Letter to Pasquale Martignetti, January 8, 1895

ENGELS TO PASQUALE MARTIGNETTI

IN BENEVENTO

London, 8 January 1895
41 Regent's Park Road, N. W.

Dear Friend,

I have had your various letters of 6 Sep., 16 Dec. and the 1st of this month and have passed on your message to Aveling. 466

Many thanks for the trouble you have been to over the preface to the third volume of Capital. It is quite a good thing that it should come out in the Rassegna 467 since it will enable people in Italy to see that abroad Loria's spurious greatness is viewed in a very different light from what it is at home. On the other hand I can understand that at present Turati should consider it better tactics not to attack the man as vehemently as I do.^[1] When we had the exceptional laws 15 to contend with in Germany, our tactics were different in many respects, and individual opponents whom we have since mercilessly attacked were temporarily spared for one reason or another. In cases such as these I must rely to a very large extent on the judgement of men who, like Turati, are in the thick of the fray; those men may not always do what I, from my standpoint over here, would consider best or most important, but nevertheless they are doing something, are doing their duty to the best of their knowledge, and are prepared to take the consequences. If the government didn't find Turati and his Milan friends exceedingly objectionable, it would not have put them under domicilio coatto^[2] for three months or five.

Admittedly neither of the two chapters of the third volume of Capital solves the kind of question relating to the theory of value that might be raised by any old bourgeois economist. There is nothing of the sort in one chapter or the other of the book. But those aspects of the subject that could not be developed in Volume I are elucidated in Parts 1-4 of Volume III.

Two or three copies of your translation of the preface will amply suffice me.

I most sincerely reciprocate your good wishes for the New Year and remain

Yours,

F. Engels