Letter to Moritz Kaufmann, October 10, 1878

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 10 October 1878


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, Second Russian Edition, Vol. 34, Moscow, 1964
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


MARX TO MORITZ KAUFMANN[1]

IN BIRKENHEAD

[Draft]

London, 10 October 1878 41 Maitland Park Road, N. W.

Dear Sir,

I have confined myself to point out in the proof-sheets one or two mistakes. To enter on the more important mis-statements, I had neither the leisure, nor would it have suited your purpose.

Proof-sheet b. I have struck out: 'one of whom was the youthful Lassalle'. He was never a collaborator of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, though he first entered at that time into personal relations with me.

I have added 'the Russian' translation of the Capital, because it is exactly in Russia that the younger University Professors have openly adopted and defended my theory.[2]

Proof-sheet d. I have struck out and formerly one of its members'. Mehring was never a member of the German Social-Democratic Party; the fact is that, by denouncing to Liebknecht some operations of the manager of the reptile funds,[3] he tried to become a member. Soon after, having been publicly branded with infamy by a judgment of the Frankfurt tribunal, on the occasion of his action for defamation against Herr Sonnemann (the proprietor of the Frankfurter Zeitung),'[4] he boldly accepted his position as a literary

scamp. Even the most conservative amongst the honest adversaries of German Social Democracy would be rather startled to find such a man styled: 'the historian of Social Democracy'. Of course, he enjoys the esteem of Mr Bamberger who, as a refugee in Paris, after the downfall of the Revolution of 1848 in Germany (he had acted during that revolution the part of a spouting demagogue), got his practical training at the hands of the Second Empire financiers, enriched himself by his participation in the Mexico loan swindle,[5] etc., returned to Germany after the Prussian victory and became one of the leading spirits of the German Börsen- und Gründungsschwindelperiode[6] . It is not exactly Mr Albert Grant at London (and he is of the Bamberger stamp, and, curiously to say, native of the same town—Mayence) one would address himself to for information and criticism of the Owenite movement f.i.

How far you were happy in considering Mr Howell's article (in The Nineteenth Century) as a 'historical source', you may see from the sheet I forward with these lines.[7]

I shall forward you to-morrow Mr Engels' book.[8]

  1. ↑ Marx's letters to the British clergyman Moritz Kaufmann of 3 and 10 October 1878 are replies to the latter's request that he look through Kaufmann's article about himself, which was to appear in the Leisure Hour magazine in December 1878 and to be included in a book on the history of socialism he was preparing for publication. Kaufmann's book Utopias; or, Schemes of Social Improvement. From Sir Thomas More to Karl Marx came out in London in 1879. Marx read through the last two chapters.
  2. ↑ Marx may have had in mind the professor of political economy at Kiev University Nikolai Sieber, one of the first to popularise Marx's economic theory in Russia. In 1876-78, Sieber published a series of articles entitled Marx's Economic Theory and some polemic articles against the Russian critics of Marx, Yuli Zhukovsky and Boris Chicherin.
  3. ↑ The reptile fund—the special fund at Bismarck's disposal for bribing the press and individual journalists. Reptiles was the name used by the left-wing press to designate periodicals which defended the interests of the government and had been bribed by it.
  4. ↑ In May 1876, Franz Mehring publicly accused Leopold Sonnemann of using his public position as editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung und Handelsblatt to engage in speculation during the Griinderjahre (see Note 118) and extract considerable profits. Sonnemann having denounced this accusation as slander, Franz Mehring had legal proceedings instituted against him. The court of the first instance found Sonnemann not guilty. In June 1877, the court of appeal found that Mehring's accusations were justified but still left Sonnemann unpunished.
  5. ↑ In the late 1850s, the Mexican government of Zuloaga and Miramön issued state bonds that became an object of large-scale speculation in France (see present edition, Vol. 19, p. 197).
  6. ↑ stock exchange speculation during the Gründerjahre (a play on the title of Glagau's work Der Börsen- und Gründungs-Schwindel in Deutschland).
  7. ↑ Marx most probably sent Moritz Kaufmann his article 'Mr. George Howell's History of the International Working-Men's Association' (see present edition, Vol. 24), a reply to Howell's 'The History of the International Association' (The Nineteenth Century, July 1878) presenting the International's history in a distorted way.
  8. ↑ F. Engels, Anti-Dühring.