Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, September 11, 1851

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 11 September 1851


First published abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Bd. 2, No. 28, 1906-07 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXV, Moscow, 1934. Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 38, pp. 453-455
Collection(s): Die Neue Zeit

To Joseph Weydemeyer in Frankfurt am Main[1]

[London,] 11 September [1851]
28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Weydemeyer,

Lupus has written to his acquaintance on the Staatszeitung about your affairs. The only cause for regret is that Mr Kinkel has recently ensconced himself there. On the other hand, there is cause for rejoicing that Mr Heinzen's paper, the New-York Schnellpost, has been compelled to declare itself insolvent. Messrs Hoff and Kapp are now trying to found a new paper by issuing shares. At any rate, this is a favourable moment for speculating in newspapers.

Our local great men are now completely at loggerheads. They are behaving as though they were Alexander's successors and were having to share out the Macedonian-Asiatic Empire between them, les drôles.[2]

If only I knew more people here, I would have tried to get you a post as an engineer, railroad surveyor or the like. Unfortunately I have no contacts whatever. Otherwise I feel sure that employment is to be found here in that LINE. The pity of it is that we are all so SHORT OF MONEY and that you haven't the means to spend some time here and take a look around. But if you really succeed in carrying out your plans in New York, you will at all events find it easier, in case of revolution, to return to Europe from there than we from here.

And yet I rack my brains trying to think of ways for you to SETTLE here, for once over there, who can say that you won't lose yourself in the FAR WEST! And we have so few people and have to be so sparing of the talent we have.

Besides, you are choosing a bad and uncomfortable time to travel. However, il n'y a rien à faire contre la nécessité des choses.[3] And if there is one thing of which I am convinced, it is that, once you are over there, you will not have to go through the same misère as all of us here. And that prospect, at least, has to be taken into account.

That this is a time of dissolution for 'democratic' provisional governments, Mr Mazzini, too, has had to learn. After some violent clashes the minority has resigned from the Italian Committee.[4] It is said that they are the more advanced ones.

I regard Mazzini's policy as basically wrong. He is working wholly in the Austrian interest by inciting Italy to the present secession. On the other hand, by failing to turn to the part of Italy that has been repressed for centuries, to the peasants, he is laying up fresh resources for the counter-revolution. Mr Mazzini knows only the towns with their liberal nobility and their citoyens éclairés.[5]

The material needs of the Italian country folk—bled white and systematically enervated and stultified just like their Irish counterparts—are, of course, too lowly for the platitudinous paradise of his cosmopolitan-neo-catholic-ideological manifestos. But admittedly it required some courage to tell the bourgeoisie and the nobility that the first step towards gaining Italy's independence was the complete emancipation of the peasants and the transformation of their metayage system into bourgeois freeholdings. Mazzini would seem to regard a loan of 10 million francs as more revolutionary than a gain of 10 million human beings. I very much fear that, if the worst comes to the worst, the Austrian Government itself will alter the state of tenure in Italy and effect 'Galician' reforms.[6]

Tell Dronke that I shall write to him in a few days' time. Warm regards to you and your wife from my wife and myself. Consider once again whether you mightn't give it a try here.

Your
K. Marx

  1. ↑ An extract from this letter was published in English for the first time in: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Correspondence. 1846-1895, London, 1934; the letter was published in full in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955.
  2. ↑ The queer fellows.
  3. ↑ Needs must when the devil drives.
  4. ↑ This refers to the split in the provisional Italian National Committee formed after the fall of the Roman Republic (July 1849) by members of its Constituent Assembly who had emigrated to England. Mazzini and his followers were in the majority. The Committee was empowered among other things to organise a national movement and to float loans for Italy's liberation.
  5. ↑ Enlightened citizens.
  6. ↑ In February-March 1846, simultaneously with the national liberation insurrection in the free city of Cracow, which had been under the joint control of Austria, Prussia and Russia since 1815, a big peasant revolt flared up in Galicia. Taking advantage of class contradictions, the Austrian authorities provoked clashes between the insurgent Galician peasants and the Polish nobility who sought to help Cracow. After quelling the insurgent movement of the nobility, the Austrian Government also suppressed the peasant uprising in Galicia. In the spring of 1848 in another effort to gain the support of the Galician peasants against the Polish national liberation movement, the Austrian Government abolished corvée and some other services. However, this half-hearted reform did not affect the big landed estates and the whole burden of the redemption payment fell on the peasants.