Letter to Friedrich Engels, May 25, 1876

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 25 May 1876


First published abridged in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 4, Stuttgart, 1913 and in full in MEGA, Abt. III, Bd. 4, Berlin, 1931
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


MARX TO ENGELS

IN RAMSGATE

[London,] 25 May 1876

Dear FRED,

At the same time as this letter I am posting off Most's manuscript[1] in the inadequately packed state in which it arrived. I opened the enclosed scrawl from Wilhelm[2] because I thought it had something to do with Most's affair. In addition, I removed from your house a communication from the GREAT NORTHERN RAILWAY intending to forward it to you because I thought it was a business letter, but now discover it to be simply a PROGRAMME OF TOURIST ARRANGEMENTS.

I consider that, if one is to adopt a 'position vis-à-vis these gentlemen' one can do so only by criticising Dühring without any compunction. He has obviously been secretly at work among the literary loutish careerists devoted to him in order to obviate such criticism; they for their part have been counting on Liebknecht's weakness of which they are well aware. It was, BY THE BY, Liebknecht's duty, and he should be told as much, to let these laddies know that he had repeatedly asked for such criticism and that we had long (for the business started after my first return from Karlsbad[3] ) refused on the grounds that the work was too paltry. As he knows, and as his letters to us go to prove, the thing only seemed worth doing when, by repeatedly passing on to us the louts' letters, he drew our attention to the threat of debased propaganda within the party.

As regards Mr Most in specie, he must by the nature of things regard Dühring as an authentic thinker because of the latter's having broadcast the discovery, not only in a lecture to workers in Berlin, but subsequently in black and white, that Most was the only one to have made some sense out of Capital.[4] Dühring systematically flatters these louts—something they cannot complain we do. Most and Co.'s vexation over the way you dumbfounded the Swabian Proudhonist[5] is typical. It serves as a terrible example before which they quail, and they are trying to prevent such a thing ever happening again by means of tittle-tattle, stalwart bonhomie and outraged brotherly love.

Certainly, the root of the trouble is and will remain Liebknecht's want of manuscripts, in which, generally speaking, his editorial talent seems to be concentrated. However, the pettiness with which he avoids according Becker's history of the French Commune[6] so much as a word of recognition, let alone publishing an extract or two from it, proves that even the want of manuscripts is not the only governing factor.

You may remember that, in a recent conversation we had about Turkey, I drew your attention to the possibility of a puritan party (based on the Koran) amongst the Turks. This has now supervened. According to a news item from Constantinople in the Frankfurter Zeitung, there is a plan, if things continue as they are, to remove the Sultan and put his brother in his place.[7] The correspondent, who speaks Turkish and has much personal intercourse with Turks in Constantinople, insists inter alia that they know very well what Ignatiyev is up to, and that he is the source of all the disquieting rumours circulating among the Christians in Constantinople. Of one thing we may be sure: the Turks are not to be got rid of WITHOUT HARNESS ON THEIR BACK, and the Russians, who did not dare (or, perhaps, could not, due to lack of money) act swiftly and thus seize time by the forelock, may perhaps by the present ADVENTURE contribute more to the collapse of their own régime than to that of the Turks in Europe.

Jennychen is well, but the little boy is somewhat seedy, though it's nothing of consequence, the doctor says. He is to be called Jean (after Longuet's father) Laurent (NICKNAME OF LAURA) Frederick (in your honour).

The Copenhagen people have invited me by telegram, as well as in a letter to Pio (who left on Monday[8] ), to attend a working men's congress (beginning of June).[9] It's fantastic to suppose I should now be able to give guest performances of this kind.

Today our park has been boarded off. Funny how ancient Teutonic customs survive as curiosities in England. This is the safeguarding of 'genuine freehold' by fencing off and hence separating it from the common mark.

Pumps has written long letters to my wife and Tussy. Even if the spelling sometimes isn't up to scratch, she has really made astonishing progress in the matter of style and ease of expression, which are far more important.

Kindest regards to Madame Lizzy.

Your

K. Marx

What a jackass Dizzy[10] has become! At a moment when England is completely isolated, he insists on keeping a dozen or more Fenians to himself![11]

As regards 'Richter'/ Liebknecht shouldn't confine himself to mere HINTS when uttering warnings of this kind.[12] While there may be a possibility that my address book disappeared along with Richter, I don't for the time being believe it.

The fact of Eichhoff's working for Arnim was, of course, known to us long before Liebknecht, nor is there anything in the least surprising about it, in view of Eichhoff's hatred of Bismarck and Stieber. Notabene, in the Frankfurter Zeitung there is a Prussian warrant against Arnim, in accordance with which he is to be relieved of his money and handed over to the Berlin police; the authorities abroad will have their expenses paid and are assured of their services being requited in kind! (This on account of the suppression of documents for which he had already been sentenced.)

  1. ↑ Johann Most's manuscript was a panegyric on Eugen Dühring's Cursus der Philosophie, which appeared in 1875. Most's article about Dühring was printed in September-October 1876 in the Berliner Freie Presse under the heading 'Ein Philosoph'.
  2. ↑ Wilhelm Liebknecht
  3. ↑ On 15 August 1874 Marx, accompanied by his daughter Eleanor, left for Karlsbad (Karlovy Vary) on doctors' recommendations, where he stayed from 19 August to 21 September. On the way back to London, Marx stopped off in Dresden, Leipzig, Berlin and Hamburg. In Leipzig, where he stayed approximately from 25 to 28 September, he had talks about the state of the German working-class movement with Wilhelm Liebknecht and Wilhelm Bios, as well as with members of the Leipzig party branch. While in Hamburg on 29 September-1 October, Marx met Social-Democratic leaders.
  4. ↑ Marx is probably referring to Dühring's opinion of Most's pamphlet Kapital und Arbeit (see Note 154) made in the second edition of his Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Socialismus, Berlin, 1875, p. 570.
  5. ↑ Marx is referring TO ENGELS' work The Housing Question; its first and third parts contain criticism of Arthur Mülberger's articles which were reprinted under the general heading 'Die Wohnungsfrage' by Der Volksstaat in February-March 1872 from the Austrian workers' paper Volkswille (see present edition, Vol. 23).
  6. ↑ An excerpt from this letter was published in English for the first time in: K. Marx, On History and People, McGraw Hill Book Company, New York, 1977. It appeared in English in full in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979.
  7. ↑ On 30 May 1876, a palace revolution overthrew Sultan Abdul Aziz and enthroned his nephew Prince Murad (Murad V) who had a reputation as reformer. On 4 June Abdul Aziz was assassinated.
  8. ↑ 22 May
  9. ↑ On 6 June 1876, the congress held in Copenhagen re-established the Danish Social-Democratic Workers' Party which had been originally founded in 1871 as a section of the International and dissolved by the government in 1872. Up to 1884, it was called the Social-Democratic League. The congress approved rules and a programme based on the principles of the Gotha Programme of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany (see Note 121). Louis Pio was elected chairman, and Paul Geleff the second chairman of the Executive.
  10. ↑ Benjamin Disraeli
  11. ↑ At the House of Commons sitting on 22 May 1876, one of the Irish M.P.s inquired of Prime Minister Disraeli whether the government intended to amnesty the Fenians who were still in prison. Disraeli stated that 15 Fenians remained imprisoned, and that the government had no intention of pardoning them since it regarded them as 'criminals and deserters'. The statement provoked a storm of indignation among the Irish M.P.s. The Fenians were Irish revolutionaries who had taken their name from the 'Féne', the ancient population of Ireland. Their first organisations appeared in the 1850s among the Irish immigrants in the USA, and later in Ireland itself. The secret Irish Revolutionary Brotherhood, as the organisation was known in the early 1860s, aimed at establishing an independent Irish republic by means of an armed uprising. The Fenians, who expressed the interests of the Irish peasantry, came chiefly from the urban petty bourgeoisie and intellectuals, and believed in conspiratorial tactics. The British government attempted to suppress the Fenian movement by severe police reprisals. In September 1865 it arrested a number of Fenian leaders, who were sentenced to long terms of imprisonment (O'Donovan Rossa received a life sentence). In 1867, following the abortive attempt at an uprising, hundreds of Irishmen were thrown into prison. Marx and Engels, who repeatedly pointed to the weak sides of the Fenian movement, their reliance on conspiracy and sectarian errors, nevertheless had a high regard for its revolutionary character and did their best to encourage it to embark on mass struggle and joint action with the English working class. In the 1870s, the Fenian movement declined.
  12. ↑ In his letter of 16 May 1876, Wilhelm Liebknecht warned Engels that he and his friends had reason to suspect Dmitry Richter of espionage. Later the suspicions were proved to be unfounded (see this volume, pp. 155-59).