MARX TO LUDWIG KUGELMANN ” 

London, 9 October? 1866 
1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, 
Haverstock Hill 

Dear Friend, 

I hope I must not conclude from your lengthy silence that my 
last letter? has in any way offended you. The case should be quite 
the reverse. Any person, who is in desperate straits, sometimes 
feels the need to ventilate his feelings. But he only does so to 
people in whom he has a special and exceptional confidence. I do 
assure you that my domestic troubles disquiet me far more for 
being an obstacle to the completion of my work‘ than for any 
personal or family reasons. I could dispose of the whole problem 
tomorrow if I were prepared to take up a practical trade 
tomorrow, instead of working for the cause. And I equally hope 
that you are not cmbarrassed by the fact that you can do nothing 
to alleviate my plight. That would indeed be the most unreasona- 
ble of reasons. 

4 The original has: November. - © See this volume, pp. 311-12. - ¢ Capital 

And now to some more general matters. 

I was profoundly apprehensive about the first congress in 
Geneva.””” By and large, however, it went off better than 1 
expected. We had not in the least anticipated the effect it would 
have in France, England and America. I was unable to attend, nor 
did I wish to, but I did write the programme for the London 
delegates.“ I deliberately confined it to points which allow direct 
agreement and combination of efforts by the workers and give 
direct sustenance and impetus to the requirements of the class 
struggle and the organisation of the workers into a class. The 
Parisian gentlemen had their heads stuffed full of the most 
vacuous Proudhonist clichés. They prattle incessantly about science 
and know nothing. They spurn all revolutionary action, i.e. arising 
from the class struggle itself, every concentrated social movement, 
and therefore also that which can be achieved by political means 
(e.g., such as limitation of the working day by law). Beneath the 
cloak of freedom and anti- governmentalism or anti-authoritarian 
individualism these gentlemen, who for 16 years now have so 
quietly endured the most wretched despotism, and are still 
enduring it, are in actuality preaching vulgar bourgeois economics, 
only in the guise of Proudhonist idealism! Proudhon has done 
enormous harm. His pseudo-critique and his pseudo-confrontation 
with the Utopians (he himself is mo more than a_philistine 
Utopian, whereas the Utopias of such as Fourier, Owen, etc., 
contain the presentiment and visionary expression of a new world) 
seized hold of and corrupted first the ‘jeunesse brillante’,? the 
students, then the workers, especially those in Paris, who as 
workers in luxury trades are, without realising it, themselves deeply 
implicated in the garbage of the past. ignoranily vain, arrogant, 
compulsively talkative, rhetorically inflated, they were on the verge 
of spoiling everything, as they flocked to the congress in numbers 
quite out of proportion to the number of their members. In my 
rerorr I shall give them a discreet rap over the knuckles. 

I was exceedingly pleased at the American workers’ congress, 
which took place at the same time in Baltimore. The watchword 
there was organisation for the struggle against capital, and, 
remarkably enough, most of the demands I had put up for 
Geneva were put up there, too, by the correct instinct of the 
workers.*? 

* K. Marx, ‘Instructions for the Delegates of the Provisional General Council. The 
Different Questions’. - > brilliant youth