ENGELS TO HERMANN SCHLÜTER
IN HOTTINGEN-ZURICH
London, 1 July 1885
Dear Mr Schlüter,
Herewith the preface to the Trial.[1] I have made a note of the other items. It is unlikely that I can do a preface[2] and notes for the Communist Trial[3] before the beginning of September. In July I shall not have a moment to spare and in August I must relax at the seaside for a while.
After which I shall also be able to tackle the June Insurrection.[4]
I should be delighted to see the Schlesische Milliarde republished. In addition, you should reprint my biographical note on Wolff from the Neue Welt (about 1873 I think), to which I should also do an introduction.[5]
I am still waiting for Volume II of Capital. I can't really do anything for you where Meissner is concerned; I have no right to meddle in these matters, and the chap is meticulous.[6]
There are still several hundred portraits of Marx available, in both sizes.
On the whole, everything is going quite well in Germany; our working men will see to it that everything turns out all right.
Yours sincerely,
F. E.
Please let me have clean sheets of the Diihring[7] so that I can draw up a list of printer's errors. I would also ask that in future you let me have 2 clean proofs, as is customary and, indeed, essential.
If you wish to call the things 'From the Neue Rheinische Leitung', Vols. I, II, etc., I am quite agreeable, of course.
- ↑ F. Engels, 'Preface to the Pamphlet Karl Marx Before the Cologne Jury'.
- ↑ F. Engels, 'On the History of the Communist League'.
- ↑ K. Marx, Revelations Concerning the Communist Trial in Cologne.
- ↑ Eight of Marx's draft manuscripts for Volume II (Book II, as he originally intended) of Capital have survived. The longest of them, consisting of three lengthy chapters, is Manuscript I. It was completed in the spring of 1865, and Engels subsequently turned it into parts of Volume II. Since he did not regard the said manuscript as the final version of Book II, as he was preparing Volume I of Capital for the press Marx wrote Manuscript III (in which he gave a conspectus of works apparently intended for quotation in Volume II) and Manuscript IV, which Engels later described as 'an elaboration, ready for the press, of Part I and the first chapters of Part II of Book IF (see present edition, Vol. 36, Preface). In 1868-70 Marx wrote a completely new version of the second book, i.e. Manuscript II. The reason why manuscripts III and IV appeared earlier than Manuscript II is that, when he was numbering the drafts of Volume II in the late seventies, Marx started with the two complete versions and followed them with the outlines of individual parts. In the latter half of the 1870s Marx resumed work on Book II, having realised that it was not complete; although he had examined the simple reproduction of capital in great detail in Manuscript II, he had not analysed its extended reproduction. Manuscripts V, VI and VII appeared between April 1877 and July 1878 and were an attempt to turn the text into a suitable form for printing. The final version of the second book of Capital was Manuscript VIII on which Marx seems to have worked between the autumn of 1879 and early 1880. Later it was used in full by Engels when preparing Part III of Volume IL
- ↑ The reference is to a separate edition of Wilhelm Wolffs series of articles on the situation of the Silesian peasants called Die schlesische Milliarde and printed in a number of issues of the Neue Rheinische Leitung between 22 March and 22 April 1849. Engels included a preface in this edition, which came out in 1886. Its first section was a biography of Wolff which he had written back in 1876 (see F. Engels, 'Wilhelm Wolff, present edition, Vol. 24) but in a much abbreviated form, whilst the second section was the article 'On the History of the Prussian Peasants. Introduction to Wilhelm Wolffs pamphlet The Silesian Milliard (Vol. 26) specially for that edition.
- ↑ In his letter of 24 June 1885 Hermann Schlüter informed Engels that Meissner, whose publishing house had issued Capital, was offering Der Sozialdemokrat publishers in Zurich copies of the second volume of Capital to distribute on terms he considered unfavourable.
- ↑ On 7 April 1884 Eduard Bernstein informed Engels that the second and third parts of his work Anti-Diihring ('Political Economy' and 'Socialism', see present edition, Vol. 25) were almost sold out and that 300 copies remained of the first part ('Philosophy'). He therefore suggested that a new edition of the work be prepared, but this time as a single volume and not in separate parts. The second German edition of Anti-Dühring appeared in Zurich at the beginning of December 1885 with additions made by Engels to the second chapter of the third part. The title page gave the year of publication as 1886.