London, 20 May 1883 
122 Regent’s Park Road, N. W. 

Dear Sir, 

I have received your pamphlet on Karl Marx. You are entitled to 
subject his doctrines to the most stringent criticism, indeed to misun- 
derstand them; you are entitled to write a biography of Marx which 
is pure fiction. But what you are not entitled to do, and what I shall 
never permit anyone to do, is slander the character of my departed 
friend. 

Already in a previous work* you took the liberty of accusing Marx 
of quoting in bad faith. When Marx read this he checked his and 
your quotations against the originals and he told me that his were all 
correct and that if there was any bad faith it was on your part. And 
seeing how you quote Marx, how you have the audacity to make 
Marx speak of profit when he speaks of Mehrwerth,” when he defends 
himself time and again against the error of identifying the two (some- 
thing which Mr Moore and I have repeated to you verbally here 
in London) I know whom to believe and where the bad faith lies. 

This however is a trifle compared to your ‘deep and firm convic- 
tion... that conscious sophistry pervades them all’ (Marx’s doctrines); 
that Marx ‘did not baulk at paralogisms, while knowz¢ng them to be such’, 
that ‘he was often a sophist who wished to arrive, at the expense of the 
truth, at a negation of present-day society’ and that, as Lamartine 
says, ‘il jouatt avec les mensonges et les vérités comme les enfants avec les 
osselets’. © °3 

In Italy, a country of ancient civilisation, this might perhaps be 
taken as a compliment, or it might be considered great praise among 
armchair socialists, °* seeing that these venerable professors could 
never produce their innumerable systems except ‘at the expense of the 
truth’. We revolutionary communists see things differently. We re- 

* A. Loria, La teoria del valore negli economisti italiani. -” 

lies and truth like children with marbles’ 

surplus value -° ‘he played with 

gard such assertions as defamatory accusations and, knowing them to 
be lies, we turn them against their inventor who has defamed himself 
in thinking them up. 

In my opinion, it should have been your duty to make known to 
the public this famous ‘conscious sophistry’ which pervades all of Marx’s 
doctrines. But I look for it in vain! Nagott/* 

What a tiny mind one must have to imagine that a man like Marx 
could have ‘always threatened his critics’ with a second volume 
which he ‘had not the slightest intention of writing’, and that this sec- 
ond volume was nothing but ‘an ingenious pretext dreamed up by 
Marx in place of scientific arguments’. This second volume exists and 
it will shortly be published. Perhaps you will then learn to under- 
stand the difference between Mehrwerth and profit. 

A German translation of this letter will be published in the next 
issue of the Zurich Sozialdemokrat. 

I have the honour of saluting you with all the sentiments you de- 
serve.