Letter to Ferdinand Fleckles, January 21, 1877

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 21 January 1877


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 45


MARX TO FERDINAND FLECKLES

IN KARLSBAD

[London,] 21 January 1877

Dear Friend,

To begin with, my best thanks for the medicinal salts and my regret that your first, long letter went astray.

Tomorrow a small parcel of books goes off from here to Madame Wollmann, containing the French edition of Capital for your cousin and, for yourself (from the 'child'[1] ), Lissagaray's Histoire de la Commune. The muster-roll of the Social-Democratic party in Germany on the occasion of the general elections[2] has rudely alarmed, not only our amiable German philistine, but also les classes dominantes in England and France. An English paper comments sourly upon, inter alia, the contrast between 'THE MELODRAMATIC FITS AND STARTS OF THE FRENCH AND THE BUSINESSLIKE WAY OF PROCEEDING OF THE GERMAN SOCIALISTS'.

The increasing extent to which even the ideologists of the German middle classes are being affected by the insidious poison is evident from, amongst other things, a short pamphlet recently published by an old acquaintance of yours, Schäffle, entitled Die Quintessenz des Socialismus. You ought to order the thing, if only for amusement's sake. It is full of unintentional comedy. For, on the one hand, the little book, as the author himself indicates, is aimed especially at Protestant clergymen who, after all, cannot leave flirtation with socialism entirely to their Catholic rivals. On the other, Mr Schäffle, with a fantasy truly Swabian, paints so pretty a picture of the future socialist millennium as to make it seem the kingdom come of your cosy petty bourgeois, a paradise fit only for the Karl Mayers of this world.

Not only is the weather here unspeakable—close, damp, with a fog in so deep a tinge of yellow that one has, as I do, to keep the gaslight on throughout the morning, but the 'ORIENTAL QUESTION' is rampant. Wherever you go, you're buttonholed by un John Bull[3]

quelconque: 'Now, SIR, WHAT DO YOU THINK OF THE ORIENTAL QUESTION?' Politeness precludes one from giving the only appropriate answer: 'I THINK, SIR, THAT YOU ARE A DAMNED ASS.'

Whatever the outcome of the war,[4] whether favourable or unfavourable to the Little Father in Petersburg,3 that 'sick man',[5]

deafened and confused by the hysterical philanthropic bellowing of the English liberal 'PARTY OF PROFIT AT ANY PRICE', has given the signal for a convulsion which has long been in the making within his own Empire, the ultimate result of which will be to put paid to the whole of old Europe's present status quo.

Please give your dear cousin my warmest regards and apply yourself seriously to the study of the English language, for if the worst comes to the worst, England is still the best place in which to set up medical quarters.

Yours very sincerely,

Karl Marx

  1. ↑ Eleanor Marx
  2. ↑ Regular elections to the German Reichstag were held on 10 January 1877. About half a million votes were cast for the socialist candidates of whom 12 were actually elected (see also Note 248).
  3. ↑ some John Bull or other
  4. ↑ Engels' forecast based on an in-depth analysis of European policy in the Levant proved correct. The Russo-Turkish war began on 24 April 1877 and ended in defeat for Turkey. On 3 March 1878, the preliminary San Stefano Treaty (see Note 430) was signed, which granted complete sovereignty to Serbia, Montenegro and Romania.
  5. ↑ A 'sick man'—an expression used by Nicholas I with reference to Turkey in the talks of 9 January 1853 and in subsequent negotiations with George Hamilton Seymour, the British envoy.