Letter to Theodor Koll, August 10, 1871

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 10 August 1871


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVI, Moscow, 1935
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 44


MARX TO THEODOR KOLL

IN LONDON

[Draft]

[London,] 10 August [1871] 1 Maitland Park Road, Haverstock Hill, N.W.

Citizen Koll,

After I had received £4.1/6 from Lessner for the Pest tailors, I read in the German papers that the tailors' strike in Pest was over.

I therefore wrote at once to Jakob Holländer[1] (at the address of Johann Travnick, etc., which is the address Holländer himself had given to the Workers' Society[2] ). In my letter [I] informed him that I had received £4.1/6 to send to him from the German Workers' Society, but that I had read in the German papers that the STRIKE was over, and therefore wanted to know— if the news turned out to be true—whether the Pest tailors would mind the money being put into the fund for the French refugees. I asked him for an immediate reply.

Since no answer came, on 27 June I paid the money into the refugee fund (as you can see from the enclosed receipt) in the name of the Workers' Society.

This was done with the reservation that if the Pest workers, acting through their correspondent Holländer, should direct me to put the money to another use, the £4.1/6 paid by me into the refugee fund in the name of the Workers' Educational Society should be regarded as a personal contribution from myself, and I would then send the money on to Pest on behalf of the Workers' Society.

However, no reply came from Pest and so I regarded the matter as settled.

In consequence of your letter I have now written to Bachruch

(a Hungarian worker in Paris) and asked him to find a safe way to write to Jakob Holländer in Pest and request him to reply to my letter at once.

I would ask you at the same time to announce my resignation from the Society to its members.

Yours faithfully,

Karl Marx

  1. ↑ The Landwehr—a second-line army reserve formed in Prussia during the struggle against Napoleonic rule. In the 1870s, it consisted of men under forty years of age who had seen active service and had been in the first-line reserve. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71, the Landwehr was used in military actions on a par with the regular troops.
  2. ↑ the German Workers' Educational Society in London