Declaration against Arnold Ruge

Karl Marx/Friedrich Engels

Declaration [against Arnold Ruge]

According to the manuscript.

The *Bremer Tages-Chronik* of 17 January of this year, in a London correspondence dated 13 January, imports a whole cargo of badly written absurdities, fabricated and ill-understood tittle-tattle, clumsy insinuations, and moral attitudinising against the *Neue Rheinische Zeitung* and against the undersigned.

“Prominent and resolute men” of the dimensions of that London correspondent have always responded to superior criticism in the manner of apes. They pelt the enemy with their own dung. Chacun selon ses facultés. <Jeder nach seinen Fähigkeiten>

His prettily fabricated little tales about the *Neue Rh. Zeitung* we make a present of to the “resolute and prominent” man. As to his well-meaning insinuations concerning our resignation from the Great Windmill Society, we declare:

Neither before nor after their resignation from the Society had Engels and Marx ever had the slightest thing to do with the administration of its funds. They took part in the administration of the refugees’ fund, and only resigned after their previous management of it had been examined and found correct. That they resigned in order to evade paying a monthly subscription of nine pence—a conceit worthy of a Reichs-Stüber thrown out of circulation <Lower Rhenish petty coin, in circulation until 1824>! And to this end one of them is supposed to have moved to Manchester, the other to be about to wander across the ocean. What pure pearls repose not in the depths of morally indignant souls!—

Our party comrades in Germany are acquainted with the
real motives
for our resignation from
that society and our separation from its leaders. They have approved them and share them; they are not a matter to be laid before the

public. Under
the existing German conditions, an adroit agent provocateur <agent provocateur>
would not have induced us to make further declarations, much less the bearishly clumsy one of the *Bremer Tages-Chronik*.

Finally, it suffices to indicate that the man who manures the *Bremer Tages-Chronik* from London with his own guano is none other than the Pomeranian thinker upon whom the *Neue Rh. Zeitung* always reverted with a kind of artistic predilection, whom we have characterised elsewhere from his writings as “the sewer into which all the phrase-mongering filth and all the contradictions of German democracy flow together”—in a word, that the cousin from Bremen is none other than our
“Arnold Winkelried Ruge”,
the fifth wheel on the state coach of European Central Democracy. The depravity of the *Neue Rh. Zeitung* is now understood.

London, 27 January 1851

Karl Marx – Friedrich Engels