Letter to Ferdinand Lassalle, March 11, 1858

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 11 March 1858


First published in: F. Lassalle. Nachgelassene Briefe und Schriften, Bd. III, Stuttgart-Berlin, 1922
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40


MARX TO FERDINAND LASSALLE[1]

IN BERLIN

London, 11 March 1858

9 Grafton Terrace, Maitland Park,

Haverstock Hill

Dear Lassalle,

I was confined to bed when your letter arrived, [hence] the delay in replying. Now I am ALL RIGHT again. D'abord whatever the outcome of the NEGOTIATION initiated by you, whether successful or otherwise, I would like to express my warmest thanks for your exertions whose value is doubled by the fact that you yourself were in poor health. I hope that you are now perfectly well again. Friend Quételet[2] has calculated that, after Petersburg and Madrid, Berlin is the most insalubrious capital in Europe—as, indeed, having lived there 5 years, I personally can confirm by comparison with London, Brussels and Paris.

But to come to business. You will, perhaps, permit me to reply to question 4 first and then proceed in reverse.

1. The publisher shall have the right to cease publication on receipt of the second instalment, always provided I am given due notice. A proper contract, assuming he intends to publish more than one instalment, shall not be concluded before delivery of the third.[3]

2. As regards the fee, I shall, if necessary, agree to a minimum of 0 for the first instalment, for while I certainly cannot write the whole work gratis, I am even less prepared to see its publication come to grief over the question of money. I have no idea what authors are paid in Germany. But if you do not think 30 talers per sheet is too much, that is what you should ask,—less, if you think it excessive. Once the thing has been launched we shall see on what conditions the publisher can and will go on with it.

3. Minimum length of the instalments SAY 4 sheets; maximum 6. It is to be desired, of course, that each instalment should form a relative whole. But the separate sections vary greatly in length.

Whatever the circumstances, the first instalment would have to constitute a relative whole and, since it lays the foundations for all that follows, it could hardly be done in under 5 or 6 sheets. But that is something I shall find out when I come to finish it off. It contains 1. Value, 2. Money, 3. Capital in General (the process of production of capital; process of its circulation; the unity of the two, or capital and profit; interest). This constitutes a pamphlet in its own right. As you yourself will have discovered from your economic studies, Ricardo's exposition of profit conflicts with his (correct) definition of value, thus giving rise among his followers either to a complete departure from his basis, or to the most objectionable eclecticism. I believe that I have cleared the matter up. (On closer examination the economists will, to be sure, find t h a t ALTOGETHER IT IS A DIRTY BUSINESS.)

4. As to the total number of sheets I am myself very much in the dark since, in my notebooks, the material for the work is entirely in the form of monographs,[4] many of which go into a wealth of detail that would disappear in the course of compilation. Nor is it my intention to elaborate to an equal degree all the 6 books into which I am dividing the whole, but rather to give no more than the broad outline in the last 3, whereas in the first 3, which contain the actual nub of the economic argument, some degree of amplification will be unavoidable. I hardly think that the whole can be done in under 30 or 40 sheets.

With kind regards.

Your

K. M.

PS. If the publisher is agreeable, I could arrange for him to have the first instalment ABOUT the end of May.

  1. ↑ This letter is Marx's reply to Lassalle's letter of 3 March 1858, containing a number of questions regarding the publication of Marx's economic work (see this volume, pp. 269-71). On the first English publication of Marx's letter see Note 82.—286
  2. ↑ A. Quételet, Sur l'homme et le développement de ses facultés.... Marx used an English translation of the book, A Treatise on Man and the Development of the Faculties.
  3. ↑ This refers to the large economic work planned by Marx. Only one instalment was published. It appeared under the tide A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859.
  4. ↑ In the summer of 1857 Marx began to write a series of economic manuscripts in order to sum up and systematise the results of his extensive economic research started in the 1840s and continued most intensively in the 1850s. (In the first half of the 1850s he filled 24 paginated and several unpaginated notebooks with excerpts from the works of bourgeois economists, books of statistics, documents and periodicals.) These manuscripts were preliminary versions of an extensive economic work in which he intended to investigate the laws governing the development of capitalist production and to criticise bourgeois political economy. Marx oudined the main points of this treatise in an unfinished draft of the 'Introduction' (one of the first manuscripts of the series) and in letters to Engels, Lassalle and Weydemeyer (see pp. 298-304, 269-71, 286-87, 376-78). Further economic study prompted Marx to specify and change his original plan. The central place in the series is occupied by the extensive manuscript, Critique of Political Economy (widely known as the Grundrisse), on which Marx worked from October 1857 to May 1858. In this preliminary draft of his future Capital Marx expounded his theory of surplus value. After the first instalment had been prepared for publication in 1859 under the title A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Marx added several more manuscripts to the series in 1861. The manuscripts of 1857-61 were first published in German by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU in 1939 under the editorial heading Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Rohentwurf). These manuscripts and A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Part One are included in Vols. 29 and 30 of the present edition.—217, 224, 226, 238, 244, 249, 256, 270, 287, 307, 499, 566.