Letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht, September 20, 1865

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 20 September 1865


First published in the language of the original, English, in Wilhelm Liebknecht. Briefwechsel mit Karl Marx und Friedrich Engels, The Hague, 1963
Published in English in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 42


MARX TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT

IN LEIPZIG

[London,] 20 September 1865

Dear Miller,[1]

I received yours yesterday afternoon, too late to post a letter here. Illness had much to do with my protracted silence. There were other reasons which I think useless now to dwell upon. Much business pressing upon my time just now, I can only return these few lines.

A Report[2] (English, of course) on your part is very important. It must be here on Monday next (25 September). It cannot arrive timely unless you send me the letter directly by the Leipzig post.

The Swiss have chosen two delegates, Mons Dupleix, a Frenchman, and Mr Philipp Becker, a German.

Old Hatzfeldt dwells at Paris, where the old hag is intriguing with the 'horn-bearing' father of 'Socialism', Moses,[3] her most cringing slave. It was at her instigation, that he inserted his 'warning' in the Nordstern and his slander into the Social-Demokrat.2iS She is now concocting with him the 'Apotheosis' of her own belated 'Oedipus'.[4] The London correspondent of the Social-Demokrat seems to be cracked Weber.[5] All these things have been reported to me from Paris. As to myself, I carefully abstain from taking any notice whatever of what is going on in the Berlin and Hamburg 'organs' of the movement.0 This so-called movement is so disgusting a thing that the less you hear of it the better.

We have founded here a weekly paper of our own The Workman's Advocate. You will oblige by sending correspondence (English) for it to my address.

Yours truly

A. Williams[6]

  1. ↑ Liebknecht's conspiratorial pseudonym
  2. ↑ On 15 September 1865 Liebknecht wrote to Marx that he could not go to the London Conference of the International because of urgent matters and the removal of his family to Leipzig, but promised him to send a report on the working-class movement in Germany. This report was sent to Marx on 23 September but Marx did not read it out at the conference because, he believed, it said too much about his personal services (see Marx's letter to Liebknecht of 21 November 1865, this volume, pp. 201-03).
  3. ↑ Moses Hess
  4. ↑ Ferdinand Lassalle
  5. ↑ Louis Weber
  6. ↑ Marx's conspiratorial pseudonym