Letter to Carlo Cafiero, July 29, 1879

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 29 July 1879


First published in La Vie ouvrière, No. 57, Paris, 5 février 1912
Printed according to the original
Translated from the French
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


MARX TO CARLO CAFIERO[1]

IN NAPLES [Draft]

London, 29 July 1879
41 Maitland Park Road, N. W.

Dear Citizen,

My sincerest thanks for the two copies of your work[2] ! Some time ago I received two similar works, one written in Serbian,[3] the other in English (published in the United States),[4] but both of them err in that, by seeking to provide a succinct and popular résumé of Capital, they also devote themselves in too pedantic a manner to the scientific form of the argument. Thus it seems to me that they more or less lose sight of their principal object, which is to make an impression on the public for whom these résumés are intended. And it is here that your work is vastly superior!

As to the concept of the thing, I believe I am not mistaken when I find an apparent gap in the views set out in your preface, which is that there is no proof that the material conditions indispensable to the emancipation of the proletariat are engendered in spontaneous fashion by the progress of capitalist production.3

Moreover, I share your opinion—if I have interpreted your preface aright—that one ought not to overload the minds of the people one is proposing to educate. There is nothing to prevent your making, at the right moment, a further attempt aimed at placing greater emphasis on this materialist basis of Capital.

Once again many thanks.

Yours very sincerely,

Karl Marx

  1. ↑ An excerpt from this letter was published in English for the first time in: Marx, Engels, Lenin, On Scientific Communism, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1967. It appeared almost in full in: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Letters on 'Capital', New Park Publications Ltd., London, 1983.
  2. ↑ Marx is referring to Carlo Cafiero's pamphlet Il Capitale di Carlo Marx, which was a popular exposition of the first volume of Capital. It appeared in Italian in Milan in 1879.
  3. ↑ Really
  4. ↑ A reference to the English translation of Johann Most's pamphlet Kapital und Arbeit (see Note 154) done by Otto Weydemeyer from the second German edition of the work. It was originally published in the form of eleven extracts from Marx's Capital in the American weekly, The Labor Standard, between 30 December 1877 and 10 March 1878. In August 1878, the work appeared anonymously as a separate pamphlet.