Re: the Spanish Edition of Karl Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy

Add a subpage to this text

Read the help page for usage.

 

This is Engels’ reply to the letter sent by Jose Mesa, one of the leaders of the Socialist Workers‘ Party of Spain, on March 2, 1891, in which he requested Engels’ consent to the publication by the Party’s National Council of his Spanish translation of Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy. Answer to the “Philosophy of Poverty” by M. Proudhon (see present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 105-212). Mesa had begun work on the translation back in 1872. Excerpts from it were published in Spanish for the first time in the organ of the Madrid Sections of the First International La Emancipacion, No. 44, April 13, and Nos 68 and 69, October 5 and 13, 1872. Mesa continued work on the translation in the 1870s and 1880s, although an opportunity to publish the book in Spain did not appear until the early 1890s.

Engels’ letter was published as a preface to the Spanish edition of Marx’s work, which came out in Madrid in the summer of 1891.

The supplement carried the party programme adopted at its first congress in Barcelona in 1888.

London, March 24, 1891

My Dear Friend Mesa,

We were very pleased to hear from your letter of the 2nd of this month about the forthcoming publication of your translation of The Poverty of Philosophy by Marx. It goes without saying that we fully associate ourselves with this publication, which undoubtedly must have the most favourable effect on the development of socialism in Spain.

The Proudhonist theory, destroyed in its foundations by Marx’s book, has probably disappeared from the face of the earth since the fall of the Paris “Commune”. But it continues to furnish the arsenal from which the radical bourgeoisie and pseudo-socialists of Western Europe produce the phrases with which they lull the workers. And as the workers of these same countries have inherited from their predecessors similar Proudhonist phrases, it happens that this radical phraseology still finds an echo in many of them. This is what happens in France, where the only remaining Proudhonists are the radical bourgeoisie or Republicans who call themselves socialists. And, if I am not mistaken, you also have in your Cortes and in your newspapers some of these Republicans who call themselves socialists because they see in Proudhonist ideas a plausible way, and one within everyone’s reach, of opposing true socialism, the rational and concise expression of the aspirations of the proletariat, a bourgeois socialism of bad faith.

Fraternal greetings .

F. Engels