Letter to Friedrich Engels, November 7, 1859

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 7 November 1859


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 2, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXII, Moscow, 1929
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 40


MARX TO ENGELS

IN MANCHESTER

London, 7 November 1859

Dear Engels,

I shall send you the Grimm.[1]

I have not written anything yet about Morocco,[2] or about the Caucasus,[3] or any military stuff on Asia. I have no diplomatic particulars about Morocco, so you will have to pick up your pen again. My circumstances are such as to preclude my doing sufficient work on the 2nd instalment, which I regard as of crucial importance.[4] It does, in fact, contain the pith of all the bourgeois stuff.

Biskamp's letter[5] is infinitely discreditable; in view of his situation one can explain but not excuse it. The whole of vulgar democracy is seeking to hush up the Blind affair in the German press while assailing me. E.g. Mr Meyen, present editor of the Freischütz.[6] I have now sent a sharply-worded statement to the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung and the Reform in Hamburg.[7] I shall bring Vogt and Blind face to face even if it has to be done at gun point.

In a couple of lines in the Tribune the wretched Pulszky dismisses my letter[8] as emanating from the camp of the 'CRACKED' Urquhart.[9] The fellows dare not open their traps. For they don't know what kind of evidence we have at our disposal. For Kossuth, or so Szemere wrote and told me, secretly decamped after the treaty of Villafranca without a word to Klapka and the other officers. For he was afraid of being handed over to the Austrians.[10] Hence the greatest animosities against him in the Hungarian camp. I shall give Pulszky a thorough lambasting.

Your

K. M.

  1. ↑ J. Grimm, Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, Bd. 1-2.
  2. ↑ In the summer of 1859 hostilities resumed in the second Opium War in China (1856-60). In October 1859 Spain declared war on Morocco and invaded the country. This colonial incursion met with stubborn resistance and brought the Spaniards no success. The fighting continued until March 1860. In April a peace treaty was concluded under which Spain received indemnities and insignificant territorial concessions.—515, 523
  3. ↑ Marx refers to the war waged by the mountaineers of Daghestan and Chechnya under Shamil against Tsarist Russia. Having defeated Shamil's main forces and taken him prisoner (August 1859), the Russians were breaking the resistance of separate detachments of Shamil's followers.—523
  4. ↑ After the publication, in June 1859, of the first instalment of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (see present edition, Vol. 30), Marx intended, as previously agreed with the Berlin publisher Duncker, to prepare for the press and publish as the second instalment the 'Chapter on Capital', which constitutes the bulk of his main economic manuscript of 1857-58; and then publish the remaining parts of his economic work (see Notes 250 and 355). As he proceeded with his plan, however, he realised that he would have to do more research to formulate the basic propositions of his economic theory. But his journalistic activity and other party obligations, above all the need to refute publicly Vogt's slanderous allegations against proletarian revolutionaries, temporarily diverted him from his economic studies. It was not until 1861 that he resumed them in earnest. Later Marx decided to publish his researches not as the second and further instalments of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy but as a large independent work.—489, 498, 502, 508, 511, 522, 523, 542, 574
  5. ↑ E. Biskamp, [Letter to the Editor of the Allgemeine Zeitung, 20 October 1859,] Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 300, 27 October 1859.
  6. ↑ [E. Meyen,] 'Der Proceß Carl Vogt's gegen die Augsburger Allg. Ztg.', Der Freischütz, No. 132, 3 November 1859.
  7. ↑ K. Marx, 'Statement to the Editors of Die Reform, the Volks-Zeitung and the Allgemeine Zeitung'.
  8. ↑ K. Marx, 'Kossuth and Louis Napoleon'.
  9. ↑ Marx refers to Pulszky's report of 11 October 1859 published in the New-York Daily Tribune, No. 5775, 26 October 1859.
  10. ↑ During the Italian war of 1859 Kossuth was in Italy where, on his initiative, a Hungarian legion has been formed to fight against Austria on the side of Piedmont and Bonapartist France. He hoped to win independence for Hungary with the help of the latter. On the Villafranca peace see Note 450.—524, 532