Letter to Pyotr Lavrov, June 18, 1875

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 18 June 1875


First published, in Russian, in Letopisi marksizma, Book V, Moscow-Leningrad, 1928
Printed according to the original
Translated from the French
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


MARX TO PYOTR LAVROV

IN LONDON

[London,] 18 June 1875

My dear Friend,

When I visited you the day before yesterday I forgot to tell you an important piece of news of which you may not yet be aware. Traube, a Berlin physiologist, has succeeded in making artificial cells.[1] Needless to say, they are not completely natural cells, being without a nucleus.

If a colloidal solution, e.g. of gelatine, is combined with copper sulphate, etc., this produces globules surrounded by a membrane that can be made to grow by intussusception. Here, then, membrane formation and cell growth have left the realm of hypothesis! It marks a great step forward, the more so since Helmholtz and others were engaged in disseminating the absurd doctrine that the germs of terrestrial life fall ready-made from the moon, i.e. that they were brought down here by aerolites.[2] I detest the kind of explanation which solves a problem by consigning it to some other locality.

The trade crisis goes on. Everything now depends on the news that will arrive from the Asiatic markets which, for years, have been getting increasingly overstocked — especially those in East Indies. Under certain conditions, which are, however, not likely to materialise, the final crash may yet be delayed until the autumn.

One truly remarkable phenomenon is the decrease in the number of years between general crises. I have always regarded that number not as a constant, but as a decreasing magnitude; what is pleasing, however, is that the signs of its decrease are so palpable as to augur ill for the survival of the bourgeois world.[3]

My compliments to Mrs and Mr Noel.[4]

Yours ever,

K. M.

  1. ↑ Traube's artificial cells—inorganic formations representing a model of living cells; they were created by the German chemist and physiologist Moritz Traube by mixing colloidal solutions. He read a paper on his experiments to the 47th Congress of German Naturalists and Physicians in Breslau on 23 September 1874. Marx and Engels thought highly of Traube's discovery.
  2. ↑ See present edition, Vol. 25, p. 574.
  3. ↑ Marx elaborated these ideas in Chapter XXV of the French edition of the first volume of Capital (see Note 17). Engels did not include this passage in the English translation of the volume which is to be found in Vol. 35 of the present edition.
  4. ↑ Rozalia Idelson and her husband Valerian Smirnov