Letter to Karl Marx, November 23, 1882

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 23 November 1882


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
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 46


ENGELS TO MARX

IN VENTNOR

London, 23 November 1882

Dear Moor,

Encl. letter from Lafargue which you might let me have back as I only got it this morning. So he will doubtless have to wend his way to the cachot[1] within the next few days. What incurable fools they are. If Guesde and Lafargue are locked up in Montluçon, the paper[2] will be pretty well done for. The government dare not bring them before a court in Paris, but may well take the liberty of quietly neutralising one after the other in the provinces. Until the paper had been firmly established, they ought not to have provided any pretexts for intervention; instead of that we have these Bakuninist antics.

I had asked Lafargue for information about the relative strength of the two parties and also about the Maret-Godard affair.[3] You see what he says. Obviously it was to please the Chambres Syndicales[4] and none other than Malon & Co. sacrificed the programme and the movement's entire past since the time of the Marseilles Congress.[5] His apparent strength is his real weakness. If you debase your programme to the level of the most ordinary TRADES UNIONS, you will clearly have no difficulty in obtaining a 'large public'.

Electricity has enabled me to score a minor triumph. You may perhaps remember my discussing the Cartesian-Leibnizian point of dispute in regard to mv and mv2 as measures of motion.[6] What it boils down to is that mv is the measure of mechanical motion when transmitted by mechanical motion as such, whereas mv2 is the measure of motion when it changes its form, i.e. the measure in conformity with which it turns into heat, electricity, etc. Now, so long as the chaps in the physical laboratories had the sole say in electrical matters, the measure of electromotive force, the force regarded as representative of electrical energy, was the volt (E), the product of the intensity of the current (ampère, C) and resistance (ohm, R).

E = C x R.

And that is correct so long as electrical energy does not change on transmission into another form of motion. Now, however, in his presidential address at the last meeting of the British Association,[7] we have Siemens proposing an additional unit, the watt (hereafter W) which is intended to express the true energy of an electric current (i.e. as distinct from other forms of motion, vulgo energy) and whose value is volt x ampère, W = E x C.

But W = E x C = C x R x C = C2R. Resistance in electricity represents the same as mass in mechanical motion. Hence it would appear that in electrical as in mechanical motion the quantitatively measurable manifestation of this motion — on the one hand velocity, on the other intensity of current — functions, in the case of simple transmission without change of form, as a simple factor of the first power, while in the case of transmission with change of form, as a factor squared. Thus what I have formulated for the first time is a universal natural law of motion. Now, however, I must really go ahead and finish my dialectics of nature.

All is well at your house, but the beer everywhere is rotten; only the German stuff in the West End is any good.

Your

F.E.

  1. ↑ prison
  2. ↑ L'Égalité
  3. ↑ After a long search, Sorge sent Marx an 'Annual Report of the Secretary of Internal Affairs of the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, for 1876-1877', Part III. Industrial Statistics, Vol. V, Harrisburg, 1878, containing information he needed on the situation in the mining industry of Pennsylvania.
  4. ↑ Syndicalist Chambers (more on these trade union organisations see on pp. 388-89)
  5. ↑ A reference to Napoleon III's wife Eugénie de Montijo de Guzman who lived in England after the fall of the Second Empire; following her husband's death in 1873, she assumed leadership of the Bonapartist party.
  6. ↑ On 23 December 1871, The Eastern Post printed Marx's letter to the editor concerning Charles Bradlaugh's slanderous attacks on him (see present edition, Vol. 23, pp. 62-63). The same issue featured a report of the meeting of the International's General Council held on 19 December 1871 at which Marx had exposed Bradlaugh's activities.
  7. ↑ An extract from this letter was published in English for the first time in: Karl Marx, On Colonialism and Modernization, Anchor Books, New York, 1969.