Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, January 23, 1852 (Marx)

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 23 January 1852


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXV, Moscow 1934
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 39


MARX TO JOSEPH WEYDEMEYER

IN NEW YORK

[London,] 23 January 1852 28 Dean Street, Soho

Dear Weydemeyer,

Unfortunately my indisposition has up till now prevented me from writing to you this week, i.e. for your paper.[1] With much effort I concocted an article for Dana,[2] who had received nothing from me for six weeks or more. For years, nothing has so pulled me down as this damned haemorrhoidal complaint, not even the last French fiasco.[3] Enfin,[4] I shall be all the better for having been forcibly kept away from the library[5] for 4 weeks, hard though this was.

You will be getting two more articles about the 18th Brumaire,[6] of which the first will be dispatched, come what may, on Friday next and the other immediately afterwards, if not at the same time.

Enclosed Pieper's article.[7]

As for Lupus, I have been chivvying him a great deal and he seems to have made up his mind to take a retrospective look at Kossuth's Hungarian carrière[8] for your paper. You have made two mistakes, first in failing to name Lupus along with ourselves in your announcement,[9] and secondly in not approaching him direct. Make good the second with a letter which you may enclose in one to myself and in which you urge him to write. No one else among us all has his popular style. He is extrêmement modeste.[10] All the more must one avoid giving the impression that his cooperation is regarded as superfluous.

Because I live some distance from Freiligrath and because I received Pieper's article only just before the post left, we have today been compelled to send you two letters instead of one. This will be avoided next time.

Enclosed another statement from my friend Pfänder (Bauer no longer belongs to our League). You will have to publish it, since the Windmill Streeters' statement against him appeared in both the American and the European papers.[11] It would be a good idea if, beneath this statement, you were to print the comment that it contains only what could be published under present police conditions (the accounts between Bauer and Pfänder on the one hand and the former League on the other, further, the control exercised by the Central Authority over the administration of those monies, we being in the majority on the C.A.—none of these things can, of course, be published yet); that, counting on the political precautions we, for our part, have to take in Germany, Arnold Winkelried Ruge,[12] that old gossip and 'Confusius'[13] of European democracy, made an allusion to those matters (i.e. those of Pfänder and Bauer) about which he himself knew only from hearsay at 3rd or 4th hand, in the hope of incriminating myself and Engels in the eyes of the public, although the business was no concern of ours,[14] in just the same way as the jackass suggested that it was the Windmill Streeters who threw us out when it was we who had broken with that society,[15] as Pfänder's letter also implies.

You might also announce that a new workers society has been formed in London under Stechans chairmanship,[16] which will keep aloof from 'Emigration', 'Agitation'[17] and Great Windmill Street alike, and pursue a serious line.

Tu comprends, mon cher,[18] that this society belongs to us, although we only send our younger people there; I refer to our jebildeten[19] people, not to our workers. They all go there.

Stechan has about him something of the solidity of a guild brother and the fickleness of a small master-artisan, but he is educatable and has considerable influence in Northern Germany. That is why I have also called on him to provide contributions for you.[20] We have BY AND BY pushed him into the foreground, which he likes to shun, and into contradiction, which he likes to gloss over. Willich had asked him to guarantee Kinkel's loan[21] but he refused. At first enthusiastically welcomed by Schapper and Willich, and set against us by them, he was soon enabled by his better nature to see through the shabbiness and hollowness of these fellows and their following. And so (with a little help from Lochner and other assistants with whom we had provided him incognito) he openly broke with the rabble.

Is A. Hentze our Hentze from Hamm? If so, I would write to him, for as it is Willich has done everything to blacken me in his eyes. L'infâme![22]

Warmest regards from my family to yours.

Your

K. Marx

I am sending material for pamphlets, etc., all in one batch, likewise Jones' Notes.[23] Sent piecemeal, they cost too much. The Northern Star is no longer in O'Connor's hands but in those of a Chartist faction which is secretly in touch with the Financial and Parliamentary Reformers.[24]

  1. ↑ Die Revolution
  2. ↑ F. Engels, Revolution and Counter-Revolution, VII.
  3. ↑ An allusion to Louis Bonaparte's coup d'état of 2 December 1851.
  4. ↑ Well
  5. ↑ of the British Museum
  6. ↑ K. Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, III and IV.
  7. ↑ Pieper's article 'Die Arbeiter Assoziation in England' was written on 15 January 1852, but as Die Revolution had ceased to appear the article was published in Die Reform, Nos. 41, 42 and 44 on 20, 21 and 31 August 1853
  8. ↑ career
  9. ↑ See next letter.
  10. ↑ extremely modest
  11. ↑ When the Communist League (see Note 15) split, and Marx, Engels and their followers withdrew from the German Workers' Educational Society in London, the spokesmen of the Willich-Schapper faction (located in Great Windmill Street) brought a suit on behalf of the Society against Heinrich Bauer and Karl Pfänder, supporters of the majority of the League's Central Authority, who, as trustees, held part of the Society's money to be used under the Central Authority's control for the needs of the League and to help political refugees. They were accused of stealing this money. A libel campaign against Bauer and Pfänder was started in the press (Schweizerische National-Zeitung, 7 January 1851; Republik der Arbeiter, New York, Nos. 19, 20 and 21 for 23 and 30 August and 6 September 1851). In the statement made on 21 January 1852 and mentioned here, Pfänder refuted the libel and said that on 20 November 1850 the court had acknowledged the charge to be invalid (see present edition, Vol. 38, Note 328). 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. After the reorganisation of the League of the Just in the summer of 1847 and the founding of the Communist League, the latter's local communities played the leading role in the Society. In 1847 and 1849-50 Marx and Engels took an active part in the Society's work
  12. ↑ Arnold Ruge is ironically compared with Arnold Winkelried—a semi-legendary hero of the Swiss war of liberation against the Austrian yoke in the fourteenth century.
  13. ↑ A play on the resemblance between Confusius (confusion) and Confucius, the name of the Chinese philosopher.
  14. ↑ K. Marx and F. Engels, 'Statement' (present edition, Vol. 10, pp. 535-36).
  15. ↑ See K. Marx and F. Engels, 'Statement on Resignation from the German Workers' Educational Society in London' (present edition, Vol. 10).
  16. ↑ This refers to the workers' society founded in London in January 1852 with Marx's support. It consisted of those who had withdrawn from the German Workers' Educational Society (see Note 24) and had the carpenter G. L. Stechan, a refugee from Hanover, as its chairman. An active part in organising this society was also played by Georg Lochner, a worker, Communist League member and close friend of Marx and Engels. The society did not survive long, many of its members, Stechan included, coming under the influence of the Willich-Schapper faction and rejoining their organisation
  17. ↑ Agitation and Emigration were the names Marx gave to two rival German petty-bourgeois refugee organisations in London which appeared in the summer of 1851—the Agitation Union headed by Ruge and Goegg and the German Emigration Club headed by Kinkel and Willich. The aim of both these small organisations was to raise money for an 'immediate revolution' in Germany
  18. ↑ You will understand, my dear fellow
  19. ↑ Marx uses Berlin dialect: jebildeten (educated).
  20. ↑ See this volume, pp. 19-20.
  21. ↑ The reference is to the so-called German-American revolutionary loan which Kinkel and other petty-bourgeois refugee leaders tried to raise among the German emigrants in Europe and America in 1851-52 to finance an 'immediate revolution' in Germany. Kinkel's trip to the USA for this purpose in September 1851-March 1852 was a failure. In a number of their works (e. g. The Great Men of the Exile, The Knight of the Noble Consciousness, present edition, Vols. 11 and 12), Marx and Engels ridiculed this idea of Kinkel's and denounced the attempts to produce a revolution artificially when the revolutionary movement was on the wane
  22. ↑ The scoundrel!
  23. ↑ Notes to the People
  24. ↑ In January 1852 The Northern Star was sold by O'Connor to A. G. Flemming and D. MacGowan. In 1849 a radical political trend among the Free Traders founded the National Parliamentary and Financial Reform Association to campaign for an electoral reform (the so-called Little Charter) and a taxation reform. By opposing their programme to that of the Chartists and at the same time borrowing some of their demands though in an extremely curtailed form, the bourgeois radicals expected to split the Chartist movement and to influence the workers. The bourgeois radicals, supported in their campaign by Cobden, Bright and the reformist elements among the Chartists under O'Connor, failed and the Association ceased to exist in 1855. In writing about a Chartist faction connected with the supporters of the financial and parliamentary reform, Marx has Harney's group in mind (see Note 20)