Karl Marx to Friedrich Engels 
in Manchester 
London, Wednesday, 28 January 1863 

I 28 Jan. 1863. 
Dear Frederick, 
Through a series of strange accidents it was yesterday positively im-
possible for me to acknowledge receipt of your letter and the bill. 

I know quite exactly how risky it was for you to bring such great and 
unexpected help in this way. I cannot be thankful enough to you, al-
though, in my innermost forum, I needed no new proof of your friend-
ship to convince me that it is self-sacrificing. If, moreover, you had seen 
the joy of my children, that would have been a fine reward for you. 

I can now also tell you without further ado that, in spite of all the 
pressure under which I have been living during the last few weeks, noth-
ing pressed upon me, even relatively, so much as the fear that a rift might 
have occurred in our friendship. I repeatedly declared to my wife that the 
whole muck was nothing to me compared with the fact that, owing to 
these bourgeois lousy affairs and their eccentric excitement, I had been 
capable, at such a moment, instead of comforting you, of rudely assailing 
you with my private needs. Consequently, domestic peace was very much 
disturbed and the poor woman had to bear the brunt of something for 
which she was in fact as innocent as women are accustomed to demand 
the impossible. She naturally had no inkling of what I wrote, but with a 
little reflection she could have worked out that such a thing was bound to 
happen. Women are comical creatures, even those equipped with a great 
deal of understanding. In the morning my wife wept over Mary and your 
loss, so that she completely forgot her own misfortune, which culminated 
on that very day — and in the evening she believed that, apart from us, 
no one in the world could suffer who does not have the broker in the 
house and children. 

I asked you in my last letter about the selfactor. The question, namely: 
In what way, before its invention, the so-called spinner intervened. The 
selfactor is explicable to me, but || the preceding state is not. 

I am inserting some things into the section on machinery. There are 
some curious questions there which I ignored at the first elaboration. In 
order to get clear about them, I have reread my notebooks (extracts) on 
technology from start to finish, and I am likewise attending a practical 
(purely experimental) course for workers given by Prof. Willis (in 
Jermyn Street, the Institute for Geology, where Huxley also gave his lec-
tures). With me it is the same with mechanics as with languages. I under-
stand the mathematical laws, but the simplest technical reality requiring 
intuition is harder for me than the greatest knots. 

You know, or perhaps do not know, since the matter is in itself indiffer-
ent, that there is a great dispute as to what distinguishes a machine from 
a tool. The English (mathematical) mechanics, in their rough way, call a 
tool a simple machine, and a machine a complicated tool. The English 
technologists, however, who pay somewhat more regard to economics, 
distinguish the two on the grounds (and after them, many, indeed most 
English economists) that in the one case the motive power proceeds from 
man, in the other from a natural force. The German donkeys, who make 
much of such trifles, have therefore concluded that a plough, for exam-
ple, is a machine, and the most complicated jenny etc., so long as it is 
moved by hand, is not. Now, there is no question but that, if we look at 
the machine in its elementary form, the industrial revolution does not 
proceed from the motive power, but from that part of machinery which 
the English call the working machine, hence not, for example, from the 
replacement of the foot that moves the spinning-wheel by water or 
steam, but from the transformation of the immediate spinning process 
itself and the displacement of the part of human labour which does not 
merely constitute an exertion of power (as in treading the wheel), but 
which concerns the working-up, the direct action on the material to be 
worked upon. On the other hand, it is equally unquestionable that, as 
soon as || it is no longer a question of the historical development of 
machinery, but of machinery on the basis of the present mode of produc-
tion, the working machine (e.g., in the sewing machine) is the only deci-
sive one, since, once this process has been handed over to the mechanism, 
everyone nowadays knows that, according to the size of the thing, it can 
be moved by hand, water, or a steam engine. 

For mere mathematicians these questions are indifferent, but they be-
come very important where it is a matter of demonstrating the connec-
tion of human social relations with the development of these material 
modes of production. 

The re-reading of my technological-historical extracts has led me to 
the view that — apart from the inventions of gunpowder, the compass, 
and the printing press — these necessary preconditions of bourgeois de-
velopment — from the 16th to the mid-18th century, i.e., for the period 
of manufacture developing out of handicraft up to large-scale industry 
proper, the two material bases on which, within manufacture, the prelim-
inary work for the machine industry was formed, were the clock and the 
mill (at first the corn mill, and indeed the watermill), both handed down 
from antiquity. (The watermill was brought from Asia Minor to Rome 
at the time of Julius Caesar.) The clock is the first automaton applied to 
practical purposes, and the whole theory of the production of uniform 
motion was developed on it. By its very nature, it rests on the combina-
tion of semi-artistic handicraft and direct theory. Cardanus, for exam-
ple, wrote (and gave practical recipes) on the construction of clocks. 
Clockmaking was called “learned (non-guild) handicraft” by German 
writers of the 16th century, and on the development of the clock it could 
be shown how utterly different, on the basis of handicraft, the relation of 
learning and practice is from that, for example, in large-scale industry. 
There is also no doubt that in the 18th century the clock first provided 
the idea of applying automata (and indeed ones set in motion || by 
springs) to production. Vaucanson’s experiments in this line exerted an 
historically demonstrable and extraordinary effect on the imagination of 
the English inventors. 

In the case of the mill, on the other hand, from the very outset, as soon 
as the watermill was delivered, the essential differences in the organism 
of a machine are present. Mechanical motive force. The prime motor on 
which it acts. The transmission mechanism. Finally, the working ma-
chine that seizes the material, all in independent modes of existence to-
wards one another. The theory of friction and thereby the investigations 
into the mathematical forms of gearing, cogs, etc. were all made on the 
mill; here likewise the theory of measuring the degree of motive force, of 
the best way of applying it, etc. Almost all the great mathematicians since 
the middle of the 17th century, insofar as they engage in practical me-
chanics and theorise about it, start from the simple water-corn mill. 
Hence, in fact, also the name Mühle and mill, which arose during the 
manufacturing period, for everything mechanically driven for practical 
purposes. 

But with the mill, just as with presses, hammer-works, the plough, etc., 
from the very beginning the actual labour, beating, crushing, grinding, 
pulverising, etc., is done without human labour, even if the moving force 
is human or animal. Hence this type of machinery is very old, at least in 
its beginnings, and at an earlier date mechanical motive force was actu-
ally applied to it. Hence also it is almost the only machinery that occurs 
in the manufacturing period. The industrial revolution begins as soon as 
the mechanism is applied where from time immemorial the final result 
required human labour, i.e., where, unlike with those tools, the actual 
material to be worked upon had never been handled by the human hand; 
where, by the nature of the thing, man did not from the start act as mere 
power. If one wished, with the German donkeys, to explain the applica-
tion of animal powers (i.e., just as much voluntary movement as human) 
as machinery, then in any case the use of such locomotives is much older 
than the simplest hand tool. | 

Itzig is sending me, as is inevitable, his defence speech (sentenced to 
4 months) before the court. Macte puer virtute! In the first place, this 
swaggerer has had the brochure which you have, the speech on “the es-
tate of the workers”, reprinted in Switzerland under the pompous title: 
“Workers’ Programme”. 

You know that the thing is nothing but a bad vulgarisation of the 
“Manifesto” and of other things we have preached so often that they 
have become to some extent commonplaces. (The fellow, for example, 
calls the working class an “estate”.) 

Well. In his speech before the Berlin court he has the shamelessness to 
say: 

“I further maintain that this brochure is not only a scientific work, like 
many another, which summarises already known results, but that, even 
in the most multifarious respect, it is a scientific deed, a development of 
new scientific thoughts. ... In various and difficult fields of science I have 
brought extensive works to light, have shunned no toils and no night 
watches, in order to extend the boundaries of science themselves, and I 
can perhaps say with Horace: militavi non sine gloria. But I myself de-
clare to you: Never, not in my most extensive works, have I written a line 
that would be more strictly scientifically conceived than this production 
from its first page to its last. ... Cast a glance, then, at the content of this 
brochure. This content is nothing other than a philosophy of history 
compressed into 44 pages. ... It is a development of the objective rational 
thought process which || underlies European history for more than a mil-
lennium, an unfolding of the inner soul, etc.” 

Is that shamelessness not towering? The fellow obviously thinks he is 
the man to take on our inventory. At the same time the grotesquely ri-
diculous! 

Salut 
D 
KM 

Let Lupus give you today’s Star and see in it the reprint of the letters 
about The Times and Delane from the Morning Herald. |