but the latter chance?

As to the commune, it is only possible so long as the differences of wealth among its members are but trifling. As soon as these differences become great, as soon as some of its members become the debt-slaves of the richer members, it can no longer live. The kulaki and miroyedy (kulaks and parasites) of Athens, before Solon, have destroyed the Athenian gens with the same implacability with which those of your country destroy the commune. I am afraid that institution is doomed. But on the other hand, capitalism opens out new views and new hopes. Look at what it has done and is doing in the West. A great nation like yours outlives every crisis. There is no great historical evil without a compensating historical progress. Only the modus operandi is changed. Que les destinees s'accomplissent! [Only the mode of operation is changed. Let fate be accomplished.]

Engels to Sorge

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

London, November 11, 1893

Read on the front page of to-day’s Workman’s Times the article by Autolycus (Burgess) about the Fabian Manifesto. These gentlemen, after having declared for years that the emancipation of the working-class can only be accomplished through the Great Liberal Party, after having decried all independent election activity of the workers in respect to Liberal candidates also as disguised Toryism and after having proclaimed the permeation of the Liberal Party by socialist principles as the sole life task of the Socialists, now declare that the Liberals are traitors, that nothing can be done with them and that in the next elections the workers should put up candidates of their own, regardless of Liberals or Tories, with the aid of £30,000 to be made available in the meantime by the Trade Unions, if these do the Fabians that favour, which they certainly won’t. It is a complete confession of sins committed by these overweening bourgeois, who would graciously deign to emancipate the proletariat from above if it would only be sensible enough to realise that such a raw, uneducated mass cannot alone emancipate itself and cannot achieve anything except by the grace of these clever lawyers, writers and sentimental old women. And now the first attempt of these gentry, which was announced with beating of drums and sounding of trumpets as destined to Cause the earth to tremble, has ended in so dismal a failure that they have to admit it themselves. That is the funny side of the story.

Engels to Sorge

Source: Science and Society Volume II, Number 3, 1938;

Translated and Edited: by Leonard E. Mins.

London, December 2, 1893.

Dear Sorge:

Many thanks to you and your wife for your friendly wishes and your letter of November 19th.

I am very sorry that you are suffering from gout; I hope it will come around with time. It is a tricky disease.

The repeal of the silver purchase law has saved America from a severe money crisis and will promote industrial prosperity. But I don’t know whether it wouldn’t have been better for this crash to have actually occurred. The phrase “cheap money” seems to be bred in the bone of your Western farmers. First, they imagine that if there are lots of means of circulation in the country, the interest rate must drop, whereby they confuse means of circulation and available money capital, concerning which very enlightening things will come to light in Volume III. Second, it suits all debtors to contract debts in good currency and to pay them off later in depreciated currency. That is why the debt-ridden Prussian Junkers also clamor for a double currency, which would provide them with a veiled Solonic riddance of their debts. Now if they had been able to wait with the silver reform in the United States until the consequences of the nonsense had also reacted upon the farmers, that would have opened many of their dense heads.

The tariff reform, slow as it is in getting started, does seem to have caused a sort of panic among the manufacturers in New England already. I hear — privately and from the papers — of the layoff of numerous workers. But that will calm down as soon as the law is passed and the uncertainty is over; I am convinced that America can boldly enter into competition with England in all the great branches of industry.

The German socialists in America are an annoying business. The people you get over there from Germany are usually not the best — they stay here — and in any event they are not at all a fair sample of the German party. And as is the case everywhere, each new arrival feels himself called upon to turn everything he finds upside down, turning it into something new, so that a new epoch may date from himself. Moreover, most of these greenhorns remain stuck in New York for a long time or for life, continually reinforced by new additions and relieved of the necessity of learning the language of the country or of getting to know American conditions properly. All of that certainly causes much harm, but on the other hand, it is not to be denied that American conditions involve very great and peculiar difficulties for a continuous development of a workers’ party.

First, the Constitution, based as in England upon party government, which causes every vote for any candidate not put up by one of the two governing parties to appear to be lost. And the American, like the Englishman, wants to influence his state; he does not throw his vote away.

Then, and more especially, immigration, which divides the workers into two groups: the native-born and the foreigners, and the latter in turn into (1) the Irish, (2) the Germans, (3) the many small groups, each of which understands only itself: Czechs, Poles, Italians, Scandinavians, etc. And then the Negroes. To form a single party out of these requires quite unusually powerful incentives. Often there is a sudden violent élan, but the bourgeois need only wait passively, and the dissimilar elements of the working class fall apart again.

Third, through the protective tariff system and the steadily growing domestic market the workers must be exposed to a prosperity no trace of which has been seen here in Europe for years now (except in Russia, where, however, the bourgeois profit by it and not the workers).

A country like America, when it is really ripe for a socialist workers’ party, certainly cannot be hindered from having one by the couple of German socialist doctrinaires.

Part I of Volume III (246 pages of ms., dating from about 1850) is ready for the printer. This is between the two of us. It will now go ahead rapidly, I hope.

Cordial regards to your wife and yourself, and wishes for your recovery, from L. K. and

Your

F. Engels

1894

Engels to Paul Lafargue 3 January

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov 4 January

Engels to Giuseppe Canepa 9 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky 9 January

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov 10 January

Engels to George William Lamplugh 10 January

Engels to Henri Rave 10 January

Engels to Victor Adler 11 January

Engels to George William Lamplugh 12 January

Engels to Albert Delon 21 January

Engels to W Borgius 25 January [alt]

Engels to Filippo Turati 26 January

Engels to Richard Fischer 1 February

Engels to Karl Kautsky 13 February

Engels to Georg Von Gizycki 17 February

Engels to Eduard Bernstein 22 February

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 23 February

Engels to Adelheid Dworak and Julius Popp [Feb.]

Engels to Paul Lafargue 6 March

Engels to August Momberger 9 March

Engels to Victor Adler 20 March

Engels to Nikolai Danielson 20 March

Engels to Panait Musoiu 20 March

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 21 March

Engels to Victor Adler 22 March

Engels to Pablo Iglesias 26 March

Engels to Benno Karpeles 29 March

Engels to Hunter Watts 3 April

Engels to Laura Lafargue 11 April

Engels to Filippo Turati 12 April

Engels to Henry William Lee 16 April

Engels to Editorial Board of a French Socialist Newspaper 24 April

Engels to Carl Eberle 24 April

Engels to Laura Lafargue 11 May

Engels to Filippo Turati 11 May

Engels to Adolph Sorge 12 May

Engels to Boris Krichevsky 20 May

Engels to Georgi Plekhanov 21 May

Engels to Stanislav Mendelson 22 May

Engels to Georgi Plekhanov 22 May

Engels to Boris Krichevsky 31 May

Engels to Nikolai Danielson 1 June

Engels to Paul Lafargue 2 June

Engels to Witold Jodko-Narkevich 5 June

Engels to Stanislaw Zablocki 7 June

Engels to Karl Kautsky 19 June

Engels to Karl Kautsky 26 June

Engels to Otto Wachs end June-early July

Engels to Boris Krichevsky July

Engels to Laura Lafargue 4 July

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer 5 July

Engels to Editor of the Neue Zeit 9 July

Engels to Karl Kautsky 16 July

Engels to Victor Adler 17 July

Engels to Julius Motteler 21 July

Engels to Karl Kautsky 28 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue 28 July

Engels to Filippo Turati 31 July

Engels to Victor Adler 4 August

Engels to Pablo Iglesias 9-14 August

Engels to Eduard Bernstein 14 August

Engels to Thomas Clarke 15 August

Engels to Filippo Turati 16 August

Engels to Paul Lafargue 22 August

Engels to Eduard Bernstein 6 September

Engels to Eduard Bernstein 18 September

Engels to Laura Lafargue 2nd half Sept.

Engels to Karl Kautsky 23 September

Engels to Emile Vandervelde 21 October

Engels to Maria Mendelson 26 October

Engels to Georgi Plekhanov 1 November

Engels to Carl Hirsch 8 November

Engels to Eleanor Marx-Aveling 10 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 10 November

Engels to Laura Lafargue 12 November

Engels to August Bebel and Paul Singer 14 November

Engels to Eduard Bernstein 14 November

Engels to Laura Lafargue and Eleanor Marx-Aveling 14 November

Engels to Karl Kautsky 15 November

Engels to Eduard Bernstein 20 November

Engels to Karl Kautsky 22 November

Engels to Paul Lafargue 22 November

Engels to Jossif Atabekjanz 23 November

Engels to Nikolai Danielson 24 November

Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht 24 November

Engels to Mrs Karpeles 30 November

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 4 December

Engels to Filippo Turati 4 December

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 12 December

Engels to Victor Adler 14 December

Engels to Witold Jodko-Narkiewicz 14 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue 17 December

Engels to Pyotr Lavrov 18 December

Engels to Paul Lafargue 18 December

Engels to George William Lamplugh 21 December

Engels to Victor Adler 22 December

Engels to Paul Singer 26 to 29 December

Engels to Victor Adler 27 December

Engels to Laura Lafargue 29 December

Engels to Borgius[1]

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, January 25, 1894

Here is the answer to your questions!

(1) What we understand by the economic conditions, which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society, are the methods by which human beings in a given society produce their means of subsistence and exchange the products among themselves (in so far as division of labour exists). Thus the entire technique of production and transport is here included. According to our conception this technique also determines the method of exchange and, further, the division of products, and with it, after the dissolution of tribal society, the division into classes also and hence the relations of lordship and servitude and with them the state, politics, law, etc. Under economic conditions are further included the geographical basis on which they operate and those remnants of earlier stages of economic development which have actually been transmitted and have survived – often only through tradition or the force of inertia; also of course the external milieu which surrounds this form of society.

If, as you say, technique largely depends on the state of science, science depends far more still on the state and the requirements of technique. If society has a technical need, that helps science forward more than ten universities. The whole of hydrostatics (Torricelli, etc.) was called forth by the necessity for regulating the mountain streams of Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We have only known anything reasonable about electricity since its technical applicability was discovered. But unfortunately it has become the custom in Germany to write the history of the sciences as if they had fallen from the skies.

(2) We regard economic conditions as the factor which ultimately determines historical development. But race is itself an economic factor. Here, however, two points must not be overlooked:

(a) Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development. But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic base. It is not that the economic position is the cause and alone active, while everything else only has a passive effect. There is, rather, interaction on the basis of the economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself. The state, for instance, exercises an influence by tariffs, free trade, good or bad fiscal system; and even the deadly inanition and impotence of the German petty bourgeois, arising from the miserable economic position of Germany from 1640 to 1830 and expressing itself at first in pietism, then in sentimentality and cringing servility to princes and nobles, was not without economic effect. It was one of the greatest hindrances to recovery and was not shaken until the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars made the chronic misery an acute one. So it is not, as people try here and there conveniently to imagine, that the economic position produces an automatic effect. Men make their history themselves, only in given surroundings which condition it and on the basis of actual relations already existing, among which the economic relations, however much they may be influenced by the other political and ideological ones, are still ultimately the decisive ones, forming the red thread which runs through them and alone leads to understanding.

(b) Men make their history themselves, but not as yet with a collective will or according to a collective plan or even in a definitely defined, given society. Their efforts clash, and for that very reason all such societies are governed by necessity, which is supplemented by and appears under the forms of accident. The necessity which here asserts itself amidst all accident is again ultimately economic necessity. This is where the so-called great men come in for treatment. That such and such a man and precisely that man arises at that particular time in that given country is of course pure accident. But cut him out and there will be a demand for a substitute, and this substitute will be found, good or bad, but in the long run he will be found. That Napoleon, just that particular Corsican, should have been the military dictator whom the French Republic, exhausted by its own war, had rendered necessary, was an accident; but that, if a Napoleon had been lacking, another would have filled the place, is proved by the fact that the man has always been found as soon as he became necessary: Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc. While Marx discovered the materialist conception of history, Thierry, Mignet, Guizot, and all the English historians up to 1850 are the proof that it was being striven for, and the discovery of the same conception by Morgan proves that the time was ripe for it and that indeed it had to be discovered.

So with all the other accidents, and apparent accidents, of history. The further the particular sphere which we are investigating is removed from the economic sphere and approaches that of pure abstract ideology, the more shall we find it exhibiting accidents in its development, the more will its curve run in a zig-zag. So also you will find that the axis of this curve will approach more and more nearly parallel to the axis of the curve of economic development the longer the period considered and the wider the field dealt with.

In Germany the greatest hindrance to correct understanding is the irresponsible neglect by literature of economic history. It is so hard, not only to disaccustom oneself of the ideas of history drilled into one at school, but still more to rake up the necessary material for doing so. Who, for instance, has read old G. von Gülich, whose dry collection of material nevertheless contains so much stuff for the clarification of innumerable political facts!

For the rest, the fine example which Marx has given in the Eighteenth Brumaire should already, I think, provide you fairly well with information on your questions, just because it is a practical example. I have also, I believe, already touched on most of the points in Anti-Dühring I, Chapters 9-11, and II, 2-4, as well as in III, I, or Introduction, and then in the last section of Feuerbach.

Please do not weigh each word in the above too carefully, but keep the connection in mind; I regret that I have not the time to work out what I am writing to you so exactly as I should be obliged to do for publication.

1. This letter was first published without any mention of the addressee in the journal Der socialistische Akademiker No 20, 1895, by its contributor H. Starkenburg. As a result Starkenburg was wrongly identified as the addressee in all previous editions.— from Progress Publishers, 1968

Engels to Filippo Turati

In Milan

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, January 26, 1894

In my opinion the position in Italy is the following.

The bourgeoisie, which came to power during and after the national independence movement, would not and could not complete its victory. It neither destroyed the remains of feudalism nor transformed national production according to the modern capitalist pattern. Incapable of ensuring the relative and temporary advantages of the capitalist system to the country, they burdened it on the other hand with all the damage and the disadvantages of the system. And as if that were not enough, they forfeited the last remnant of respect and confidence by involving themselves in the dirtiest bank scandals.

The labouring population – peasants, handicraft workers, agricultural and industrial workers – finds itself in consequence in an oppressive position, on the one hand owing to old abuses inherited not only from feudal times but from an even earlier period (take, for instance, the mezzadria [share farming], or the latifundia of the south, where cattle are supplanting men); on the other hand owing to the most rapacious fiscal system ever invented by bourgeois policy. Here too one can say with Marx: "Like all the rest of continental Western Europe we are tortured not only by the development of capitalist production, but by the lack of its development. Side by side with modern distress we are oppressed by a whole sequence of inherited distress arising from the fact that ancient and antiquated methods of production, resulting in social and political conditions unsuited to the time, continue to vegetate among us. We suffer not only from the living but from the dead. Le mort saisit le vif. [The living are in the grip of the dead.]

This situation is pressing towards a crisis. Everywhere the producing masses are in a ferment: here and there they are rising. Where will this crisis lead?

The Socialist Party of Italy is obviously too young and, considering the whole economic position, too weak, to be able to hope for an immediate victory of Socialism. In this country the rural population far outweighs the urban; in the towns industry is only slightly developed and hence the real typical proletariat is small in number: here the majority is composed of handicraft workers, small masters and small merchants, a mass which fluctuates to and fro between the petty bourgeoisie and the proletariat. These are the petty and middle bourgeoisie of medieval times in their decay and dissolution – certain to be for the most part proletarians in the future, but at present not yet proletarianised. And this class, which sees ruin daily staring it in the face and is now driven to desperation, is the only class which can supply the fighters and leaders for a revolutionary movement in Italy. Along this path they will be followed by the peasantry, who are shut out from an effective initiative of their own by the fact that they live spatially scattered and cannot read and write, but who will in any case be strong and indispensable allies.

In the case of a more or less peaceful success, a change of Ministry will take place and the "converted" Republicans will come to the top; in the case of a revolution the bourgeois republic will triumph.

What should and must be the attitude of the Socialist Party in face of this situation?

The tactics which, since 1848, have brought Socialists the greatest success are those recommended by The Communist Manifesto: "In the various stages of development which the struggle of the working class against the bourgeoisie has to pass through, the Socialists always represent the interests of the movement as a whole ... They fight for the attainment of the immediate aims, for the enforcement of the momentary interests of the working class, but in the movement of the present they also represent and take care of the future of that movement."

Consequently they take an active part in all the phases of the development of the struggle between the two classes without in so doing losing sight of the fact that these phases are only just so many preliminary steps to the first great aim: the conquest of political power by the proletariat as the means towards a new organisation of society. Their place is by the side of those who are fighting for the immediate achievement of an advance, which is at the same time in the interests of the working class. They accept all these political or social progressive steps, but only as instalments. Hence they regard every revolutionary or progressive movement as a step further in the attainment of their own end; and it is their special task to drive other revolutionary parties ever further, and, in case one of them should be victorious, to guard the interests of the proletariat. These tactics, which never lose sight of the last great final aim, preserve us Socialists from the disappointments to which the other less clear-sighted parties, be they republicans or sentimental socialists, who confuse what is only a mere stage with the final aim of the advance, must inevitably succumb.

Let us apply what has been said to Italy.

The victory of the petty bourgeoisie, who are in process of disintegration, and of the peasantry, may perhaps bring a ministry of "converted" Republicans into power. This will give us universal suffrage and greater freedom of movement (freedom of the press, of organisation, and of assembly) – new weapons not to be despised.

Or it will bring us the bourgeois republic, with the same people and some Mazzinist or other among them. This would extend liberty and our field of action still further, at any rate for the moment. And Marx has said that the bourgeois republic is the only political form in which the struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie can be resolved. To say nothing of the reaction which would make itself felt in Europe.

Thus the victory of the revolutionary movement which is being prepared cannot but strengthen us and place us under more favourable conditions. We should commit the greatest mistake if we refrained from sympathy with it or if in our attitude to the "related" parties we confined ourselves merely to negative criticism. There may come a moment when it would be our duty to co-operate in a positive way. What moment could that be?

Undoubtedly it is no business of ours directly to prepare a movement ourselves which is not strictly a movement of the class we represent. If the Republicans and Radicals believe the hour has come let them give free play to their desire to attack. As for ourselves we have been far too often disappointed by the large promises of these gentlemen to allow ourselves to be misused yet another time. Neither their proclamations nor their conspiracies will mislead us. If it is our duty to support every real movement of the people, it is not less our duty to protect the scarcely formed core of our proletarian Party, not to sacrifice it uselessly and not to allow the proletariat to be decimated in fruitless local risings.

But if, on the contrary, the movement is a really national one, our people will not keep themselves hidden and will need no password. ...

But if it comes to this, we must be conscious of the fact, and openly proclaim it, that we are only taking part as an "independent Party," which is allied for the moment with Radicals and Republicans but is inwardly essentially different from them: that we indulge in absolutely no illusions as to the result of the struggle in case of victory; that this result not only cannot satisfy us but will only be a newly attained stage to us, a new basis of operations for further conquests; that from the very moment of victory our paths will separate; that from that same day onwards we shall form a new opposition to the new government, not a reactionary but a progressive opposition, an opposition of the most extreme Left, which will press on to new conquests beyond the ground already won.

After the common victory we might perhaps be offered some seats in the new Government – but always in a minority. Here lies the greatest danger. After the February Revolution in 1848 the French socialistic Democrats (the Réforme people, Ledru-Rollin, Louis Blanc, Flocon, etc.) were incautious enough to accept such positions. As a minority in the Government they involuntarily bore the responsibility for all the infamy and treachery which the majority, composed of pure Republicans, committed against the working class, while at the same time their participation in the government completely paralysed the revolutionary action of the working class they were supposed to represent.

Here I am only expressing my personal opinion, which you asked me for, and I am doing this only with a certain amount of caution. As for the general tactics here communicated, I have convinced myself of their correctness throughout the whole of my life. They have never let me down. But with regard to their application in Italy under present conditions, the decision must be made on the spot and by those who are in the midst of the movement.

Engels to Sorge

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

Eastbourne, February 23, 1894

Complete disintegration prevails among the official politicians here, both Liberal and Conservative. The Liberals can keep going only by means of new political and social concessions to the workers; but for that they lack the courage. So they try an election cry against the House of Lords, instead of proposing payment of members, payment of election expenses by the Government, and a second ballot. That is, instead of offering the workers more power against the bourgeois and the Lords, they only want to give the bourgeois more power against the Lords; but the workers no longer fall for such bait. At any rate there will be a general election here this summer and if the Liberals do not summon all their courage and make real concessions to the workers they will be beaten and go to pieces. At present they are held together only by Gladstone, who may die any day now. Then there will be a bourgeois-democratic party favourably disposed to the workers and the rest of the Liberals will go over to Chamberlain. And all this by mere pressure of a working-class that is still internally split and only half politically conscious. Should it gradually gain consciousness things will take a quite different turn.

Engels to Sorge

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

London, May 12, 1894

Here things go on as before. No possibility of bringing about any kind of unity among the labour leaders. Nevertheless the masses are moving forward — slowly, it is true, and at first struggling towards consciousness, but unmistakably, the same will happen here as is happening in France and earlier in Germany: unity will be gained by compulsion as soon as a number of independent workers (in particular those not elected with the aid of the Liberals) have seats in Parliament. The Liberals are doing their utmost to prevent this. In the first place, they don’t even extend the suffrage to those who on paper are already entitled to it; on the contrary, in the second place, they are making the electoral registers even more expensive for the candidates than they were before, because they are to be drawn up twice a year and the costs of a proper registration are to be defrayed by the candidates or the representatives of the respective political parties and not by the State; in the third place, they expressly refuse to have the State or the community assume the costs of the election; fourthly, the question of salaries and, fifthly, a second ballot. The preservation of all these old abuses amounts to a direct denial of the eligibility of working-class candidates in three-fourths or more of the constituencies. Parliament is to remain a club of the rich. And this at a time when the rich, because satisfied with the status quo, all become Conservative and the Liberal Party is dying out and getting more and more dependent upon the labour vote. But the Liberals insist that the workers should elect only bourgeois, not workers, and certainly not independent workers.

This is what is killing the Liberals. Their lack of courage estranges the labour vote in the country, reduces their small majority in Parliament to nothing, and if they do not take some very bold steps at the last minute they are most likely doomed. Then the Tories will get in and accomplish what the Liberals really intended to carry out, and not merely promise. And then an independent labour party will be fairly certain.

The Social-Democratic Federation here shares with your German-American Socialists the distinction of being the only parties who have contrived to reduce the Marxist theory of development to a rigid orthodoxy. This theory is to be forced down the throats of the workers at once and without development as articles of faith, instead of making the workers raise themselves to its level by dint of their own class instinct. That is why both remain mere sects and, as Hegel says, come from nothing through nothing to nothing.

Engels to Plekhanov

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

May 21, 1894

Here things are moving, though slowly and in zigzags. Take for instance Mawdsley, the leader of the Lancashire textile workers. He’s a Tory: in politics a Conservative and in religion a devout believer. Three years ago these gentry were violently opposed to the eight-hour day, today they vehemently demand it. In a quite recent manifesto Mawdsley, who last year was a fierce opponent of any separate policy for the working class, declared that the textile workers must take up the question of direct representation in Parliament, and a Manchester labour newspaper calculated that the Lancashire textile workers might control twelve seats in Parliament in this county alone. As you see, it is the Trade Union that will enter Parliament. It is the branch of industry and not the class that demands representation. Still, it is a step forward. Let us first smash the enslavement of the workers to the two big bourgeois parties, let us have textile workers in Parliament just as we already have miners there. As soon as a dozen branches of industry are represented class consciousness will arise of itself.

The height of comedy is reached in this manifesto when Mawdsley demands bimetallism to maintain the supremacy of English cotton fabrics on the Indian market.

One is indeed driven to despair by these English workers with their sense of imaginary national superiority, with their essentially bourgeois ideas and viewpoints, with their “practical” narrow-mindedness, with the parliamentary corruption which has seriously infected the leaders. But things are moving none the less. The only thing is that the “practical” English will be the last to arrive, but when they do arrive their contribution will weigh quite heavy in the scale.

Engels To Karl Kautsky

In Stuttgart

London, 26 June 1894

122 Regent’s Park Road, N. W.

Source: MECW Volume 50, p.314.

Dear Baron,

Marx’s two chapters despatched by registered mail at the same time as this. You might entitle them: ‘From Book III of Capital by K. Marx’ – I and II, and indicate in a note that these are Chapters XXIII and XXIV, taken from Part V, ‘Division of Profit into Interest and Profit of Enterprise. Interest- bearing Capital’. The titles of the chapters must be retained in each case. In order to simplify things I have deleted the Greek, also all the notes save one important one.

The article ‘On the History of Early Christianity’ – that is what I shall probably call the thing – is in hand and, WELL ADVANCED. But yesterday there was a Handel festival at the Crystal Palace and Louise, I and the Avelings went to hear The Messiah. Today I have got to deal with my letters and tomorrow I shall probably buckle to again, but Liebknecht is here and we are having a heat-wave.

Thank you for the bit of the Volksanwalt. As regards the thing from the Critica Sociale, Victor has really been leading me up the garden path. After I had agreed to let him have it, he simply dropped the thing altogether and now proposes to await the moment when it ‘becomes topical’ again. Next time I shall be more wary; he treats his contributors in a very odd way. Well, I look forward keenly to seeing what the fate of your daily will be. Not, I hope, that of Guesde’s and Lafargue’s Socialiste quotidien ‘pour paraître en octobre’; only yesterday we were chaffing poor Bonnier about it when he passed this way.

So Carnot has been stabbed to death. A poor, stupid, boring fellow – the first Frenchman to rise to the top through being a bore – and in France too! But now Alexander III will repudiate the French alliance. ‘Merci’, he will say, ‘there’s plenty of that sort of thing to be had at home and at less expense!’ Incidentally, there might be a certain element of vengeance for Aiguesmortes in this. I shall be curious to see how the sixty self-styled ‘Socialists’ in the Chamber will now behave. That the affair will be exploited à la Hödel there can be no doubt, but on the other hand the sixty will weigh heavily in the scales at the presidential elections next Wednesday.

Kindest regards from one household to the other.

Yours,

F. E.

27 June. Left unfinished yesterday,

Benno Karpeles intervened. During the past three days there has been 1. One Hellmut von Gerlach of Berlin, 2. Liebknecht, 3. Karpeles and, today, 4. Prof. Tonnies of Kiel – not to mention the Handel Festival the day before yesterday – so how can a man be expected to work?

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence and Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971, p. 356-57;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

November 10, 1894

...

The movement over here still resembles the American movement, save that it is somewhat ahead of you. The mass instinct that the workers must form a party of their own against the two official parties is getting stronger and stronger; this was more apparent than ever in the municipal elections on 1 November. But all kinds of old traditional memories and a lack of people capable of transforming this instinct into conscious action that will embrace the entire country tends to keep the workers in this preliminary stage which is marked by haziness of thought — and local isolation of action.

...

Anglo-Saxon sectarianism prevails in the labour movement, too. The Social-Democratic Federation, just like your German Socialist Labour Party [365], has managed to transform our theory into the rigid dogma of an orthodox sect; it is narrow-mindedly exclusive and thanks to Hyndman has a thoroughly rotten tradition in international politics, which is shaken from time to time, to be sure, but which has not been broken with as yet. The Independent Labour Party is extremely indefinite in its tactics, and its leader, Keir Hardie, is a super-cunning Scot, whose demagogic tricks are not to be trusted for a minute. Although he is a poor devil of a Scottish coal miner, he has founded a big weekly, The Labour Leader [366], which could not have been established without considerable money, and he is getting this money from Tory or Liberal-Unionist, that is, anti-Gladstone and anti-Home Rule sources. There can be no doubt about this, and his notorious literary connections in London as well as direct reports and his political attitude confirm it. Consequently, owing to desertions by Irish and radical voters [367], he may very easily lose his seat in Parliament at the 1895 general elections and that would be a stroke of good luck — the man is the greatest obstacle at present. He appears in Parliament only on demagogic occasions, in order to cut a figure with phrases about the unemployed — without getting anything done — or to address imbecilities to the Queen [A] on the occasion of the birth of a prince, which is infinitely banal and cheap in this country, and so forth. Otherwise there are very good elements both in the Social-Democratic Federation and in the Independent Labour Party, especially in the provinces, but they are scattered; yet they have at least managed to foil all the efforts of the leaders to incite the two organisations against each other.

...

John Burns [1] stands pretty much alone politically; he is being viciously attacked both by Hyndman [2] and by Keir Hardie [3] and acts as if he despaired of the political organisation of the workers and set his hopes solely on the trade unions. To be sure, he has had bad experiences with the former and might starve if the Engineers Union did not pay him his Parliamentary salary. He is vain and has allowed the Liberals, that is, the ‘social wing’ of the radicals, to lead him a bit too much by the nose. He attaches altogether too much importance to the numerous individual concessions that he has forced through, but with all that he is the only really honest fellow in the whole movement, that is, among the leaders, and he has a thoroughly proletarian instinct which will, I believe, guide him more correctly at the decisive moment than cunning and selfish calculation will the others.

...

On the Continent success is developing the appetite for more success, and catching the peasant, in the literal sense of the word, is becoming the fashion. First the French in Nantes declare through Lafargue not only (what I had written to them) that it is not our business to hasten by direct interference of our own the ruin of the small peasant which capitalism is seeing to for us, but they also add that we must directly protect the small peasant against taxation, usurers and landlords. But we cannot co-operate in this, first because it is stupid and second because it is impossible. Next, however, Vollmar comes along in Frankfort and wants to bribe the peasantry as a whole, though the peasant he has to do with in Upper Bavaria is not the debt-laden poor peasant of the Rhineland but the middle and even the big peasant, who exploits his men and women farm servants and sells cattle and grain in masses. And that cannot be done without giving up the whole principle. We can only win the mountain peasants and the big peasants of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein, if we sacrifice their ploughmen and day labourers to them, and if we do that we lose more than we gain politically. The Frankfort Party Congress did not take a decision on this question and that is to the good in so far as the matter will now be thoroughly studied; the people who were there knew far too little about the peasantry and the conditions on the land, which vary so fundamentally in different provinces, to have been able to do anything but take decisions in the air. But there has got to be a resolution on the question some time all the same.

...

The war in China has given the death-blow to the old China. Isolation has become impossible; the introduction of railways, steam-engines, electricity and modern large-scale industry has become a necessity, if only for reasons of military defence. But with it the old economic system of small peasant agriculture, where the family also made its industrial products itself, falls to pieces too, and with it the whole old social system which made relatively dense population possible. Millions will be turned out and forced to emigrate; and these millions will find their way even to Europe, and en masse. But as soon as Chinese competition sets in on a mass scale, it will rapidly bring things to a head in your country and over here, and thus the conquest of China by capitalism will at the same time furnish the impulse for the overthrow of capitalism in Europe and America...

...

Footnotes

A. Victoria. — Ed.

365. The Social-Democratic Federation — an English socialist organisation founded in August 1884, on the basis of the Democratic Federation. It united heterogeneous socialist elements, mainly intellectuals. The Federation was for a long time led by reformists, with Hyndman at the head, who followed an opportunist and sectarian policy. The group of revolutionary Marxists in the Federation (Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Edward Aveling, Tom Mann and others) opposed Hyndman’s line and fought for the establishment of close links with the mass working-class movement. After the split in the autumn of 1884 and the formation in December 1884 by the Left-wingers of an independent organisation — the Socialist League — the opportunists became more influential in the Federation. Under the influence of the revolutionary-minded masses, however, revolutionary elements kept forming in the Federation and dissatisfaction with the opportunistic leadership grew.

The Socialist Labour Party of America was founded in 1876. Most of its members were immigrants (chiefly Germans) who had little contacts with the native American workers. As its programme the party proclaimed the struggle for socialism, but, owing to the sectarian policy of its leadership, which ignored work in the American proletariat’s mass organisations, it did not become a genuinely revolutionary Marxist party.

366. The Labour Leader — an English monthly founded in 1887 as Miner. From 1889, under its new name, it appeared as the organ of the Scottish Labour Party, and in 1893 it became the organ of the Independent Labour Party. James Keir Hardie was its editor up to 1904.

367. General Parliamentary elections were held in England from July 12 to 29, 1895, and were won by the Conservatives with a majority of more than 150 seats. Many candidates of the Independent Labour Party, including Keir Hardie, were blackballed.

1. John Elliot Burns (1858-1943) — English politician and statesman, in 1880s a leader of trade unions, took part in many strikes, including big London dockers’ strike in 1889, was member of English Social-Democratic Federation, but soon withdrew from it. In 1892 was elected to Parliament, where he opposed workers’ interests and advocated collaboration with capitalists.

2. Henry Meyers Hyndman (1842-1921) — English socialist, founder and leader of Democratic Federation (reorganised in 1884 into Social-Democratic Federation), pursued opportunist and sectarian policy in labour movement, later one of the leaders of British Socialist Party, from which he was expelled for supporting imperialist war.

3. James Keir Hardie (1856-1915) — leader of English labour movement, reformist, founder and leader of Workers Party of Scotland (1888) and Independent Labour Party (1893), leader of Labour Party.

1895

Engels to Emma Adler 1 January

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann 1 January

Engels to Hermann Schluter 1 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky 3 January

Engels to Ludwig Schorlemmer 3 January

Engels to Paul Stumpf 3 January

Engels to Pasquale Martignetti 8 January

Engels to Victor Adler 9 January

Engels to Nikolai Danielson 9 January

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann 9 January

Engels to Victor Adler 12 January

Engels to Karl Kautsky 12 January

Engels to Hermann Engels 12 January

Engels to Paul Lafargue 13-14 January

Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge 16 January

Engels to Laura Lafargue 19 January

Engels to Paul Lafargue 22 January

Engels to Ferdinand Tönnies 24 January

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann 25 January

Engels to Victor Adler 28 January

Engels to Wilhelm Ellenbogen 28 January

Engels to Vera Zasulich 30 January

Engels to Witold Jodko-Narkiewicz 2 February

Engels to Richard Fischer 2 February

Engels to Georgi Plekhanov 8 February

Engels to Hermann Engels 8 February

Engels to Richard Fischer 12 February

Engels to Richard Fischer 13 February

Engels to Julius Motteler 23 February

Engels to Paul Lafargue 26 February

Engels to Georgi Plekhanov 26 February

Engels to Julius Motteler 2 March

Engels to Eduard Vailliant 5 March

Engels to Nikolai Danielson 5 March

Engels to Richard Fischer 8 March

Engels to Werner Sombart 11 March

Engels to Conrad Schmidt 12 March

Engels to Karl Kautsky 13 March

Engels to Victor Adler 16 March

Engels to Carl Hackenberg 16 March

Engels to Pablo Iglesias 16 March

Engels to Carl Hirsch 19 March

Engels to Ludwig Kugelman 19 March

Engels to Hermann Engels 20 March

Engels to Vera Zasulich 22 March

Engels to Karl Kautsky 25 March

Engels to Laura Lafargue 28 March

Engels to Karl Kautsky 1 April

Engels to Harry Quelch 2 April

Engels to Paul Lafargue 3 April

Engels to Richard Fischer 5 April

Engels to Conrad Schmidt 6 April

Engels to Stephan Bauer 10 April

Engels to Hermann Engels 12 April

Engels to Krystyu Rakovski 13 April

Engels to Richard Fischer 15 April

Engels to Laura Lafargue 17 April

Engels to Ludwig Kugelmann 18 April

Engels to Richard Fischer 18 April

Engels to Stanislaw Mendelson 23 April

Engels to Franz Mehring end April

Engels to Franz Mehring 9 May

Engels to Richard Fischer 9 May

Engels to Laura Lafargue 14 May

Engels to Ignaz Brand 20 May

Engels to Carl Hirsch 20 May

Engels to Karl Kautsky 21 May

Engels to Editors of Rheinische Zeitung 22 May

Engels to Richard Fischer 29 May

Engels to Nikolai Danielson 4 June

Engels to Eduard Bernstein 18 June

Engels to Bolesaw Antoni Jedrzejowski 28 June

Engels to Filippo Turai 28 June

Engels to Paul Lafargue 29 June

Engels to Richard Fischer 29 June

Engels to Louise Freyberger 1 July

Engels to Eduard Bernstein 4 July

Engels to Eleanor Marx-Aveling 4 July

Engels to Filippo Turati 4 July

Engels to Antonio Labriola 8 July

Engels to Eleanor Marx-Aveling 9 July

Engels to Laura Lafargue 23 July

Engels to Schlüter

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Britain, Progress Publishers 1953;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

London, January 1, 1895

Things here are much the same as in your country. The socialist instinct is getting stronger and stronger among the masses, but as soon as it is a question of translating the instinctive impulses into clear demands and ideas people at once begin to disagree. Some go to the Social-Democratic Federation, others to the Independent Labour Party, still others go no further than the trade-union organisation, etc., etc. In brief, nothing but sects and no party. The leaders are almost all pretty unreliable fellows, the candidates for the top leadership are very numerous but by no means conspicuously fitted for the posts, while the two big bourgeois parties stand there, purse in hand, on the look-out for someone they can buy. Besides, so-called “democracy” here is very much restricted by indirect barriers. A periodical costs a terrible amount of money, a parliamentary candidature ditto, living the life of an M.P. — ditto, if only on account of the enormous correspondence entailed. A checking up of the miserably kept electoral register likewise costs a lot and so far only the two official parties can afford the expense. Anyone, therefore, who does not sign up with either of these parties has little chance of getting on the election list of candidates. In all these respects people here are a long way behind the Continent, and are beginning to notice this. Furthermore, we have no second ballots here and a relative majority or, as you Americans say, plurality, suffices. At the same time everything is arranged for only two parties. A third party can at most turn the scales in favour of one of the other two until it equals them in strength.

Nor are the Trade Unions in this country capable of accomplishing anything like the beer boycott in Berlin. An arbitration court like the one they succeeded in getting there is something still unattainable here.

Yet here, as in your country, once the workers know what they want, the state, the land, industry and everything else will be theirs.

Friedrich Engels to Ferdinand Tönnies

In Kiel

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

24 January 1895 [1]

... Your observations on Auguste Comte [2] are very interesting. As far as this ‘philosopher’ is concerned a considerable amount of work has in my opinion still to be done. Comte was for five years secretary to Saint-Simon [3] and his intimate friend. The latter positively suffered from repleteness of thought. He was a genius and mystic in one. To establish clearness, order, system was not his forte. So Comte was a man he enlisted who after his master’s death would perhaps present these overbrimming ideas to the world in orderly fashion. Comte’s mathematical schooling and method of thought seemed to render him peculiarly fit for this in contrast to other pupils, who were dreamers. Suddenly Comte broke with his ‘master’ and withdrew from the school. Then, after a rather lengthy period of time, he came out with his ‘positive philosophy’.

In this system there are three characteristic elements: 1) a series of brilliant thoughts, which however are nearly always spoiled to some extent because they are incompetently set forth likewise; 2) a narrow, philistine way of thinking sharply contrasting with that brilliant mind; 3) a hierarchically organised religious constitution, whose source is definitely Saint-Simonian, but divested of all mysticism and turned into something extremely sober, with a regular pope at the head, so that Huxley [4] could say of Comtism that it was Catholicism without Christianity.

Now I'll bet that No 3 furnishes us the clue to the otherwise incomprehensible contradiction between No 1 and No 2; Comte took all his bright ideas from Saint-Simon but when arranging them he distorted these ideas in his own peculiar way; by divesting them of the mysticism that adhered to them he dragged them down to a lower level, reshaping them in philistine fashion to the best of his ability. In very many of them the Saint-Simonist origin can easily be traced and I am convinced that this would be possible in yet other cases if somebody could be found to tackle the job seriously. It would certainly have been discovered long ago if after 1830 Saint-Simon’s own writings had not been completely stifled by the clamour of the Saint-Simonist school and religion, which stressed and developed certain aspects of the master’s teaching to the detriment of the magnificent conceptions as a whole.

Then there is another point I should like to correct, the note on p 513. [5] Marx never was Secretary General of the International but only Secretary for Germany and Russia. And none of the Comtists in London participated in the founding of the International. Professor E Beesly [6] deserves great credit for his defence of the International in the press at the time of the Commune against the vehement attacks of that day. Frederic Harrison [7] too publicly took up the cudgels for the Commune. But a few years later the Comtists cooled off considerably toward the labour movement. The workers had become too powerful and it was now a question of maintaining a proper balance between capitalists and workers (for both are producers according to Saint-Simon) and to that end of once more supporting the former. Ever since then the Comtists have wrapped themselves in complete silence as regards the labour question.

Yours very truly

F Engels

Notes

1. Ferdinand Tönnies (1855-?) – German bourgeois sociologist – Progress Publishers.

2. Auguste Comte (1798-1857) – French philosopher and sociologist, founder of positivism – Progress Publishers.

3. Claude Henri Saint-Simon (1760-1825) – great French utopian socialist – Progress Publishers.

4. Thomas Henry Huxley (1825-1895) – well-known English naturalist, biologist, friend and follower of Darwin, active propagandist of his teaching, inconsistent materialist in philosophy – Progress Publishers.

5. Engels refers to a note in Tönnies’ article ‘Neuere Philosophie der Geschichte: Hegel, Marx, Comte’ ('Modern Philosophy of History: Hegel, Marx, Comte’) – Progress Publishers.

6. Edward Spencer Beesley (1831-1915) – English historian and political figure, bourgeois radical, positivist, professor at London University, known for his defence of First International and Paris Commune in the English press in 1870-71 – Progress Publishers.

7. Frederic Harrison (1831-1923) – English publicist, follower of Auguste Comte – Progress Publishers.

Engels To W. Sombart

In Breslaun

London, March 11, 1895

First published: in the Beitrage zur Geschichte der deutscher Arbeiterbewegung No. 3, 1961;

Source: Marx and Engels, Selected Works, Volume 3, pp. 504-506;

Transcribed: by Steve Palmer.

Dear Sir,

Replying to your note of the 14th of last month, may I thank you for your kindness in sending me your work on Marx; I had already read it with great interest in the issue of the Archiv[1] which Dr. H. Braun was good enough to send me, and was pleased for once to find such understanding of Capital at a German University. Naturally I can’t altogether agree with the wording in which you render Marx’s exposition. Especially the definitions of the concept of value which you give on pages 576 and 577 seem to me to be rather all-embracing: I would first limit them historically by explicitly restricting them to the economic phase in which alone value has up to now been known, and could only have been known, namely, the forms of society in which commodity exchange, or commodity production, exists; in primitive communism value was unknown. And secondly it seems to me that the concept could also be defined in a narrower sense. But this would lead too far, in the main you are quite right.

Then, however, on page 586, you appeal directly to me, and the jovial manner with which you hold a pistol to my head made me laugh. But you need not worry, I shall “not assure you of the contrary.” The logical sequence by which Marx deduces the general and equal rate of profit from the different values of s / C = s / (c + v) produced in various capitalist enterprises is completely foreign to the mind of the individual capitalist. Inasmuch as it has a historical parallel, that is to say, as far as it exists in reality outside our heads, it manifests itself for instance in the fact that certain parts of the surplus value produced by capitalist A over and above the rate of profit, or above his share of the total surplus value, are transferred to the pocket of capitalist B whose output of surplus value remains as a rule below the customary dividend. But this process takes place objectively, in the things, unconsciously, and we can only now estimate how much work was required in order to achieve a proper understanding of these matters. If the conscious co-operation of the individual capitalists had been necessary to establish the average rate of profit, if the individual capitalist had known that he produces surplus value and how much of it, and that frequently he has to hand over part of his surplus value, then the relationship between surplus value and profit would have been fairly obvious from the outset and would presumably have already been described by Adam Smith, if not Petty.

According to Marx’s views all history up to now, in the case of big events, has come about unconsciously, that is, the events and their further consequences have not been intended; the ordinary actors in history have either wanted to achieve something different, or else what they achieved has led to quite different unforeseeable consequences. Applied to the economic sphere: the individual capitalists, each on his own, chase after the biggest profit. Bourgeois economy discovers that this race in which every one chases after the bigger profit results in the general and equal rate of profit, the approximately equal ratio of profit for each one. Neither the capitalists nor the bourgeois economists, however, realise that the goal of this race is the uniform proportional distribution of the total surplus value calculated on the total capital.

But how has the equalisation been brought about in reality? This is a very interesting point, about which Marx himself does not say much. But his way of viewing things is not a doctrine but a method. It does not provide ready-made dogmas, but criteria for further research and the method for this research. Here therefore a certain amount of work has to be carried out, since Marx did not elaborate it himself in his first draft. First of all we have here the statements on pages 153-156, III, I, [2] which are also important for your rendering of the concept of value and which prove that the concept has or had more reality than you ascribe to it. When commodity exchange began, when products gradually turned into commodities, they were exchanged approximately according to their value. It was the amount of labour expended on two objects which provided the only standard for their quantitative comparison. Thus value had a direct and real existence at that time. We know that this direct realisation of value in exchange ceased and that now it no longer happens. And I believe that it won’t be particularly difficult for you to trace the intermediate links, at least in general outline, that lead from directly real value to the value of the capitalist mode of production, which is so thoroughly hidden that our economists can calmly deny its existence. A genuinely historical exposition of these processes, which does indeed require thorough research but in return promises amply rewarding results, would be a very valuable supplement to Capital.[3]

Finally, I must also thank you for the high opinion which you have formed of me if you consider that I could have made something better of volume III. I cannot share your opinion, and believe I have done my duty by presenting Marx in Marx’s words, even at the risk of requiring the reader to do a bit more thinking for himself. ...

1. The reference is to Sombart’s article “Zur Kritik des ökonomischen Systems von Karl Marx” (Critique of the Economic System of Karl Marx), published in the journal Archiv für sociale Gesetzgebung und Statistik, Vol VII, 1894.

2. See Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. III, Moscow, 1966, pp. 170-75.

3. In May 1895 Engels wrote his Supplement to “Capital,” Volume Three: “Law of Value and Rate of Profit” and “The Stock Exchange” (see Karl Marx, Capital Vol III, Moscow 1966, pp. 887-910).

Engels to Conrad Schmidt

In Zurich

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Ryde, Isle of Wight, March 12, 1895

Your letter gives me some light, I think, on how you have come to be side-tracked with the rate of profit. There I find the same way of going off into details, for which I put the blame on the eclectic method of philosophising which has made such inroads in the German universities since '48, and which loses all general perspective and only too often ends in rather aimless and fruitless argumentation about particular points.

Now of the classical philosophers it was precisely Kant with whom you had formerly chiefly occupied yourself, and Kant, owing to the position of German philosophising in his time and to his opposition to Wolf's pedantic form of Leibnitzism, was more or less obliged to make some apparent concessions in form to this Wolfian argumentation. This is how I explain your tendency, which also shows itself in the excursus on the law of value in your letter, to absorb yourself to such a degree in details, without always, as it seems to me, paying attention to the connection as a whole, that you degrade the law of value to a fiction, a necessary fiction, rather as Kant makes the existence of God a postulate of the practical reason.

The reproaches you make against the law of value apply to all concepts, regarded from the standpoint of reality. The identity of thought and being, to express myself in Hegelian fashion, everywhere coincides with your example of the circle and the polygon. Or the two of them, the concept of a thing and its reality, run side by side like two asymptotes, always approaching each other yet never meeting. This difference between the two is the very difference which prevents the concept from being directly and immediately reality and reality from being immediately its own concept. But although a concept has the essential nature of a concept and cannot therefore prima facie directly coincide with reality, from which it must first be abstracted, it is still something more than a fiction, unless you are going to declare all the results of thought fictions because reality has to go a long way round before it corresponds to them, and even then only corresponds to them with asymptotic approximation.

Is it any different with the general rate of profit ? At each moment it only exists approximately. If it were for once realised in two undertakings down to the last dot on the i, if both resulted in exactly the same rate of profit in a given year, that would be pure accident; in reality the rates of profit vary from business to business and from year to year according to different circumstances, and the general rate only exists as an average of many businesses and a series of years. But if we were to demand that the rate of profit – say 14·876934... – should be exactly similar in every business and every year down to the 100th decimal place, on pain of degradation to fiction, we should be grossly misunderstanding the nature of the rate of profit and of economic laws in general – none of them has any reality except as approximation, tendency, average, and not as immediate reality. This is due partly to the fact that their action clashes with the simultaneous action of other laws, but partly to their own nature as concepts.

Or take the law of wages, the realisation of the value of labour power, which is only realised as an average, and even that not always, and which varies in every locality, even in every branch, according to the customary standard of life. Or ground rent, representing a superprofit above the general rate, derived from monopoly over a force of nature. There too there is by no means a direct coincidence between real superprofit and real rent, but only an average approximation.

It is exactly the same with the law of value and the distribution of the surplus value by means of the rate of profit.

(1) Both only attain their most complete approximate realisation on the presupposition that capitalist production has been everywhere completely established, society reduced to the modern classes of landowners, capitalists (industrialists and merchants) and workers – all intermediate stages, however, having been got rid of. This does not exist even in England and never will exist – we shall not let it get so far as that.

(2) Profit, including rent, consists of various component parts: –

(a) Profit from cheating – which is cancelled out in the algebraic sum.

(b) Profit from increased value of stocks (e.g., the remainder of the last harvest when the next one has failed). Theoretically this ought also to equalise itself out (in so far as it has not been already cancelled by the fall in the value of other commodities) either because the capitalist buyers have to contribute what the capitalist sellers gain, or, in the case of the workers' means of subsistence, because wages must also eventually increase. The most essential of these increases in value, however, are not permanent, and therefore the equalisation only takes place in an average of years, and extremely incompletely, notoriously at the expense of the workers; they produce more surplus value because their labour power is not fully paid.

(c) The total sum of surplus value, from which again, however, that portion is deducted which is presented as a gift to the buyer, especially in crises, when overproduction is reduced to its real value of socially necessary labour.

From this indeed it follows from the very first that the total profit and the total surplus value can only approximately coincide. But when you further take into consideration the fact that neither the total surplus value nor the total capital are constant magnitudes, but variable ones which alter from day to day, then any coincidence between rate of profit and the sum of surplus value other than that of an approximating series, and any coincidence between total price and total value other than one which is constantly striving towards unity and perpetually moving away from it again, appears a sheer impossibility. In other words, the unity of concept and appearance manifests itself as essentially an infinite process, and that is what it is, in this case as in all others.

Did feudalism ever correspond to its concept? Founded in the kingdom of the West Franks, further developed in Normandy by the Norwegian conquerors, its formation continued by the French Norsemen in England and Southern Italy, it came nearest to its concept – in Jerusalem, in the kingdom of a day, which in the Assises de Jerusalem left behind it the most classic expression of the feudal order. Was this order therefore a fiction because it only achieved a short-lived existence in full classical form in Palestine, and even that mostly only on paper?

Or are the concepts which prevail in the natural sciences fictions because they by no means always coincide with reality? From the moment we accept the theory of evolution all our concepts of organic life correspond only approximately to reality. Otherwise there would be no change: on the day when concepts and reality completely coincide in the organic world development comes to an end. The concept fish includes a life in water and breathing through gills: how are you going to get from fish to amphibian without breaking through this concept? And it has been broken through and we know a whole series of fish which have developed their air bladders further into lungs and can breathe air. How, without bringing one or both concepts into conflict with reality are you going to get from the egg-laying reptile to the mammal, which gives birth to living young? And in reality we have in the monotremata a whole sub-class of egg-laying mammals – in 1843, I saw the eggs of the duck-bill in Manchester and with arrogant narrow-mindedness mocked at such stupidity – as if a mammal could lay eggs – and now it has been proved! So do not behave to the conceptions of value in the way I had later to beg the duck-bill's pardon for!

In Sombart's otherwise very good article on Volume III I also find this tendency to dilute the theory of value: he had also obviously expected a somewhat different solution?

...

Your article in the Centralblatt [2] is very good indeed and the proof of the specific difference between Marx’s theory of the rate of profit — by quantitative determination — and that of the old political economy was very well demonstrated. The illustrious Loria [3] in his wisdom sees in the third volume a direct renunciation of the theory of value, and here your article comes in handy as a ready reply. Now two people are interested in this: Labriola [4] in Rome and Lafargue, who is polemicising with Loria in the Critica Sociale. If therefore you could send a copy to Professor Antonio Labriola, Corso Vittorio Emmanuele, 251, Rome, the latter would do his utmost to publish an Italian translation of it; and a second copy to Paul Lafargue, Le Perreux, Seine, France, would occasion him to quote you. For that reason I wrote to both of them that your article contained a ready answer to the main point. If you cannot get these copies off please advise me of that fact. But here I must close, otherwise I'll never finish.

Best regards

Yours

F Engels

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor.

1. Conrad Schmidt (1863-1932) — German economist and philosopher, at the beginning of his career adopted Marx’s economic doctrine but subsequently joined bourgeois opponents of Marxism, author of works that served as a theoretical source of revisionism.

2. ‘Der dritte Band des “Kapital"’ (’the Third Volume of Capital’), which was published in the Sozialpolitisches Centralblatt.

3. Achille Loria (1857-1926) — Italian reactionary sociologist and economist, falsifier of Marxism.

4. Antonio Labriola (1843-1904) — Italian literary man and philosopher, in 1880s and 1890s was close to Marxism, later retired from political life.

Engels to Victor Adler

In Vienna

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, March 16, 1895

...As you want to have a grind in prison at Capital [Volumes] II and III, I will give you a few hints to make it easier.

Volume II, Section I. Read Chapter I thoroughly, then you can take Chapters 2 and 3 more lightly; Chapter 4 more exactly again as it is a summary; 5 and 6 are easy and 6, especially, deals with secondary matters.

Section II. Chapters 7-9 important. Specially important 10 and 11. Equally so 12, 13, 14. On the other hand 15, 16, 17 need only be skimmed through at first.

Section III is a most excellent account of the entire circuit of commodities and money in capitalist society – the first since the days of the Physiocrats. Excellent in content but fearfully heavy in form because (1) it is put together from two versions which proceed according to two different methods and (2) because version No. 1 was carried to its conclusion by main force during a state of illness in which the brain was suffering from chronic sleeplessness. I should keep this right to the end, after working through Volume III for the first time. For your work too, it is not immediately indispensable.

Then the third volume. Important here are: In Section 1, Chapters 1 to 4; less important for the general connection, on the other hand, are Chapters 5, 6, 7, on which much time need not be spent at first.

Section II. Very important. Chaps. 8, 9, 10. Skim through 11 and 12.

Section III. Very important: the whole of 13-15.

Section IV. Likewise very important, but also easy to read: 16-20.

Section V. Very important, Chapters 21-27. Less so Chapter 28. Chapter 29 important. As a whole Chapters 30-32 are not important for your purposes; 33 and 34 are important as soon as paper-money is dealt with; 35 on international rates of exchange important, 36 very interesting for you and easy to read.

Section VI. Ground rent. 37 and 38 important. Less so, but still to be taken with them, 39 and 40. 41-43 can be more neglected (Differential rent II. Particular cases). 44-47 important again and mostly easy to read too.

Section VII. Very fine, but unfortunately a fragment and with very marked traces of sleeplessness as well.

Thus, if you go through the main things thoroughly and the less important ones superficially to begin with, following these indications (best first to re-read the main things in Volume II) you will get an idea of the whole and can later also work through the neglected portions more easily.

Engels To Kautsky

In Stuttgart

Source: Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers. Third revised edition 1975;

Transcribed: by Joska Rabb, Andy Blunden.

Abstract

London, April 1, 1895

Dear Baron,

Postcard received. To my astonishment I see in Votwärts! today an extract from my “Introduction,” printed without my prior knowledge and trimmed in such a fashion that I appear as a peaceful worshipper of legality at any price. So much the better that the whole thing is to appear now in the Neue Zeit so that this disgraceful impression will be wiped out. I shall give Liebknecht a good piece of my mind on that score and also, no matter who they are, to those who gave him the opportunity to misrepresent my opinion without even telling me a word about it ...

Engels To Paul Lafargue

In Paris

Source: Marx-Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers. Third revised edition 1975;

Transcribed: by Joska Rabb, Andy Blunden.

Abstract

London, April 3, 1895

... Liebknecht just played me a nice trick. He has taken from my Introduction to Marx’s articles on France of 1848-50 everything that could serve him to support the tactic of peace at any price and of opposition to force and violence, which it has pleased him for some time now to preach, especially at present when coercive laws are being prepared in Berlin. But I am preaching these tactics only for the Germany of today, and even with an important proviso. In France, Belgium, Italy, and Austria these tactics could not be followed in their entirety and in Germany may become inapplicable tomorrow ...

Engels to Karl Kautsky

In Stuttgart

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

Additional text from Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975;

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 2000;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

London, May 21, 1895

... You had undertaken at that time to publish a history of Socialism. Of all persons alive there was then but one — surely I am entitled to say this — whose collaboration in this work seemed absolutely necessary, and this one person was I. And I even venture to say that without my help such a job is at present bound to be incomplete and defective. You people knew that as well as I. But of all persons that could possibly be made use of it was exactly I, and I alone, who was not asked to collaborate. You must have had very cogent reasons for excluding precisely me. I don’t complain about that; far from it. You had a perfect right to act the way you did. I am only stating a fact.

What did pique me, but only for a moment, was the strange mysteriousness in which you wrapped the matter as far as I was concerned, while the whole world was talking about it. It was only through third persons that I learned of the whole project and only through the printed prospectus of the outlines of the plan. Not a word from either you or Ede. [1] It was as if you had a bad conscience. At the same time surreptitious inquiries were made by all sorts of people: how I regarded the matter, whether I had declined to collaborate, etc. And then at long last, when silence was no longer possible, good old Ede got to talking about this matter, with a shame-facedness and embarrassment that would have been worthy of a worse cause — for nothing improper had really occurred except this laughable comedy, which by the way, as Louise [2] can testify, brought me many an hour of real good fun.

Well then, you have confronted me with an accomplished fact: a history of socialism without my collaboration. I have accepted this fact from the beginning without complaint. But you cannot unmake the fact you yourselves have accomplished, nor can you ignore it should this suit you some day. I too cannot unmake it. Having shut the big front door to me after mature deliberation at a time when my counsel and my help could be of substantial use to you, please do not now ask me to sneak in through some small back-door to help you out of a difficulty now. I confess that if our roles had been reversed I would have deliberated for a very long time before making a proposal like the one in question. [3] Is it really so extremely difficult to understand that everyone must bear the consequences of his own action? As you make your bed, so you must lie in it. If there is no room for me in this business, that is so only because you wanted it so.

Well, that’s that. And now please do me the favour and consider this reply irrevocable. Let the whole incident be dead and buried as far as both of us are concerned. I shall also not speak about it with Ede, unless he starts.

Meanwhile I am about to send you a piece of work for the Neue Zeit that will please you: ‘Ergänzungen und Nachtrage zum Kapital, Buch III, Nr I: Wertgesetz und Profitrate’, [4] reply to the scruples of Sombart [5] and Conrad Schmidt. [6] Later No 2 will follow: the role of the stock exchange, which has altered very considerably since Marx wrote about it in 1865. To be continued according to demand and time available. The first article would have been finished if my mind had been free.

As for your book [7] I can say that it gets better the further one reads. Plato and Early Christianity are still inadequately treated, according to the original plan. The mediaeval sects much better, and crescendo, the best are the Taborites, Münzer, and the Anabaptists. Very many important economic analyses of political events, paralleled however by commonplaces where there were gaps in research.

I have learnt a great deal from the book [Forerunners of Modern Socialism, by K. Kautsky]; it is an indispensable preliminary study for my new revision of the Peasant War. The main faults seem to be only two: (1) A very inadequate examination of the development and role of the declassed elements, almost like pariahs, who stood right outside the feudal organisation and were inevitably bound to come to the fore whenever a town was formed; who constitute the lowest stratum of the population of every mediaeval town, having no rights at all, detached from the Markgenossenschaft, from feudal dependence and from the craft guild. This is difficult, but it is the chief basis, for by degrees as the feudal ties are loosened, these elements become the pre-proletariat which in 1789 made the revolution in the suburbs of Paris, and which absorbs all the outcasts of feudal and guild society. You speak of proletarians – the expression is ambiguous – and bring in the weavers, whose importance you describe quite correctly – but only after declassed journeymen weavers, existed outside the guilds, and only in so far as these existed, can you make them into your proletariat. Here there is still a lot to make good.

(2) You have not fully grasped Germany's position in the world market, her international economic position, in so far as it is possible to speak of this, at the end of the 15th century. This position alone explains why the bourgeois plebeian movement in religious form which was defeated in England, the Netherlands and Bohemia could have a certain success in Germany in the 16th century: the success of its religious disguise, whilst the success of the bourgeois content - of the new direction of the world market which had arisen in the meantime – was reserved for Holland and England. This is a lengthy subject, which I hope to deal with in extenso [in full] in the Peasant War. – If only I were already at it!

[Note: a few months later Engels died of throat cancer.]

Notes

Notes provided by the Moscow Editor and the MIA.

1. Eduard Bernstein.

2. Louise Kautsky, Kautsky’s wife and Engels’ secretary [MIA].

3. Kautsky did not want Engels to take part in guiding the work A History of Socialism but, eager to make use of Engels’ erudition, he asked Engels to send him material for the chapter dealing with the history of the First International.

4. Supplement and addenda to Capital, Book III, No 1: Law of Value and Rate of Profit.

5. Werner Sombart (1863-1941) — German vulgar economist, tried to refute Marx’s labour theory of value.

6. Conrad Schmidt (1863-1932) — German economist and philosopher, at the beginning of his career adopted Marx’s economic doctrine but subsequently joined bourgeois opponents of Marxism, author of works that served as a theoretical source of revisionism.

7. The reference is to Vorläufer des neueren Sozialismus (Forerunners of Modern Socialism).

Editors’ Footnotes from Volume 1

1. Reflections of a Young Man on the Choice of a Profession — an essay written by Marx at the school leaving examinations at the Royal Frederick William III gymnasium in Trier in August 1835. Only seven of Marx’s examination papers have been preserved: the above-mentioned essay on a subject at the writer’s choice, a Latin essay on the reign of Augustus and a religious essay (both are published in the appendices to this volume), a Latin unseen, a translation from the Greek, a translation into French, and a paper in mathematics (all of which are published in: Marx/Engels, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Band 1, Zweiter Halbband, Berlin, 1929, S. 164-82).

In the original there are numerous underscorings presumably made by the history and philosophy teacher, the then headmaster of the gymnasium, Johann Hugo Wyttenbach (they are not reproduced in the present edition). He also made the following comment: “Rather good. The essay is marked by a wealth of thought and a good systematised narration. But generally the author here too made a mistake ‘ peculiar to him-he constantly seeks for elaborate picturesque expressions. Therefore many passages which are underlined lack the necessary clarity and definiteness and often precision in separate expressions as well as in whole paragraphs.”

In English this essay was published in 1961 in the United States, in the journal The New Scholasticism, Vol. XXXV, No. 2, Baltimore-Washington, pp. 197-20 1, and in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 35-39.

2. Letter from Marx to His Father — this is the only letter written by Marx in his student years which has been preserved. Of all Marx’s letters that are extant, this is the earliest. It was published in English in the collections: The Young Marx, London, 1967, pp. 135-47, Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 40-50 and Karl Marx. Early Texts, translated and edited by David McLellan, University of Kent at Canterbury, Oxford, 1971, pp. 1-10.

3. The Pandect-compendium of Roman civil law (Corpus iurus civilis) made by order of the Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire Justinian 1 in 528-534. The Pandect or the Digest contained excerpts from works in civil and criminal law by prominent Roman jurists.

4. The work mentioned is not extant.

5. Marx quotes these passages from memory.

6. This refers to the classification of contracts in Immanuel Kant’s Die Metaphysik der Sitten. Theil I. Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Rechtslehre, Königsberg, 1797-98.

7. The philosophical dialogue mentioned here has not been preserved.

8. The Doctors’ Club was founded by representatives of the radical wing of the Hegelian school in Berlin in 1837. Among its members were lecturer on theology of Berlin University Bruno Bauer, gymnasium history teacher Karl Friedrich Köppen and geography teacher Adolf Rutenberg. The usual meeting place was the small Hippel café. The Club, of which Marx was also an active member, played an important part in the Young Hegelian movement.

9. The work has not been preserved.

10. Marx refers to the Deutscher Musenalmanach, a liberal annual published in Leipzig from 1829.

11. As is seen from Heinrich Marx’s letter of September 16, 1837, to his son (see this volume, p. 680), Karl Marx intended at that time to publish a journal of theatrical criticism.

12. The letter has not survived.

13. These two poems, written in 1837, were included in a book of verse dedicated to Karl Marx’s father (see this volume, pp. 531-632). The general title Wild Songs was introduced when the poems were published in the journal Athendum in 1841. The text of both poems was reproduced with slight alterations. In 71e Fiddler two lines

“Fort aus dem Haus, fort aus dem Blick, Willst Kindlein spielen urn dein Genick?” (“Away from the house, away from the look, 0 child, do you seek to risk your neck?")

coming in the original in the fifth stanza after the lines

“How so! I plunge, plunge without fail

My blood-black sabre into your soul”

were omitted.

A comment on the Wild Songs was published in the Frankfurter Konversationsblatt No. 62 of March 3, 1841. Though unfavourably commenting on the form, the paper admitted the author’s “original talent”.

In English the poems were published in the book: R. Payne, Marx, New York, 1968, pp. 62-64.

14. Marx’s work Difference Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature is part of a general research on the history of ancient philosophy which he planned as far back as 1839.

During his research on ancient philosophy Marx compiled the preparatory Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy (see this volume, pp. 401-509). In early April 1841 Marx submitted his work to the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Jena as a dissertation for a doctor’s degree (see this volume, p. 379) and received the degree on April 15. He intended to have his work printed and for this purpose wrote the dedication and the foreword dated March 1841. However, he did not succeed in getting it published, although he thought of doing so again at the end of 1841 and beginning of 1842.

Marx’s own manuscript of the thesis has been lost. What remains is an incomplete copy written by an unknown person. This copy has corrections and insertions in Marx’s handwriting. Texts of the fourth and fifth chapters of Part One and the Appendix, except for one fragment, are missing. Each chapter of Part One and Part Two has its own numeration of the author’s notes. These notes, in the form of citations from the sources and additional commentaries, are also incomplete. They are given, according to the copy of the manuscript which has survived, after the main text of the dissertation and marked in the text, in distinction to the editorial notes, by numbers and brackets. Obvious slips of the pen have been corrected. Changes made by Marx which affect the meaning are specified.

In the first publication of the thesis in Aus dem Literischen Nachlass" von Kar1 Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, Bd. I, Stuttgart, 1902, the fragments from the Appendix "Critique of Plutarch’s Polemic Against the Theology of Epicurus", have been omitted as well as all the author’s notes except for some excerpts. The first publication in full (according to the part of the manuscript that has been preserved) was carried out by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CC CPSU, in 1927 in Volume One of MEGA (Marx/Engels, Historisch-Kritische Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Band 1, Erster Halbband, S. 3-81).

The first translation into English was done by the Austrian-born Kurt Karl Merz in 1946 in Melbourne (a typewritten copy of it is kept in the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CC CPSU, in Moscow). The foreword to the thesis was published in the collection: K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion Moscow, 1957, pp. 13-15. In 1967 a translation by Norman D. Livergood was published in the book: Activity in Marx’s Philosophy, Hague, 1967, pp. 55-109. Two excerpts from the dissertation (see this volume, pp. 84-87 and 103-05) were published in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 60-66, and Kari Marx. Early Texts, Oxford, 1971, pp. 11-22.

15. Marx here refers to the book Petri Gassendi, Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenis Laertii, qui est De Vita, Moribus, Placitisque Epicuri, Ludguni, 1649.

16. Marx never realised his plan to write a larger work on the Epicurean, Stoic and Sceptic philosophies.

17. This refers to the following passage from the book by Karl Friedrich Köppen, Friedrich der Grosse und seine Widersacher, Leipzig, 1840: "Epikureismus, Stoikismus und Skepsis und die Nervenmuskel und Eingeweidesysteme des antiken Organismus, deren unmittelbare, natürliche Einheit die Schönheit und Sittlichkeit des Altertums bedingte, und die beim Absterben desselben auseinanderfielen" (S. 39) ("Epicureanism, Stoicism and Scepticism are the nerve muscles and intestinal system of the antique organism whose immediate, natural unity conditioned the beauty and morality of antiquity, and which disintegrated with the decay of the latter"). Köppen dedicated his book to Karl Marx.

18.. Marx quotes David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature from the German translation: David Hume über die menschliche Natur aus Englischen nebst kritischen Versuchen zur Beurtheilung dieses Werks von Ludwig Heinrich Jakob, 1. Bd., Über den menschlichen Verstand, Halle, 1790, S. 485.

19. Marx quotes from a letter by Epicurus to Menoeceus; see Diogenes Laertii de clarorum philosophorum vitis, dogmatibus et apophthegmatibus libri decem (X, 123).

20. Gymnosophists - Greek name for Indian sages.

21. Ataraxy- in ancient Greek ethics- tranquillity. In Epicurean ethics - the ideal of life; state of the sage who has attained inner freedom through knowledge of nature and deliverance from fear of death.

22. The manuscripts of "General Difference in principle Between the Democritean and Epicurean Philosophy of Nature" and "Result" have not been found.

23. Characterising here the gods of Epicurus, Marx, obviously, had in mind the remark by Johann Joachim Winckelmann in his book Geschichte der Kunst des Altelluim, 2 Teile, Dresden, 1767: "The beauty of the deities in their virile age consists in the combination of the strength of mature years and the joyfulness of youth, and this consists here in the lack of nerves and sinews, which are less apparent in the flowering of the years. But in this lies also an expression of divine self-containment which is not in need of the parts of our body which serve for its nourishment; and this illuminates Epicurus’ opinion concerning the shape of the gods to which he gives a body, which looks like a body, and blood, but which looks like blood, something which Cicero considers obscure and inconceivable".

24. Hyrcanian Sea-ancient name of the Caspian Sea.

25. The reference is probably to the commentaries by johann Baptist Carl Niirnberger and johann Gottlob Schncider on the following editions: Diogems Laertius. De vitis, dogmatibus et aethegmatibus liber decimus graece et latine separation editus... a Carolo Nürnbergerg Norimbergae, 1791 (the second edition appeared in 1808) and Epicuri physica et meteorologica duabus epistolis eiusdem compmhenia. Graeca ad fidem librorum sciiptorum et editorum emandavit atque interpretatus est. jo. Gottl. Schneider, Lipsiae, 1813.

26. This is not Metrodorus of Lampsacus, the disciple of Epicurus, but Metrodorus of Chios, the disciple of Democritus, named incorrectly by Stobaeus (in the author’s note) as the teacher of Epicurus. The same lines may be found in the fifth notebook on Epicurean philosophy (see this volume, pp. 96 and 486).

27. Two fragments from the Appendix have been preserved: the beginning of the first paragraph of Section Two and the author’s notes to Section One. The general title of the Appendix, which is missing in the first fragment, is reproduced here according to the contents (see this volume, p. 33). The text of this fragment corresponds almost word for word to the text of the third notebook on Epicurean philosophy (see this volume, pp. 452-54) and was written in an unknown hand on paper of the same kind as the text of the notebook. On this ground some scholars assume that this fragment does not belong to the Doctoral dissertation, but is part of a non-extant work on ancient philosophy. The content of the fragment, however, and the quotations from Plutarch in it are closely connected with the author’s notes to the Appendix (see this volume, pp. 102-05). As the available data do not yet permit a final decision as to where this fragment belongs, in this edition it is included in the Doctoral dissertation.

28. The reference is to Plutarch’s mystic conception of three eternally existing categories of men.

29. In the manuscript of the author’s notes all quotations are given in the original-Greek or Latin. While Marx, in the Notebooks on Epicurean Philosophy, quotes Diogenes Laertius according to Pierre Gassendi’s edition (Lyons, 1649), in his notes to the dissertation he quotes from the Tauchnitz edition of Diogenes Laertius, De vitis philosorum libri.... X, T. 1-2, Lipsiae, 1833. Editorial explanatory insertions are given in square brackets when necessary.

30. Massilians were the citizens of the city of Massilia, now Marseilles, founded circa 600 B. C. as a Greek colony by Ionic Phocaeans. The battle of Marius with the German Cimbri tribes who invaded Caul and Northern Italy took place in 101 B. C. near Vercelli.

31. Marx refers here to the struggle between different trends in the German philosophy of the late thirties and early forties of the nineteenth century. By the "liberal party" Marx means here the Young Hegelians. The most advanced of the Young Hegelians (Ludwig Feuerbach, Bruno Bauer, Arnold Ruge) took the stand of atheism and political radicalism. In answer to this evolution of the Left wing of the Hegelian school, the conservative German philosophers united under the banner of the so-called positive philosophy- a religious-mystical trend (Christian Hermann Weisse, Immanuel Hermann Fichte junior, Franz Xaver von Baader, Anton Gunther and others), which criticised Hegel’s philosophy from the right. The "positive philosophers" tried to make philosophy subservient to religion by proclaiming divine revelation the only source of "positive" knowledge. They called negative every philosophy which recognised rational cognition as its source.

32. Marx cites (in the manuscript in French) from the book System de La nature, ou des du monde physique et du monde moral. Par. M. Mirabaud, Secrétaire Perpétuel et 1’un des Quarante de l’Académie Francaise, Londres, 1770. The real author of the book was the French philosopher Paul Holbach, who for the sake of secrecy put the name of J. Mirabaud, the secretary of the French Academy, on his book (J. Mirabaud died in 1760).

33. Both Friedrich Schelling’s works quoted by Marx (Philosophische Briefe uber Dogmatismus und Kriticismus and Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie, oder uber das Unbedingte im menschlichen Wissen) appeared in 1795. Later Schelling renounced his progressive views and turned to religious mysticism. In 1841 Schelling was invited by the Prussian authorities to the University of Berlin to oppose the influence of the representatives of the Hegelian school, the Young Hegelians in particular.

34. Marx probably refers to the 13th lecture on the history of religion delivered by Hegel at the University of Berlin during the summer term of 1829.

35. The reference is to Kant’s critique of different ways of proving God’s existence in his Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Critique of Pure Reason).

36. Marx refers to the following remark made by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason in connection with the speculation on the logical meaning of the elements of reasoning (subject, predicate and the copula "is"): "... A hundred real talers do not contain the least coin more than a hundred possible talers. For as the latter signify the concept, and the former the object and the positing of the object, should the former contain more than the latter, my concept would not, in that case, express the whole object, and would not therefore be an adequate concept of it. My financial position is, however, affected very differently by a hundred real talers than it is by the mere concept of them (that is, of their possibility). For the object, as it actually exists, is not analytically contained in my concept, but is added to my concept (which is a determination of my state) synthetically; and yet the conceived hundred talers are not themselves in the least increased through thus acquiring existence outside my concept."

37. Wends — old name of West Slavic tribes.

38. At the end of 1841 and beginning of 1842 Marx made a new attempt to publish his dissertation. He drafted the beginning of a new preface in which many passages were altered or crossed out. It was probably at the same period that he wrote the note against Schelling which was inserted in Marx’s handwriting in the copy of the manuscript.

39. Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction was the first work written by Marx as a revolutionary journalist. It was occasioned by the censorship instruction of the Prussian Government of December 24, 1841. Though formulated in moderate liberal terms, the instruction actually not only retained but intensified the censorship of the press. Written between January 15 and February 10, 1842, just after the publication of the instruction in the press (it was published in the Allgemeine Preussische Staats-Zeitung No. 14, January 14, 1842; Marx cites from this publication), the article was originally intended for the Deutsche Jahrbücher under the editorship of Arnold Ruge (see this volume, p. 381) but because of the censorship restrictions it was published only in 1843 in Switzerland in Anekdota which contained works by appositional authors, mostly Young Hegelians.

Excerpts from the article were reprinted in the Mannheimer Abendzeitung Nos. 71 and 72, March 26 and 28, 1843.

In 1851 Hermann Becker, a member of the Communist League, made an attempt to publish Marx’s collected works in Cologne. On the author’s initiative the first issue began with this article (see Gesammette Aufsätze von Karl Marx, herausgegeben von Hermann Becker, 1. Heft, Köln, 1851). However, the publication was ceased because of the government repressions.

The first English translation of the article appeared in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 67-92, and an excerpt from it in Karl Marx. Early Texts, Oxford, 1971, pp. 26-30. P. 109

40. The reference is to the Bundesakte adopted by the Congress of Vienna on June 8, 1815. The Act proclaimed the formation of a German Confederation consisting initially of 34 independent states and four free cities. The Act virtually sanctioned the political dismemberment of Germany and the maintaining of the monarchical estate system in the German states.

Article 18 of the Act vaguely mentioned a forthcoming drafting of uniform instructions providing for “freedom of the press” in the states of the German Confederation. However, this article remained on paper. The Provisional Federal Act on the Press of September 20, 1819 (it remained provisional for ever), introduced preliminary censorship for all publications of not more than 20 signatures (actually all periodicals) throughout Germany as well as a series of other restrictions.

41. Lettre de cachet — a secret royal order for the imprisonment or exile of any person without judge or jury. This method of reprisals against appositional elements and undesirable persons was widely used in France in the period of absolutism, especially under Louis XIV and Louis XV.

42. An allusion to the negotiations of Prussian diplomats with the Pope concerning the disagreements between the Prussian Government and the Catholic Church known as the “Cologne” or “church conflict”. The conflict concerning the religious denomination of children of mixed marriages between Catholics and Protestants arose in 1837 with the arrest of C. A. Droste-Vischering, Archbishop of Cologne, who was accused of high treason for refusing to obey the orders of Frederick William Ill, the King of Prussia. It ended in 1841 under Frederick William IV with the Prussian Government yielding to the Catholic Church (see Marx’s letter to Ruge of July 9, 1842, pp. 389-90 of this volume).

43. The article Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. First Article. Debates on Freedom of the Press and Publication of the Proceedings of the Assembly of the Estates was Marx’s first contribution to the Rheinische Zeitung für Politik, Handel und Gewerbe. Marx began his work as a contributor and in October 1842 became one of the editors of the newspaper. By its content and approach to vital political problems, the article helped the newspaper, founded by the appositional Rhenish bourgeoisie as a liberal organ, to begin a transition to the revolutionary-democratic positions.

The appearance of Marx’s article in the press raised a favourable response in progressive circles. Georg Jung, manager of the Rheinische Zeitung, wrote to Marx: “Your articles on freedom of the press are extremely good.... Meyen wrote that the Rheinische Zeitung had eclipsed the Deutsche Jahrbücher ... that in Berlin everybody was overjoyed with it” (MEGA, Abt. 1, Bd. 1, Hb. 2, S. 275). In his comments on the article published in the Rheinische Zeitung Arnold Ruge wrote: “Nothing more profound and more substantial has been said or could have been said on freedom of the press and in defence of it” (Deutsche Jahbücher, 1842, S. 535-36).

In the early 1850s Marx included this article in his collected works then being prepared for publication by Hermann Becker (see Note 39). However only the beginning of the article was included in the first issue. The major part of the text which had been published in the Rheinische Zeitung No. 139 was left unprinted. The end of the article was intended for the following issue, which was never published.

A copy of the Rheinische Zeitung which Marx sent from London to Becker in Cologne in February 1851 with the author’s notes on the text of the articles (mostly in the form of abbreviations) intended for the edition Becker was preparing has recently been found in the archives of Cologne University library. This copy of the newspaper proves that Marx thought of publishing-partly in an abridged form- many of his articles written for the Rheinische Zeitung. However, his plan was not realised. Marginal notes show that the articles “Communal Reform and the Kölnische Zeitung” and “A Correspondent of the Kölnische Zeitung vs. the Rheinische Zeitung belong to Marx. These articles have never been published in any collection of Marx’s works.

In English an excerpt from the Proceedings was published in Karl Marx. Early Texts, Oxford, 1971, pp. 35-36.

44. Marx devoted three articles to the debates of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly, only two of which, the first and the third, were published. In the first article Marx proceeded with his criticism of the Prussian censorship which he had begun in his as yet unpublished article “Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction”. The second article, devoted to the conflict between the Prussian Government and the Catholic Church, was banned by the censors. The manuscript of this article has not survived, but the general outline of it is given by Marx in his letter to Ruge of July 9, 1842 (see this volume, pp. 389-90). The third article is devoted to the debates of the Rhine Province Assembly on the law on wood thefts.

45. Assemblies of the estates were introduced in Prussia in 1823. They embraced the heads of princely families, representatives of the knightly estate, i.e., the nobility, of towns and rural communities. The election system based on the principle of landownership provided for a majority of the nobility in the assemblies. The competency of the assemblies was restricted to questions of local economy and administration. They also had the right to express their desires on government bills submitted for discussion.

The Sixth Rhine Province Assembly was in session from May 23 to July 25, 1841, in Düsseldorf. Ale debates dealt with in the article took place during the discussion on publication of the proceedings of the assemblies (this right had been granted by the Royal edict of April 30, 1841) and in connection with petitions of a number of towns on freedom of the press.

Citations in the text are given according to the Sitzungs-Protokolle des sechsten Rheinischen Provinziat-Landtags, Koblenz, 1841.

46. The reference is to the article “Die inlandische Presse u. die inlandische Statistik”, published in the Allgemeine Preussische Staats-Zeitung No. 86, March 26,1842. Marx cited mainly from this article, and also from two other articles, “Die Wirkung der Zensur-Verfiigung vom 24. Dezember 1841” and “Die Besprechung inlandscher Angelegenheiten,” published in the same newspaper in Nos. 75 and 78, March 16 and 19, 1842, respectively.

47. Vossische Zeitung — the name given after its owner to the daily Königlich privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung von Staats und gelehnen Sachen.

48. Spenerche Zeitung -the name given after its publisher to the Berlinische Nachrichten von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen which was a semiofficial government organ at the beginning of the 1840s.

49. Marx ironically compares Prussian officialdom’s enthusiasm for statistics with the ardent philosophical systems which assigned a special importance to signs and numbers. He hints in particular at the ardent Chinese “I Ching” writings, of which Confucius was considered in the nineteenth century to be one of the first commentators. According to the philosophical conception laid down in them, hu signs, which were formed from variou-s combinations of three continuous or broken lines, symbolised things and natural phenomena.

When calling Pythagoras the “universal statistician” Marx had in mind the ancient Greek philosophers’ conceptions of number as the essence of all things.

50. The reference is to positive philosophy. See Note 31.

51. By this Marx meant Heraclitus’ maxim: The dry soul is the wisest and the best.

52. The reference is to the Provisional Federal Act on the Press for the German states adopted on September 20, 1819 (see Note 40).

53. The reference is to the historical school of law — a trend in history and jurisprudence which originated in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century. Its representatives (Gustav Hugo and Friedrich Carl von Savigny) tried to justify the privileges enjoyed by the nobility and the existence of feudal institutions by eternal historical traditions. An assessment of this school is given by Marx in the article “The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law” (ace this volume, pp. 203-10).

54. By the decision of the Vienna Congress of 1815, Belgium and Holland were incorporated in the single kingdom of the Netherlands, Belgium being actually subordinated to Holland. Belgium became an independent constitutional monarchy after the bourgeois revolution of 1830.

55. Ku — see Note 49.

56. Marx cites these and the following lines of Hariri’s poem from Friedrich Rückert’s Die Verwandiungen des Abu Stid von Semg, oder die Mahamm des Hariri Stuttgart, 1826.

57. This work is the beginning of a critical article which Marx planned to write against the abstract, nihilist treatment of the problem of state central station in the article by Moses Hess, “Deutschland und Frankreich in bezug auf die Zentralstionsfrage,” which was published in the Supplement to the Rheinische Zeitung No. 137 of May 17, 1842.

Marx’s article was evidently not finished. The part which was written has survived in manuscript form.

It was first published in English in Writings of the Young Ma7x on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 106-08.

58. This article was occasioned by attacks on the trend of the Rheinische Zeitung on the part of the influential Kölnische Zeitung, which defended the Catholic Church in the 1840s. In 1842 the Kölnische Zeitung, under the editorship of Karl Hermes, a secret agent of the Prussian Government, took an active part in the campaign against the progressive press and progressive philosophical trends, the Young Hegel’s in particular.

The article was published in English in the collections: K. Marx and F. Engels, On Religion, Moscow, 1957, pp. 16-40, and Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 109-30.

59. Marx cites Lucian from Griechische Prosaiker in neuen Übersetzungen. Fünftes Bindchen, Stuttgart, 1827, S. 176.

60. Vedas — ancient Hindu religious and literary works in verse and prose written over several centuries, not later than the sixth century B.C.

61. This wording is given in Article 3 of La Chart octroye — the fundamental law of the Bourbon monarchy proclaimed in 1814, and in La Charm bâclée proclaimed on August 14, 1830, after the July bourgeois revolution in France. While introducing some changes into the constitution of the French monarchy (certain restrictions of royal power, lowering of age and property qualifications, the practice of open debates in the Chambers, etc.), the second charter retained essentially the main principles laid down in the charter of 1814 granted by the Bourbons after the restoration.

62. Here and further Marx cites from Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preussische Staaten, second edition, Berlin, 1794.

63. Code Napoléon — a civil code published in 1804; it was introduced also in West and South-West Germany conquered by Napoleon and continued in force in the Rhine Province after its union with Prussia in 1815. It was a classical code of bourgeois society.

64. An allusion to the participation of the editor of the Kölnische Zeitung Hermes in the appositional movement of the German students in his youth.

65. Corybantes — priestesses of the goddess Cybele; Cabiri were priests of the ancient Greek divinities. The Corybantes and Cabiri were identified in Asia Minor with the Curetes, priests of Rhea, the mother of Zeus. According to mythology the Curetes clashed their weapons to drown the cries of the infant Zeus and thus saved him from his father, Cronus, who devoured his own children.

66. By this Marx means the attacks of the German press against the philosophical critique of religion which began with Strauss’ book Das Leben Jesus the first volume of which appeared in 1835.

67. Deutsche Jahrbücher — abbreviated title of the Left Hegelian literary-philosophical journal Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst. The journal was published in Leipzig from July 1841 and edited by Arnold Ruge. Earlier (1838-41) it came out under the title Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst. Its name was changed and publication transferred from the Prussian town of Halle to Saxony because of the threat of suppression in the Prussian state. However, it did not last long under its new name. In January 1843 it was closed by the Government of Saxony and its further publication was prohibited throughout Germany by the Federal Diet (Bundestag).

68. When this article was published in the Rheinische Zeitung, one of the sections, “The Chapter on Marriage”, was banned by the censors. It appeared in full only in 1927. In the present edition the article is reproduced, as in all previous complete publications, according to the manuscript, which is extant.

The article was published in English in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 96-105.

69. Papageno — a character in Mozart’s opera Die Zauberflöte, a bird-catcher who clad himself in feathers.

70. The reference is to a pamphlet written by the German jurist Friedrich Carl von Savigny in 1838 on the occasion of Gustav Hugo’s jubilee -the fiftieth anniversary of his being awarded a doctor’s degree: Der Zehente Mai 1788. Beytrag zur Geschichte der Rechtswissenschaft (Berlin, 1838).

71. Marx cites the first volume of Benjamin Constant’s De la religion (Book 2, Ch. 2, pp. 172-73, Paris edition, 1826). A detailed synopsis of this work written by Marx in Bonn in 1842 has survived.

72. Marx refers here to the preaching of “free love” in the works of some of the Young Germany writers.

Young Germany — a group of writers which emerged in the 1830s in Germany and was influenced by Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Bisme. The Young Germany writers (Karl Gutzkow, Ludolf Wienbarg, Theodor Mundt and others) came out in defence of freedom of conscience and the press, their writings, fiction and journalists, reflecting opposition sentiments of the petty-bourgeoisie and intellectuals. The views of the Young Germans were politically vague. Soon the majority of them turned into mere liberals.

73. An allusion to Savigny’s book Vom Beruf umrer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft, Heidelberg, 1814, and to Savigny’s appointment as Minister of Justice for the revision of the law in 1842.

74. This article was written in connection with the attacks made by the German philosopher Otto Friedrich Gruppe on Bruno Bauer’s book Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker. Attacking the leader of the Young Hegelians in his pamphlet Bruno Bauer und die akademische Lehrfreiheit, Gruppe tried under the guise of non-partisanship and neutrality in philosophy to discredit Bauer as a critic of the gospel sources. In his article Marx cites and slightly paraphrases Gruppe’s statement: “The writer of these lines has never served any party and has not been influenced by anybody.” The Young Hegelian journal Deutsche Jahrbücher replied with a series of articles in defence of Bruno Bauer.

75. Marx expounds the statement made by the Protestant theologian Joachim Neander in his book Das Leben Jesu Christi in seinem geschichtlichen Zusammenhange und seiner geschichtlichen Entwickelung dargestellt, Hamburg, 1837, S. 265, and quoted by Bruno Bauer in his Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker (Bd. 2, S. 296).

76. Citation from Bruno Bauer’s Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte der Synoptiker. Citations from the New Testament are given according to this work (Bd. 2, S. 297, 299 and 296).

77. This article is the first written by Marx for the Rheinische Zeitung after he became its editor. The article in No. 284 of the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung against which Marx polemises was published on October 11, 1842, under the title “Die Kommunistenlehren”.

In English the article was published in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 136-42, and in Vol. 1 of On Revolution New York, 1971, pp. 3-6.

78. The reference is to a report from Berlin on August 21, 1842, reprinted in the Rheinische Zeitung No. 273, September 30, 1842, from Weitling’s Journal Die Junge Generation under the title “Die Berliner Familienhäuser”.

79. Marx means the critical article “Die Augsburger Allgewine Zeitung in ihrer tiefsten Emiedrigung” published in the journal Mefistofeles. Revue der deutschen Gegenwart in Shizun und Umrissen, issues 1 and 2, 1842.

80. The reference is to the tenth congress of scientists of France which took-place in Strasbourg from September 28 to October 9, 1842. It was attended by scientists from Germany, Switzerland, Great Britain, Belgium, Russia and other countries. One of its sections discussed proposals made by the followers of Fourier for improving the social position of the non-propertied classes. The report cites Edouard de Pompery’s speech in which he compared the proletariat’s struggle against private property with the struggle of the bourgeoisie against feudalism.

This report, an excerpt from which Marx quotes below, was published in the Rheinische Zeitung No. 280, October 7, 1842, with a note: “Strassburg, 30. Sept.”

81. This refers to the following proposition from Emmanuel Sieyès’ Qu'est-ce que le tiers état? published in 1789 on the eve of the French revolution: “What is the third estate? Everything. — What was it until now in the political respect? Nothing. — What is it striving for? To be something.”

82. An allusion to the revolutionary. actions of the proletariat in England and France. In August 1842 Manchester was one of the centres of Chartist agitation and a massive strike movement; in May 1839 a revolt organised by the secret revolutionary Society of the Seasons took place in Paris; the Lyons weavers rose in 1831 and 1834.

83. The reference is to an article datelined: “Karlsruhe, 8. Oktober”, published in the Augsburg Allgmeine Zeitung No. 284. Excerpts from this article are printed below.

84. This refers to an article datelined: “London, 5. Oktober 1842”, published in the Augsburg Allgmeine Zeitung No. 284.

85. Automnists — the name given to the members of former landowning families of princes and counts who, on the basis of the Federal Act of 1815, retained the right to dispose of their hereditary estates at their discretion irrespective of the general legislation on inheritance, trusteeship, etc.

86. This apparently refers to the book by Wilhelm Kosegarten, Betrachtungen über die Veräusserlichheit und Theilbarkeit des Landbesitzes mit besonderer Rücksicht auf einige Provinzen der Preussischen Monarchie, in which the author criticised the parcelling out of the landed estates and upheld the restoration of feudal landownership.

87. This refers to the article “Die Kommunistenlehren” published in the Allgemeine Zeitung of October 11, 1842, and criticised by Marx in his article “Communism and the Augsburg Allgmeine Zeitung “.

88. Proceedings of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly. Third Article. Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood is one of the series of articles by Marx on the proceedings of the Rhine Province Assembly from May 23 to July 25, 1841. Marx touched on the theme of the material interests of the popular masses for the first time, coming out in their defence. Work on this and subsequent articles inspired Marx to study political economy. He wrote about this in the preface to his A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): “In the year 1842-43, as editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, I first found myself in the embarrassing position of having to discuss what is known as material interests. Debates of the Rhine Province Assembly on the theft of wood and the division of landed property; the official polemic started by Herr von Schaper, then Oberpräsident of the Rhine Province, against the Rheinische Zeitung about the condition of the Mosel peasantry, and finally the debates on free trade and protective tariffs caused me in the first instance to rum my attention to economic questions.”

Excerpts from the speeches by the deputies to the Assembly are cited from Sitzungs-Protokolle des secham Rheinischen Provinzial-Landtags, Koblenz, 1841.

89. The second article written by Marx on the proceedings of the Rhine Province Assembly, banned by the censors, was devoted to the conflict between the Prussian Government and the Catholic Church or the so-called church conflict (see Note 42).

90. Marx refers to the Criminal Code of Karl V (Die peinliche Halsgerichtsordnung Kaiser Karts V. Constitutio criminalis Carolina), approved by the Reichstag in Regensburg in 1532; it was distinguished by its extremely cruel penalties.

91. The reference is to the so-called barbaric laws (leges barbarorum) compiled in the fifth-ninth centuries which were records of the common law of various Germanic tribes (Franks, Frisians, Burgundians, Langobards [Lombards], Anglo-Saxons and others).

92. Dodona — a town in Epirus, scat of a temple of Zeus. An ancient oak grew near the main entrance to the temple with a spring at its foot; oracles interpreted the will of the gods from the rustling of its leaves.

93. The fact mentioned took place during the siege of Antwerp in 1584-85 by the troops of King Philip II of Spain, who were suppressing the Netherland’s revolt against absolutist Spain.

94. The reference is to the Barebone’s, nominated, or Little Parliament summoned by Cromwell in July and dissolved in December 1653. It was composed mainly of representatives of the Congregational Churches who couched their criticism in religious mystic terms.

95. Tidong — a region in Kalimantan (Borneo).

96. An allusion to the debate of the Sixth Rhine Province Assembly on a bill against violations of game regulations, which deprived the peasants of the right to hunt even hares.

97. This note was a footnote to an article marked “Vom Rhein” printed in the same issue. The article in its turn was a reply to a previous article printed in the Supplement to the Rheinische Zeitung Nos. 265, 268, 275 and 277, September 22 and 25 and October 2 and 4, 1842, under the title “Fehlgriffe der liberalen Opposition in Hannover”.

98. The reference is to la Charte bâclée, proclaimed on August 14, 1830 (see Note 61).

99. In 1837 King Ernst Augustus and his supporters made a coup d'état in Hanover. They abolished the 1833 Constitution which was moderately liberal (according to it ministers were appointed by the king but were responsible to the provincial assembly) and revived the fundamental state law of 1819 which retained representation on the estate principle and drastically restricted the lights of the provincial assembly. Liberal circles in Hanover attempted to restore the 1833 law. Their demand was formulated in a protest by seven professors of the University of Göttingen (Dahlmann, Gervinus, the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm, Ewald, Albrecht and Weber) who were subsequently deprived of their chairs and some of them banished. The controversy on the constitutional questions in Hanover was transferred to the Bundestag, which by a decision of 1839 sanctioned restoration of the law of 1819. The new constitutional Act of the King of Hanover in 1840 re-asserted the principal clauses of the law.

100. This article and the article “A Correspondent of the Kölnische Zeitung vs. the Rheinische Zeitung” which is closely linked with it (see this volume, pp. 277-79) were written on the occasion of a sharp polemic launched in the press on the proposed reform of local administration in towns and villages of the Prussian provinces. For the Rhine Province this reform meant the abolition of progressive elements in local government which had survived from the time of the French revolution and Napoleon 1. The struggle for their preservation and development assumed the form of defending these principles against Prussian absolutism and monarchically orientated nobility.

The Rheinische Zeitung played a leading part in this struggle. Already in August 1842 its editorial board publicly stated its views on this matter. From November 3 to December 1 the paper published in its Supplement a series of articles entitled “The Reform of the Rhenish Administration”, written by Claessen, a member of the paper’s Board of Directors. These articles contained demands for unification and equality of urban and rural local administration, publicity of local administration sessions, extension of their rights and reduction of bureaucratic control over them. Reflecting the Prussophilism and anti-democratic sentiments of a certain section of the Rhenish bourgeoisie the Kölnische Zeitung attacked the Rheinische Zeitung in its “Summing Up” published on November 1, 1842. On November 1 1 and 16 the Kölnische Zeitung continued the polemic by publishing short items containing attacks on Claessen’s articles and insinuations against the Rheinische Zeitung. The two articles mentioned here were in answer to these attacks (see Note 43).

101. In this note Marx laid down the principal lines for the criticism of the Divorce Bin which he later developed in the Rheinische Zeitung in a special article (see this volume, pp. 307-10). Preparation and discussion in government quarters of the Divorce Bill making the dissolution of marriage much more difficult was kept in great secrecy. However, on October 20, 1842, the Rheinische Zeitung published the Bill and thus initiated broad discussion on this subject in the progressive press. Prior to this article by Marx, the Rheinische Zeitung had published a brief article on the new Bill under the title “Bilmerkungen über den Entwurf einer Verordnung über Ehescheidung, vorgelegt von dem Ministerium für Revision der Gesetze im Juli 1842” (Rheinische Zeitung No. 310, November 6, 1842, Supplement). Marx mentions the article in this item which was written in the form of an editorial note to another article devoted to the same subject, “Der Entwurf zu dem neuen Ehegesetz”.

Owing to the general dissatisfaction with the government Bill, Frederick William IV was compelled to abandon his intention of carrying it through.

The publication of the Bill and the resolute refusal of the Rheinische Zeitung editorial board to name the person who had sent the text of it to the paper was one of the reasons for the banning of the Rheinische Zeitung.

In English this note was published in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 136-38.

102. This refers to the law of the Kingdom of Prussia codified in 1794; it reflected backwardness of feudal Prussia in the sphere of law and justice.

103. This note reflects Marx’s desire as the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung to use the liberal wording of the Cabinet Order on the press, to which Frederick William IV frequently resorted with demagogic aims, so as to provide juridical barriers against the persecution of the paper being prepared by the censorship and to repulse the harassing action on the part of governmental officials and the reactionary press. Marx resorted to similar tactics also on other occasions when forced to do so by the situation.

104. The trend pursued by the Rheinische Zeitung after Marx became its editor was a source of apprehension for the Prussian authorities. Oberpräsident of the Rhine Province von Schaper wrote to Berlin stressing that the tone of the paper was “becoming more and more impudent and harsh”. By his order Regierungspräsident of Cologne von Gerlach demanded on November 12, 1842, the dismissal from the editorial board of Rutenberg (whom the authorities considered to be the initiator of the radical trend) and conveyed the instructions of the censorship ministries on changes in the paper’s trend. The editorial board replied with a letter by the publisher Engelbert Renard who was the official manager of the paper. As can be seen from the rough copy, the actual author of the letter was Marx.

The arguments put forward by Marx deprived the government representatives of grounds for banning the paper, although it is obvious from von Schaper’s report to the censorship ministers on December 17, 1842, that they did not abandon the intention of bringing a suit against the editors of the Rheinische Zeitung, in particular the author of the article “Debates on the Law on Thefts of Wood”, for “impudent and disrespectful criticism of the existing government institutions”. However, having no formal grounds for prosecution, the authorities had temporarily to confine themselves to intensifying censorship measures (change of censors, etc.).

105. This refers to articles published in the Supplement to the Rheinische Zeitung: “Auch eine Stimme über eine Hegemonie in Deutschland"’ (author, Fidedrich Wilhelm Carovoé; signed ‘Vom Main'), No. 135, May 15, 1842; “Hegemonie in Deutschland”, No. 146, May 26, 1842; and “Weitere Verhandlungen über die Hegemonie Preussens”, No. 172, June 21, 1842, when Marx was not yet editor of the newspaper.

106. This note was published in the Rheinische Zeitung as a footnote to the article “Die hannoverschen Industriellen und der Schutzzol”. It has not yet been proved who the author of this item was. Some scholars doubt whether it was written by Marx.

107. “The Free” (Die Freien) — a Berlin group of Young Hegelians, which was formed early in 1842. Among its prominent members were Edgar Bauer, Eduard Meyen, Ludwig Buhl and Max Stirner (pseudonym of Kaspar Schmidt). Their criticism of the prevailing conditions was abstract and devoid of real revolutionary content and ultra-radical in form; it frequently discredited the democratic movement. Subsequently many representatives of “The Free” renounced radicalism.

When Marx had become editor of the Rheinische Zeitung, he took steps to prevent “The Free” from using the newspaper as a mouthpiece for their pseudo-revolutionary statements. On his conflict with “The Free” see his letter to Arnold Ruge, November 30, 1842 (this volume, pp. 393-95). The article quotes almost word for word from Herwegh’s letter of November 22, 1842 to the Rheinische Zeitung.

108. This is an editor’s note quoted from the Rheinische Zeitung No. 322, November 18, 1842. The report referred to was published in issue No. 317 of the paper on November 13, 1842.

109. Here and elsewhere is quoted the article mentioned below, “Leipzig (Julius Mosen u. die Rhein. Zeitung),” which was published in the Allgemeine Zeitung No. 329, November 25, 1842.

110. Marx wrote this work in reply to an article in the Allgemeine Zeitung which tried to justify the Prussian Government’s attempts to substitute the establishment of the all-German Assembly of the Estates for the introduction of the constitution. The article criticised by Marx, “Berlin, im November. Über die Zusammensetzung der ständischen Ausschüsse in Preussen”, was published in the Supplement to the Allgemeine Zeitung Nos. 335 and 336, December 1 and 2, 1842 (below are quoted passages from this article). For reasons of tactics Marx made the reservation that the polemics were directed against the opinion of the conservative press on the Prussian state institutions and not against these institutions themselves. This enabled him to criticise them severely and expose their spurious constitutionalism.

Commissions of the estates of the provincial assemblies were set up in Prussia in June 1842. They were elected by the provincial assemblies out of their membership (on the estate principle) and formed a single advisory body-the United Commissions. With the help of this body which was but a sham representative assembly, Frederick William IV planned to introduce new taxes and obtain a loan.

An excerpt from this article was published in English in Karl Marx. Early Texts, Oxford, 1971, pp. 55-57. p. 292

111. This is an excerpt from the law of March 27, 1824, introducing an assembly of the estates in the Rhine Province and adopted on the basis of the law on the provincial assemblies of the estates promulgated in Prussia on June 5, 1823.

112. Mediatised lands were former imperial fiefs which were previously held directly from the Emperor but afterwards became dependent on princes, on the King of Prussia in the given case; their holders retained some of their privileges, including personal membership of the Assembly of the Estates.

113. Virilstimme was an individual vote enjoyed in the assemblies of the estates by persons of knightly (noble) descent and individual German cities by virtue of privileges granted them in the Middle Ages.

114. On the Divorce Bill and the stand of the Rheinische Zeitung on this question see Note 101. The article was published in English in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 138-42.

115. Late in 1842 the German governments intensified persecutions of the opposition press. The Cabinet Order of December 28, 1842, prohibited distribution of the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung in Prussia for the publication, in its issue of December 24, of a letter by Georg Herwegh, a democratic poet, to King Frederick William IV, accusing him of breaking the promise to introduce freedom of the press. The Rheinische Zeitung editor’s defence of the persecuted press required particular courage because the paper was increasingly threatened with government repressions.

Each section of the article was published in the Rheinische Zeitung under its own title, the general title was given by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU.

116. This refers to the report marked “Köln, 4. Jan.”, published in the Kölnische Zeitung No. 5, January 5, 1843.

117. This refers to the report marked “Vom Rhein, den 4. Jan.”, published in the Rhein- und Mosel-Zeitung No. 6, January 6, 1843.

118. The reference is to the events connected with the abolition of the Constitution by the King of Hanover in 1837 and the protest against this arbitrary act by seven liberal professors of Göttingen University who were subjected to repressions (see Note 99). The Hanover events evoked a wide response all over Germany. The Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung came out in defence of the Göttingen professors.

119. The allusion is to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung. At the end of 1842 and beginning of 1843 the newspaper again made a number of attacks against the Rheinische Zeitung (in particular, in No. 4, January 4, 1843), stating its intention to polemicise on principles with the latter but failing to supply any weighty arguments. In reply, the Rheinische Zeitung of January 12, 1843, carried a polemical article by Marx against the Allgemeine Zeitung, which is published in this volume together with the reply to the paper’s attacks which he made on January 3, 1843 (see this volume, pp. 359-60).

120. See Note 115.

121. This refers to the report marked “vom Niederrhein”, which was published in the Kölnische Zeitung No. 9, January 9, 1843.

122. This refers to the article “Die preussische presse” published in the Rheinische Zeitung No. 6, January 6, 1843.

123. See Note 110.

124. Here and below Marx quotes the report marked “Köln, 10. Jan.”, published in the Kölinische Zeitung No. 11, January 11, 1843.

125. This refers to two reports published in the Rhein- und Mosel-Zeitung No. 11, January 11, 1843, the first of which is marked “Koblenz, den 10. Jan.” and the second “Vom Rhein, den 9. Jan.”

126. This refers to the report marked “Koblenz, den 13. Jan.”, published in the Supplement to the Rhein- und Mosel-Zeitung No. 15, January 15, 1843.

127. The Rheinische Zeitung No. 348, December 14, 1842, carried, on Marx’s initiative, an unsigned article marked “Von der Mosel”, written by the democratic lawyer P. I. Coblenz. The situation in the Mosel was also dealt with in another article marked “Bemkastel, 10. Dez.”, published in issue No. 346. They were printed for the purpose of drawing public attention to the distress of the Mosel peasants and censuring the prejudiced and inattentive attitude of the government circles towards their complaints. The publication of these articles led to two resclipts from von Schaper, Oberpräsident of the Rhine Province, to the newspaper, accusing the Mosel correspondent of distorting the facts and slandering the government. Von Schaper demanded answers to a number of questions, in the hope of securing in effect a disavowal of the accusations levelled at the government. On December 18, issue No. 352 of the Rheinische Zeitung published the rescripts and asked the author to write a reply to them. However, as Coblenz was unable to produce sufficient grounds for his theses and disprove the accusations made against him, Marx took the task upon himself in order to use the polemics against von Schaper to expose the Prussian sociopolitical system. At the time the present announcement of the forthcoming reply to the Oberpräsident was published Marx was gathering material for his article “Justification of the Correspondent from the Mosel”.

128. This article was written by Marx instead of P. I. Coblenz, the author of the report “Von der Mosel”, in reply to the charges levelled against the latter in the rescripts of von Schaper, Oberpräsident of the Rhine Province (see Note 127). Marx was unable to carry out his programme for a reply ‘m full -out of five questions he managed to answer only two. Further publication was banned by the censor. The manuscript is not extant. Subsequently a report datelined “Von der Mosel in Januar 1843” entitled “Die Krebswhiiden der Moselgegend”, which coincided with the formulation of the third point of a reply Marx had planned to give, appeared in the book by K.Heinzen, a contributor to the Rheinische Zeitung, Die Preussische Bureaukratie (Darmstadt, 1845, S. 220-25). However, the content was strictly factual, and the style of this item differed from those parts of Marx’s article which had been published. At present it is still difficult to tell for certain who the author of this report was, but it may be assumed that what Heinzen published under this heading was one of the previously unpubbshed articles by Coblenz, whom Marx defended, rather than the continuation of Marx’s article.

The publication of the article in defence of the Mosel correspondent provided the immediate pretext for the government, at the insistence of the king, to pass a decision on January 19, 1843, banning the Rheinische Zeitung as from April 1, 1843, and imposing a rigorous censorship for the remaining period. The decree was promulgated on January 21.

The article was published in part in English in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 143-48.

129. This refers to the Prussian Government’s new censorship instruction (see Note 39).

130. See Note 39.

131. The two items published here under a title supplied by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism were printed in the Rheinische Zeitung in reply to the attacks of the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung (see Note 119).

132. These notes are the draft reply written by Marx to disprove the accusations contained in the ministerial rescript of January 21, 1843, which ordered suppression of the Rheinische Zeitung as from April 1, 1843, and imposed a rigorous censorship for the remaining period. The manner in which Marx replied was determined by his purpose of shielding the Rheinische Zeitung against government repressions and securing a repeal of the ban, but not at the cost of a change in its political line. Hence the Aesopean language which he uses in elucidating the paper’s stand on questions of principle in the the life of Germany.

133. Marx apparently refers to Das Neue eleganteste Conversatione — Lexicon für Gebildete aus allen Ständen published in Leipzig in 1835. On p. 255 of this book it was stated that Hegel came to Berlin in 1818 so that “his doctrine might be turned into a state philosophy”.

134. This refers to the article “Eingesandt aus Preussen” published in the Allgemeine Königsberger Zeitung No. 30, February 4, 1843.

135. This charge was provoked by the article “Die russische Note über die preussische Presse” published in the Rheinische Zeitung No. 4, January 4, 1843. The article criticised Russian Tsarism and the interference of its representatives in German affairs for the purpose of suppressing the opposition press. The publication of this article caned forth a Note of protest from the tsarist government.

136. Marx reproduces almost word for word the Prussian censorship instruction of October 18, 1819.

137. Ultramotanes — supporters of ultramontanism, a trend in the Roman Catholic Church advocating greater papal authority. In the Rhine Province Catholics were in opposition to the Prussian Government, which supported the Regrets.

138. This refers to the separatist ideas advocated by Johannes Joseph von G6rres in 1838 in the Historisch-politische Blätter für das Kathoiische Deutschland published in Munich.

139. This refers to Karl Marx’s article “The Supplement to Nos. 335 and 336 of the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung on the Commissions of the Estates in Prussia” (see this volume, pp. 292-306).

140. This refers to the negotiations between Prussia and Russia which were held in the summer of 1842 on the questions of concluding a trade agreement and cancelling, under the pressure of German public opinion, the 1830 Convention with Russia concerning extradition of deserters, prisoners of war and criminals.

141. The Cabinet Order of October 14, 1842, obliging the editorial boards of newspapers to publish government officials’ refutations of incorrect data given in these newspapers, was published in the Rheinische Zeitung No. 320, November 16, 1842.

The editorial note on this Order ironically remarks that whatever the author’s intentions it constituted “a perfect guarantee of the independence’ of the press and recognition of its social significance.

142. The quotations which follow are from the article marked “, Vom Rhein, den 6. März”, published in the Rhein- und Mosel-Zeitung No. 67, March 8, 1843.

143. The Rhein- und Mosel-Zeitung was published in Koblenz. Further on in the text Marx refers to it as the “Koblenz newspaper”. p. 367

144. Marx further quotes from the article “Friedrich v. Sallet ist totl” published in the Trier’sche Zeitung No. 63, March 6, 1843. This obituary to the German anti-clerical poet was attacked by the pro-Catholic editors of the Rhein- und Mosel-Zeitung, which carried in issue No. 70, March 11, 1843, an article entitled “Friedrich v. Sallets Laien-Evangelium”. Marx severely criticises both this article (excerpts from which are also quoted) and attempts of the Trier’sche Zeitung article to describe Sallet as an author with religious beliefs.

145. Sanbenito- a yellow robe worn by heretics sentenced by the Inquisition when they were led to the place of execution.

146. This refers to the article marked “Vom Rhein, den 11. März”, published in the Rhein- und Mosel-Zeitung No. 72, March 13, 1843. Marx quotes from this article below.

147. After the publication of the rescript of January 21, 1843, which suppressed the Rheinische Zeitung as from April 1, 1843, Marx directed his efforts to secure its repeal. Neither the refutation of the charges against the newspaper (see this volume, pp. 361-65), nor the petitions of the inhabitants of Colgne and other dries of the Rhine Province in defence of the paper succeeded in shaking the government’s decision. At the end of January 1843 Marx was already thinking of resigning the editorship (see letter to Ruge of January 25, 1843, p. 397 of this volume), but he did not consider it possible to carry out his intention at the height of the campaign for the repeal of the ban. In March, however, he believed that changes in the editorial board could provide a chance of saying the newspaper, and made up his mind to resign officially from his post. He handed over his duties to Dagobert Oppenheim. Marx was probably prompted to do so also by his unwillingness to take upon himself the responsibility for a possible change of line of the newspaper by which the liberal shareholders wished to prolong its existence.

Notwithstanding Marx’s resignation, the royal rescript was not repealed. The last issue of the newspaper appeared on March 31, 1843.

148. Marx’s thesis, together with his applications in German and Latin, was recorded under No. 26 on April 13, 184 1, in-the Jena University Register. On the same day Bachmann, the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy, and a group of professors signed a highly commentator ,y review on it (see this volume, pp. 705-06). On April 15 Marx was awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy and received his diploma (see illustration).

149. In mid-April 1841, after he had been awarded the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, Marx moved to Trier and in July of the same year to Bonn, because he had intended to enlist as Privat-Docent at Bonn University. In view of the government persecutions of progressive scientists (in the autumn of 1841 Bruno Bauer, a Young Hegelian, was banned from lecturing at Bonn University), Marx had to give up his plans for an academic career and become a publicist.

From January till March 1842 Marx stayed in Trier in the family of his fiancée, Jenny von Westphalen.

Marx’s correspondence with Arnold Ruge was occasioned by his intention to contribute to the opposition periodicals of the time including the Deutsche Jahrbücher, edited by Ruge.

150. ‘This refers to Ludwig Feuerbach’s review of Karl Bayer’s book Betrachtungen laber den Begriff des sittlichen Geistes und über das Wesen der Tugend published in the Hallische Jahrbücher for 1840.

151. The full title is Anekdota zur neusten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik which Ruge planned to publish in Switzerland. The first issue of the almanac (1843) carried Marx’s article “Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction” and also articles by Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl. Friedrich K6ppen, Amold Ruge and others.

152. The reference is to Bruno Bauer’s book Die Posaune des jungsten Gerichts über Hegel den Atheisten und Antichristen. Ein Ultimatum which was published anonymously in early November 1841. Bauer wrote it in August and September 1841 with some assistance from Marx. Bauer and Marx intended to publish the second part of the book as their joint work. However. their co-operation soon came to an end. chiefly be-cause Marx, who wanted to link advanced philosophy more closely with politics, was dissatisfied with Bauer’s tendency to confine himself to radical criticism of theology. After Marx had left Bonn for Trier in January 1842 to see the father of his fiancée, Ludwig von Westphalen, who was dying, Bauer published the second part of Die Posaune as a separate book entitled Hegels Lehre von der Religion und der Kunst von dem Standpunkte des Glaubem aus beuteilt (Leipzig, 1842) without the section which was to be written by Marx — a treatise on Christian art.

153. The article did not appear in the publication for which it was written. The manuscript is not extant. later on set forth his criticism of the constitutional monarchy in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law written in the summer of 1843 (see present edition, Vol. 3).

154. In the autumn of 1841 Bruno Bauer was banned from lecturing by Eichhorn, Minister of Religious Worship, Education and Medicine, and in March 1842 he was suspended from the post of Privat-Docent of Theology at Bonn University for his atheistic views and opposition statements. Bruno Bauer’s letter mentioned by Marx has not been found.

Lit de justice — sitting of the old French Parliament which was held in the presence of the king, whose directions in that case acquired the force of law.

155. This refers to the Cabinet Order of February 18, 1842, concerning revision of the earlier decrees of the Prussia Government (the Cabinet orders of March 6, 1821, and of August 2, 1834) according to which, in respect of certain judicial proceedings, the French Penal Code and trial by jury, which had been applied so far in the Rhine Province, were replaced by Prussian law and secret hearing. Under pressure from the discontented Rhenish bourgeoisie the Prussian Government revised these decrees. However the Cabinet Order of February 18, 1842, contained a number of reservations which in fact retained the Prussian law for cases of high treason, malfeasance. etc.

156. This is how Marx ironically calls the official newspapers published in Germany at the time.

157. Marx was unable to realise his intention to move to Cologne at the time (see this volume, p. 389). About April 10, 1842, he was to go to back to Bonn where he stayed with interruptions due to visits to Trier for family reasons till early October of the same year.

158. Spandau — a fortress in Brandenburg, later included in Great Berlin. It was used for a long time as a prison for state criminals.

159. Of the list of articles given by Marx only one was published, namely, “The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law”, in the Rheinische Zeitung (see this volume, pp. 203-10).

160. Friedrich Rudolf Hasse’s Ansein von Canterbury, Part I, was published in 1843, Part II appeared in 1852.

161. Marx had to leave for Trier at the end of May 1842 because his younger brother Hermann had died. During his stay in Trier (till mid-July 1842, when he returned to Bonn) his conflict with his mother, which had begun earlier, grew more acute. Henriette Marx was displeased with her son’s refusal to embrace an advantageous government or academic career. She stopped paying him allowance and prevented him from receiving his share of his father’s estate. On account of this Marx had to postpone his marriage with Jenny von Westphalen and, moreover, found himself in very straitened circumstances.

162. See Note 89.

163. On “The Free” see Note 107.

Marx refers to the article in the Königsberger Zeitung No. 138, June 17, 1842, which announced the aims and tasks of “The Free”. The article was reprinted in the Rheinische Zeitung No. 176, June 25, 1842, and marked “Aus Berlin”.

164. Ruge’s article was published in the Supplement to the Rheinische Zeitung No. 268. September 25, 1842, under the title “Sächsische Zustände”.

165. This refers to an unsigned article published in the Supplement to the Rheinische Zeitung No. 226, August 14, 1842, under the title “Ein Wort als Einleitung zur Frage: entsplicht die Rheinische Kommunal-Verfassung den Anforderungen der Gegenwart?”.

The above-mentioned articles by Karl Heinrich Hermes against Jewry were published in the Kölnische Zeitung (Nos. 187 and 211, and in the Supplement to No. 235, July 6 and 30, and August 23, 1842).

166. Apparently, Marx had in mind the unsigned article “Aus dem Hannoverschen” published in the Rheinische Zeitung No. 241, August 29, 1842.

167. The unsigned article “Das Juste-Milieu” was published in the Supplement to the Rheinische Zeitung Nos. 156,228, 230, 233 and 235 of June 5 and August 16,18, 21 and 23, 1842. The author of this article was the Young Hegelian Edgar Bauer, a leader of “The Free”. It was directed against the half-hearted attitude of the liberals. It criticised them from the positions characteristic of “The Free”, that is, from the positions of complete rejection of any progressive role of the liberal opposition to the absolutist feudal system. The clamorous tone of the article served as a pretext for persecutors of the progressive press.

168. Marx moved to Cologne in the first half of October 1842, and on October 15 he became editor of the Rheinische Zeitung.

The first English translation of this letter appeared in Karl Marx. Early Texts, Oxford, 1971, pp. 52-54.

169. Concerning the conflict between the Prussian authorities and the editorial board of the Rheinische Zeitung, which began in November 1842, see Note 104.

170. This refers to the rescript of January 21, 1842. For a criticism of this resclipt see Marx’s article “Marginal Notes to the Accusations of the Ministerial Rescript” (pp. 361-65 of this volume).

171. Marx refers to the 1842 Divorce Bill. See Note 101.

172. See Note 39.

173. Marx published the announcement of his resignation from editorship of the Rheinische Zeitung on March 17, 1843. See Note 147.

174. This refers to the radical monthly Der Deutsche Bote aus der Schweiz which Herwegh was planning to publish in Zurich in 1842 and to which Marx was invited to contribute. The plan of the publication did not materialise. Articles by various authors written for it were published in the summer of 1843 in a collection entitled Ein-und-wanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz.

175. Marx intended to enlist progressive German and French intellectuals to contribute to the prospective journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.

The publication of the journal was started by Marx and Ruge only at the beginning of 1844, after Marx had moved to Paris in the autumn of 1843. Only one double issue appeared. Its publication was discontinued mainly due to disagreements between its editors.

The first English translation of Marx’s letter appeared in Karl Marx. Early Texts, Oxford, 1971, pp. 58-60.

176. Robert Eduard Prutz’s article entitled “Die Jahrbücher der Gegenwart und die deutschen Jahrbücher” was published in the Supplement to the Rheinische Zeitung No. 43, February 12, 1843. The author’s intention was to prove that the journal Jahrbücher der Gegenwart (editor Albert Schwegler, published in Stuttgart and Tübingen), the publication of which had been announced in the press, could not be regarded, judging by its ideological tendency, as a continuation of the Deutsche Jahrbücher, which had been suppressed by the Government of Saxony.

177. Marx refers to the pamphlet by Arnold Ruge and Otto Wigand entitled An die Hohe Zweite Kammer der Sächsischen Ständversammlung. Beschwerde über die durch ein Hohes Ministerium des Innem angeordnete und 3. Januar 1843 ausgeführte Unterdrückung der Zeitschrift “Deutsche Jahrbücher für Wissenschaft und Kunst”, published in early 1843 in Brunswick.

The review of this pamphlet by Pffitzner was published in the Supplement to the Rheinische Zeitung Nos. 71 and 73, March 12 and 14, 1843.

178. Ruge’s correspondence with the German censors was published in the first volume of Anekdota zur neuesten deutschen Philosophie und Publicistik under the title “Aktenmässige Darlegung der Cenzurverhiltnisse der Hanischen und Deutschen Jahrbücher in den Jahren 1839, 1841, 1842”.

179. The Notebooks written by Marx in 1839 served as preparatory material for his future work on ancient philosophy and were widely used in his doctor’s thesis (see this volume, pp. 25-106). The Notebooks sum up the results of Marx’s research into ardent philosophy and, besides his own views, contain lengthy excerpts in Latin and Greek from the works of ardent authors, chiefly of the Epicurean school of philosophy. The extant manuscript consists of seven notebooks of which five (notebooks 1-4 and 7) carry the heading “Epicurean Philosophy” on the cover. The covers of notebooks 2-4 bear the inscription “Winter Term, 1839”. The covers of notebooks 5 and 6 are not extant. The fifth notebook has several pages missing. The last five pages of the sixth notebook contain excerpts from Hegel’s Encyclopedia, under the heading “Plan of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature”; as these are not connected with the main content of the Notebooks they are published separately (see this volume, pp. 510-14).

The Notebooks were first published in 1927 in Marx/Engels, Gesamtatisgabe, Bd. I. That edition included mainly the text written by Marx himself without the excerpts or his commentaries on them. The full text was first published in Russian in the collection: Marx and Engels, From Early Writings, Moscow, 1956. In the language of the original (with parallel translations into German of the Latin and Greek quotations) the work was first published in Marx/Engels, Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, Berlin, 1968.

An excerpt from the sixth notebook was published in English in Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, pp. 51-60.

The present edition gives the quotations from Greek and Latin authors in English. Greek and Latin terms and expressions have been left untranslated only when they were used in the German text in the author’s digressions and commentaries. Vertical lines made by Marx in the manuscript for emphasis are reproduced here in the margins. In quotations from the works of Diogenes laertius (Book X), Sextus Empiricus and Plutarch, the editors give, in square brackets, Roman figures to denote chapters and Arabic figures to denote paragraphs in accordance with the division of the text accepted in publications of the works of these authors. In some cases there are editorial interpolations within quotations (also in square brackets) made on the basis of the sources used by Mar-x to reconstruct the meaning. The general title corresponds to the author’s headings of individual notebooks and to his definition of the subject of the investigation (see foreword to the dissertation, this volume, p. 29),

180. This treatise of Aristotle is not extant. The passage referred to is to be found in Aristotle, De partibus animalium (I, 5).

181. in his translation Marx quotes Epicurus according to Petri Gassendi, Animadversiones in decimum librum Diogenes Laertii, qui est De Vita, Moribus, Placitisque Epicuri, Ludguni, 1649.

182. The followers of Epicurus received this name because the school of Epicurus in Athens founded in 307-06 B. C. was situated in a garden. The Garden became the main centre of materialism and atheism of Ancient Greece.

183. Marx apparently quotes Jakob Böhme from Ludwig Feuerbach’s book Geschichte der neuern Philosophie von Bacon von Verulam bis Benedict Spinoza, Ansbach, 1833, S. 161.

184. The fifth notebook is not extant in full. The beginning, including the cover, has been lost and the extant part has some pages missing. Still extant are also some separate sheets containing the continuation of the excerpts from the works of Seneca and Stobaeus, the beginning of which is in the extant part of the notebook, and the relevant excerpts from the works of Clement of Alexandria. In the collection From Early Writings (Russ. ed., 1956), these sheets were included in the sixth notebook, which is extant also without its cover or the usual author’s list of works quoted. There are good grounds, however, for including them in the fifth notebook as was done in Marx/Engels, Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, Berlin, 1968. The arrangement of the material of notebooks 5 and 6 in this edition corresponds to that in the Werke.

185. There are no excerpts from Book VI of Lucretius’ poem On the Nature of Things in the extant manuscript of the Notebooks.

186. See Note 1 80.

187. Apparently Marx refers to Chapter IX of Book One of the Metaphysics in which Aristotle criticises Plato’s teaching.

188. The reference is to the Enneads, a work by Plotinus.

189. There are no excerpts from Cicero’s Tusculanae quaestiones in the extant manuscript though it is mentioned by Marx on the cover of the seventh notebook. But the seventh notebook contains excerpts from Cicero’s work De finibus bonorum et malorum, which is not listed on the cover.

190. The Plan of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature consists of brief notes on the content of those paragraphs of Hegel’s work Encyclopedie der philophischen Wissewchaftem in Grundrisse, 3 Aufl., Heidelberg, 1830, which deal with the philosophy of nature. These notes were made by Marx in 1839 in three versions on five pages of the sixth notebook. The first version covers 5§ 252-334 of Hegel’s book and most closely reproduces the order in which Hegel sets forth his material. Marx departs from Hegel’s terminology here only in separate cases. The second version covers fewer paragraphs dealing with the philosophy of nature but it is marked by greater independence in systematising the material and in terminology. Most original in this respect is the third version, which, though brief, expounds the contents of Hegel’s philosophy of nature more fully than the previous ones.

191. This section contains several poems from Marx’s three albums of poems written in the late autumn of 1836 and in the winter of 1836-37. According to his daughter Laura Lafargue and his biographer Franz Mehring, who had access to his manuscripts after his death, two of these albums bore the title Book of Love, Part I and Part II, and the third, Book of Songs. Each had the following dedication: “To my dear, ever beloved Jenny von Westphalen.” lie covers of the albums with the titles and dedications are not extant. Some poems from these albums were later included by Marx in his book of verse dedicated to his father (published below in full). Recently a copybook and a notebook belonging to Karl Marx’s eldest sister Sophic were discovered among the documents of Heinrich Marx’s heirs in Trier. Alongside verses by different people they contain some by the young Marx. Most of them were taken from other copybooks, but some were new.

Marx was very critical of the literary qualities of his early poems but he believed that they conveyed his warm and sincere feelings (see this volume, p. 11). Later on, his view of them grew even more critical. Laura Lafargue, for example, wrote, “My father treated his verses very disrespectfully; whenever my parents mentioned them, they would laugh to their hearts’ content.” (Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lassalle, Stuttgart, 1902, S. 25-26.) In 1954 the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU came into possession of the two albums of Marx’s early verse from the inheritance of his grandson Edgar Longuet, and in 1960 Marcel Charles Longuet, Marx’s great-grandson, presented the Institute with the third album. A number of poems from these albums drew the attention of Marx’s biographers and translators and were published at various times, chiefly abridged, in different publications, in particular, in the books: Aus dem literarischen Nachlass von Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels und Ferdinand Lasalle, Stuttgart, 1902; J. Spargo, Karl Marx, New York,) 1910; M. Oflivier, Marx et Engels poeks, Paris, 1933; Marx/Engels, Werke, Ergänzungsband, Erster Teil, Berlin, 1968; and the magazines Yunost (Youth) No. 11, Moscow, 1958, and Inostrannaya Literatura (Foreign Literature) No. 1, Moscow, 1968.

192. This album contains 12 poems of which the ballads Lucinda, Distraught and The Pale Maiden and the poem Human Pride were later included by Marx in the book of verse dedicated to his father (see this volume, pp. 565-71, 581-83, 612-15, 584-86).

193. This album is the bulkiest of the three dedicated to Jenny von Westphalen. It contains 53 poems of which Yearning, Siren Song, Two Singers Accompanying Themselves on the Harp and Harmony were included by Marx in the book of verse dedicated to his father (see this volume, pp. 538-39, 542-45, 574-75, 580-81).

194. This album contains 22 poems of which Song to the Stars and The Song of a Sailor at Sea were included by Marx in the book of verse dedicated to his father (see this volume, pp. 608-09, 610-11). Passages from the poems My World, Feelings and Transformation published in this volume appeared in English in the translation by Meta L. Stern in the book: J. Spargo, Karl Marx, New York, 19 10, pp. 42, 43 and

44. p. 523

195. In this book the young Marx collected samples of his early poetical writings, including ballads, sonnets, romances, songs, translations of Ovid’s elegies, scenes from Oulanen a tragedy in verse, epigrams and jokes. It had as a supplement chapters from his satirical novel Scorpion and Felix. Marx mentioned this book in his letter of November 10-11, 1837 (see this volume, p. 17). Two poems, The Fiddler and Nocturnal Love (published in the first section of this volume), were published by Marx in 1841 in the journal Athenäum. The order of the poems in the book differs slightly from the order in the contents drawn up by Marx.

The book was first published in full in German in 1929. Subsequently separate poems were reprinted in biographies and other publications.

The poem To the Medical Student and excerpts from Epigrams were published in English in R. Payne’s book Marx, New York, 1968, Oulanm in The Unknown Karl Marx by the same author, New York, 1971, pp. 55-94.

196. The reference is to Christoph Gluck’s opera Amide.

197. The age of Marx’s father is stated in this document inaccurately. According to latest investigations, Heinrich Marx was born in 1777, not in 1782 (see H. Monz, Karl Marx und Trier, Verhältnisse-Beziehungen-Einflusse, Trier, 1964, S. 130).

198. Concerning Marx’s gymnasium examination papers see Note 1.

On August 17, 1835, his teacher Küpper wrote the following comment on the present composition: “It is profound in thought, brilliantly and forcefully written, deserving of praise, although the topic — the essence of union — is not elucidated, its cause is dealt with only one-sidedly, its necessity is not proved adequately.”

This essay was first published in English in R. Payne’s book, The Unknown Karl Marx, New York, 1971, pp. 39-43.

199. The manuscript of Marx’s essay in Latin was underscored in many places by the examiner Johann Hugo Wyttenbach, headmaster of the gymnasium. In the margins there are a number of remarks in Latin, some of which deal with the content of the work. Thus, there is the following remark at the end of the first paragraph, “See what a broad, almost limitless task you set yourself when you intend to examine the question in this way.” The words at the beginning of the seventh paragraph, “That the Augustan age was unlike this no one can deny”, were commented as follows: “You should have avoided altogether any comparison of this kind and description of the period preceding the Carthaginian Wars as well as the epoch of Nero.” There is a correction to the following words in one of the last paragraphs, “Tacitus also speaks of Augustus and his age with the utmost respect": “Not at all! See Annali, I, 1-10. But you could have refrained from such disquisitions”.

The general remarks at the end of the manuscript signed by Wyttenbach and Loers, teacher of Latin and Greek, say, “With the exception of some passages, which called forth the above remark, and a few mistakes, particularly at the end, the composition reveals a profound knowledge of history and of Latin. But what atrocious handwriting!”

This essay was first published in English in R. Payne’s book, The Unknown Karl Marx, New York, 1971, pp. 44-48.

200. In addition to the certificate of maturity issued to Karl Marx by the Trier. gymnasium there are extant rough copies of the certificate, an excerpt from the record of the graduation examinations at the Trier gymnasium, an extract from the report, and a list of the pupils who took the examinations.

The first rough copy of the certificate, which is kept in the archives of the Trier gymnasium, gives a more detailed account of the graduate’s knowledge of Greek: “His knowledge and ability in regard to understanding the classics are almost as good as in Latin, but his skill in translating the classics read at the gymnasium is less owing to lack of solid knowledge of grammar and because he is less sure than in Latin, although he often succeeds in explaining correctly even the more difficult passages; on the whole, he translates quite satisfactorily.”

201. Some letters of Heinrich Marx to his son have reached us in a very bad condition. Undecipherable words or phrases are marked by dots in square brackets. Square brackets are also used to indicate tentative interpretation of illegible words or phrases.

Not a single one of Karl Marx’s replies to his father’s letters during his stay at Bonn University (October 1835-July 1836) has been preserved. Of his correspondence with his father during his subsequent stay in Berlin (he moved there late in October 1836 from Trier where he had spent his summer vacation and become engaged to Jenny von Westphalen) only one letter dated November 10-11, 1837, remains (see this volume, pp. 10-21).

202. Apparently Heinrich Marx refers to §§ 7 and 60 of Immanuel Kant’s Anthologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht, Königsberg, 1798.

203. The letter bears mainly illegible markings and separate words apparently added later by Karl Marx.

204. The certificate of release is extant in the form of a copy written by an unknown person and submitted to Jena University together with the other documents sent there by Marx when he applied for a doctor’s degree for his treatise on the history of ardent philosophy (see Note 148).

205. The letter has not been found.

206. The letter was addressed to his wife and son. Apparently, it was first sent to Henriette Marx in Trier, and from there to Karl in Berlin.

207. These lines are Heinrich Marx’s last letter to his son. Heinrich died on May 10, 1838.

208. Passages from this letter were published for the first time in Russian in the book: P. Vinogradskaya, Jenny Marx, Moscow, 1964, pp. 20, 55-57.

The end of the letter is missing.

209. The original has a note written by Marx in the right-hand corner: “Permission to issue the leaving certificate to Herr Marx, student of [the Faculty of] Law, 18.3.4l.”

Before the text filled in by the student the form has the following notification: “In accordance with the Ministry directives of September 26, 1829, every student must occupy at lectures during the whole term only that seat the number of which is stated by the respective tutor in the record sheet. If any student is prevented from attending lectures for several days or longer due to any circumstances, no one is allowed to take his seat under any pretext.”

210. The certificate bears the remark “To No. 26” made in April 1841 at Jena University on registration of the application and other documents submitted by Marx for the award of a doctor’s degree (see Note 148).

211. See Note 148.

212. Jenny von Westphalen uses ironically the expression “Hegeling gentlemen”, a derogatory name given to the followers of Hegel by their rabid opponent Heinrich Leo, historian and publicist. Leo wrote against the Young Hegehans the pamphlet Die Hegelingen.Actenstücke und Belege zu der s. g. Denunciation der ewigen Wahrheit Halle, 1838.

213. The announcement of the publication of Bruno Bauer’s book Kritik der evangelischen Geschichte den Synoptiker and his three small articles were carried in the Supplement to the Allgemeine Zeitung of August 1, 1841.

214. This petition was compiled on January 30, 1843, and illegally circulated among the inhabitants of Cologne. By February 18 it had been signed by 911 citizens. The petition was rejected on March 31, 1843.

Similar petitions requesting the lifting of the ban on the Rheinische Zeitung were addressed to the King of Prussia from Aachen, Barmen, Wesel, Düsseldorf and a number of other towns. However, all steps taken in defence of the newspaper were fruitless.

215. The joint meeting of the shareholders of the Rheinische Zeitung and the editorial board was held in the Cologne casino and lasted for six hours -from 10 a. m. till 1 p.m. and from 5 p.m. till 8 p.m. The debates were so long because of a sharp struggle between the moderate-liberal majority of the meeting who were prepared to denounce the radical-democratic views expounded by the newspaper and to have the petition couched in a tone of loyalty, and those who stood for firm defence of the right of the opposition press to exist. The latter were headed by Marx and upheld his policy as editor. The record of Marx’s statements was very brief. Marx and his followers, however, succeeded in persuading the meeting to refrain from officially denouncing the trend of the newspaper (the petition denounced only the sharp tone of its statements), and this gave the radicals grounds for signing it despite its extremely moderate form.

Brief reports of the meeting were carried in the Aachener Zeitung No. 46, February 15, and in the Frankfurt Journal No. 52, February 21, 1843.

The minutes of the general meeting of the shareholders were later published with insignificant changes in the book Rheinische Briefe und Akten zur eschichte der politischen Bewegung 1830-1850, Essen, 1919, Bd. 1, S. 436-47. The present volume reproduces the minutes according to the book of minutes.

216. For details concerning the conflict, see Note 104. This was followed by von Schapees reply to Renard on November 19, 1842 (see Rheinische Briefe und Akten zur Geschichte dei. politischen Bewegung 1830-1850, Essen, 1919, Bd. 1, S. 380-82).

217. The newspaper was suppressed within the borders of Prussia by the Cabinet Order of December 28, 1842 (see this volume, pp. 311-30 and Note 115).

218. Part of this petition was published as a footnote in the book Rheinische Briefe und Akten zur Geschichte der politischen Bewegung 1830-1850, Essen, 1919, Bd. 1, S. 448.

219. See Note 175.

220. This apparently refers to the book: Marie Lafargue (Laffarge), Memoires de Marie Cappelle, veuve Lafarge, écrits par elle-même. In 1841 another book on the same subject was published in Leipzig: Marie Lafarge, verurtheilt als Giftmischerin und angeklagt ass Diamantendiebin. Criminalgeschichte den neuesten Zeit.

Editors’ Footnotes from Volume 2

1. The Bedouin was Engels’ first work to appear in print. He wrote it at the beginning of his stay in Bremen, where he worked as a clerk in a trading company from July 1838 to March 1841. When preparing this poem for the press the editors of the Bremisches Conversationsblatt changed the last stanza without the author’s permission. The original text is cited by Engels in his letter to the Graeber brothers dated September 17-18, 1838.

2. In this poem Engels ridiculed the heated polemic between the weekly Der Bremer Stadtbote and the newspaper Bremisches Unterhaltungsblatt (see Engels’ letters to his brother Hermann of March 11-12, 1839, and to his sister Marie of March 12, 1839). For fun Engels sent this poem to Der Bremer Stadtbote under the pen-name of Theodor H. (Hildebrand). Not realising its ironical character, the editors published the poem as a regular item against the rival newspaper. The editors of the Bremisches Unterhaltungsblatt, however, perceived the poem’s irony directed against Der Bremer Stadtbote and reprinted it with appropriate comments.

In this volume the poem is given according to the Bremisches Unterhaltungsblatt since the Publishers do not possess a copy of Der Bremer Stadtbote.

3. As can be seen from Engels’ letter to his sister Marie of March 12, 1839 (see this volume, pp. 419-20), this poem was sent to Der Bremer Stadtbote in a fuller version. The publication of Th. Hildebrandt’s poem Book Wisdom was mentioned in the Bremer Wöchentliche Nachrichten No. 36, 2. Beilage, S. 2, for March 25, 1839. However, the Publishers do not possess a copy of Der Bremer Stadtbote containing this poem.

4. “Letters from Wuppertal” is Engels’ first journalistic work with which he started his contributions to the Telegraph für Deutschland, a progressive Hamburg journal published by the Young Germany literary group. In November 1839 Engels’ articles began to appear there under the pseudonym of Oswald (first S. Oswald, then Friedrich Oswald).

The “Letters” evoked a lively response in Barmen and Elberfeld, two neighbouring towns situated in the Wupper valley (in 1930 they merged to form one town, Wuppertal). Wilhelm Blank, a friend of Engels’, wrote to Wilhelm Graeber on May 24, 1839, that all copies of the journal containing the article had been bought up immediately. The Wuppertal philistines were furious with the anonymous author (many believed that the article had been written by some local celebrity, the poet Ferdinand Freiligrath in particular). For the reaction of the Wuppertal bourgeois to the article see also Engels’ letter to Wilhelm Graeber written about April 28-30, 1839.

5. Friends of Light — a religious trend opposed to pietism (see Note 7), which dominated in the official Lutheran Church. This opposition was one of the expressions of the dissatisfaction of the German bourgeois with Germany’s monarchic regime, based on the estates system, in the 1830s and 1840s.

6. After 1817, when the Lutherans were united with the Reformists (Calvinists) in a compulsory union, its opponents, the Old Lutherans, split away to form a separate trend defending the “true” Lutheran Church.

7. This refers to pietism, a trend in the Lutheran Church that emerged in Germany in the 17th century. Distinguished by extreme mysticism, it rejected rites and attached special importance to personal religious experience.

8. An allusion to the dispute in 1075-76 between Pope Gregory VII and Henry IV, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the two protagonists in the struggle for supremacy between ecclesiastical and temporal power.

9. After the Vienna Congress (1814-15), many members of the student gymnastic associations, which emerged in the course of the struggle against Napoleonic rule, opposed the reaction of the monarchist landowners and called for the unification of Germany. On October 18, 1817, on the occasion of the tercentenary of the Reformation and the fourth anniversary of the battle of Leipzig, the German students organised the Wartburg festival, which turned into a demonstration against the Metternich regime. In 1819, the student opposition and other free-thinking intellectuals were accused of “demagogy” by the Karlsbad Conference of Ministers of the Chief German States and subjected to reprisals.

10. Hermann (Arminiusy — chief of the Cherusci and other German tribes which defeated the Romans in the Teutoburg Woods (9 A. D.).

11. Evangelisch Kirchen-Zeitung Nos. 76-80, September 22-October 6, 1838.

12. Engels is referring to the review of J. Ch. F. Winkler’s book Harfenklänge printed in the Telegraph für Deutschland No. 208 in December 1838 under the title “Zeichen der Zeit”.

13. Barmen and Elberfeld were incorporated in the Kingdom of Prussia along with the other territories of the former Dukedom of Berg by decision of the Vienna Congress of 1814-15 and became parts of her Rhine Province.

14. Köster’s article entitled “Kurze Darstellung der Dkhtungsarten” was published in the Neunter Bericht über die höhere Stadtschule in Barmen, Barmen, 1837.

15. F. Haase’s review “Übersicht über 9 lateinische Grammatiken” was printed in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung Nos. 65-70, August 1838, Jena and Leipzig, Ergänzungsblätter.

16. J. C. H. Clausen’s “Pindaros der Lyriker” was published in the Programm des Gymnasium Elberfeld, 1834.

17. Rektoratsschulen was the name given to elementary five-class schools in the Rhine Province and Westphalia.

18. Young Germany (Junges Deutschland) — a literary group that emerged in Germany in the 1830s and was under the influence of Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne. In their fiction and journalistic works, the writers of this group (also known as Young Literature), Gutzkow, Wienbarg, Mundt, Laube, Jung and others, expressed the opposition sentiments of the petty bourgeois and intellectuals who advocated freedom of conscience and the press, the introduction of a constitution, the emancipation of women, and so on. Their political views were vague and inconsistent; many of them soon became ordinary liberals.

For the demgogues see Note 9.

19. Engels is referring to the owners of the Barmen trading company J. P. von Eynern & S6hne, where Ferdinand Freiligrath worked as a clerk in 1837-39.

20. Engels is referring to the following reviews: Dr. F. Dingelstedt, “Ferdinand Freiligrath. Ein Literaturbild”, published in the jahrbuch der Literatur, 1. jg., Hamburg, 1839, and Moritz Carrière, “Gedichte von Ferdinand Freiligrath, Stuttgart und Tübingen, 1838”, published in the Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik No. 8, January 1839, Berlin.

21. Allusions to the folk-tale Die Unkenkönigin (The Frog Queen) can be found in Freiligrath’s poem Schwalbenmärchen and to the tale Schneewittchen (Snow-White) in his poem Meerfahrt.

Below Engels mentions Freiligrath’s poems printed in the following publications: Freiligrath, Gedichte, Stuttgart und Tübingen, 1838; Prinz Eugen, der edle Ritter in the Rheinisches Odeon. Hg. v. I. Hub, F. Freifigrath u. A. Schnezler, 1. jg., Coblenz, 1836; Freifigrath, Der ausgewanderte Dichter (Bruchstlache eines unvolleneten Cyklus). Sechs Gedichte ohne besondere Überschriften, published in the Rheinisches Odeon 2. jg., Diasseldorf, 1838; Freiligrath, Der ausgewanderte Dichter. Weitere Bruchstücke. Fünf Gedichte ohne einzeine Uberschriften, published in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stäne No. 218, September 10, 1836.

22. A reference to the second instalment of Freiligrath’s cycle of poems Der ausgewandeu Dichter, published in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Stände No. 218, September 10, 1836 (see Note 21).

23. Engels gives this ironical name, Montanus Eremita (mountain hermit), to Vincenz Zuccalmaglio, a German writer who under the pen-name of Montanus published, ü 1836, the book: Die Vorzeit der Länder Cleve-Mark, Jülich-Berg und Westphalen.

24. Engels is referring to the following publication: Johann Pol, Gedichte, 1. Teil, Geistliche Gesänge und Lieder, 2. Teil, Vemischte Gedichte, Heedfeld, 1837.

25. In this poem Engels expressed his attitude to the weekly Der Bremer Stadbote, to which for fun he had sent several months in succession his poems (including To the Enemies, see this volume, p. 5) under the signature of Theodor Hildebrand, passing himself off as its supporter. This poem is also quoted, with minor stylistic changes, in Engels’ letter to Wilhelm Graeber written about April 28-30, 1839.

26. Expressing the attitude of the local bourgeoisie to Engels’ “Letters from Wuppertal”, the Elberfelder Zeitung on April 12, 1839, published an article by Martin Runkel, its editor, sharply attacking the “Letters” and their author. The “Open Letter to Dr. Runkel” was Engels’ reply to this article.

The Elberfelder Zeitung published the “Open Letter” with the following footnote: “We found this article in our premises yesterday without knowing who had sent it in. We are printing it word for word since we wish to be impartial but, for our part, we would note that we shall defend our generally expressed statements in detail only if the Wuppertal letter-writer names himself, just as we have done.”

27. An allusion to Martin Runkel’s poem Zu Grabbe’s Bildniss printed in the Rheinisches Odeon, 2. jg., Düsseldorf, 1838.

For the Young Germany writers see Note 18.

28. This item was published in the Telegraph für Deutschland in the “Kleine Chronik” section. Engels also wrote about the sermon in question by F. W. Krummacher in his letter to Wilhelm Graeber on April 30,1839.

29. These are the following publications: Volksbücher, hrsg. v. G. 0. Marbach, Leipzig, 1838-39; Deutsche Volksbücher nach den ächtesten Ausgaben hergestellt v. Dr. Karl Simrock, Berlin, 1839; and Deutsche Volksbücher, neu gereimt v. K. Simrock, Berlin, 1839.

30. Besides the above-mentioned Marbach edition, the following publications are referred to here: Der hörneree Siegfried. Eine wunderschöne Historie von dem gehörnten Siegfried. Was wunderliche Ebentheuer dieser theure Ritter ausgestanden, sehr denkwürdig und mit Lust zu lose, Cöln (nd.), and Buch der schönten Geschichten und Sagen für Alt und Jung wiedrerzühlt von Gustav Schwab, 2 Teile, Stuttgart, 1836-37.

31. The publication referred to is Leben und Thaten des grossen Helden Heinrich des Löwen, Henog zu Brautuchweig, Einbeck (n.d.).

32. On December 10, 1835, the Federal Assembly banned the works by writers of the Young Germany group (see Note 18). Some of them, such as Gutzkow’s Wally, die Zweifierin raised the question of women’s emancipation.

The Federal Assembly (Diet) of the German Confederation (1815-66) consisted of representatives of the German states and was a pillar of the conservative monarchical order in Germany.

33. An allusion to Tieck’s comedy Kaiser Octavianus which was based on a German popular book of the same name and published in Ludwig Tieck’s Schriften Bd. 1, Berlin, 1828.

34. Gottfried von Strassburg’s poem Tristan und Isolde was written in the early 13th century.

35. Die neue Bibel and Das junge Palästina are the titles of the parts of Karl Beck’s collection of poems Nächte. Gepanzerk Lieder, which appeared in Leipzig in 1838.

36. In his article “Der Schwabenspiegel” (in the Jahrbuch der Literatur, 1. jg., Hamburg, 1839), Heine criticised the “Swabian poetical school” which comprised a number of poets and literary critics representative of late romanticism, including Ludwig Uhland, Justinus Kerner, Gustav Schwab, Wolfgang Menzel and Gustav Pfizer.

37. Song of Ludwig — a poem by an unknown medieval poet written in the late 9th century in the Franconian dialect. It glorifies the victory of Ludwig Ill, King of the Western Franks, over the Normans in 881.

38. A reference to Gustav Kühne’s book Weibliche und männliche Charaktere, 2 Teile, Leipzig, 1838; and to his article “Deutsche Lyük. Karl Beck, Ferdinand Freiligrath” published anonymously in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt Nos. 223 and 224, November 13 and 15, 1838.

39. Engels is referring to the following passage from Ludolf Wienbarg’s article “Ludwig Uhland als Dramatiker”, included in his book Die Dramatiker der jetztzeit, 1. Heft, Altona, 1839: “Gustav Pfizer has spoken in and out and round about on the character and talent of Uhland, as a pupil about his teacher, as a friend about his friend and not a word about Uhland the dramatist, What should one conclude from this? Simply that a certain younger writer is right in calling the latter mediocre. The pamphlet by Pfizer which I have in mind appeared about two years ago. It compares Uhland with Rfickert, or rather, it weighs the talents of the two. Let us say it in passing, rather like a grocer”.

Pfizer’s pamphlet Uhland und Rückert. Ein kritischer Versueh wag printed in 1837.

40. Beck’s poem Schlaf wohll included in his collection Stille Lieder was originally published in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt No. 126, June 30, 1838.

41. Act I of Beck’s Saul was published in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt Nos. 216-1 9 for November 4, 5, 7 and 8, 1839. On November 25, the Allgemeine Theater-Chronik (No. 143) printed a review by J. P. Lyser entitled “Episoden. Carl Beck als Dramatiker”, while the Telegraph für Deutschland, in its “Kleine Chronik” section, published an anonymous review of Act 1 with a note by Karl Gutzkow.

42. A reference to Gutzkow’s tragedy König Saul, which appeared in print shortly before the publication of Act 1 of Beck’s tragedy Saul.

43. In its issue No. 203, immediately following Engels’ article, the Telegraph für Deutschland printed an article about Beck by Gutzkow entitled “Ergenzung” (“Supplement”) (the end of the article was published in No. 204 under the title “Karl Beck”). In this article Gutzkow subjected Beck’s Stille Lieder to even sharper criticism, emphasising the “childish nature” of his poetry.

44. A reference to the bourgeois revolution of July 1830 in France, the main events of which took place between July 27 and August 2.

45. The Second Silesian School — a literary trend in Germany in the second half of the 17th century that expressed the sentiments of the feudal nobility. Its main exponents were Christian Hofmannswaldau and Daniel Lohenstein.

46. Engels is referring to the following publications: Gesammette Werke des Grafen August von Platen. In Einem Band, Stuttgart und Tübingen, 1839; and Gedichte am dem ungedmaten Nachlasse des Grafen August von PlatenHallermünde. Als Anhang zu den bei Cotta erschienenen itedichten Platem, Strassburg, 1839.

47. Pentarchy — Europe’s political system in the period of the Restoration. It was based on the supremacy of the five Great Powers, England, France, Russia, Austria and Prussia.

48. This is a translation into German of the poem A La invención de La imprenta by Manuel José Quintana, a Spanish poet, politician and supporter of the 18th-century French Enlightenment. The poem was first published in Madrid in 1803 in Quintana’s book Poesias. Engels’ translation was published together with the original in the Gutenbergs-Album issued on the occasion of the quatercentenary of the invention of printing (the official date of the invention is 1440). The anniversary was widely celebrated in Germany in June 1840.

49. Hegelings was a pejorative name for the followers of the Hegelian school coined by their opponent Heinrich Leo, the historian and journalist. In 1838 he published in Hane a pamphlet entitled Die Hegelingen. Actenstücke und Belege zu der S.g. Denunciation der ewigen Wahr which fiercely attacked the Young Hegelians.

50. In his Kampf und Sieg Franz Carl Joel Jacoby extolled the Basques for their support of the Carlists in Spain and the struggle waged against the liberals by the ultramontane clergy in Belgium, in particular the intrigues of the Belgian Jesuit Order which he called the “Belgian nightingale”.

Carlists — an absolutist clerical group in Spain that supported Don Carlos, brother of Ferdinand VII, in his claims to the Spanish throne. The Civil War of 1833-40 unleashed by the Carlists (known as the First Carlist War) was in fact a clash between the Catholic feudal and the liberal bourgeois elements in Spain and ended with the defeat of the Carlists.

51. This article appears to have been written in connection with rumours about the proposed suspension of the Zeitung für den Deutschen Adel, which started publication in January 1840. However, the newspaper continued to appear until 1844.

52. This refers to the attacks by Martin Luther, founder of the Lutheran Church, on the Catholic Church and papism in which he relied on the original Greek texts of the Gospels (hence Engels’ comparison of them to “Greek fire”). On October 31, 1517, the beginning of the Reformation in Germany, Luther posted up on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg his 95 Theses refuting certain dogmas of medieval Catholic faith and containing the fundamentals of Lutheranism. An important place in his subsequent activities was occupied by the translation into German and corresponding interpretation of the New and the Old Testament. He completed his translation of the Bible in 1534.

53. Engels is quoting from the “Ankfindigung und Einladung zur Subscription auf die mit dem 1. januar 1840 erscheinende Zeitung für den Deutschen Adel”, published in the Sprecher oder Rheinisch-Westphälischer Anzeiger No. 69, August 28, 1839, and other papers.

54. An allusion to the leading article by Fouqué, editor of the Zeitung für den Deutschen Adel, published in its first issue on January 1, 1840, under the title “Vorwort an unsere Leser”.

55. A reference to Kant’s book Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf, Königsberg, 1795.

56. This work consists of two articles. Engels published them in the Mitternachtzeitung für gebildete Leser, a liberal newspaper that appeared in Brunswick, because he wanted to express his views freely on Karl Gutzkow and the Young Germany group (see Note 18), something he could not do in Gutzkow’s Telegraph für Deutschland. Engels apparently intended to continue the series by dealing with other aspects of the German literary scene in the late 1830s and the early 1840s, but was forced to cease contributing to the Miternachtzeitung because of his differences with its editor, Eduard Brinckmeier (Engels mentions them in his letter to Levin Schücking of July 2, 1840; see this volume, p. 496).

57. Gutzkow’s article “Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. 1830-1838” contained a criticism of German literature of that period. It was published in the first and only issue of the jahrbuch der Literatur, which appeared in Hamburg in 1839.

58. The première of Gutzkow’s tragedy Richard Savage oder: Der Sohn einer Mutter took place on July 15, 1839, in Frankfurt am Main. Originally it was printed privately under the pen-name of Leonhard Falk. It appeared under the author’s real name in Leipzig in 1842 in his Dramatische Werke, Bd. 1.

59. Gutzkow’s tragedy König Saul was printed in Hamburg in 1839 as a separate book.

60. A reference to Gutzkow’s Marino Falieri and Hamlet in Wittenberg published in a collection of his unfinished writings entitled Skizzenbuch, Cassel and Leipzig, 1839.

61. The scene in question is from Gutzkow’s Wally, die Zweiflerin, Book Two.

62. In the preface to his book Die Dramatiker der jetztzeit (see Note 39) Wienbarg wrote: “I shall begin with Uhland because I see in this misunderstood, original and simple dramatist, so childlike in his manhood, to a certain extent the pure, unaffected type of German dramatist”.

63. Engels is referring to the anonymous article “Moderne Romane” in the Rheinische Jahrbuch für Kunst und Poesie, 1. jrg., Köln, 1840, which reviewed Gutzkow’s novel Blasedow und seine Sohne, printed in Stuttgart in 1838, and other works by contemporary writers.

64. Griseldis, a drama by Friedrich Halm (the pen-name of Ernst Münch-Bellinghausen), was staged in Vienna in 1835 and was a great success. However, when it was published in 1837 it was sharply criticised.

65. After the première of Gutzkow’s Richard Savage in Stuttgart, the local weekly Deutscher Courier (No. 44, November 3, 1839) carried a review of it entitled “Erste Vorstellung von Richard Savage, oder der Sohn einer Mutter, Trauerspiel in 5 Aufzügen von Karl Gutzkow”.

66. The première of Werner, oder Herz und Welt took place in Hamburg on February 21, 1840. The play was published in Gutzkow’s Dramatische Werke, Bd. 1, Leipzig, 1842.

67. One of the reasons why Engels wrote this article, “Modern Polemics”, the second in his series Modern Literary Life, was the publication in the Telegraph für Deutschland (No. 3, 1840) of the article “Haben wir einen modernen Styl?” by Ludwig Wihl, a representative of the Young Germany group. Below Engels refers to this article.

68. This refers to the satirical comedy by Creizenach, Der schwäbische Apoll, published in 1839, which poked fun at the Swabian school (see Note 36).

Beck’s article “Literatur in Ungarn” was printed in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt in September 1837 (Nos. 173-81).

69. An allusion to the ban in 1835 on works by writers of the Young Germany movement (see Note 32).

70. Mundt has no work by this title. In all probability Engels is referring to his book Charaktere und Situationen. Vier Bücher Novellen, Shizzen, Wanderungen auf Reisen und durch die neue Literatur, 2 Teile, Wismar, 1837.

71. In the second issue of his Altona journal Freihafen for 1838, Mundt published an article entitled “Lebenserinnerungen von Münch”, reviewing the memoirs of the German historian and publicist Ernst Münch-Bellinghausen which appeared in Karlsruhe in 1836-38.

72. Gutzkow’s essays Literatische Elfenschicksale. Ein Mädchen ohne Anspielung, directed against Mundt, were printed in the Telegraph für Deutschland in February (Nos. 31, 32, 35 and 36) and April (Nos. 65-68) 1838. The next year they were included in Gutzkow’s Skizzenbuch under the title Die literarischen Elfen, Ein Märchen ohne Atupielung.

73. Engels is referring to Deutschlands jüngste Literatur- und Kulturepoche, a work by the German writer and journalist Hermann Marggraff that appeared in Leipzig in 1838.

74. This article was published anonymously in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt (Nos. 192-93) for October 1-2, 1838; Kühne sharply criticised Gutzkow’s literary work and his novels Seraphine and Blasedow und seine Söhne.

75. Heine’s article “Der Schwabenspiegel” was published in the jahrbuch der Literatur (1839) in distorted form. in a special statement published in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt on February 8, 1839, Heine renounced his authorship.

76. Under the press laws in the states of the German Confederation, only books exceeding 20 printed sheets were not liable to preliminary censorship.

77. The article criticising Gutzkow’s Richard Savage was published in Kühne’s Zeitung für die elegante Welt (No. 135) on July 13, 1839, under the title “Richard Savage, oder: grosse Geister begegnen sich”.

Ludwig Wihl’s declaration (Zeitung für die elegante Welt No. 102, May 28, 1839) was directed against Heine. The same issue contained a mock reply by Kühne signed Hektor, jagähund bei Hoffmann und Campe in Hamburg. On April 18-20, 1839, Heine had published in Kühne’s newspaper, under the title “Schriftstellernäten”, an open letter to Julius Campe, publisher of the Jahrbuch der Literatur, accusing Wihl of distorting his article “Der Schwabenspiegel”, and calling him Campe’s hound (Jagähund).

78. The dispute between Beck and Gutzkow started after the latter had published in the Telegraph für Deutschland No. 190 (November 1839), in the “Kleine Chronik” section, a note drawing attention to the resemblance, suggestive of imitation, between Beck’s Saul and Gutzkow’s König Saul. Beck replied with a sharply-worded declaration in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt of November 25, 1839. Concerning Gutzkow’s “Supplement”, written later to Engels’ critical article “Karl Beck” (published in the Telegraph für Deutschland), see Note 43.

79. This poem was published in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt on February 8, 1838.

80. Thiersch’s song Ich bin ein Preusse was published in the book: Lieder und Gedichte des Dr. Bernhard Thiersch, von seinen Freunden in und bei Halberstadt für sich herausgegeben, Halberstadt, 1833.

81. Lot’s wife was changed into a pillar of salt for having looked back regretfully at the condemned cities of Sodom and Gomorrah after God had warned Lot to flee from them with his family (Genesis 19).

82. The Calvinist Synod, which met in Dordrecht (Holland) from November 13, 1618, to May 9, 1619, condemned the Arminian sect for its non-conformist views and reasserted strictly Calvinist dogmas.

83. This refers to the second issue of the book by Ferdinand Freiligrath and Levin Schücking, Das malerische und romantische Westphalen, published in Barmen and Leipzig in 1840, some time after the publication of this article. The first issue appeared in 1839.

84. The copy of the above-mentioned book with the dedication “In memory of Münster” (“Andenken an Münster”) was presented to Engels during his travels round Westphalia in May 1840 by the writer Levin Schücking (see Engels’ letter to him of June 18, 1840; this volume, pp. 494-96).

Annette Elisabeth von Droste-Hülshoff’s book Gedichte came out in Münster in 1838 under the initials D. H.

85. The review bore the title “Richard Savage in Leipzig. Correspondenz” and was published in Nos. 95, 97-99 of the Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst for April 20, 22-24, 1840.

86. The Gutenberg festival — the quater-centenary of the invention of printing (see Note 48).

87. The Customs Union (Zollverein) of German states was set up in 1834. The member states (originally numbering eighteen) established a common customs frontier. Prussia played the leading role in the Union. The Hanseatic towns of Bremen, Lübeck and Hamburg were not members of this Union.

88. Here and below Engels plays on the titles of the following works by the Spanish dramatist Calderón: Mantible Bridge, Doctor of His Honour, The Daughter of the Air, April-and-May Morning, The Constant Prince and Life Is a Dream.

89. This report was printed in the Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser in the summer of 1841, a year after it was written. As can be seen from Engels’ letter to his sister Marie of July 7-9, 1840 (see this volume, pp. 498-500), he made an outing to Bremerhaven on July 5, 1840. It is evident from the report that it was written immediately after the outing.

Bremerhaven-an independent town in North-West Germany, Bremen’s outer harbour in the mouth of the Weser. In 1939 it became part of Wesermünde.

90. Bremen, the capital of an ecclesiastic dukedom in the early Middle Ages and one of the leading Hanseatic ports in the 13th century, was declared a free imperial town in 1646, but later repeatedly came under the rule of various neighbouring foreign and German princes. It resumed the status of a free town by the Final Act of the Vienna Congress in 1815.

91. Patrimonial court were feudal courts based on the landowner’s right to try and punish his peasants. They were not finally abolished in Germany until 1877.

92. The “Native Americans” party emerged in the U.S.A. in 1835. It advocated privileges for persons horn in the United States. Under its pressure the period of permanent residence in the country for immigrants wishing to acquire U. S. citizenship was increased from 7 to 21 years.

93. This refers to the struggle by the rising bourgeoisie of Bremen to abolish the oligarchic system of government by the old merchant aristocracy. Self-government was not introduced in Bremen until April 1849, during the German revolution. It was abolished in 1854 and power again passed to 150 patrician merchant families.

94. Rationalism here means the trend in Protestant German theology which enjoyed a considerable following in the 18th and the early 19th century. The rationalists sought to combine theology with philosophy and to prove that “divine truths” could be understood by reason.

95. The Song of Anno, a poem written in the Central German dialect in the late 11th or the early 12th century in praise of Archbishop Anno of Cologne, subsequently canonised.

96. Castra vetera (ancient camp) — an ancient Roman military station, situated on the left bank of the Rhine, where the dry of Xanten later grew up.

97. For the demagogues see Note 9. The persecution of the demagogues increased in the 1830s, after the July revolution in France, which had a strong impact on the German states.

98. Engels wrote this article following the publication, in Leipzig in 1840, of Arndt’s book Erinnerungen aus dem äusseren Leben. The editors of the Telegraph für Deutschland provided the name of the author, F. Oswald (Engels’ pen-name), with an asterisk referring the reader to the following footnote: “A much discussed publication, reviewed by the Telegraph.”

99. Engels is comparing Arndt to Eckart, a hero from medieval German tales, who in the Tannhäuser legend stands on guard at Venusberg and warns those approaching of the danger of Venus’ charms.

100. The Constitution of 1812, adopted in the interests of the liberal nobility and the liberal bourgeoisie, limited the king’s power by diets and did away with certain survivals of feudalism. The return to power of the feudal and clerical forces after the country’s liberation from Napoleon’s rule led, in 1814, to the repeal of this constitution, which became the banner of the liberal constitutionalist movement in Spain and other European countries.

101. This refers to the congresses of the Holy Alliance (founded by the Vienna Congress on September 26, 1815) held in Aachen (1818), Troppau (1820), Laibach (1821) and Verona (1822), at which the European monarchs and their ministers worked out measures for protecting “legitimist” regimes restored after the victory over Napoleon and for suppressing revolutionary and national liberation movements.

102. In 1804, in France and subsequently some countries in Western and South Western Europe which were dependent on Napoleon (Italy, the Netherlands, the Kingdom of Westphalia, Belgium and others), a Civil Code (Code Napoleon) was introduced instead of the archaic private law based largely on pandects, part of the Roman Code drawn up in 528-34 under Justinian I, Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire.

103. The Hallische Jahrbücher für deutsche Wissenschaft und Kunst Nos. 281 and 282, for November 23 and 24, 1840, carried Arnold Ruge’s review of Florencourt’s book Politische-kirchliche und literarische Zustände in Deutschland. Ein journalistischer Beitrag zu den jahren 1838 und 1839, Leipzig, 1840. The review was entitled “Friedrich von Florencourt und die Kategorieen der politischen Praxis”.

104. The Burschenschaften (fraternities) were German student organisations that arose in the course of liberation war against Napoleon. They advocated German unification, but Right-wing nationalistic views were also current among them.

105. The historical school of law — a trend in German historiography and jurisprudence in the late 18th century. The representatives of this school, Gustav Hugo, Friedrich Karl von Savigny and others, sought to justify the privileges of the nobility and feudal institutions by referring to the inviolability of historical traditions.

106. This refers to the London Convention concluded on July 15, 1840, between England, Russia, Austria and Prussia, on. the one hand, and Turkey, on the other, on rendering military aid to the Turkish Sultan against the Egyptian Pasha Mohammed Ali, who was supported by France.

107. See Note 47.

108. This poem was written on the occasion of the transfer, in 1840, of Napoleon 118 remains from St. Helena to Paris.

109. In Greek mythology, the nymph Arethusa, daughter of Nereus and Doris, pursued by the river-god Alpheus fled, by swimming over the sea or crossing the sea bed, to Sicily where she turned into a spring. Several other springs in ancient Greece bore the name of Arethusa.

110. ‘Positive philosophy’ — a mystical religious trend (represented by Christian Hermann Weisse, Immanuel Hermann Fichte junior, Franz Xaver von Baader, Anton Günther, and Schelling in his late period) which criticised Hegel’s philosophy from the right. The supporters of this trend sought to subordinate philosophy to religion by declaring divine revelation to be the only source of “positive” knowledge, and labelled as “negative” any philosophy which proceeded from rational knowledge.

111. Bremen’s basic laws dated back to the Middle Ages: the Tafel (Table) was drawn up in 1433 and the Neue Eintracht (New Concord) in 1534.

112. This folk epic was published in Lübeck in 1498 in the Low German — dialect (Reyneke Vos).

113. Engels is referring to Reinhold Köstlin’s article “Die deutschen Dichter und ihr Publikum”, published in the journal Europa. Chronik der gebildeten Welt, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1840.

114. The words “apris moi Le déluge” (“after me the deluge”) are attributed to Louis XV of France. They were also quoted by Frederick II of Prussia, in a letter to Prince Heinrich of Prussia dated October 18, 1782.

The defeat of the Prussian troops by Napoleon in the battle of Jena on October 14, 1806, led to Prussia’s surrender.

115. On May 31, 1840, Prussia marked the centenary of Frederick II’s ascent to the throne. By the interregnum of twenty years Engels means the period between 1786, the year of Frederick II’s death, and 1806, when the Prussian troops were routed at Jena.

116. This essay describes Engels’ impressions of his travels in Switzerland and Italy in mid-May 1841. He started from Barmen, to which he had returned in the middle of March 1841 after his almost three-year stay in Bremen. ‘ne essay was not completed. Part I was evidently to he followed by Part II, but it did not appear, probably because the Athenäum, the Young Hegelian weekly in which this article was printed, was banned in late December 1841.

117. In 1839 the radical government of the canton of Zurich offered David Strauss a professorship at Zurich University, which caused a sharp conflict between the radicals and conservative-clerical circles. On September 6, 1839, Strauss’ opponents, headed by Bernhard Hirzel, a priest from the village of Pfäffikon (Engels dubbed his followers “Pfäffikon guardians of Zion”, i.e., guardians of the orthodox faith), staged an armed demonstration in Zurich. But even before the demonstration took place the government was compelled to withdraw the invitation and later resigned.

118. Engels is quoting Petrarch’s 261st sonnet from his cycle Canzoniere (“In visa e in morte di Madonna Laura”) in the following German translation, possibly his own:

119. In the Holy Roman Empire (which comprised Germany, Austria, part of Italy, Bohemia, Burgundy, the Netherlands and other countries, and existed from 962 to 1806) the Emperor was elected, according to the Golden Bull of 1356, by the seven most powerful princes.

120. This article opens a series of Engels’ writings directed against Schelling. By this time Schelling had abandoned many rationalist elements of his former views and had become a prophet of the mystical religious “positive philosophy” (see Note 110). He was invited to Berlin by Frederick William IV of Prussia, as a counterweight to the Hegelian school, particularly the Young Hegelians.

On November 15, 1941, Schelling started his course of lectures at Berlin University. Engels attended them as a non-matriculated student. He had come to Berlin from Barmen in the latter half of September 1841 and did military training there in an artillery brigade until August 1842.

Excerpts from Schelling’s lectures which continued until March 18, 1842, are quoted in Engels’ works from his own notes. Only a small part of these lectures were printed at the time (Schelling’s Verlesungen in Berlin, Darstellung und Kritik der Hauptpunkte derselben, mit besonderer Beziehung auf das Verhältniss zwischen Chistenthum und Philosophie von Dr. J. Frauenstadt, Berlin, 1842), the greater part being published only after the author’s death in his Complete Works. See F. W. Schelling, Philosophie der Offenbarung. Simmtliche Werke, II Abt., Bd. I-IV, Stuttgart und Augsburg, 1856-1861.

121. This pamphlet is Engels’ major work directed against Schelling’s mystical religious concepts. It was written at the same time as Schelling was lecturing at Berlin University and is mainly a critique of the opening lectures of Schelling’s course.

The pamphlet was published anonymously (it was not until the summer of 1842, in an article against Jung which he signed Friedrich Oswald, that Engels confirmed his authorship; see this volume, p. 295) and soon attracted the attention of various public circles. Schelling’s followers described Engels’ criticism as “absurd attacks” (see the Jahrbuch der deutschen Universitäten, II, Leipzig, 1842, S. 22), while the Young Hegelians acclaimed the pamphlet. The Deutsche Jahrbücher, a Young Hegelian journal, published a special article on the pamphlet (in Nos. 126-28, May 28, 30-31, 1842) by its editor, Arnold Ruge, which noted the author’s spirit and lucidity in his criticism of Schelling’s views. When Ruge learned later that the pamphlet was written by Engels he wrote to him inviting him to contribute to the journal and addressing him as a “Doctor” (see Engels’ reply to Ruge of June 15, 1842).

122. Engels is referring to the following publication: G. F. W. Hegel, Werke. Vollständige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten. 19 Bücher in 23 Bänden, Berlin, 1831-1845. By 1841 almost all the books had been published except for 7 and 18. In 1887 Briefe van und an H., hrsg. von K. Hegel, appeared as the 19th and last book.

123. A reference to Strauss’ work Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet, Rd. 1-2, which was published in Tubingen in 1835-36.

124. Engels is presumably quoting here from Cuvier’s book Discours sur les revolutions de la surface du globe, Paris, 1840, p. 53.

125. The Temple of Fortuna primigenia, an ancient Roman deity embodying creative power, was at Praeneste (the ancient name for the town of Palestrina), east of Rome.

126. The Holy Grail. According to medieval legend, this was a precious cup possessing miraculous powers.

127. Engels’ pamphlet Schelling, Philosopher in Christ was written, following his Schelling and Revelation, in response to the continued attacks on Hegel’s philosophy and progressive philosophical trends made by Schelling in his Berlin lectures from the standpoint of religious mysticism.

The conservative press sharply criticised the author: the pietist Elberfelder Zeitung for May 18, 1842, described him as a “young, frivolous scribbler”, while the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung accused him of “cynicism” (No. 139, May 15, 1842). The Rheinische Zeitung, published with the active co-operation of Young Hegelians, came out in defence of the pamphlet (in No. 138, May 18, and No. 157, June 6, 1842), as did several other progressive German periodicals. Among other things it praised the pamphlet’s original satirical form. The author, it wrote on May 18, 1842, had imitated the pietist tone very skilfully.

128. Pelagianism (after the Celtic monk Pelagius)-a Christian trend hostile to the official church and widespread in the Mediterranean countries in the early 5th century. The Pelagians affirmed the freedom of man’s will.

Socinianism (after the Italian theologian Faustus Socinus) — a religious doctrine widespread in Poland in the late 16th and the early 17th century, and later in certain other European countries. Its followers were critical of the dogmas of the official church and like the Pelagians affirmed the freedom of man’s will.

For rationalism see Note 94.

129. The books of the Sibyls, — a collection of oracles attributed to the legendary prophetess Sibyl. They were used in ardent Rome for official fortune-telling when danger threatened the state. At the time of the Roman Empire the Jews and Christians also had Sibylline books.

130. See Note 18.

131. This was the first article written by Engels for the Rheinische Zeitung, an opposition newspaper to which he contributed until the end of 1842. Engels’ articles were marked with a special sign ‘X’, as were articles written by the newspaper’s other leading correspondents. Some of his articles were signed F. 0. (Friedrich Oswald, Engels’ main pseudonym).

Soon after the publication of Engels’ first article Marx also began to contribute to the Rheinische Zeitung (his article “Debates on Freedom of the Press” was published in May 1842). After moving to Cologne in October 1842, he became its editor and held the post until March 17, 1843.

132. The events mentioned here took place in 1837 after Ernst August, the new King of Hanover, abrogated the moderately liberal constitution of 1833. Hanover’s liberal circles strove to have it reintroduced. Their demand found expression in a protest by seven professors at G6ttingen University (Albrecht, Dahlmann, Gervinus, jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Ewald and Wilhelm Weber), for which they were dismissed from theirposts. jacob Grimm, Dahlmann and Gervinus were made to leave the country.

133. See Note 32.

134. In the autumn of 1841, Bruno Bauer, one of the leaders of the Young Hegelians, was suspended from teaching at Bonn University by Eichhorn, the Prussian Minister of Religious Worship, Education and Medicine. In March 1842, he was dismissed from his post as lecturer in theology on account of his atheistic views and opposition speeches. Bauer’s dismissal evoked sharp protests from radical and liberal intellectuals.

For Hegelings see Note 49.

135. Lectures given by Philipp Konrad Marheineke in Berlin University were published in 1842-43 in two books: Ph. Marheineke, Einleitung in die öffentlichen Vorselungen über die Bedeutung der Hegetschen Philosophie in der christlichen Theologie, Berlin, 1842; Ph. Marheineke, Zur Kitik der Schellingschen Offenbarungsphilosophie, Berlin, 1843. In the latter book the author mentions Engels’ anonymous pamphlet Schelling und die Offenbarung (Schelling and Revelation). In quoting Marheineke’s lectures and the lectures given by Leopold Henning, Engels used the notes which he made during the lectures.

136. This article is marked with the figure I in the Rheinische Zeitung. Presumably Engels wanted to continue it, but this intention did not materialise.

137. The great festivals in Athens, in honour of Athena, the tutelary goddess of the city. The Greater Panathenaea were celebrated with especial magnificence in the third year of each Olympiad and were accompanied by contests of poets and musicians. In other years the festival was known as the Lesser Panathenaea.

138. The Federal Act was part of the Final Act of the Vienna Congress. It was signed on June 8, 1815, and proclaimed the German Confederation, which originally comprised 34 independent states and 4 free cities. The Federal Act intensified the political disunity of Germany and preserved the absolutist feudal regime in the German states.

139. A reference to a review of Johann Michael Leupoldt’s Geschichte der Gesundheit und der Krankheiten (Erlangen, 1842) by Heinrich Leo, an opponent of the Hegelian philosophy, who called Hegel’s adherents by the contemptuous name of “Hegelings” (see Note 49). This review was published in the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung Nos. 36 and 37, May 4 and 7, 1842. The quotations given by Engels are from No. 36, except for the last one, which he took from No. 37.

140. Engels appears to be referring to the revolts against the July monarchy, which occurred in a number of industrial centres in France in the 1830s. In November 1831 the weavers of Lyons rose in a revolt which was followed, in June 1832, by an armed uprising of the Paris workers led by the petty-bourgeois republicans. A second revolt of the Lyons workers broke out in April 1834 and was supported by armed struggle under republican slogans in Paris, Saint-Etienne, Grenoble, Clermont-Ferrand and other towns. Both revolts in Lyons were an important landmark in the history of the proletariat’s struggle for liberation and marked a step forward in the independent class movement of the proletariat.

141. This article about Jung’s book marked Engels’ final break with the Young Germany literary group (see Note 18), whose political and ideological views he had begun to question earlier. When he moved to Berlin in September 1841 and made contact with the Young Hegelians he became increasingly convinced that political half-heartedness and hostility to philosophical radicalism of the Young Germany movement made it incapable of becoming the exponent of progressive ideas and the champion of consistent struggle against outdated institutions. In December 1841, he ceased contributing to Gutzkow’s journal, telegraph für Deutschland, and later decided publicly to dissociate himself from the Young Germany group and to subject the weak aspects of their outlook and literary activity to open criticism. This he did in the Deutsche Jahrbücher, a journal edited by the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge.

In reply to Engels’ criticism Jung wrote a scornful article entitled “Ein Bonbon für den kleinen Oswald, meinen Gegner in den Deutschen Jahrbücher.” (Königsberger Literatur-Blatt No. 42, July 20, 1842).

142. Engels is hinting at the similarity between Jung’s ideological views and the mysticism of Schelling and other exponents of “positive philosophy” (see Note 110).

143. A reference to Arnold Ruge’s review of Jung’s book, Königsberg in Preussen und die Extreme des dortigen Pietismus, published in 1840. The review, entitled “Die Restauration des Christentums”, appeared in the Deutsche Jahrbücher Nos. 153-55, December 27-29, 1841, that is, after the journal had changed its title. (From July 1841 Ruge’s journal Hallische Jahrbücher appeared under the title of Deutsche Jahrbücher.) Engels uses the old title.

144. Nothing learnt, nothing forgotten. This phrase is commonly thought to have been coined by Talleyrand in reference to the Bourbons. Its origin, however, goes back to Admiral de Panat who, in 1796, said about the Royalists: “Personne n'a su ni rien oublier ni rien prendre (Nobody has been able to forget anything or learn anything).”

145. A reference to Schelling’s preface to the German edition of Victor Cousin’s (Über französische und deutsche Philosophie (Stuttgart and Tübingen, 1834). In discussing Cousin’s attitude to Hegel, Schelling completely ignored Hegel’s role in the development of German and world philosophy. See p. XXIII.

146. Eduard Meyen’s review of Jung’s Vorlesungen über die moderne Literatur der Deutschen appeared in the Rheinische Zeitung Nos. 149-51, May 29-31, 1842.

147. An allusion to Jung’s intention to become a preacher after graduating from the theological faculty, an intention which did not materialise.

148. In late 1841, the editors of the Athenäum, a Young Hegelian journal, gave a reception in Berlin in honour of Karl Theodor Welcker, a deputy of the Baden Provincial Diet and member of the liberal opposition in Germany. The reception was used as a pretext for suppressing the journal in December of that year.

149. Engels is referring to the censorship instruction issued by the Prussian Government on December 24, 1841, and published in the semiofficial Allgemeine Preussische Staats-Zeitung on January 14, 1842. In word the instruction disapproved of the restrictions imposed on literary activity, but in fact it preserved and even tightened government control over the press under the cover of phrases about liberal and moderate censorship.

Marx criticised the instruction in his article “Comments on the Latest Prussian Censorship Instruction” (see present edition, Vol. 1, pp. 109-31).

150. Engels would seem to have in mind Ludwig Uhland, Paul Pfizer, Friedrich Römer and Gustav Duvernoy, prominent leaders of the liberal opposition in the Württemberg Provincial Diet which was re-elected in 1833 after being dissolved the year before.

151. In 1841 the Baden Chamber of Deputies was dissolved by Grand Duke Leopold on account of its conflict with the Baden Government over the latter’s refusal to grant two state officials leave for executing their functions as deputies. The Chamber did not resume its work until after new elections held in January 1842.

152. During the 1841-42 elections Itzstein was elected to the Second Chamber of the Baden Provincial Diet not from the Schwetzingen constituency, whose deputy he had been for many years, but from another one.

153. Engels is referring to the article “Aufsätze über inländische Gegenstände. XVI. Ein Rückblick”, which appeared in the Spenersche Zeitung Nos. 137-38, June 16 and 17, 1842, and was marked with two asterisks. He calls its author “our asterisk man” and makes a play on the words Ein Rückblick (a review).

154. See Note 149.

155. In the Rheinische Zeitung this article was printed slightly abridged and revised by the editors. In this volume it is published in its original form, according to Engels’ manuscript. The most important discrepancies between the manuscript and the newspaper version are given in the footnotes.

156. Promulgated in 1794, the Prussian Law reflected the backwardness of feudal Prussia in the sphere of law and the judiciary. In his article Engels quotes excerpts from the Prussian Law from the publication Allgemeines Landrecht für die Preussischen Staaten Berlin, 1794, Teil II, Titel 20.

157. Engels is referring to Johann Jacoby, author of the anonymous pamphlet Vier Fragen beantwortet von einem Ostpreussen, Mannheim, 1841, in which he criticised the Prussian state system and called for a constitution in Prussia. This pamphlet resulted in legal proceedings against its author. Although in its verdict of April 20, 1842, the Berlin court acquitted Jacoby of high treason, he was nevertheless sentenced to two and a half years of imprisonment for disrespectful criticism of the laws of the land and lése-majesti. It was only the Senate of Appeal of the Supreme Court that unconditionally acquitted Jacoby in its ruling of January 20, 1843.

In 1842, during the judicial inquiry, Jacoby published a pamphlet in Switzerland entitled Meine weitere Vertheidigung wider die gegen mich erhobene Beschuldigung der Majestätsbeleidigung und des frechen, unehrerbietigen Tadels des Landesgesetzes, Zürich und Winterthur, 1842. Engels is quoting both pamphlets by Jacoby.

158. Gesetz-Sammiung für die Königlichen Preussischen Staaten, Berlin, 1819.

159. See Note 149.

160. This poem is a parody on the struggle between the Young Hegelians and the conservative opponents of the Hegelian philosophy (Sack and others) who took part in the slander campaign against Bruno Bauer. ‘ne poem was written as a protest against Bruno Bauer’s dismissal from Bonn University in late March 1842 (see Note 134). Engels wrote it together with Bruno’s brother Edgar. The poem was widely commented on in the German and Swiss press. Its publication was announced in the radical Zurich paper Schweizischer Republikaner on December 9, 1842 (No. 98). Excerpts from it were reprinted in several Leipzig periodicals, among them Friekugeln No. 52, December 30, 1842. Comments on it appeared in the Hamburger Literarische und Kritische Blätter (No. 220, December 19, 1842) and the Hamburger Neue Zeitung (No. 303, December 31, 1842).

161. Engels is referring to the fact that, under the pressure of clerical and conservative circles, the government of the canton of Zulich cancelled its invitation to David Strauss to lecture at Zurich University in 1839 (see Note 117).

162. An allusion to Bruno Bauer’s transfer as university lecturer from Berlin to Bonn in 1839.

163. See Note 110.

164. “The Free"-the Berlin group of Young Hegelians which was formed in the first half of 1842 and was led by Edgar Bauer, Eduard Meyen, Ludwig Buhl and Max Stirner (pseudonym of Caspar Schmidt). Its members advocated radical and atheistic views and condemned the half-heartedness of liberalism.

The fact that “The Free” lacked any positive programme and ignored the realities of political struggle soon led to differences between them and the representatives of the revolutionary-democratic wing of the German opposition movement. A sharp conflict arose between “The Free” and Marx in the autumn — of 1842, after Marx had become editor of the Rheinische Zeitung (see present edition, Vol. 1, pp. 393-95).

During his stay in Berlin Engels associated closely with “The Free” but, unlike many of them, he held that it was necessary to go beyond purely atheistic propaganda and take part in the actual struggle for political liberties and democracy. Engels’ revolutionary-democratic convictions, which found expression in the satirical poem The Insolently Threatened Yet Miraculously Rescued Bible, together with his developing materialistic outlook, led to his parting company with “The Free” and the Young Hegelian trend in general.

165. An ironical allusion to the decisions of the Federal Diet (see Note 32), directed against the opposition movement in Germany (in particular against radical journalism and literature). ‘ne Federal Diet assembled in the free city of Frankfurt am Main.

166. See Note 49.

167. See Note 164.

168. On March 18, 1842, when Schelling finished his lectures on the “philosophy of revelation”, Berlin students organised a torchlight procession in the Leipziger Strasse, where the philosopher lived.

169. The Commissions of the Estates in the Landtags (provincial diets), to which Engels is referring here, were instituted in Prussia in June 1842. Elected by the Landtags from their deputies according to the estates principle, they formed a single advisory body known as the “United Commissions”, which the government intended to convene in Berlin on October 18, 1842. With the help of this body, which was a mockery of a representative institution, Frederick William IV hoped to enforce new taxes and obtain a loan.

170. Valhalla (from the name given in Norse mythology to the abode of the souls of slain warriors)-a huge building near Regensburg erected in 1841 by Ludwig I, King of Bavaria. Busts of many famous Germans were collected there.

Walhalla’s Genossen, geschildert durch König Ludwig den Ersten von Bayern, dem Gründer Walhalla’s was published in Munich in 1842; it contained biographies of Germans whose busts were exhibited in Valhalla.

171. The problem of centralisation was discussed in the Rheinische Zeitung on several occasions. An article by Moses Hess, entitled “Deutschland und Frankreich in Bezug auf die Centralisationsfrage”, appeared in the paper’s supplement on May 17, 1842. The author discussed the problem from an abstract, nihilist point of view, which prompted Marx to enter into a polemic with him. Marx, however, did not finish the article he planned. Its beginning exists in manuscript (see present edition, Vol. 1, pp. 182-83).

On May 29, 1842, the Rheinische Zeitung began publishing excerpts from De la Centralisation, a pamphlet by Louis Cormenin which appeared in Paris in 1842 under the pseudonym of Timon. Engels used this occasion to express his views on the issue and on West-European liberalism in general.

172. Huguenot Wars — the religious wars in France between the Catholics and Protestant Calvinists (the Huguenots). They lasted, with intermissions, from 1562 to 1594 and resulted in the consolidation of royal power, whose mainstay was the Catholic Church. During these wars Paris was the stronghold of Catholicism, and the southern provinces of France were the centre of the Huguenot movement.

173. A representative body in medieval France. It consisted of representatives of the three estates of clergy, nobles and commons and sanctioned the, levying of taxes and money subsidies to the king. Under the absolutist regime the states-general were not convened for 175 years, from 1614. They met in May 1789, at the time of the maturing bourgeois revolution, and on June 17 were transformed by the deputies of the third estate into a National Assembly, which proclaimed itself a Constituent Assembly on July 9 and became the supreme organ of revolutionary France.

174. Engels wrote this article for the radical monthly Der deutsche Bote aus der Schweiz which Georg Herwegh planned to publish in Zurich in 1842 in place of a journal appearing there under the same name. Marx was also invited to contribute, but the new journal did not materialise and the articles intended for it were published in the summer of 1843 as a collection entitled Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz.

175. In 1841 the government of Frederick William IV granted the right to establish their own church to the Old Lutherans, the faction opposing the 1817 compulsory union between the Lutherans and the Reformists (Calvinists) (see Note 6).

176. In 1837, the Archbishop of Cologne was arrested and accused of high treason for his refusal to submit to the demands of Frederick William III, King of Prussia. This arrest led to the conflict known as the “ecclesiastical discord” or “Cologne discord”. At its root lay the controversy over the religion of children born into mixed Catholic and Protestant families. The conflict came to an end in 1841, under Frederick William IV, when the Prussian Government gave in to the Catholic Church.

177. Provincial diets (Landtags) were instituted in Prussia in 1823. They were composed of the heads of princely families and representatives of the nobility, the towns and the rural communities. The estates principle of representation, coupled with a system of election based on a high tax and property qualification, ensured the predominance of the nobility in the Landtags. The jurisdiction of the provincial diets was limited to matters of local economy and administration. They could also express an opinion on government bills submitted for discussion.

178. Engels is referring to the solemn promises given by Frederick William IV in 1840 when he accepted the oath of allegiance from the deputations of various Prussian provinces and towns, Königsberg, Breslau and others; the King said he would “concern himself with the welfare of all estates and religions”.

179. This article was the first one sent by Engels to the Rheinische Zeitung from England.

After finishing his military service as a volunteer, Engels returned from Berlin to Barmen about October 10, 1842. In the latter half of November he was sent to England to study commerce at a cotton mill in Manchester which was owned by a firm of which his father was a partner. On his way from Berlin to Barmen and again before his departure to England Engels visited the editorial office of the Rheinische Zeitung in Cologne to discuss his future work on the newspaper. During his second visit to Cologne, at the end of November 1842, Engels met Marx who was the editor of the Rheinische Zeitung at the time. This first personal encounter was somewhat cool since Marx disagreed strongly with the Berlin group of “The Free” to which Engels then belonged. This, however, did not prevent him from forming a high opinion of Engels as a prospective English correspondent of the newspaper. Engels sent his first item from England immediately after his arrival there.

180. The People’s Charter containing the demands of the Chartists was published on May 8, 1838, as a Bill to be submitted to Parliament. It consisted of six points: universal suffrage (for men of 21 and over), annual parliaments, vote by ballot, equal electoral areas, no property qualifications for candidates for Parliament, and payment for M.P.s.

181. These laws, passed in 1651 and subsequent years, forbade the transportation of English goods in foreign vessels; they were repealed in 1849.

182. Engels is referring to a wave of strikes which in August 1842 swept over several industrial districts of England, including Lancashire and Yorkshire. In some areas the strikers had armed clashes with troops and police.

183. See Note 105.

184. The Com Laws (first adopted in England as far back as the 15th century) introduced high import tariffs on agricultural produce in order to maintain high prices on the home market. In 1815 the import of foreign grain was prohibited as long as its price in England was below 80s. per quarter (according to the 1822 Act-below 70s. per quarter). In 1828, a sliding-scale of duties was introduced according to which import tariffs on grain were raised -h- its prices on the home market fell and lowered when the price of grain went up. In 1838 the Manchester factory owners Cobden and Bright founded the Anti-Corn Law League, which demanded the lifting of the corn tariffs and urged unlimited freedom of trade for the purpose of weakening the economic and political power of the landed aristocracy and reducing workers’ wages. The struggle between the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy over the Corn Laws ended in 1846 with their repeal.

185. See Note 182.

186. The Reform Bill, enacted on June 7, 1832, by reforming the basis of parliamentary representation, effectively placed political power in the hands of the industrial capitalists and their middle-class followers. No electoral rights were given to the workers and small property owners, who were the real driving force of the reform movement.

Catholic emancipation — the lifting by the English Parliament in 1829 of restrictions on the rights of Catholics. The Catholics, most of whom were Irish, were granted the right to stand for election to Parliament and to hold certain government offices. Simultaneously, the property qualification, was raised fivefold.

For the struggle to abolish the Corn Laws see Note 184.

187. Engels did not carry out his intention at the time, but subsequently the struggle for the repeal of the Corn Laws in England was a frequent theme of his journalistic articles and major works.

188. Most of the extant letters by the young Engels (to his sister Marie and his school-friends, the brothers Friedrich and Wilhelm Graeber, and other people) were written in Bremen. Between July 1838 and March 1841 Engels worked there as a clerk at a large trading house belonging to Consul Leupold. In his spare time he improved his education and engaged in literary and journalistic work. .

189. A reference to the pamphlet Jacob Grimm über seine Entlassung (published in Basle in 1838) written in connection with the dismissal, in 1837, of seven liberal-minded professors from Göttingen University (see Note 132).

For the Cologne affair or “Cologne discord” see Note 176.

190. Ibis part of the letter is written in rhymed prose and Engels jokingly calls it “my Makamas”, alluding to the picaresque -novel in Arabic, Persian and Jewish literature of the Middle Ages.

191. See Note 18.

192. Engels is referring to Karl Gutzkow’s review of Ahasver, a poem by Julius Mosen. The review was printed in the Telegraph für Deutschland No. 124, August 1838.

193. A reference to Theodor Creizenach’s article, “Gutzkow über Ahasver”, published in the Zeitung für die elegante Welt No. 189, September 27, 1838.

194. A reference to a collection of ballads by Eduard Duller, published in Munich in 1831 under the tide Die Wittetsbacher, marry of these ballads were included in a German reader compiled by G. Hüllstett, Sammlung ausgewähiter Stücke aus den Werken deutscher Prosaiker und Dichter, zum Erklären und mündlichen Vortragen für die unteren und mittleren Klassen von Gymnasien, 2 Teile, Düsseldorf, 1830-1831.

195. Engels has in mind Eduard Dufler’s introduction to Grabbe’s play Die Hermansschlacht.

196. Engels’ letter to Wilhelm Graeber mentioned here has not come to light.

197. See Note 12.

198. The issue of the newspaper Der Bremer Stadtbote in which this letter by Engels was published has not come to light.

199. Wolfgang Menzel’s review of Wally, die Zweiflerin, a novel by Karl Gutzkow, was published in the Literatur-Blatt Nos. 93 and 94 for September 11 and 14, 1835, and accused Gutzkow of holding immoral and blasphemous views. This review was one of the pretexts used by the Prussian Government for banning on November 14, 1835, the works by the writers of the Young Germany movement. On December 10, a decision to this effect was adopted by the Federal Diet (see Note 32).

200. See Note 18.

201. A reference to Karl Gutzkow’s critical article “Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. 1830-1838”, published in 1839 (see Note 57).

202. See Note 36.

203. A reference to a publishing house in Cologne called after Pierre Marteau, a fictitious publisher under whose trademark books and pamphlets in French,

Dutch and German were printed in the 17th-19th centuries.

204. Engels is presumably referring to a book by F. Marlow (the pseudonym of the poet Hermann Ludwig Wolfram), Faust. Ein dramatisches Gedicht in drei Abschnitten, published in Leipzig in 1839.

Raupach was the author of many philistine plays on historical subiects.

205. In his article “Über den Charakter des Wilhelm Tell in Schillers Drama”, which appeared in the Dramaturgische Blätter, Ludwig Börne sharply criticised Schiller’s hero, calling him a downright philistine who was more like a petty bourgeois than a “bold mountaineer”.

206. The March 1839 issue of the Athenium für Wissenschaft, Kunst und Leben, a journal published in Nuremberg, gave the following appraisal of Engels’ “Letters from Wuppertal”: “In several issues of the Telegraph for March of this year we find a really true picture of religious life in Elberfeld and Barmen. Krummacher is depicted very authentically in a few characteristic strokes.”

207. See Note 49.

208. See Note 176.

209. See Note 117.

210. See Note 99.

211. Engels is referring to the decision of the Federal Diet to ban works by the writers of the Young Germany movement (see Note 32 and Note 199). Karl Gutzkow’s novel Wally, die Zweiflerin was one of the pretexts for this decision and also for arresting and prosecuting the author. Gutzkow was arrested in late November 1835, and on January 13, 1836, sentenced to one month’s imprisonment for “blasphemous views, disrespect for the Christian faith and the Church and depicting immoral situations”.

212. For Börne’s essay on Schiller’s Wilhelm Tell see Note 205. It was evidently about this time that Engels began translating works by Shelley, who was one of his favourite poets. In 1840, he consulted the radical German writers Levin Schücking and Hermann Pütmann on the preparation and publication of a collection of Shelley’s poems (see this volume, pp. 494-95).

Engels’ translations have not come to light.

213. Professor Eduard Cans died on May 5, 1839, and was buried in Berlin. He supported the Hegelian school, and his popularity with the students aroused the concern of the Prussian Government.

214. On pp. 147-62 of Volume 3 of Deutschland und die Deutschen, published in Altona in 1840, Beurmann gives a description of Barmen and Elberfeld (Wuppertal) that is reminiscent in many respects of Engels’ “Letters from Wuppertal”.

215. Engels is referring to the German translation of Roman Soltyk’s book La Pologne.

Précis historique, politique et militaire de sa révolution, T. I-II, Paris, 1833. This translation appeared in Stuttgart in 1834 under two titles: Polen, geographisch und historisch geschildm. Mit einer volistindigen Geschichte der jahre 1830 und 1831. Von einem Augenzeugen and Polen und seine Helden im letzten Freiheitshample. Nebst einem hurzen Abriss der poinischen Geschichte seit ihrem Beginne bis zum jahre 1830 von dem Grafen Soltyk.

216. In his Odysseus Redivivus, a work which has not come to light, Engels apparently described one of the heroes of the national liberation struggle waged by the Greeks against Turkish rule in 1821-25.

Engels sympathised deeply with the struggle of the Greek people for their freedom even when he was quite young. This is evident from his unfinished Pirate Tale which he wrote while still at school.

217. Engels is quoting a parody on a poem by the 18th-century German writer Count Friedrich Leopold von Stolberg in which an old Swabian knight is speaking to his son (Sohn da hast Du meinen Speer).

218. Engels is referring to the book Darlegung der Haupt-Resultate aus den wegen der revolutionären Complotte der neueren Zeit in Deutschland geführten Untersuchungen. Auf den Zeitabschnitt mit Ende juli 1838, Frankfurt am Main.

This book contained documents of the central investigation commission of the German Confederation in Frankfurt am Main, which inquired into the activities of the “demagogues”, an opposition movement involving students and people from other social strata (see Note 9).

219. Engels is referring to the first article in David Strauss’ collection Charakteristiken und Kritiken. Eine Sammlung zerstreuter Aufsütze aus den Gebieten der Theologie, Anthropologie und Aesthetik, Leipzig, 1839. The article is entitled “Schleiermacher und Daub in ihrer Bedeutung fiar die Theologie unsrer Zeit”.

220. See Note 216.

221. The article attacking Darstellung und Kritik des modernen Pietismus, a book by the Young Hegehan Dr. Christian Mürklin, was published in the Evangelische Kirchen-Zeitung (Nos. 1-8, January 1, 4, 8, 11, 15, 18, 22 and 25, 1840) under the title “Vorwort”.

222. Parsees — members of a religious sect in India and Iran deifying fire, air, water and earth; adherents of Zoroastrianism.

Libertines-members of a pantheistic sect in France and Switzerland in the middle of the 16th century; they were democratic in nature and fought against Calvin and his followers, but were defeated.

223. Engels is referring to the first, sixth and seventh articles by David Strauss in his collection Charakteristiken und Kritiken: I. “Schleiermacher und Daub in ihrer Bedeutung für die Theologie unsrer Zeit”; VI. “Kerner, Geschichten Besessener neuerer Zeit”; VII. “Kerner, Eine Erscheinung aus dem Nachtgebiete der Natur......

224. A reference to the article “Vorwort des Herausgebers zum zehnten jahrgange”, published in the Literarischer Anzeiger für christliche Theologie und Wissenschaft überhaupt Nos. 1 and 2, 1840.

225. A reference to the marriage feast at Cana at which Christ turned water into wine (St. John, Ch. 2).

226. A reference to Friedrich Mallet’s article “Vorwort” in the Bremer Kirchenbote Nos. 1 and 2, January 12 and 19, 1840.

227. Rulemann Friedrich Eylert, court preacher and confidant of Frederick William III, made this speech on January 19, 1840, in the Rittersaal at the royal palace in Berlin. It was published in the Allgemeine Preussische Staats-Zeitung No. 20, January 20, 1840.

228. During the war against Napoleon, Frederick William III, King of Prussia, recognised the Spanish Constitution of 1812 (see Note 100). In December 1822, however, the Verona Congress of the Holy Alliance adopted a decision, sponsored by the Emperors of Russia and Austria and the Prussian King, sanctioning an armed intervention by France against revolutionary Spain. On April 7, 1823, French troops invaded Spain, the absolute power of Ferdinand VI1 was restored and the 1812 Constitution again abrogated (it was first declared null and void by the clerical and aristocratic circles in May 1814 but then restored during the second Spanish revolution of 1820-23).

229. Carbonari (from carbonaro — a coal man) — members of secret conspiratorial societies in Italy and France in the opening decades of the 18th century. In Italy their aim was national liberation and the unification of the country, and certain political reforms; in France, the overthrow of the Bourbons.

230. Engels is speaking about the dedication in a volume of poems by Annette Elisabeth von Droste-Hülshoff, which he received as a present from Levin Schücking when visiting Münster (see Note 84).

231. Engels is referring to Levin Schücking’s review of poems by Annette Elisabeth von Droste-Hülshoff, which was printed in the Telegraph für Deutschland No. 170, October 1838.

232. See Note 212.

233. In one of the sections of the article entitled “Tagebuch aus Berlin”, which appeared in the Telegraph für Deutschland in June and July 1840, Karl Gutzkow attacked the Hallische Jahrbücher, a journal published by the Young Hegelians (see issue No. 97, June 1840).

234. A reference to the following books by Hermann Püttmann: Die Düsse über Malerschute und ihre Leistungen seit der Errichtung des Kuiutvereines im jahre 1829, Leipzig, 1839, and Chatterton, Barmen, 1840.

235. Engels is referring to Coleridge’s poems translated into German by Levin Schücking.

236. In the article mentioned here Engels criticised the writings of the Young Germany literary group and condemned the unprincipled dissension within it. He did not break with this group, however, until a much later date, and contributed to Gutzkow’s Telegraph für Deutschland until the end of 1841.

237. The Blätter zur Kunde der Literatur des Auslands for June 7, 1840, contained Schücking’s translations of two poems by Shelley and three by Coleridge.

238. Music to the words of the Catholic hymn, Stabat mater dolorosa, was set by many composers, including Pergolese, Palestrina and Rossini.

239. See Note 49.

240. The poem by Robert Prutz to which Engels is, referring was published as a separate publication in Leipzig in 1840.

241. In late March 1841 Engels returned to his parents in Barmen after finishing his term of service at the Bremen office of Heinrich Leupold’s trading firm.

242. Engels wrote to his sister Marie from Bremen on March 8, 1841, about his intention to make a journey to Italy (see this volume, p. 529), but he did not go there until the middle of May. On the way he visited Basle and Zurich and then crossed the Alps at Splügen. His travel impressions are described in the unfinished essay “Wanderings in Lombardy” (see this volume, pp. 170-80).

243. Engels decided to go to Berlin for a term of military training as a volunteer in an artillery brigade, and also to attend lectures at Berlin University and make closer contacts with radical scientists and writers.

Engels’ subsequent letters to Marie were sent from Berlin, where he arrived in the latter half of September 1841.

244. Karl Werder’s tragedy Columbus was first performed on January 7, 1842, at the Royal Opera in Berlin. Excerpts from Beethoven’s symphonies were played before the curtain went up and between the acts.

245. Engels’ term of military service expired in early October 1842.

246. A reference to Jung’s reply to Engels’ article “Alexander Jung, ‘Vorlesungen über die moderne Literatur der Deutschen'”. Jung’s reply was printed in the Königsberger Literatur-Blatt No. 42, July 20, 1842, under the ironical title of “Ein Bonbon for den kleinen Oswald, meinen Gegner in den Deutschen Jahrbücher’ (see Note 141).

247. Argonauts (Greek mythology) -the heroes who sailed with Jason in the Argo to Colchis in quest of the Golden Fleece guarded by the dragon.

248. Engels wrote this poem in Greek and read it at his school’s public celebrations in Elberfeld on September 15, 1837. The theme was taken from the Greek myth about the war waged by Argos against Thebes. The campaign was led by Polynices, son of King Oedipus, against his brother Eteocies, who had usurped power in Thebes. Aeschylus’ tragedy Seven against Thebes was based on this myth.

249. A reference to a school report from the Elberfeld gymnasium, which Engels entered in October 1834. Prior to this he attended the Barmen municipal school.

250. Engels received this reference in September 1837 when he had to leave the top form of the Elberfeld gymnasium in compliance with the wishes of his father, who sent him to study commerce at the Barmen office of his firm; in June 1838, Engels went to Bremen for the same purpose.

Editors’ Footnotes from Volume 3

1. Marx mentions his intention of critically analysing Hegel’s views on the state and law as far back as in the spring of 1842. In a letter to Arnold Ruge of March 5 he writes that he is preparing an article on Hegel’s legal and political views in which he intends first of all to criticise Hegel’s apology on behalf of the constitutional monarchy (see this edition, Vol. 1). The above-mentioned article is not extant and it is unknown whether he actually wrote it, but the subject-matter continued to attract his attention. As Marx’s theoretical views developed and he gradually adopted a materialist standpoint, largely due to Feuerbach’s influence, his plans of writing a critique of Hegel’s philosophy became more extensive and profound and finally he conceived the idea of counterposing the materialist conception of social phenomena to their idealist interpretation. For Marx the basic problem was the interdependence of material social relations, property relations and so on-which Hegel called “civil society"-and the political system of society, the state.

Marx began to work on his plan during his stay from May to October 1843 in Kreuznach (where his bride Jenny von Westphalen, whom he married in June 1843, lived with her mother). Here, apparently, he wrote the original version of the work. In the process of writing it he felt the need for greater concrete historical material, and with this aim in view he began to study problems related not only to the theory and history of the state as a whole but to the history of individual countries (England, France, Germany, the United States, Italy, Sweden) and major world-historical events, in particular the Great French Revolution, as can be seen from his five notebooks containing excerpts (the Kreuznach Notebooks). Later on, he wrote an introduction to that work which was published in February 1844 in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. But Marx did not manage to prepare the main sections of his work for publication because he turned to other studies and conceived other literary plans (economic studies, preparation of a book against the Young Hegelians, work on the history of the Convention and so on). However, his work on the manuscript dealing with the criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of law played a major role in his spiritual development and was an important stage in the formation of his materialist views. Marx himself pointed to this in 1859 in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Engels, for his part, in his article “Karl Marx” (1869) described the conclusions arrived at by his friend as a result of the critical analysis of Hegel’s views in the following way: “Proceeding from the Hegelian philosophy of law, Marx came to the conclusion that it was not the state which Hegel had described as the ‘top of the edifice’ but ‘the civil society’ which Hegel had regarded with disdain that was the sphere in which a key to the understanding of the process of historical development of mankind should be looked for.”

The extant manuscript consists of 39 big sheets numbered in Roman figures by the author (II-XL), apparently after the work had been finished. The first sheet is missing. Each sheet is folded in two to form four pages, which are numbered in Arabic figures from sheet 1-XXII. The manuscript contains a critical analysis of paragraphs 261-313 of G. W. F. Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. These paragraphs comprise the subsection “Internal State Law” in the third part of Hegel’s work. The missing first sheet apparently dealt with “257-260 as can be seen from the extant text. The manuscript bears the imprint of an unfinished work. Some problems which the author promises to deal with below have not been treated by him in the extant part. The title of the work given by the author, which is missing in the manuscript, is reproduced from the above-mentioned introduction published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. In one of the notebooks written by Marx in Bonn in 1842 there are some notes connected with this manuscript. The date of writing the notes is not established. The notes contain some subheadings, the first of which refers to the non-extant part of the manuscript and contains references to the sheets and pages of the manuscript of the Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. The content of the notes is as follows.. “Duplication of the Development System. I. 3,4. Logical Mysticism. II, 8. III, 9 [see this volume, pp. 7, 8].

“Mystical way of presentation.

"Ibid. Example, §267. IV, pp. 13, 14 [see this volume, pp. 10, 11].

"Idea as Subject. IV, pp. 15, 16 [see this volume, pp. 11-131. (Real subjects become mere names.) P. 17, p. 18, pp. 20, 21, pp. 24, 26, 27, p. 28, p. 40, p. 57, pp. 75, 78 [see this volume, pp. 13, 14-15, 16-18, 20-21, 22-24, 33-34, 48-49, 60, 62-631. XXVI, 2. XXVIII. XXX, 3. XXXI, 3. XXXII, 2. XXXIV, 2, 3, 4. P. XXXVII, 2 [see this volume p. 82-83, 89-90, 98-99, 101-02, 109-10, 114-15]. Opposites. XXXIX [see this volume, p. 121-24].”

Marx’s manuscript was first published in Moscow by the Institute- of Marxism-Leninism.

This work was first published in English in part in the book Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967, and in full as a separate edition entitled Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’ by Karl Marx. Translated from the German by Annette Jolin and Joseph O'Malley, Cambridge, 1970.

In translating the term “Hegelsche Rechtsphilosophie”, the translators and editors, being aware of the difficulty of its rendering into English, proceeded from the interpretation of this and similar concepts in the works of Marx and Engels written in English. Thus, in the English authorised edition of Engels’ work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Hegel’s expression “Begriff des Rechts” is translated in one of the notes as “concept of law” (see Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Works, Vol. 3, Moscow, 1970, p. 115).

In this manuscript as in the other works published in this volume Marx frequently uses two similar German terms, “Entäusserung” and “Entfremdung” to express the notion of “alienation”. In the present edition the former is’ generally translated as “alienation”, the latter as “estrangement”, because in the later economic works (Theories of Surplus-Value) Marx himself used the word “alienation” as the English equivalent of the term “Entäusserung”.

2. Here and below Marx quotes Hegel, Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts oder Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse, according to the edition Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Werke, Bd. 8, hrsg. von Dr. Eduard Gans, Berlin, 1833. Sometimes Marx quotes with omissions which he does not always indicate with dots. Similarly, he does not always reproduce italics, frequently italicising instead other words and passages in the quotations. In the present edition emphasis in the quotations from Hegel’s work reproduced by Marx is rendered by italics, whereas passages emphasised by Marx are printed in bold italics. In individual cases where there are no indications in the manuscript, the editors give in square brackets references to the corresponding paragraphs of Hegel’s work.

3. Marx did’ not return to this question anywhere else in the extant manuscript.

4. Apparently this refers to G. W. F. Hegel, Encyclopädie der Philosophische Wissenschaften im Grundrisse, Erster Theil, Die Wissenschaft der Logik.

5. This possibly refers to Saint-Simon and his followers, who considered that in the future society the state would turn from an instrument for administering people into an instrument for administering things, i.e., would lose its political character.

6. In the extant manuscript an analysis of the Addition to § 290 of Hegel’s work is missing.

7. The Prussian Common Law (Preussische Landrecht) — the laws of the provinces in the kingdom of Prussia codified in 1794. It reflected the backwardness of feudal Prussia in the sphere of law and court procedure.

8. The extant manuscript does not deal with this question.

9. This section is from the third, concluding part of Hegel’s Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, comprising H 182-256. It precedes the section “Der Staat”, the paragraphs of which (§§ 261-313) are analysed in this manuscript. There is no special analysis of this section in the extant part of the manuscript though Marx repeatedly touches on Hegel’s views on civil society when examining § 308 (see, in particular, pp. 111-15 of this volume).

10. This refers to la Charte bâclée (the Constitutional Charter) introduced after the July 1830 revolution in France.

11. This problem is not dealt with in the extant part of the manuscript.

12. This apparently refers to the same problem which Marx mentioned above, on page 121, as a problem to be analysed later on (see Note 11).

13. This note was written by Marx in connection with his reading and summarising of the journal Historisch-politische Zeitschrift, edited by Leopold Ranke. Hamburg, 1832, Bd. 1, Heft 1. Marx was interested, in particular, in Ranke’s article, “Über die Restauration in Frankreich”. This note is to be found in the fourth Kreuznach Notebook which contains Marx’s historical excerpts relating to July-August 1843 (see Note 1). The thoughts expressed in it on the inconsistency of the Hegelian idealist conception of the relation between the abstract idea of the state and its concrete historical forms, etc., are directly connected with Marx’s work Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law (see pp. 75-80 and 82-83 of this volume).

14. This refers to the Constitutional Charter of 1814, the basic law of the Bourbons returned to power, and the Charter published on August 14, 1830, after the bourgeois revolution in France. The Constitutional Charter of 1830 was the basic law of the July monarchy. It repeated the main principles of the 1814 Charter but the preamble of the 18 14 Charter, speaking of the constitution being granted (octroyée) by the king, was omitted from the 1830 Constitution and the rights of the Upper and Lower Chambers were extended at the expense of some of the monarch’s prerogatives. Under the new constitution the monarch was regarded only as the head of the executive and was deprived of the right to repeal or suspend laws.

15. Early in the spring of 1843 Marx conceived the idea of launching a new journal as the organ of the German and French democrats. He intended to publish it in collaboration with the Young Hegelian Arnold Ruge, editor of the journal Deutsche Jahrbücher, which had been suppressed by the government (see Marx’s letter to Ruge of March 13, 1843, this edition, Vol. 1). At the end of May 1843 Marx went to Dresden to see Ruge on this question. In the course of the preliminary talks, two tendencies became apparent in respect of the line of the future journal. Ruge pursued chiefly educational goals and planned to turn the journal into a means for an exchange of ideas in the sphere of philosophy (primarily German philosophy) and social and political sciences (above all, French), whereas Marx sought to link the theoretical tasks of the journal as closely as possible with the actual revolutionary struggle against the feudal-absolutist order in Germany, to use the journal as an ideological weapon in the struggle for restructuring society. The different approaches to the journal’s programme were reflected in the materials prepared for it and in the correspondence between its prospective editors. Marx’s intention to turn the journal into a more radical and militant organ is felt also in the given draft programme of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, which Marx wrote after he had received Ruge’s programmes in German and French in August 1843. Marx used these programmes but changed some formulations, especially those of the second and partly of the third point which in Ruge’s programmes read as follows:

French Text of Ruge’s Programme

“2) Reviews of the newspapers, which will give a calm but just and strict appraisal of the periodicals of our day, the spirit inspiring them, their actions and tendencies and also their impact on public opinion.

"3) Critical reviews of books published on both sides of the Rhine.”

German Text of Ruge’s Programme

“2) Reviews of the newspapers and journals which express their attitude to the problems of the day.

"3) Reviews of old-time writings and belles-lettres in Germany as well as reviews of books published in the two countries which open or continue the new epoch.”

In elaborating the final text of the programme, Ruge was to take into account the draft written by Marx and reproduce, wholly or in part, some of his formulations. For the sake of comparison we quote below the text printed in issue No. 1-2 of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, Paris, 1844:

“This journal is a critical publication, but it is not a German literary newspaper. We shall publish excerpts from French and German sources:

"1. On men and systems which are of significance and enjoy influence, on topical questions, on the constitution, legislation, political economy, morals and institutions. Instead of the divine policy of the heavenly kingdom it will reflect the true science of human affairs.

"2. Reviews of newspapers and journals which express their attitude to the problems of our day.

"3, Reviews of old-time writings and belies-lettres in Germany which of necessity will subject to criticism the old German spirit in its transcendent, now moribund existence; as well as reviews of books of the two countries which open or continue the new epoch which we are entering.”

16. The journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher was to contribute to rallying various representatives of progressive democratic and socialist thought in France and Germany, and to become the organ of “a Franco-German scientific alliance” as Marx wrote in a letter to Ludwig Feuerbach on October 3, 1843 (see p. 349 of this volume). Invitations to contribute to the journal were extended to Frederick Engels, Ludwig Feuerbach, Heinrich Heine, Moses Hess, Karl Bernays, Julius Fröbel, Pierre Joseph Proudhon, Félicité de Lamennais, Alphonse de Lamartine, Louis Blanc, Pierre Leroux, Étienne Cabet and others. This letter of the editorial board of the future journal, which was signed by Marx and Ruge, was published in the Fourierist newspaper Démocratie pacifique in reply ta an unsigned item, written by Lamartine, which appeared on December 10, 1843, in the newspaper Bien Public.

17. This refers to a letter of November 16, from Leipzig, which was published in the Kölnische Zeitung on November 20, 1843.

18. These letters written by Marx form part of his correspondence with Ruge at the time of their preparations for publishing the journal Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, they were published in the journal in the section “From the Correspondence of 1843”, where letters by Ruge, Bakunin and Feuerbach were also printed. In these letters Marx in fact formulated his revolutionary views on the programme of the journal which went further than the tasks of disseminating abstract philosophical ideas and bourgeois-democratic political views, set by its other editor, Ruge.

Marx’s letters to Ruge from the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher were first published in English in the book Writings of the Young Marx on Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967.

Despite considerable organisational and material difficulties (the journal was edited in Paris and printed in Zurich) the editorial board managed to put out the first double issue (No. 1-2) of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher at the end of February 1844. The main trend of the journal was determined by Marx’s letters and articles (“On the Jewish. Question”, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. Introduction”) and Engels’ articles (“Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy”, “The Condition of England. Past and Present by Thomas Carlyle”), which were published in it and were imbued with revolutionary-communist spirit. However, the publication of the journal was discontinued (for the reason see this volume, p. 188, and Note 36).

By its sharp political presentation of material the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher attracted the attention of the progressive sections of society in Germany, France and other countries but at the same time evoked indignation of the conservative press. On March 10, 1844, the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung wrote: “The criticism to which the new Paris journal resorts knows no mercy, in its polemics it disregards all aesthetic standards, and its satirical tone, though it does not stab like a dagger, punches like a huge fist.” The Prussian Government considered the political line of the journal extremely “dangerous”, banned its import to Germany and issued warrants for the arrest of Marx, Ruge, Heine and the other contributors in the event of their coming to Prussia. About two-thirds out of the total of three thousand copies fell into the hands of the police.

19. This figure of speech was used by analogy with the satirical poem of the German humanist Sebastian Brant, Das Narrenschiff (The Ship of Fools), published in 1494. In a letter to Ruge in May 1843 Marx repeated this metaphor (see p. 139 of this volume).

20. In a letter to Marx written from Berlin in March 1843, Ruge complained about the absence of any signs of revolutionary ferment in Germany, about the spirit of servility, submission to despotism and allegiance that had been prevalent in the country for many years. This letter was published in the section “From the Correspondence of 1843” in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher.

21. Marx alludes to the patronage and support which Frederick William IV, while still Crown Prince, extended to the journal Berliner politisches Wochenblatt (1831-41) which was the mouthpiece for the ideas of feudal reaction and conservative romanticism.

The coronation of Frederick William IV, which took place on June 7, 1840, in Königsberg, was surrounded with the pageantry of medieval knighthood.

22. In a letter to Marx in August 1843 (published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher) Ruge informed him of the final decision to have the journal published in Paris. Earlier there had been no unanimity on this point, besides Paris other places had been suggested, in particular Switzerland and Strasbourg.

23. Marx’s departure for Paris was delayed. He arrived there with Jenny at the end of October 1843.

24. This article was written in reply to the Young Hegelian Bruno Bauer, who in his works on this subject reduced the problem of the emancipation of the Jews to their emancipation from Judaism. Being an idealist, Bauer considered the overcoming of religious prejudices as the decisive means for eliminating national contradictions. Polemics with him over this question provided Marx with an occasion for considering from the materialist point of view the broader problem of emancipating not only the Jews but the whole of mankind from economic, political and religious fetters.

When quoting from the works of Bruno Bauer and others Marx sometimes slightly departs from the text of the source; the emphasis, as a rule, is Marx’s, but in quoting from Hegel’s book Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts he reproduces also the author’s emphasis. Quotations from books and documents in French are given by Marx in the French language. In the present work these are given in French in the text, and the corresponding English texts are given in the footnotes.

The first English translation of this article was published in the book: Karl Marx, Selected Essays; London, Parsons, 1926.

25. The text of the French Constitution of 1791 (which was preceded by the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen) is quoted by Marx from the

W. Wachsmuth, Geschichte Frankreichs im Revolutionszeitalter, Bd. 1, Hamburg, 1840 (documents in the book are cited in French). Excerpts from the Constitution of 1793 are quoted from the documentary publication in many volumes by P. J. B. Buchez and P. C. Roux entitled Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française, Vol. 31, Paris, 1837. Below, when quoting constitutional documents of the period of the French Revolution, Marx uses the same sources, mainly the work of Buchez and Roux.

26. The quotation from the Constitution of 1795 is taken from Vol. 36 of the Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française by P. J. B. Buchez and P. C. Roux.

27. The first quotation is taken from the book: W. Wachsmuth, Geschichte Frankreichs im Revolutionszeitalter, the second from Vol. 31 of the Histoire parlementaire de la Révolution française by P. J. B. Buchez and P. C. Roux.

28. Quoted from Thomas Münzer’s pamphlet directed against Martin Luther: Hochlebende Fleisch zu Wittenberg, verursachte Schutzrede und Antwort wider das geistlose, sanft welches mit verkehrter Weise durch den Diebstahl der heiligen Schrift die erbdrmiiche Christenheit also ganz jämmerlich besudelt hat. The pamphlet was published in 1524. Marx quotes it from Leopold Ranke, Deutsche Geschichte im Zeitalter der Reformation, Berlin, 1839.

29. According to Marx’s intention, this article was to serve as an introductory section to a detailed work in which he planned to make a critical analysis of Hegel’s idealist philosophy and political views (see Note 1). While working on the “ Introduction” Marx did not confine himself to the criticism of Hegel’s philosophy; he set himself the task of defining his attitude not only to the existing ideological trends but also to the actual revolutionary processes.

The first English translation of this work was published in the book: Karl Marx, Selected Essays, London, Parsons, 1926.

30. This remark testifies to Marx’s intention to complete his criticism of the Hegelian philosophy of law which he had begun earlier, to finish and prepare for publication the rough draft of the manuscript of 1843 on this subject. However, after the publication of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher had been discontinued, Marx gradually abandoned his plan because he was busy with other work, primarily, the study of economic relations. Marx also had other reasons, which he mentioned in the Preface to the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, namely, his dissatisfaction with the chosen form of combining a criticism of Hegel’s views on different subjects with a critical analysis of these subjects as such, his growing conviction that in this form his work would give “the impression of arbitrary systematism” (see p. 231 of this volume).

Proceeding from these considerations, Marx arrived at the conclusion that it would be better to give a critical analysis of law, ethics, politics, etc., in separate booklets and to crown it all with a critical work summing up his views on the idealist, speculative philosophy. Soon, however, the need arose of first coming out against the Young Hegelians and Marx’s plans again underwent a change. He began to connect his elaboration of the principles of a new, revolutionary-materialist world outlook primarily with a criticism of the idealist world outlook of the Young Hegelians and other representatives of German bourgeois and petty-bourgeois ideology. This task was fulfilled by Marx and Engels in their joint works: The Holy Family and The German Ideology.

31. The historical school of law — a trend in the historical and legal science which arose (Gustav Hugo, Friedrich Karl von Savigny and others) attempted to justify the in Germany at the end of the 18th century. The representatives of this school privileges of the nobility and feudal institutions on the grounds of stability of historical traditions. For a description of this school see Marx’s article “The Philosophical Manifesto of the Historical School of Law” (this edition, Vol. 1).

32. This refers to the liberal circles of Germany, representatives of the liberal op position in the Landtags, liberal publicists of various descriptions, and others, who demanded constitutional reforms.

33. This refers to the Young Hegelians. They drew radical atheistic conclusions from Hegel’s philosophy but at the same time detached philosophy from reality and turned it into a self-contained and determining force. In fact the Young Hegelians were withdrawing more and more from the practical revolutionary struggle.

34. The September laws promulgated by the French Government in September 1835 restricted the rights of the jury and introduced severe measures against the press. They provided for increased money deposits for periodical publications and introduced imprisonment and large fines for publishing statements against private property and the existing state system. The enactment of these laws in conditions of the July constitutional monarchy, which formally proclaimed freedom of the press, emphasised the anti-democratic nature and hypocrisy of the bourgeois system.

35. The Holy Roman Empire of the German nation (962-1806) comprised at different times German, Italian, Austrian, Hungarian and Czech lands, Switzerland and the Netherlands and was a loose confederation of feudal kingdoms and principalities, church domains and free cities with different political systems, laws and traditions.

36. The printing of the journal was carried out in Zurich by the publishing house Das literarische Comptoir founded by Julius Fröbel in 1842. Besides the reason mentioned in the letter, disagreements between Marx and Arnold Ruge were largely responsible for the journal ceasing to he published. These disagreements boiled down to the fact that the bourgeois radical Ruge opposed Marx’s revolutionary-communist world outlook. The final break between Marx and Ruge took place in March 1844. Ruge’s hostile attitude towards the revolutionary struggle of the masses, which became evident at the time of the Silesian uprising of June 1844, induced Marx to come out in the press against his former co-editor.

37. This article was written in reply to Ruge’s article signed “Ein Preusse”, which was published in the newspaper Vorwärts! on July 27, 1844, under the title “Der König von Preussen und die Sozialreform”. In his article Ruge represented the Silesian weavers’ uprising (June 4-6, 1844) as a futile revolt of the helpless poor people driven to despair. Unlike Ruge, Marx saw it as the first big battle of the German proletariat against the bourgeoisie, as the manifestation of the growth of class-consciousness of the German workers.

With the publication of this article, Marx began to contribute to the newspaper Vorwärts!, which prior to that, during the initial period of its publication-from early 1844 to the summer of the same year- was of a moderate liberal trend due to the influence of its publisher, the German businessman Heinrich Börnstein, and its editor Adalbert von Bornstedt. However, when a friend of Marx, Karl Bernays, a revolutionary-minded radical, became its editor in the summer of 1844, the newspaper began to assume a democratic character. Having become a contributor to the newspaper, Marx began to influence its editorial policy and in September became one of its editors. On his proposal Engels, who had published in it two articles in the series “The Condition of England”, was also included on the editorial board. Among its other contributors were Heine, Herwegh, Ewerbeck and Bakunin. Under Marx’s influence the newspaper began to express communist views. It sharply criticised Prussian absolutism and moderate German liberalism. To comply with the demand of the Prussian Government, the Guizot ministry took repressive measures against its editors and contributors in January 1845 and its publication ceased.

In the quotations from the article by Ruge the emphasis is Marx’s. Works of other authors-French and English (in their publications in French)-were quoted by Marx in German, apparently in his own translation.

This article was first published in English in the book: Karl Marx, Selected Essays, London, Parsons, 1926.

38. The editorial of the French democratic newspaper La Réforme of July 20, 1844, dealt with the Cabinet order of the Prussian King Frederick William IV to display concern for the poor. This Cabinet order was prompted by the fear caused by the Silesian weavers’ uprising. The author of the article was inclined to take the Prussian King’s demagogy for a serious intention to carry out social reforms.

39. Marx refers to the Cabinet order of the Prussian King Frederick William IV of July 18, 1843, issued in connection with the participation of government officials in a banquet arranged in Düsseldorf by the liberals to mark the seventh Rhenish Landtag; the order prohibited the government officials to take part in manifestations of this kind.

40. This refers to the Corn Laws — a series of laws in England (the first of which dated back to the 15th century) which imposed high duties on imported corn with the aim of maintaining high prices on it on the home market. In the first third of the 15th century several laws were passed (in 18 1 5, 1822 and later) changing the conditions of corn imports, and in 1828 a sliding-scale was introduced, which raised import duties on corn when prices fell on the home market and, vice versa, lowered import duties when prices rose.

In 1838 the Manchester factory owners Cobden and Bright founded the Anti-Corn Law League, which widely exploited the popular discontent at rising corn prices. While agitating for the abolition of the corn duties and demanding complete freedom of trade, the League strove to weaken the economic and political positions of the landed aristocracy and to lower workers’ wages.

The struggle between the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy over the Corn Laws ended in their repeal in 1846.

41. Marx quotes Francis Bacon according to the French translation of McCulloch’s book A Discourse on the Rise, Progress, Peculiar Objects, and Importance, of Political Economy (J. R. MacCulloch, Discours sur 1'origine, les progris, les objets particuliers, et 1'importance de 1'économie politique, Genève-Paris, 1825, pp. 131-32).

42. This quotation from Dr. Kay’s pamphlet published anonymously in 1839 is cited by Marx in his own free translation with omissions from the two-volume edition of Eugène Buret, De la misire des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France.... T. 1, pp. 396, 398, 401.

43. The decree of the National Convention of May 11 (22 Floréal), 1794, ordered the compilation of a Livre de la bienfaisance nationals (Book of National Charity) in which were to be entered invalids, orphans, the incapacitated and so forth, who were entitled to certain grants. It was one of the palliative measures for fighting the misery of the popular masses, introduced by the Jacobin government before its fall on July 27 (9 Thermidor), 1794.

The irruption of a crowd of hungry women into the building of the National Convention on May 20 (1 Prairial), 1795, marked the beginning of an uprising by the plebeian and proletarian masses of Paris against the Thermidor reaction; they put forward the slogan, “Bread and the Constitution of 1793!” Like the preceding uprising in Germinal (April) of the same year, the Prairial uprising was suppressed by military force.

44. Marx refers to the revolutionary song Das Blutgericht which was popular among the Silesian weavers on the eve of the revolt.

45. This refers to the revolts of the Lyons weavers in November 1831 and April 1834.

46. The Cabinet order of Frederick William IV quoted here and below was published on August 9, 1844, in the Allgemeine Preussische Zeitung. It was caused by an abortive attempt on the life of the king on July 26, 1844, in Berlin, by the former burgomaster of the town of Storkow, H. L. Tschech, acting on personal grounds.

47. This refers to the proposals submitted by the Prussian diplomat Bunsen to Frederick William IV in the spring and summer of 1844 concerning the proposed reform of the Prussian political system. According to Bunsen, his project was drawn up in “the monarchical and conservative spirit” and provided for the institution of an English-type bicameral Prussian parliament (Landtag) with an aristocratic upper chamber and a lower chamber elected on the estates principle.

48. These comments are made by Marx in his conspectus of James Mill’s book Elements of Political Economy (Marx used the French translation published in 1823 under the title Élémens d'économie politique), which forms part of the fourth and fifth of the nine notebooks of excerpts made by Marx during his stay in Paris from the end of 1843 till January 1845. The Paris Notebooks reflect Marx’s intense work on political economy. The books summarised by Marx include works by J. B. Say, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, McCulloch, James Mill, Destutt de Tracy, Sismondi, Jeremy Bentham, Boisguillebert, Lauderdale, Schütz, List, Skarbek and Buret. At the time Marx used mainly French translations of the British authors. In a number of his conspectuses Marx added his own comments to the excerpts or to his summaries of passages from the books he was studying. However, most of these comments are of a fragmentary nature. Many ideas set forth in them are reproduced in one form or another, and frequently in a more developed form, in the extant sections of the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. The most detailed and systematised comments are those from his conspectus of Mill’s book, which form two lengthy digressions from the text he was summarising. In their ideas they are close to the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and it is possible that they anticipated the thoughts expounded in the missing pages of the second manuscript of this work.

The first author’s digression in the conspectus follows a considerable number of excerpts from Mill’s book, which, like the other excerpts or summaries of passages in the concluding part of the conspectus, are not given in this edition. The full text of the conspectus was published in: Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Band 3, Berlin, 1932. However, the excerpts from Mill’ book made by Marx in between these two digressions, which by their content constitute a link between these comments, are published in full. Marx quotes excerpts from Mill’s book and from other French publications partly in French, but mainly in his own translation into German, alternating German text with French. In the present edition the texts quoted or paraphrased by Marx are given in English, exact quotations are reproduced from the original edition: James Mill, Elements of Political Economy, London, 1821. The emphasis in the quotations is Marx’s.

The first English translation of this article was published, in part, in the book: Writings of the Young Marx an Philosophy and Society, New York, 1967.

49. The text of this comment in the conspectus is immediately preceded by the following excerpts from James Mill’s book:

“...A medium of exchange ... is some one commodity, which, in order to effect an exchange between two other commodities, is first received in exchange for the one, and is then given in exchange for the other.” (P. 93.) Gold, silver, money.

“By value of money, is here to be understood the proportion in which it exchanges for other commodities, or the quantity of it which exchanges for a certain quantity of other things.”

“This proportion is determined by the total amount of money existing in a given country.” (p. 95.)

“What regulates the quantity of money?”

“Money is made under two sets of circumstances: Government either leaves the increase or diminution of it free; or it controls the quantity, making it greater or smaller as it pleases.

“When the increase or diminution of money is left free, government opens the mint to the public, making bullion into money for as many as require it. Individuals possessed of bullion will desire to convert it into money only when it is their interest to do so; that is, when their bullion, converted into money, will be more valuable than in its original form. This can only happen when money is peculiarly valuable, and when the same quantity of metal, in the state of coin, will exchange for a greater quantity of other articles than in the state of bullion. As the value of money depends upon the quantity of it, it has a greater value when it is in short supply. It is then that bullion is made into coin. But precisely because of this conversion, the old ratio is restored. Therefore, if the value of money rises above that of the metal of which it is made, the interest of individuals operates immediately, in a state of freedom, to restore the balance by augmenting the quantity of money.” (Pp. 99-101.)

“Whenever the coining of money, therefore, is free, its quantity is regulated by the value of the metal, it being, the interest of individuals to increase or diminish the quantity, in proportion as the value of the metal in coins is greater or less than its value in bullion.

“But if the quantity of money is determined by the value of the metal, it is still necessary to inquire what it is which determines the value of the metal.... Gold and silver are in reality commodities. They are commodities for the attaining of which labour and capital must be employed. It is cost of production, therefore, which determines the value of these, as of other ordinary productions.” (P. 101.)

50. The monetary system-an early type of mercantilism. Its adherents believed that wealth consisted in money, in amassing bullion reserves, hence the prohibition of gold and silver exports, the policy of securing an active trade balance.

51. This passage (which in the original reads as follows: “Durch die wechselseitige Entäusserung oder Entfremdung des Privateigentums ist das Privateigentum selbst in die Bestimmung des entdusserten Privateigentums geraten”) shows that when using the terms “Entäusserung” and “Entfremdung” to denote alienation Marx imparted to them an identical or nearly identical meaning. On the translation of these terms in this edition see Note 1.

52. This refers primarily to James Mill, who divided his system of political economy into four independent sections: Production, Distribution, Exchange and Consumption.

53. The rest of the conspectus contains further excerpts from Mill’s book. Concerning his excerpts from pages 261-66, on which Mill examines the question of the rent of land, profit on capital and wages as sources of taxation and the state revenue, Marx made the following brief comment:

“Es versteht sich, dass Mill wie Ricardo dagegen protestiert, irgend einem Gouvernement den Gedanken einflössen zu wollen, die Grundrente zur einzigen Quelle der Steuern zu machen, da sie parteiisch ungerechte Belastung ciner besonder Klasse von Individuen. Aber — und dies ist ein gewichtiges heimtiickisches Aber — aber die Steuer auf die Grundrente ist die einzige, vom nationalökonomischen Standpunkt aus nicht schädliche, also die einzig nationalökonomisch gerechte Steuer. Ja, das einzige Bedenken, was die Nationalökonomie aufsteilt, ist mehr anlockend als abschreckend, nimlich: class in einem selbst nur gewöhnlich bevölkerten und ausgedehnten Lande, die Höhe der Grundrente das Bedürfnis der Regierung übersteigen würde.” (“Needless to say, Mill, like Ricardo, denies that he wishes to impress on any government the idea that land rent should be made the sole source of taxes, since this would be a partisan measure placing an unfair burden on a particular class of individuals. But-and this is a momentous, insidious but-but the tax on land rent is the only tax that is not harmful from the standpoint of political economy, hence the only just tax from the point of view of political economy. Indeed, the one doubt raised by political economy is rather an attraction than a cause for apprehension, namely, that even in a country with an ordinary number of population and of ordinary size the amount yielded by land rent would exceed the needs of the government.”)

51. The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 is the first work in which Marx tried to systematically elaborate problems of political economy from the standpoint of his maturing dialectical-materialist and communist views and also to synthesise the results of his critical review of prevailing philosophic and economic theories. Apparently, Marx began to write it in order to clarify the problems for himself. But in the process of working on it he conceived the idea of publishing a work analysing the economic system of bourgeois society in his time and its ideological trends. Towards the end of his stay in Paris, on February 1, 1845, Marx signed a contract with Carl Leske, a Darmstadt publisher, concerning the publication of his work entitled A Critique of Politics and of Political Economy. It was to be based on his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 and perhaps also on his earlier manuscript Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law. This plan did not materialise in the 1840s because Marx was busy writing other works and, to some extent, because the contract with the publisher was cancelled in September 1846, the latter being afraid to have transactions with such a revolutionary-minded author. However, in the early 1850s Marx returned to the idea of writing a book on economics. Thus, the manuscripts of 1844 are connected with the conception of a plan which led many years later to the writing of Capital.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts is an unfinished work and in part a rough draft. A considerable part of the text has not been preserved. What remains comprises three manuscripts, each of which has its own pagination (in Roman figures). The first manuscript contains 27 pages, of which pages 1-XII and XVII-XXVII are divided by two vertical lines into three columns supplied with headings written in beforehand: “Wages of Labour”, “Profit of Capital” (this section has also subheadings supplied by the author) and “Rent of Land”. It is difficult to tell the order in which Marx filled these columns. All the three columns on p. VII contain the text relating to the section “Wages of Labour”. Pages XIII to XVI are divided into two columns and contain texts of the sections “Wages of Labour” (pp. XIII-XV), “Profit of Capital” (pp. XIII-XVI) and “Rent of Land” (p. XVI). On pages XVII to XXI, only the column headed “Rent of Land” is filled in. From page XXII to page XXVII, on which the first manuscript breaks off, Marx wrote across the three columns disregarding the headings. The text of these pages is published as a separate section entitled by the editors according to its content “Estranged Labour”.

Of the second manuscript only the last four pages have survived (pp. XL-XLIII).

The. third manuscript contains 41 pages (not counting blank ones) divided into two columns and numbered by Marx himself from I to XLIII (in doing so he omitted two numbers, XXII and XXV). Like the extant part of the second manuscript, the third manuscript has no author’s headings; the text has been arranged and supplied with the headings by the editors.

Sometimes Marx departed from the subject-matter and interrupted his elucidation of one question to analyse another. Pages XXXIX-XL contain the Preface to the whole work which is given in the present volume before the text of the first manuscript. The text of the section dealing with the critical analysis of Hegel’s dialectic, to which Marx referred in the Preface as the concluding chapter and which was scattered on various pages, is arranged in one section and put at the end in accordance with Marx’s indications.

In order to give the reader a better visual idea of the structure of the work, the text reproduces in vertical fines the Roman numbers of the sheets of the manuscripts, and the Arabic numbers of the columns in the first manuscript. The notes indicate where the text has been rearranged. Passages crossed out by Marx with a vertical line are enclosed in pointed brackets; separate words or phrases crossed out by the author are given in footnotes only when they supplement the text. The general title and the headings of the various parts of the manuscripts enclosed in square brackets are supplied by the editors on the basis of the author’s formulations. In some places the text has been broken up into paragraphs by the editors. Quotations from the French sources cited by Marx in French or in his own translation into German, are given in English in both cases and the French texts as quoted by Marx are given in the footnotes. Here and elsewhere Marx’s rendering of the quotations or free translation is given in small type but without quotation marks. Emphasis in quotations, belonging, as a rule, to Marx, as well as that of the quoted authors, is indicated everywhere by italics.

The Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 was first published by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism in Moscow in the language of the original: Marx/Engels, Gesamtausgabe, Abt. 1, Bd. 3, 1932.

In English this work was first published in 1959 by the Foreign Languages Publishing House (now Progress Publishers), Moscow, translated by Martin Milligan.

This refers to Bruno Bauer’s reviews of books, articles and pamphlets on the Jewish question, including Marx’s article on the subject in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, which were published in the monthly Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung (issue No. 1, December 1843, and issue No. IV, March 1844) under the title “Von den neuesten Schriften über die Judenfrage”. Most of the expressions quoted are taken from these reviews. The expressions “utopian phrase” and “compact mass” can be found in Bruno Bauer’s unsigned article, “Was ist jetzt der Gegenstand der Kritik?”, published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, issue No. VIII, July 1844. A detailed critical appraisal of this monthly was later on given by Marx and Engels in the book Die heilige Familie, oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik (see this edition, Vol. 4, The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism).

56. Marx apparently refers to Weitling’s works: Die Menschheit, wie sie ist und wie sie sein sollte, 1838, and Garantien der Harmonie und Freiheit, Vivis, 1842.

Moses Hess published three articles in the collection Einundzwanzig Bogen aus der Schweiz (Twenty-One Sheets from Switzerland), Erster Teil (Zürich und Winterthur, 1843), issued by Georg Herwegh. These articles, entitled “Sozialismus und Kommunismus”, “Philosophie der Tat” and “Die Eine und die ganze Freiheit”, were published anonymously. The first two of them had a note-"Written by the author of ‘Europäische Triarchie'”.

57. The term “element” in the Hegelian philosophy means a vital element of thought. It is used to stress that thought is a process, and that therefore elements in a system of thought are also phases in a movement. The term “feeling” (Empfindung) denotes relatively low forms of mental life in which no distinction is made between the subjective and objective.

58. Shortly after writing this Preface Marx fulfilled his intention in The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism, written in collaboration with Engels (see this edition, Vol. 4).

59. The expression “common humanity” (in the manuscript in French, “simple humanity”) was borrowed by Marx from the first volume (Chapter VIII) of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations, which he used in Garnier’s French translation (Recherches sur La nature et les causes de La richesse des nations, Paris, 1802, t. 1, p. 138). AB the subsequent references were given by Marx to this publication, the synopsis of which is contained in his Paris Notebooks with excerpts on political economy. In the present volume wherever there are references to or quotations from this work by Adam Smith the corresponding pages of the English edition are given and references to Garnier’s edition are reproduced in square brackets, e.g., Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, Everyman’s Library edition, Vol. 1, pp. 58-60 [Garnier, t. 1, pp. 132-36].

60. Marx uses the German term “Nationalökonomie” to denote both the economic system in the sense of science or theory, and the economic system itself.

61. Loudon’s work was a translation into French of an English manuscript apparently never published in the original. The author did publish in English a short pamphlet-The Equilibrium of Population and Sustenance Demonstrated, Leamington, 1836.

62. Unlike the quotations from a number of other French writers such as Constantin Pecqueur and Eugéne Buret, which Marx gives in French in this work, the excerpts from J. B. Say’s book are given in his German translation.

63. From this page of the manuscript quotations from Adam Smith’s book (in the French translation), which Marx cited so far sometimes in French and sometimes in German, are, as a rule, given in German. In this volume the corresponding pages of the English edition are substituted for the French by the editors and Marx’s references are given in square brackets (see Note 59).

64. The text published in small type here and below is not an exact quotation from Smith but a summary of the corresponding passages from his work. Such passages are subsequently given in small type but without quotation marks.

65. The preceding page (VII) of the first manuscript does not contain any text relating to the sections “Profit of Capital” and “Rent of Land” (see Note 54).

66. The whole paragraph, including the quotation from Ricardo’s book in the French translation by Francisco Solano Constancio: Des principes de 1'économie politique, et de 1'impôt, 2-e 6d., Paris, 1835, T. 11, pp. 194-95 (see the corresponding English edition On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, London, 1817), and from Sismondi’s Nouveaux principes d'économie politique.... Paris, 1819, T. If, p. 331, is an excerpt from Eugéne Buret’s book De la misère des classes laborieuses en Angleterre et en France.... Paris, 1840, T. 1, pp. 6-7, note.

67. The allusion is to the following passage: “In a perfectly fair lottery, those who draw the prizes ought to gain all that is lost by those who draw the blanks. In a profession where twenty fail for one that succeeds, that one ought to gain all that should have been gained by the unsuccessful twenty.” (Smith, Wealth of Nations, Vol. 1, Bk. 1, p. 94.)

68. See Note 65.

69. The Corn Laws — see Note 40.

70. Pages XIII to XV are divided into two columns and not three like the other pages of the first manuscript; they contain no text relating to the section “Rent of Land”. On page XVI, which also has two columns, this text is in the first column, while on the following pages it is in the second.

71. Marx, still using Hegel’s terminology and his approach to the unity of the opposites, counterposes the term “Verwirklichung” (realisation) to “Entwirklichung” (loss of realisation).

72. Re the translation of the terms “Entfremdung” and “Entäusserung” which express the concept of alienation see Note 1.

73. The term “species-being” (Gattungswesen) is derived from Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy where it is applied to man and mankind as a whole.

74. Apparently Marx refers to Proudhon’s book Quest-ce que la propriété?, Paris, 1841.

75. This passage shows that Marx here uses the category of wages in a broad sense, as an expression of antagonistic relations between the classes of capitalists and of wage-workers. Under “the wages” he understands “the wage-labour”, the capitalist system as such. This idea was apparently elaborated in detail in that part of the manuscript which is not extant.

76. This apparently refers to the conversion of individuals into members of civil society which is considered as the sphere of property, of material relations that determine all other relations. In this case Marx refers to the material relations of society based on private property and the antagonism of different classes.

77. The Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834 deprived poor people considered able to work (including children) of any public relief except a place in the workhouse, where they were compelled to work.

78. In the manuscript “sein für sich selbst” which is an expression of Hegel’s term “für sich” (for itself) as opposed to “an sich” (in itself). In the Hegelian philosophy the former means roughly explicit, conscious or defined in contrast to “an sich”, a synonym for immature, implicit or unconscious.

79. This refers to Révolutions de France et de Brabant, par Camille Desmoulins. Second Trimestre, contenant mars, avril et mai, Paris, l'an lier 1790, N. 16, p. 139 sq.; N. 23, p. 425 sqq.; N. 26, p. 580 sqq.

80. This refers to Georg Ludwig Wilhelm Funke, Die aus der unbeschränkten Theilbarkeit des Grundeigenthums hervorgehenden Nachtheile, Hamburg und Gotha, 1839, p. 56, in which there is a reference to Heinrich Leo, Studien und Skizzen zu einer Naturlehre des Staates, Halle, 1833, p. 102.

81. The third manuscript is a thick notebook the last few pages of which are blank. The pages are divided into two columns by a vertical line, not for the purpose of dividing the text according to the headings but for purely technical reasons. The text of the first three sections comprises pp. 1-XI, XIV-XXI, XXXIV-XXXVIII and was written as a supplement to the missing pages of the second manuscript. Pages XI-XIII, XVII, XVIII, XXIII, XXIV, XXVI-XXXIV contain the text of the concluding chapter dealing with the criticism of Hegel’s dialectic (on some pages it is written alongside the text of other sections). In some places the manuscript contains the author’s remarks testifying to his intention to unite into a single whole various passages of this section separated from each other by the text of other sections. Pages XXIX-XL comprise the draft Preface. Finally, the text on the last pages (XLI-XLIII), is a self-contained essay on the power of money in bourgeois society.

82. The manuscript has “als für sich seiende Tätigkeit”. For the meaning of the terms “für sich” and “an sich” in Hegel’s philosophy see Note 78.

83. Marx refers to the rise of the primitive, crude equalitarian tendencies among the representatives of utopian communism at the early stages of its development. Among the medieval religious communistic communities, in particular, there was current a notion of the common possession of women as a feature of the future society depicted in the spirit of consumer communism ideals. In 1534-35 the German Anabaptists, who seized power in Münster, tried to introduce polygamy in accordance with this view. Tommaso Campanella, the author of Civito Solis (early 17th century), rejected monogamy in his ideal society. The primitive communistic communities were also characterised by asceticism and a hostile attitude to science and works of art. Some of these primitive equalitarian features, the negative attitude to the arts in particular, were inherited by the communist trends of the first half of the 19th century, for example, by the members of the French secret societies of the 1830s and 1840s (“worker-egalitarians”, “humanitarians”, and so on) comprising the followers of Babeuf (for a characterisation of these see Engels, “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent”, pp. 396-97 of this volume).

84. This note is given by Marx on page V of the manuscript where it is separated by a horizontal line from the main text, but according to its meaning it refers to this sentence.

85. This part of the manuscript shows clearly the peculiarity of the terminology used by Marx in his works. At the time he had not worked out terms adequately expressing the conceptions of scientific communism he was then evolving and was still under the influence of Feuerbach in that respect. Hence the difference in the use of words in his early and subsequent, mature writings. In the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 the word “socialism” is used to denote the stage of society at which it has carried out a revolutionary transformation, abolished private property, class antagonisms, alienation and so on. In the same sense Marx used the expression “communism equals humanism”. At that time he understood the term “communism as such” not as the final goal of revolutionary transformation but as the process of this transformation, development leading up to that goal, a lower stage of the process.

86. This expression apparently refers to the theory of the English geologist Sir Charles Lyell who, in his three-volume work The Principles of Geology (1830-33), proved the evolution of the earth’s crust and refuted the popular theory of cataclysms. Lyell used the term “historical geology” for his theory. The term “geognosy” was introduced by the 18th-century German scientist Abraham Werner, a specialist in mineralogy, and it was used also by Alexander Humboldt.

87. This statement is interpreted differently by researchers. Many of them maintain that Marx here meant crude equalitarian communism, such as that propounded by Babeuf and his followers. While recognising the historic role of that communism, he thought it impossible to ignore its weak points. It seems more justifiable, however, to interpret this passage proceeding from the peculiarity of terms used in the manuscript (see Note 85). Marx here used the term “communism” to mean not the higher phase of classless society (which he at the time denoted as “socialism” or “communism equalling humanism”) but movement (in various forms, including primitive forms of equalitarian communism at the early stage) directed at its achievement, a revolutionary transformation process of transition to it. Marx emphasised that this process should not be considered as an end in itself, but that it is a necessary, though a transitional, stage in attaining the future social system, which will be characterised by new features distinct from those proper to this stage.

88. Page XI (in part) and pages XII and XIII are taken up by a text relating to the concluding chapter (see Note 81).

89. The greater part of this page as well as part of the preceding page (XVII) comprises a text relating to the concluding chapter (see Note 81).

90. Apparently Marx refers to a formula of the German philosopher Fichte, an adherent of subjective idealism.

91. The preceding pages starting from p. XXI, which is partly taken up by a text relating to this section, contain the text of the concluding chapter.

92. In some of his early writings Marx already uses the term “bürgerliche Gesellschaft” to mean two things: (1) in a broader sense, the economic system of society regardless of the historical stage of its development, the sum total of material relations which determine political institutions and ideology, and (2) in the narrow sense, the material relations of bourgeois society (later on, that society as a whole), of capitalism. Hence, the term has been translated according to its concrete meaning in the context as “civil society” in the first case and “bourgeois society” in the second.

93. The two previous pages of the manuscript contain the draft Preface to the whole work, which is published on pages 231-34.

94. Ontology- in some philosophical systems a theory about being, about the nature of things.

95. Originally the section on the Hegelian dialectic was apparently conceived by Marx as a philosophical digression in the section of the third manuscript which is published under the heading “Private Property and Communism” and was written together with other sections as an addition to separate pages of the second manuscript (see pp. 293-306 of this volume). Therefore Marx marked the beginning, of this section (p. XI in the manuscript) as point 6, considering it to be the continuation of the five points of the preceding section. He marked as point 7 the beginning of the following section, headed “Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property”, on page XIV of the manuscript. However, when dealing with this subject on subsequent pages of his manuscript, Marx decided to collect the whole material into a separate, concluding chapter and mentioned this in his draft Preface. The chapter, like a number of other sections of the manuscript, was not finished. While writing it, Marx made special excerpts from the last chapter (“Absolute Knowledge”) of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, which are in the same notebook as the third manuscript (these excerpts are not reproduced in this edition).

96. The reference is not quite accurate. On page 193 of the work mentioned, Bruno Bauer polemises not against the anti-Hegelian Herr Gruppe but against the Right Hegelian Marheineke.

97. Marx here refers to Feuerbach’s critical observations on Hegel in §§ 29-30 of his Grundsätze tier Philosophie der Zukunft.

This note is given at the bottom of page XIII of the third manuscript without any indication what it refers to. The asterisk after the sentence to which it seems to refer is given by the editors.

98. Here on page XVII of the third manuscript (part of which comprises a text relating to the section “Human Requirements and Division of Labour Under the Rule of Private Property”) Marx gave the note: “see p. XIII”, which proves that this text is the continuation of the section dealing with the critical analysis of the Hegelian dialectic begun on pp. XI-XIII.

99. At the end of page XVIII of the third manuscript there is a note by Marx: “continued on p. XXII”. However number XXII was omitted by Marx in paging (see Note 54). The text of the given chapter is continued on the page marked by the author as XXIII, which is also confirmed by his remark on it: “see P. XVIII”.

100. Marx apparently refers here not only to the identity of Hegel’s views on labour and some other categories of political economy with those of the English classical economists but also to his profound knowledge of economic writings. In lectures he delivered at Jena University in 1803-04 Hegel cited Adam Smith’s work. In his Philosophie des Rechts (§ 189) he mentions Smith, Say and Ricardo and notes the rapid development of economic thought.

101. Hegel uses the term “thinghood” (Dingheit) in his work Phänomenologie des Geistes to denote an abstract, universal, mediating link in the process of cognition; “thinghood” reveals the generality of the specific properties of individual things. The synonym for it is “pure essence” (das reine Wesen).

102. These eight points of the “surmounting of the object of consciousness”, expressed “in all its aspects”, are copied nearly word for word from §§ 1 and 3 of the last chapter (“Absolute Knowledge”) of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes.

103. Number XXV was omitted by Marx in paging the third manuscript.

104. Marx refers to § 30 of Feuerbach’s Grundsätze der Philosophie der Zukunft, which says: “Hegel is a thinker who surpasses himself in thinking”.

105. This enumeration gives the major categories of Hegel’s Encyclopädie der Philosophische Wissenschaften in the order in which they are examined by Hegel. Similarly, the categories reproduced by Marx above (on p. 340) from civil law” to “world history”, are given in the order in which they appear in Hegel’s Philosophie des Rechts.

106. This letter was written soon after the termination of the talks which Marx had with Arnold Ruge from March to September 1843, on the question of publishing the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (see Note 15). The letter was connected with Marx’s intention to enlist advanced German and French intellectuals to contribute to the journal. At the end of October 1843 Marx went from Kreuznach to Paris, where the journal was to be published.

This letter was first published in English in abridged form in the book Karl Marx. Early Texts, translated and edited by David McLennan, Oxford, 1971.

107. As follows from Feuerbach’s reply to Marx on October 25, 1843, Feuerbach when mentioning a book against Schelling, which was soon to appear, referred not to his own work, but to that of his friend and follower Kappa: Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, Leipzig, 1843.

108. Marx ironically calls Schelling the 38th member of the German Confederation. The Confederation uniting 33 German states and 4 free cities was established at the 1815 Congress of Vienna with a view to ending feudal disunity in Germany.

109. According to the Prussian censorship instructions all publications of 21 signatures and more were not subject to preliminary censorship.

110. The reference is to German public opinion on the controversy over the book of the German theologian Paulus about Schelling’s philosophy of revelation. After this book was published in 1843 Schelling brought in several law-suits against the author demanding that dues should be paid to him for quotations from his lectures. The proceedings were widely commented in the press. This incident prompted Heinrich Heine to write his satirical poem Kirchenrat Prometheus.

111. Although in his letter of October 25, 1843, Feuerbach fully agreed with the appraisal of the political tendencies of Schelling’s philosophy given by Marx in his letter, he nevertheless refused to send an article on Schelling for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher on the plea that he was occupied with other plans.

112. This letter concerns the circumstances of publication of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher which was printed in the printshop of the publisher Fröbel. Apparently some of the manuscripts were forwarded directly to Fröbel.

113. See Note 111.

114. This letter was first published in English in the book: Karl Marx. Early Texts, translated and edited by David McLellan, Oxford, 1971.

115. The English translation of Feuerbach’s Wesen des Chrisenthums was apparently never published. The French translation was published in the book: A. H. Ewerbeck, Quest-ce que la religion d'apris la nouvelle philosophic allemande, Paris, 1850.

116. The statements quoted here and some lines below were taken by Marx from articles published in the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, issues V and VI, 1844. Marx criticised them in chapters seven and nine of The Holy Family (see this edition, Vol. 4).

117. The summary of the first volume of the Jacobin Levasseur’s Memoirs was compiled by Marx in connection with his plans to write a work on the history of the French Revolution. Marx began to be interested in the revolutionary events in France at the end of the eighteenth century as early as the summer of 1843, as can be seen from his excerpts from special works on this subject by the German historians Wachsmuth and Ludwig contained in the Kreuznach Notebooks. As evidenced by A. Ruge (Ruge’s letters to Feuerbach of May 15, 1844, to Fleischer of May 20 and July 9, 1844 — see A. Ruges Briefwechsel und Tagebuchblätter, Bd. 1, Berlin, 1886), after he had moved to Paris in the autumn of 1843, Marx planned to write a work on the history of the French Convention. He worked on it during several months of 1844, reading a lot of material, including the press of the time, memoirs of contemporaries, etc. In 1845 the radical Trier’sche Zeitung also wrote about these plans of Marx, which were never realised, in connection with Marx’s banishment from France. Excerpts from Levasseur’s Memoirs were published in the newspaper Vorwärts! in 1844, evidently on Marx’s advice.

The time when this conspectus was compiled apparently coincided with the beginning of Marx’s economic research: it is contained in the third notebook of the series with excerpts from the works of economists which Marx made since his arrival in Paris to August 1844. Besides the summary of Levasseur’s Memoirs, the notebook contains the end of the excerpts from the French translation of Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations begun in the second notebook.

The pages of the notebook are divided into two columns by a vertical line. On the left-hand side Marx wrote direct quotations from the book in French (only one quotation is in German) or gave brief rendering in German of separate passages. Marx’s own text consists of laconic comments and references which are typed in long primer in this edition. On the right-hand side there is more coherent rendering of the book’s contents to which Marx gave the title: “The Struggle Between the Montagnards and the Girondists”. The whole text is in German with the exception of some French terms and expressions which are given in the original in this edition. In some cases, especially when assessing events and public figures, Marx also quotes from Levasseur’s text word for word or almost word for word in German. These passages are typed in small type (the quotation marks being the editors').

In this edition we publish first the text of the left columns under the subheading “Excerpts”, and then the text of the summary proper, written in the right columns. The italics are Marx’s.

118. On June 20, 1792, a mass manifestation took place in Paris in front of the Legislative Assembly and the royal palace of the Tuileries. The participants demanded cancellation of the royal veto on the decree of the establishment of a camp of Marseilles volunteers (fédérès) near Paris and restoration to their ministerial posts of the Girondist leaders dismissed by the king. The actual refusal to meet these demands made the atmosphere still more tense. The Mayor of Paris, the Girondist Pétion, dismissed from his post for supporting the manifestation, was recalled under the pressure of the Parisian sections in mid-July 1792. During the month of July 1792, despite the royal veto, detachments of fédérès continued to arrive in Paris from Marseilles and other towns. This strengthened the movement for the abolition of the monarchy and made for an energetic rebuff to the external enemies of the revolution.

119. On April 20, 1792, the Legislative Assembly voted the decree on the declaration of war on Austria, which marked the beginning of revolutionary France’s prolonged armed struggle against the coalition of counter-revolutionary states. This act was preceded by intense war propaganda on the part of the Jacobin Club (Appeals of February 15 and 17, 1792) conducted under the influence of Girondists. Representatives of the Left wing of the Club (Robespierre and others), on the contrary, considered it necessary to put off as long as possible the inevitable military conflict with the aim of gaining time for strengthening revolutionary order.

The Jacobin Club (“Société des amis de la constitution”) founded in October 1789, initially united the representatives of different political trends in the anti-absolutist camp. In July 1791, following the internal struggle, the moderate constitutionalists left the Club, and after the uprising of August 10, 1792, the Girondists followed suit. The influence of the revolutionary-democratic circles (Jacobins) then prevailed entirely. Having become their party centre, the Club, with its branches in the provinces, played an outstanding part in making revolutionary transformations.

120. On the page mentioned Levasseur writes about the ambiguous position of General Lafayette, one of the leaders of the moderate liberal constitutionalists, on the eve of the uprising of August 10, 1792. He enjoyed the confidence neither of the royal court nor of the revolutionary-patriotic camp.

121. August 10, 1792 — the day of the overthrow of the monarchy in France as a result of a popular uprising.

122. Interregnum — the period between the uprising of August 10, 1792, and the convocation of the Convention on September 20, 1792, lasting 42 days (the first open session was held on the 21st of September). It was marked by acute struggle between the Legislative Assembly and the revolutionary Paris Commune, which was formed instead of the former municipal council during the uprising of August 10 and directed the actions of the insurgents.

123. The Convention Committee consisted of a President to be re-elected every fortnight and six secretaries.

124. Feuillants — moderate liberal constitutionalists whose representatives (the Lameth brothers and others) left the Jacobin Club on July 16, 1791, after it adopted a petition for the dethroning of the king (see Note 1 19), and formed their own political club (they met in a house formerly occupied by the religious order bearing the name of the Feuillants, which was abolished in 1789). Having a considerable influence among the members of the Legislative Assembly, they strove in the interests of the big bourgeoisie and the liberal nobility to prevent the development of the revolution.

125. On these pages Levasseur refutes the Girondists’ accusations against the leaders of the Montagnards that they had been bribed by the émigrés and foreign agents. He characterises Danton, Robespierre and Marat (the latter with the reservation that he does not agree with his “wild” theories) as unselfish leaders devoted to the revolution.

126. On these pages Levasseur cites Marat’s speech in his self-defence in the Convention on September 25, 1792. In this speech Marat succeeded in proving the groundlessness of the Girondist accusation of incitement to revolt against the Convention and in defeating the proposal that his activity should be censured. Although Levasseur disliked Marat, he was compelled to admit the courage and composure with which he fought this campaign of slander and hatred launched by his opponents.

127. In Levasseur’s book: “It was difficult for the long-winded and garrulous eloquence of the latter to compete with the empty trumpery of Louvet.” Further Levasseur speaks about the unsubstantiated accusations that Robespierre aimed at dictatorship and instigated reprisals against royalist prisoners in September 1792. In his speech in the Convention on November 5, 1792, Robespierre fully disproved these Girondist insinuations.

128. The discussion of Buzot’s proposal which envisaged that the decree on the expatriation of the dethroned Bourbons should apply to the secondary branch of the dynasty as well — the family of the Duke of Orléans — was postponed by a majority vote. Levasseur states that many members of the Convention feared that expatriation of the former Duke of Or1éans, Philippe Égalité, would be a dangerous precedent of violating a deputy’s immunity.

129. On these pages Levasseur characterises the Girondists as a party whose activity objectively played into the hands of counter-revolutionary forces. “Though they were ardent republicans, they, unfortunately, fought on the side of the royalists, and, what is worse, concealed some of the royalists amidst themselves.”

130. On September 2-5, 1792, when the enemy armies were launching an offensive, in an atmosphere of disturbing rumours of counter-revolutionary conspiracies and preparations of reprisals against the families of patriots who fought the foreign enemies, the popular masses of Paris stormed the prisons, organised improvised courts and executed about a thousand prisoners who were supporters of the monarchy. These spontaneous terroristic actions of the people were used by the Girondists to accuse the Jacobins of organising the September massacres.

131. The question of performance of religious rites arose in the Convention in connection with the discussion of the report on the primary education on December 12 and 14, 1792. The proposal to introduce religious education in the primary schools was rejected during the debate, but at the same time prominent Montagnard leaders (Robespierre, Danton) came out against some deputies who proposed the general prohibition of religious rites.

Under the Decree on Means of Subsistence is meant the repeal of the corn trade restrictions and the decision on the armed suppression of the movement for fixed prices adopted by the Convention under pressure of the Girondists in December 1792. These measures strongly infringed the interests of the masses who were suffering from shortage of food and the soaring prices. During this period the Montagnards did not support the popular demands for fixed prices on bread and other products but at the same time they rejected the principle of unrestricted freedom of trade upheld by the Girondists. Thus, speaking on the food question on December 2, 1792, Levasseur advocated the necessity of compulsory measures against sabotage by the farmers and grain merchants.

132. On March 10, 1793, representatives of the most radical plebeian trend in the revolutionary camp, called “les enragés”, who wanted fixed prices, social measures against poverty, punishment of profiteers, etc., attempted to stir up a rebellion. Participants in the rebellion, during which two Girondist printshops were smashed up, wrote a petition in which they demanded the expulsion of the Girondists from the Convention. However, not being supported by the Jacobins, who were afraid to oppose the Girondists openly, “les enragés” did not attain their goal.

The Cordelier Club (“Société des amis droits de 1'homme et du citoyen”)-One of the most radical democratic organisations during the French Revolution, founded in 1790. The Left-wing Jacobins had a majority in the Club. Despite the fact that “les enragés” took part in its activities, it did not support their action of March 10, 1793.

133. On May 31 and June 2, 1793, a popular uprising took place in Paris resulting in the expulsion of the Girondists from the Convention. A revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the Jacobins supported by the masses was established. The success of the uprising was achieved through the unity of the revolutionary forces (Jacobins, “les enragés”) in their struggle against the political supremacy of the Girondist Party which became an exponent of the counter-revolutionary tendencies of the big bourgeoisie.

134. According to Levasseur’s statement Danton described Dumouriez as an extremely talented general, but having political convictions which were doubtful from the point of view of the republicans. Danton pointed to Dumouriez’ extreme ambition, his obvious reluctance to submit to the Convention’s control and his tendency to surround himself with flatterers and plotters.

135. The aggravation of the food crisis, the growing discontent of the masses and the agitation of “les enragés” for fixed prices compelled the Convention to discuss the food question again in the spring of 1793. Taking into consideration the sentiments of the people, the Jacobins this time spoke in favour of fixing the maximum prices on corn. Despite the Girondists’ resistance the decree on maximum corn prices was adopted on May 4, 1793.

136. The summary of Engels’ article “Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy” is in the fifth notebook of excerpts from the works of economists made by Marx when he was in Paris (concerning the Paris Notebooks see Note 48). The conspectuses and excerpts in the fifth notebook were probably made in the first half of 1844.

137. Letters from London-a series of articles written by Engels and printed in May-June 1843 in the progressive journal Schweizerischer Republikaner published by German emigrants (Fröbel and others) in Zurich. They were actually the continuation of Engels’ reports on the social and political conflicts in England which he published in the Rheinische Zeitung at the end of 1842, soon after his arrival in that country (see this edition, Vol. 2). In early 1843 Engels temporarily interrupted his activity as a journalist owing, on the one hand, to his intensive study of social conditions in England, the English labour movement and English socialist literature and, on the other, to the closure of the Rheinische Zeitung in the spring of 1843. Later, especially from the autumn of 1843, Engels began to contribute to the labour and socialist newspapers in England and on the Continent.

Only the fourth article from the series Letters from London was published in English, in the collection: Marx and Engels, Ireland and the Irish Question, Moscow, 1971.

138. The Anti-Corn Law League — see Note 40.

139. The People’s Charter, containing the demands of the Chartists, was published on May 8, 1838, in the form of a bill to be submitted to Parliament. It consisted of six points: universal suffrage (for men over 21), annual parliaments, vote by ballot, equal electoral districts, abolition of the property qualifications for M.P.s, and remuneration of M.P.s.

140. The English edition of Strauss’ book Das Leben Jesu was put out by Hetherington Publishers in 1842 in weekly instalments.

141. Graham’s Bill “For Regulating the Employment of Children and Young Persons in Factories, and for the Better Education of Children in Factory Districts” was submitted to the House of Commons on March 7, 1843 (see Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates: Third series, Vol. LXVII, Second Volume of the Session, London, 1843, p. 422 sqq.).

142. Engels quotes from an article in the Allgemeine Zeitung No. 1 10, April 20, 1843, datelined: “London, 13 April”.

143. The National Charter Association, founded in July 1840, was the first mass workers’ party in the history of the labour movement, numbering up to 50 thousand members in the years of the rise of the Chartist movement. The lack of ideological and tactical unity among its members and the petty-bourgeois ideology of the majority of the Chartist leaders affected the activities of the Association. After the defeat of Chartism in 1848, the Association declined and it ceased its activity in the 1850s.

144. The editorial board of the Schweizerische Republikaner gave the following note to this passage: “This comprises 1,767,500 Rhenish Fl., a sum which, according to our continental notions of ‘the poor’ is scarcely probable.”

145. The reference is apparently to the project to establish a special fund for buying plots of land and distributing them among workers. This plan was proposed by the Chartist leader Feargus O'Connor as early as 1838; he tried more than once to put it into effect; in 1845, with this aim in view, he founded the Chartist Land Co-operative Society, which was also a failure.

146. No article by Engels on this subject was published in the Schweizerische Republikaner. Later Engels wrote about the Chartists’ attitude towards the Anti-Corn Law League in his book The Condition of the Working-Class in England (Chapter “Labour Movements”, see this edition, Vol. .4).

147. The reference is to the following passage from Robert Owen’s work The Marriage System of the New Moral World, Leeds, 1838: “I resume the subject of marriage because it is the source of more demoralisation, crime, and misery than any other single cause, with the exception of religion and private property; and these three together form the great trinity of causes of crime and immorality among mankind.” (P. 54.)

148. An apparent reference to the following editions: J. J. Rousseau, An Inquiry into the Nature of the Social Contract, or Principles of Political Right, 184 [... ]; [Holbach,] System of Nature, London, 1817. Announcements of popular and cheap editions of the classics of French philosophy were published in Owen’s weekly The New Moral World.

149. The Act of Union with England was imposed on Ireland by the English Government after the suppression of the Irish rebellion in 1798. The Union, which came into force on January 1, 1801, abolished an autonomous Irish Parliament and made Ireland still more dependent on England. The demand for the repeal of the Union became a most popular watchword in Ireland after the 1820s. However, the Irish liberals who were at the head of the national liberation movement (O'Connell and others) considered the agitation for the repeal of the Union only as a means of obtaining concessions for the Irish bourgeoisie and landowners from the English Government. In 1835 O'Connell came to an agreement with the English Whigs and stopped agitation altogether. Under the impact of the mass movement, however, the Irish liberals were compelled in 1840 to found an Association of Repealers, which they tried to direct onto the path of compromise with the English ruling classes.

150. The principal tenant — a middleman who leased land directly from the landowner and then let it in small plots to subtenants, who in their turn often parcelled out these plots and let them too.

151. The second Chartist petition demanding the adoption of the People’s Charter was written by the Executive Committee of the National Charter Association and submitted to Parliament in May 1842. It also demanded for Ireland the right to annul the forced Act of Union of 1801. Despite this, the Irish liberals, far from supporting the Chartists’ agitation, took a hostile attitude towards the Chartists.

152. With the article “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent” Engels started contributing to the London socialist weekly The New Moral World: and Gazette of the Rational Society founded by Robert Owen. The article was supplied with notes (reproduced at the end of this volume). Almost at the same time the article was published in an abridged form in the Chartist newspaper The Northern Star Nos. 313 and 315, November 11 and 25, 1843.

The article was welcomed in English proletarian and socialist circles. The editor of the weekly, Fleming, noted in 1844 that the English readers had got to know some representatives of continental socialism, in particular Wilhelm Weitling, thanks to the appearance at the end of the previous year of a series of articles ably written by a German living in England (The New Moral World, 1844, No. 14, p. 110). The editorial board of The Northern Star assessed Engels’ article as “an interesting ... exposition of ‘Continental Communism’ from the pen of one who was master of his subject, because he knew the facts with which h(. made the public acquainted” (The Northern Star No. 386, May 4, 1844).

Engels continued to contribute to the organ of the English Owenists after he left England in August 1944 up to May 1845.

153. The English translation of Buonarroti’s book was published in London in 1836 under the title Buonarroti’s History of Babeuf’s Conspiracy for Equality; with the Author’s Reflections on the Causes and Character of the French Revolution, and His Estimate of the Leading Men and Events of that Epoch. The translation was made by Bronterre O'Brien, one of the leaders and theoreticians of Chartism.

154. The reference is to the group of English Utopian Socialists who in 1842 founded the colony-commune Concordium in Ham Common near London; followers of the English mystic J. P. Greaves, the Ham Common Socialists preached moral self-perfection and an ascetic way of life. The colony did not 155 survive long.

155. The editors of The New Moral World supplied the following note to this passage: “A few years since we gave a complete exposition of the system in a series of articles in this journal.” The author of the note meant two large series of articles: “Socialism in France. Charles Fourier” and “Fourierism”; the first was published in The New Moral World in 1819 (Nos. 45-46, 48, 49), the second in 1839-40 (Nos. 53, 55, 57, 61-63, 71, 73-75).

156. The editors of The New Moral World gave the following note to this passage: “Now entitled Démocratie Pacifique.” Besides the daily newspaper La Démocratie Pacifique, published since August 1843, the Fourierists continued to publish La Phalange as a theoretical journal.

157. Engels refers here to a series of armed actions by the French proletariat directed against the regime of the bourgeois July monarchy and also to the workers’ active participation in the uprisings led by the republican secret societies. The major events in the 1830s were: the uprisings of Lyons workers at the end of November 1831 and in April 1834, and also republican revolts in Paris on June 5, 1832, April 13-14, 1834, and May 12, 1839, the main participants in which were workers.

158. “Travailleurs Égalitaires” — a secret society of the French Communists-Babouvists, which sprang up in 1840 and consisted mainly of workers. Humanitarians — a secret society of Communists-Babouvists, who in 1841 rallied around the newspaper L'Humanitaire. These two societies were under tile ideological influence of Théodore Dézamy and belonged to the revolutionary, and materialist trend in French utopian communism.

159. The editor of The New Moral World gave the following note to this sentence: “It is proper to reiterate that the Icarian Communists, in their organ, tile Populaire, have, in the strongest manner, disowned all participation in secret societies, and affixed the names of their leaders to public documents, expositions of their principles and objects.”

160. Harmony — the name of a communistic colony founded by the followers of Robert Owen in Hampshire in 1841; the colony survived till the beginning of 1846.

161. The public debate between J.Watts, who was at that time an active proponent of Owenism, and the Chartist speaker J.Bairstow took place in Manchester on October 11, 12 and 13, 1843. Engels apparently attended it.

162. Münzer’s communist revolutionary ideas, which are mentioned below, were expounded in a series of pamphlets issued by him on the eve and during the Peasant War in Germany (1524-25), in particular in the proclamation: “Ausgedrückte Entblössung des falschen Glaubens der ungetreuen Welt durchs Zeugnis des Evangelions Lucae, vorgetragen der elenden erbdrmlichen Christenheit zur Erinnerung ihres Irrsais”, published in the autumn of 1524 in Mülhausen. Later Engels called this pamphlet “a highly inciting paper” (see F. Engels, The Peasant War in Germany, Ch. 11; this edition, Vol. 10).

163. Engels’ statement is based on the prospectus of Wilhelm Weitling’s book Das Evangelium der armen Sünder which was published at that time. The book itself was published only in 1845 in Berne under the title Das Evangelium eines armen Sünders.

164. The Federal Diet-the supreme body of the German Confederation (1815-66) consisting of representatives of the German states; it defended the conservative monarchical regime in Germany.

165. The reference is to a letter written by the democratic poet Georg Herwegh to Frederick William IV in which he accused the king of breaking his promise to introduce the freedom of the press and, in particular, of banning the radical monthly Der deutsche Bote aus der Schweiz, which was being prepared for printing at the time. Herwegh’s letter appeared in the Leipziger Allgemeine Zeitung on December 24, 1842; this led to the banning of the newspaper and Herwegh’s banishment from Paris. In England the letter was published in The Times on January 16, 1843, in The Morning Herald on January 17, 1843, and in other newspapers.

166. Engels’ article on this subject did not appear in The New Moral World.

167. Edgar Bauer was sentenced to four years’ imprisonment for his book Der Streit der Kritik mit Kirche und Staat, Charlottenburg, 1843, confiscated by the Prussian Government.

168. During his stay in England Engels attended meetings organised by members of the Chartist movement and tried to establish personal contacts with its leaders. In the autumn of 1843 he visited Leeds, where the central Chartist organ, The Northern Star, was published at the time, and got acquainted with its editor George Julian Harney, a prominent figure in the revolutionary wing of the Chartist Party. Engels introduced himself, Harney recalled, as a permanent reader of The Northern Star, who was very much interested in the Chartist movement. As a result of this meeting Engels started contributing to the Chartist press, but at first only incidentally. On November 11 and 25, 1843, The Northern Star reprinted with some abridgements Engels’ article “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent” immediately after its first publication in the weekly The New Moral World. Two weeks later these notes connected with the above-mentioned article appeared in the Chartist paper. They also appeared in The New Moral World. In this volume they are published as one article. Closely connected with these is the short report “The Press and the German Despots” published in The Northern Star on February 3, 1844 (see this volume, p. 417). Later Engels proposed to the editors that he would systematically contribute to the paper reports about events on the Continent (see his letter to the editor of The Northern Star, p. 514 of this volume). From that time on Engels’ articles and reports were regularly published in the newspaper. After his departure from England in August 1844 his reports ceased to appear in the paper but were resumed in the autumn of 1845. (In the summer of that year Engels visited England once more and again met Harney.) He contributed to The Northern Star till 1850.

169. The reference is to the League of the Just, a secret revolutionary organisation founded in 1836 by German proletarianised emigrant craftsmen in Paris. Besides France, League branches existed in Germany, England and Switzerland. A great role in their organisation was played by Weitling. Various theories of utopian communism and socialism, in particular Weitlingism, formed the ideological foundation of the League. The emigrant workers of other nationalities also participated in the League’s activities. The internationalisation of the League and the evolution of its members’ views under the influence of the ideas of Marx and Engels led to its reorganisation into the Communist League in 1847.

By the time of the publication of this article the final verdict of the Weitling case was not yet pronounced. At the end of December 1843, the Supreme Court of Appeal of the Swiss Bund sentenced Weitling to 10 months of imprisonment and 5-year exile from Switzerland on the basis of the appeal of the prosecutor who protested the decision of the court of the Zurich canton.

170. The reference is to the anonymous article The Communists in Germany published in The Times on December 29, 1843, and reprinted in The New Moral World No. 28 on January 6, 1844. Engels cites from this article below.

171. The reference is to the Paris uprising of May 12, 1839, prepared by the secret republican socialist Société des Saisons headed by Louis Auguste Blanqui and Armand Barbès; the uprising was suppressed by troops and the National Guard.

172. Repealers-see Note 149.

173. Engels alludes to prominent members of the League of the Just: the type-setter Karl Schapper, the watchmaker Joseph Moll and others, connected with the Blanquist secret Société des Saisons which organised the Paris uprising of May 12, 1839. Schapper and Moll took part in the uprising, were prosecuted by the French authorities and compelled to leave for England, where they headed local branches of the League. Engels made their acquaintance in the spring of 1843 in London, as he wrote later in his article “On the History of the Communist League”.

174. On May 27, 1832, a political manifestation took place near the castle of Hambach in Bavarian Pfaiz, which was organised by representatives of the German liberal and radical bourgeoisie. Participants of the “Hambach festival” launched an appeal to fight for the unification of Germany, for the bourgeois freedoms and constitutional reforms.

On July 27, 1834, on the occasion of the anniversary of the July revolution in France a large meeting in defence of the idea of German unification was held in Steinhölzli near Berne (Switzerland) on the initiative of the German emigrants.

175. Rebeccaites — members of the peasant movement in South Wales in 1843-44 demanding the removal of tollgates. The leader of the movement acted under the assumed name of Rebecca, a personage from the Bible. The Rebeccaites acted at night dressed in women’s clothes.

176. Voigtland — the name given to one of the working-class districts in Berlin. Saint Giles’ — a district of London populated by poor people.

177. The double issue of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (No. 1-2) was put out at the end of February 1844.

178. The Final Protocol of the 1834 Vienna Conference of the ministers of the states of the German Confederation envisaged measures for suppressing the liberal and democratic movement in Germany, stricter censorship and mutual support of the states in the struggle against the liberal and radical opposition. This Protocol as well as the decisions of the Federal Diet (the supreme body of the German Confederation) issued in June-July 1832 on the prohibition of popular societies and meetings and also on rendering military aid to those German states which were in danger of an uprising of their subjects was the answer of the ruling circles of Germany to the unrest in the country caused by the July revolution of 1830 in France. The chief inspirer of these police measures was the Austrian Chancellor Metternich.

The Protocol of the Vienna Conference and the reactionary decision of the 1819 Karlsbad Conference of the representatives of the German states, which had been kept secret, were published by the German liberal publicist and historian K. G. Wekker in his book Wichtige Urkunden für den Rechtszustand der deutschen Nation, Mannheim, 1844. Even before the book was put out the contents of the Protocol had been known to democratic circles and published in the German emigrant press, in particular in the Paris Vorwärts! in January 1844. The text was also reprinted in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher at the end of February 1844.

179. The reference is to the trial of O'Connell and eight other leaders of the Repeal movement which started in January 1844. Taking advantage of the waverings among the Irish liberal leaders fearing the scope of the movement, the Tory government wanted to deal a smashing blow at the movement by staging this trial. In February 1844 O'Connell and his followers were sentenced to various terms of imprisonment up to twelve months. However, under the impact of mass protest the House of Lords soon quashed the sentence.

180. The Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy is the first economic work written by Engels. It was one of the principal works published i n the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, and together with the programme articles written by Marx it determined the journal’s communist trend. Marx was very much interested in this work of Engels and wrote a summary of it (see pp. 375-76 of this volume). Later on he mentioned this work more than once in his writings. In the Preface to the first edition of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859) Marx called it a “brilliant essay on the critique of economic categories”. Despite the fact that the work contained some traits of immaturity which are inevitable at the earlier stage of the formation of ideas: the influence of Feuerbach’s abstract humanism which had not yet been completely overcome, a one-sided appraisal of the labour theory of value, etc.-shortcomings about which Engels wrote in a general way in his letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht on April 13, 1876-the work contained profound anticipation of some propositions in the new, materialist economic teaching.

The work also produced a strong impression on other representatives of progressive circles. For example, the Berlin physician Julius Waldeck, stressing in his letter to Johann Jacoby the maturity and boldness of the ideas expounded in this work, exclaimed: “Engels has worked a real miracle!” (G. Mayer, Friedrich Engels. Eine Biographie, Bd. 1, S. 171.)

In English the Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy was first published as an appendix to the book: Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1959.

181. The Anti-Corn Law League — see Note 40.

182. The reference is to the New York fire of December 16, 1835.

183. Several pamphlets signed “Marcus” appeared in England, in particular: On the Possibility of Limiting Populousness, printed by John Hill, Black Horse Court, Fleet Street, 1838, and The Theory of Painless Extinction, the publication of which was announced in The New Moral World on August 29, 1840. They expounded the Malthusian misanthropic theory of population. The principal ideas of “Marcus” were also summed up in the anonymous pamphlet: An Essay on Populousness, printed for private circulation; printed for the author, 1838.

184. The reference is to the Poor Law Amendment act of 1834, under which the poor were placed in workhouses named by the people “Poor Law Bastilles”. The repeal of this law was one of the main demands of the Chartists.

A characterisation of this law is given in Marx’s work “Critical Marginal Notes on the Article ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian” (see pp. 194-95 of this volume).

185. It is difficult to judge by the available material to which literary plan this statement refers. Possibly Engels had in mind a work on English social history which he intended to write and which he mentions at the end of this work (see p. 443 of this volume). In his series of articles, The Condition of England, which is a brief preliminary outline of this work, Engels characterises the economic teaching of Adam Smith and the utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham and James Mill as a theoretical expression of the domination of private property, egoism, alienation of man, which represent the consummation of the principles following from the Christian world outlook and world order (see pp. 485-87 of this volume). It is probable, however, that he had in mind a plan of some special work on economics. A year later, in particular, Engels worked on a pamphlet about the German economist List (see his letter to Marx of November 19, 1844).

186. Engels has in mind a work on English social history which he planned to write and for which he collected material during his stay in England (November 1842-August 1844). He intended to devote a whole chapter of this work to the condition of the working class in England. Later he changed his plans and decided to write a special work on the English proletariat, which he did upon his return to Germany. His book The Condition of the Working-Class in England was published in Leipzig in 1845 (see this edition, Vol. 4).

187. Engels intended to write The Condition of England as a series of articles for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. The critical analysis of Carlyle’s book Past and Present was, the beginning of it, a sort of introduction, which was to be followed, according to the. author’s plans, by the main sections under the same general title ‘(see p. 468 of this volume). However, two other articles written by Engels on the same subject for the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher were never printed in the journal as its publication ceased. These articles were published in two parts in the Paris Vorwärts! some months later, after Engels met Marx in Paris at the end of August 1844 and with the help of his friend became an editor of and a contributor to the newspaper.

The part of the work published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher aroused considerable interest, as Engels himself stated, among the readers in Germany (see Engels’ letter to Marx of early October 1844).

Engels cites from Thomas Carlyle’s book in his own translation into German. In so doing he often abridged the text and does not always mark the omissions by leaders. In some cases he merely renders the contents of some passage or another; the italics in quotations as a rule belong to Engels. Engels gives no references to page numbers; for the readers’ convenience page numbers are given in footnotes in this edition.

188. The reference is to the repeal in 1828 of the Test Act of 1673 and some other acts under which only members of the Church of England could occupy governmental or elective posts, and also to the subsequent abolition of some religious restrictions and of the privileges of the top aristocracy (the Act of Emancipation of 1829, which granted Catholics the right to be elected to Parliament; the Reform Act of 1832). Engels wrote about this in greater detail in the last of the series of his articles The Condition of England (see pp. 490-91 of this volume).

189. Concerning the English translation of David Strauss’ book see Note 140.

190. The Reform Act passed by the British Parliament in June 1832 was directed against the political monopoly of the landed and financial aristocracy and made membership of Parliament open to representatives of the industrial bourgeoisie. The proletariat and the petty bourgeoisie, which formed the main force in the struggle for the reform, did not get any electoral rights.

191. In August 1842 Manchester was the centre of Chartist agitation and of a powerful strike movement.

192. The People’s Charter-see Note 139.

193. The Corn Laws — see Note 40.

194. Laissez-faire, laissez-aller — the formula of the economists who advocated free trade and non-intervention by the state in the sphere of economic relations.

195. By the “great week” is meant the bourgeois July revolution of 1830 in France. The major events took place between July 27 and August 2.

196. Morison’s pills — pills invented by the English quack James Morison and widely advertised by him in the mid-twenties of the nineteenth century as a remedy for all ailments. They were prepared from the juice of certain tropical plants.

197. Engels has in mind the last period of SchelIing’s life and activity when, having renounced many of his progressive ideas, he started preaching a mystical philosophy of open irrationalism. At that time Schelling was Invited to Berlin University to oppose the influence of the Hegelian school (end of 1841-42). For more detail see Engels’ Schelling and Revelation (this edition, Vol. 2).

198. Home-colonies-the name Robert Owen gave to his communist societies.

199. Engels expressed the same hope for subsequent evolution of Carlyle’s views in the radical direction in his note to the concluding chapter of his book: The Condition of the Working-Class in England (1845) (see this edition, Vol. 4). However, his hopes were not justified and he decided to make the following addition to this note in the second German edition (1892): “But the February Revolution made him [Carlyle] an out-and-out reactionary. His righteous wrath against the Philistines turned into sullen Philistine grumbling at the tide of history that cast him ashore.”

200. This and the following article are the continuation of The Condition of England published in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (see Note 187). Both articles were evidently written not later than February-March 1844, as can be judged by their contents and, in particular, the references to some facts (rejection of the motion to publish parliamentary minutes, O'Connell’s trial) as events that had taken place several weeks before (see pp. 500 and 506 of this volume). It is possible that Engels ceased writing this series because of the closure of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher. From the last lines of the preceding article we see that the central theme of this series was to he the condition of the working class in England.

In English the article was first published in the book: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles on Britain, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971.

201. The reference is to the coalition wars of European states against revolutionary and Napoleonic France lasting from 1792 till 1815. England was an active member of these coalitions.

202. According to later historical investigations, in the 15th-17th centuries copyholders (a category of peasants holding land by copy, life and hereditary tenants who paid feudal rent) comprised the majority of the English peasants who had freed themselves from serf bondage. Modern science uses the terms villeins, bordars and cottars to denote the various categories of serf peasants in medieval England.

203. The People’s Charter — see Note 139.

204. In the Introduction to the second German edit 1 ion (1892) of his book The Condition of the Working-Class in England (see this edition, Vol. 4), Engels made .the following addition to the analogous note: “The historical outline of the industrial revolution given above is not exact in certain details; but in 1843-44 no better sources were available.” The more precise information gained from later investigations includes, in particular, the fact that Arkwright was not the inventor of the spinning-jenny but used a number of inventions made by others. judging by the corresponding passages in The Condition of the Working-Class in England, Engels here made use of other books besides Porter’s work: E. Baines, History of the Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain, London. 1835; A. Ure, The Cotton Manufacture of Great Britain, Systematically Investigated and Illustrated, Vols. 1-2, London, 1836.

205. The reference is to the democratic correspondence societies organised in various English towns in the 90s of the eighteenth century under the influence of the French revolution. The first — the London Correspondence Society — was founded in 1792. In the autumn of 1793 an attempt was made to unite these organisations by convening a congress in Edinburgh which assumed the name of the Convention. The government answered with reprisals; some members of the Convention were condemned to penal servitude. In 1794 the leaders, of the London Correspondence Society (Thomas Hardy, Horne Tooke and others) were arrested. By the end of the 90s the activity of the correspondence societies ceased; however, their ideas and traditions had a great influence on the further development of the radical movement in England, especially in the period of intensive agitation for the democratic reorganisation of its political system in 1816-23.

206. In English this article was published in the book: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Articles on Britain, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1971.

207. The Test Act of 1673 demanded recognition of the dogmas of the Church of England by persons occupying governmental posts. At first directed against attempts to re-establish Catholicism, this Act was subsequently applied against various religious sects and trends which deviated from the dogmas of the Established Church.

The Habeas Corpus Act was passed by the English Parliament in 1679. Concerning this Act see p. 506 of this volume.

The Bill of Rights, passed by the English Parliament in 1689, restricted the rights of the King in Parliament and confirmed the compromise between the landed aristocracy and the top financial and commercial bourgeoisie which had been achieved as a result of the “Glorious Revolution” of 1688.

208. The Magna Carta Libertatum — a document signed by the English King John Lackland on June 15, 1215, under pressure from the rebellious barons. It restricted the rights of the King, mainly in the interests of the big feudal lords, and contained some concessions to the knights and to the towns.

The Reform Act — see Note 190.

209. The reference is to the mass campaign for the electoral reform, the peak year being 1831. The Reform Act was passed as a result of this campaign. (Concerning the Reform Act see Note 190.)

210. The reference is to Thomas Duncombe’s speech in the House of Commons on August 9, 1832 (see Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates 1832, Vol. XIV, pp. 1159-1161).

211. The Act of Emancipation — see Note 188.

212. The reference is to the rejection by the House of Commons on February 12, 1844, of the motion by the’ radical M.P.s, Christie, Duncombe and others, concerning publication of minutes of the parliamentary debates (see Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 1844, Vol. LXXII, pp. 580-600).

213. The Thirty-Nine Articles — the symbol of faith of the Church of England passed by the English Parliament in 1571.

214. The Corporation Act, passed in 1661, demanded recognition of the dogmas of the Church of England by persons holding elective posts (mostly in municipal administration). It was repealed in 1828.

Concerning the repeal of the Test Act see Note 188.

215. See Note 188.

216. The reference is to Thomas Gibson’s speech in the House of Commons on February 14, 1844 (see Hansard’s Parliamentary Debates, 1844, Vol. LXXII, p. 798).

217. Repealers — see Note 149.

218. The reference is to the banning by the English authorities of the mass meeting in Clontarf fixed by the Irish Repealers for October 5, 1843. The government concentrated troops in the region to prevent the protest demonstration. In these circumstances O'Connell and his followers decided to cancel the meeting; this encouraged the English authorities. who regarded it as a sign of weakness, and they decided to bring the Irish leaders to trial. The trial took place in January-February 1844 (concerning the trial see Note 179).

219. The reference is to the National Charter Association, concerning which see Note 143.

220. Re Anti-Corn Law League — see Note 40.

221. The reference is to the trials of the leaders of the National Charter Association and the participants in the strike movement of August 1842, ordered by the authorities in various towns of England after the suppression of the movement. There were mass reprisals. Out of more than 1,500 persons (mostly workers) arrested more than a half were put on trial. Sentences as a rule were very severe. Thus in Stafford (October 1842) fifty accused were sentenced to transportation (many of them for life) and 180 to various terms of imprisonment. A large group of Chartist leaders headed by Feargus O'Connor were also sentenced, their trial being held in March 1843 in Lancaster (later the sentence was quashed owing to mass pressure). Besides the towns mentioned by Engels trials were held in Chester, Liverpool and some other places in the autumn of 1842.

222. Carolina — the criminal code of the Emperor Charles V (Constitutio criminalis Carolina) passed by the Reichstag in Regensburg in 1532; it was marked by the extreme severity of the penalties which it prescribed.

223. This passage proves that Engels intended to continue the series The Condition of England (see Note 200). He evidently planned to describe the condition of the English working class and examine the social, including labour, legislation that existed in England.

224. This letter written by Engels to the editor of The Northern Star is incomplete: only the part of it which was published in the newspaper’s editorial article on May 4, 1844, “The ‘Movement’, at Home and Abroad”, has survived. Without mentioning the author’s name, the editor of The Northern Star introduced him to the readers as the author of an essay on “Continental Communism” (they had in mind Engels’ article: “Progress of Social Reform on the Continent” which had been reprinted in the newspaper). Engels’ offer to contribute to the newspaper met the intentions of its editor Harney, who wanted to impart an international character to the newspaper by extending information on foreign affairs, as the editorial article mentioned above stated. From that moment Engels worked as an official reporter of the Chartist newspaper. The same issue carried Engels’ note on the situation in Prussia marked: “From our own Correspondent”, which (sometimes with slight alterations) was used in respect of all the material he sent to The Northern Star. Articles written by Engels were printed in the section: “Movements Abroad” under the editorial headings denoting the country the information referred to (“Germany”, “Prussia”, “Bavaria”, “Poland”, “Russia”, “Switzerland”, “France”, etc.). Sometimes several articles by Engels were printed in the same issue under different headings (e. g., on May 18 and 25, 1844). it is possible that in such cases the editors themselves divided the material of a single report into several parts.

225. In the course of his further study of the position in Germany Engels came to the conclusion that in the historical conditions obtaining the establishment of a centralised and not of a federal republic would meet the aims of the consistent struggle against political disunion and the remnants of medieval particularism in all spheres of social life. During the revolution of 1848-49 Marx and Engels, Germany into a in contraposition to the petty-bourgeois republicans, who adhered to the principle of federalism, upheld the demand of transforming single democratic republic.

226. The work under this title was not published by David Strauss.

227. The reference is apparently to the following pamphlets by Adam Gurowski: La vérité sur la Russie, 1834 and La civilisation et la Russie, 1840.

228. One of the public buildings of Ludwig of Bavaria, built in 1841 near abode of the German mythological heroes. The palace contained a collection of Regensburg, was named by him “Walhalla” after the legendary posthumous sculptures of famous men in Germany. The King himself wrote a guide book for it: Walhalla’s Genossen, gesehildert durch König Ludwig den Ersten von Bayern, dem Gründer Walhall’s, München, 1842. Poems written by Ludwig of Bavaria provide a sample of meaningless and pretentious poetry; they were published in 1842.

229. The reference is to the wars waged by the tsarist government against the peoples of the North Caucasus (Adyghei, Chechens, Avars, Lezghins, etc.) fighting for their independence. In the 1820s the liberation struggle of these peoples against the tsarist colonisers and the arbitrary rule of the local feudal lords was headed by Shamil, who was proclaimed Imam of Daghestan in 1834. The movement reached its peak in the 40s of the nineteenth century and was suppressed in 1859.

230. The canton of Vaud (German: Waadt) was known for its democratic traditions.

231. Prior to 1798 Switzerland was a union of small autonomous cantons in which political sway was exercised by the mountain patriarchal cantons headed by an aristocratic oligarchy. In 1798 a Helvetic Republic dependent on France was set up in Switzerland which was at the time occupied by the troops of the French Directory. Political privileges of the old cantons were abolished. However, the Treaty of Alliance of 1814 was approved by the Congress of Vienna, 1814-15, which restored the former sovereignty of the cantons; in the majority of them the clerical aristocratic elements again came to the fore.

232. In 1830 the movement for democratic reforms in Switzerland became more widespread under the influence of the July revolution in France. In the twelve north-western cantons, which were more advanced, the power went to the bourgeoisie, but its aspirations for the unification of the country encountered resistance from the backward mountain cantons.

233. This provision of Engels came true in three years. In November 1847 a civil war broke out in Switzerland between the aristocratic cantons united into a separate confederation known as the Sonderbund (the treaty was concluded at the end of 1845) and the north-western bourgeois cantons, in the course of which the Sonderbund was defeated. Bourgeois reforms were carried out in the Swiss cantons. Under the Constitution of 1848 Switzerland became a confederation.

In 1844, under the influence of the ruling clerical aristocratic circles the canton of Valais entered the Sonderbund. Radicals in Valais again came to power after the Sonderbund broke up.

Engels’ article “The Civil War in Switzerland” was a response to the events of 1847 (see this edition, Vol. 6).

234. During the July revolution of 1830, which led to the downfall of the Bourbon dynasty, Jacques Laffitte, a representative of moderate liberal circles of the financial bourgeoisie and a member of the Chamber, which assumed power in Paris, helped to secure the accession to the throne of Louis Philippe, the Duke of Or1éans.

235. The liberation struggle of the Algerians led by Emir Abd-el-Kader against the French colonisers lasted with interruptions from 1832 to 1847. Taking advantage of their military superiority, the French conquered Abd-el-Kader’s state in Western Algeria in the period between 1839 and 1844. However, Abd-el-Kader continued the struggle, resorting to guerrilla warfare and relying on the help of the Sultan of Morocco. When the latter was defeated in the Franco-Moroccan war in 1844, Abd-el-Kader hid in the oases of the Sahara. An uprising in Western Algeria in 1845-47, which was suppressed by the French colonisers, was the last stage of this struggle.

236. Caliphs-local rulers in Abd-el-Kader’s state, subject to the central government.

237. The reference is to the Divorce Bill drafted in 1842 by Friedrich Savigny, one of the founders of the reactionary historical school of law, who from 1842 to 238 1848 was High Chancellor of Prussia.

238. Although the Divorce Bill was kept secret, the Rheinische Zeitung edited by Marx published the Bill on October 20, 1842, thus initiating a broad discussion on the subject. on December 19, Marx’s article “The Divorce Bill” (see this edition, Vol. 1), in which he criticised the Bill, was published. The publication of the Bill in the Rheinische Zeitung was one of the reasons for the persecution of the paper, which finally led to its banning in March 1843.

239. Landtags- provincial and local assemblies of estates established in Prussia in 1823; they consisted in the main of representatives of the nobility; urban and village communities had very small representation. Landtags were convened by the King and their functions were restricted to discuss-ion of bills and to questions of local economy and administration.

240. This report had the following paragraph added to it by the editors: “In addition to the above, we give the following paragraph from the Sun: We learn from Breslau on the 9th inst. that the weavers have returned to their work after having obtained an increase of wages. They burst in, during their excursions, the doors of several wood-rangers’ houses, and carried off the fowling-pieces and ammunition, but without touching anything else."'

241. On the song of Silesian weavers, sung by the participants of the uprising of June 4-6, 1844, see Note 44.

242. This draft of the young Engels’ verse drama Cola di Rienzi only became known after Volume 2, containing his early works, letters and literary experiments, had already gone to press. This draft is therefore being published in the present volume as a supplement, although chronologically it belongs to Volume 2.

The draft manuscript was discovered among the posthumous papers of the German poet Adolf Schults, a native of Elberfeld, by Michael Knieriem, director of Frederick Engels House in Wuppertal. Schults belonged to a group of Wuppertal writers and art-lovers which included many of Engels’ fellow pupils from the Elberfeld high school who kept in touch with him during his residence (from July 1838 to March 1841) ;n Bremen, where he was gaining practical experience with a commercial firm and was also engaged in literary activities. Knieriem arranged the first publication of this drama in co-operation with Hans Pelger, director of Karl Marx House in Trier (see Michael Knieriem, Friedrich Engels: Cola di Rienzi. Ein unbehannter dramatischer Entwurf. Herausgegeben vom Friedrich-Engels-Haus, Wuppertal, und Karl-Marx-Haus, Trier, Trier, 1974). The draft was evidently intended for an opera libretto, as may be gathered from a letter of September 30, 1840, sent by Engels’ schoolfriend Carl de Haas to Schults and other Elberfeld writers in which there is a reference to Engels’ intention of writing the text of an opera at the request of one of his Elberfeld friends. This is also borne out by the style of the work, parts of which are specially adapted for performance (ducts, trios, and settings for chorus), and in which provision is made for the insertion of musical episodes. The draft was in all probability written between the end of 1840 and the beginning of 1841, since one page of the manuscript bears a short passage in Hebrew from the Old Testament which was also quoted in a letter of February 22, 184 1, from Engels to Friedrich Graeber (see present edition, Vol. 2, p. 526).

Engels took the plot for his drama from events in Rome in the middle of the 14th century — the struggle which developed between the feudal aristocracy on the one hand and the merchant and artisan population on the other. In May 1347, as a result of a popular uprising, a republic was proclaimed in Rome with “people’s tribune” Cola di Rienzi at its head. With Rienzi, firm measures against the nobility and a desire to affirm the principle of popular sovereignty and achieve the unification of Italy were combined with fantastic notions about the restoration of ancient Rome’s grandeur and world domination. Banished from Rome at the end of 1347 as a result of intrigues by the feudal magnates, Rienzi was reinstated in August 1354 with the aid of mercenary troops commanded by foreign condottieri. The people rose against Rienzi, however, resenting his despotic behaviour, his ambitiousness, and the increased tax burden, a measure which was forced on him by the costs of paying the mercenaries and conducting the war with the aristocrats. On October 8, 1354, an insurrection flared up against him and he was killed. The action in Engels’ drama deals with the second period of Rienzi’s rule.

The manuscript is a rough draft. In several places, there are author’s corrections, erasures and additions in the margin. On one page, the initials “F. E.” and Engels’ signature are to be seen in the margin. Some drawings made by the author on several pages refer to the plot of the drama, while others are unconnected with it (there are also some cartoons). The last pages contain a variant of the beginning of Act One, Scene One (in the present edition, this has been printed after the corresponding first version and has been separated from it, as from the continuation, by a horizontal line).

243. In mid-June 1844 Jenny Marx with her baby girl Jenny born on May 1 left Paris, where she had lived with her husband since October 1843, for Trier to visit her mother Caroline von Westphalen. Jenny with her daughter and a wet-nurse returned to Paris in September 1844.

244. At the end of 1843 Caroline von Westphalen left Kreuznach, where she had lived after the death of her husband, Ludwig von Westphalen, for Trier. Apparently, she lived in Trier for a time in the house of the tax-collector Wettendorf.

245. An allusion to the reverberations of the Silesian uprising of weavers of June 4-6, 1844. In Breslau, the capital of Silesia (Polish: Wroclaw), new popular disturbances took place on June 6 and 7.

246. Jenny had in mind the strained relations between Marx and his mother caused by Marx’s refusal to enter the civil service and his choice, after graduating from the University, of a type of activity which from his mother’s point of view could bring neither material welfare nor a stable social position. The fame brought to Marx by the publication of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher and a certain improvement in his material condition made Henriette Marx slightly change her attitude towards Marx and his family.

247. An apparent reference to the work Marx was planning to write on Bruno Bauer and other Young Hegelians (see Note 30). This plan was realised later, when together with Engels he wrote The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (see this edition, Vol. 4).

248. Only that part of this letter has survived which Marx decided to publish in the Paris newspaper Vorwärts!, without mentioning the author’s name, under the title “From the Letter of a German Lady”. In his letter to Ludwig Feuerbach of August 11, 1844, he wrote that the excerpt had been taken from his wife’s letter (see this volume, p. 357). The publication of this letter was prompted by an attempt made on Ying Frederick William IV on July 26, 1844, by H. L. Tschech (see Note 46).

249. Marx’s letters to his wife mentioned here have not been found.

250. The reference is to the traditional religious rites connected with the cult of the so-called Holy Coat of Trier (supposedly stripped off Christ before his crucifixion) kept in Trier Catholic Cathedral. This cult attracted many pilgrims from other German towns.

251. The German radical publicist Georg Jung and other friends of Marx in Cologne took upon themselves to sell a certain number of copies of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher which Marx had received instead of author’s emoluments and instead of wages for his work as an editor. Some of the copies sent from Switzerland by boat were confiscated by the Baden authorities. On July 31, 1844, Jung wrote to Marx that he had posted Marx 800 francs in compensation of the confiscated copies.

Notes

1. This is the earliest extant letter of Engels to Marx, written soon after Engels’ return to Germany from England. On his way back to Germany at the end of August 1844, he stopped in Paris, where he met Marx. During the days they spent together they discovered that their theoretical views coincided, and the immediately began their first joint work, directed against the Young Hegelians. Engels finished his part before leaving Paris, while Marx continued to write his. At first they intended to call the book A Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Co. But while it was being printed Marx added The Holy Family to the title.

This meeting of Marx and Engels in Paris marked the beginning of their friendship, joint scientific work and revolutionary struggle.

The extant original of this letter bears no date. The approximate time of its writing was determined on the basis of Engels’ letter to Marx of 19 November 1844 (see this volume, pp. 9-14).

This letter was published in English in frill for the first time in: Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence. Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955.

2. Karl Bernays, one of the editors of the German newspaper Vorwärts!, published in Paris, was sued by the French authorities in September 1844 at the request of the Prussian Government for not having paid the caution-money required for the publication of a Political newspaper. The real reason, however, was the article ‘Attentat auf den König von Preussen’ published in Vorwärts!, No. 62, 3 August 1844. On 13 December 1844 Bernays was sentenced to two months,’ imprisonment and a fine.

3. Engels left Germany in November 1842 and lived for nearly two years in England, working in the office of a Manchester cotton-mill of which his father was co-proprietor.

4. In July 1844 Marx began to contribute to the newspaper Vorwärts!, which prior to that — from early 1844 to the summer of the same year — reflected the moderate liberalism of its publisher, the German businessman H. Börnstein, and its editor A. Bornstedt. However, when Karl Bernays, a friend of Marx, became its editor in the summer of 1844, the newspaper assumed a democratic character. By contributing to the newspaper, Marx began to influence its policy and in September became one of its editors. Other contributors were Engels, Heine, Herwegh, Ewerbeck and Bakunin. Under Marx’s influence the newspaper came to express communist views, and attacked Prussian absolutism and moderate German liberalism. At the behest of the Prussian Government, the Guizot ministry took repressive measures against its editors and contributors in January 1845, when publication ceased.

5. Engels is referring to Kritik der Politik und National-Ökonomie, a work which Marx planned to write. Marx began to study political economy at the end of 1843 and by spring 1844 he set himself the task of writing a criticism of bourgeois political economy from the standpoint of materialism and communism. The draft Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (see present edition, Vol. 3), written at that time, have reached us incomplete. Work on The Holy Family forced Marx temporarily to interrupt his study of political economy until December 1844. In February 1845, just before his expulsion from Paris. he signed a contract for his Kritik der Politik und National-Okonomie with the publisher Leske (see Note 27). In Brussels Marx continued to study the works of English, French, German, Italian and other economists and added several more notebooks of excerpts to those compiled in Paris, although his original plan for the book was not carried out.

6. The Holy Family by Marx and Engels was published not in Hamburg by Hoffmann and Campe, but in Frankfurt am Main by Z. Löwenthal, founder o i f the Literarische Anstalt publishing house (owned by Joseph Rütten since the autumn of 1844).

7. Heinrich Heine wrote to Marx from Hamburg on 21 September 1844 (see the new Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe — referred to in future as MEGA2 — Abt. III, Bd. 1, S. 443-44) telling him that a new collection of his poems, Neue Gedichte, had been published there. It contained romances, ballads and other poems including the satirical poem Deutschland. Ein Wintermärchen, which was also published separately by Hoffmann and Campe. Heine sent Marx a copy of this poem for simultaneous publication in Vorwärts! and announcement of his new collection of verse in this and other newspapers (he promised to bring the ballads and other poems to Paris himself).

On 19 October 1844 Vorwärts!, No. 84, carried Heine’s preface to the separate edition of his poem. It was dated 17 October 1844 and entitled ‘H. Heines neue Gedichte’. It was preceded by an editorial introduction which accorded high praise to the poet’s new work and in fact expressed Marx’s point of view. The poem was published in full in Vorwärts! in late October-November 1844.

8. L. Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Glaubens im Sinne Luther’s was published ill instalments in Vorwärts! from the middle of August to the end of October 1844.

9. This letter without an address on the back of it was published in English for the first time in: K. Marx and F. Engels, On Britain, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1953 and in full in Letters of the Young Engels, 1838-1845, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976.

10. The letter written by Marx and Bürgers to Engels on 8 October 1844 has not been found.

11. The disagreements between Marx and Engels on the one hand and Arnold Ruge on the other dated back to the time of the publication of the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, under the editorship of Marx and Ruge. These disagreements were due to Ruge’s negative attitude towards communism and the revolutionary proletarian movement, the fundamental difference between Marx’s views and those of the Young Hegelian Ruge, who was an adherent of philosophical idealism. The final break between Marx and Ruge occurred in March 1844. Ruge’s condemnation of the Silesian weavers’ rising in June 1844 impelled Marx to criticise his views in the article ‘Critical Marginal Notes on the Article “The King of Prussia and Social Reform. By a Prussian"’ (see present edition, Vol. 3, pp. 189-206).

12. A reference to the Associations for the Benefit of the Working-Classes formed in a number of Prussian towns in 1844 and 1845 on the initiative of the German liberal bourgeoisie, who were alarmed at the rising of the Silesian weavers in the summer of 1844, and hoped that the associations would help to divert the German workers from militant struggle. Despite the efforts of the bourgeoisie and the government authorities to give these associations a harmless philanthropic appearance, they gave a fresh impulse to the growing political activity of the urban masses and drew the attention of broad sections of German society to social questions. The movement to establish such associations was particularly widespread in the towns of the industrial Rhine Province.

Seeing that the associations had taken such an unexpected direction, the Prussian Government hastily cut short their activity in the spring of 1845 by refusing to approve their statutes and forbidding them to continue their work.

13. Rationalists — representatives of a Protestant trend which tried to combine theology with philosophy and to prove that ‘divine truths’ can be explained by reason. Rationalism opposed pietism, an extremely mystical trend in Lutheranism.

14. At the meeting held in Cologne on 10 November 1844 and attended by former shareholders of and contributors to the Rheinische Zeitung, liberals Ludolf Camphausen, Gustav, Mevissen, radicals Georg Jung, Karl d'Ester, Franz Raveaux and others among them, a General Association for Relief and Education was set up with the aim of improving the workers’ condition (the measures to be taken included raising funds for mutual assistance and relief to the sick, etc.). Despite the opposition of the liberals, the meeting adopted democratic rules which provided for the workers’ active participation in the work of the Association. Subsequently a definitive split took place between the radical-democratic elements and the liberals. The latter headed by Camphausen withdrew from the Association, which was soon prohibited by the authorities.

In November 1844 an Educational Society was set up in Elberfeld. Its founders had from the very start to fight against the local clergy, who attempted to bring the Society under their influence and give its activity a religious colouring. Engels and his friends wished to use the Society’s meetings and its committee to spread communist views (see F. Engels, ‘Speeches in Elberfeld’, present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 243-64). As Engels had expected, the statute of the Society was not approved by the authorities, and the Society itself ceased 1 to exist in the spring of 1845. (On the meetings in Cologne and Elberfeld, see F. Engels, ‘Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany’, present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 229-42).

15. Originally Engels planned to write a work on the social history of England and to devote one of its chapters to the condition of the working class in England (see present edition, Vol. 4, p. 302). But realising the special role played by the proletariat in bourgeois society, he decided to deal with this problem in a separate book, which he wrote on his return to Germany, between September 1844 and March 1845. Excerpts in Engels’ notebooks made in July and August 1845, and the letters of the publisher Leske to Marx of 14 May and 7 June 1845 (see MEGA2, Abt. III Bd. 1, S. 465, 469) show that in the spring and summer of 1845 Engels continued to work on the social history of England. Though he did not abandon his plan up to the end of 1847, as is seen from an item in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, No. 91 of 14 November 1847, he failed to put it into effect.

16. Engels did not write a pamphlet on Friedrich List’s book Das nationals System der politischen Oekonomie (Stuttgart und Tübingen, 1841) though later he continued to discuss this idea with Marx (see this volume, pp. 28 and 79), who in his turn intended to publish a critical analysis of List’s views (see K. Marx, ‘Draft of an Article on Friedrich List’s Book Das nationals System der politischen Oekonomie’, present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 265-93), Engels criticised the German advocates of protectionism, and List above all, in one of his ‘Speeches in Elberfeld’ (see present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 256-64).

17. ‘The Free’ — a Berlin group of Young Hegelians formed early in 1842. Among its prominent members were Edgar Bauer, Eduard Meyen, Ludwig Buhl ant Max Stirner (pseudonym of Kaspar Schmidt). Their criticism of the prevailing conditions was abstract, devoid of real revolutionary content and ultra-radical in form. The fact that ‘The Free’ lacked any positive programme and ignored the realities of political struggle soon led to differences between them and the representatives of the revolutionary-democratic wing of the German opposition movement. A sharp conflict arose between ‘The Free’ and Marx in the autumn of 1842, when Marx had become editor of the Rheinische Zeitung (see present edition, Vol. 1, pp. 393-95).

During the two Years which had elapsed since Marx’s clash with ‘The Free’ (1843-44), Marx’s and Engels’ disagreement with the Young Hegelians on questions of theory and politics had deepened still more. This was accounted for not only by Marx’s and Engels’ transition to materialism and communism, but also by the evolution in the ideas of the Bauer brothers and their fellow-thinkers. In the Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung Bauer and his group renounced the ‘radicalism of 1842’ and, besides professing subjective idealist views and counterposing chosen personalities, the bearers of ‘pure Criticism’, to the allegedly sluggish and inert masses, they began spreading the ideas of moderate liberal philanthropy.

It was to the exposure of the Young Hegelians’ views in the form which they had acquired in 1844 and to the defence of their own new materialistic and communistic outlook that Marx and Engels decided to devote their first joint work The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism. Against Bruno Bauer and Co. (present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 3-211).

18. Here Marx writes about the Vorwärts! Pariser Deutsche Monatsschrift which Heinrich Börnstein planned to publish instead of the newspaper Vorwärts! The prospectus of the monthly published in German and French on 1 January 1845 (a publication date helps in determining the approximate date of this letter) stated that one of the reasons for the reformation of Vorwärts! was that no caution-money was needed for publishing a journal as distinct from a newspaper. The journal of eight printed sheets was to appear on the 16th of each month. The expulsion of Marx and other contributors to Vorwärts! from France (see notes 4 and 19) prevented the publication of the first issue, the proof sheets of which had already been printed.

As is seen from this letter and that of Engels to Marx written approximately 20 January 1845 (see this volume, p. 16), Marx intended to write a critical review of Stirner’s Der Einzige und sein Eigenthum at the end of December 1844 and originally wanted to publish it in the monthly Vorwärts! There is no information on whether this plan materialised. It is only known that two years later Marx and Engels scathingly criticised Stirner’s book in their German Ideology (see present edition, Vol, 5, pp. 117-443).

19. Marx, Ruge and Bernays were expelled from France for contributing to the newspaper Vorwärts! The French authorities issued the expulsion decree on 11 January 1845, under pressure from the Prussian Government. Hearing about this, Marx hastened to warn Ruge despite the ideological conflict between them (the postmark on the envelope shows that the letter was written on 15 January). The expulsion decree was handed to Marx together with the order to leave Paris within a week. Marx prepared to leave for Brussels on 3 February (see this volume, p, 21).

20. The letter is not dated. The postmark shows that it was sent on 20 January 1845, but its contents prove that Engels wrote it over several days.

An excerpt from this letter was published in English for the first time in: Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955; published in English in full for the first time in Letters of the Young Engels. 1838-1845, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976.

21. This letter of Marx has not been found.

22. Engels took part in preparing the publication of the Elberfeld journal Gesellschaftsspiegel, in drawing up its programme and in compiling the prospectus published in the first issue in the form of the editorial address (see present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 671-74). The prospectus reflected Engels’ intention that the journal should expose the evils of the capitalist system and defend the interests of the workers by criticising half-measures and advocating a radical transformation of the social system. But at the same time, not a few abstract philanthropic sentiments in the spirit of ‘true socialism’, emanating from Hess, found a place in the prospectus. Dissatisfaction with the position adopted by Hess was apparently one reason why Engels refused to become one of the editors. Under the editorship of Hess the journal very soon became a mouthpiece of the reformist and sentimental ideas of ‘true socialism’.-16, 23

23. Ein Handwerker (An Artisan) was the pseudonym under which Lebenslieder, a cycle of poems by J. F. Martens, was published in Vorwärts! on 24 August, 4 September and 20 October 1844, and the article ‘Über Handwerksunterricht’ on 25 December.

24. Under the press laws existing in a number of German states, only publications exceeding 20 printed sheets were exempted from preliminary censorship. The size of the Rheinische Jahrbücher exempted it from censorship, but the police of the Grand Duchy of Hesse nevertheless confiscated the first volume of the journal which was published in Darmstadt in August 1845 and banned its publication altogether. The second volume was published in Belle-Vue, Switzerland, at the end of 1846.

25. On Engels’ intention to write a book on the social history of England (it was also to deal with the history of English social thought) see Note 15.

26. Engels’ reference is to the Berlin confectioner who owned a shop in the Gendarmenmarkt where ‘The Free’ used to have their meetings.

27. The letter has no date. The approximate date of its writing is established on the basis of Marx’s mentioning in it his imminent departure from Paris due to the expulsion decree issued against him by the French authorities (see Note 19), and also his meeting with the publisher Leske during which he probably concluded the contract for publishing his Kritik der Politik und National-Ökonomie (for the text of the contract see present edition, Vol. 4, p. 675) which was signed on 1 February 1845.

This letter was first published in English in full in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, 1979.

28. The first English translation of this letter was published in Letters of the Young Engels. 1838-1845, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1976.

29. On Marx’s expulsion, see Note 19.

Soon after his arrival in Brussels from Paris Marx was followed by his wife Jenny Marx and daughter Jenny (born on 1 May 1844). it was with great difficulty that Jenny Marx had managed to get the money for the journey.

30. Engels’ apprehensions proved to be well founded. When Marx arrived in Brussels the Belgian authorities demanded that Marx should undertake not to publish anything concerning current politics in Belgium. Marx was compelled to undertake such an obligation on 22 March 1845 (see present edition, Vol. 4, p. 677 and this volume, p. 31). The Prussian Government, too, did not leave Marx in peace and pressed for his expulsion from Belgium. To deprive the Prussian authorities of the pretext for interfering in his life, Marx officially renounced his Prussian citizenship in December 1845.

31. Feuerbach’s letter to Engels and that of Marx and Engels to Feuerbach have not been found.

32. The meetings in Elberfeld on 8, 15 and 22 February 1845 were described by Engels in the third article of the series ‘Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany’ published in The New Moral World in May 1845 (see present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 237-42). Engels’ speeches at the first two meetings were published in the Rheinische Jahrbücher zur gesellschaftlichen Reform (ibid., pp. 243-64). Further meetings were banned by the police.

33. The socialist circle in Westphalia and the Rhine Province, with which Engels maintained close contacts and whose members were Otto Lüning and Julius Meyer, was mentioned in the report of the Prussian police superintendent Duncker to the Minister of the Interior Bodelschwingh of 18 October 1845. This report contains the following remark concerning Engels: ‘Friedrich Engels of Barmen is a quite reliable man, but he has a son who is a rabid communist and wanders about as a man of letters; it is possible that his name is Frederick.'

34. This refers to the General Association for Relief and Education founded in Cologne in November 1844 (see Note 14)

35. Cabinets noirs (secret offices or black offices) were established under the postal departments in France, Prussia, Austria and a number of other countries to deal with the inspection of correspondence. They had been in existence since the time of the absolute monarchies in Europe.

36. The Holy Family by Marx and Engels was published about 24 February 1845.

37. The projected publication in Germany of the. ‘Library of the Best Foreign Socialist Writers’ was also discussed by Marx and Engels in their subsequent letters (see this volume, pp. 27-28). Engels mentioned it in the third article of his series ‘Rapid Progress of Communism in Germany’ published in May 1845 in The New Moral World. In early March 1845 Marx drew up a list of authors to be included in the ‘Library’ (see present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 241 and 667). This list shows that ‘Library’ was intended to he an extensive publication in German of works by French and English utopian socialists. The project was not realised because of publishing difficulties. The only work completed was ‘A Fragment of Fourier’s on Trade’ compiled by Engels and published with his introduction and conclusion in the Deutsches Bürgerbuch für 1846 (see present edition, Vol. 4, pp, 613-44).

38. Here Engels has in mind Marx’s Kritik der Politik und National-Ökonomie and probably his own work on the social history of England (see notes 5 and 15).

39. Marx’s letter mentioned here has not been found. judging by this letter of Engels, Marx expressed there his thoughts about the ‘Library of the Best Foreign Socialist Writers’.

40. Engels means the translation of Charles Fourier’s unfinished work Section ébauchée des trois unités externes published posthumously in the journal La Phalange for 1845. The same journal published Fourier’s manuscripts on cosmogony. Excerpts from his first work in Engels’ translation made up the core of the latter’s ‘A Fragment of Fourier’s on Trade’ (see present edition, Vol. 4, pp, 613-44).

41. This letter adds new aspects to the intention of Marx and Engels to criticise in the press List’s book Das nationals System der politischen Oekonomie (see Note 16). Judging by the publisher Leske’s letter to Marx of 14 May 1845, at the latter’s request conveyed to him by Püttmann, Leske had sent Marx the book he needed for this purpose: K. H. Ran, Zur Kritik über F. List’s nationales System der politischen Oekonomie, Heidelberg, 1843 (see MEGA2, Abt. Ill, Bd. 1, S. 465). However, the intention of Marx and Engels to criticise List in Püttmann’s Rheinische Jahrbücher did not materialise.

42. Engels left Barmen for Brussels early in April 1845.

43. This letter was first published in English in full in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, 1979.

44. Julius Campe’s letter to Engels mentioned here has not been found.

45. The available sources do not allow us to establish what publication is meant here. It can only be supposed that it was connected with the intention of Marx and Engels to write a critical work against List (see notes 16 and 41). Many years later Engels recalled in his letter to Hermann Schlüter of 29 January 1891 that in the forties or some years later they simulated a dispute in which Marx defended free trade and Engels protective tariffs. This recollection may have been a late reflection of that intention.

46. Queen Victoria already had five children by that time.

47. During his trip to England with Marx in July-August 1845 Engels again met in Manchester Mary Burns, an Irish working woman with whom he had become acquainted as far back as 1843. They now began their life together and Mary also left for Brussels.

48. This letter has no date. The approximate time of its writing was established on the basis of a letter written to Marx on 8 May 1846 by P. V. Annenkov (see ,MEGA2, Abt. III, Bd. 2, S. 187) who had brought this particular letter from Brussels to Paris. Annenkov wrote that he had already been in Paris over a month.

This letter was first published in English in full in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, 1979.

49. The bulk of the letter was compiled by Marx, copied by Gigot and signed by Marx. Without the P.S. by Marx and the additions by Gigot and Engels, it was first published in English in: Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955.

50.Having left Paris (see Note 19) Marx arrived in Brussels at the beginning of February. During his three-year stay there he lived mostly in the Hotel Bois Sauvage, where he and his family moved at the beginning of May 1846.

51. A reference to the Communist Correspondence Committee formed by Marx and Engels at the beginning of 1846 in Brussels. Its aim was to prepare the ground for the creation of an international proletarian party. The Committee had no strictly defined composition. Besides the Belgian communist Philippe Gigot, Joseph Weydemeyer, Wilhelm Wolff, Edgar von Westphalen and others were equal members at various times. As a rule, the Committee discussed problems of communist propaganda, corresponded with the leaders of existing proletarian organisations (the League of the Just, Chartist organisations), tried to draw Proudhon, Cabet and other socialists into its work, and issued lithographed circulars. On the initiative of Marx and Engels, correspondence committees and groups connected with the Brussels Committee were set up in Silesia, Westphalia and the Rhine Province, Paris and London. These committees played an important role in the development of international proletarian contacts and the organisation of the Communist League in 1847.

52. Marx has in mind members of the League of the Just in Paris and the German Workers’ Educational Society in London.

The League of the Just — the first political organisation of German workers and artisans — was formed between 1836 and 1838 as a result of a split in the Outlaws’ League, which consisted of artisans led by petty-bourgeois democrats. The League of the Just, whose supreme body — the People’s Chamber — was in Paris, and from the autumn of 1846 in London, was connected with French secret conspiratorial societies and had groups in Germany, Switzerland and England. Besides Germans it included workers of other nationalities. The views of the League’s members showed the influence of various utopian socialist ideas, primarily those of Wilhelm Weitling.

The German Workers’ Educational Society in London was founded in February 1840 by Kari Schapper, Joseph Moll and other members of the League of the Just, its aim being political education of workers and dissemination of socialist ideas among them. After the Communist League had been founded the leading role in the Society belonged to the League’s local communities. In 1847 and 1849-50 Marx and Engels took an active part in the Society’s work.

53. In his reply to Marx of 17 May 1846 Proudhon refused to collaborate and declared that he was opposed to revolutionary methods of struggle and to communism (see MEGA2, Abt. III, Bd. 2, S. 205-07).

51. A reference to the fee due to Bernays for an article which seems to have been an extract from his manuscript on crimes and criminal law, then being prepared for printing by the publisher Leske but was demanded back by the author because of careless typesetting. Marx wanted to include this article in the quarterly journal the planned publication of which was discussed with Westphalian publishers in 1845 and 1846 (see Note 57). Thanks to Marx’s mediation, Bernays, who was in need of money, received two advances on his article. But as the planned publication of the quarterly did not take place, Bernays’ work, in the form he had conceived it, was not published.

55. The visit to Liège in the first half of May 1846 mentioned here by Marx seems to have been his second visit there; there is some evidence that Marx stopped in Liège at the beginning of February 1845 on his way from Paris to Brussels.

56. This seems to refer to the undiscovered reply by the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee’ to Weydemeyer’s letter of 30 April 1846.

57. A reference to the two volumes of a quarterly journal the publication of which was negotiated in 1845 and 1846 with a number of Westphalian socialists, the publishers Julius Meyer and Rudolph Rempel among others. Marx and Engels intended to publish in it their criticism of The German Ideology which they started to write in the autumn of 1845. It was also planned to publish a number of polemical works by their fellow-thinkers, in the first place those containing criticism of German philosophical literature and the works of the ‘true socialists’.

In November 1845 Hess reached an agreement with Meyer and Rempel on financing the publication of two volumes of the quarterly. Further negotiations were conducted by Weydemeyer, who visited Brussels in February 1846 and returned to Germany in April on the instruction of the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee. In a letter to the Committee of 30 April 1846 from Schildesche (Westphalia) he wrote that no headway was being made and that he proposed that Meyer should form a joint-stock company in Limburg (Holland), as in Germany manuscripts of less than 20 printed sheets were subject to preliminary censorship. He also recommended that Marx should sign a contract with the Brussels publisher and bookseller C. G. Vogler for the distribution of the quarterly and other publications. The contract was not concluded because Vogler could not assume even part of the expenses.

Weydemeyer continued his efforts, but succeeded only in getting from Meyer a guarantee for the publication of one volume. But as early as July 1846 Meyer and Rempel refused their promised assistance on the pretext of financial difficulties, the actual reason being differences in principle between Marx and Engels on the one hand and the champions of ‘true socialism’ on the other, whose views both publishers shared.

Marx and Engels did not abandon their hopes of publishing the works ready for the quarterly, if only by instalments, but their attempts failed. The extant manuscript of The German Ideology was first published in full in the Soviet Union in 1932.

58. The reference is to Joseph Weydemeyer’s letters to Engels and Gigot of 13 May, and to Marx of 14 May 1846 with the current information on the negotiations with the publishers Meyer and Rempel on the publication of a quarterly. Weydemeyer wrote to Marx that because of the financial difficulties the Westphalian publishers would be able to pay in the near future only a limited sum of his fee on account.

Engels’ reply mentioned here to Weydemeyer’s first letter has not been found.

59. On 1 February 1845 Marx signed a contract with the publisher Leske (see notes 5 and 27) for the publication of his Kritik der Politik und National-Ökonomie. But as early as March 1846 Leske suggested that Marx find another publisher and, in case he did find one, return him the advance received. Therefore Marx hoped to repay Leske either when he signed a contract with a new publisher or out of the sum received for financing the planned publication. But Marx was unable either to sign a new contract or to fulfil his intention to write a work on economics, and in February 1847 the contract with Leske was cancelled.

60. Marx has in mind a group of bourgeois-democratic intellectuals, Georg Jung among others, who contributed to the Rheinische Zeitung and were already enthusiastic about socialist ideas in 1842. Georg Jung, however, who was on friendly terms with Marx and supported his criticism of the Young Hegelians, left the socialist movement in 1846.

61. Marx’s letter to Herwegh has not been found.

62. Marx writes here about the advance which Hess had probably already received from Meyer and Rempel for his collaboration in preparing the quarterly planned by Marx and Engels. Hess wrote articles on A. Ruge ('Dottore Graziano, der Bajazzo der deutschen Philosophic') and G. Kuhlmann ('Der Dr. Georg Kuhlmann aus Holstein oder die Prophetic des wahren Sozialismus') for the first two volumes of the quarterly. Later Hess tried in vain to have the first article published separately, and finally, on 5 and 8 August 1847, it was printed in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung under the title ‘Dottore Grazianos Werke. Zwei Jahre in Paris. Studien und Erinnerungen von A. Ruge’. The article on G. Kuhlmann, edited by Marx and Engels, was included in The German Ideology and published as Chapter V of Volume 11 (see present edition, Vol. 5, pp. 531-39).

63. In 1846 the Government of Frederick William IV began the transformation of the Prussian Bank into a joint-stock company in order to draw private capital to redeem the state debts. The management of the bank was left in the hands of the Government (see F. Engels, ‘The Prussian Bank Question’, present edition, Vol. 6, p. 57). The reorganisation of the Bank was completed by 1 January 1847 on the basis of a decree of 5 October 1846.

64. Judging by Marx’s letter to Leske of 1 August 1846 (see this volume, pp. 49-52), it may be assumed that in the first half of August Marx had a 12 or 14 days’ holiday with Engels at Ostend.

65. This letter of Marx has not been found.

66. C. F. J. Leske, with whom Marx had signed a contract for the publication of his Kritik der Politik und National-Ökonomie on 1 February 1845 (see Note 5; the text of the contract is published in the present edition, Vol. 4, p. 675), wrote to Marx on 16 March 1846 that he doubted the possibility of publishing the book owing to the growing repression in Prussia against opposition literature. Marx’s reply (presumably of 18 March 1846) to this letter and his other letters to Leske mentioned below have not been found.

On 31 March 1846 Leske sent Marx a second letter proposing to him to find another publisher who would agree to redeem the advance received by the author. In a letter of 29 July 1846 he asked Marx whether he had found such a publisher and informed him that, if he had not, he could publish the book with the imprint of another publishing house. He stressed the necessity of giving the book a strictly academic character. In reply Marx wrote the letter which is published here according to the extant draft, which has many author’s corrections and stylistic improvements. On 19 September 1846 Leske informed Marx that he could not publish the book because of the severe censorship.

This letter was first published in English in full in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, 1979.

67. See Notes 57 and 62.

68. On the formation of a joint-stock company for the publication and distribution of socialist and communist literature, see Note 57.

In the summer of 1846 the project found support among the members of the socialist movement in Cologne (Bürgers, d'Ester, Hess). Some German bourgeois sympathising with socialism were also expected to finance the publication. This and other similar projects were repeatedly discussed by Marx and Engels in their correspondence. The present letter also deals with this below.

69. During his trip to England with Engels in July-August 1845, Marx studied works by the English economists and utopian socialists in the library of the Athenaeum in Manchester.

70. Engels arrived in Paris on 15 August 1846 entrusted by the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee with communist propaganda among the workers, primarily among the members of the Paris communities of the League of the Just (see Note 52), and with founding a correspondence committee. After failing to draw Weitling into the activities of the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee, Marx and Engels broke with him in the spring of 1846, and particular importance was attached to the struggle against the sectarian views of his followers, who advocated crude egalitarian communism, and against ‘true socialism’, a petty-bourgeois socialist trend which spread between 1844 and 1846 among German intellectuals and artisans, including emigrants in France. ‘True socialism’ was a mixture of the idealistic aspects of Feuerbachianism with French utopian socialism in ail emasculated form. As a result, socialist teaching was turned into abstract sentimental moralising divorced from real needs.

71. A reference to the negotiations which Weydemeyer helped to conduct with Meyer and Rempel on the publication of a quarterly. Marx and Engels wanted to publish in it their manuscripts which later appeared under the title of The German Ideology (see Note 57). During the negotiations the Westphalian publishers continually twisted and turned, and finally refused to finance the publication.

Joseph Weydemeyer was an artillery lieutenant dismissed from the Prussian army for political reasons.

72. Engels refers here to the critical work against L. Feuerbach which Marx was still writing in the second half of 1846 and which was to be included in the first volume of the planned two-volume edition of polemical works directed also against Bauer, Stirner, Ruge and Grün (see Note 57). Marx did not finish this work and later it became Chapter 1 of The German Ideology written jointly by him and Engels.

73. The letter of Engels and Ewerbeck to Bernays has not been found.

74. Apart from the letters to Marx containing information on his activities in Paris, in the autumn of 1846 Engels sent several letters to other members of the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee (Ph. Gigot, W. Wolff, et al.) C/0 Marx, marked ‘Committee’ and numbered. They differed from official reports to an organisation and rather recalled private correspondence between close friends.

75. On the struggle against the Weitlingians in the League of the Just, particularly in its Paris communities, see Note 70.

76. A reference to a machine invented by Weitling for making ladies’ straw hats.

77. The congress of liberal press representatives was held in Paris in 1846. The committee it elected drew up a draft electoral reform which became the main demand of the liberal opposition to the July monarchy. The sponsors of the congress did their utmost to prevent more radical circles, including the workers who supported L'Atelier (a journal of Christian socialists), from attending it and taking part in drafting a constitution. At the same time they simulated its ,unanimous’ approval by all opposition press organs.

78. This letter has reached us in the form of an extract quoted in Bernays’ reply to Marx of August 1846. Bernays touches on criticism of various alien trends, including ‘true socialism’, as an ideological prerequisite for the creation of a revolutionary party (see MEGA2, Abt. III, Bd. 2, S. 294).

79. The letter of Marx and other members of the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee to Engels mentioned here has not been found.

80. A reference to the Paris communities of the League of the Just (see Note 52).

81. Barrière meetings were Sunday assemblies of members of the League of the Just held at the Paris city gates (barrières). As a police agent reported on 1 February 1845, 30 to 200 German emigrants gathered in premises rented for this purpose from a wine-merchant in avenue de Vincennes near the city gate.

82. By ‘tailors’ communism’ Engels means the utopian communism of W. Weitling and his followers — see Note 70).

Karl Grim, who visited Paris in 1846-47, preached ‘true socialism’ (see Note 70) and Proudhon’s petty-bourgeois reformist ideas among the German workers.

83. Adolph Junge, a cabinet-maker from Düsseldorf, was a notable figure in the Paris communities of the League of the Just in the early 1840s. At the end of June 1846, after a short visit to Cologne, he returned to Paris via Brussels where he met Marx and Engels. In Paris he vigorously opposed Grün and other advocates of ‘true socialism’ and became an associate of Engels when the latter was in Paris. At the end of March 1847, the French police expelled Junge from the country.

84. Grün’s German translation of Proudhon’s book was published in Darmstadt in February (Volume 1) and in May (Volume If) 1847 under the title Philosophie der Staatsökonomie oder Notwendigkeit des Elends.

85. By labour-bazars or labour markets Engels means equitable-labour exchange bazars which were organised by the Owenites and Ricardian socialists (John Gray, William Thompson, John Bray) in various towns of England in the 1830s for fair exchange without a capitalist intermediary. The products were exchanged for labour notes, or labour money, certificates showing the cost of the products delivered, calculated on the basis of the amount of labour necessary for their production. The organisers considered these bazars as a means for publicising the advantages of a non-capitalist form of exchange and a peaceful way — together with cooperatives — of transition to socialism. The subsequent and invariable bankruptcy of such enterprises proved their utopian character.

86. Straubingers — travelling journeymen in Germany. Marx and Engels used this term for German artisans, including some participants in the working-class movement of that time, who were still largely swayed by guild prejudices and cherished the petty-bourgeois illusion that it was possible to return from capitalist large-scale industry to petty handicraft production.

87. Engels refers to Proudhon’s letter to Marx of 17 May 1846, in which he turned down a proposal to work in the correspondence committees (see Note 53).

88. Engels had been misled by Karl Bernays and Heinrich Börnstein as he later pointed out in his letter to Marx of 15 January 1847 (see this volume, p. 109). The item in the Allgemeine Zeitung dealt with the tsarist spy Y. N. Tolstoy and not with the Russian liberal landowner G. M. Tolstoy whose acquaintance Marx and Engels had made in Paris.

89. During the campaign for the elections to the local councils in Cologne which started at the end of June 1846, it was obvious at the very first meetings that the Cologne communists had a considerable influence on the petty-bourgeois electors (the Prussian workers were virtually deprived of suffrage). In the course of the election campaign, disorders took place in Cologne on 3 and 4 August, and were suppressed by the army. The people indignantly demanded that the troops should be withdrawn to their barracks and a civic militia organised. Karl d'Ester, a Cologne communist, described these disturbances in an unsigned pamphlet Bericht über die Ereignisse zu Köln vom 3. und 4. August und den folgenden Tagen, published in Mannheim in 1846.

90. By materialists Engels meant associates of Théodore Dézamy and other revolutionary representatives of French utopian communism who drew their socialist conclusions from the teaching of the eighteenth-century French materialist philosophers. In the 1840s there existed in France a society of materialist communists which consisted of workers; in July 1847 eleven of its members were brought to trial by the French authorities.

91. By spiritualists Engels must have meant the editors of the Fraternité who were influenced by the religious-socialist ideas of Pierre Leroux, and by the ‘Christian socialism’ of Philippe Buchez and Félicité Lamennais.

92. An extract from this letter was published in English for the first time in: Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955.

93. When the Westphalian publishers Meyer and Rempel finally refused to help in the publication of the polemical works of Marx and Engels (The German Ideology), of Hess and other authors (see Note 57), Marx demanded, through Weydemeyer, that the manuscripts ready for publication should be dispatched from Westphalia to Roland Daniels in Cologne. This decision was taken because there was a project to start a joint-stock company for the publication of socialist literature, which was supported by a group of Cologne communists (see Note 68). Here Engels asks Marx how the project was faring.

94. In July 1846 Das Westphälische Dampfboot published ‘Circular Against Kriege’ written by Marx and Engels. However, the editor of the journal, Otto Lüning, a representative of ‘true socialism’ criticised in the circular, subjected the text to tendentious editing and in a number of places glossed over the sharp principled criticism of this trend. Yet he had to admit in the conclusion that in publishing the circular the journal was criticising itself.

95. Engels’ letter to Püttmann has not been found.

In the summer of 1846 Hermann Püttmann, a radical journalist and ‘true socialist’, put out a prospectus of the journal Prometheus, whose publication was planned. Among its probable contributors he included ‘people in Brussels’, i.e. members of the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee. The only issue — a double one — of Prometheus appeared at the end of 1846. Neither Marx nor Engels contributed to it.

96. A reference to the joint address of the German Readers’ Society and German Workers’ Educational Society in London (see Note 52) on the Schleswig-Holstein problem. When the Educational Society passed it on 13 September 1846, it was printed as a leaflet; then it was published in the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung, No. 77, 18 September 1846 and, translated into English, in The Northern Star, No. 463, 27 September 1846.

As early as 17 September the leaflets were delivered to Paris and distributed by the members of the League of the Just. It was then that Engels acquainted himself with the address.

The address to the working people of Schleswig and Holstein emphasised the interests common to the workers of all countries. But the attempt to contrast proletarian internationalism with bourgeois nationalism did not escape the influence of ‘true socialism’, which opposed the struggle for bourgeois-democratic freedoms and the bourgeois-democratic national movements.

97. The Customs Union (Zollverein) of German states (initially including 18 states), establishing a common customs frontier, was founded in 1834 and headed by Prussia. By the 1840s the Union embraced all the German states except Austria, the Hanseatic towns (Bremen, Lübeck, Hamburg) and some small states. Formed owing to the necessity for an all-German market, the Customs Union subsequently promoted Germany’s political unification.

98. An allusion to the Berliner Zeitungs-Halle published by Gustav Julius from 1846 and used by him to attack the liberal bourgeoisie using typically ‘true socialist’ arguments. By these tactics the Prussian ruling circles wanted to cause clashes between the different opposition groups.

During the 1848-49 revolution, however, the Berliner Zeitungs-Halle expressed the views of the left democratic forces.

99. The government of Christian VIII tried in all possible ways to strengthen its rule over the German population in the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein which had been ceded to Denmark by decision of the Vienna Congress of 18 15. On the other hand, up to 1848 the national movement in Schleswig-Holstein did not go beyond the bounds of moderate liberal opposition and pursued the separatist aim of setting up another small German state. Influenced by the revolutionary events of 1848, however, it assumed a liberation character. The struggle for the secession of Schleswig and Holstein from Denmark became a part of the progressive struggle in Germany for the national unification of the country and was supported by Marx and Engels.

100. Dithmarschen — a district in the south-west of present-day Schleswig-Holstein. It was remarkable for its peculiar historical development; in particular, up to the second half of the nineteenth century there were still survivals of patriarchal customs and the communal system preserved among the peasants even after the conquest by Danish and Holstein feudal lords in the sixteenth century.

101. A reference to the Cologne citizens’ protest against the official report of the War Minister von Boyen, the Minister of the interior von Bodelschwingh and the Chief Counsellor of Justice Ruppenthal on the Cologne disturbances of 3 and 4 August 1846 (see Note 89).

102. A reference to the General Synod convened in Berlin in the summer of 1846 on the initiative of Frederick William IV, at which an unsuccessful attempt was made to reduce the differences between the Lutheran and Reformist (Calvinist) trends of Protestantism, the contradictions between which grew more acute despite their forced union in 1817.

103. Droit d'aubaine (the right of escheat) — a feudal custom widespread in France and other countries during the Middle Ages, according to which the property of aliens dying without heirs reverted to the crown.

104. From 1841 Friedrich Walthr published the radical Trier’sche Zeitung, which during the period dealt with was a mouthpiece of the ‘true socialists’, but he had no influence on the paper’s political line.

105. A reference to the numerous anonymous pamphlets (about thirty, as Engels pointed out in his ‘Government and Opposition in France’, see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 61-63) published in France against Rothschild (one of the authors was the French worker Dairnvaell). Directed against one of the biggest bankers of France, they testified to the growing opposition to the July monarchy regime which relied on financial tycoons.

106. Only an extract of this letter has survived. In it Engels discusses the project of starting a company for the publication of socialist and communist literature (see notes 57 and 68).

The date of this letter was established by the fact that this extract and Engels’ letter to Marx of 18 September 1846 deal with the same project.

107. A reference to assemblies of the estates introduced in Prussia in 1823. They embraced the heads of princely families, representatives of the knightly estate, i.e. the nobility, of towns and rural communities. The election system based oil the principle of landownership provided for a majority of the nobility in the assemblies. The competency of the assemblies was restricted to questions of local economy and administration. They also had the right to express their desires on government bills submitted for discussion.

108. This letter is not dated. The time of its writing was established by the fact that at the end of the letter Engels mentions a meeting of the Paris communities of the League of the Just which was to take place ‘this evening’. Judging by his letter to the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee of 23 October 1846 that meeting was held on Sunday, 18 October (see this volume, p. 82).

109. A reference to the following passage in the preface mentioned: ‘The evil is not in the head or the heart, but in the stomach of mankind. But of what help is all the clarity and healthiness of the head and the heart, when the stomach is ill, the basis of human existence spoilt’ (L. Feuerbach, Sämtliche Werke, Bd. 1, Leipzig, 1846, S. XV).

110. Marx’s letter to Engels mentioned here has not been found.

111. Engels probably means a special pamphlet (see p. 28 and notes 16 and 41) in which he intended to develop the criticism of the German protectionists, particularly List, which he had made in his second ‘Elberfeld speech’ (see present edition, Vol. 4, pp. 256-64), The manuscript of the pamphlet has not been found.

112. A reference to the polemical material against the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee published in the Volks-Tribun by its editor Hermann Kriege in reply to the ‘Circular Against Kriege’ by Marx and Engels. On the demand of the Committee the ‘Circular’ was published in the newspaper under the title ‘Eine Bannbulle’ but was accompanied by insinuations against its authors (Der Volks-Tribun, Nos. 23 and 24, 6 and 13 June 1846).

113. In October 1846 Marx wrote a second circular against Kriege, but it has not been found so far.

114. Engels’ intention to use the projected journal Die Pariser Horen for communist propaganda did not materialise. The journal appeared from January to June 1847 and carried works by Herwegh, Heine, Freiligrath, Mäurer and other authors; in general, it was influenced by ‘true socialism’ and that this would be its line had already been proved by the editorial introduction to the first issue.

115. This letter was published in English in part for the first time in: Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955.

116. At the beginning of this letter Engels gives the name Straubingers (see Note 86) to the members of the Paris communities of the League of the Just (see Note 52) who supported the ‘true socialist’ Karl Grün. Further on he uses it to denote advocates of ‘true socialism’ among the German artisans, including those living in the USA.

117. A reference to an uprising in Geneva which began in October 1846; as a result the radical bourgeoisie came to power and rallied the advanced Swiss cantons in their struggle against the Sonderbund, the separatist union of Catholic cantons.

118. A reference to the civil war in Portugal which was caused by the actions taken by the dictatorial ruling Coburg dynasty against the popular uprising. It broke out in the spring of 1846 and was crushed in the summer of 1847 with the help of British and Spanish interventionists.

119. This letter is not dated. The time of its writing is ascertained by Engels’ reference to a letter he wrote almost at the same time to the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee on 23 October 1846 and by the Brussels postmark of 24 October.

The letter was published in English in part for the first time in: Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955.

120. Engels refers to the second (October) Circular against Kriege (see Note 113).

121. Weitling was in Brussels with intervals from February to December 1846, when he left for France and later to the USA.

122. Fraternal Democrats — an international democratic society founded in London on 22 September 1845. It embraced representatives of Left Chartists, German workers and craftsmen — members of the League of the Just — and revolutionary emigrants of other nationalities. During their stay in England in the summer of 1845, Marx and Engels helped in preparing for the meeting at which the society was formed, but did not attend it as they had by then left London. Later they kept in constant touch with the Fraternal Democrats trying to influence the proletarian core of the society, which joined the Communist League in 1847, and through it the Chartist movement. The society ceased its activities in 1859.

Engels’ letter to Harney mentioned here has not been found.

123. This is a postscript by Engels to the letter Bernays wrote to Marx on 2 November 1846 (see text of the letter in MEGA2, Abt. III, Bd. 2, S. 62-63).

124. A reference to Bernays’ article on crimes and criminal law (see Note 54). When speaking about printed stuff, Engels seems to have in mind proofs of Bernays’ work on the above subject, which the latter demanded back front the publisher Leske.

125. Engels’ letter to the Swiss publisher J. M. Schläpfer who printed works by opposition writers (F. Freiligrath, K. Heinzen and others), written prior to 2 November 1846, has not been found.

126. This letter is not dated. The approximate time of its writing is established from reference to the London Correspondence Committee’s letter to the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee of 11 November 1846, which was probably sent to Engels in Paris in mid-November. Other evidence for establishing the date of the letter is that it mentions Proudhon’s Philosophie de la misère, which Marx received in Brussels not earlier than 15 December 1846 (see this volume, p. 96). Judging by this letter, Engels did not yet know that Marx had obtained Proudhon’s book.

127. Disturbances among workers took place in the Faubourg St. Antoine in Paris from 30 September to 2 October 1846. They were caused by the intended raising of the price of bread. The workers stormed bakers’ shops and raised barricades, there were clashes with troops. Paris members of the League of the Just were suspected by police of participating in the disturbances.

Engels’ letter to Gigot mentioned above has not been found.

Straubingers — see notes 86 and 116.

128. Ewerbeck had left for Lyons at that time.

129. A reference to the complications which arose in the relations of Marx and Engels with the leaders of the League of the Just in London (Karl Schapper, Joseph Moll, Heinrich Bauer). The latter maintained contacts with the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee and together with Harney formed a correspondence committee in London (below Engels writes about Harney’s correspondence with Brussels and his letter of 11 November 1846 in particular). However, Schapper, Moll and Bauer, influenced by certain immature ideas of utopian ‘working-class communism’, including those of Weitling, were still very cautious at that time in regard to revolutionary theoreticians — ‘scholars’. They did not approve of Marx’s and Engels’ attacks on Kriege and other ‘true socialists’, sought ways of reconciling various trends and, with this aim in view, planned to convene a congress of participants in the communist movement early in May 1847. In this connection they issued an address to the League of the Just members in November 1846. Marx and Engels considered that to convene such a congress without thorough preparation and dissociation from the trends hostile to the proletariat would be premature. The effect of scientific communist ideas, however, proved stronger than sectarian and backward tendencies. At the beginning of 1847 the London leaders of the League of the Just themselves took a step to remove their differences and draw closer to Marx and Engels.

130. The address of the German Workers’ Educational Society in London to Johannes Ronge, leader of the bourgeois trend of German Catholics, was drawn up by Weitling in March 1845 and testified to the immature views of the leaders of the Society and the League of the Just. The document developed the idea that the Christian religion, ‘purified’ and reformed, could serve communism.

On the address of the Educational Society in London about Schleswig-Holstein, see Note 96.

131. At that time the Verlagsbuchhandlung zu Belle-Vue was owned by Johann Marmor and August Schmid. It is impossible to establish which of the two Engels means. In December 1846 the firm moved to Constance.

132. As is seen from the publisher Löwenthal’s letter to Engels of 11 March 1847 (included in MEGA2, Abt. III, Rd. 2, S. 330), Engels intended to have his ‘Die Gegenwart der blonden Race’ printed by J. Rütten of Literarische Anstalt publishers. Judging by Engels’ letter to Marx of 10 December 1851, Engels returned to this subject after the 1848-49 revolution, which had interrupted his studies (see this volume, p. 509). However, there is no, information as to whether he realised his intention.

133. The Order of the Dannebrog (Order of the Danish State Banner) — an Order of Danish knights founded in 1671.

134. Engels’ report to the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee has not been found.

135. Marx wrote this letter in reply to the request of his Russian acquaintance Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov for his opinion on Proudhon’s Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère. On 1 November 1846 Annenkov wrote to Marx, concerning Proudhon’s book: ‘I admit that the actual plan of the work seems to be a jeu d'esprit, designed to give a glimpse of German philosophy, rather than something grown naturally out of the subject and requirements of its logical development.'

Marx’s profound and precise criticism of Proudhon’s views, and his exposition of dialectical and materialist views to counterbalance them, produced a strong impression even on Annenkov, who was far from materialism and communism. He wrote to Marx on 6 January 1847: ‘Your opinion of Proudhon’s book produced a truly invigorating effect on me by its preciseness, its clarity, and above all its tendency to keep within the bounds of reality’ (MEGA2, Abt. III, Bd. 2, S. 321).

When in 1880 Annenkov published his reminiscences ‘Remarkable Decade 1838-1848’ in the Vestnik Yevropy, he included in them long extracts from Marx’s letter. In 1883, the year when Marx died, these extracts, translated into German, were published in Die Neue Zeit and New-Yorker Volkszeitung.

The original has not been found. The first English translation of this letter was published in: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence. 1846-1895, Martin Lawrence Ltd., London, 1934.

136. Here Marx uses the word ‘cacadauphin’ by which during the French Revolution opponents of the absolutist regime derisively described the mustard-coloured cloth, recalling the colour of the Dauphin’s napkins, made fashionable by Queen Marie Antoinette.

137. Parliaments — juridical institutions which arose in France in the Middle Ages. They enjoyed the right to remonstrate government decrees. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries their members were officials of high birth called noblesse de robe (the nobility of the mantle). The parliaments, which finally became the bulwark of feudal opposition to absolutism and impeded the implementation of even moderate reforms, were abolished in 1790, during the French Revolution.

138. The letter was dated 1845 by mistake. The correct date was established on the basis of the contents and the postmark: ‘Paris 60, 15. Janv. 47'

An extract from this letter was published in English for the first time in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Literature and Art, International Publishers, N. Y., p. 81, 1947.

139. The reference here and below is to Marx’s possible removal to Paris and the documents he needed for that move. The text below shows that Marx had the permission of the Belgian authorities to stay in Belgium. It was issued to him after his expulsion from France in February 1845 and signed on 22 March 1845 on condition that Marx would not publish anything concerning current politics. Besides, on 1 December 1845 Marx received a certificate of renunciation of his Prussian citizenship and perhaps permission to emigrate to America for which he had applied in order to deprive the Prussian authorities of any pretext for interfering in his future. However, Marx was not able to go to Paris until after the February 1848 revolution.

140. An allusion to relations with Hess which deteriorated in February and March 1846 when Marx and Engels started a decisive struggle against ‘true socialism’ and Weitling’s utopian egalitarian communism. In air effort to avoid an open break, Marx and Engels persuaded Hess to leave Brussels in March 1846.

141. The reference is to The Poverty of Philosophy by Marx. He worked on it from the end of December 1846 to the beginning of April 1847. It came out early in July 1847 in Brussels and Paris. In it Marx compared Proudhon’s views and the theory of the British utopian communist John Bray. The latter advocated exchange of the products of labour without money as a method of transition to a society free from exploitation (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 138-44). Bray expounded his theory in his Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy, Leeds, 1839. By ‘our publication’ Engels meant the manuscripts of The German Ideology intended for publication.

142. Here Engels refers to the second part of his and Marx’s joint work The German Ideology devoted to the critique of ‘true socialism’ (see present edition, Vol. 5, pp. 453-539). Engels continued his work on this section up to April 1847 and its results have reached us in the form of an unfinished manuscript ‘The True Socialists’ supplementing The German Ideology (see present edition, Vol. 5, pp. 540-81).

143. As is seen from this letter Engels originally intended to work up the article he had apparently written in the autumn of 1846 or early in 1847 on Grün’s Über Goethe for the second Part of The German Ideology, devoted to the critique of ,true socialism’. Later this article served as a basis for the second essay in the series German Socialism in Verse and Prose (see present edition, ‘Vol. 6, pp. 249-73). It is quite possible that Engels also used the manuscripts of The German Ideology for the first essay in that series. The essays on Grün were published in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, Nos. 93-98 of’ 21, 25 and 28 November and 2, 5 and 9 December 1847.

144. Engels has in mind the time the young Goethe spent among the burghers of his native town Frankfurt am Main, and his service at the Duke of Weimar’s court: from 1782 to 1786 Goethe held several high administrative posts, was a member of the Privy Council, Minister of Education, etc.

145. Marx’s letter to Zulauff has not been found. Like the letter published here, it apparently concerned the tasks facing the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee and the communist groups close to it when Marx and Engels joined the League of the Just as a result of their negotiations at the end of January and the beginning of February 1847 with Joseph Moll, a representative of the London leaders of the League who was sent to Brussels and Paris specially for this purpose. — The negotiations showed that the League leaders were prepared to recognise the principles of scientific communism as a basis when drawing up its programme and carrying out its reorganisation. Marx and Engels, therefore, called on their followers grouped around the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee not only to join the League of the Just but also to take an active part in its reorganisation.

146. See Note 86. Here the reference is to the members of the Paris communities of the League of the Just.

147. The reference is to Engels’ as yet unfound satirical pamphlet about Lola Montez, a favourite of King Ludwig I of Bavaria. The scandalous influence of this Spanish dancer on the policy of the Bavarian Government caused ill 1847-48 the appearance of numerous pamphlets, articles, cartoons, etc. Further on, the text (see p, 114) shows that Engels tried to have this pamphlet published b), Vogler in Brussels and by the Belle-Vue publishers in Switzerland. A letter has survived which Vogler wrote on 3 April 1847 in reply to Engels’ letter of 28 March which has riot been found. Engels’ proposal was rejected because of the censorship existing in the Great Duchy of Baden where the publishers had moved by that time.

148. The reference is to the rescripts by Frederick William IV of 3 February 1847 convening the United Diet — a united assembly of the eight provincial diets. The United Diet as well as the provincial diets consisted of representatives of the estates: the curia of high aristocracy and the curia of the other three estates (nobility, representatives of the towns and the peasantry). its powers were limited to authorising new taxes and loans, to voice without vote during the discussion of Bills, and to the right to present petitions to the King.

The United Diet opened on 11 April 1847, but it was dissolved as early as June because the majority refused to vote a new loan.

149. Engels intended to have this work published as a pamphlet by Vogler in Brussels who was printing Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy. However, when Marx received the manuscript, Vogler had been arrested in Aachen (see this volume, p. 117). The part of the pamphlet which has reached us was first published in Russian in the USSR in 1929.

150. Communistes matérialistes — members of the secret society of materialist communists founded in the 1840s (see Note 90). The members of this society were tried in July 1847 and sentenced to long terms of imprisonment.

151. The persecution of the Paris members of the League of the Just by the French police was reported in an item datelined Paris, 2 April 1847, published in the Berliner Zeitungs-Halle, No. 81, 8 April 1847. It said of Engels: “Several police agents have also been to Fr. Engels, who lives here in great retirement and devotes himself only to economic and historical studies; naturally they could find nothing against him.”

152. Marx’s letter to Bakunin has not been found.

153. The reference is to a cartoon by Engels of Frederick William IV of Prussia delivering the speech from the throne at the opening of the United Diet in Berlin on 11 April 1847 (see present edition, Vol. 6, p. 67). This cartoon was published as a special supplement to the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung of 6 May 1847.

154. The reference is to the congress of the League of the Just at which, as agreed between the League leaders in London (H. Bauer, J. Moll, K. Schapper) and Marx and Engels early in 1847, the League was to be reorganised. The congress was held between 2 and 9 June 1847. Engels represented the Paris communities, and Wilhelm Wolff, briefed by Marx, was a delegate of the Brussels communists.

Engels’ active participation in the work of the congress affected the course and the results of its proceedings. The League was renamed the Communist League, the old motto of the League of the Just ‘All men are brothers’ was replaced by a new, Marxist one: ‘Working Men of All Countries, Unite!’ The congress expelled the Weitlingians from the League. The last sitting on 9 June approved the draft programme and the draft Rules of the League, which had been drawn up either by Engels or with his help (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 96-103 and 585-88). Both documents and the congress circular to the League members were sent to the local communities and districts for discussion to be finally approved at the next, second congress.

This congress laid the foundation for the first international proletarian communist organisation in history.

155. Engels arrived in Brussels about 27 July 1847 and stayed there up to mid-October. He actively contributed to enhancing the influence of the Communist League among the German workers residing in Belgium and to the establishment of international contacts between representatives of the proletarian movement and progressive democratic circles.

155a This letter was first published in English abridged in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliff, New Jersey, 1979.

156. Marx refers here to the prospects of his and Engels’ regular collaboration in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung. Previously they had only occasionally contributed to this emigrant newspaper, though they approved of the collaboration in it of W. Wolff, G. Weerth and others of their followers. On the whole up to that time the newspaper’s line had reflected the desire of its editor-in-chief, the petty-bourgeois democrat A. Bornstedt, to combine eclectic ideological trends in opposition. But financial and other difficulties compelled him to agree to the collaboration of the proletarian revolutionaries in the newspaper. From 9 September 1847 Marx and Engels were its regular contributors, directly influenced its line and at the end of 1847 concentrated editorial affairs in their own hands. During this period the newspaper became a mouthpiece of the proletarian party then being formed, virtually the press organ of the Communist League.

157. Engels wrote this letter to Marx when the latter was on a visit to his relatives in Holland to settle his financial affairs. At the end of September 1847 Marx spent a few days in Zalt-Bommel at his uncle’s (on his mother’s side), Lion Philips, and returned to Brussels early in October.

158. The German Workers’ Society was founded by Marx and Engels in Brussels at the end of August 1847, its aim being the political education of the German workers who lived in Belgium and dissemination of the ideas of scientific communism among them. With Marx, Engels and their followers at its head, the Society became the legal centre rallying the revolutionary proletarian forces in Belgium. Its most active members belonged to the Communist League. The Society played an important part in founding the Brussels Democratic Association. After the February 1848 revolution in France, the Belgian authorities arrested and banished many of its members.

159. The international banquet of democrats in Brussels on 27 September 1847, of which Engels speaks here, adopted the decision to found a Democratic Association. Engels was elected to its Organising Committee.

The Democratic Association united proletarian revolutionaries, mainly German refugees and advanced bourgeois and petty-bourgeois democrats. Marx and Engels took an active part in its establishment. On 15 November 1847 Marx was elected its Vice-President (the President was Lucien Jottrand, a Belgian democrat) and under his influence it became a centre of the international democratic movement. During the February 1848 revolution in France, the proletarian wing of the Brussels Democratic Association sought to arm the Belgian workers and to intensify the struggle for a democratic republic. However, when Marx was expelled from Brussels in March 1848 and the most revolutionary elements were repressed by the Belgian authorities, its activity assumed a narrow, purely local character and in 1849 the Association ceased to exist.

160. The text of Engels’ speech at the democratic banquet on 27 September 1847 is not extant. The recorded speeches of some speakers were published in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, No. 80, 7 October 1847.

161. The reference is to the newspaper Correspondence Bureau (Deutsche Zeitungs-Correspondenzbureau), set up by S. Seiler and K. Reinhardt in the spring of 1845. It supplied information and correspondence material to the German newspapers.

162. The reference is to Georg Weerth’s speech at the International Congress of Economists held in Brussels on 16-18 September 1847 to discuss free trade. Marx, Engels and Wilhelm Wolff also attended the congress, intending to make use of it to criticise bourgeois economics (the free trade doctrine, in particular) and to defend working-class interests. When Weerth made a speech along these lines the congress organisers closed the discussion on 18 September without allowing Marx to speak. Excerpts from Weerth’s speech were published in a few German, British and French newspapers. It was published in full in the Belgian Atelier Démocratique on 29 September 1847. A report on the proceedings of the congress is given by Engels in his articles ‘The Economic Congress’ and ‘The Free Trade Congress at Brussels’ (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 274-78 and 282-90).

163. This refers to the agreement reached with Bornstedt in September 1847 concerning Marx’s and Engels’ regular contribution to the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung (see Note 156).

164. The discussion of protective tariffs and free trade which had begun before Marx went on a visit to Holland continued at a meeting of the German Workers’ Society on 29 September 1847. To enliven this discussion Marx and Engels started a ‘sham battle’ which Engels later recalled in a letter to Hermann Schlüter of 29 January 1891: ‘...I remember only that when the debates in the German Workers’ Society in Brussels became dull Marx and 1 agreed to start a sham discussion in which he defended free trade and 1 protective tariffs.

165. Engels means the meeting of the Brussels community of the Communist League. The community and the Brussels District Committee of the League were formed on the basis of the Communist Correspondence Committee on 5 August 1847. The District Committee included Marx, Engels, Junge and Wolff (see present edition, Vol. 6, p. 601).

166. Marx seems to have in mind primarily literary works reflecting local peculiarities in the various shades of ‘true socialism’ (cf. F. Engels, ‘The True Socialists’, present edition, Vol. 5, pp. 540-81).

167. Marx’s intention to start a joint-stock company for the publication of a communist monthly in 1847, about which he also wrote to Herwegh on 26 October 1847 (see this volume, p. 141) like similar earlier plans did not materialise.

168. Engels’ letter to Louis Blanc presumably written soon after his arrival in Paris from Brussels in mid-October 1847 has not been found.

169. At that time a civil war was imminent in Switzerland between the Sonderbund (a separatist union formed by seven economically backward cantons which opposed progressive bourgeois reforms and defended the privileges of the Church and the Jesuits) and the other cantons which persuaded the Swiss Diet to declare the dissolution of the Sonderbund in July 1847. Hostilities began early in November, and the Sonderbund army was defeated by the federal forces on 23 November 1847.

Johann Jacoby, a representative of the German radicals since the convocation of the United Diet in Prussia in 1847 (see Note 148), criticised it as a substitute for people’s representation. In April and June 1847 he made a trip to Saxony, South Germany, Switzerland, visited Cologne and Brussels where he established contact with the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung.

A radical programme of political reforms was adopted at a meeting of representatives of the democratic wing of the opposition movement (F. Hecker, G. Struve, etc.) in Offenburg (Grand Duchy of Baden) on 12 September 1847.

170. The Prussian United Diet (see Note 148) was dissolved in June 1847. In calling A. Ruge the panegyrist of the Diet Engels refers to the ‘Adresse an die Opposition des vereinigten Landtages in Berlin’ of 11 June 1847 included by Ruge in the Polemische Briefe published in Mannheim that year.

171. Engels’ first article in La Réforme, ‘The Commercial Crisis in England. — The Chartist Movement. — Ireland’ (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 307-09), appeared as early as 26 October 1847. After that the newspaper regularly carried his articles, or summaries of The Northern Star reports on the Chartist movement which he translated into French. As a rule they were published under the headings ‘Mouvement chartiste’ and ‘Agitation chartiste’ and introduced by the editorial ‘On nuns écrit de Londres’. Engels contributed to La Réforme till January 1848. Though Engels’ views differed from those of the newspaper’s editors (especially Louis Blanc and Ledru-Rollin), his articles on the Chartist movement to some extent helped to overcome the national exclusiveness of La Réforme and exerted a revolutionary influence on its readers — the French workers and the radical middle classes.

172. Engels contributed to the Chartist Northern Star from the end of 1843 to 1848. From May 1844 he sent in regular reports about European events, primarily about the political and social movement.

173. Here Engels refers to the speech on free trade Marx intended to deliver at the International Congress of Economists in Brussels held between 16 and 18 September 1847 (see Note 162). Not being allowed to speak, Marx published it in the Atelier Démocratique on 29 September. Part of the speech was also published by Joseph Weydemeyer in 1848 under the title ‘The Protectionists, the Free Traders and the Working Class’ and excerpts from it were quoted by Engels in his article ‘The Free Trade Congress at Brussels’ in The Northern Star, No. 520, 9 October 1847 (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 279-90). As is seen from this letter the version sent to La Réforme was not printed, and it is not extant.

174. Engels alludes to the case of the Duke of Praslin. In August 1847 the Duchess of Praslin was found murdered in her house. Suspicion fell on her husband and he was arrested. A political scandal broke out which caused the Duke of Praslin to take poison during the investigation.

175. The management referred to is that of the Correspondence Bureau of S. Seiler and K. Reinhardt (see Note 161).

176. In the summer of 1847 the London Central Authority of the Communist League distributed for discussion in the League’s local communities and districts the ‘Draft of a Communist Confession of Faith’ drawn up by Engels and approved by the First Congress (see Note 154). In mid-October, when Engels returned to Paris from Brussels, the League’s draft programme written in the form of a catechism was already being discussed in the Paris communities. Hess proposed to the Paris District Committee his own version of the draft, which was rejected after sharp criticism by Engels. But Engels was no longer satisfied with his own version because in drafting it he had to take into account the fact that the delegates to the League’s First Congress were still influenced by utopian communism. In a new version — ‘Principles of Communism’ — drawn up by Engels this shortcoming was eliminated and the programme principles of the working-class movement were elaborated in greater detail, but still in the form of a catechism. This new document was later approved by the Paris communities as the draft programme for the Second Congress of the Communist League.

177. Engels refers to Born’s intended participation in the Second Congress of the Communist League, but Born did not go to the congress.

178. Neither Engels’ letter to the. Elberfeld communists nor their reply to it has been found. Presumably they were about the possibilities for publishing Marx’s and Engels’ works on free trade and protective tariffs (see Note 173).

179. Marx alludes here to Countess Hatzfeldt’s divorce case which lasted from 1846 to 1854.

180. Marx presumably has in mind here the refusal of Baron Arnim, Prussian Ambassador to Paris, to give Emma Herwegh, Georg Herwegh’s wife, a visa for Berlin. The fact was reported in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung on 21 October 1847. Later Emma Herwegh set out with a Swiss passport without a visa.

181. Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy was published simultaneously by Vogler ill Brussels and by Frank in Paris. As is seen from Marx’s letter to Engels of 15 October 1868, both Vogler and Frank were mere ‘commissioners’ (agents de vente), all printing expenses being paid by the author.

182. The reference is to the election of delegates from the Paris district to the Second Congress of the Communist League which was to meet in London on 29 November 1847.

183. The Lille Banquet took place on 7 November 1847 during the campaign for an election reform in France which revealed the extremely anti-democratic stand of the liberal opposition to the July monarchy and of the moderate republicans of the National party (see Engels’ ‘Split in the Camp. — The Réforme and the National. — March of Democracy’, present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 385-87).

184. An international meeting organised by the Fraternal Democrats (see Note 122) took place in London on 29 November 1847 to mark the anniversary of the Polish insurrection of 1830. Marx and Engels, who had come to London for the Second Congress of the Communist League, made speeches about Poland. The report on the meeting and accounts of the speeches made by Marx and Engels appeared in the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung, No. 140, 3 December 1847, The Northern Star, No. 528, 4 December 1847, and the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, No. 98, 9 December 1847. Engels wrote a special item on this subject for La Réforme, which published it on 5 December 1847 (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 391-92).

185. Proposals to convene an international democratic congress were made both by the Fraternal Democrats and the Brussels Democratic Association. During his stay in London at the end of November 1847, Marx had talks on the subject with the Chartist leaders and representatives of the proletarian and democratic emigrants. Engels had similar talks with French socialists and democrats. In the beginning of 1848 it was agreed to convene the congress in Brussels. It was scheduled for 25 August 1848, the eighteenth anniversary of the Belgian revolution. However, these plans did not materialise because in February 1848 a revolution began in Europe.

186. Engels sent this letter to Marx on the eve of the Second Congress of the Communist League for which they both made thorough preparations and expected to reach a final agreement concerning their stand during their meeting on the way to London. What Engels writes here on certain points, e.g. a Communist League programme not in the form of a catechism or confession of faith (see notes 154 and 176) but of a manifesto, found expression in the congress decisions.

The Second Congress of the Communist League was held in London from 29 November to 8 December 1847. It was attended by delegates from Germany, France, Belgium, Switzerland, Poland and Denmark. Marx represented the League’s Brussels communities, Engels the Paris communities and Victor Tedesco the Liège communities. During many days of discussion Marx and Engels defended the principles of scientific communism on which the congress based its decisions. It was resolved that in all its external relations the League would come out openly as a communist party. The congress adopted the previously drawn up Rules in an improved form, a clause clearly defining the League’s communist aim being included. On the instruction of the Second Congress Marx and Engels wrote as the League’s programme the Manifesto of the Communist Party, which was published in February 1848 (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 477-519).

An excerpt from this letter was published in English for the first time in: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence, 1846-1895. A Selection with Commentary and Notes, Martin Lawrence Ltd., London, 1934, and International Publishers, New York, 1935.

187. Marx’s letter to Engels written about 22 November 1847 has not been found.

188. The working man referred to was Stephan Born, who was to speak at the meeting of the Democratic Association in Brussels held to mark the seventeenth anniversary of the Polish revolution of 1830 instead of Marx who at that time was to take part in the Second Congress of the Communist League in London. Below Engels mentions Wilhelm Wolff (Lupus) and Georg Weerth as possible representatives, with Born, of the German Workers’ Society at the Brussels meeting. It was held on 29 November 1847, and Born spoke on behalf of the German workers.

A report on the meeting was published in the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung, No. 96, 2 December 1847.

189. Engels refers to the Congress of Economists in Brussels where Georg Weerth made a speech on 18 September (see Note 162).

190. The reason for Marx’s visit to London was to attend the Second Congress of the Communist League. Marx and Engels profited by this occasion to attend the international meeting (mentioned in this letter) held in London to mark the anniversary of the Polish insurrection of 1830 (see Note 184).

191. Engels returned to Paris at the end of December 1847 after a few days’ stay in Brussels, where he had arrived from England soon after Marx, on about 17 December (Marx and Engels had gone to England to participate in the Second Congress of the Communist League — see Note 186). In Brussels Engels worked with Marx on the Manifesto of the Communist Party. On his arrival in Paris, Engels wished to meet Louis Blanc, as he writes at the beginning of the letter, to get him to write a review of Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy for La Réforme.

192. In 1843 Jules Michelet was dismissed from his teaching post for his democratic and anti-clerical convictions; his right to teach history at the Paris University was not restored till after the February 1848 revolution.

193. Here Engels means the United commissions, an advisory social-estate body in Prussia elected by the Provincial Diets from their own members. Engels’ article on Prussian finances, mentioned in the letter, has not been found.

194. It is not known whether Engels carried out his intention. The review of Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy did not appear in La Réforme.

195. Engels’ letter to Bernays has not been found.

196. At the end of February 1848 a revolution took place in France which was enthusiastically welcomed in Belgium. Alarmed by the scope of the democratic movement in the country, the Belgian authorities resorted to arrests and expulsion of German revolutionary emigrants. They arrested the Communist League members Wilhelm Wolff and Victor Tedesco. On 3 March Marx was ordered to leave Belgium in twenty-four hours. However, in the night of 3 March, when he was preparing to leave, the police burst into Marx’s flat, arrested him and then his wife. After 18 hours of imprisonment Marx and his family were forced to leave Belgium at once. On the invitation of Flocon, who had been elected member of the Provisional Government of the French Republic, Marx moved to Paris.

Engels, expelled from Paris at the end of January 1848 for his revolutionary activity, was in Brussels from 31 January.

The time of writing of this letter, as well as of many other undated ones, is established on the basis of the chronology of events mentioned, in particular the constitution of the new Central Authority of the Communist League on 7 March 1848, and of Jones’ departure for England, where he arrived not later than 12 March, etc.

An excerpt from this letter was published in English for the first time in Labour Monthly, 1948, No. 3, III.

197. The Second Congress of the Communist League retained the seat of the Central Authority in London. However, as a revolution had broken out in France, Schapper, Bauer, Moll and other members of the London Central Authority intended to move to the Continent and decided to transfer their powers of general direction of the League to the Brussels District Committee headed by Marx. But the persecution of revolutionaries by the Belgian authorities impelled the Brussels Central Authority that had been formed to adopt on 3 March 1848 a decision to dissolve itself and to empower Marx to form a new Central Authority in Paris. Marx arrived in Paris on 5 March and took up this appointment. On 7 March the Paris Central Authority mentioned by Marx was formed. Engels was elected in his absence.

198. The reference is to the arrest of Marx and his wife by the Belgian police (see Note 196).

199. The interpellation on the arrest and expulsion of Marx and his family was made by Bricourt at the sitting of the Chamber of Representatives of the Belgian Parliament on 11 March 1848.

200. Marx’s notes on Wilhelm Wolff’s arrest on 27 February 1848, his maltreatment by the police and prison authorities and his expulsion from Belgium on 5 March have survived. Marx published an article on the persecution of revolutionary emigrants in Belgium in La Réforme, 12 March 1848 (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 567-68 and 581-82).

201. The news of the victory of the February revolution in France caused a widespread popular movement in the Rhine Province of Prussia and other parts of Germany. A demonstration of about five thousand workers and artisans, organised by the local community of the Communist League, was held in Cologne on 3 March before the town hall. A petition demanding universal suffrage, freedom of speech, press and assembly, armament of the people, labour protection, children’s education at the public expense, etc., was presented to the magistrate. The meeting following the demonstration was dispersed by troops, and the Leaders of the demonstration — Andreas Gottschalk, August Willich and Friedrich Anneke — were arrested and brought to trial (they were set free on 21 March when a revolution began in Prussia). Gottschalk, Willich and Anneke belonged to a group in the local community of the Communist League which was under the influence of ‘true socialism’ and, in contrast to Kari d'Ester, Roland Daniels and Heinrich Bürgers (below Engels calls them ‘old friends'), displayed sectarian tendencies.

202. The information received by Engels concerning d'Ester was inaccurate. D'Ester was present at the sitting of the Cologne city council on 3 March 1848 and spoke for the inclusion of a number of the people’s demands in the liberal memorandum under discussion to be presented to the Berlin authorities. His proposals were rejected.

203. A movement for definitive secession from the German Empire and for bourgeois-democratic reforms arose in 1797 in the territories along the left bank of the Rhine seized by the armies of the French Republic. With the approval of the French commander-in-chief, General Hoche, a plan was drawn up in September 1797 to form a filial left-bank Rhine Republic (Cisrhenanische Republik) allied to France. However, as a result of General Bonaparte’s victory over Austria the territories along the left bank of the Rhine were directly attached to France by the Campo Formio Treaty (November 1797).

204. An extract from this letter was published in English for the first time in Labour Monthly, 1948, No. 3, III.

205. The German Democratic Society was formed in Paris after the February 1848 revolution. The Society was headed by petty-bourgeois democrats, Herwegh, Bornstedt and others, who campaigned to raise a volunteer legion of German refugees, with the intention of marching into Germany. In this way they hoped to carry out a revolution in Germany and establish a republic there. Marx and his followers in the Communist League opposed to this adventurist plan the tactics of uniting the German emigrants and organising their return to Germany individually to take part in the revolutionary struggle that was developing there. Late in April 1848 the volunteer legion moved to Baden, where it was dispersed by government troops.

Black, red and gold were the colours symbolising German unity; the unity slogan was interpreted by the petty-bourgeois democrats as a call to establish in Germany a federation of autonomous provinces on the pattern of the Swiss Confederation.

206. There is no further information about the letters Marx intended to write to Maynz and Jottrand.

207. Engels moved to Paris from Brussels about 21 March 1848.

208. Neither Engels’ letter to his mother nor his mother’s letter quoted by Engels below has been found.

209. On 24 February 1848 the people of Paris revolted, overthrew the monarchy and formed a Provisional Government, with the party of the National in the majority. Under pressure from the armed masses, however, the bourgeois republicans were compelled to include in the government four ministers from the list compiled by La Réforme, among them Louis Blanc and a worker Albert, a leader of secret republican societies and participant in the street fighting.

On 17 March there was a 100,000-strong demonstration of Paris workers demanding postponement of the elections to the Constituent Assembly (see Note 214).

210. The reference is to the organisation of a legion of German refugees to march into Germany (see Note 205).

211. This letter was published in English for the first time in Science and Society, New York, 1940, Vol. IV, No. 2.

212. The reference is to the attempts of Ledru-Rollin, Minister of the Interior, to renew the administrative staff of municipal councils and his decree of 14 March to abolish the privileged National Guard units of bourgeois and aristocrats.

213. This refers to the utopian plans for the ‘organisation of labour’ with the help of a bourgeois state proposed by Louis Blanc as president of the Labour Commission set up by the Provisional Government on 28 February 1848 (it held its meetings in the Luxembourg Palace). The Commission was dissolved by the Government after the popular action of 15 May 1848.

214. The reference is to the elections to the National Guard, fixed for 18 March, and to the Constituent Assembly of the Republic, which originally were to be held on 5 April 1848. To hold the elections in a short time would have benefited the anti-revolutionary forces. That is why the demonstration of the Paris workers on 17 March, of which Engels writes above, demanded that the Provisional Government, besides withdrawing the troops from the capital, should postpone the elections to the National Guard till 5 April and to the Constituent Assembly till 31 May 1848. The Government was compelled to comply with these demands, but the elections to the Constituent Assembly were postponed only till 23 April.

215. About 6 April 1848 Marx and Engels returned to Germany from emigration to take part in the revolution that was developing there. On their way to Cologne, the centre of the Rhine Province — the most economically developed region in Germany — which they chose as the place for the planned publication of a revolutionary newspaper, they made a stop at Mainz on 8 April. Here they discussed with the local communists (Karl Wallau who had arrived from Paris earlier, Adolf Cluss and others) the plan of actions to prepare for the creation of a mass party of the German proletariat, with the Communist League as its nucleus. Marx and Engels arrived at Cologne about 11 April.

There is no information about the letters which Marx and Engels promised to write to Cabet from Germany.

216. In mid-April Engels left Cologne and made a trip to towns of the Rhine Province of Prussia — Barmen, Elberfeld and others — to organise a subscription to the shares for the publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. During the trip he also acted as an emissary of the Communist League’s Central Authority. He returned to Cologne on 20 May 1848.

217. on 10 April 1848 a Chartist demonstration in London was dispersed by troops and special constables; the purpose. of the demonstration was to present the third Chartist Petition to Parliament.

Engels’ letter to Harney has not been found.

218. The subject is the prospects of the planned Neue Rheinische Zeitung, the first issue of which appeared on 31 May but was dated 1 June 1848.

Marx and Engels began to prepare for the publication of a German revolutionary newspaper as early as March 1848 when they were in Paris (see this volume, p. 173). They regarded a proletarian periodical as an important step towards creating a mass party of the German proletariat based on the Communist League. Soon after their return to Germany, however, they realised that the conditions for the creation of such a party had not yet matured. Disunity and lack of political awareness made the German workers susceptible to the artisan and petty-bourgeois influences and particularise aspirations. Moreover it was senseless for the League to continue to work underground in the context of the revolution but the League was too weak and numerically small to serve as a rallying centre. Under these conditions the newspaper was to play an especially important role in the ideological and political education of the masses. It was also to become an organ of political guidance for the Communist League members, whom Marx and Engels advised to take an active part in the workers’ organisations and democratic societies then being set up in Germany.

It was decided to call the newspaper the Neue Rheinische Zeitung in order to stress that it was to continue the revolutionary-democratic traditions of the Rheinische Zeitung which was edited by Marx in 1842 and early 1843. In view of the specific conditions and the absence of an independent proletarian party, Marx, Engels and their followers entered the political scene as the Left, in fact proletarian, wing of the democratic movement. This predetermined the stand adopted by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, which had as its subtitle Organ der Demokratie (Organ of Democracy). The editorial board included Karl Marx (editor-in-chief), Frederick Engels, Wilhelm Wolff, Georg Weerth, Ferdinand Wolff, Ernst Dronke and Heinrich Bürgers. In October 1848 Ferdinand Freiligrath also became an editor.

The consistent revolutionary line of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, its militant internationalism, its articles containing political accusations against the Government aroused the displeasure of its bourgeois shareholders in the first months of its existence and led to attacks in the feudal monarchist and liberal bourgeois press. The editors were persecuted by the police and judicial authorities. On 26 September 1848, when a state of siege was declared in Cologne, the publication of the newspaper was suspended and was resumed only on 12 October. Despite all this, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung courageously defended the interests of revolutionary democracy and the proletariat. In May 1849, against the background of the general counter-revolutionary offensive, the Prussian Government issued an expulsion order against Marx on the grounds that he had not obtained Prussian citizenship. This arbitrary act and repressions against other editors led to the paper ceasing publication. The last issue, No. 301, printed in red ink, appeared on 19 May 1849. In their farewell address to the workers the editors wrote that ‘their last word everywhere and always will be: emancipation of the working class’ (see present edition, Vol. 9, p. 467).

219. On 6 May 1848 Marx and Weerth arrived in Elberfeld to discuss with Engels problems connected with the publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and the activity of the Communist League.

220. An extract from this letter was published in English for the first time in: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence. 1846-1895. A Selection with Commentary and Notes, Martin Lawrence Ltd., London, 1934, and International Publishers, New York, 1935.

221. Engels’ letter to Wilhelm Blank has not been found.

222. Moses Hess, Friedrich Anneke and other sectarians in the Communist League attempted to start a new paper in Cologne to succeed the Rheinische Zeitung of the early 1840s. The newspaper’s programme, published by Hess and Anneke on 7 April, was very vague and narrowed the tasks of the planned publication, which they conceived as a local, provincial news-sheet. Hess and his followers were prevented from realising their plan by the return of Marx and Engels to Cologne.

223. There is no other information about the Italian and Spanish translations mentioned here of the Manifesto of the Communist Party. The first Spanish and Italian translations of the Manifesto appeared in 1872 and 1889 respectively.

224. Engels did not finish this translation. In the autumn of 1850 he helped Helen Macfarlane translate the Manifesto into English and it appeared in The Red Republican, Nos. 21-24, in November 1850.

225. The Elberfeld political club, which was formed soon after the March revolution in Prussia, advocated a constitutional monarchy and gradual reforms.

226. Presumably Engels means Marx’s letter to Ewerbeck concerning the Paris communities of the Communist League; this letter has not been found.

227. The shareholders of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung were to meet in Cologne in May 1848, before the newspaper started publication. The shareholders from other towns who could not attend the meeting in person sent in proxies for the newspaper’s editors or other persons in Cologne.

228. Air extract from this letter was published in English for the first time in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975.

229. Here and below Engels gives the addresses of the editorial office and the dispatch department of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung which at the beginning was printed by Clouth (12 St Agatha) and from 30 August 1848 by Dietz (17 Unter Hutmacher).

230. In the spring of 1848 the Polish national liberation uprising broke out in the Grand Duchy of Posen subject to Prussia. The Prussian General Pfuel ordered that all the insurgents who had been taken prisoner should be shaved and their hands and ears branded with silver nitrate.

In May 1848 a clash took place between the soldiers and the civic militia in Mainz, which the fortress commander Hüser used as a pretext to send troops to disarm the latter. The conflict was discussed in the Frankfurt National Assembly which, however, did not take any serious measures to stop the arbitrary actions of the Prussian military authorities.

231. The all-German National Assembly, which opened on 18 May 1848 in Frankfurt am Main, was convened for the purpose of unifying the country and drawing up its constitution. The liberal majority of the Assembly turned it into a debating club engaged in fruitless discussions such as on the disarmament of the civic militia in Mainz.

232. The editorial office of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was removed at the end of August to 17 Unter Hutmacher (see Note 229).

There is no information about the article by Köppen who might have sent it in after meeting Marx in Berlin in August 1848 when Marx went there on business connected with the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

By the ‘sleepless night of exile’ Engels presumably meant the time Marx and he spent abroad before the 1848 revolution.

233. On 26 September 1848 the Prussian authorities, fearing the growing revolutionary-democratic movement, declared a state of siege in Cologne (it was lifted on 2 October). By order of the military command political organisations and associations were banned, the civic militia disbanded, democratic newspapers, including the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, suspended, and an order issued for the arrest of Engels and a few other editors. Engels and Dronke had to leave Cologne. For a time Engels lived in hiding in Barmen. On 5 October Engels and Dronke arrived in Paris after a short stay in Belgium whence they were expelled by the police. Dronke remained in the French capital and wrote to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from there, while Engels started on foot for Switzerland via the south-west of France. About 24 October he arrived in Genoa and at the beginning of November moved to Lausanne (these facts served as a basis for establishing the date of this letter and those by Marx which followed and were not dated); Engels arrived in Neuchâtel on 7 November and in Berne on 9 November. He stayed there until mid-January 1849 when it was possible for him to return to Germany.

Engels’ letter written to Marx from Geneva has not been found.

234. In 1848 Engels lived at Plasmann’s, owner of a stationery firm and a shareholder of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. His address was: Köln, In der Höhle, 14.

235. The discontent of the bourgeois shareholders over the political fine of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung grew particularly strong after it defended the June proletarian insurgents in Paris. — These shareholders refused to finance arid support the newspaper any longer. So in August arid September 1848 Marx made a trip to Berlin and Vienna to raise funds for the further publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Wladislaw Kóscielski gave him about 2,000 talers on behalf of the Polish democrats.

The interruption in publication caused by the state of siege in Cologne aggravated the newspaper’s financial position. Marx was practically compelled to take upon himself most of the expenses arid he spent his share of the inheritance front his father — about 7,000 talers — to purchase an expensive quick printing press.

236. Early in July 1848 legal proceedings were instituted against Marx because of his article ‘Arrests’ Published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung (see present edition, Vol. 7, pp. 176-79), exposing the arbitrary actions of the Prussian authorities. At the beginning of October 1848 the Cologne Public Prosecutor started air investigation against Marx arid other newspaper editors for publishing anonymously Georg Weerth’s series of feuilletons Leben und Taten des berühmten Ritters Schnapphanski. At the end of October 1848 the Cologne Public Prosecutor began another investigation against Marx as the newspaper’s editor-in-chief for publishing the proclamation of the republican Friedrich Hecker. The ‘insult’ to the Public Prosecutor and ‘libel’ against the police officers contained in the article ‘Arrests’ were the main accusations levelled at Marx arid Engels at the trial held on 7 February 1849. The jury acquitted them.

237. on 1 November 1848 the King of Prussia transferred power to the openly counter-revolutionary Brandenburg-Manteuffel Government. It decided on a coup d'état which was successful and led to the dissolution of the National Assembly on 5 December. The very first steps of this government aroused a protest campaign in democratic circles, especially in the Rhine Province, which sought to unite the opposition forces. In Düsseldorf, in particular, for 14 November a joint meeting was announced for this purpose of the local People’s Club, the Union for the establishment of a democratic monarchy, the General Civil Union. and the civic militia (it was probably this meeting that Marx called the democratic-monarchist club). At this meeting Lassalle put forward Marx’s plan of actions.

238. The Central Committee of German Democrats was set up in June 1848 at the first democratic congress in Frankfurt am Main convened with the am) of uniting the local democratic associations. The second all-German democratic congress in Berlin (26-30 October 1848) elected a new Central Committee.

239. This refers to the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats set up at the first district congress of democrats of the Rhine Province and Westphalia (13-14 August 1848). The committee directed the activity of the democratic organisations in the Rhineland, Marx playing a prominent role in it.

240. on 14 November 1848 Marx was summoned to the examining magistrate for ‘insulting’ the Cologne Public Prosecutor Hecker in the article ‘Public Prosecutor “Hecker” and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung’ published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 129, 29 October 1848 (see present edition, Vol. 7, pi). 485-89).

241. The Code Pénal was adopted in France in 1810 and introduced into the regions of West and South-West Germany conquered by the French. It remained in force in the Rhine Province even after its incorporation into Prussia in 1815.

242. In order to give its readers prompt information on events, the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung often put out supplements to the main issue or a second edition. If the news was very important they printed special supplements and special editions in the form of posters.

243. Marx probably made the acquaintance of Eduard von Müller-Tellering during his stay in Vienna in August and September 1848. In October and November the Neue Rheinische Zeitung published a number of articles marked 9 which were sent by E. von Müller-Tellering from Vienna. They described the situation in the city after the suppression of the popular rising in October.

244. The arrest of Andreas Gottschalk and Friedrich Anneke, the leaders of the Cologne Workers’ Association, on 3 July 1848 was the subject of Marx’s article ‘Arrests’ which served as a pretext for accusing Marx and other editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of insulting the Public Prosecutor and libelling police officers (see Note 236). On 23 December 1848, Gottschalk and Anneke were acquitted by a Cologne jury.

245. The reference is to the state of siege declared in Cologne on 26 September 1848 and the persecution of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung editors, Engels among them (see Note 233). On 3 October, though the state of siege had been lifted, the Public Prosecutor issued a warrant for Engels’ arrest. Engels was able to return to Cologne only in mid-January 1849.

246. This is a draft reply to the letter sent from Berlin on 26 December 1848 by Wilhelm Stieber to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. fir it Stieber tried to disprove information on his spying activities in Silesia during and after the Silesian weavers’ uprising in 1844 (he went there disguised as an artist, under the name Schmidt), and on his secret mission to Frankfurt am Main in September 1848 in connection with a popular uprising there. This information was given in a report from Frankfurt am Main published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, No. 177, 24 December. Marx agreed to make a correction as regards Stieber’s visit to Frankfurt (the supplement to No. 182 stated that he went there on private business) but did not disavow the information on his spying in Silesia. Later, in his Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne (end of 1852), exposing Stieber as an organiser of police persecution of the Communist League members and disclosing his attempts to blacken the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx quoted in full Stieber’s letter to the newspaper editors of 26 December 1848. Marx stressed that the reply to Stieber was sent by another editor (see present edition, Vol. 11, pp. 435-36). It may be assumed that the final version of the letter was signed by Wilhelm Wolff, who was well aware of Stieber’s activities in Silesia.

247. On the Code pénal see Note 241. The reference is to ‘Livre troisième. Titre II. Chapitre 1. Section VII. 2. Calumnies...’

248. Engels received news, probably on 11 or 12 January, that he could return to Germany without running the risk of being arrested. He immediately undertook all the formalities necessary to obtain an exit permit from Switzerland, and obtained it on 18 January 1849 (see present edition, Vol. 8, p. 515). Shortly after this Engels returned to Cologne and resumed work as editor of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

249. By ‘grace and favour (oktroyierte) Prussia’ Engels means Prussia after the counter-revolutionary coup d'état which resulted in the dissolution of the National Assembly on 5 December 1848 and the proclamation of the so-called imposed constitution. The Constitution introduced a two-chamber parliament: the First Chamber consisting of privileged aristocrats and the Second Chamber elected in two stages. Under the law of 6 December a considerable proportion of the workers had no right to vote. The King was invested with wide powers, including the right to convene and dissolve both Chambers, to repeal their decisions, to appoint Cabinets and to revise the Constitution itself.

250. The March Association, thus named after the March 1848 revolution, was founded in Frankfurt am Main at the end of November 1848 by the Left-wing deputies of the Frankfurt National Assembly and had branches in various towns of Germany. Fröbel, Simon, Ruge, Vogt and other petty-bourgeois democratic leaders of March associations confined themselves to revolutionary phrase-mongering and showed indecision and inconsistency in the struggle against the counter-revolutionaries, for which Marx and Engels sharply criticised them.

251. Marx’s letter to Eduard von Müller-Tellering has not been found.

At the beginning of January von Müller-Tellering was arrested and banished from Vienna (on his reports from that city published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung see Note 243). Later Tellering sent reports from Silesia and Saxony on the situation in Vienna based on the letters of his Vienna acquaintances, and also reports from Leipzig and Dresden (these were marked A).

252. Threatened with arrest after the state of siege was declared in Cologne on 26 September 1848 (see Note 233), Dronke emigrated to Paris but persisted in the desire to return to Germany. He was kept in Paris only by categorical directions from Marx, who had grounds to fear he would be arrested. It was not till March 1849 that Dronke returned to Cologne and began to work on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

Neither Marx’s previous letter to Dronke nor his other letters mentioned below have been found.

253. An anonymous item published in the supplement to No. 233 of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung for 28 February 1849 accused von Uttenhoven, a Captain in the 8th Company of the 16th Infantry Regiment, known for his reactionary views, of misuse of and speculation in army fuel.

254. This refers to two lawsuits held in Cologne on 7 and 8 February 1849. The first was instituted by the Cologne Public Prosecutor’s office against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, its editors Marx and Engels and the responsible editor Hermann Korff for publishing the article ‘Arrests’ (see notes 236 and 244).

The pretext for the second was the charge against Marx, Kari Schapper and the lawyer Schneider 11 of incitement to mutiny in connection with the call of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats (see Note 239) of 18 November 1848 for refusal to pay taxes. In both cases the juries acquitted the defendants.

255. From mid-April to 9 May 1849 Marx made a trip to North-Western Germany. He visited Bremen, Hamburg and the neighbouring towns, including Hamburg. On his way back to Cologne Marx stopped at Bielefeld and Hamm. The purpose of the trip was to strengthen contacts between the Communist League members and workers’ associations in preparation for the creation of a mass proletarian party, to discuss problems of revolutionary tactics with members of the working-class and democratic movements, and to raise funds for the continued publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In Marx’s absence Engels directed the newspaper.

Engels’ letter to Marx mentioned here has not been found.

256. Karl Bruhn participated in the Baden republican uprising in April 1849 and played an active role in the popular uprising in Frankfurt am Main (September 1848) in protest against the ratification by the Frankfurt National Assembly of the capitulatory truce of Malmö. Concluded between Prussia and Denmark, this truce preserved Danish rule in Schleswig-Holstein. Since the end of 1848 Bruhn had been working in Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein on the instruction of the Communist League and sending reports to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung from there.

257. An allusion to the cruel suppression of the popular uprising in Vienna in October 1848 by the Austrian counter-revolution. Marx made Andreas Stiftt’s acquaintance in August 1848 during his visit to Vienna (see Note 235), where he made a speech at a meeting of the Democratic Society and delivered a report and a lecture at the Vienna Workers’ Society. Stiftt was member of both these organisations and a contributor to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.

258. After the Neue Rheinische Zeitung had ceased publication on 19 May 1849, Marx and Engels left for Frankfurt am Main where they tried to persuade the Left-wing deputies to the all-German National Assembly to take decisive action in support of the uprising in South-Western Germany at the time in defence of the Imperial Constitution drawn up by the Assembly but rejected by the German sovereigns. Having failed to achieve their aim they left for Karlsruhe and then Kaiserslautern — capitals of insurgent Baden and the Palatinate. Convinced that the petty-bourgeois democratic leaders of the Provisional Governments in Baden and the Palatinate lacked revolutionary energy and were helpless, Marx and Engels left at the end of May for Bingen, where they parted. Early in June Marx went to Paris, and Engels returned to Kaiserslautern to join the Baden-Palatinate revolutionary army.

259. Marx arrived in Paris about 2 June 1849 with the mandate from the Central Committee of German Democrats (see Note 238) issued to him in Kaiserslautern by d'Ester, a member of the Committee and of the Palatinate Provisional Government. Marx decided to go to France when he realised that the petty-bourgeois democrats of Baden and the Palatinate were unable to make the struggle all-German in scale, to launch a resolute offensive and bring the Frankfurt Assembly openly to join the uprising. New great events were expected in France, where the conflict between the democratic party — the so-called Montagne (mountain) — and the ruling circles was coming to a head.

In Paris Marx hoped to strengthen international contacts between the German and French democrats, for this would have been of major importance in the event of a new revolutionary upsurge in both countries.

260. Montagnards — during the French revolution of 1848-49 representatives in the Constituent and subsequently Legislative Assembly of a bloc of democrats and petty-bourgeois socialists grouped around the newspaper La Réforme. They called themselves the Montagne by analogy with the Montagne in the Convention of 1792-94.

On 13 June 1849 the Montagne staged a peaceful demonstration to protest against the sending of French troops to suppress the Roman Republic. The demonstration was dispersed by the army and the bourgeois detachments of the National Guards and there followed a counter-revolutionary offensive, persecution of democrats and proletarian activists, including emigrants. Many Montagnards were arrested or emigrated.

261. Engels’ ‘article in French’ on the national liberation struggle in Hungary was probably never written.

262. The last issue, No. 301, of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung for 19 May 1849, printed in red, was published in a greater number of copies than usual. Later it was reprinted several times and used by the Communist League members, who remained in Germany, for propaganda purposes.

263. Jenny Marx spent June 1849 in her native town of Trier. On July 7 she joined her husband in Paris accompanied by her three children and Hé1ène Demuth (the Marxes’ housekeeper).

264. At the beginning of June 1849, when in Kaiserslautern, Engels entered into close contact with d'Ester, the most energetic member of the Palatinate Provisional Government, but refused, however, to accept any civil or military post.

On 13 June Engels left for Offenburg, where he joined Willich’s volunteer corps of 800 men, mostly workers, which was part of the Baden-Palatinate insurgent army. Engels fought the whole campaign as Willich’s adjutant. Willich’s corps covered the retreat of this army under pressure from numerically superior counter-revolutionary forces and was among the last units to cross the Swiss border on 12 July 1849. On 24 July Engels arrived at Vevey (Canton Vaud) where he stayed for a month. He described the operations of the insurgent army in The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 147-239).

Engels’ letter to Marx from Kaiserslautern has not survived.

An extract from Engels’ letter to Jenny Marx was published in English for the first time in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Correspondence. 1846-1895, Martin Lawrence Ltd., London, 1934, and International Publishers, New York, 1935.

265. On 17 June 1849 Engels fought in the battle of Rinnthal. He commanded a flank group of Willich’s corps which covered the retreat of the Palatinate army and fought the advance guard of an enemy division for many hours.

On 21 June Willich’s men, with the active participation of Engels, checked the advance of a Prussian battalion at Neuchart near Karlsdorf and forced it to retreat.

On 28 June 1849 Engels took part in an engagement at Michelbach in which the advance guard of the division to which Willich’s corps belonged after the reorganisation of the insurgent army defeated a Prussian force.

On 29 and 30 June at Rastatt the Baden-Palatinate insurgent army fought and lost its last battle against the Prussian army. At certain critical moments of the battle Engels assumed command of the vanguard.

266. The subject is Lassalle’s intention to raise funds to help Marx.

The letters to Lassalle mentioned by Marx have not been found.

An extract from this letter was published in English for the first time in: K. Marx and F. Engels, On Britain, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1954.

267. These were the two factions in the so-called Party of Order — a conservative bloc of the monarchist groups formed in 1848 which had the majority in the Legislative Assembly of the French Republic (opened at the end of May 1849).

The Philippists or Orleanists were supporters of the House of Orleans (a lateral branch of the Bourbon dynasty) overthrown by the February revolution of 1848; they represented the interests of the financial aristocracy and the big industrial bourgeoisie; their candidate for the throne was Louis Philippe Albert, Count of Paris and grandson of Louis Philippe.

The Legitimists, supporters of the main branch of the Bourbon dynasty overthrown in 1830, upheld the interests of the big hereditary landowners and the claim to the French throne of the Count of Chambord, King Charles X’s grandson, who called himself Henry V. Some of the Legitimists remained outside the bloc of monarchist groups.

268. According to a decision of the Constituent Assembly the wine tax was to be abolished before I January 1850. But, as Marx predicted, it was retained by a decision of the Legislative Assembly on 20 December 1849 (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 117-19).

269. The Peace Society — a pacifist organisation founded by the Quakers in 1816 in London. It was actively supported by the Free Traders who assumed that in peace time free trade would enable Britain to make better use of its industrial superiority and win economic and politics supremacy.

270. The Corn Laws (first introduced in the fifteenth century) imposed high import duties on agricultural produce in the interests of landowners in order to maintain high prices for these products on the home market. In 1838 the Manchester factory owners Cobden and Bright founded the Anti-Corn Law League, which demanded the lifting of the corn tariffs and urged unlimited freedom of trade for the purpose of weakening the economic and political power of the landed aristocracy and reducing worker’s wages. The struggle between the industrial bourgeoisie and the landed aristocracy over the Corn Laws ended in 1846 with their repeal.

The Navigation Acts were passed by the British Parliament in 1651 and subsequent years to protect British shipping companies against foreign rivals. They were repealed in 1849.

271. Marx mentions the Holy Alliance in connection with the attempts of feudal-monarchical circles in Prussia, Austria and tsarist Russia to form a coalition similar to the counter-revolutionary Holy Alliance founded in 1815 by the European monarchs, and which ceased to exist after the 1830 revolution in France.

272. On 19 July 1849 in an atmosphere of repression against democrats and socialists following the events of 13 June in Paris (see Note 260), the French authorities notified Marx that an order had been issued for his expulsion from Paris to Morbihan, a swampy and unhealthy département in Brittany. Marx protested and the expulsion was delayed, but on 23 August he again was ordered by the police to leave Paris within 24 hours.

Marx compares the d département of Morbihan with the Pontine marshes in Italy, mentioned by Strabo in his Geography, Book 5, Ch. 3, § 5, and other ancient authors, which are a breeding-ground of malaria and other diseases.

273. Marx’s suggestion was approved and subsequently put into practice by Engels. However, Engels started writing his work, which was later published under the heading, The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution (see present edition, Vol. 10), not earlier than mid-August 1849 after he had moved to Lausanne (see this volume, p. 215) and did not finish it until February 1850, after his arrival in London from Switzerland.

274. The negotiations mentioned here ended in December 1849 in the foundation of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Politisch-ökonomische Revue. The periodical was planned as a continuation of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung published by Marx and Engels during the 1848-49 revolution. Altogether six issues appeared from March to November 1850, one of them a double one (5-6). The journal was edited in London and published in Hamburg. Most of the articles and literary and international reviews were written by Marx and Engels, who got their followers Wilhelm Wolff, Joseph Weydemeyer and Johann Georg Eccarius to contribute to the Revue. The works published in the journal assessed the results of the 1848-49 revolution and developed further the theory and tactics of the revolutionary proletarian party. The publication of the Revue was discontinued due to police persecution in Germany and lack of funds.

275. The date of writing of this letter was established on the basis of Marx’s mentioning in it the receipt of Engels’ letter to Jenny Marx of 25 July 1849.

In English this letter was first published abridged in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Letters to Americans. 1848-1895, International Publishers, New York, 1953.

276. The reference is to a contract signed between Leske and Marx on 1 February 1845 for the publication of Marx’s work Kritik der Politik und National-ökonomie (see Note 59).

277. An allusion to the setback of the Montagne on 13 June 1849 (see Note 260).

In the battle of Waterloo (18 June 1815) Napoleon’s army was defeated by the Anglo-Dutch and Prussian forces commanded by Wellington and Blücher.

278. There is no information about this article except a mention in Marx’s next letter to Weydemeyer.

279. This seems to refer to Rühl’s offer to participate in publishing a series of pamphlets (see this volume, p. 208) planned by Marx. The offer was conveyed through Weydemeyer on the basis of whose letter to Marx of 28 August 1849 the approximate date of this letter was established.

280. It is not known whether Marx wrote to Naut or not.

281. This letter written in the first half of August 1849 has not been found.

282. Marx’s protest to the French Ministry of the Interior against the decision to expel him from Paris has not been found. When he wrote this letter Marx did not know that his protest had been rejected. But he soon received a notification by the commissioner of police, dated 16 August 1849, stating that Minister of the Interior Dufaure had upheld the decision on Marx’s expulsion (see present edition, Vol. 9, p. 527).

283. The reference is to the home situation in France in the summer of 1849 which was characterised by intensified repressions against democrats and socialists and by discord and friction within the ruling circles themselves — between the various factions in the Assembly majority (see Note 267), between these factions and the Government, and between the Assembly and Louis Bonaparte’s entourage.

The addition of 45 centimes to every franc of all direct taxes was introduced by the Provisional Government on 16 March 1848. It aroused particular discontent among the peasants, who formed the bulk of tax-payers.

In mid-August 1849 tinder pressure from the monarchist deputies, a two months’ adjournment of the French Legislative Assembly was decreed. The Assembly met again in October 1849.

284. At the meeting on 13 August 1849 in the London Drury Lane Theatre of the National Association for Parliamentary and Financial Reform (founded by the bourgeois radicals in 1849 with the aim of achieving a democratic electoral system and changes in the tax system) O'Connor advocated a union of the middle and working classes. His speech was supported by the Free Trader Thomas Thompson.

285. On 23 August 1849 Marx and his wife were ordered by the police to leave Paris within 24 hours. Jenny Marx got permission to stay in Paris till 15 September with her children, but Marx was obliged to make leave in haste. According to the Boulogne stamp in the passport issued to him by the French police on 24 August, he was in this port on his way to London on 26 August (see present edition, Vol. 9, pp. 529-30). Presumably he arrived on the same day in London, where he was based for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile Engels had left Vevey for Lausanne.

286. The Elberfeld uprising of workers and petty bourgeoisie in defence of the Imperial Constitution, which flared up on 8 May 1849, served as a signal for armed struggle in a number of towns in the Rhine Province (Düsseldorf, Iserlohn, Solingen and others). Engels arrived in Elberfeld on 11 May and took an active part in the uprising, in particular directing the erection of street barricades. However, his efforts to secure the disarmament of the bourgeois civic militia, the imposition of a war tax on the bourgeoisie, the formation of the nucleus of a Rhenish revolutionary army out of armed workers’ detachments and to unite localised uprisings, met with opposition from the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois leaders of the movement. Under pressure from bourgeois circles Engels was expelled front the town on 15 May. The uprising in Elberfeld, as in other towns of the Rhine Province, was a failure.

On Engels’ participation in the revolutionary struggle in Baden and the Palatinate see notes 264 and 265.

287. In English this letter was first published abridged and datelined ‘25 August 1849’ in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Letters to Americans. 1848-1895, International Publishers, New York, 1953.

The date of writing has been corrected after a more exact deciphering of the original.

288. At the end of May 1849, returning from insurgent Baden and the Palatinate (see Note 258), Marx and Engels were arrested on the way to Bingen by Hesse soldiers, who suspected them of being insurgents, and were deported to Darmstadt and thence to Frankfurt am Main. There they were released and resumed their journey to Bingen.

Early in June 1849 Engels was arrested in Kirchheimbolanden by the Palatinate Provisional Government on a charge of anti-government propaganda. The day after his arrest he was released on the insistence of d'Ester, a member of the Provisional Government.

289. Jenny Marx and her three children arrived in London about 17 September 1849.

290. Accepting Marx’s suggestion to move to London Engels had to go via Piedmont, as he risked being arrested in France and more so in Germany. On 5 October 1849 he arrived in Genoa, and on the following day left for England on a British schooner via Gibraltar and the Bay of Biscay. The voyage lasted nearly five weeks. About 12 November, Engels arrived in London as was reported in the item: ‘London, 14. Nov.’ by the Westdeutsche Zeitung, No. 154, 20 November 1849.

The English original of the present letter was first printed in the Harney Papers Assen, 1969.

291. This letter has not been found.

292. Societies referred to are the German Workers’ Educational Society (London) (see Note 52) and the Democratic Association formed by a group of petty-bourgeois democrats headed by Kallenberg in London early in November 1849, and joined later by some former members of the Educational Society, Ludwig Bauer among them. Engels also wrote to Jakob Schabelitz on the collision between the two organisations (see this volume, p. 222).

The German Political Refugee Committee was set up on Marx’s initiative under the auspices of the German Workers’ Educational Society in London on 18 September 1849. Besides Marx and other members of the Communist League it included some petty-bourgeois democrats. At the meeting of the Educational Society on 18 November the Committee was transformed into the Social-Democratic Refugee Committee, the aim being to dissociate the proletarian section of the London refugees from the petty-bourgeois elements. The new Committee included only members of the Communist League. Marx was elected its chairman. Engels, who after his arrival in London was included in the Central Authority of the Communist League restored by Marx, also became a member of the Social-Democratic Refugee Committee.

Besides rendering material aid to the proletarian refugees, the Committee played an important role in reorganising the Communist League and re-establishing ties between its members. In September 1850, Marx, Engels and their adherents withdrew from the Committee because the followers of the Willich-Schapper sectarian group were in the majority in the Educational Society to which the Refugee Committee was accountable.

Early in November 1849, the petty-bourgeois democrats of the Democratic Association formed their own Refugee Committee headed by Ludwig Bauer, Friedrich Bobzin and Gustav Struve.

293. In English this letter was first published abridged in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Letters to Americans. 1848-1895, International Publishers, New York, 1953.

294. On Marx’s plans to write and publish a work on political economy see notes 5 and 59.

295. Marx’s intention to enlist Joseph Weydemeyer as a regular contributor to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue was never realised. About mid-January Weydemeyer wrote his first article ‘From South Germany’ but it was not published in the first issue of the Revue owing to lack of space, and later lost its topical interest.

296. In a series of articles published in the Voix du Peuple from 10 November 1849 to 18 January 1850 Proudhon polemicised bitterly with Louis Blanc, particularly against the latter’s idea of using the existing State for solving the social problem, and censured his activity as a member of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (see Note 213) calling him a pseudo-socialist and pseudo-democrat.

Proudhon criticised from anarcho-reformist positions Louis Blanc’s ‘state socialism’ and other French socialists’ ideas close to Blanc’s.

297. After their defeat in 1848 (dispersal of their demonstration of 10 April, etc.) the Chartists resumed agitation in the autumn of 1849: mass meetings in factory districts were held in support of the imprisoned Chartists and an amnesty of political prisoners was demanded. At the beginning of December 1849 a new wave of meetings swept over London and the towns of Northern England on the occasion of the nomination of delegates to the Chartist Convention which was to reorganise the movement.

298. Karl Heinzen’s statements in his pamphlet, Lehren der Revolution, that during the future revolution millions of reactionaries would be beaten up, were used by some conservative European press organs for launching a campaign against political refugees. As The Times of 23 November 1849 tried to lay the responsibility for these ‘hellish doctrines’ on all German socialists and described Heinzen as one of their leading figures, Marx and Engels deemed it necessary to dissociate themselves from his utterances. With this aim in view Engels published a note ‘The German Social Democrats and The Times’ in the Chartist Northern Star, 1 December 1849 (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 3-4).

299. The first issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue published on 8 March 1850 carried the first part of Marx’s The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850 (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 45-70), two chapters of Engels’ The Campaign for the German Imperial Constitution (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 147-85) and Karl Blind’s article ‘Osterreichische und preussische Parteien in Baden’.

The general introduction mentioned in this letter was not published. The review of events written by Marx and Engels appeared only in the second issue of the journal (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 257-70). Wilhelm Wolff’s article was only published in the fourth issue under the heading ‘Nachträgliches “aus dem Reich ... ; it discussed the final stage in the work of the Frankfurt National Assembly (see Note 231) after the majority of the liberal deputies had withdrawn and it had been transferred to Stuttgart (end of May 1849).

The lectures on political economy which Marx delivered in the London German Workers’ Education ‘ al Society (see Note 52) at the end of 1849 and in 1850 were not published in the Revue.

300. The club referred to by Engels is the emigrant Democratic Association (see Note 292).

In 1848-49 the republican democrats in Germany called the moderate bourgeois constitutionalists ‘wailers’ (Heuler). In this particular instance the reference is to petty-bourgeois democrats who left the London German Workers’ Educational Society and took part in setting up the Democratic Association.

301. In a letter of 30 December 1849 addressed to Marx and Engels and other refugees, Louis Bamberger (editor of the Deutsche Londoner Zeitung), Eduard von Müller-Tellering and Rudolf Schramm invited them to attend a German refugees’ meeting which was to be held on 3 January 1850 with the alleged aim of uniting the German refugees. Actually the organisers wanted to bring the proletarian elements under petty-bourgeois influence.

302. Marx’s letter to Jung has not been found.

Besides raising funds for the publication of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue and the projected resumption of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Conrad Schramm’s trip to the USA was aimed at raising funds for other activities of the Communist League, which was being reorganised by Marx and Engels. The trip did not take place for lack of funds.

For his participation in the revolutionary movement Conrad Schramm (presumably a Communist League member since the beginning of 1849) was sentenced in Cologne on 15 June 1849 to two years’ imprisonment in the fortress of Jülich. On 8 September 1849 he escaped from prison and emigrated to London where he was elected to the Central Authority of the Communist League.

303. In his note of 5 February 1850 Eduard von Müller-Tellering asked for a ticket to the ball organised by the London German Workers’ Educational Society. Engels’ refusal was used by Tellering as a pretext for intrigues against Marx and Engels. See also this volume, pp. 229-30.

304. The printing of the first issue of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue by Köhler’s printshop in Hamburg turned to be of poor quality. Because of this and of the disagreements between Köhler and the publisher Schuberth, from the second issue the Revue was printed at H. G. Voigt’s in Wandsbeck near Hamburg.

305. While the Revue was being printed, disagreements arose between the proof-reader Theodor Hagen and the publisher Schuberth, who wanted to accommodate the Revue to the censorship standards existing in Germany at the time. Hagen proposed to assume responsibility to the censors for the content, and Marx and Engels insisted that Hagen’s name should appear as ‘responsible editor’ on the title page. However Schuberth succeeded in having Hagen’s proposal rejected.

306. On 3 March 1850 the court of honour, presided by Willich, expelled Tellering from the London German Workers’ Educational Society. Tellering wrote a new letter of protest, slandering Engels. This letter of Marx was in reply to Müller-Tellering’s intrigues and slander (see also Note 303).

307. Marx presumably has in mind Müller-Tellering’s unprincipled behaviour in connection with a translation of the memoirs of György Klapka, a participant in the 1848-49 Hungarian revolution. When Klapka had declined Tellering’s offer to translate the memoirs, early in January 1850 Tellering tried in vain to have material compromising the Hungarian general published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue of which Marx was an editor. At the same time Tellering proposed his services to Klapka in the struggle against Karl Heinzen, but having been exposed in this intrigue, he helped Heinzen to spread insinuations against Marx and Engels.

308. The Refugee Committee in Frankfurt am Main was founded by the Frankfurt Workers’ Association at the end of 1849. At its meeting on 28 September 1849, presided by Joseph Weydemeyer, the Association decided to make weekly allocations to refugees.

309. In April 1850 the petty-bourgeois democrats Gustav Struve, Rudolf Schramm and others tried to gain influence among the German political refugees in London to counterbalance the Social-Democratic Refugee Committee. They spread false rumours, which got into the German press, alleging a biased approach on the part of the Committee in distributing material aid among the refugees. The London Refugee Committee’s statement mentioned at the beginning of this letter refuted the rumours.

310. This letter was published in English for the first time in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Letters to Americans. 1848-1895, International Publishers, New York, 1953.

311. Engels’ letter to Dronke has not been found.

312. The letter of Marx and Engels to Naut has not been found.

313. The society referred to is that of the French Blanquist refugees in London (Société des proscrits démocrates socialistes) with whom Marx and Engels, and also representatives of the revolutionary wing of the Chartists, concluded an agreement in mid-April 1850 (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 614-15) to set up a Universal Society of Revolutionary Communists (Société universelle des communistes révolutionnaires). However, the Blanquists soon violated the agreement by contacting the emigrant ‘Society in Greek Street’ — the petty-bourgeois Democratic Association (on this see Note 292). Subsequently, the leaders of the Blanquist refugees took an openly hostile stand towards Marx and Engels and their supporters by making a bloc with a sectarian faction within the Communist League. In these circumstances Marx and Engels considered it appropriate to cancel their agreement with the Blanquists early in October 1850 (see present edition, Vol. 10, p. 484).

314. This is an allusion to the campaign against German political refugees launched by the Prussian conservative newspapers and taken up by the English press. This campaign grew in intensity especially after an attempt on the life of King Frederick William IV of Prussia in Berlin on 22 May 1850 by the retired non-commissioned officer Max Sefeloge (he died in a lunatic asylum). The reactionary press, the Neue Preussische Zeitung in particular, spread the lie that the attempt had been prepared by Marx and other leaders in London of an extensive conspiracy. The Prussian authorities urged the British Government to deport the political refugees. Marx and Engels unmasked the organisers of this slander campaign in their letter to the Prussian Ambassador in London Bunsen and in other statements in the press (see present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 370, 378 and 386).

315. Two excerpts of this letter are extant: one is quoted by Roland Daniels in his letter to Marx of 28 June 1850, the other in the letter of 10 July 1850 from the Cologne leading district of the Communist League to the London Central Authority of the League.

The letter reflects the disagreement which arose in the summer of 1850 between the London Central Authority and the leaders of the Cologne organisations of the Communist League (Heinrich Bürgers, Roland Daniels, Peter Röser and others). The Cologne people’s claim to become the Communist League’s leading centre for the whole of Germany was contrary to the League’s Rules, which were inspired by democratic centralism and provided for equality of the district organisations in individual provinces and countries and their equal responsibility to the Central Authority.

316. This letter was first published in English with abridgments in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Letters to Americans. 1848-1895, New York, 1953.

However, a slip of the pen on the part of the author, substituting July for June, was not taken into account and in the present edition it has been corrected on the basis of Weydemeyer’s reply to Marx of 3 July 1850.

317. Marx’s intention to reply to Lüning’s criticism remained unfulfilled. However, in a statement to the editor of the Neue Deutsche Zeitung (published on 4 July 1850) Marx and Engels protested against Lüning’s attempts to distort their views on the dictatorship of the proletariat and the role of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung as the mouthpiece of the working class.

318. The foreign policy of the Russell cabinet was debated in the House of Commons on 24-27 June 1850. Despite strong Tory opposition the Whig Government was given a vote of confidence by majority of 46.

319. This refers to the proposed convocation of a congress of the Communist League (see also present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 375-76) which did not take place, however, owing to the split in the League in September 1850 caused by the disruptive activity of the Willich-Schapper separatist group.

320. Marx may have had in mind the situation in the Duchy of Schleswig-Holstein in the summer of 1850, when Communist League members conducted intense propaganda among the military units there. During the 1848 revolution the population of the duchy staged a national liberation uprising against Danish rule, demanding union with Germany. Prussian circles launched a phoney war against Denmark, but a truce was signed on 26 August 1848. The Prusso-Danish war was resumed at the end of March 1819 and it ended with a new betrayal by Prussia signing a peace treaty with the Danish monarchy on 2 July 1850. As a result the insurgents were compelled to continue the war on their own and on 24-25 July 1850 the Schleswig-Holstein army was defeated by Danish troops, and ceased resistance.

321. In the summer of 1849, after the closing down of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Jenny Marx on her way to Trier with her children stopped for a few days, in Frankfurt am Main where, badly needing money to continue her journey, pawned, with the help of Joseph ad Louise Weydemeyer, the silver plate she had inherited from her family’s Scottish relations.

322. Weydemeyer did not carry out his plan to write a popular outline of political economy until after his Arrival in the USA :In October 1851. This work published in New York in April-August 1853 in the German newspaper Die Reform under the title ‘National-ökonomische Skizzen’.

Engels to Marx

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Literature and Art, Moscow 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

May 20, 1857

Everyone here [Arts exhibition in Manchester] is now a friend of art and chatters about the. paintings in the exhibition. The affair will be plus ou moins a failure, financially at any rate. There are, by the way, some very fine pictures on show, however, most of those by the good and the best painters are only second-rate pieces. Among. the finest exhibits is a splendid portrait of Ariosto by Titian. The modern German and French school is very bad and practically unrepresented. Three-quarters of the exhibition is English rubbish. The Spanish and Flemish painters are represented best of all, and after them the Italians. You must come over somehow this summer with your wife to have a look at the thing, s'il y a moyen. It won’t do to write anything about this business for the Tribune; I wouldn’t know where to begin in any case, and the Tribune can find the usual tittle-tattle in all the newspapers.

Marx to Lasalle[*]

In Berlin

Abstract

Written: London, 16 January, 1861;

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: London, 27 February, 1861;

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

The Cologne people have made a nice mess of my library. The whole Fourier is stolen, ditto Goethe, ditto Herder, ditto Voltaire and, what is the most awful to me, the Économistes du I8me Siécle (quite new, cost me about 500 francs) as well as many volumes of the Greek classics, many single volumes of other works. If I come to Cologne I shall have a word to say about this with Mr. National Union Bürgers. Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic ditto....

As a relaxation in the evenings I have been reading Appian on the Roman Civil Wars, in the original Greek text. A very valuable book. The chap is an Egyptian by birth. Schlosser says he has "no soul," probably because he goes to the roots of the material basis for these civil wars. Spartacus is revealed as the most splendid fellow in the whole of ancient history. Great general (no Garibaldi), noble character, real representative of the ancient proletariat.

Pompeius, reiner Scheisskerl [an utter rotter]; got his undeserved fame by snatching the credit, first for the successes of Lucullus (against Mithridates), then for the successes of Sertorius (Spain), etc., and as Sulla's "young man," etc. As a general he was the Roman Odilon Barrot. As soon as he had to show what he was made of--against Caesar--a lousy good-for-nothing. Caesar made the greatest possible military mistakes --deliberately mad--in order to bewilder the philistine who was opposing him. An ordinary Roman general--say Crassus --would have wiped him out six times over during the struggle in Epirus. But with Pompeius everything was possible. Shakespeare, in his Love's Labour Lost, seems to have had an inkling of what Pompey really was.

Engels to Marx

In London

Abstract

Written: Manchester, 21 April, 1863;

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

What is to be done with Lassalle it is hard to say; after all, I should assume that it would be beneath the dignity of the great Itzig [Lassalle] to bring out the heavy artillery of a formal denial against such petty gossip as that of Meyen. Let the fellow get out of his own dirty mess himself; if he can do anything he will not need any testimonial from you, and why should you compromise yourself after once having told him that he cannot go with us all the same, or we with him. What stupidity, to start with, to mix himself up in the Schulze-Delitzsch Knoten business and to attempt to form a party there, of all places, on the basis of our former work. We can only welcome the fact that Schulze-Delitzsch and other rabble are trying during this bourgeois period to raise the Knoten to the heights of the bourgeois point of view, for otherwise we should have had this business to wade through during the revolution, and in Germany, where everything is so much complicated by the mentality of the petty state, this small beer might have been held up to us as something new and practical. That is finished with now; we have got out opponents in the right position and the Knote has become conscious and so transferred himself to the ranks of the petty-bourgeois democracy. But to regard these chaps as representatives of the proletariat! It takes Itzig to do that.

Letter to Engels

Marx Joins the International

Written: in 4th November 1864;

First published: in the Nordstern, No. 287, December 10, 1864;

Translated: by Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1955;

Transcribed: by director@marx.org.

Marx To Frederick Engels

in Manchester

November 4, 1864

London

Dear Frederick:

[...]

Sometime ago London workers sent an address about Poland to Paris workers and summoned them to common action in this matter.

The Parisians on their part sent over a deputations headed by a worker called Tolain, the real workers' candidate at the last election in Paris, a very nice fellow. (His companions too were quite nice lads.) A public meeting in St. Martin's Hall was summoned for Septemeber 28, 1864, by Odger (shoemaker, president of the Council here of all London trade unions and also especially of the Trade Unions Suffrage Agitation Society, which is connected with Bright), and Cremer, mason and secretary of the Masons' Union. (These two organized the big meeting of the trade unions in St. James's Hall for North America, under Bright, ditto the Garibaldi demonstrations.) A certain Le Lubez was sent to ask me if I would take part on behalf of the German workers, and especially if I would supply a German worker to speak at the meeting, etc. I provided them with Eccarius, who came off splendidly, and ditto was present myself as a mute figure on the platform. I knew that this time real "powers" were involved on both the London and Paris sides and therefore decided to waive my usual standing rule to decline any such invitations.

(Le Lubez is a young Frenchman, i.e., in his thirties, who has however grown up in Jersey and London, speaks English excellently, and is a very good intermediary between the French and English workers.) (Music teacher and French lessons.)

At the meeting, which was packed to suffocation (for there is now evidently a revival of the working classes taking place), Major Wolff (Thurn-Taxis, Garibaldi's adjutant) represented the London Italian Working Men's Society. It was decided to found a "Working Men's Internatinoal Association", the General Council of which should be in London and should act as an "intermediary" between the workers' societies in Germany, Italy, France, and England. Ditto that a Genreal Working Men's Congress should be summoned in Belgium in 1865. A provisional committee was appointed at the meeting: Odger, Cremer, and many others, some of them old Chartists, old Owenits, etc., for England; major Wolff, Fontana, and other Italians for Italy; Le Lubez, etc., for France; Eaccrius and I for Germany. The committee was empowered to coopt as many members as it chose.

So far so good. I attended the first meeting of the committee. A subsommittee (including myself) was appointed to draft a declaration of principles and provisional statutes. Being unwell, I was prevented from attending the meeting of the subcommittee and the meeting of the whole committee which followed.

In these two meetings which I had missed — that of the subcommittee and the subsequent one of the whole committee — the following had taken place:

Major Wolff had handed in the reglement [statutes] of the Italian Workers' Societies (which possess a central organization but, as later transpired, are really associated benefit societies) to be used for the new association. I saw the stuff later. It was evidently a compilation of Mazzini's, so you alredy know the spirit and phraseology in which the real question, the workers' question, was dealt with. Also how nationalities were shoved in.

In addition an old Owenite, Weston — now a manufacturer himself, a very amiable and worthy man — had drawn up a program of indescribable breadth and full of the most extreme confusion.

The subsequent general committee meeting instructed the subcommittee to remodel Weston's program, ditto Wolff's regulations. Wolff himself left in order to attend the Congress of Italian Working Men's Associations in Naples and get them to decide on joining the London Central Association.

Another meeting of the subcommittee — which I again failed to attend, because I was informed of the rendezvous too late. At this a "declaration of principles" and a new version of Wolff's statutes were put forward by Le Lubez and accepted by the committee for submission to the general committee.

The general committee met on October 18.

As Eccarius had written me that delay would be dangerous, I appeared and was really frightened when I heard the worthy Le Lubez read out an appallingly wordy, badly written, and utterly undigested preamble, pretending to be a declaration of principles, in which Mazzini could be detected everywhere, the whole thing crusted over with the vaguest tags of French socialism. Added to this, the Italian statutes were taken over in the main, and these, apart from all their other faults, aim at something which is in fact utterly impossible, a sort of central government of the European working classes (with Mazzini in the background, of course). I put up a mild opposition and after a lot of talking backwards and forwards Eccarius proposed that the subcommittee should submit the thing to further "editing". On the other hand the "sentiments" contained in Lubez' declaration were voted for.

Two days later, on October 20, Cremer (for the English, Fontana (Italy), and Le Lubez assembled at my house. (Weston was prevented.) Hitherto I had never had the documents (those of Wolff and Le Lubez) in my hand so could not prepare anything, but was firmly determined that if possible not one single line of the stuff should be allowed to stand. In order to gain time I proposed that before we "edited" the preamble we should "discuss" the rules. This took place. It was an hour after midnight by the time the first of forty rules was agreed to. Cremer said (and this was what I had aimed at): We have nothing to put before the committee, which meets on October 25. We must postpone the meeting til November 1. But the subcommittee can get together on October 27 and attempt to reach a definite conclusion. This was agreed to and the "papers" "left behind" for my opinion.

I saw that it was impossible to make anything out of the stuff. In order to justify the extremely strange way in which I intended to present the "sentiment" already "voted for", I wrote an Address to the Working Classes (which was not in the original plan: a sort of review of the adventures of the working classes since 1845); on the pretext that everything material was included in the address and that we ought not to repeat the same things three times over, I altered the whole preamble, threw out the declaration of principles, and finally replaced the 40 rules with 10. Insofar as international politics come into the address, I speak of countries, not of nationalities, and denounce Russia, not the lesser nations. My proposals were all accepted by the subcommittee. Only I was obliged to insert two phrases about "duty" and "right" into the preamble to the statutes, ditto "truth, morality, and justice", but these are placed in such a way that they can do no harm.

At the meeting of the general committee my address, etc., was agreed to with great enthusiasm (unanimously). The discussion on the method of printing, etc., takes place next Tuesday. Le Lubez has a copy of the address to translated into French and Fontana one to translate into Italian. (For a state there is a weekly paper called the Bee-Hive, edited by Potter the trade unionist, a sort of Moniteur.) I myself am to translate the stuff into German.

It was very difficult to frame the thing so that our view [Engels and Marx] should appear in a form acceptable from the present standpoint of the workers' movement. In a few weeks the same people will be holding meetings for the franchise with Bright and Cobden. It will takes time before the re-awakened movement allows the old boldness of speech. It will be necessary to be fortiter in re, suaviter in modo [bold in matter, mild in manner]. As soon as the stuff is printed you will get it....

Yours,

K.M.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: London, 20 May, 1865;

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

I am now working like a horse, as I must use the time in which it is possible to work and the carbuncles are still there, though now they only disturb me locally and not in the brainpan.

Between whiles, as one cannot always be writing, I am doing some Differential Calculus dx/dy. I have no patience to read anything else. Any other reading always drives me back to my writing-desk.

This evening a special session of the International. A good old fellow, an old Owenist, Weston (carpenter) has put forward the two following propositions, which he is continually defending in the Beehive: (1) That a general rise in the rate of wages would be of no use to the workers; (2) That therefore, etc., the trade unions have a harmful effect.

If these two propositions, in which he alone in our society believes, were accepted, we should be turned into a joke (so wären wir Kladderadatsch) both on account of the trade unions here and of the infection of strikes which now prevails on the Continent.

On this occasion--as non-members may be admitted to this meeting--he will be supported by a born Englishman, who has written a pamphlet to the same effect. I am of course espected to supply the refutation. I ought really therefore to have worked out my reply for this evening, but thought it more important to write on at my bookt and so shall have to depend upon improvisation.

Of course I know beforehand what the two main points are :

(1) That the wages of labour determine the value of commodities; (2) That if the capitalists pay 5 instead of 4 shillings to-day, they will sell their commodities for 5 instead of 4 shillings to-morrow (being enabled to do so by the increased demand).

Inane though this is, only attaching itself to the most superficial external appearance, it is nevertheless not easy to explain to ignorant people all the economic questions which compete with one another here. You can't compress a course of political economy into one hour. But we shall do our best.

[Note: Marx debated against Weston on the night of May 20 and again on the 23rd; on June 24, 1865, he wrote to Engels: "I have read a paper in the Central Council (it would make two printer's sheets, perhaps) on the question brought up by Mr. Weston as to the effect of a general rise of wages, etc. The first part of it was an answer to Weston's nonsense; the second a theoretical explanation, in so far as the occasion was suited to this. Now the people want to have this printed... In the second part the thing contains, in an extremely condensed but relatively popular form, much that is new, taken in advance from my book [Capital], while at the same time it has necessarily to slur over all sorts of things."

The "paper " referred to is Marx's Value, Price and Profit, which he had read on June 20. He did not agree to its publication in 1865, when the fuller exposition in Capital had not yet been given to the world and it was then forgotten until after Engels' death in 1895, when it was found by Marx's daughter, Eleanor Marx Aveling, who edited and published it in its original English form in 1898.]

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: London, 20 June, 1866;

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Yesterday there was a discussion in the International Council on the present war. [Prussian-Austrian war of 1866] It had been announced beforehand and our room was very full. The Italian gentlemen had also sent us representatives once more. The discussion wound up, as was to be expected, with "the question of nationality" in general and the attitude we should take towards it. This subject was adjourned till next Tuesday.

The French, very numerously represented, gave vent to their cordial dislike for the Italians.

Moreover the representatives of "young France" (non-workers) came out with the announcement that all nationalities and even nations were "antiquated prejudices." Proudhonised Stirnerism. Everything to be dissolved into little "groups" or "communes" which will in their turn form an "association" but no state. And indeed this "individualisation" of mankind and the corresponding "mutualism" are to proceed while history comes to a stop in all other countries and the whole world waits until the French are ripe for a social revolution. They will then perform the experiment before our eyes, and the rest of the world, overcome by the force of their example, will do the same. Just what Fourier expected of his model phalanstery. Moreover, everyone who encumbers the "social" question with the "superstitions" of the old world is "reactionary."

The English laughed very much when I began my speech by saying that our friend Lafargue, etc., who had done away with nationalities, had spoken "French" to us, i.e., a language which nine-tenths of the audience did not understand. I also suggested that by the negation of nationalities he appeared, quite unconsciously, to understand their absorption into the model French nation.

For the rest, the line is difficult now because one has equally to oppose the silliness of English pro-Italianism on the one hand and the false polemic of the French on the other, and must specially prevent any demonstration which would involve our Association in a one-sided direction.

Marx To Engels

In Manchester

Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 359;

First published: abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Berlin, 1930.

Hanover, 24 April 1867

Dear Fred,

I have been here as Dr Kugelmann’s guest for a week now. I was obliged to stay in Hamburg or right near Hamburg on account of the printing [of Volume I of Capital]. Things stand as follows. Meissner wants to have the whole undertaking complete in 4-5 weeks, but cannot get the printing done in Hamburg, both because there are not enough printers, and because the proof-readers are insufficiently learned. He is therefore having the printing done at Otto Wigand’s (or rather his son’s, as that puffed-up old cur only has a nominal share in the business now). He sent the manuscript to Leipzig a week ago. He now wants to have me to hand to check the first 2 proof-sheets and at the same time to decide whether it is ‘possible’ to print quickly with a single proof-reading on my part. In this case, the whole undertaking would be complete in 4-5 weeks. However, Easter week is now holding it up. Wigand Jr wrote to Meissner that he cannot start until the end of this week. At Kugelmann’s pressing invitation, I therefore came here (which also has economic advantages) for the interim. Before I say anything about ‘local’ affairs, I must not forget to tell you: Meissner would appreciate it, and asks me to pass on the request to you, if you would write a warning concerning Russia, for the benefit of the Germans and the French simultaneously. If you do undertake it, he wishes it done quickly. He would, however, prefer you to write at some length rather than more briefly, as small pamphlets do not sell well. You could discuss conditions when you send him the manuscript, as he says the two of you would not fall out over the matter. You could write with ‘no holds barred’, as Meissner considers that there is no need whatever to be concerned about considerations.

Regarding Hanover, then.

Kugelmann is a doctor of great eminence in his special field, which is gynaecology. He is in correspondence with Virchow and the other authorities (including one Meyer in Berlin) and formerly with von Siebold in Göttingen and with Semmelweis in Vienna, before he went mad. Whenever there is a difficult case in this field over here, he is always brought in as consultant. As an instance of the professional jealousy and stupidity of the locals, he told me he had initially been blackballed, i.e., not admitted to the doctors’ association here, because ‘gynaecology’ is a ‘cesspit of immorality’. Kugelmann is very talented technically, too. He has invented a mass of new instruments in this field.

Kugelmann is secondly a fanatical supporter (and for my taste excessively Westphalian in his admiration) of our ideas and the two of us personally. He sometimes bores me with his enthusiasm, which is at odds with the detachment he displays as a doctor. But he understands, and he is a really excellent man, unaffected by qualms, capable of making sacrifices, and, most important of all, convinced. He has a charming little wife and an 8-year old daughter who is positively sweet. He has in his possession a far better collection of our works than the two of us together. I even came across The Holy Family again here, which he presented to me and of which he will be sending you a copy. I was pleasantly surprised to find that we have no need to feel ashamed of the piece, although the Feuerbach cult now makes a most comical impression upon one. The ordinary people, and in the capital, Hanover, even the bourgeoisie, are extremely hostile to the Prussians (ditto in Electoral Hesse) and miss no opportunity of expressing their sentiments. They openly proclaim their longing — for the French. If one remarks to them that this is unpatriotic, they say, ‘The Prussians did just the same thing. When they marched through here, they were boasting, the officers first and foremost among them, that the French would come to their aid — if need be.’ Wehner’s father is much respected here and is considered a Guelph. Bismarck sent one of his satraps, the advocate Warnebold, to see me yesterday (keep this under your hat). He wishes to ‘make use of me and my great talents in the interests of the German people’. Von Benningsen will be paying ‘meah’ his respects tomorrow.

The standing the two of us enjoy in Germany, particularly among the ‘educated’ officials, is of an altogether different order from what we imagined. Thus, e.g., the director of the statistical bureau here, Merkel, visited me and told me, he had been studying questions of money for years to no avail, and I had immediately clarified the matter once and for all. ‘Your Dioscurus Engels,’ he told me, ‘was recently acknowledged by my colleague Engel before the royal family in Berlin.’ These are trifling things, but they are important for us. We have more influence on these officials than on the louts.

I was also invited to attend the society of ‘Europeans’, as they call the anti-Prussian, North-Germanic members of the National Association here. What jackasses!

I also received an invitation from the head (head-in-chief, as Stieber calls it) of the railway here. I went along, he provided some good herb wine, his wife was ‘delaighted’, and as I was leaving, he thanked me ‘for doing him such an honour’.

I have a debt of honour — £10 — to settle with Mr Wheeler, a member of our Council and Manager of the Empire Insurance Corporation. You would oblige me greatly if you would send him the money on my behalf: ‘G. Wheeler, Esq., 27 Gresham Street, E.C. Private’ (London). I am also very much afraid that my family in London may be ‘in profundis’. This grieves me the more particularly because poor good little Jenny’s birthday is May Ist. I have cast out nets with a view to making a monetary haul. With what success remains to be seen.

My health is extraordinarily improved. No trace of the old complaint. What is more, in good spirits, despite all adversity, and no liver trouble.

Do please write me a few lines by return (address: Dr Kugelmann, Hanover). Salut to Mrs Burns.

Your

Moor

Freiligrath is making a fool of himself by his public beggary in Germany. Meissner tells me he has disappeared without trace in North Germany.

Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels in Manchester, 11 September 1867

Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975). Scanned and prepared for the Marxist Internet Archive by Paul Flewers.

... At the next Congress in Brussels I shall personally deliver a knock-out blow to these Proudhonist jackasses. [1] I have managed the whole thing diplomatically and did not want to come out personally until my book was published and our Association had struck root. I will moreover give them a hiding in the Official Report of the General Council (despite all their efforts, the Parisian babblers could not prevent our re-election). [2]

Meanwhile our Association has made great progress. The wretched Star, which wanted to ignore us entirely, has announced in a leading article published yesterday that we are more important than the Peace Congress. [3] Schulze-Delitzsch was not able to prevent his ‘Workers Association’ in Berlin from joining us. [4] The scoundrels among the English trade unionists, who thought we went too ‘far’, now come running to us. In addition to the Courrier français, the Liberté of Girardin, the Siècle, the Mode, the Gazette de France, etc, have printed reports on our Congress. Things are moving. And in the next revolution, which is perhaps nearer than it appears, we (that is, you and I) will have this powerful engine in our hands. Compare this with the results of the operations conducted by Mazzini, etc, during the last thirty years! And moreover without any financial means! Considering the intrigues of the Proudhonists in Paris, the Mazzinis in Italy, the jealous Odgers, [5] Cremers [6] and Potters [7] in London, and the Schulze-Delitzschists and Lassalleans in Germany! – We can be very well satisfied...

Notes

1. The Brussels Congress of the First International was held in September 1868. Thanks to the thorough preparatory work carried out by Marx and his associates the decisions of the Brussels Congress greatly reduced the influence of the Proudhonists in the International Working Men’s Association – Progress Publishers.

2. Marx is alluding to the fact that the Lausanne Congress of the First International held in 1867 re-elected Marx and most of the other former Council members to the new General Council – Progress Publishers.

3. The reference is to the Inaugural Congress of the League of Peace and Freedom, which took place in Switzerland in September 1867 – Progress Publishers.

4. The Workers Association in Berlin was set up in January 1863 with the active participation of Schulze-Delitzsch and remained under the influence of the Progressive Party. It advocated trade unionism and bourgeois cooperative societies. After the creation of the International Working Men’s Association the foremost members of the Workers Association gravitated towards the International. Franz Hermann Schulze-Delitzsch (1808-1883) – German political figure, vulgar economist, attempted to divert workers from revolutionary struggle by organising cooperative societies – Progress Publishers.

5. George Odger (1820-1877) – reformist leader of British trade unions, member of General Council of First International (1864-71) but resigned after attacking Paris Commune – Progress Publishers.

6. William Randall Cremer (1838-1908) – reformist leader of British trade unions, member of General Council of First International (1864-67), later Liberal – Progress Publishers.

7. George Potter (1832-1893) – carpenter, reformist leader of British trade unions, advocated a policy of compromise with liberal bourgeoisie – Progress Publishers.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

[London,] November 2, 1867

Source: Marx/Engels Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, 1955;

Transcribed and HTML markup: Tim Delaney, 1999.

... The trial of the Fenians in Manchester is just what one expected it to be. You will have seen what a row “our men” have made in the Reform League. I did everything I could to provoke this demonstration of English workers for Fenianism.

Greetings

Yours,

K. M.

I used to think the separation of Ireland from England impossible. I now think it inevitable, although after the separation there may come federation. The way the English are going on is shown by the agricultural statistics for this year, published a few days ago. In addition the form of the evictions. The Irish Viceroy, Lord Abicorn (this is roughly the name) [Marx refers to Lord Abercorn, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. – Ed.] has “cleared” his estate of thousands within recent weeks by compulsory executions. Among the evicted are well-to-do farmers whose improvements and capital investments are confiscated in this fashion! There is no other Enropean country in which foreign rule takes this i direct form of native expropriation. The Russians only confiscate for political reasons; the Prussians in West Prussia buy out.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

London, November 30, 1867

Published: Marx/Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, Progress Publishers, 1955;

Transcribed and HTML Markup by: Tim Delaney, 1999;

...If you have read the journals you will have seen that 1) the Memorial of the International Council for the Fenians was sent to Hardy and that 2) the debate on Fenianism was public (last Tuesday week) and reported in the Times. Reporters of the Dublin Irishman and Nation were also present. I came very late (I ran a temperature for about a fortnight and the fever passed only two days ago) and really did not intend to speak, firstly because of my troublesome physical condition, and secondly because of the ticklish situation. Nevertheless Weston, who was in the chair, tried to force me to, so I moved that the meeting be adjourned. This obliged me to speak last Tuesday. As a matter of fact I had prepared for Tuesday last not a speech but the points of a speech. But the Irish reporters failed to come.... After the opening of the meeting I therefore stated I would yield the floor to Fox on account of the belated hour. Actually, owing to the executions that had taken place in the meantime in Manchester, our subject, Fenianism. was liable to inflame the passions to such heat that I (but not the abstract Fox) would have been forced to hurl revolutionary thunderbolts instead of soberly analysing the state of affairs and the movement as I had intended. The Irish reporters therefore, by staying away and delaying the opening of the meeting, did signal service for me. I don't like to get involved with people like Roberts, Stephens, and the rest.

Fox's speech was good, for one thing because it was delivered by an Englishman and for another because it concerned only the political and international aspects. For that very reason however he merely skimmed along the surface of things. The resolution he handed up was absurd and inane. I objected to it and had it referred to the Standing Committee. What the English do not yet know is that since 1846 the economic content and therefore also the political aim of English domination in Ireland have entered into an entirely new phase, and that, precisely because of this, the characteristic features of Fenianism are socialistic tendencies (in a negative sense, directed against the appropriation of the soil) and the fact that it is a movement of the lower orders. What can be more ridiculous than to confuse the barbarities of Elizabeth or Cromwell, who wanted to supplant the Irish by English colonists (in the Roman sense), with the present system, which wants to supplant them by sheep, pigs and oxen! The system of 1801-46 (when evictions were exceptional and occurred mainly in Leinster where the land is especially good for cattle raising) with its rackrents and middlemen, collapsed in 1846. The repeal of the Corn Laws, partly the result of or at any rate hastened by the Irish famine, deprived Ireland of its monopoly of supplying corn to England in normal times. Wool and meat became the slogan, hence conversion of tillage into pasture. Hence from then onwards systematic consolidation of farms. The Encumbered Estates Act, which turned a mass of farmer middlemen who had become rich into landlords, hastened th e process. Clearing of the Estates of Ireland is now the only purpose of English rule in Ireland. The stupid English Government in London knows nothing of course of this immense change since 1846. But the Irish know it. From Meagher's Proclamation (1848) down to the election manifesto of Hennessy (Tory and Urquhartite) (1866), the Irish have expressed their awareness of this in the clearest and most forcible manner.

The question now is, what advice shall we give to the English workers? In my opinion they must make the repeal of the Union (in short, the affair of 1783, but in a more democratic form and adapted to the conditions of the present time) an article of their pronunziamento . This is the only legal and therefore only possible form of Irish emancipation which can be embodied in the programme of an English party. Experience must show later whether the merely personal union can continue to subsist between the two countries. I half think it can if it takes place in time.

What the Irish need is:

1) Self-government and independence from England.

2) An agrarian revolution. With the best intentions in the world the English cannot accomplish this for them, but they can give them the legal means of accomplishing it for themselves.

3) Protective tariffs against England. Between 1783 and 1801 all branches of Irish industry flourished. The Union, by abolishing the protective tariffs established by the Irish Parliament, destroyed all industrial life in Ireland. The bit of linen industry Is no compensation whatever. The Union of 1801 had just the same effect on Irish industry as the measures for the suppression of the Irish woollen industry, etc., taken by the English Parliament under Anne, George II, and others. Once the Irish are independent, necessity will turn them into protectionists, as it did Canada, Australia, etc. Before I present my views in the Central Council (next Tuesday, this time fortunately without reporters), I should be glad if you gave me your opinion in a few lines.

Greetings.

Yours,

K. M.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: [London,] 11 January, 1868;

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

At the Museum, where I did nothing but glance through catalogues, I also discovered that Dühring is a great philosopher. For he has written a Natural Dialectic against Hegel's "unnatural" one. Hence these tears. The gentlemen in Germany (all except the theological reactionaries) think Hegel's dialectic is a "dead horse." Feuerbach has much to answer for in this respect.

Marx to Kugelmann

In Hanover

Abstract

Written: London, 6 March, 1868;

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

There is something touching about Thünen. A Mecklenburg junker (true, with a German training in thinking) who treats his estate at Tellow as the land, and Mecklenburg-Schwerin as the town, and who, proceeding from these premises, with the help of observation, the differential calculus, practical accounting, etc., constructs for himself the Ricardian theory of rent. It is at once worthy of respect and at the same time ridiculous.

I can now understand the curiously embarrassed tone of Herr Dühring's criticism. He is ordinarily a most bumptious, cheeky boy, who sets up as a revolutionary in political economy. He has done two things. He has published, firstly, (proceeding from Carey) a Critical Foundation of Political Economy (about 500 pages) and, secondly, a new Natural Dialectic (against the Hegelian). My book has buried him from both sides. He gave it notice because of his hatred for Roscher, etc. For the rest, half intentionally, and half from lack of insight, he commits deceptions. He knows very well that my method of development is not Hegelian, since I am a materialist and Hegel is an idealist. Hegel's dialectic is the basic form of all dialectic, but only after it has been stripped of its mystical form, and it is precisely this which distinguishes my method. As for Ricardo, it really hurt Herr Dühring that in my treatment of Ricardo the weak points in him, which Carey and a hundred others before him pointed out, do not even exist. Consequently he attempts, in mauvaise foi [bad faith], to burden me with all Ricardo's limitations. But never mind. I must be grateful to the man, since he is the first expert who has said anything at all.

In the second volume (which will certainly never appear if my health does not improve) property in land will be one of the subjects dealt with, competition only in so far as it is required for the treatment of the other themes.

During my illness (which I hope will soon cease altogether) I was unable to write, but I got down an enormous amount of "stuff," statistical and otherwise, which in itself would have been enough to make people sick who are not used to that sort of fodder and do not possess stomachs accustomed to digesting it rapidly.

My circumstances are very harassing, as I have been unable to do any additional work which would bring in money, and yet certain' appearances must be maintained for the children's sake. If I did not have these two damned volumes to produce (and in addition to look for an English publisher) which can be done only in London, I would go to Geneva, where I could live very well with the means at my disposal.

*Thünen, Johann Heinrich Von (1783-1850). German economist. He deduced differential ground rent by presupposing a town surrounded by a series of circles of different kinds of agricultural cultivation whose respective distance from the town was determined by the amount of human labour they required (e.g., vegetable cultivation nearer, cattle-raising further off). In his book, Der isolierte Staat (The Isolated Slate) he raised the question of the nature of capitalist exploitation.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: [London,] 25 March, 1868;

Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

With regard to Maurer. His books are exceptionally important. Not only primitive times but the whole later development of the free imperial cities, of the immunity of landowners, of public authority and of the struggle between free peasantry and serfdom is given an entirely new form.

Human history is like paleontology. Owing to a certain judicial blindness even the best intelligences absolutely fail to see the things which lie in front of their noses. Later, when the moment has arrived, we are surprised to find traces everywhere of what we failed to see. The first reaction against the French Revolution and the period of Enlightenment bound up with it was naturally to see everything as mediaeval and romantic, even people like Grimm are not free from this. The second reaction is to look beyond the Middle Ages into the primitive age of each nation, and that corresponds to the socialist tendency, although these learned men have no idea that the two have any connection. They are therefore surprised to find what is newest in what is oldest--even equalitarians, to a degree which would have made Proudhon shudder.

To show how much we are all implicated in this judicial blindness:--right in my own neighbourhood, on the Hunsrücken, the old Germanic system survived up till the last few years, I now remember my father talking to me about it from a lawyer's point of view. Another proof: Just as the geologists, even the best, like Cuvier, have expounded certain facts in a completely distorted way, so philologists of the force of a Grimm mistranslated the simplest Latin sentences because they were under the influence of Möser etc., (who, I remember, was enchanted that "liberty" never existed among the Germans but that "Luft macht eigen" [the air makes the serf]) and others. E.g., the well-known passage in Tacitus: "arva per annos mutant et superest ager," which means, "they exchange the fields, arva (by lot, hence also sortes [lot] in all the later law codes of the barbarians) and the common land remains over" (ager as public land contrasted with arva)--is translated by Grimm, etc. "they cultivate fresh fields every year and still there is always (uncultivated) land over!"

So too the passage: "Colunt discreti ac diversi" [their tillage is separate and scattered] is supposed to prove that from time immemorial the Germans carried on cultivation on individual farms like Westphalian junkers. But the same passage continues: "Vicos locant non in nostrum morem connexis et cohaerantibus aedificiis: suum quisque locum spatio circumdat;" [they do not lay out their villages with buildings connected and joined together after our fashion: each surrounds his dwelling with a strip of land]; and primitive Germanic villages still exist here and there in Denmark in the form described. Obviously Scandinavia must become as important for German jurisprudence and economics as for German mythology. And only by starting from there shall we: be able to decipher our past again. For the rest even Grimm, etc., find in Caesar that the Germans always settled as Geschlechtsgenossenschaften and not as individuals: "gentibus cognationibusque qui uno coiereant" [according to clans and kindreds, who settled together].

But what would old Hegel say in the next world if he heard that the general [Allgemeine] in German and Norse means nothing but the common land [Gemeinland], and the particular, Sundre, Besondere, nothing but the separate property divided off from the common land? Here are the logical categories coming damn well out of "our intercourse" after all.

Climate and the Vegetable World throughout the Ages, a History of Both, by Fraas (1847) is very interesting, especially as proving that climate and flora have changed in historic times. He is a Darwinist before Darwin and makes even the species arise in historic times. But he is also an agricultural expert. He maintains that as a result of cultivation and in proportion to its degree, the "damp" so much beloved by the peasant is lost (hence too plants emigrate from south to north) and eventually the formation of steppes begins. The first effects of cultivation are useful, later devastating owing to deforestation, etc. This man is both a thoroughly learned philologist (he has written books in Greek) and a chemist, agricultural expert, etc. The whole conclusion is that cultivation when it progresses in a primitive way and is not consciously controlled (as a bourgeois of course he does not arrive at this), leaves deserts behind it, Persia, Mesopotamia, etc., Greece. Here again another unconscious socialist tendency!

This Fraas is also interesting from a German point of view. First Dr. Med., then inspector and teacher of chemistry and technology. Now head of the Bavarian veterinary organisation, university professor, head of government experimental agriculture, etc. In his last things one notices his advanced age, but he is still a gay lad. Has knocked around a lot in Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt! His history of agriculture is important too. He calls Fourier "this pious and humanistic socialist." Of the Albanians, etc.: "every kind of abominable lewdness and rape."

It is necessary to look carefully at the new and newest things on agriculture. The physical school is opposed to the chemical school.

Marx to Kugelmann

In Hanover

Abstract

London, July 11, 1868

Written: London, 1868, July 11;

Translated: from the German;

Transcription/Markup: Brian Baggins;

Online Version: Marx/Engels Internet Archive (marxists.org) 2000.

Every child knows a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs required different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance , is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange value of these products.

Science consists precisely in demonstrating how the law of value asserts itself. So that if one wanted at the very beginning to "explain" all the phenomenon which seemingly contradict that law, one would have to present science before science. It is precisely Ricardo's mistake that in his first chapter on value [ On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation , Page 479] he takes as given all possible and still to be developed categories in order to prove their conformity with the law of value.

On the other hand, as you correctly assumed, the history of the theory certainly shows that the concept of the value relation has always been the same — more or less clear, hedged more or less with illusions or scientifically more or less definite. Since the thought process itself grows out of conditions, is itself a natural process, thinking that really comprehends must always be the same, and can vary only gradually, according to maturity of development, including the development of the organ by which the thinking is done. Everything else is drivel.

The vulgar economist has not the faintest idea that the actual everyday exchange relations can not be directly identical with the magnitudes of value. The essence of bourgeois society consists precisely in this, that a priori there is no conscious social regulation of production. The rational and naturally necessary asserts itself only as a blindly working average. And then the vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, as against the revelation of the inner interconnection, he proudly claims that in appearance things look different. In fact, he boasts that he holds fast to appearance, and takes it for the ultimate. Why, then, have any science at all?

But the matter has also another background. Once the interconnection is grasped, all theoretical belief in the permanent necessity of existing conditions collapses before their collapse in practice. Here, therefore, it is absolutely in the interest of the ruling classes to perpetuate a senseless confusion. And for what other purpose are the sycophantic babblers paid, who have no other scientific trump to play save that in political economy one should not think at all?

But satis superque [enough and to spare]. In any case it shows what these priests of the bourgeoisie have come down to, when workers and even manufacturers and merchants understand my book [Capital] and find their way about in it, while these "learned scribes" (!) complain that I make excessive demands on their understanding....

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: August 26, 1868;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

The invitation which I received to the Congress of the General Association of German Workers (Hamburg, August 22 to 25) was signed by Schweitzer as President and by more than twenty workers from the various districts of Germany (members of the Executive). I had to take this latter fact into consideration in my reply. The reason I gave for not coming was the work of the Central Council of the International Workingmen's Association, and I said I was glad to see that the starting-points of any "serious" working-class movement--agitation for full political freedom, regulation of the working day and international co-operation of the working class--were emphasised in their programme for the Congress. In other words, that is to say, I congratulated them on having given up Lassalle's programme. Whether they will see the joke, remains to be seen. Schweitzer, the only one with a head in the whole Lassalle gang, will certainly be aware of it. But whether he will think it more advisable to show this or to pretend to be dense, we shall see.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: 26 September, 1868;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

For the German working class the most necessary thing of all is that it should cease conducting its agitation by kind permission of the higher authorities. A race so schooled in bureaucracy must go through a complete course of "self-help." On the other hand they undoubtedly have the advantage of beginning the movement at a period when conditions are much more advanced than they were for the English and, being Germans, of having heads on their shoulders capable of generalising.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: October 10, 1868;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

When you were here last you saw the Blue Book on the land situation in Ireland 1844-45. By accident I have found in a small second-hand shop the Report and Evidence on Irish Tenant Right, 1867 (House of Lords). This was a real find. While Messrs. the Economists treat the question whether ground rent is payment for natural differences in the land, or merely interest on the capital invested in the land, as a pure conflict of dogmas, we have here an actual life and death struggle between farmer and landlord on the question of how far the rent should also include, in addition to payment for the difference in the land, interest on the capital invested in it--not by the landlord but by the tenant. It is only by substituting for conflicting dogmas the conflicting facts and real contradictions which form their hidden background that we can transform political economy into a positive science.

Letter from Marx to Schweitzer

In Berlin

Abstract

Written: October 13, 1868 [Draft];

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryanin 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

As for the Lassalle Association, it was founded in a period of reaction. Lassalle--and this remains his immortal service--re-awakened the workers' movement in Germany after its fifteen years of slumber. But he committed great mistakes. He allowed himself to be too much governed by the immediate circumstances of the time. He made a small starting-point-his opposition to a dwarf like Schulze-Delitzsch--into the central point of his agitation--state aid versus self-help. In so doing he merely took up again the slogan which Buchez the leader of French Catholic socialism, had given out in 1843 and the following years against the genuine workers' movement in France. Much too intelligent to regard this slogan as anything but a temporary makeshift, Lassalle could only justify it on the ground of its (alleged) immediate practicability. For this purpose he had to maintain that it could be carried out in the near future. Hence the "state" transformed itself into the Prussian State. And thus he was forced into concessions to the Prussian monarchy, the Prussian reaction (feudal party) and even the clericals.

With Buchez' state aid for associations he combined the Chartist cry of universal suffrage. He overlooked the fact that conditions in Germany and England were different. He overlooked the lessons of the Second Empire with regard to universal suffrage. Moreover from the outset, like everyone who declares that he has a panacea for the sufferings of the masses in his pocket, he gave his agitation a religious and sectarian character. Every sect is in fact religious. Further, just because he was the founder of a sect, he denied all natural connection with the earlier movement both in Germany and outside. He fell into the same mistake as Proudhon, and instead of looking among the genuine elements of the class movement for the real basis of his agitation, he tried to prescribe their course to these elements according to a certain dogmatic recipe.

Most of what I am now saying after the event I foretold to Lassalle in 1862, when he came to London and invited me to place myself with him at the head of the new movement.

You yourself have experienced in your own person the opposition between the movement of a sect and the movement of a class. The sect sees the justification for its existence and its "point of honour"--not in what it has in common with the class movement but in the particular shibboleth which distinguishes it from it. Therefore when at Hamburg you proposed the congress for the formation of trade unions you were only able to defeat the opposition of the sect by threatening to resign from the office of president. In addition, you were obliged to double yourself and to announce that in one case you were acting as the head of the sect and in the other as the organ of the class movement.

The dissolution of the General Association of German Workers gave you the historic opportunity to accomplish a great step forward and to declare, to prove if necessary, that a new stage of development had now been reached, and that moment was ripe for the sectarian movement to merge into the class movement and make an end of all dependence. Where the true content of the sect was concerned it would, as with all previous working-class sects, be carried on into the general movement as an element which enriched it. Instead of this you actually demanded of the class movement that it should subordinate itself to the movement of a particular sect.

Those who are not your friends have concluded from this that whatever happens you want to preserve your "own workers' movement."

Engels to Marx

In London

Abstract

Written: November 6, 1868;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

It is difficult to come to an absolutely definite judgment about the thing [Dietzgen's manuscript]. As a philosopher the man is no child of nature, and added to that is only half self-taught. Some of his sources (e.g., Feuerbach, your book, and various rubbishy popular works on natural science) can be immediately recognised from his terminology, but one cannot tell what else he has read. His terminology is of course still very confused--hence there is a lack of sharpness and frequent repetition in new terms. There is also some dialectic in it, but appearing more in flashes than as a connected whole. The account of the thing-in-itself as Gedankending [thing made of thought] would be very nice and even brilliant if one could be sure that he had discovered it for himself. There is a lot of wit and, despite the lack of grammar, a marked talent for style. On the whole, a remarkable instinct for arguing out so much correctly with such deficient preliminary training.

As I said, the repetitions are the result partly of the deficient terminology and partly of unfamiliarity with the discipline of logic. It will be very hard to get them all out. If the man absolutely insists on having his things printed I am not sure that to limit him to two printer's sheets would be the best for him — in any case it would give him the devil's own job as he is not conscious of his repetitions, and then I am not sure either whether two sheets would get any attention paid them at all. More likely six to eight. And he will never get it into a periodical.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: November 7, 1868;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Borkheim is translating the chief passages from the Russian book on the disintegration of agriculture for me, and has also given me a French book about it by the Russian, Shedo-Ferroti. The latter makes a great mistake--he is altogether quite a superficial fellow--when he says the Russian communal system first originated from the law prohibiting the peasant from leaving the land. The whole thing, down to the smallest details, is absolutely identical with the primitive Germanic communal system. What the Russians have added (and this is also found in a section of the Indian communal system, not in the Punjab but in the South) is (I) the non-democratic but patriarchal character of the commune leadership, and (2) the collective responsibility for taxes to the state, etc. It follows from the second point that the more industrious a Russian peasant is, the more he is exploited for the purposes of the state, not only for taxes, but for the supply of produce, horses, etc., during the continual passage of bodies of troops, for government couriers etc. The whole foul mess is in process of collapse.

I regard Dietzgen's development, in so far as Feuerbach, etc.--in short, his sources--are not obvious, as entirely his own independent achievement. For the rest, I agree with everything you say. I will say something to him about the repetitions. It is bad luck for him that it is precisely Hegel that he has not studied.

Engels to Marx

In London

Abstract

Written: Manchester November 18, 1868;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

What do you say to the elections in the factory districts? Once again the proletariat has discredited itself terribly. Manchester and Salford return three Tories to two Liberals, including moreover the milk-and-water Bayley. Bolton, Preston, Blackburn, etc., practically nothing but Tories. In Ashton it looks as if M[ilner] Gibson would go to the wall. Ernest Jones nowhere, despite the cheering. Everywhere the proletariat are the tag, rag and bobtail of the official parties, and if any party has gained additional strength from the new voters, it is the Tories. The small towns, the half rotten boroughs are the salvation of bourgeois liberalism and the roles will be reversed: the Tories will now be in favour of more members for the big towns and the Liberals for unequal representation.

Here the electors have increased from 24,000 to not quite 48,000, while the Tories have increased their voters from 6,000 to 14,000--15,000. The Liberals threw away a lot and Mr. Henry did a lot of harm, but it cannot be denied that the increase of working-class voters has brought the Tories more than their mere additional percentage and has improved their relative position. On the whole this is to the good. It looks at present as if Gladstone will get a narrow majority and so be compelled to keep the ball rolling and reform the Reform Act; with a big majority he would have left it all to God as usual.

But it remains a hopeless certificate of destitution for the English proletariat, all the same. The parson has shown unexpected power and so has the cringing to respectability. Not a single working-class candidate had a ghost of a chance, but my Lord Tomnoddy or any parvenu snob could have the workers' votes with pleasure.

Marx to Kugelmann

In Hanover

Abstract

Written: London, December 12, 1868;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

I am also returning Dietzgen's portrait. The story of his life is not quite what I had imagined it to be, although I always had a feeling that he was "not a worker like Eccarius." It is true that the sort of philosophic outlook which he has worked out for himself requires a certain amount of peace and leisure which the everyday workman does not enjoy. I have got two very good workmen living in New York, A. Vogt, a shoemaker and Siegfried Meyer, a mining engineer, both from Berlin. A third workman who could give lectures on my book, is Lochner, a carpenter (common working man), who has been here in London about fifteen years.

Tell your wife I never suspected her of being one of Generaless Geck's subordinates. My question was only intended as a joke. In any case ladies cannot complain of the International, for it has elected a lady, Madame Law, to be a member of the General Council.

Joking aside, great progress was evident in the last Congress of the American "Labour Union" in that among other things, it treated working women with complete equality. While in this respect the English, and still more the gallant French, are burdened with a spirit of narrow-mindedness. Anybody who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without the feminine ferment. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex (the ugly ones included).

Engels to Marx

In London

Abstract

Written: Manchester December 18, 1868;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Many thanks for Ténot and the Baudin trial. As soon as I have read the latter I will send them both back. You can keep the Provinces for I have ordered both volumes for myself from the bookseller, as one must possess a copy of a thing of this kind. It is a necessary result of every victorious reaction that the causation of the revolution and especially of the counter-revolution should pass into utter oblivion; the younger generation in Germany knows absolutely nothing about 1848 except the groans of the Kreuzzeitung, which were echoed by all the other papers from 1849-52; history suddenly comes to an end there in 1847.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: December 19, 1868;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Ténot's Province is much better. It gives us a lot of new details. If the Parisians had held out one or two days longer the empire would have been done for. The (republican) movement among the country people was much bigger than we knew.

Marx to Kugelmann

In Hanover

Abstract

Written: London, March 3, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

A very interesting movement is going on in France.

The Parisians are making a regular study of their recent revolutionary past, in order to prepare themselves for the business of the impending new revolution. First the origin of the Empire--then the coup d'etat of December. This has been completely forgotten, just as the reaction in Germany succeeded in stamping out the memory of 1848-49.

That is why Ténot's books on the coup d'etat attracted such enormous attention in Paris and the provinces that in a short time they went through ten impressions. They were followed by dozens of other books on the same period. It was all the rage and therefore soon became a speculative business for the publishers.

These books were written by the opposition--Ténot, for example is one of the Siécle [Century] men (I mean the liberal bourgeois paper, not our "century"). All the liberal and illiberal scoundrels who belong to the official opposition patronise this movement. Also the republican democrats, people like, for example, Delescluze, formerly Ledru Rollin's adjutant, and now, as a republican patriarch, editor of the Paris Réveil.

Up to the present everybody has been revelling in these posthumous disclosures or rather reminiscences, everybody who is not Bonapartist.

But then came the other side of the medal. First of all the French government itself got the renegade Hippolyte Castille to publish Les Massacres de Juin 1848 [The Massacres of June 1848.] This was a blow for Thiers, Falloux, Marie, Jules Favre, Jules Simon, Pelletan, etc., in short, for the chiefs of what is called in France l' Union Liberale, who want to wangle the next elections, the infamous old dogs!

Then, however, came the Socialist Party, which "exposed" the opposition--and the republican democrats of the old style. Among others, Vermorel: Les Hommes de 1848 and l'Opposition. [The Men of 1848 and The Opposition].

Vermorel is a Proudhonist.

Finally came the Blanquists, for example G. Tridon: Gironde et Girondins.

And so the whole historic witches' cauldron is bubbling.

When shall we be so far!

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: March 5, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

The enclosed little document [1] arrived yesterday (although dated February 27). You must send it back as soon as you have read it, as I have to lay it before the Council on Tuesday next. The gentlemen of the "Alliance" have taken a long time to achieve this opus [production].

As a matter of fact we would rather they had kept their "innumerable legions" in France, Spain and Italy for themselves.

Bakunin thinks to himself: if we approve his "radical programme" he can make a big noise about this and compromise us tant soit peu (just a little bit). If we declare ourselves against it we shall be decried as counter-revolutionaries. Moreover: if we admit them he will see to it that he is supported by some riff-raff at the Congress in Basle. I think the answer should be on the following lines:

According to Paragraph I of the Statutes every workers' association "aiming at the same end, viz, the protection, advancement and complete emancipation of the working classes" shall be admitted.

As the stage of development reached by different sections of workers in the same country and by the working class in different countries necessarily varies very much, the actual movement necessarily expresses itself in very various theoretical forms.

The community of action which the International Workingmen's Association called into being, the exchange of ideas by means of the different organs of the sections in all countries, and, finally, the direct discussions at the General Congresses, will by degrees create for the general workers' movement its common theoretical programme also.

With regard to the programme of the "Alliance," therefore, it is not necessary for the General Council to submit it to a critical examination. The Council has not to examine whether it is an adequate, scientific expression of the working-class movement. It has only to ask if the general tendency of the programme is in opposition to the general tendency of the International Workingmen's Association--the complete emancipation of the working classes.

This reproach could only apply to one phrase in the programme, par. 2: "above all things it desires the political, economic and social equalisation of the classes." "The equalisation of the classes," literally interpreted, is nothing but another expression for the "harmony of capital and labour" preached by the bourgeois socialists. Not the logically impossible "equalisation of classes" but the historically necessary "abolition of classes" constitutes the final aim of the International Workingmen's Association. But from the context in which this phrase occurs in the programme it would appear that it is only a slip of the pen. The less, therefore, does the General Council doubt that this phrase, which might lead to serious misunderstanding, will be removed from the programme.

This being assumed, it is in accordance with the principle of the International Workingmen's Association to leave to each section the responsibility for its own programme. There is therefore nothing to prevent the transformation of the sections of the Alliance into Sections of the Workingmen's Association.

As soon as this has taken place, an enumeration of the newly joined sections according to country, locality and number must be sent to the General Council in accordance with the regulations.

This last point--the census of their legions--will especially tickle the gentlemen. Tell me everything you want altered in this draft of the reply when you return the letter.

Footnotes

A notification from the Geneva Russia section of the Bakunin "Alliance" of their desire to affiliate with the International.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: April 15, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

... To-day I have discovered by accident that we have two copies of the Neveu de Rameau [1] in our house and am therefore sending you one. This unique masterpiece will give you fresh pleasure again. Old Hegel says about it: " The mocking laughter at existence, at the confusion of the whole and at itself, is the disintegrated consciousness, aware of itself and expressing itself, and is at the same time the last audible echo of all this confusion. ... It is the self-disintegrating nature of all relations and their conscious disintegration.... In this aspect of the return to self the vanity of all things is the self's own vanity, or the self is itself vanity ... but as the indignant consciousness it is aware of its own disintegration and by that knowledge has immediately transcended it....Every part of this world either gets its mind expressed here or is spoken of intellectually and declared for what it is. The honest consciousness (the role which Diderot allots to himself in the dialogue) takes each element for a permanent entity and does not realise in its uneducated thoughtlessness that it is doing just the opposite. But the disintegrated consciousness is the consciousness of reversal and indeed of absolute reversal; its dominating element is the concept, which draws together the thoughts that to the honest consciousness lie so wide apart; hence the brilliance of its language. Thus the contents of the mind's speech about itself consist in the reversal of all conceptions and realities; the universal deception of oneself and others and the shamelessness of declaring this deception is therefore precisely the greatest truth....To the quiet consciousness, which in its honest way goes on singing the melody of the True and the Good in even tones, i.e., on one note, this speech appears as 'a farrago of wisdom and madness'" etc. (a passage from Diderot follows).

More amusing than Hegel's commentary is that of Mr. Jules Janin, [2] from which you will find extracts in the appendix to the little volume. This cardinal de la mer [sea-cardinal] feels the lack of a moral in Diderot's Rameau and has therefore set the thing right by the discovery that all Rameau's contrariness arises from his vexation at not being a " born gentleman." The Kotzebue-ish rubbish which he has piled up on this cornerstone is being performed as a melodrama in London. From Diderot to Jules Janin is no doubt what the physiologists call regressive metamorphosis. The French intellect as it was before the revolution and under Louis Philippe!...

Footnotes

Le Neveu de Rameau [Rameau's Nephew], a satirical dialogue by Diderot (1713-1784), one of the leading French materialist philosophers of the 18th century, editor of the Encyclopédie and a brilliant man of letters. The passage from Hegel quoted here by Marx is from the Phänomonolgie des Geistes (Phenomenology of Mind), [Ed. Eng. ed.]

Janin, Jules (1804-74) French bourgeois author and literary critic with a popular reputation in bourgeois circles.

Engels to Marx

In London

Abstract

Written: Manchester July 6, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Nothing can in any case be done with Wilhelm [Liebknecht] until he has quite definitely separated his organisation from the People's Party and placed himself at most in a loose cartel relation with them. Very nice too his intending to put the International in the title of his little paper, which would then be the organ of the International Workingmen's Association and of the People's Party at the same time! The organ both of the German petty bourgeoisie and of the European workers!

Another fine idea of Wilhelm's, that one must neither accept nor even force concessions to the workers from the "present state." This will get him the hell of a long way with the workers....

[In Tridon's pamphlet--Gironde et Girondins (1869)--there is] the comic idea that the dictatorship of Paris over France, which was the reason why the first revolution went to pieces, could be carried out in just the same sort of way to-day but with a successful result.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: August 10, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

It cannot be denied that the section of the speech made by Wilhelm [Liebknecht] in Berlin, reprinted in the supplement, shows, beneath its stupidity, an undeniable cunning in arranging the affair to suit himself. This, by the way, is very fine! Because the Reichstag must only be used as a means of agitation, one must never agitate there for anything reasonable directly affecting the interests of the workers! The worthy Wilhelm's illusion that because Bismarck "is fond of" using expressions friendly to the workers he would therefore not oppose real measures on behalf of the workers is really charming. "As if"--as Bruno Bauer would say--Herr Wagener had not declared in the Reichstag that he was for the factory laws in principle but against them in practice "because they were useless under Prussian conditions." "As if" Herr Bismarck, if he really wished or was able to do anything for the workers, would not himself enforce the carrying out of the existing laws in Prussia itself! The mere fact of this happening in Prussia would be enough to force the Liberal "Saxony" to follow suit. What Wilhelm does not grasp is that while the present governments coquette with the workers they are very well aware that their only support lies with the bourgeoisie; they therefore scare the latter by phrases friendly to the workers but cannot ever really go against them.

The cow [Liebknecht] believes in the future "Staat DER Demokratie" [democratic state]. Privately this means at one moment constitutional England, at another the bourgeois United States, and at the next the wretched Switzerland. "It" has not the faintest idea of revolutionary politics. This is what he gives as a proof--according to Schwabenmayer--of democratic energy: the railway to California was built by the bourgeoisie presenting themselves, through Congress, with an enormous mass of "national land"; that is to say, therefore, they expropriated the workers from it by importing a mob of Chinese to force down wages and finally formed a new branch of themselves, the "financial aristocracy."

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: August 18, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999.

In Posen, as Zabicki reported, the Polish workers (joiners, etc.) have brought a strike to a victorious end by the help of their colleagues in Berlin. This struggle against Monseiur le Capital--even in the suborpinate form of the strike--is a very different way of getting rid of national prejudices from that of the bourgeois gentlemen with their peace declamations.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: September 25, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

This tour in Belgium, stay in Aix-la-Chapelle and voyage up the Rhine have convinced me that the priests, especially in the Catholic districts, must be energetically attacked. I shall work on these lines through the International. The curs (e.g., Bishop Ketteler in Mainz, the parsons at the Dusseldorf Congress, etc.) are flirting, where they find it suitable, with the labour question. Indeed it was for them that we worked in 1848, they alone enjoyed the fruits of the revolution during the period of reaction.

Engels to Marx

In London

Abstract

Written: Manchester October 24, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Irish history shows one how disastrous it is for a nation when it has subjugated another nation. All the abominations of the English have their origin in the Irish Pale. I have still to work through the Cromwellian period, but this much seems certain to me, that things would have taken another turn in England but for the necessity for military rule in Ireland and the creation of a new aristocracy there.

Engels to Marx

In London

Abstract

Written: Manchester November 9, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

I never thought that Mr. Carey would be such amusing reading.... The fellow imagines that the reason why rent is so high in South Lancashire and, among other places, in the Forest of Rossendale (a thickly-populated industrial centre) is because the land here is exceptionally good corn-producing land! I am making a heap of marginal notes for you and as soon as I have read his theory of rent will write you my opinion and send the book back. Of course he explains the origin of rent by just as wild and senseless a story as Ricardo, and his idea too of how it took place is as absurd as the way in which all economists represent this sort of thing to themselves. But that has nothing to do with the theory of rent itself. What Carey calls the "best land" you can see from the fact that, according to his own statement, it is exceptional now for the so-called best land, even in the Northern States, to yield a profit when taken into cultivation.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: November 18, 1868;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

Last Tuesday I opened the discussion on Point No. I, the attitude of the British Ministry to the Irish Amnesty question. Made a speech of about three-quarters of an hour, much cheered, and then proposed the following resolutions on Point No. I:

Resolved :

that in his reply to the Irish demands for the release of the imprisoned Irish patriots--a reply contained in his letter to Mr. O'Shea, etc., etc.--Mr. Gladstone deliberately insults the Irish nation;

that he clogs political amnesty with conditions alike degrading to the victims of misgovernment and, the people they belong to;

that having, in the teeth of his responsible position, publicly and enthusiastically cheered on the American slaveholders' rebellion, he now steps in to preach to the Irish people the doctrine of passive obedience;

that his whole proceedings with reference to the Irish Amnesty question are the true and genuine offspring of that "policy of conquest," by the fiery denunciation of which Mr. Gladstone ousted his Tory rivals from office;

that the General Council of the "International Workingmen's Association" express their admiration of the spirited, firm and high-souled manner in which the Irish people carry on their Amnesty movement;

that these resolutions be communicated to all branches of, workingmen's bodies connected with, the "International Workingmen's Association" in Europe and America.

Engels to Marx

In London

Abstract

Written: Manchester November 19, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

...And now for Carey.

The whole question at issue does not seem to me to have any direct connection with economics proper. Ricardo says, rent is the surplus yield of the more fertile pieces of land over that of the less fertile. Carey says just the same. ... They are therefore agreed on what rent is. The dispute is only about how rent arises. Now Ricardo's description of the process by which rent originates (Carey, p. 104) is just as unhistorical as all the similar detailed stories of the economists and as Carey's own great Robinson-Crusoeade about Adam and Eve (p. 96 seq.). In the older economists, including Ricardo, this is still excusable to a certain extent; they do not want any historical knowledge, they are just as unhistorical in their whole conception as the other apostles of the eighteenth century Enlightenment, with whom such alleged historical digressions are nothing more than a manner of speech enabling them to represent the origin of this, that or the other to themselves in a rational way, and in which primitive man always thinks and behaves exactly as if he were an apostle of eighteenth-century Enlightenment. But when Carey, who wants to develop his own historical theory, proceeds to introduce Adam and Eve to us as Yankee backwoodsmen, he cannot expect us to believe him, he has not the same excuse.

There would be no dispute at all if Ricardo had not been naive enough to call the more productive land simply "fertile." The most fertile and most favourably situated land "is, according to Ricardo, the first cultivated. Just the way a thoughtful bourgeois in a land that has been cultivated for centuries would be bound to represent the thing to himself. Now Carey fastens on to the "fertile," foists on to Ricardo the assertion that the lands most capable of productivity in themselves are those taken into cultivation, and says: No, on the contrary, the most naturally fertile lands (the valley of the Amazon, the Ganges delta, tropical Africa, Borneo and New Guinea, etc.) are not cultivated even yet; the first settlers, because they cannot help themselves, start cultivation on land which drains itself, namely, strips lying on hills and slopes, but these are by nature poorer land. And when Ricardo says: fertile and the most favourably situated, he is saying the same thing, without noticing that he is expressing himself loosely and that a contradiction can be introduced between these two qualifications connected by "and." But when Carey inserts a sketch on page 138 and declares that Ricardo puts his first settlers in the valley while Carey puts them on the hills (on bare crags and impracticable declivities of 45 degrees, in the sketch) he is simply lying about Ricardo.

Carey's historical illustrations, in so far as they refer to America, are the only useful thing in the book. As a Yankee he was able to live through the process of settlement himself and could follow it from the beginning: here, therefore, he knows all about it. Nevertheless there is no doubt a lot of uncritical stuff here as well, which would have first to be sifted out. But when he gets to Europe he begins inventing and making himself ridiculous. And that he is not unprejudiced even in America is indicated by the eagerness with which he attempts to prove the worthlessness, indeed the negative quality, of the value of the uncultivated land (that in some respects it is worth minus 10 dollars an acre) and praises the self-sacrifice of the societies which, to their own certain ruin, make waste land serviceable for mankind. Related of the country of colossal land jobbery, this produces a humorous effect. Moreover, he never mentions the prairie land here and it is very lightly touched upon elsewhere. The whole story of the negative value of the waste land and all the calculation he gives to prove it are after all best contradicted by America itself. If the story were true, America would not only be the poorest of countries, but would be becoming relatively poorer every year, because more and more labour would be thrown away on this worthless land.

Now as to his definition of rent: "The amount received as rent is interest upon the value of labour expended, minus the difference between the productive power (the rent-paying land) and that of the newer soils which can be brought into activity by the application of the same labour that has been there given to the work"--pp. 165-6. This may, within certain limits, have a certain amount of truth here and there, especially in America. But rent is in any case such a complicated thing, to which so many other circumstances contribute, that even in those cases, this definition could apply only if other things were equal, only to two pieces of land lying side by side. That "interest for the value of labour expended" is also contained in rent, Ricardo knew as well as he. If Carey declares the land as such to be worse than worthless then rent is bound of course to be either "interest upon the value of labour expended," or, as it is called on p. 39, theft. But he has still to show us the transition from theft to interest.

The origin of rent in different countries and even in one and the same country seems to me to be by no means such a simple process as both Ricardo and Carey imagine. In Ricardo, as I said, this is excusable; it is the story of the fishers and hunters in the sphere of agriculture. It is not in fact an economic dogma, but Carey wants to make a dogma out of his theory and prove it to the world--for which indeed historical studies of a very different sort from Mr. Carey's are necessary. There 'may even have been places where rent originated in Ricardo's way and others where it originated in Carey's way, and still others where its origin was entirely different. One might also remark to Carey that where fever has to be reckoned with, and above all tropical fever, economics pretty well cease to hold. Unless his theory of population means that with the increase of inhabitants the surplus population is obliged to begin work on the most fertile, i.e., the most unhealthy pieces of land, an attempt in which they either succeed or perish. If so, he has successfully established a harmony between himself and Malthus.

In Northern Europe, rent originated neither in Ricardo's nor in Carey's way, but simply from the feudal burdens which were later reduced to their right economic level by free competition. In Italy different again, see Rome. To calculate how much of the rent in the old civilised countries is really original rent and how much is interest for labour invested is impossible, because every case is different. Moreover it has no importance at all once it has been proved that rent can also increase where no labour is put into the land. The grandfather of Sir Humphrey de Trafford, in Old Trafford near Manchester, was so laden with debt that he did not know what to do. His grandson, after paying off all the debts, has an income of £40,000 a year. If we subtract about £10,000 of this, which comes from building land, £30,000 remains as the yearly value of the agricultural estate, which eighty years ago brought;n perhaps £2,000. Further, if £3,000 is taken as interest on invested labour and capital, which is a lot, there remains an increase of £25,000, or five times the former value, including the improvements. And all this, not because labour was put into it, but because labour was put into something else near by--because the estate lies close to a city like Manchester, where milk, butter and garden produce get a good price. It is just the same on a larger scale. From the moment England became a corn and cattle importing country, and even earlier, the density of population became a factor in the determination of rent, and particularly of rent-increases, quite independently of the labour invested in the land of England as a whole. Ricardo, with his "most favourably situated lands" includes the consideration of connection with the market as well, Carey ignores it. And if he were then to say that land itself only has a negative, but situation a positive value, he would have nevertheless admitted, what he denies, that land, just because it can be monopolised, has, or can have, a value independent of the labour invested in it. But on this point Carey is as quiet as a mouse.

It is equally indifferent whether the labour invested in the land in civilised countries pays regularly or not. More than 20 years ago I made the assertion that in our present society no instrument of production exists which can last from 60 to 100 years, no factory, no building, etc., which by the end of its existence has covered the cost of its production. I still think that one way and another this is perfectly true. And if Carey and I are both right, that proves nothing about the rate of profit or the origin of rent, it only proves that bourgeois production, even measured by its own standards, is rotten.

With these random comments on Carey you will no doubt have enough. They are very mixed because I made no extracts. As for the historical-materialistic-scientific trimming, its whole value = that of the two trees, the tree of life and the tree of knowledge, which he has planted in his Paradisical work, not indeed for Adam and Eve, who have to slave in the backwoods, but for their descendants. This wretched ignorant stuff can only be compared with the shamelessness which allows him to unburden himself of such nonsense.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: November 26, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

...In my book against Proudhon, [Poverty of Philosophy, ch. 2] where I still fully accepted Ricardo's theory of rent, I already showed what was false in it, even from Ricardo's own point of view.

"Ricardo, after having presupposed bourgeois production as necessary for the determination of rent, nevertheless applies it to landed property in every epoch and every country. These are the errors of all the economists, who regard the conditions of bourgeois production as eternal categories." Mr. Proudhon had of course immediately transformed Ricardo's theory into an expression of equalitarian moralty and therefore discovered in Ricardo's determination of rent, "an immense land valuation, carried out by farmers and landlords in opposition to one another...in a higher interest of which the final result must be to equalise the possession of the land between the exploiters of the soil and the industrialists."

Upon this I remark, among other things:

"In order that any valuation whatever, determined by rent, should have a practical value, it is always necessary to remain within the actual conditions of society. Now we have shown that the rent paid for his farm by a farmer to his landlord roughly expresses the rent only in those countries which are most advanced industrially and commercially. And this farm rent often also includes the interest paid to the landlord for the capital invested in the land. The situation of the land, the neighbourhood of towns and many other circumstances have their effect on the farming and modify the rent....On the other hand, rent cannot be a constant index of the degree of fertility possessed by a piece of land, since at each instant the modern application of chemistry comes in to change the nature of the soil, and it is precisely in the present day that geological knowledge is beginning to upset the old estimates of relative fertility .... fertility is not such a natural quality as might well be believed; it is intimately connected with existing social relations."

With regard to the progress of cultivation in the United States themselves, Mr. Carey ignores even the most familiar facts. The English agricultural chemist, Johnstone, for instance, shows in his Notes on the United States that the settlers who left New England for the State of New York left worse for better land (better not in Carey's sense, that the land has first to be made, but in the chemical and at the same time economic sense). The settlers from the State of New York who established themselves at first beyond the Great Lakes, say in Michigan, left better for worse land, etc. The settlers in Virginia exploited the land suited both in situation and fertility to their chief product, tobacco, so abominably that they had to move on to Ohio, where the land was less good for this product (though not for wheat, etc.). The nationality of the immigrants also asserted itself in their settlements. The people from Norway and from our high forest lands sought out the rough northern forest land of Wisconsin; the Yankees in the same province kept to the prairies, etc.

Prairies, both in the United States and Australia, are, in fact, a thorn in Carey's flesh. According to him land which is not absolutely overgrown with forests is infertile by nature-including, therefore, all natural pasture land.

The best of it is that Carey's two great final conclusions (relating to the United States) stand in direct contradiction to his dogma. First, owing to the diabolical influence of England, the inhabitants, instead of socially cultivating the good model lands of New England, are disseminated over the poorer(!) lands of the West. Progress therefore from better land to worse. (Carey's "dissemination," in opposition to "association," by the by, is all copied out of Wakefield). Second, in the south of the United States there is the unfortunate fact that the slaveowners (whom Mr. Carey, as a harmonist, has hitherto defended in all his previous works) take the better land into cultivation too soon and leave out the worst. In fact just what ought not to be: starting with the better land! If Carey had convinced himself by this instance that the real cultivators, in this case the slaves, were decided in this course neither by economic nor any other reason of their own, but by external force, it would have been obvious to him that this condition also exists in other lands.

According to his theory, cultivation in Europe should have started from the mountains of Norway and continued to the Mediterranean countries instead of proceeding in the reverse direction.

Carey tries, by a highly absurd and fantastic theory of money, to conjure away the awkward economic fact that, unlike all other improved machinery, the earth-machine, which according to him is always a better one, increases--(periodically at least)--the cost of its products instead of cheapening them. (This was one of the points which influenced Ricardo; he could see no further than his nose, namely, the history of corn prices in England from about 1780 to 1815).

As a harmonist, Carey first proved that there was no antagonism between capitalist and wage-labourer. The second step was to prove the harmony between landowner and capitalist, and this is done by taking landownership where it is still in an undeveloped state and representing this as normal. The great and decisive difference between the colonies and the old civilised countries, that in the latter the mass of the population is excluded from land and soil--whether fertile or unfertile, cultivated or uncultivated--by the system of landed property, while in the colony land can, relatively speaking, still be appropriated by the cultivator himself--this fact must not be mentioned whatever happens. It must have absolutely nothing to do with the rapid development of the colonies. The disagreeable "question of property" in its most disagreeable form, would indeed knock harmony off its feet.

As for the deliberate distortion that, because in a country with developed production the natural fertility of the soil is an important condition for the production of surplus value (or, as Ricardo says, affects the rate of profit), therefore the converse must also follow that the richest and most developed production will be found in the most naturally fertile lands, so that it must stand higher, e.g., in Mexico than in New England, I have already answered this in Capital, p. 502 et seq."

Carey's only merit is that he is just as one-sided in asserting the progress from worse to better lands as Ricardo is in asserting the opposite. In reality, different kinds of land, unequal in their degrees of fertility, are always cultivated simultaneously, and therefore the Germans, the Slavs and the Celts took this into account and made a very careful division of the strips of land of different kinds among the members of the community; it was this which later made the breaking up of the common lands so difficult. As to the progress of cultivation throughout the course of history, however, this, influenced by a mass of circumstances, sometimes takes place in both directions at once, sometimes one tendency prevails for a period and sometimes the other.

Interest on the capital embodied in the land becomes a part of the differential rent just because of the fact that the landowner gets this interest from capital which not he but the tenant-farmer has put into the land. This fact, known throughout Europe, is supposed to have no economic existence because the tenant system is not yet developed in the United States. But there the thing takes place in another form. The land jobber and not the farmer gets paid in the end, in the price of the land, for the capital invested by the latter. Indeed the history of the pioneers and land jobbers in the United States often reminds one of the worst horrors taking place, e.g., in Ireland.

Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann

In Hanover

Source: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels Selected correspondence Progress Publishers, 1975;

Written: 29 November 1869;

Transcribed: Rick Kuhn.

London, November 29, 1869

... You must seek for an explanation of my long and to a certain extent criminal silence in the vast amount of work with which I had to catch up, not only in my scientific studies but also in regard to the International; I had moreover to study Russian because of a book sent to me from Petersburg about the condition of the working class (of course peasants included) in Russia[a]; and, finally, that my state of health was by no means satisfactory.

You will probably have seen in the Volksstaat the resolutions against Gladstone proposed by me on the question of the Irish amnesty. I have now attacked Gladstone — and it has attracted attention here — just as I had formerly attacked Palmerston. The demagogic refugees here love to fall upon the Continental despots from a safe distance. That sort of thing attracts me only when it is done vultu instantis tyranni. [b]

Nevertheless, both my utterance on this Irish amnesty question and my further proposal in the General Council to discuss the attitude of the English working class to Ireland and to pass resolutions on it have of course other objects besides that of speaking out loudly and decidedly for the oppressed Irish against their oppressors.

I have become more and more convinced—and it is only a question of driving this conviction home to the English working class — that it can never do anything decisive here in England until it separates its policy with regard to Ireland most definitely from the policy of the ruling classes, until it not only makes common cause with the Irish but even takes the initiative in dissolving the Union established in 1801 and replacing it by a free federal relationship. And this must be done, not as a matter of sympathy with Ireland but as a demand made in the interests of the English proletariat. If not, the English people will remain tied to the leading-strings of the ruling classes, because it will have to join with them in a common front against Ireland. Every one of its movements in England itself is crippled by the strife with the Irish, who form a very important section of the working class in England. The primary condition of emancipation here—the overthrow of the English landed oligarchy—remains impossible because its position here cannot be stormed so long as it maintains its strongly entrenched outposts in Ireland. But, once affairs are in the hands of the Irish people itself, once it is made its own legislator and ruler, once it becomes autonomous, the abolition there of the landed aristocracy (to a large extent the same persons as the English landlords) will be infinitely easier than here, because in Ireland it is not merely a simple economic question but at the same time a national question, for the landlords there are not, like those in England, the traditional dignitaries and representatives of the nation, but its mortally hated oppressors. And not only does England’s internal social development remain crippled by her present relations with Ireland; but also her foreign policy, and in particular her policy with regard to Russia and the United States of America.

But since the English working class undoubtedly throws the decisive weight into the scale of social emancipation generally, the lever has to be applied here. As a matter of fact, the English republic under Cromwell met shipwreck in Ireland. Non bis in idem![c] The Irish have played a capital joke on the English government by electing the “convict felon” O’Donovan Rossa to Parliament. The government papers are already threatening a renewed suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, a renewed system of terror. In fact England never has and never can—so long as the present relations last—rule Ireland otherwise than by the most abominable reign of terror and the most reprehensible corruption...

Notes

a N. Flerovsky, The Condition of the Working Class in Russia.—Ed.

b Right in the face of the tyrant.—Ed.

c Not twice the same thing!—Ed.

Engels to Marx

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: November 29, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

The election in Tipperary [of O'Donovan Rossa, a Fenian prisoner] is an event. It forces the Fenians out of empty conspiracy and the fabrication of small coups into a path of action which, even if legal in appearance, is still far more revolutionary than what they have been doing since the failure of their insurrection. In fact, they are adopting the methods of the French workers and that is an enormous advance. If only the thing is carried on as intended. The terror which this new turn has produced among the philistines, and which is now being screeched throughout the whole Liberal press, is the best proof that this time the nail has been hit on the head. Typical is the Solicitors' Journal, which remarks with horror that the election of a political prisoner is without precedent in the realm of Britain! So much the worse--where is there a country except England in which such a case is not a common event! The worthy Gladstone must be horribly annoyed.

But you really ought to look at the Times now. Three leaders in eight days in which either it is demanded of the Government or the Government itself demands that an end be put to the excesses of the Irish Nationalist press.

I am very eager to hear about your debate to-morrow evening and its result, about which there can be no doubt. It would be very fine to get Odger into a hole. I hope Bradlaugh will stand for Southwark as well as he, and it would be much better if Bradlaugh were elected. For the rest, if the English workers cannot take an example from the peasants of Tipperary they are in a bad way....

Last week I waded through the tracts by old Sir John Davies (Attorney-General for Ireland under James). I do not know if you have read them, they are the main source; at any rate you have seen them quoted a hundred times. It is a real shame that one cannot have the original sources for everything; one can see infinitely more from them than from the second-hand versions which reduce everything that is clear and simple in the original to confusion and complexity.

From these tracts it is clear that communal property in land still existed in full force in Ireland in the year 1600, and this was brought forward by Mr. Davies in the pleas regarding the confiscation of the alienated lands in Ulster, as a proof that the land did not belong to the individual owners (peasants) and therefore either belonged to the lord, who had forfeited it, or from the beginning to the Crown. I have never read anything finer than this plea. The division took place afresh every two to three years. In another pamphlet he gives an exact description of the income, etc., of the chief of the clan. These things I have never seen quoted and if you can use them I will send them you in detail. At the same time I have nicely caught Monsieur Goldwin smith. This person has never read Davies and so puts up the most absurd assertions in extenuation of the English. But I shall get the fellow.....

Engels to Marx

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: December 9, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

...Ireland still remains the Holy Isle whose aspirations must on no account be mixed with the profane class-struggles of the rest of the sinful world. This is no doubt partly honest madness on the part of the people, but it is equally certain that it is also partly a calculation on the side of the leaders in order to maintain their domination over the peasant. Added to this, a nation of peasants always has to take its literary representatives from the bourgeoisie of the towns and their intelligentsia, and in this respect Dublin (I mean Catholic Dublin) is to Ireland much what Copenhagen is to Denmark. But to these gentry the whole labour movement is pure heresy and the Irish peasant must not on any account know that the Socialist workers are his sole allies in Europe.

Letter from Marx to Engels

In Manchester

Abstract

Written: December 11, 1869;

Source: Marx and Engels Correspondence;

Publisher: International Publishers (1968);

First Published: Gestamtausgabe;

Translated: Donna Torr;

Transcribed: Sally Ryan in 1999;

HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.

As to the Irish question....The way I shall put forward the matter next Tuesday is this: that quite apart from all phrases about "international" and "humane" justice for Ireland--which are to be taken for granted in the International Council--it is in the direct and absolute interest of the English working Glass to get rid of their present connection with Ireland. And this is my most complete conviction, and for reasons which in part I cannot tell the English workers themselves. For a long time I believed that it would be possible to overthrow the Irish regime by English working class ascendancy. I always expressed this point of view in the New York Tribune. Deeper study has now convinced me of the opposite. The English working class will never accomplish anything before it has got rid of Ireland. The lever must be applied in Ireland. That is why the Irish question is so important for the social movement in general.

I have read a lot of Davies in extracts. The book itself I had only glanced through superficially in the Museum. So you would do me a service if you would copy out the passages relating to common property. You must get Curran's Speeches edited by Davies, (London, James Duffy, 22 Paternoster Row.) I meant to have given it you when you were in London. It is now circulating among the English members of the Central Council and God knows when I shall see it again. For the period 1779-80 (Union) it is of decisive importance, not only because of Curran's speeches (especially the legal ones; I consider Curran the only great advocate--people's advocate--of the eighteenth century and the noblest nature, while Grattan was a parliamentary rogue) but because you will find quoted there all the sources for the United Irishmen. This period is of the highest interest, scientifically and dramatically. Firstly, the foul doings of the English in 1588-89 repeated (and perhaps even intensified) in 1788-89. Secondly, it can be easily proved that there was a class movement in the Irish movement itself. Thirdly, the infamous policy of Pitt. Fourthly, which will annoy the English gentlemen very much, the proof that Ireland came to grief because, in fact, from a revolutionary standpoint, the Irish were too far advanced for the English Church and King mob, while on the other hand the English reaction in England had its roots (as in Cromwell's time) in the subjugation of Ireland. This period must be described in at least one chapter. John Bull in the pillory!... As to the present Irish movement, there are three important factors: (1) opposition to lawyers and trading politicians and blarney ; (2) opposition to the dictates of the priests, who (the superior ones) are traitors, as in O'Connell's time, from 1789-1800; (3) the agricultural labouring class beginning to come out against the farming class at the last meetings. (A similar phenomenon in 1795-1800.)

The rise of the Irishman was only due to the suppression of the Fenian press. For a long time it had been in opposition to Fenianism. Luby, etc., of the Irish People, etc., were educated men who treated religion as a bagatelle. The government put them in prison and then came the Pigotts and Co. The Irishman will only be anything until those people come out of prison again. It is aware of this although it is making political capital now by declaiming for the "felon-convicts."

Engels to Marx

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Art and Literature, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

November 29, 1873

Yesterday I read the chapter on factory legislation in the French translation of [Capital]. With all due respect for the skill with which it has been translated into elegant French, I am sorry for that beautiful chapter. All its power and life’s blood have been sent to the devil. The mediocre writer castrates the language in order to express himself with a certain degree of elegance. It is becoming increasingly difficult to think in this modern constrained French. Already the sentence inversions, necessitated almost everywhere by pedantic formal logic, deprive the presentation of all its force and liveliness. I think it would be a grave mistake to use the French version as a basis for an English translation. The strength of expression in the original need not be diminished in English; whatever is inevitably lost from the truly dialectical passages will be balanced by the greater power and tenseness of the English language in many other passages.

Herr Kokosky, by the way, excuses his miserable translation by declaring that I write in the — very difficult “Liebknechtian-Marxian style.” What a compliment!

Marx to Sorge

Abstract

Source: Marx and Engels on the Trade Unions, Edited by Kenneth Lapides;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

August 4, 1874

In England the International is as good as dead for the present, although some of its members are active individually. The great event over here is the reawakening of the agricultural laborers. The miscarriage of their initial efforts does no harm, au contraire. As for the urban workers, it is regrettable that the whole gang of leaders did not get into Parliament. That is the surest way of getting rid of the rascals.

In France workers’ syndicates [trade unions] are being organized in the various big cities and are in correspondence with one another. They confine themselves to purely professional matters, nor can they do anything else. Otherwise they would be suppressed without further ado. Thus they keep some sort of organization, a point of departure for the time when freer movement will again be possible.

Friedrich Engels To Eduard Bernstein

March 10, 1882

Source:New International, Vol. I, No. 1, July 1934, pp. 15-16;

Also Published: in French in “Lettres sur Le Capital,” pp. 316-18;

Transcribed:by Daniel Gaido.

Dear Mr. Bernstein!

I am availing myself of an afternoon that has set in to write to you. As regards the Virgin Mary-Isis, this is a detail into which I would be unable to enter if only because of space, Mariolatry however belonging like all hagiolatry to a far later period than the one considered by me (a time when priestly calculation in the realm of the saints reproduced for the polytheistic peasant people its many tutelary gods), and finally the derivation would have to be proved historically too, for which special studies are required. Likewise with the halo and moonshine.[1] As for the rest, the Cult of Isis was part of the state religion in the imperial days in Rome.

Bimetallism. The main thing is that we, particularly after the ghastly boasting and bragging of many “leaders” about the economic superiority of our party over the bourgeois, something for which these same gentlemen are totally blameless-that we must be on our guard against laying ourselves open to such economic attacks, as these same gentlemen do so unceremoniously the minute they believe they can thereby flatter a certain type of worker, obtain an election victory or some other advantage. Just because silver is extracted in Saxony, they believe it is necessary to go in for the double standard swindle. In order to gain a couple of voters, our party is supposed to make itself awfully ridiculous in the field where its strength certainly ought to lie!

But that’s what our Messrs. literati are. Just like the bourgeois literati they believe they have the privilege of learning nothing and of arguing about everything. They have concocted a literature for us which seeks its equal in economic ignorance, new-fangled utopianism and arrogance, and which Bismarck did us a great favor to interdict.

In the question of the double standard it is not a question today so much of the double standard in general as of a specific double standard in the ratio gold to silver as 15½:1. This, then, to be singled out.

The double standard is rendered more impossible every day by the fact that the value relationship of gold and silver, formerly at least approximately constant and changing only slowly, is now subjected to daily and violent fluctuations, and first of all in the direction that silver falls in value as a result of the immensely increasing production, especially in North America. The exhaustion of gold is an invention of the silver barons. But be the reason for the change in the value what it will, the fact remains, and that is above all what we have to deal with. Silver loses more and more each day the capacity of serving as a measure of value, gold retains it.

The value relationship of the two is now around 17½:1. The silver people, however, want once more to dictate to the world the old relationship of 15½:1 and that is just as impossible as to maintain constantly and generally machine-spun yarn and fabrics at the price of hand-woven yarn and fabrics. The coiner’s die does not determine the value of coins, it guarantees the recipient only weight and alloy, it can never transfer to 15½ pounds of silver the value of 17½.

All this is so clearly and exhaustively dealt with in Capital, chapter on money (chapter 3, pp. 72 to 120) that there is nothing more to say about it. For material with regard to the latest fluctuations, cf. Soetbeer:Edelmetall, Production und Wertverhältnis, etc. (Gotha, Perthes, 1879). Soetbeer is a first-rate authority in this field and the father of German coin reform – he advocated the “Mark” of one-third of a Taler even before 1840.

So then:if silver is coined at 15½ pfennig = 1 pfennig gold, then it flows back into the state coffers, everybody tries to get rid of it. That was the experience of the United States with its silver dollar coined with the old content, which is worth only ninety cents, and likewise Bismarck, when he tried to put into circulation again by force the withdrawn silver Talers which had been replaced by gold.

Mr. Bank President Dechend imagines it possible by means of the double standard to pay off Germany’s debts abroad in bad silver instead of full-valued gold, and thus avert every gold crisis, which would certainly be very convenient for the Reichsbank [Federal Bank] if it would only work. But the only upshot of the whole thing is that Mr. Dechend himself demonstrates that he is totally incompetent to be bank president and belongs much rather on the school bench than on the Reichsbank.

The Prussian Junker would, to be sure, be likewise happy if he were able to pay back or pay interest in silver at 15½:1. And as this would have to be settled at home, such a bamboozling of the creditors by the debtors would certainly be workable-if the nobility could only find people to feed it silver d 17½:1 so that it might pay back at 15½:1. For his own means do not permit him the repayment. But he did have to take his silver at 15½ and so everything remained for him as of old.

Insofar as the German silver production is concerned, the extraction from German ore takes on a slighter position every year by the side of the (Rhenish) extraction from South American ore. 1876 total production in Germany:about 280,000 pounds, of which 58,000 out of South American ore, since then increasing even higher.

That the forcing down of silver to small change must still more reduce the value of silver, is clear; the consumption of silver for other purposes is trifling compared with its consumption for money, and therefore it does not increase because demonetization calls more silver on the market.

That England will ever introduce the double standard, is not to be thought of. No country which has the gold standard can now introduce the double standard again for any length of time. A general double standard is moreover already a general impossibility. If everybody were to agree that silver today is once more to have the value of 15½:1, they cannot alter the fact that it is worth only 17½:1, and there is absolutely nothing to be done about it. You could just as well adopt a decision that 2 x 2 should be 5.

Bamberger did us any number of services in our first period of exile, he was a very decent and obliging man, the secretary of Karl von Braunschweig. Afterwards we lost sight of him. Best greetings.

Fr. ENGELS.

1. The question was the historical connection between the cult of the Virgin Mary with the Jesus child and the cult of the goddess Isis, who bears the young god Horus in her arm. It has more than once been presumed that Mariolatry arose as an imitation of Isisolatry at about the time when the statues of the latter had lost their object. - Note by EDUARD BERNSTEIN.

Engels To Eduard Bernstein

Abstract

Source: Marx & Engels on the Irish Question, Progress Publishers, Moscow 1971;

Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan.

August 9,1882

You naturally presumed that, in view of our old friendship, Liebknecht had a perfect right to ask you to give him my letter[A], and that you were obliged to give it to him. I can see nothing in that for me to complain about. You could not know that four-fifths of the many differences I have had with Liebknecht were due to such arbitrary actions on his part, to public misuse of private letters, to notes on my articles which were silly or directly contradictory to the meaning of the text, etc. This time too he has used my letter in an unjustifiable way. The letter was written with direct reference to your article. Liebknecht treated it as if it were “my” interpretation of the entire Irish question. That is terribly frivolous, particularly when speeches by Davitt are advanced against it, which had not even been made when the letter was written, and which have nothing to do with it, since Davitt with his state ownership of the land is so far only a symptom. But Liebknecht always acts frivolously when he wants to demonstrate his “superiority.” I do not grudge him the fun, but he should not misuse my letters for that, and now he compels me to ask you in future (I want to express myself as correctly and diplomatically as possible) de lui donner- tout an plus — lecture de mes lettres sans cependant lui abandonner l’original ni lui en laisser copie. [B]

Notes

A.. See preceding letter. — Ed.

B.. To give him my letters to read, at the very most, without, however, leaving him the original or a copy. — Ed.

Engels to Friedrich Sorge

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Art and Literature, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

June 29, 1883

The critique of H. George, which Marx sent you, is so clearly a masterpiece in content, so stylistically monolithic, that it would be a shame to weaken it by adding the desultory English notes written in the margin of Marx’s copy. These can always be used later. This letter to you is written, as was Marx’s custom, with an eye to future publication in toto. You would therefore commit no indiscretion of you let it be printed. If it is to be published in English, I’ll do the translation for you since, as the translation of the Manifesto has shown once again, there seems to be no one over there who can convey our German into literary, grammatical English. For that one must have literary experience in both languages, and not only the experience of writing for the daily papers.

To translate the Manifesto is fearfully hard. The Russian translations are by far the best I’ve seen.

Engels to Eduard Bernstein

In London

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Art and Literature, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

July 12-13, 1883

The ass who wrote the article in the Vossische (and four different people have sent me a copy) seems to have stirred up a good deal of sorrow about the sorrowful Marx in our good old Germany. When I'm in the mood for some fun perhaps I'll give him a good kick. If these oxen ever read the correspondence between the Moor and myself, they would be struck dumb. Heine’s poetry is child’s play compared to our impudent, laughing prose. The Moor might have raged, but mope — jamais! I rolled with laughter when I re-read the old things. This correspondence, remarkable also from the historical point of view, is going to fall into the proper hands as far as it depends on me. Unfortunately I have Marx’s letters only from 1849 but these at least are complete.

Engels to Eduard Bernstein

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Art and Literature, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

February 5, 1884

Dear Bernstein,

One thing you can be sure of: I wish for no better translator than you. In the first folio, in endeavouring to reproduce the sense correctly and accurately, you somewhat neglected the syntax — voilà tout. In addition, I wanted to render Marx’s peculiar style, to which you are unaccustomed; hence the numerous alterations.

If, having once conveyed the sense in German, you read through the manuscript once more with a view to simplifying the syntax, and at the same time remember to avoid wherever possible clumsy, schoolmasterish syntax, which continually places the verb right at the end of the subordinate clause (and which we have all had crammed into. us), then you will encounter little difficulty and will yourself put everything in order.

Engels to Eduard Bernstein

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Art and Literature, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

June 29, 1884

So you, too, are finally coming round to the view that one can, after all, deal with the “wise men” quite well. I sent for a few copies of Neue Welt to get to know the gentlemen chez eux. So far, I've only read the editorial post column. German schoolboy impudence, which assumes a very tame readership.

For the rest, don’t allow yourself to be drawn by pinpricks, that is the first rule in battle. Remember that:

There’s nothing nicer in this world

Than all one’s foes to answer back,

Than about all those clumsy blokes

One’s feeble little jokes to crack.

Engels to Minna Kautsky

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Art and Literature;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

London, November 26, 1885

I have now also read Die Alten und die Neuen [The Old Ones and the New, a novel by Minna Kautsky], for which I sincerely thank you. The life of the salt-mine workers is described with as masterly a pen as were the portraits of the peasants in Stefan. The descriptions of the life of Vienna society are for the most part likewise very fine. Vienna is indeed the only German city which has a society; Berlin possesses merely “certain circles,” and still more uncertain ones, that is why its soil produces only novels about men of letters, officials or actors. You are in a better position to judge whether the plot in this part of your work develops sometimes too rapidly. Many things that may give us this impression, perhaps look quite natural in Vienna considering the city’s peculiar international character and its intermixture with Southern and East-European elements. In both spheres the characters exhibit the sharp individualisation so customary in your work. Each of them is a type but at the same time also a definite individual, a “Dieser,” as old Hegel would say, and that is how it should be. And now, to be impartial, I have to find fault with something, which brings me to Arnold. He is really much too worthy a man and when he is finally killed in a landslide one can reconcile this with poetic justice only by assuming that he was too good for this world. But it is always bad if an author adores his own hero and this is the error which to some extent you seem to me to have fallen into here. In Elsa there is still a certain individualisation, though she is also idealised, but in Arnold the personality merges still more in the principle.

The novel itself reveals the origins of this shortcoming. You obviously felt a desire to take a public stand in your book, to testify to your convictions before the entire world. This has now been done; it is a stage you have passed through and need not repeat in this form. I am by no means opposed to partisan poetry as such. Both Aeschylus, the father of tragedy, and Aristophanes, the father of comedy, were highly partisan poets, Dante and Cervantes were so no less, and the best thing that can be said about Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe is that it represents the first German political problem drama. The modern Russians and Norwegians, who produce excellent novels, all write with a purpose. I think however that the purpose must become manifest from the situation and the action themselves without being expressly pointed out and that the author does not have to serve the reader on a platter — the future historical resolution of the social conflicts which he describes. To this must be added that under, our conditions novels are mostly addressed to readers from bourgeois circles, i.e., circles which are not directly ours. Thus the socialist problem novel in my opinion fully carries out its mission if by a faithful portrayal of the real conditions it dispels the dominant conventional illusions concerning them, shakes the optimism of the bourgeois world, and inevitably instils doubt as to the eternal validity of that which exists, without itself offering a direct solution of the problem involved, even without at times ostensibly taking sides. Here your exact knowledge and admirably fresh and lifelike presentation of both the Austrian peasants and Vienna “society” find ample material, and in Stefan you have demonstrated that you are capable of treating your characters with the fine irony which attests to the author’s dominion over the beings he has created.

But now I must finish, or I shall bore you to tears. Everything here is as before. Karl and his wife [Karl and Louise Kautsky] are studying physiology in Aveling’s evening classes, and are also working diligently; I am likewise engrossed in work; Lenchen, Pumps and her husband are going to the theatre this evening to see a sensational play, and meanwhile old Europe is preparing to set itself in motion again — and not before time, perhaps. I simply hope that it gives me time to finish the third volume of Capital, then it can begin!

In cordial friendship and with sincere respect I am Yours,

F. Engels

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Art and Literature, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

November 16, 1889

Anyhow you have done a marvellous thing in the Senator, about the most difficult thing on earth to be put into English. Not only that you have done it with all the proper impropriety, but even with a near approach to the lightness of the original. And that while both subject and metre are rebellious to translation, the senator of Empire No. 142 being an unknown quantity over here. If you were a boy I should say: Molodetz, but I am not versed enough in Russian to know whether that epithet (equal about to the English: you're a brick!) can be feminised into: Molodtza!

Engels to Laura Lafargue

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Art and Literature, Progress Publishers, 1976;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

January 8, 1890

My dear Laura,

Prosit Neujahr avant tout! Et puis après, as I cannot bear the idea you should translate Walther von der Vogelweide from a modernisation, I send you a copy of the original. You are quite right, the metre and rhyme of the original ought to be preserved in every translation of poetry, or else go the whole hog like the French and turn it at once into prose.

REL="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://www.marxists.org/css/works.css">

Engels to J. Bloch

In Berlin

London, September 21, 1890

Source: New International, Vol.1 No.3, September-October 1934, pp.81-85;

Translated: Sidney Hook;

Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan in 2006.

The letters to Schmidt, Starkenburg and Bloch were first brought to light by Eduard Bernstein in his Documente des Socialismus in 1902. They were first translated into English by Sidney Hook as an appendix to his Towards an Understanding of Karl Marx. New International are indebted to the author and his publishers, The John Day Co., for their kind permission to reprint the letters. With one exception, the foot-notes are from the German edition edited by Dr. Hermann Duncker. By arrangement, we have made certain minor emendations in the translation on the basis of the original text.

Dear Sir:

YOUR letter of the 3rd inst. was forwarded to me at Folkestone; but as I did not have the book in question there, I could not answer you. Returning home on the 12th I discovered such a pile of urgent work waiting for me, that only today have I found the time to write you a few lines. This in explanation of the delay which I hope you will kindly pardon.

To Point I. [2] First of all you will please note on p.19 of the Origin that the process of development of the Punaluan family is presented as having taken place so gradually that even in this century marriages of brother and sister (of one mother) have taken place in the royal family of Hawaii. And throughout antiquity we find examples of marriages between brother and sister, e.g., among the Ptolemies. Secondly, we must here distinguish between brother and sister deriving from the side of the mother, or deriving only from the side of the father; adelphos, adelphse come from delphos, womb, and originally signified, therefore, only brother and sister on the side of the mother. The feeling had survived a long time from the time of the mother-right that the children of the same mother who have different fathers, are more closely related than the children of the same father who have different mothers. The Punaluan form of the family excludes only marriages between the first group, but by no means between the second who according to the existing notion are not even related (since mother-right rules). As far as I know, the cases of marriage between brother and sister in ancient Greece are restricted either to those individuals who have different mothers or to those about whom this is not known, and for whom, therefore, the possibility is not excluded; hence, they are absolutely not in contradiction to the Punaluan usage. You have overlooked the fact that between the time of the Punaluan family and the time of Greek monogamy there lies the jump from the matriarchate to the patriarchate, which alters matters considerably.

According to Wachsmuth’s Hellen. Altertumern, in the heroic age of Greece, “there is no sign of any concern about the too close blood relationship of husband and wife, except for the relation of parent and child” (III, p.156). “Marriage with one’s own sister was not disapproved of in Crete” (ibid., p.170). The last also according to Strabo, Bk.X, for the moment however, I cannot find the passage because of the absence of chapter divisions. – By one’s own sister I understand, until there is proof to the contrary, sisters on the father’s side.

To Point II. [3] I qualify your first major proposition as follows: According to the materialistic conception of history, the production and reproduction of real life constitutes in the last instance the determining factor of history. Neither Marx nor I ever maintained more. Now when someone comes along and distorts this to mean that the economic factor is the sole determining factor, he is converting the former proposition into a meaningless, abstract and absurd phrase. The economic situation is the basis but the various factors of the superstructure – the political forms of the class struggles and its results – constitutions, etc., established by victorious classes after hard-won battles – legal forms, and even the reflexes of all these real struggles in the brain of the participants, political, jural, philosophical theories, religious conceptions and their further development into systematic dogmas – all these exercize an influence upon the course of historical struggles, and in many cases determine for the most part their form. There is a reciprocity between all these factors in which, finally, through the endless array of contingencies (i.e., of things and events whose inner connection with one another is so remote, or so incapable of proof, that we may neglect it, regarding it as nonexistent) the economic movement asserts itself as necessary. Were this not the case, the application of the history to any given historical period would be easier than the solution of a simple equation of the first degree.

We ourselves make our own history, but, first of all, under very definite presuppositions and conditions. Among these are the economic, which are finally decisive. But there are also the political, etc. Yes, even the ghostly traditions, which haunt the minds of men play a role albeit not a decisive one. The Prussian state arose and developed also through historical, in the last instance, economic causes. One could hardly, however, assert without pedantry that among the many petty principalities of North Germany, just Brandenburg was determined by economic necessity and not by other factors also (before all, its involvement in virtue of its Prussian possessions, with Poland and therewith international political relations – which were also decisive factors in the creation of the Austrian sovereign power) to become the great power in which was to be embodied the economic, linguistic and, since the Reformation, also the religious differences of North and South. It would be very hard to attempt to explain by economic causes, without making ourselves ridiculous, the existence of every petty German state of the past or present, or the origin of the shifting of consonants in High-German, which reinforced the differences that existed already in virtue of the geographical separating wall formed by the mountains from Sudeten to Taunus.

Secondly, history is so made that the end-result always arises out of the conflict of many individual wills, in which every will is itself the product of a host of special conditions of life. Consequently there exist innumerable intersecting forces, an infinite group of parallelograms of forces which give rise to one resultant product – the historical event. This again may itself be viewed as the product of a force acting as a whole without consciousness or volition. For what every individual wills separately is frustrated by what every one else wills and the general upshot is something which no one willed. And so the course of history has run along like a natural process; it also is subject essentially to the same laws of motion. But from the fact that the wills of individuals – who desire what the constitution of their body as well as external circumstances, in the last instance economic (either personal or social) impel them to desire – do not get what they wish, but fuse into an average or common resultant, from all that one has no right to conclude that they equal zero. On the contrary, every will contributes to the resultant and is in so far included within it.

I should further like to beg of you to study the theory from its original sources and not at second hand. It is really much easier. Marx hardly wrote a thing in which this theory does not play a part. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Bonaparte is an especially remarkable example of its application. There are many relevant passages also in Capital. In addition, permit me to call your attention to my own writings, Herrn E. Dühring’s Umwälzung der Wissenschaft and L. Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie where I give the most comprehensive exposition of historical materialism which to my knowledge exists anywhere.

Marx and I are partly responsible for the fact that at times our disciples have laid more weight upon the economic factor than belongs to it. We were compelled to emphasize this main principle in opposition; to our opponents who denied it, and there wasn’t always time, place and occasion to do justice to the other factors in the reciprocal interaction. But just as soon as it was a matter of the presentation of an historical chapter, that is to say, of practical application, things became quite different; there, no error was possible. Unfortunately it is only too frequent that a person believes he has completely understood a new theory and is capable of applying it when he has taken over its fundamental ideas – but it isn’t always true. And from this reproach I cannot spare many of the recent “Marxists”. They have certainly turned out a rare kind of tommyrot.

To Point I again. Yesterday (I am writing now on the 22nd of September), I found the following decisive passage, in Schoe-mann’s Griechische Altertümer (Berlin, 1855, I, p.52), which completely confirms the view taken above: “It is well known, however, that marriages between half-brothers or sisters of different mothers was not regarded as incest in late Greece.”

I hope that the appalling parenthetical expressions which, for brevity’s sake, have slipped from my pen, won’t frighten you off, and I remain.

Footnote

2. Bloch had asked how it came about that even after the disappearance of the consanguine family, marriages between brother and sister were not forbidden among the Greeks, as may be concluded from Nepos. – H.D.

3. Bloch had asked how the fundamental principle of the materialistic conception of history was understood by Marx and Engels themselves; whether the production and reproduction of real life constituted the sole determining factor or were only the foundation upon which all other relations developed a further activity of their own. – H.D.

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Engels to Conrad Schmidt

In Berlin

London, October 27 1890

Source: New International, Vol.1 No.3, September-October 1934, pp.81-85;

Translated: Sidney Hook;

Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan in 2006.

The letters to Schmidt, Starkenburg and Bloch were first brought to light by Eduard Bernstein in his Documente des Socialismus in 1902. They were first translated into English by Sidney Hook as an appendix to his Towards an Understanding of Karl Marx. New International are indebted to the author and his publishers, The John Day Co., for their kind permission to reprint the letters. With one exception, the foot-notes are from the German edition edited by Dr. Hermann Duncker. By arrangement, we have made certain minor emendations in the translation on the basis of the original text.

London, October 27, 1890.

Dear Schmidt:

SEIZE the first free moment to write you. I think you would be well advised to accept the position at Zurich. [1] You can always learn considerably about economic matters there, especially if you bear in mind that Zurich is still only a third-rate money and speculation market, and that, consequently, the effects which make themselves felt there are weakened, and indeed deliberately falsified by double and triple-fold refraction. But one acquires a practical knowledge of the business and is compelled to follow first-hand market reports from London, New York, Paris, Berlin, Vienna – and the world market is then revealed in its reflected form as money and security market. Of the economic, political and other reflections the same thing is true as of the images in the human eye. They all pass through a convex lens and therefore appear upside down, standing on their head. Only the nervous system is lacking to set them right on their feet again. The money-market expert sees the movement of industry and the world market only in the inverted reflection of the money and security market, and takes the effect for the cause. I saw that take place as far back as the Forties in Manchester. The London market reports were absolutely useless as a guide to the development of industry and its periodic maxima and minima because m’lords wanted to explain everything as arising from the crises in the money market which were, after all, only symptoms. Behind the matter at that time was the desire to explain away the fact that industrial crises arose out of temporary overproduction; in addition there was a bias which invited distortion. This last is now irrelevant – once for all, at least for us; besides it is a fact, that the money market can also have its own crises, in which direct industrial disturbances play only a subordinate role or none whatever. In this connection there is still much to be ascertained and investigated especially in the last twenty years.

Wherever there is a division of labor on a social scale, there will also be found the growing independence of workers in relation to each other. Production is in the last instance the decisive factor. However, as soon as the commercial exchange of commodities separates itself from actual production it follows a movement which, although as a whole still dominated by production, in turn obeys in its particular details and within the sphere of its general dependence, its own laws. These flow from the nature of the new factor involved. This movement has its own phases and reacts in turn upon the course of production. The discovery of America resulted from the hunger for money, which had already driven the Portuguese to Africa (cf. Soetbeer’s Edelmetall-Produktion), because the tremendous expansion of European industry in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries together with the corresponding commercial activity demanded more means of exchange than Germany – the great silver country from 1450 to 1550 – could provide. The conquest of India by the Portuguese, Dutch, and English from 1500 to 1800 was undertaken for the sake of imports from India. At that time no one thought of exports. And yet what colossal counter-effects these discoveries and conquests which were determined purely by interests of trade, had upon exports to those countries and upon the development of large scale industry. The same is true for the money market. Just as soon as dealing in money is separated from commodity exchange, it acquires a development of its own, special laws determined by its particular nature, and its own phases. Yet they all take place within the given limits and conditions of production and commodity exchange. Where dealing in money is extended in the course of its further evolution to include securities that are not merely government consols but industrials and railroad stocks, and thereby wins direct control over a phase of the production which as a whole controls it, the reaction of the money market upon production becomes all the stronger and more complicated. The investment bankers are the owners of railroads, mines, steel mills, etc. These means of production take on a double aspect: business has to be run now with an eye to the interests of direct production, and now with an eye to the needs of the stock-holders in so far as they are money lenders. The crassest illustration of this is furnished by the activities of the North American railroads which depend completely, upon the immediate market operations of a Jay Gould, Vanderbilt and others – operations that are totally foreign to the road in question and its interests as a common carrier. And even here in England we have witnessed decades of struggle between different railway companies in competitive territories in which an enormous amount of money went up in smoke not in the interest of production and communication but solely because of a rivalry whose main function was to make possible market operations of the wealthy stock-holders.

In these few intimations of my conception of the relation between production and commodity exchange, and of both to the money market, I have already answered in essence your questions concerning historical materialism in general. The matter can most easily be grasped from the standpoint of the division of labor. Society gives rise to certain public functions which it cannot dispense with. The people who are delegated to perform them constitute a new branch of the division of labor within society. They acquire therewith special interests in opposition even to those who have designated them; make themselves independent of them, and the state is here. And now the same thing takes place as in commodity exchange and later in money exchange: while the new independent power must, on the whole, submit to the movement of production, in turn it also reacts, by virtue of its immanent, i.e., its once transmitted but gradually developed relative independence, upon the conditions and course of production. There is a reciprocity between two unequal forces; on the one side, the economic movement; on the other, the new political power which strives for the greatest possible independence and which having once arisen is endowed with its own movement. The economic movement, upon the whole, asserts itself but it is affected by the reaction of the relatively independent political movement which it itself had set up. This political movement is on the one hand the state power, on the other, the opposition which comes to life at the same time with it. Just as the money market reflects, on the whole, with the qualifications indicated, the movement of the industrial market, but naturally in an inverted fashion, so there is reflected in the struggle between government and opposition, the struggle between already existing and contending classes but again in an inverted form, no longer direct but indirect, not as a class struggle but as a struggle for political principles. So inverted is this reflection that it required thousands of years to discover what was behind it.

The reaction of the state power upon economic development can take a three-fold form. It can run in the same direction, and then the tempo of development becomes accelerated; it can buck up against that development in which case today in every large nation the state power is sure to go to smash for good; or it can block economic development along some directions and lay down its path along others. This last case is ultimately reducible to one of either of the foregoing two. It is clear that in the second and third cases the political power can do great damage to the course of economic development and result in a great waste of energy and materials.

We must add to the above the case of conquest and brutal destruction of economic resources in which under certain circumstances it was possible in the past for a local or national economic development to be completely destroyed. Today cases of this kind usually produce opposite effects, at least among the large nations. Often it is the conquered who in the long run wins more economically, politically and morally than the conqueror.

The same is true for law. Just as soon as the necessity arises for the new division of labor which creates professional jurists, another new independent domain is opened which, for all its dependence upon production and trade in general, still possesses a special capacity to react upon these fields. In a modern state, law must not only correspond to the general economic situation and be its expression; it must also be its coherently unified expression, free from glaring internal inconsistencies. In order to achieve this, the fidelity with which the law reflects economic conditions constantly diminishes. This is all the truer, the more rarely it happens, that the legal code expresses the harsh, unrelieved and naked fact of class rule. For that contradicts the very “concept of law”. The pure and consistent jural concept of the revolutionary bourgeoisie of 1792-96 already appears falsified in many respects in the Code Napoleon. And in so far as it is incorporated it is subject to daily modifications of all kinds because of the growing power of the proletariat. That doesn’t prevent the Code Napoleon from serving as a legal model for new codifications of law in all parts of the world. The course of “legal development” consists, in large part, first in the attempt to erect an harmonious system of law by eliminating the contradictions flowing from the direct translation of economic relations into jural propositions; and then in the fact that the influence and compulsion exerted by the further economic development keeps on upsetting the system and plunging it into new contradictions. (I speak here for the time being only of civil law.)

The reflection of economic relations as principles of law is necessarily also an inverted one. The process takes place without the participants becoming conscious of it. The jurist imagines that he is operating with a priori propositions, while the latter are after all only reflections of the economic process. And so everything remains standing on its head. This inverted reflex so long as it is not recognized for what it is constitutes what we call ideological conceptions. That it is able to exert a reactive influence on the economic basis and within certain limits to modify it, seems to me to be self-evident. The foundations of the law of inheritance, corresponding stages in the development of the family being presupposed, are economic. Nonetheless it would be very hard to prove that, e.g., the absolute freedom of testamentary disposition in England, and the strongly restricted right in France. in all particulars have only economic causes. Yet both methods react in a very significant way upon the economic system in that they influence the distribution of wealth.

And now as concerns those ideological realms which tower still higher in the clouds – religion, philosophy, etc. – they all possess from pre-historical days an already discovered and traditionally accepted fund of – what we would today call idiocy. All of these various mistaken ideas of nature, of the very creation of man, of spirits, magical forces, etc., have as their basis, in the main, negative economic grounds. The primitive economic development of the pre-historical period is supplemented by false ideas of nature, but in places it is often also conditioned and even caused by them. However, even if economic need has been the chief driving force in the advance of natural knowledge, and has become even more so, it would be altogether pedantic to seek economic causes for all this primitive idiocy. The history of science is the history of the gradual elimination of this idiocy, i.e., its replacement by new, but always less absurd, idiocy. The people who supply it belong again to special spheres in the division of labor and imagine that they are working up an independent domain. And in so far as they constitute an independent group within the social division of labor, their products, inclusive of their errors, exerts a counter-acting influence upon the entire social development, even upon the economic. Nonetheless they still remain under the dominant influence of economic development. For example, in philosophy this is easiest to demonstrate for the bourgeois period. Hobbes was the first modern materialist (in the spirit of the eighteenth century) but an absolutist at a time when in the whole of Europe absolute monarchy was enjoying the height of its power and in England had taken up the struggle against the people. Locke was, in religion as in politics, a son of the class-compromise of 1688. The English Deists, and their more consistent followers, the French materialists, were the genuine philosophers of the bourgeoisie – the French, even of the bourgeois revolution. In German philosophy from Kant to Hegel the German philistine makes his way – now positively, now negatively. But as a definite domain within the division of labor, the philosophy of every age has as its presuppositions a certain intellectual material which it inherits from its predecessors and which is its own point of departure. That is why philosophy can play first violin in economically backward countries: France in the eighteenth century as opposed to England upon whose philosophy her own was based; and later Germany as opposed to both. But in France as in Germany, philosophy, like the general outburst of literary activity of that time, was a result of an economic upswing. The final supremacy of economic development even in these realms is now established but it takes place within the conditions which are set down by the particular realm: in philosophy, e.g., through the effect of economic influences (which in turn exert influence through disguised political, etc., forms) upon the existing philosophical material which our predecessors have handed down. Of itself economics produces no effects here directly; but it determines the kind of change and development the already existing intellectual material receives, and even that, for the most part, indirectly, since it is the political, jural and moral reflexes which exercize the greatest direct influence upon philosophy.

I have said what is necessary about religion in the last section on Feuerbach.

If Barth imagines that we deny all and every retroaction of the political, etc., reflexes of the economic movement upon that movement itself, he is simply contending against windmills. He ought at least take a glance at Marx’s Eighteenth Brumaire, which almost restricts itself to the treatment of the special role that political struggles and events play, naturally within the sphere of their general dependence upon economic conditions; or in Capital, e.g., the section on the working day, where legislation, which certainly is a political act, operates so decisively; or the section on the history of the bourgeoisie (Chap.24). Or else, why are we struggling for the political dictatorship of the proletariat, if political power has no economic effects? Force (i.e., the state power) is also an economic power!

But I have no time at present to criticize the book. The third volume must first come out, and besides I believe that, for example, even Bernstein can do the job quite well.

What all these gentlemen lack is dialectics. All they ever see is cause here, effect there. They do not at all see that this is a bare abstraction; that in the real world such metaphysical polar opposites exist only in crises; that the whole great process develops itself in the form of reciprocal action, to be sure of very unequal forces, in which the economic movement is far and away the strongest, most primary and decisive. They do not see that here nothing is absolute and everything relative. For them Hegel has never existed. Yours, etc.

Footnotes

1. Conrad Schmidt had written Engels that he intended to take over the commercial section of a Zurich newspaper. – H.D.

Engels to Franz Mehring

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Art and Literature;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

April 11, 1893

I am glad that The Lessing Legend has appeared as a separate book; works of this kind suffer greatly from being broken up. It was highly creditable on your part to have worked through the chaos of Prussian history and indicated the correct interconnections; current realities in Prussia make this absolutely necessary, no matter how unpleasant the work is in itself. I am not in complete agreement with your opinion on certain points, particularly in places concerning the causal links with the preceding period, but this does not prevent your book from being by far the best there is on this period of German history.

Engels to Karl Kautsky

Abstract

Source: Marx Engels On Art and Literature;

Transcribed: by Andy Blunden.

June 1, 1893

Your Berlin correspondent is certainly highly subjective, but he knows how to write and has a very good grasp of the materialist conception of historical events; I would not always say the same of his understanding of current events. The Lessing Legend was first-rate, although I place a different interpretation on certain points.

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Engels to Franz Mehring

London, July 14, 1893

Abstract

Source: New International, Vol.1 No.3, September-October 1934, pp.81-85;

Translated: Sidney Hook;

Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan in 2006.

YOU have expressed [5] the main facts admirably and for every open-minded person convincingly. If I were to take exception to anything, it would be to the fact that you ascribe more credit to me than I deserve, even if I include everything I could have possibly discovered in the course of time by myself; but which Marx with his quicker coup d’œil and greater breadth of view, discovered much sooner. When one has had the good fortune to work together for forty years with a man like Marx, one does not during his lifetime usually receive the appreciation one believes he deserves. But just as soon as the greater of the two dies, the lesser is easily overrated. That seems to be the case with me right now. History, however, will take care of all that and by that time one is happily here no longer and cares nothing at all about it.

Only one point is lacking which Marx and I did not stress systematically enough in our writings and in relation to which we are equally to blame. Namely, we both placed and had to place the chief weight upon the derivation of political, legal and other ideological notions, as well as the actions which they led up to, from fundamental economic facts. In consequence we neglected the formal side, i.e., the way in which these ideas, etc., arose, for the sake of the content. That gave our opponents a welcome occasion for misunderstanding. Paul Barth is a striking example.

Ideology is a process which of course is carried on with the consciousness of the so-called thinker but with a false consciousness. The real driving forces which move him, he remains unaware of, otherwise it would :not be an ideological process. He therefore imagines false or apparent driving forces. Because it is a thought process, he derives both its content and form from pure thought, either his own or that of his predecessors. He works with purely conceptual material which he unwittingly takes over as the product of thought and therefore does not investigate its relations to a process further removed from and independent of thought. Indeed this seems to him self-evident, for it appears to him that since all activity is mediated by thought, it is ultimately grounded in thought.

The historical ideologist (and historical here simply takes in political, jural, philosophical, theological, in short, all domains which belong to society and not merely to nature) – the historical ideologist is confronted in every scientific field by material which has been built up independently out of the thought of earlier generations, and which through the minds of these successive generations has undergone an independent development peculiar to itself. External facts from this or other fields may have contributed to determine this development but these facts, according to the tacit presupposition made, are themselves mere fruits of a thought process. And so we still remain in the realm of pure thought which has succeeded so well in digesting even the toughest facts. It is this appearance of an independent history of state constitutions, systems of law, of ideologies in every special field, which, above all, has blinded so many people. When Luther and Calvin “transcend” the official Catholic religion; when Hegel “transcends” Fichte and Kant; and Rousseau, indirectly with his contrat social, the constitutionalist, Montesquieu – it is a process which remains within theology, philosophy and political science. It merely represents a stage in the history of these intellectual domains and never emerges from the field of pure thought at .all. And ever since the illusion of the eternity and ultimacy of the system of capitalist production has been added, even the refutation of the Mercantilists by the physiocrats and A. Smith has been regarded not as the intellectual reflection of altered economic realities, but only as a victory of thought, as a correct insight, won at last, into actual conditions existing always and everywhere. If only Richard the Lion-hearted, and Philip Augustus, had introduced free trade, instead of involving themselves in crusades, five hundred years of misery and stupidity would have been spared us.

This side of the matter, which I can here only indicate, we have all neglected, I think, more than it deserved. It’s the old story. In the beginning the form is always neglected for the content As already said, I myself have made that error and it has always occurred to me only post festum. I am far from reproaching you with it. As an old sinner in this respect I have hardly the right, just the contrary. But I do wish to call your attention to this point for the future.

This is bound up with the stupid conception of the ideologists. Because we denied that the different ideological spheres, which play a part in history, have an independent historical development, we were supposed therewith to have denied that they have any historical efficacy. At the basis of this is the ordinary undialectical notion of cause and effect as fixed, mutually opposed, polar relations, and a complete disregard of reciprocity. These gentlemen forget, almost intentionally, that an historical factor, once it has been brought into the world by other – ultimately economic facts – thereupon also reacts upon its surroundings and even affects its own causes. Thus Barth, e.g., in connection with priesthood and religion, on p.475 in your book ...

Friedrich Engels

Footnote

5. The reference is to Mehring’s On Historical Materialism which appeared as an appendix to the first edition of his Lessing-Legende in 1893; in it he settled accounts with the then lecturer on philosophy at Leipzig, Paul Barth, mentioned by Engels elsewhere in these letters. – Ed.

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Engels to Borgius

London, January 25, 1894

Source: New International, Vol.1 No.3, September-October 1934, pp.81-85;

Translated: Sidney Hook;

Transcribed: by Einde O’Callaghan in 2006.

This letter was first published without any mention of the addressee in the journal Der socialistische Akademiker No 20, 1895, by its contributor H. Starkenburg. As a result Starkenburg was wrongly identified as the addressee in all previous editions.- from Progress Publishers, 1968.

The letters to Schmidt, Starkenburg and Bloch were first brought to light by Eduard Bernstein in his Documente des Socialismus in 1902. They were first translated into English by Sidney Hook as an appendix to his Towards an Understanding of Karl Marx. New International are indebted to the author and his publishers, The John Day Co., for their kind permission to reprint the letters. With one exception, the foot-notes are from the German edition edited by Dr. Hermann Duncker. By arrangement, we have made certain minor emendations in the translation on the basis of the original text.- New International 1934

Dear Sir:

HERE are the answers to your questions [4]: 1. By economic relations, which we regard as the determining basis of the history of society, we understand the way in which human beings in a definite society produce their necessities of life and exchange the products among themselves (in so far as division of labor exists). Consequently the whole technique of production and transportation is therein included. According to our conception, this technique determines the character and method of exchange, further, the distribution of the products and therewith, after the dissolution of gentile society, the division into classes, therewith, the relationships of master and slave, therewith, the state, politics, law, etc. Under economic relations are included further, the geographical foundations upon which they develop and actually inherited remains of earlier economic stages of development which have, persisted, often through tradition only or vis inertia, and also, naturally, the external milieu surrounding this social form.

If the technique, as you properly say, is for the most part dependent upon the state of science, then so much the more is science dependent upon the state and needs of technique. If society has a technical need, it serves as a greater spur to the progress of science than do ten universities. The whole of hydrostatics (Torricelli, etc.) was produced by the need of controlling the mountain streams in Italy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We only acquired some intelligible knowledge about electricity when its technical applicability was discovered. Unfortunately, in Germany, people have been accustomed to write the history of the sciences as if the sciences had fallen from the sky.

2. We regard the economic conditions as conditioning, in the last instance, historical development. But race is itself an economic factor. But there are two points here which must not be overlooked.

(a) The political, legal, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development rest upon the economic. But they all react upon one another and upon the economic base. It is not the case that the economic situation is the cause, alone active, and everything else only a passive effect. Rather there is a reciprocal interaction with a fundamental economic necessity which in the last instance always asserts itself. The state, e.g., exerts its influence through tariffs, free trade, good or bad taxation. Even that deadly supineness and impotence of the German philistine which arose out of the miserable economic situation of Germany from 1648 to 1830 and which expressed itself first in pietism, then in sentimentalism and crawling servility before prince and noble, were not without their economic effects. They constituted one of the greatest hindrances to an upward movement and were only cleared out of the way by the revolutionary and Napoleonic wars which made the chronic misery acute. Hence, it is not true, as some people here and there conveniently imagine, that economic conditions have an automatic effect. Men make their own history, but in a given, conditioning milieu, upon the basis of actual relations already extant, among which, the economic relations, no matter how much they are influenced by relations of a political and ideological order, are ultimately decisive, constituting a red thread which runs through all the other relations and enabling us to understand them.

(b) Men make their own history but until now not with collective will according to a collective plan. Not even in a definitely limited given society. Their strivings are at cross purposes with each other, and in all such societies there therefore reigns a necessity, which is supplemented by and manifests itself in the form of contingency. The necessity which here asserts itself through all those contingencies is ultimately, again, economic. Here we must treat of the so-called great man. That a certain particular man and no other emerges at a definite time in a given country is naturally pure chance. But even if we eliminate him, there is always a need for a substitute, and the substitute is found tant bien que mal; in the long run he is sure to be found. That Napoleon – this particular Corsican – should have been the military dictator made necessary by the exhausting wars of the French Republics that was a matter of chance. But that in default of a Napoleon, another would have filled his place, that is established by the fact that whenever a man was necessary he has always been found: Caesar, Augustus, Cromwell, etc. Marx, to be sure, discovered the materialistic conception of history – but the examples of Thierry, Mignet, Guizot, the whole school of English historians up to 1850 show they were working towards it; and the discovery of the same conception by Morgan serves as proof that the time was ripe for it, and that it had to be discovered.

So with all other accidents and apparent accidents in history. The further removed the field we happen to be investigating is from the economic, and the closer it comes to the domain of pure, abstract ideology, the more we will find that it reveals accidents in its development, the more does the course of its curve run in zig-zag fashion. But fit a trend to the curve and you will find that the longer the period taken, the more inclusive the field treated, the more closely will this trend run parallel to the trend of economic development.

The greatest obstacle to the correct understanding of the theory in Germany is the irresponsible neglect of the literature of economic history. It is hard not only to get rid of historical conceptions which have been drummed into one’s head at school but even more so to gather together the material necessary to do it. Who has even read, e.g., old G. v. Gülich, whose dry accumulation of material nonetheless contains so much stuff which explains innumerable political facts?

In addition I believe that the fine example which Marx himself gives in his Eighteenth Brumaire ought to give you considerable information on your questions just because it is a practical illustration. I also believe that in the Anti-Dühring, ch.I, 9-11, and II, 2-4, as well as III, 1, or the introduction, and then in the final section of Feuerbach, I have already treated most of the points.

I beg of you not to weigh gingerly each separate word of the above by itself but to take the connections into account. I am sorry that I have not the time to work things out and write you with the same exact detail that I would have to do for publication.

Please pay my respects to Mr. ... and thank him for me for sending along the ..., which cheered me up greatly.

F. Engels

Footnote

4. 1. To what extent are economic relations causally effective (are they sufficient causes, occasions or permanent conditions etc., of social development)? 2. What roles do the factors of race and historical personality play in Marx-Engels’ conception of history? – H.D.

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