Letter to César de Paepe, January 24, 1870

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 24 January 1870


First published abridged in Bazelsky kongress Pervoeo Internatsionala, 6-11 September 1869, Moscow-Leningrad, 1934 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVI, Moscow, 1935
Printed according to the original
Translated from the French
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 43


MARX TO CÉSAR DE PAEPE[1]

IN BRUSSELS

London, 24 January 1870

Dear citizen De Paepe,

I am writing to you WITH SOME DIFFICULTY, as my left arm is bandaged. At the end of last month, an abscess of the gland began to form near the armpit. I neglected the thing, and I am punished for my sin. Several days after I sent the letter to Brussels,[2] the pain became intolerable and I fell into the hands of doctors. I underwent two operations, and I feel better, but I am still being treated and must stay at home.

In the first place, I am writing this letter to ask you a personal favour. You probably know that a part of the English bourgeoisie has formed a sort of LAND League[3] against the workers' LAND AND LABOUR LEAGUE.[4] Their ostensible purpose is to transform English landed property into small-lot property, and to create a peasantry for the greater benefit of the people. Their real purpose is an attack against landed aristocracy. They want to throw land in free circulation in order to transfer it in this way from the hands of LANDLORDS into those of capitalists. To this effect, they published a series of popular tracts under the title of Cobden Treaties, in which small-scale property is painted in rosy colours. Their great battle-horse is Belgium (principally the Flemings). It would appear that in that country the peasants live under paradisiacal conditions. They established contact with Mr Laveleye who provides them with facts for their rhetoric. In the meantime, as I treat of landed property in Volume Two of Capital, I believe it useful to go into some detail there on the structure of landed property in Belgium and of Belgian agriculture.[5] Will you have the goodness to send me the titles of the principal books which I must consult[6] ?

My illness has naturally prevented me from attending the General Council[7] in the last weeks. Yesterday evening, the subcommittee (the executive committee) of which I am a member visited me. Among other things, they communicated to me the content of a letter sent by Mr Hins to Stepney. As Stepney believed that I would be able to attend the session of the General Council (on 25 January), he did not communicate to me any extracts from that letter. I do not know any of it except from hearsay.

In the first place, it is probably believed in Brussels that the catastrophe of Geneva, the change in the staff of L'Egalité,[8] was produced by resolutions of the General Council.[9] That is an error. Jung was so busy with his work as watchmaker that he did not find the time to copy the resolutions and dispatch them to Geneva before 16 January. In the interval, he received two letters from H. Perret, secretary of the Romance Committee. The first letter, dated 4 January, is official. It is a communication of the Romance Committee to the General Council stating that some editors of L'Égalité convened to wage a public campaign against the General Council and the Swiss Committees with which they were not in accord, but that they acted against the will of the Romance Committee.

The second letter, of a later date but arriving also before the resolutions of the General Council were dispatched by Jung, is a confidential letter sent by Perret to Jung, I am giving you literal extracts from it to put you in the picture. As the letter is private, I need not tell you that these extracts must not be communicated to the Belgian Committee or that the name of the writer must remain a secret.[10]

'...Bakunin has left Geneva. So much the better. Those kind of people bring discord among us. He was the head of the Alliance[11] These democrats are authoritarians, they do not want any opposition; such are Bakunin, Perron and Robin; these three were at the head of L'Egalité. Bakunin, with his personal attacks, cost us 200 or 300 subscribers in Geneva. Robin is even more authoritarian, his ambition was to change everything here; he has not succeeded, we do not wish to allow ourselves to be dominated by these gentlemen who believe themselves to be indispensable. They attempted to bring pressure to bear on the Federal Committee, and that did not succeed; we do not want to engage in adventures with them or to bring discord in our sections. Please believe me that l'Alliance is dangerous for us, especially now. As for their plan in Geneva, I guessed it a long time ago: to let the men of l'Alliance move to the top of all the societies in order to dominate the Federation. If you knew their mode of action—denigrating at the sections the people who do not let themselves be dominated by them; they did everything to push my candidature out of the way in Basle, the same thing in Grosselin... You see the manoeuvre—sending to Basle no one but members of the l'Alliance, Heng, Brosset, Bakunin. That did not succeed at all. Besides, he worked on the delegations at Lyons, at Naples; these methods are not ethical. They left for Basle before us to prepare their intrigues... Here is something that happened at the Congress, something I guessed about but had no certain proof of. Martinaud, delegate of the Neuchâtel section, had a mandate signed by the brother of Guillaume,[12] a forged, false mandate—we have proof of that in our hands. The Neuchâtel section was not yet definitively constituted, and the provisional committee wrote to us not to recognise either Guillaume or Martinaud. These are the morals of the apostles of l'Alliance, for Guillaume and some others from Locle are their friends. Besides, the creation of Progrès has lured away subscribers to L'Égalité, although our journal was founded by all and we must support it.

'The last bit of news: the cut-throats of l'Alliance have just handed in their resignation from L'Égalité—Perron, Robin and some others, more or less capable ones. A little coup d'état à la Bakunin and à la Robin. They wanted to force the hand of the Federal Committee, that it might dismiss from the staff a member[13] who offered opposition and who condemned attacks made against various committees and the General Council. We do not wish to increase the authority of these gentlemen, we are going to have a quiet fight with them yet, but it seems that l'Alliance loses many of its members; it is diminishing—so much the better.'

So much for the extracts from Perret's letter. If Mr Hins has not yet communicated my letter (and the resolutions of the General Council) to the Belgian Council,[14] it would be better to suppress entirely the paragraph about Bakunin.[15] I have no copy of it, but I know that I wrote it in irritation brought on by physical suffering. Thus I do not doubt that Mr Hins justly blames me for the form of that paragraph. As to the substance and the facts, they are independent both from my bad manner of expression and the good opinion of Mr Hins about Bakunin. The fact is that l'Alliance, of which Bakunin is the creator and which has not been dissolved except nominally, is a danger to the International Association and an element of disorganisation.

In the paragraph concerning Bakunin, I am told that Mr Hins again picks up the phrase le bonhomme Richard. That is a SLIP OF THE PEN, which I regret all the more as Richard is one of the most active members of the Association. I used the phrase only to say that, in the correspondence cited here, he accepts with a great deal of simple-mindedness opinions which he never fathomed. Besides, when I wrote those words, Richard had just given a fresh proof of his thoughtlessness. He had sent to the Council a letter in which a judgement was expressed declaring certain persons belonging to a would-be schismatic Lyons branch to be infamous traitors expelled from the Association. We are asked to copy this judgement, to stamp and sign it, and to return it by post. And that without proof, without documents, without giving those condemned the right to defend themselves.

I am also told that Mr Hins reproaches the English Report on the Basle Congress[16] for having suppressed everything related to the question of heritage. That is obviously a misunderstanding. On pages 26-29 we find the report of the General Council,[17] the report of the committee appointed at Basle, and a summary of the discussion on this question. Moreover, the English Report on the transactions of the Congress was written by Eccarius. The Council appointed a commission to examine that report. Although I was appointed a member of this commission, I refused to take part in its work as I had not been present at the Congress and was thus not competent to judge the exactness of the report. My entire collaboration was restricted to purely stylistic improvements.

Finally, if the resolutions passed by the General Council were not good enough to satisfy Mr. Hins, they obviously satisfied the Romance Committee, for two weeks after their adoption it passed the resolution to free itself from the dictatorship of l'Alliance.

Yours very truly,

K. M.

  1. ↑ This letter was first published in English in an abridged form in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Letters on 'Capital', London, New Park Publications, 1983.
  2. ↑ The report to the Belgian Federal Council written by Marx as a temporary Corresponding Secretary for Belgium is not extant. It had been forwarded to De Paepe through Hins alongside a copy of the circular letter 'The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland' (see present edition, Vol. 21, p. 84) and Robert Shaw's obituary (see Note 511).
  3. ↑ Land League—a reference to the Land Tenure Reform Association founded in July 1869 on the initiative of John Stuart Mill. Its stated purpose was to restore the small peasantry by renting plots of land to the unemployed.
  4. ↑ The first German edition of Volume One of Capital (1867) considers the changes in the structure of capital mentioned here in the c) section of Chapter VI, 'Das allgemeine Gesetz der Kapitalistischen Accumulation'. Corresponding to this section in the second (1872) and subsequent German editions of Volume One, is Chapter XXIII of Part VII. Corresponding to this material in the English edition of 1887 edited by Engels is Chapter XXV, Part VII, 'The General Law of Capitalist Accumulation' (see present edition, Vol. 35).
  5. ↑ Die Zukunft wrote about this statement by Schweitzer on 2 April 1869: 'It should be noted that Herr von Schweitzer had earlier stated unambiguously that if even the most insignificant minority should refuse to grant him confidence, he would immediately resign. It seems, however, that he changed his mind again after the voting.'
  6. ↑ De Paepe listed the works on landed property in Belgium in a letter to Marx of about 1 February 1870.
  7. ↑ that simpleton Richard
  8. ↑ De Paepe listed the works on landed property in Belgium in a letter to Marx of about 1 February 1870.
  9. ↑ K. Marx, The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland.
  10. ↑ The private letter from Perret to Jung mentioned here was dated 4 January 1870, like the official letter. The excerpt that follows has also been preserved as a copy made by Marx's daughter Jenny. The last passage of the excerpt was copied by Marx.
  11. ↑ In his letter to Liebknecht, which has not come down to us (see Engels' letter to Marx of 13 March 1868, present edition, Vol. 42), as well as in his review of Volume One of Capital for the Demokratisches Wochenblatt published on 21 and 28 March 1868, Engels advised the worker deputies to make 'themselves thoroughly conversant with' Capital, which would supply them with the necessary material for the debate on new handicraft trades Regulations in the Reichstag (see present edition, Vol. 20, p. 336).
    The draft regulations were discussed in the Reichstag in the spring of 1869 and were approved on 29 May (see Note 324).
  12. ↑ A reference to the spinning mill industry statistics for 1860 cited on page 186 of the first German edition of Volume One of Capital. Preparing the second German edition which appeared in 1872, Marx used additional information supplied by Engels (see Note 59), cited exact data and corrected a number of factual mistakes which the first edition contained (see present edition, Vol. 35).
  13. ↑ Pierre Waehry
  14. ↑ The report to the Belgian Federal Council written by Marx as a temporary Corresponding Secretary for Belgium is not extant. It had been forwarded to De Paepe through Hins alongside a copy of the circular letter 'The General Council to the Federal Council of Romance Switzerland' (see present edition, Vol. 21, p. 84) and Robert Shaw's obituary (see Note 511).
  15. ↑ Mikhail Bakunin
  16. ↑ Report of the Fourth Annual Congress of the International Working Men's Association held at Basle, in Switzerland
  17. ↑ K. Marx, 'Report of the General Council on the Right of Inheritance'.