| Category | Template | Form |
|---|---|---|
| Text | Text | Text |
| Author | Author | Author |
| Collection | Collection | Collection |
| Keywords | Keywords | Keywords |
| Subpage | Subpage | Subpage |
| Template | Form |
|---|---|
| BrowseTexts | BrowseTexts |
| BrowseAuthors | BrowseAuthors |
| BrowseLetters | BrowseLetters |
Template:GalleryAuthorsPreviewSmall
Special pages :
Letter to Joseph Weydemeyer, December 19, 1849
First published: in Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, 1934.
To Joseph Weydemeyer in Frankfurt Am Main
In English this letter was first published abridged in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Letters to Americans. 1848-1895, International Publishers, New York, 1953.
London, 19 December 1849 4 Anderson Street, Kings Road, Chelsea[edit source]
Dear Weydemeyer,
An unconscionable time has elapsed since I last wrote to you. Civil vexations of every kind, all manner of business and, finally, the general difficulty I have in bringing myself to write a letter, will explain to you my long silence. I have at last, after so many vicissitudes, succeeded in giving reality to my Revue [Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue] that is to say, I have a printer and a distributor in Hamburg. [J. E. M. Köhler and J. Schuberth] Otherwise we do everything at our own expense. The worst of it is that in Germany so much time is always lost before one can get to the point of publication. I have little doubt that by the time 3, or maybe 2, monthly issues have appeared, a world conflagration will intervene and the opportunity of temporarily finishing with political economy will be gone.[1]
As you live in the heart of Germany and hence are more familiar with the details than we are, you might perhaps find time to describe, for our Revue, briefly and concisely in a few main features, the present condition of South Germany and everything connected with it.[2]
I would further request you to insert the following announcement in your paper [Marx and. Engels, ‘Announcement of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue’ published in the Neue Deutsche Zeitung, edited by Weydemeyer, 16 and 26 January and 5 February 1850] but not until you have seen the announcement in the Kölnische Zeitung for which the bookseller in Hamburg will be responsible. Perhaps you could send a copy to Westphalia. For you will see from the announcement that, besides our circulation through the book trade, we want to establish another by asking our party comrades to draw up subscription lists and send them to us here. For the time being we shall have to keep the price fairly high and the number of sheets low. Should our resources increase as a result of a wider circulation, this defect will be remedied.
What do you think of the row between Proudhon, Blanc and Pierre Leroux?[3]
Willich sends you his regards, and likewise Engels, red Wolff [Ferdinand Wolff] and Weerth.
Here in England the most important movement is probably taking place at this moment. On the one hand, protectionist agitation supported by the fanaticised rural population — the consequences of the free corn trade are now beginning to be felt in the form I predicted years ago [Marx, Speech On the Question of Free Trade] — on the other, the Free Traders who, as financial and Parliamentary reformers,[4] are extending the wider political and economic logic of their system to home affairs and, as Peace Party,[5] to foreign affairs; finally, the Chartists who, while acting in concert with the bourgeoisie against the aristocracy, have at the same time resumed with increased vigour their own party activity against the bourgeois.[6] The conflict between these parties will be tremendous and the outward form of agitation will become more tempestuously revolutionary if, as I hope — and not without good reason — the Tories come to power in place of the Whigs. Another event as yet imperceptible on the Continent, is the mighty industrial, agricultural and commercial crisis now looming up. Were the Continent to postpone its revolution until after the onset of this crisis, England might from the start have to be an ally, albeit an unpopular one, of the revolutionary Continent. An earlier outbreak of revolution — unless directly motivated by Russian intervention — would in my view be a misfortune since at this particular time, with trade still on the up and up the mass of the workers in France, Germany, etc., as well as the entire strata of tradesmen, etc., though perhaps revolutionary in words, are certainly not so in reality.
You know that my wife has made the world richer by one citizen [Heinrich Guido — Fawksy]? She sends her warm regards to you and your wife. My best regards to the latter also.
Write soon.
Your
K. Marx
Apropos, can you find out Citizen Hentze’s address for me?
You will have seen friend Heinzen’s inane bragging in the newspapers. This fellow, who was done for by the revolution in Germany — before that his things enjoyed a certain vogue because the petty bourgeois and the commercial traveller liked to see printed in black and white the idiocies and rodomontades they themselves served mysteriously between the cheese and the biscuits at the wine-shop — is endeavouring to rehabilitate himself by compromising the other refugees in Switzerland and England — those who have really worked — in the eyes of those countries’ governments,[7] by kicking up a row, and earning himself a lucrative martyrdom by threatening shortly to gobble up a hundred thousand of millions of men at lunch.
- ↑ Marx began to study political economy at the end of 1843 and by spring 1844 he set himself the task of writing a criticism of bourgeois political economy from the standpoint of materialism and communism. The draft Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, written at that time, have reached us incomplete. Work on The Holy Family forced Marx temporarily to interrupt his study of political economy until December 1844. In February 1845, just before his expulsion from Paris. he signed a contract for his Kritik der Politik und National-Okonomie with the publisher Leske. In Brussels Marx continued to study the works of English, French, German, Italian and other economists and added several more notebooks of excerpts to those compiled in Paris, although his original plan for the book was not carried out.
On 1 February 1845 Marx signed a contract with the publisher Leske for the publication of his Kritik der Politik und National-Ökonomie. But as early as March 1846 Leske suggested that Marx find another publisher and, in case he did find one, return him the advance received. Therefore Marx hoped to repay Leske either when he signed a contract with a new publisher or out of the sum received for financing the planned publication. But Marx was unable either to sign a new contract or to fulfil his intention to write a work on economics, and in February 1847 the contract with Leske was cancelled. - ↑ Marx’s intention to enlist Joseph Weydemeyer as a regular contributor to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-ökonomische Revue was never realised. About mid-January Weydemeyer wrote his first article ‘From South Germany’ but it was not published in the first issue of the Revue owing to lack of space, and later lost its topical interest.
- ↑ In a series of articles published in the Voix du Peuple from 10 November 1849 to 18 January 1850 Proudhon polemicised bitterly with Louis Blanc, particularly against the latter’s idea of using the existing State for solving the social problem, and censured his activity as a member of the Provisional Government of the French Republic (*) calling him a pseudo-socialist and pseudo-democrat.
Proudhon criticised from anarcho-reformist positions Louis Blanc’s ‘state socialism’ and other French socialists’ ideas close to Blanc’s.
(*) This refers to the utopian plans for the ‘organisation of labour’ with the help of a bourgeois state proposed by Louis Blanc as president of the Labour Commission set up by the Provisional Government on 28 February 1848 (it held its meetings in the Luxembourg Palace). The Commission was dissolved by the Government after the popular action of 15 May 1848. - ↑ At the meeting on 13 August 1849 in the London Drury Lane Theatre of the National Association for Parliamentary and Financial Reform (founded by the bourgeois radicals in 1849 with the aim of achieving a democratic electoral system and changes in the tax system) O'Connor advocated a union of the middle and working classes. His speech was supported by the Free Trader Thomas Thompson.
- ↑ The Peace Society — a pacifist organisation founded by the Quakers in 1816 in London. It was actively supported by the Free Traders who assumed that in peace time free trade would enable Britain to make better use of its industrial superiority and win economic and politics supremacy.
- ↑ After their defeat in 1848 (dispersal of their demonstration of 10 April, etc.) the Chartists resumed agitation in the autumn of 1849: mass meetings in factory districts were held in support of the imprisoned Chartists and an amnesty of political prisoners was demanded. At the beginning of December 1849 a new wave of meetings swept over London and the towns of Northern England on the occasion of the nomination of delegates to the Chartist Convention which was to reorganise the movement.
- ↑ Karl Heinzen’s statements in his pamphlet, Lehren der Revolution, that during the future revolution millions of reactionaries would be beaten up, were used by some conservative European press organs for launching a campaign against political refugees. As The Times of 23 November 1849 tried to lay the responsibility for these ‘hellish doctrines’ on all German socialists and described Heinzen as one of their leading figures, Marx and Engels deemed it necessary to dissociate themselves from his utterances. With this aim in view Engels published a note ‘The German Social Democrats and The Times’ in the Chartist Northern Star, 1 December 1849.