1846
Dear Marie,
Great was my joy on hearing the news that you had been blessed with a strong, sturdy boy(1) 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,a the one-eighth 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.b So now it is your turn to write when you have the opportunity.
Love to Mother, Emil and Hermann.
Your
Friedrich
17. Engels to Emil Blank. 3 April ;
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[2]
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 wifeb 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 contenu de cette lettre?
With regards,
Your
F.
18. Marx to Heinrich Heine. Beginning of April[48]
rue de l'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.a 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 Börneb 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
19. Marx to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. 5 May[49]
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 médias resc—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 Bodenbroek. 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
Rarl 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'(1) he 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
20. Marx to Karl Ludwig Bernays. 7 May
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
21. Marx to Joseph Weydemeyer. 14- 16 May
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 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[3] in Leipzig, a man chiefly engaged in the dissemination of books liable to confiscation, would, you see, take over the whole bookselling 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 meb:
'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 childc 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 unwejcome 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 ;
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.(1) 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.
22. Engels to Marx. 27 July
My wife and I send our warm regards to your betrothed.[3]
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: Au 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.
22
ENGELS TO MARX
IN BRUSSELS
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. Enfina yesterday I discovered 2 lodgings
au choixb: 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]/c 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.d
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 27 1846
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:
per month
/
Accommodation Breakfast Dinner Supper, 2-3 beef-steaks
Afternoon coffee on the beach, very necessary, 2 cups
Laundering is very dear, at least
fr. 125-fr. 150 45- " 45 " 150- " 175
60-
18- "
20-
90'
18
30
fr. 418-fr. 508
(if you sometimes eat by the sea)
(people stuff themselves here)
(In addition ba-thing ID fr. 1.30-fr. 1.50— Appr. 40 fr.)
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,b 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[3] and who is an altogether excellent fellow, although he has spent 15 years in Elberfeld and speaks German par conséquent}b
'Finally I would touch on' the Mrs Hess affair. It's bad, but one cannot possibly let her suffer for the stupidities of the aforemen-tioned 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 Godc 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]
23. Engels and Marx to Moses Hesse. 27 July and about 29 July
Yesterday these visions were to be seen in the sea by male and female spectators alike.
23
ENGELS AND MARX TO MOSES HESS
IN COLOGNE
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[3] 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.a 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 Westphaliansb 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'sc? 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.
24. Marx to Carl Friedrich Julius Leske. / August[66]
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 was 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.[2] 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.b
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' 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 incertain 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 Vs-Tt 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 litde out of
25. Engels to Marx. 19 August
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. Au Bois Sauvage, Plaine Ste Gudule, N. 19, Bruxelles.
25
ENGELS TO MARX
IN BRUSSELS
[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.a 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 1 V2 sheets printed in Switzerland .b
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,c 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.d Maurer has translated the relevant passages from Griin's booke 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 piègef 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.c 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 acknowledgement 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."d Says the wife of an employé of travaux publics,e "On ne peut pas dire cela de M. Dumon, on trouve généralement qu'il est un peu trop déboutonné pour un ministre".'"
Quelques heures après,[1] 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
" Das Wesen der Religion is quoted below according to the collection Die Epigonen, Bd. 1, Leipzig, 1846. (The end of the second quotation is paraphrased.) - f As always. -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 moinsh 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 (10™ article) in the question religieuse" 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,d 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 Bernstein, 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.e They don't even practise pederasty.
C'est un roman allemand!
Madame Hess cherche un mari. Elle se fiche de Hess. S'il se trouverait quelque chose de convenable, s'adresser à Madame Gsell, Faubourg St. Antoine.[3] 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.
26. Engels to the Communist Correspondence Committee in Brussels. 19 August[74]
Committee
Carissimi,(1)
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, 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.a 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.b 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'' 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,[76] 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[3] 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 ouvrierc
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.d 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' you see, has not yet given up hope of becoming the candidat de la lanterne.[1]
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.'b
Mr Grün's pamphlet, printed at the workers' expense, is the one I once saw at Seller's: Die preussischen Landtags-Abschiede. Ein Wort zur Zeit (anonymous); it consists mainly of plagiarisms from Marx's essays (Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher)^ 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"[1]!! 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 direc-tement'' 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 octroif 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 Garantieng 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
27. Marx to Karl Ludwig Bernays. August[78]
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.
28. Engels to the Communist Correspondence Committee in Brussels. 16 September
Dear Friends,
Your news about Belgium, London and Breslau[3] was of great interest to me.[79] I told Ewerbeck and Bernays what was of interest to them. Keep me au fait as well with the success of our enterprise and plus ou moinsh 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 people0 doing?
There's all manner of news from here.
1. 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[80] 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? 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 Barrière meetings[81]
attended by Cherethites and Pelethites, wife and children." Here— abstraction faite de toute espèce de politique[1]—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 à la Grün and green-tintedg Proudhon,[82] all this having been laboriously dinned into them, partly by no less a person than Mr Grün himself, partly by an old, bombastic master cabinet-maker and minion of Grün's, Papa Eisermann, but partly, too, by amicus^ 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[83]; 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 Grün, 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 correspondencea with six others; the plan was much acclaimed, specially by Junge, and will be implemented from here. But unless Griin's personal influence is destroyed and his platitudes eradi-cated, 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 Grün in their presence and to tax him with his personal rascalities, and Bernays also wishes to be there — Ewerbeck too has a bon^ to pick with him. This will happen as soon as they have settled their own affairs with Grün, i.e. obtained a guarantee for the money advanced for the printing of Grün's Landtag shit.b But since Junge didn't turn up and the rest behaved towards Grün±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.
2. Now for something to amuse you. In his new, as yet unprinted book, which Grün is translating,[84] 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.
Grün, 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 Grün had confided the whole plan to him. Hearken, now, to the grandeur of this plan for world redemption: ni plus ni moins* 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 associés valued strictly in accordance with the cost of the raw product plus labour, and paid for in other association products, similarly valued.[85]
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 associés wiiï 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 out-weighed 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 heals, that it is a truly Straubingerian idyll,[86] 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 Grün,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 ouvriersh (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[87] 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!a
3. Now for another highly curious affair.—The Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung of 21 July, Paris, 16 July. Article on the Russian Embassy \...
'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 be 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.[88] Besides the apartment to which he took us, the man has a magnificent hôtelc 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[6] 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.d For that they are not really too bad.
4. Father Hess. After I had happily consigned his spouse/ 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 (Grün and Gsell), I received not long since, through the agency of one Reinhardt, another letter in which the communist papa sought to re-ëstablish relations. It's enough to make one split one's sides. As if nothing had happened of course, altogether in dulci jubilo? 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 insol-vent)—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[89] 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 preuvesb).... '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
_^Mh^ I was atrociously rude to him, in return for which frm-^M [90] [91] a j a c k a s s evinces a particular affection for me, and V f ) ;Hp tells me I have a kindly" face. He resembles Karl ML >fH Moor six weeks dead. Reply soon.
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 Fraternité there has been a tremendous dispute between materialists[90] and spiritualists.[91] The materialists, outvoted by 23 to 22, walked out. But that has not stopped the Fraternité from publishing a very nice article on the various stages of civilisation and their ability to continue developing in the direction of communism.[3]
You'll be amused by the following: Journal des Economistes, August of this year, contains, in an article on Biedermann's article on communism,b 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 français (!) qu'il a été assez heureux d'étudier 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 il se garde bien d'aborder aucune question véritablement pratique. Selon lui' (note the nonsense) 'l'émancipation du peuple allemand sera le
29. Engels to Marx. 18 September
signal de l'émancipation du genre humain; la tête de cette émancipation serait la philosophie et son cœur le prolétariat. Lorsque tout sera préparé, le coq gaulois sonnera la résurrection germanique... Marx dit qu'il faut créer en Allemagne un prolétariat universel (!!) afin de réaliser la pensée philosophique du Communisme'.a Signed T. F. (mort depuis).b
That was his last work. The previous issue carried an equally comical review of my book.c The September number contains an article on Julius which I have not yet read.d
[On the back of the letter] Monsieur Charles Marx au Bois Sauvage, Plaine Ste Gudule, Bruxelles
29
ENGELS TO MARX[92]
IN BRUSSELS
[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.[6] No matter if the others read the rubbish for once.
a 'Mr. Marx is a cobbler, as another German communist, Weiding, is a tailor. The former (M[ar]x) has no great respect for French communism (!) which he has been fortunate enough to study on the spot. For that matter, neither does M. proceed beyond' (do you not recognise Mr Fix in this Alsatian expression?) 'abstract formulas, and he takes the greatest care to avoid broaching any truly practical question. According to him' (note the nonsense) 'the emancipation of the German people will be the signal for the emancipation of the human race; philosophy would be the head of this emancipation, the proletariat its heart. When all has been prepared, the Gallic cock will herald the Teutonic resurrection.... Marx says that a universal proletariat must be created in Germany (!!) in order to realise the philosophical concept of communism.' - b since deceased - c F. Engels, The Condition of the Working-Class in England (an anonymous review in the Journal des Économistes, Vol. 14, No. 56, July 1846). - d The review of G. Julius, 'Bankwesen. Ein neues Gespenst in Deutschland', in the Journal des Economistes, Vol. 15, No. 58. September 1846 was also written by Th. Fix which Engels did not know then. - e See this volume, pp. 60-67.
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 booka 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'c 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 hered 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 Westphalianse 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," the noble fellow declares this to be 'seZ/^criticism'.[94] But soon these chaps will experience in their own persons the truth of the saying:
'And if the noble fellow has no bum, on what does he propose to sit?'
And Westphalia seems gradually to be coming to realise that it has no bum or, in Moses'f parlance, no 'material basis' for its communism. *
Püttmann was not so wrong, where J 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,* 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 Jahrbücherb was concerned,—he had already received it from the publisher but, since the German soi-disantc 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,d
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 Coach-mane 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* but it's good that the old Daneb should so rudely harry the Schleswig-Holsteiners." By the way, did you read the famous poem 'Schleswig-Holstein, Sea-girt Land', in the Rheinischer Beobachter"? 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"[99] against the gentlemen of the Ministry, which is the most a German citizen can do.[101] The poor Berlin pulpit-drubber[101]! 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 droit d'aubaine,m
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.[6] 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 Junge who was in Brussels. Ewerbeck, too, has crammed the fellows' heads with 1846
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(1) 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
30. Engels to Marx. After 18 September
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[3] to be told the story of the Tolstoy affair,b 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 editionc is appearing in Switzerland and a French oned here in a few days' time.
30
ENGELS TO MARX[106]
IN BRUSSELS
[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 above-mentioned 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 V2 years; for supposing a capital of 3,000 talers expended in the first year, the Eastertide settlement would, given profitable trading, produce approx. [2]ls, 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 V3-V4 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.
31. Engels to Marx. About 18 October
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 Westphaliansa obtain here as well. Neither our honour nor our interest would incline us to accept.
To particularise: 7 in the general purposes committee [Tendenz-komitee] 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 outreb our opinions, what then?
31
ENGELS TO MARX[108]
IN BRUSSELS
[Paris, about 1.8 October 1846] 23, rue de Lille, Faubourg St. Germain
Dear M.,
At last, after much reluctance, I have brought myself to read Feuerbach's twaddlec and have discovered that we can't go into it in our critique.(1) Why, you will see when I have given you the gist of it.
'Das Wesen der Religion', Epigonen, Vol. I, 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 consequendy at a God distinct from Nature, initially only by uniting with other men into a community in which powers distinct from Nature a 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 occidental 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.b 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*: 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 lodgingsa for a few days. I'll give the Swiss publishers a try. But I hardly imagine that I'll find a taker.b
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 Mosesc 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-Tribund 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 Griin's disciples will be definitely overthrown, and then I shall have to start from scratch.
You can't imagine what demands these heducated 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
There's been some talk of a periodical here.b That manikin with the cigar, Maurer, 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 Maurer, 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.
32. Engels to the Communist Correspondence Committee in Brussels. 23 October[115]
Committee letter (No. 3)
There is little to be said about the Straubinger business[116] 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(1)
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? 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 predicamentb 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 Barriere meetings[81] 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![81]
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 Grün, 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[6] on the occasion of the Geneva Revolution,[117] 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[3] 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.[52] 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,c
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 Tribund 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,e 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 Tecklenburgerf 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.[118] 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? 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
33. Engels to Marx. About 23 October
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 Barriere 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.
33
ENGELS TO MARX[119]
IN BRUSSELS
[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 documenta 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 letterb 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"—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.b 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 '[21]? 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 catch-phrases, 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.
34. Engels to Marx. 2 November
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
34
ENGELS TO MARX[123]
IN BRUSSELS
[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." 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,b but it would seem that the curc 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 I
35. Engels to Marx. Middle of November-December
wrote to published a short pamphlet by Bernays," but even if he does take the thing, it would appear, à ce qu'écrith Püttmann, that he is bankrupt. Voilàc 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 mand 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.''
35
ENGELS TO MARX[126]
IN BRUSSELS
[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,a the noble Eisermann delivered himself of a further, detailed avis aux
mouchardsb 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,c
where we sometimes foregathered 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 placed 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 à Paris. Enfin}[1]
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,c 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.[3]
Theoretical disagreements are hardly possible with the fellows since they have no theory and, saufh 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.[3] 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 mana 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' s i; 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 manuscriptb with instructions to hand it over only against payment in cash.c 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' (imedens at han reiste i Tydskland, havde han en
Maitresse, som fortärede ham den bedste del af hans Midler,d we read in a Danish school book). He calls the German a tydsk[1] 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 Norgee exactly the same stupid, peasant economy is dominant as at the time of the noble Canute, and he, for his part, is treated en canailleh 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 Frökena Bremer and the Danes of Councillor of State (Eta traad) Oehlenschläger, Commander of the Order of the Dannebrog.'[33] 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.'[3] Write and tell me if you have Proudhon's book.b
If you wish to make use of Proudhon's book, which is bad, for your own book,[5] I will send you the very extensive excerpts I have made. It's not worth the 15 francs it costs.
36. Marx to Pavel Vasilyevich Annenkov. 28 December[135]
IN PARIS
Brussels, 28 December [1846] Rue d'Orléans, 42, Faubourg Namur
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,* 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 arriveat truth? Why does he indulge in feeble Hegelianism in order to set himself up as an esprit fortb?
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 or 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 résumé, and a very superficial and very incomplete résumé 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 social 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 naïve. 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 idées 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 be 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 oPtwo 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 movement[136] 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,[137] 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 sentimen-tality 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," that he fumes, curses, 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 amorous 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,[5] but up till now I have been unable to have printed either this work or the critique of German philosophers and socialists[3] 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 long for a reply, as I am anxious me wrapped up as I am in my
by not keeping me waiting too to know whether you understand barbarous French.
Translated from the French 1847
37
Endnotes
[4 6] Queen Victoria already had five children by that time.—35
[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.—37
[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. Ill, 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.— 37
[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.—38
[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.—38
[53] 53. 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 Karl 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.— 39, 551 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 MEGA% Abt. Ill, Bd. 2, S. 205-07).—39
[54] 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.—40, 43
[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.—41
[56] This seems to refer to the undiscovered reply by the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee to Weydemeyer's letter of 30 April 1846.—41
[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.—41, 533 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.—43
[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.—42
[59] On 1 February 1845 Marx signed a contract with the publisher Leske (see notes
[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.—43
[61] Marx's letter to Herwegh has not been found.—43
[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.—46
[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.—46
[65] This letter of Marx has not been found.—48
[66] C. F. J. Leske, with whom Marx had signed a contract for the publication of his Kritik der Politik und National-Okonomie on l 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.—48
[67] See Notes 57 and 6 2 . - 4 9
[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.— 50
[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.—51
[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 an emasculated form. As a result, socialist teaching was turned into abstract sentimental moralising divorced from real needs.— 52
[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.—53
[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 I of The German Ideology written jointly by him and Engels.—54
[73] The letter of Engels and Ewerbeck to Bernays has not been found.—55
[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/o Marx, marked 'Comité' and numbered. They differed from official reports to an organisation and rather recalled private correspondence between close friends.—56
[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.—58
[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. Ill, Bd. 2, S. 294).—60
[79] The letter of Marx and other members of the Brussels Communist Correspondence Committee to Engels mentioned here has not been found.—60
[80] A reference to the Paris communities of the League of the Just (see Note 52).—61
[82] By 'tailors' communism' Engels means the Utopian communism of W. Weitling and his followers (see Note 70). Karl Grün, who visited Paris in 1846-47, preached 'true socialism' (see Note 70) and Proudhon's petty-bourgeois reformist ideas among the German workers.—61
[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.—62
[84] Grün'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.—62
[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.—63
[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).—63
[88] Engels had been misled by Karl Bernays and Heinrich Bernstein 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.—64
[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.—65
[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.—67
[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.—68
[94] In July 1846 Das Westphälische Dampfboot published 'Circular Against Kriege' written by Marx and Engels. However, the editor of the journal, Otto Liining, 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.—68
[9 5] 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.—69
[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.—69
[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.—69
[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-H alle expressed the views of the left democratic forces.—69
[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.— 70 loi 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).—70
[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 1815. 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.— 70
[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.—70
[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.—72
[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.—73
[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.—73 H)7 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 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.— 75
[107] They
[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).—75
[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).—79
[110] Marx's letter to Engels mentioned here has not been found.— 79
[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.— 79
[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).—79 IIS In October 1846 Marx wrote a second circular against Kriege, but it has not been found so far.—80
[113] Engels' intention to use the projected journal Die Pariser H
[114] Engels' intention to use the projected journal Die Pariser Hören for communist propaganda did not materialise. The journal appeared from January to June 1847 and carried works by Herwegh, Heine, Freiligrath, Maurer 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.— 81
[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.—81
[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.—81 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.— 88, 289
[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.— 83
[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.—85
[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.—86
[120] Engels refers to the second (October) circular against Kriege (see Note 113).—86
[21] This letter of Marx has not been found.—16
[122] Fraternal Democrats—an international democratic society founded in London on
[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. Ill, Bd. 2, S. 62-63).—88
[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 from the publisher Leske.—88
[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.—88
[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.—89 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.—89 Ewerbeck had left for Lyons at that time.—90 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.—91 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.—91 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.—93 As is seen from the publisher Löwenthal's letter to Engels of 11 March 1847 (included in MEGAi, Abt. Ill, Bd. 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.—93, 509 \ The Order of the Dannebrog (Order of the Danish State Banner)—an Order of Danish knights founded in 1671.—94
[127] Disturbances among workers took place in the Faubourg St. An
[128] Engels' letter to Gigot mentioned above has not been found.
[129] A reference to the complications which arose in the relation
[130] The address of the German Workers' Educational Society in Lo
[132] (included in MEGAi,
[33] The socialist circle in Westphalia and the Rhine Province, with which Engels maintained close contacts and whose members were Otto Liming 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.'—23
[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. Ill, 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.—95
[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.—103
[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.—104
[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,
[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.—39,
[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
[3] August 1844. On 13 December 1844 Bernays was sentenced to two months' imprisonment and a fine.—4 '* 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
[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 Philosophie') and G. Kuhlmann ('Der Dr. Georg Kuhlmann aus Holstein oder die Prophétie 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 II (see present edition, Vol. 5, pp. 531-39).—44, 48
[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 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 19 November 1844 (see this volume, pp. 9-14). This letter was published in English in full for the first time in: Marx and Engels. Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955.—3
[76] A reference to a machine invented by Weitling for making ladies' straw hats.—57
[81] Barriere 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.—61, 83
[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.—63, 80, 138, 154, 161, 249, 346, 388, 394, 467, 47« t91, 498, 520
[6] The Hoh Family by Marx and Engels was published not in Hamburg by Hoffmann and Campe, but in Frankfurt am Main by Z. Löwenthal, founder of the Literarische Anstalt publishing house (owned by Joseph Rütten since the autumn of 1844).— 7
[90] By materialists Engels meant associates of Théodore Dézamy and other revolutionary representatives of French Utopian communism who drew then-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.—-66
[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 Bûchez and Félicité Lamennais.—66
[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
[5] Engels is referring to Kritik der Politik und National-Okonomie, 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 economv 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 Hoh 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 Nationalökonomie 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, 27, 94, 105, 532