Letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, June 21, 1872

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 21 June 1872


First published in Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Joh. Phil. Becker, Jos. Dietzgen, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx u. A. an F. A. Sorge und Andere, Stuttgart, 1906
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 44


MARX TO FRIEDRICH ADOLPH SORGE[1]

IN HOBOKEN

[London,] 21 June 1872

Dear Friend,

I received what you sent on 7 June yesterday (together with the enclosed report).[2]

You will in the meantime have received my second letter,[3] ditto Le Moussu's letter, which definitively formulates the COUNCIL'S position for the UNITED STATES.

The next Congress will be held on the first Monday in September 1872 in The Hague (Holland)[4] —the official notifica- tion will be sent to New York next week. It simply will not do for you to fob us off with a memorandum. At this Congress the life or death of the International will be at stake. You yourself and at least one other, if not two, must attend. As for the sections which do not send delegates directly, they can send mandates (mandates for dele- gates).

The Germans for me, F. Engels, Lochner, Karl Pfänder, Lessner. The French for G. Ranvier, Auguste Serraillier, Le Moussu, Ed. Vaillant, F. Cournet, Ant Arnaud The Irish for MacDonnel, who is doing very well, or if they prefer, for one of the above-named Germans or French.

Naturally, only 1 delegate for each section, however numerous, unless it has over 500.

You will already know of the beautiful Belgian project to revise the Rules.[5] It stems from Hins, an ambitieux impuissant,[6] who, to- gether with his Russian wife, takes orders from Bakounine. One of its finest features is the abolition of the GENERAL COUNCIL.[7] The whole plan has been deservedly hauled over the coals in La Emancipacion (Madrid), the organ of the Spanish Federal Coun- cil.[8] The same paper gave enthusiastic approval to our American resolutions.[9]

From the enclosed copy of the Egalité you will see that the Congrès Romand has also rapped Hins over the knuckles.[10]

I am sending you by post 4 COPIES of the Circulaire of the GENERAL COUNCIL on Les prétendues scissions dans l'Internationale.[11] Engels has despatched 200 to you per PARCEL COMPANY.

As for my Capital, the first German instalment will be published next week,[12] ditto the first French instalment in Paris.[13] You will be getting copies of both regularly from me for you and some of your friends. Of the French edition (the title-page of which reads, by no means as a mere phrase, 'entièrement révisée par l'auteur',[14] for I have had the devil of a job with it), 10,000 COPIES have been printed and 8,000 sold already before publication of the first instalment.

In Russia, books after printing is completed but before they are released to the public, must be submitted to the censorship authority, which must file suit in court if it does not want to pass them.

They write me as follows from Russia regarding the Russian translation (a masterly one) of my book[15] :

'In the censorship office two censors went over the work and laid their conclusions before the censorship committee. Even before the examination it was decided in principle not to hold this book up merely because of the author's name, but to make a close investigation of how far it really corresponds to its title. The following is a summary of the conclusion that was unanimously adopted by the censorship committee and submitted to the Main Administration for decision:

' "Although the author, according to his convictions, is a thorough-going socialist and the whole book has a quite definite socialist character, nevertheless, in view o r the fact that the presentation can by no means be called accessible to everyone and that, on the other hand, it possesses the form of a rigidly mathematical scientific demonstration, the Committee declares the prosecution of this book in court to be impossible."'[16]

Accordingly it was allowed out into the world. Three thousand copies have been printed. It was made available to the Russian public on 27 March, and 1,000 copies had been sold by 15 May already.

In his announcement of my book the primeval KNOW-NOTHING lout Heinzen found cause for amusement at the statement on the title-page: 'Translation rights reserved'. Who would want to translate such nonsense! The book was obviously written merely in order that Karl Heinzen shouldn't understand it.

We have issued a French translation of the ADDRESS ON THE CIVIL WAR, price 2 Väd. per copy.[17] If wanted in the UNITED STATES, please write.

Regarding the Nicholson affair, it is best not to say anything about it in the GENERAL COUNCIL for the present.[18]

Salut

Yours,

K. M.

  1. ↑ After a certain decline, the movement for recognition of the French Republic (see Note 108) gained fresh momentum in Britain at the end of December 1,870.
  2. ↑ Boustrapa—a nickname of Louis Bonaparte, composed of the first syllables of the names of cities where he staged putsches: Boulogne (6 August 1840), Strasbourg (30 October 1836) and Paris (coup d'état of 2 December 1851, which led to the establishment of a Bonapartist dictatorship in France).
  3. ↑ See this volume, p. 388.
  4. ↑ On 11 June 1872, on Marx's suggestion, the General Council resolved to convene a regular Congress in Holland on 2 September 1872 and decided on the principal item on the agenda, the consolidation of the International's organisation (revision of the General Rules and Administrative Regulations). At its next meeting on 18 June the Council decided on The Hague as the venue for the Congress and appointed a special commission (Engels, Edouard Vaillant, Joseph MacDonnel) to prepare an official announcement of the forthcoming Congress. The announcement was written by Engels and despatched to The International Herald, which published it on 29 June 1872 (see present edition, Vol. 23, pp. 170-73).—325, 366, 372, 374, 376, 392, 396, 398, 401, 404, 407, 409, 411-13, 415, 417, 418, 422, 425, 426
  5. ↑ 'Congrès ouvrier belge', L'Internationale, No. 176, 26 May 1872.
  6. ↑ ambitious nonentity
  7. ↑ The congress of the Belgian Federation held in Brussels on 19-20 May 1872 considered the draft Rules which had been drawn up by the Belgian Federal Council on the instructions of the Federation's congress held on 24- 25 December 1871 (see Note 404). Under this draft, which was written by Eugène Hins, the powers of the General Council to all intents and purposes were to be annulled and the Council turned into a mere correspondence and statistical bureau. After heated debates the congress decided to submit the draft for discussion by the sections, and then for approval by the Federation's extraordinary congress scheduled for July 1872 (see Note 568).
  8. ↑ Marx and his family were on vacation in Ramsgate from 9 to 31 August 1870.
  9. ↑ La Emancipacion, No. 43, 6 April 1872, carried the General Council's resolu tions of 5 and 12 March 1872 on the split in the Central Committee of the International Working Men's Association for North America. The editorial introduction noted the great importance of these resolutions to the campaign against the attempts by bourgeois politicians to use the working-class movement to further their own ends.
  10. ↑ Marx is referring to Resolution IV, 'Contre la suppression du Conseil Général', adopted by the Fourth Congress of the International's Romance Federation, which was held in Vevey on 2-3 June 1872. It appeared in L'Égalité, No. 12, on 13 June 1872. The Congress unreservedly supported the resolutions of the 1871 London Conference and turned down the proposal of the Belgian Federal Council for a revision of the General Rules of the Association.
  11. ↑ K. Marx and F. Engels, Fictitious Splits in the International
  12. ↑ A reference to the 'Circulaire à toutes les fédérations de l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs' adopted at Sonvillier on 12 November 1871 (see Note 374). It was printed in La Emancipacion, the organ of the Spanish Federal Council, on 25 December 1871.
  13. ↑ Marx is referring to the articles by Sigismund Borkheim, 'Russische Briefe. VIII-X. Michael Bakunin, XI. Ein russischer penny-a-liner', which were published anonymously in Die Zukunft between July and November 1869. Analysing Bakunin's articles which had appeared in Russian, Borkheim criticised the author mainly for his Pan-Slavist ideas and the idealisation of the Russian peasant commune.
  14. ↑ fully revised by the author
  15. ↑ The Russian edition of Volume I of Capital was published at the end of March 1872; the edition of 3,000 copies was rather large for that time. It was sold very quickly, contrary to the Tsarist censors' expectations; they considered Capital to be a work 'difficult to understand', and that was the reason they allowed its publication (see also Note 146).
  16. ↑ Marx quotes and partly renders in his own words Nikolai Danielson's letter of 23 May (4 June) 1872. The information concerning the publication and circulation of Volume I of Capital is also taken from this letter.
  17. ↑ In his letter dated 28 June 1871 Cafiero informed Engels that for liaison with the Florentine Società Democratica Internationale he should write to Francesco Piccini, a shoemaker.
  18. ↑ On 7 June 1872 Sorge wrote to Marx that Nicholson, the treasurer of the Provisional Federal Council of the North American sections, had stopped attending the Council's meetings and disappeared altogether.