[On the Spanish edition of Karl Marx's ‘The Poverty of Philosophy’]

[Letter to José Mesa]

After: “Miseria de la filosofia”, Madrid 1891.
From the Spanish.

London, 24 March 1891

My dear Mesa,

It was with great pleasure that we learned from your letter of the 2nd inst. that the publication of your Spanish translation of Marx’s Poverty of Philosophy is imminent. Needless to say, we readily give our consent to this undertaking. It will not fail to have the most favourable possible effect on the development of socialism in Spain.

The Proudhonist theory, which Marx’s book destroyed from the ground up, has undoubtedly vanished from the scene since the collapse of the Paris Commune. It still constitutes, however, the great arsenal from which the bourgeois radicals and pseudo-socialists of Western Europe derive phrases to lull the workers to sleep. And since the workers of those very countries have inherited similar Proudhonist phrases from their predecessors, the phraseology of the radicals still finds an echo among many of them. This is the case in France, where the only Proudhonists still extant are the bourgeois radicals or republicans who call themselves socialists. And if I am not mistaken, you too have such republicans in your Cortes and your press, who call themselves socialists because they see in Proudhonist ideas a thoroughly suitable means of counterposing to genuine socialism, the rational and succinct expression of the aspirations of the proletariat, a falsified, bourgeois socialism.

With fraternal greetings,
F. Engels