Letter to Paul Lafargue, March 6, 1891

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 6 March 1891


First published in: F. Engels, P. et L. Lafargue, Correspondance, t. III, Paris, 1959
Printed according to the original translated from the French
Published in English in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 49


ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE

AT LE PERREUX

London, 6 March 1891

My dear Lafargue,

Old Mother Victoria has behaved like a perfect idiot. ' 8 ' She ought to have known that in France, where people have fought for the Re- public for the past hundred years, her royal person would cut no ice and that in Paris they don't give a fig for her. But these personages cannot get it out of their heads that merely to appear in one place or another is to do it an honour for which all and sundry are obliged to render thanks.

Like the Broussists 3 in your country, the Social Democratic Fed- eration 29 over here has had to give way over the May demonstration. They sent 3 delegates to the Eight Hours Committee, of which Avel- ing is chairman. This evening he will submit the Justice articles ' 7 9 to the delegates ofthat committee and thus force their hand. He wrote a letter to Justice in which he challenged Hyndman to confront him at a public meeting and the latter has refused, not only to publish the letter, but to respond to the challenge: he would invite comparison with Aveling the moment he began to canvass the working man's vote.

Meanwhile you have scored a great victory by forcing the Brous- sists to stick to 1 May.182 To PUT IX THE THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE you must treat those delegates as nicely and as obsequiously as you can. Just wait and see, the demonstration will lose little, if anything at all, by being spread over two days rather than one. Perhaps you were right to complain that the Germans in Paris were wholeheartedly in favour of the 1st[1] and that they now seem to be having second thoughts,[2] but apart from that (and Tussy says that in effect no one who saw them in Paris would have guessed at their attitude today) — apart from that, no one will persuade the Germanic nations to sacrifice or even endanger the whole future of their movement for the sake of a demonstration.

Now for something else. Kautsky wrote to me a few weeks ago to say that he had had an article from you on Marx and the bourgeois economists,[3] which he thought was not entirely suited to the Ger- man public. However he hesitated to return it to you. What was he to do? I asked him to send me the article, which he did. I read it and in- deed I, too, share Kautsky's opinion that the article cannot be pub- lished in German and for the following reasons:

First of all, not one German economist has ever accused Marx of advancing theories that were not connected with those of Smith and Ricardo. On the contrary, what they do is reproach Smith and Ri- cardo with having produced Marx who, in their view, has merely drawn inferences from the theory, propounded by the aforesaid pre- decessors, of value, profit, rent and, lastly, the division of the product of labour. That is why they have become vulgar economists who don't give a damn for the classicals. You cite Brentano whose reply to you would be that all your shots are wide of the mark.

Next, everything and more you say about and quote from these two economists and other authors has been said and quoted by us in Germany:

1. Theory of value: In his Critique of Political Economy, 1859, Marx concludes each chapter with an outline of the history of the theory therein developed. After the theory of value you will find on p. 29 'historical notes on the analysis of commodities' in which, after Petty and Boisguillebert, Franklin and Steuart, the Physiocrats and Galiani and their ideas on value, he discusses A. Smith on p. 37 and Ricardo on pp. 38-39 1 8 3—hence all of it familiar stuff to the Ger- mans. I would mention further that the passage you quote from Smith is not one of his best; there are others in which he gets much closer to the truth. In your passage he fixes the value of a product in accordance, not with the labour it contains, but with what can be bought with that product. A definition which embraces the whole con- tradiction of the old system.

2. Surplus value. Everything you say about this subject has been said by me in my preface to Vol. II of Capital in the passages indi- cated to Laura who will translate them for you if you ask her nicely.

3. The man Say is no longer of any significance in Germany. What's more you rehabilitate him by discerning beneath the vulgar- ity a strain of classicism, which is more than he deserves.

The post is about to go — I am holding the article here at your dis- posal.

Yours ever,

F.E.

  1. ↑ The International Socialist Workers' Congress in Paris — virtually the inaugural con gress of the Second International — opened on 14 July 1889, the centenary of the capture of the Bastille. Some 400 delegates from 20 countries of Europe and Amer ica attended. The congress heard the reports of the representatives of socialist par ties on the state of the labour movement in their respective countries and worked out the fundamentals of international labour legislation, demanding a legal eight- hour day, the outlawing of child labour, and measures to protect working women and juveniles. It stressed the need for the political organisation of the proletariat and a struggle to ensure satisfaction of the workers' democratic demands. It also spoke out for the disbandment of standing armies and the universal arming of the people. The congress's most important resolution was the decision to hold demon strations and meetings in all countries on 1 May 1890 to back up demands for an eight-hour working day and labour legislation. The anarchists opposed the congress resolutions but were overwhelmingly outvoted.
  2. ↑ See this volume, pp. 123 24.
  3. ↑ This article by Paul Lafargue, intended for Neue Zeit, did not appear in it. In his letter to Engels of 6 February Kautsky characterised it as slipshod and containing serious mistakes, and asked what he should do with it. The article was published later in La Revue socialiste, t. XVI, No. 93, 1892, under the title 'La théorie de la valeur et de la plus-value de Marx et les économistes bourgeois'. For Engels' assess ment of it see this volume, pp. 140-42.