Letter to Friedrich Engels, May 23, 1857

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 23 May 1857


First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1913
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40


MARX TO ENGELS

IN MANCHESTER

[London,] 23 May 1857

Dear Engels,

The enclosed arrived from Dana this morning. It puzzles me how the Yankee can expect the stuff for Vol. I to be in New York by the beginning of July if he doesn't let us know what he wants until the end of May.

You might reconsider which articles one should offer to do, apart from the military. Philosophical stuff is, in fact, too badly paid and also difficult when it has TO BE DONE IN ENGLISH. Do you know if there happens to be any German or French book on the biographies of big industrialists?

I'm equally puzzled as to how aesthetics is to be dealt with in 1 PAGE, FUNDAMENTALLY, and on a Hegelian basis.

Does Lupus feel inclined to take something on? Enclosed also a letter from Miquel. I do not, in fact, understand his theory of 'non-overproduction' and yet of 'lack of the wherewith to pay for production', unless it be that the utterly superficial blather of the utterly wretched CURRENCY chaps[1] has taken root in Germany.

Saint

Your

K. M.

  1. ↑ Adherents of the so-called Currency School, a tendency in bourgeois political economy that arose in England in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. The Currency theoreticians (Lord Overstone, R. Torrens, Norman, Clay and others) contended that economic crises were caused by violations of the law of monetary circulation.