Letter to Friedrich Engels, March 6, 1868

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 6 March 1868


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 4, Berlin, 1931
Printed according to the original
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 42


MARX TO ENGELS[1]

IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 6 March 1868

DEAR FRED,

BEST THANKS FOR THE.£10. The copies of Social-Demokrat promised by Meissner have not arrived. This shows that he is not at all precise. Thus for instance the copies for Paris have not been dispatched either. There the worthy Moses[2] has prevaricated for so long[3] that the Courrier français has now finally announced that as the result of the many amendes,[4] etc., it will soon completely quit the stage.

I have not seen Eichhoff's lucubrations and anyway not the Zukunft for a very long time.[5] Since Eichhoff's brother[6] is a bookseller and specialises in political economy (he is the publisher of several opera of Dr Dühring), this is reason enough for Eichhoff to deliver lectures on the same subject.

My head is in a sorry state. But that should 'disappear' BY AND BY, as soon as the last traces of carbuncledom have gone.

I wrote to Holland[7] again yesterday since the matter is becoming brûlante.[8] Old Lafargue[9] has dealt with the necessary marriage BANNS, etc., in Bordeaux, and has sent all the papers here. He now expects that the wedding will take place here at the beginning of next month, and that the pair will go to Paris, to which he will later move. We, however, have not yet risked taking the necessary steps here for the BANNS, since my wife has not yet been able to acquire even the most essential things for Laura. For worthy Freiligrath all this went very smoothly, but then he is 'noble'.

As soon as this affair is SETTLED, it will be a great relief for the entire household, since Lafargue is as good as living with us, which perceptibly increases EXPENSES.

As far as the 'reviews' are concerned, I think that after you have supplied Liebknecht[10] you should abandon the German ones and only pursue the English. First, the echo of an English review in Germany is more powerful than vice versa, and secondly this is, after all, the only country where finally money can be made from the business.

Mr Macleod has nevertheless achieved a 2nd edition of his lousy and pedantic-scholastic book on BANKS.[11] He is a very stilted jackass who expresses every banal tautology 1. in algebraic form, and 2. constructs it geometrically. I have already given him a passing kick in the pamphlet published by Duncker.[12] His 'great' discovery is: credit is capital.

Salut

Your

K. M.

  1. ↑ Part of this letter was published in English for the first time in K. Marx, On History and People, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1977.
  2. ↑ Moses Hess
  3. ↑ A reference to an article by Moses Hess about Volume One of Capital which he had started as early as November 1867 and intended to publish in the French press (see Note 539). In 1868 for several months, he made attempts to publish it in various papers, including Le Courrier français and Morale indépendante. Its further fate is unknown.
  4. ↑ fines
  5. ↑ A reference to newspaper reports of lectures 'The Causes of Modern Trade Crises' read by Wilhelm Eichhoff from February to May 1868 in Berlin. These reports were published in Die Zukunft and the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung. In his lectures Eichhoff quoted from Marx's Capital and the Manifesto of the Communist Party by Marx and Engels.
  6. ↑ Albert Eichhoff
  7. ↑ This letter by Marx has not been found.
  8. ↑ urgent
  9. ↑ François Lafargue
  10. ↑ At Marx's request, Engels wrote a detailed review of Volume One of Capital for the Demokratisches Wochenblatt in the first half of March; it was published in it unsigned, as two articles, in Nos. 12 and 13 of 21 and 28 March 1868 (see present edition, Vol. 20).
  11. ↑ The Civil War in America broke out in April 1861. The Southern slaveholders rose against the Union and formed the Confederacy of the Southern States. The war was caused mainly by the conflict between the two social systems: the capitalist system of wage labour established in the North and the slave system dominant in the South. The Civil War, which had the nature of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, underwent two stages in its development: the period of a constitutional war for maintaining the Union and the period of a revolutionary war for the abolition of slavery. The decisive role in the defeat of the Southern slaveholders and the victory of the North in April 1865 was played by the workers, farmers and the Negroes. The causes and the nature of war in America were analysed by Marx in the articles published in the Vienna newspaper Die Presse (see present edition, Vol. 19). The discontinuance of cotton imports from America as a result of the blockade of the Southern States by the Northern fleet caused a crisis in the cotton industry of several European countries. In England, for two or three years beginning in 1862, over 75 per cent of the spinners and weavers in Lancashire, Cheshire and other counties were fully or partly unemployed. Despite privation and distress, the European proletariat gave all possible support to the American fighters against slavery.
  12. ↑ K. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy.