Marx-Engels Correspondence 1866
Source: MECW Volume 42, p 220;
First published: abridged in Die Neue Zeit, Stuttgart, 1901-1902 and in full in Pisma Marksa k Kugelmanu (Letters of Marx to Kugelmann), Moscow-Leningrad, 1928.
Dear Friend,
A happy New Year and best thanks for your kind letter.
You must excuse the brevity of these lines on account of my being excessively busy at present. I'll write more fully next time. I am enclosing two cards and will let you know in my next letter which questions are to be dealt with at the public congress in Geneva at the end of May.
Our Association has made great progress. It already has 3 official organs, one in London, The Workman’s Advocate, one in Brussels, La Tribune du Peuple, one put out by the French section in Switzerland, Journal de 1'Association Internationale des Travailleurs, Section de la Suisse Romande (Geneva), and in a few days time a journal is to be put out by the German-Swiss section, Der Vorbote, under the editorship of J. P. Becker. (Address: 6 rue du Môle, Genf, J. P. Becker, in case you wanted to send him an occasional article, political or social).
We have succeeded in attracting into the movement the only really big workers’ organisation, the English ‘trade unions’, which previously concerned themselves exclusively with the wage question. With their help, the English society we founded to achieve universal suffrage (half of its Central Committee consists of members — working men — of our Central Committee) held a giant meeting a few weeks ago, at which only working men spoke. You can tell what effect it had from the fact that the leaders of two successive issues of The Times were concerned with this meeting.
As regards my work, [Capital] I am now busy 12 hours a day writing out the fair copy. I am thinking of taking the manuscript of the first volume to Hamburg myself in March and using the opportunity to see you.
I was much amused by the antics of Justus von Möser’s successor. How wretched a man of talent must be who seeks and finds satisfaction in trivialities of that kind!
As regards Bürgers, he is doubtless well-meaning, but weak. It is not much over a year ago that he declared at a public meeting in Cologne (it appeared in print in the Cologne papers) that Schulze-Delitzsch had ‘solved’ the social question once and for all and that only personal friendship for me had induced him (Bürgers) to stray onto the tangled paths of communism! After such public statements, could I regard him as other than a ‘renegade’?
Your most sincere friend
K. Marx