Letter to Nikolai Danielson, November 15, 1878

Author(s) Karl Marx
Written 15 November 1878


First published, in Russian, in Minuvshiye gody, No. 1, St Petersburg, 1908
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


MARX TO NIKOLAI DANIELSON[1]

IN ST PETERSBURG[2]

London, 15 November 1878
41 Maitland Park Road, N. W.

My dear Sir,

I received this morning your letter, dated October, 28th. I did not receive the letter you allude to; it may have been intercepted by the German post or been lost; the Prussian postmasters having so much been interfered with on the part of Government, that many letters 'vanished', nobody knows whither, even by mere blundering. In point of fact, the last letter I had the honour to get from you, is dated— 7th May 1877.[3]

The interruption of my own correspondence to you was simply the result of warnings I had received (since the latter date), on the part of friends residing in Russia, to suspend letter-writing to them, as it might, despite the innocent contents of the letters, bring them into trouble.

In regard to the second edition of Capital, I beg to remark[4] :

1) I wish that the divisions into chapters—and the same holds good for the subdivisions—be made according to the French edition.

2) That the translator compare always carefully the second German edition with the French one, since the latter contains many important changes and additions (though, it is true, I was also sometimes obliged—principally in the first chapter—to aplatir[5] the matter in its French version).

3) Some changes I consider useful— / shall try to get [them] ready for you at all events within 8 days, so that I may despatch them Saturday next (to-day is Friday).0

So soon as the second volume of the Capital[6] will go in print—but this will hardly be before the end of 1879—you shall get the manuscript in the way demanded.

I have received some publications from Petersburg, for which my best thanks.[7] Of the polemics of Tschischerin and other people against me, I have seen nothing, save what you sent me in 1877 (one article of Sieber, and the other, I think, of Michailoff,[8] both in the Fatherlandish Annals,[9] in reply to that queer would-be Encyclopedist—Mr Joukowski). Prof. Kowalewskiy, who is here, told me that there had been a rather lively polemics on the Capital.

[The][10] English crisis which I predicted on p. 351 of the French edition, note—has at last come to a head during the past few weeks. Some of my friends—theoreticians and businessmen—had asked me to omit that note because they thought it unfounded. So convinced were they that the crises in the north and south of America and those in Germany and Austria were bound, as it were, to 'cancel out' the English crisis.

The first country in which business will describe an ascending line is the United States of North America. Only this improvement will there set in under conditions altogether altered—for the worse. The people will try in vain to get rid of the monopolising power and the (as far as the immediate happiness of the masses is concerned) baneful influence of the great compagnies swaying industry, commerce, property in land, railroads, finance—-at an always accelerated rate since the outbreak of the Civil War.[11] The best Yankee writers are loud in proclaiming the stubborn fact that, if the Anti-Slavery war has broken the chains of the black, it has on the other hand enslaved the white producers.[12]

The most interesting field for the economist is now certainly to be found in the United States, and, above all, during the period of 1873 (since the crash in September) until 1878—the period of chronic crisis. Transformations—which to be elaborated did require in England centuries—were here realised in a few years. But the observer must look not to the older States on the Atlantic, but to the newer ones (Ohio is a striking example) and the newest (California f.i.).

The imbeciles in Europe who fancy that theoreticians like myself and others are at the root of the evil, might learn a wholesome lesson by reading the official Yankee reports.

You would much oblige me by some information which you as a banker must possess—on the present state of Russian finance.

Yours very truly,

A. W.[13]

  1. ↑ An excerpt from this letter was published in English for the first time in: Marx and Engels, On the United States, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1979.
  2. ↑ The address on the envelope is in Eleanor Marx's hand: 'N. Danielson, Esq., Société du Crédit Mutuel, Pont de Kazan, Maison Lessnikoff, St Petersburg, Russia.'
  3. ↑ Presumably a reference to Danielson's letter of 7 March 1877.
  4. ↑ Part of this letter was published in English for the first time in: K. Marx, On Revolution. Translated by Saul K. Padover, New York, 1971.
  5. ↑ simplify. See this volume, p. 346.
  6. ↑ Following the publication of Part One of A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy in 1859 (see present edition, Vol. 29), Marx wrote a lengthy economic manuscript in 1861-63. It was a second rough draft of Capital (the first being the 1857-58 manuscript). In 1863, he definitively decided that the work was to have four books, the first three being theoretical, and the fourth, presenting a historical and critical survey. In August 1863, having completed work on the manuscript of 1861-63, Marx began preparing Capital for the press.
    This work resulted in a third rough draft of Capital—the Economic Manuscript of 1863-65, consisting of three theoretical books. The draft for the fourth book (Theories of Surplus Value) formed part of the 1861-63 manuscript. Subsequently, Marx returned to the first book. On Engels' advice, Marx decided it would be the first to be published, and was preparing it for the press throughout 1866 and the first half of 1867. The first German edition of the book appeared in September 1867 as Volume One of Capital. Under the plan agreed with the publisher Otto Meissner, the second and third books, analysing the process of circulation of capital and the forms of capitalist process as a whole, were to appear as Volume Two, and the fourth book, dealing with 'the history of economic theories', as the third and final volume of Capital.
    Marx, however, did not manage to prepare the second and third volumes of Capital for the press. After his death, Engels completed the work and published Marx's manuscripts of the second and third books as Volume Two (1885) and Volume Three (1894). Engels also intended to prepare for the press and publish the above-mentioned manuscript of the fourth book as Volume Four of Capital but died before this plan had been carried out. In the present edition of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels, this book of Capital has been included in the Economic Manuscript of 1861-63 (vols 30-34), while the first three volumes of Capital make up vols 35-37 respectively.
  7. ↑ In 1876-78, Marx received a considerable number of works on Russia's social, economic and political development from Nikolai Danielson in St Petersburg. The Russian section of Marx's library grew rapidly in this period (see Note 265).
  8. ↑ Nikolai Mikhailovsky
  9. ↑ Отечественные Записки.
  10. ↑ The passage from here to the words 'Only this improvement' was written in French in the English original.
  11. ↑ The Civil War in America broke out in April 1861. The Southern slaveholders rose against the Union and formed the Confederacy of the Southern States. The war was caused mainly by the conflict between the two social systems: the capitalist system of wage labour established in the North and the slave system dominant in the South. The Civil War, which had the nature of a bourgeois-democratic revolution, passed two stages in its development: the period of a constitutional war for the maintenance of the Union and that of a revolutionary war for the abolition of slavery. The decisive role in the defeat of the Southern slaveholders and the victory of the North in April 1865 was played by the workers and farmers. Marx analysed the causes and the nature of the war in his articles published in the Viennese newspaper Die Presse (see present edition, Vol. 19).
  12. ↑ The next two passages were quoted by Nikolai Danielson, in a somewhat modified form, in the preface to the first Russian edition of Volume Two of Capital, St Petersburg, 1885, p. XII.
  13. ↑ A. Williams (Marx' pseudonym).