[Copy] 

Manchester, 29 March 1865 
7 Southgate 

Dear Sir, 

I must offer you my profound apologies for allowing your kind 
letter of the 2nd-4th inst. to remain unanswered for so long. I 

4 See this volume, pp. 117-18. - > K. Marx and F. Engels, ‘To the Editor of the 
Social-Demokrat’. 

only hope you will not condemn me unheard. My excuse 1s that 
for the first few days I was greatly preoccupied in part with an 
accumulation of current business, but in part also with the large 
amount of urgent correspondence, which one always faces when 
one suddenly appears before the public again after long otium cum 
(vel sine) dignitate? and at the same time has such merry 
adventures as we have had with the Social-Demokratchen.* In 
addition to all that, I moved house, and that momentarily threw 
my papers into some disarray, in which your letter was mislaid; I 
only found it again the day before yesterday and I now hasten to 
reply to you. 

I am most grateful to you for so kindly offering to send your 
Sphinx and other publications'? to Marx and myself. My 
bookseller here is Mr Franz Thimm, Manchester, through whom 
you may send everything to me. Sending things via the bookseller 
requires 3-4 weeks as a rule; if you would send me at least the first 
few Nos. in a simple open wrapper by post (it does not cost much), 
I should be obliged to you and will gladly reimburse you. 
Communications for Marx should be sent to me here, and he will 
receive them within 12 hours of arrival. As you yourself rightly 
realise, I could not commit myself at all at this stage regarding 
possible future contributions; let us leave the question open for 
the time being, although, in your case, we are at least not running 
the risk of incurring the suspicion of wishing to rule over any 
section of the proletariat in Germany from England. 

Meanwhile, the involuntary delay in my reply has given me the 
opportunity to obtain your publication on the working-class 
question”; I read it with great interest. I, too, was immediately 
struck on first reading Darwin‘ by the remarkable similarity 
between his description of the vegetable and animal life and the 
Malthusian theory. Only my conclusion was different from yours, 
viz.: that it is to the everlasting disgrace of modern bourgeois 
development that it has not yet progressed beyond the economic 
forms of the animal kingdom. The so-called ‘economic laws’ are 
not eternal laws of nature but historical laws that appear and 
disappear, and the code of modern political economy, insofar as 
the economists have drawn it up correctly and objectively, is for us 
merely a summary of the laws and conditions in which modern 
bourgeois society can exist, in a word: its conditions of production 

@ honourable (or dishonourable) leisure (Cicero, Oratio pro Sextio, 45) - > F. A. Lange, 
Die Arbeiterfrage in ihrer Bedeutung für Gegenwart und Zukunft. - © Ch. Darwin, On the 
Origin of Species by means of Natural Selection.... 

and exchange expressed and summed up abstractly. For us, 
therefore, none of these laws, insofar as it is an expression of 
purely bourgeois relations, is older than modern bourgeois society; 
those which have been more or less valid for all previous history, 
are thus only an expression of such relations as are common to all 
forms of society based upon class rule and class exploitation. 
Amongst the former we may count the so-called Ricardian law, 
which is valid neither for serfdom nor for the slavery of antiquity; 
amongst the latter, whatever part of the so-called Malthusian 
theory can be sustained. 

The parson Malthus filched this theory, like all his other ideas, 
directly from his predecessors; the only part of it which is truly his 
is the purely arbitrary application of the two progressions.'*? The 
theory itself has long since been reduced by the economists in 
England to rational dimensions; the population exerts pressure on 
the means—not of subsistence, but of employment; mankind could 
multiply more rapidly than modern bourgeois society can stand. 
For us yet another reason to proclaim this bourgeois society to be 
a barrier to development which must fall. 

You yourself raise the question of how the increase in the means 
of subsistence can be made to keep pace with the increase in 
population; but excepting one sentence in the preface, I find no 
attempt at an answer. We start from the premise that the same 
forces which have created modern bourgeois society—the steam 
engine, modern machinery, mass colonisation, railways and 
steamships, world trade—and which through the unending 
commercial crises are already now working towards its ruin and 
ultimate destruction—that these means of production and ex- 
change will also be sufficient to reverse the relationship in a short 
while and to raise the productive power of every individual to 
such an extent that he will produce enough for the consumption 
of 2, 3, 4, 5, or 6 persons, that enough people will become 
superfluous to urban industry to devote far more manpower than 
before to agriculture, that science will at last be applied to 
agriculture on a large scale as well and as systematically as in 
industry, that those areas of South Eastern Europe and Western 
America which have been inexhaustibly fertilised for us by nature 
itself will be exploited on a far mightier scale than before. Not 
until all these areas have been turned by the plough and there is 
then dearth, will it be time to say caveant consules.'” 

Not enough is being produced, that is the root of the whole 
matter. But why is not enough being produced? Not because the 
limits of production have been reached—even for today and by 

present-day means. No, but because the limits of production are 
determined not by the number of hungry bellies, but rather by the 
number of purchasers with full purses. Bourgeois society has no 
desire, and can have no desire, to produce more. Those 
impecunious bellies, the labour which cannot be utilised with profit 
and is thus incapable of purchasing, fall prey to the mortality 
figures. Let us assume that there is a sudden boom in industry, 
such as is constantly occurring, to enable this labour to be 
employed with profit, then the labour will acquire the money with 
which to purchase, and the means of subsistence have as yet 
always been found. It is the endless circulus vitiosus* in which the 
whole political economy revolves. One takes bourgeois conditions in 
their entirety as one’s premise, and then proves that each separate 
part is a necessary part thereof—ergo, an ‘eternal law’. 

I was greatly amused by your description of the Schulzian 
co-operatives.! We have been through all that here in a different 
form, although it is now more or less a thing of the past. People in 
Germany have yet to develop their proletarian pride. 

There is a remark about old Hegel which I cannot let pass 
without comment: you deny him any deeper knowledge of the 
mathematical sciences. Hegel knew so much mathematics that 
none of his disciples was capable of editing the numerous 
mathematical manuscripts he left behind. The only man who, to 
my knowledge, has enough understanding of mathematics and 
philosophy to be able to do so is Marx. That the detail of the 
philosophy of nature is full of nonsense I will of course gladly 
grant you, but his real philosophy of nature is to be found in the 
second part of the Logic, in the theory of Essence, the true core of 
the whole doctrine. The modern scientific theory of the interac- 
tion of natural forces (Grove’s Correlation of Forces, which I think 
first appeared in 1838) is, however, only another expression or 
rather the positive proof of Hegel’s argument about cause, effect, 
interaction, force, etc. I am no longer a Hegelian, of course, but I 
still retain a deep feeling of piety and devotion for the titanic old 
fellow. 

Yours very respectfully 

Friedrich Engels