Works of Marx and Engels 1851
Source: MECW Volume 10, p. 535-536;
Written: London, January 27, 1851;
First published: Marx/Engels, Works, first Russ. ed. Vol VIII, Leningrad, 1930.
In an article from London dated January 13 the Bremer Tages-Chronik of January 17 this year has imported a whole cargo of badly-written stupidities, of fabricated and misunderstood gossip, of clumsy insinuations and moral posturing against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and against the undersigned.
"Prominent and decided men"" of the calibre of this London correspondent have from time immemorial responded to superior criticism in the manner of apes. They bombard their enemy with their own excrement. Chacun selon ses facultes.
We let this "decided and prominent" man off with his nicely fabricated little stories about the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. In answer to his well-meaning insinuations on our resignation from the Great Windmill Society we declare:
Neither before nor after their resignation from this Society have Engels and Marx ever had the slightest connection with the management of its funds. They took part in the management of the refugee fund, and resigned only after their administration up to that point had been audited and found correct. That the resignation occurred to avoid the payment of a monthly contribution of ninepence--this is the notion of a Reichs-Stuber which has been thrown out of circulation! And for this purpose one of them is said to have moved to Manchester and the other to have wished to travel overseas. What pure pearls rest in the depths of morally incensed souls!
The real motives for our resignation from the Society and for our parting with its leaders are known to our party comrades in Germany. They are approved and shared by them, they do not concern the general public. Under existing German conditions a more skilful agent provocateur would not have given us cause for further explanations, much less the bearishly clumsy one of the Bremer Tages-Chronik.
It suffices in conclusion to indicate that the man besmirching the Bremer Tages-Chronik from London with his own guano is none other than that Pomeranian thinker to whom the Neue Rheinische Zeitung has constantly returned with a kind of artistic preference, whom we have characterised elsewhere on the basis of his writings as "the gutter into which all the rhetorical refuse and all the contradictions of German democracy flow together", in a word, that the fellow in Bremen is no less a person than "Arnold Winkelried Ruge", the fifth wheel on the carriage of state of European central democracy.
Now one can understand the depravity of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung.