Letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht, July 29, 1870

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 29 July 1870


First published, in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Vol. I (VI), Moscow, 1932
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 44


MARX TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT

IN LEIPZIG

[London,] 29 July 1870

Dear Library,[1]

Enclosed an extract from the Manifesto of the General Council taken from The Pall Mall Gazette of 28 July.[2]

Be so good as to insert a note in your translation in the Volksstaat that you received the Manifesto in English. This will indicate to our other correspondents that we had no time to send them translations.

Last Tuesday[3] I translated the Reichstag protest of Bebel and yourself into English for the General Council. It was received with great acclamation.[4]

One further matter. Mr Karl Blind made a patriotic speech to a German meeting in the Sports Hall; this comedian represented as a vital, world-shaking event the fact that he, the German Brutus, had suspended his republicanism, sacrificing it on the altar of the fatherland for the duration of the war. That was Act I.

Act II: Karl Blind gives an account in his own hand in the London Deutsche Post of that same meeting, whose size, importance, etc., he exaggerates in his usual manner.

Act III: Karl Blind writes an anonymous letter[5] to The Daily News, in which he movingly depicts the overwhelming impact on the whole of Germany of the great speech made by Karl Blind at the meeting in the Sports Hall. All the German papers, he claims, have reproduced it. One of them, the Berlin Volks-Zeitung, even ventured (!) to print it in its entirety. (The fellow is a correspondent of the Volks-Zeitung.) Neither did Viennese papers allow the great event to pass them by without trace. (The fellow sent in a report himself to the Neue Freie Presse.)

This is just one of a thousand instances in which this ant-lion strives to gull the English into believing that he is a sort of German Mazzini.

Salut

Your

K. M.

  1. ↑ Nickname given to Wilhelm Liebknecht by Marx's daughters.
  2. ↑ K. Marx, 'First Address of the General Council of the International Working Men's Association on the Franco-Prussian War'.
  3. ↑ 26 July
  4. ↑ On 21 July 1870, during the vote on war credits in the North German Reichstag, Bebel and Liebknecht abstained, declaring that to vote for credits would signify giving a vote of confidence in the Prussian Government, which was waging a dynastic war; to vote against the credits, on the other hand, might be regarded as an approval of Bonaparte's treacherous policy. On 26 July 1870, Marx read their declaration in the General Council of the International, which unreservedly approved their action. The declaration was translated into English by Marx and published in The Bee-Hive Newspaper on 6 August 1870 in the report on the General Council meeting.
  5. ↑ 'Karl Blind's Speech on the War', The Daily News, No. 7561, 25 July 1870.