London, 5 March 1852 
28 Dean Street, Soho 

Dear Weywy, 

I am afraid there has been a bit of a muddle because, Having 
MISUNDERSTOOD THY LAST LETTER, I addressed the last 2 packages to: 
Office of the Revolution, 7 Chambers’ Street, Box 1817. What 
caused the confusion was that damned ‘Box 1817’, since you had 
written telling me to append this to the ‘old address’ without 
drawing any distinction between the first address and the second. 
But I hope the matter will have resolved itself before this letter 
arrives, the more so since last Friday’s letter* contained the very 
detailed fifth instalment of my article. This week T was prevented 
from finishing the sixth, which is also the last one.* If your paper 
iS appearing again, this delay will not prove an obstacle since you 
have an ample supply of material. 

Your article against Heinzen, unfortunately sent to me too late 
by Engels, is very good, at once coarse and fine, and this is the 
right combination for any polemic worthy of the name. I have 
shown this article to Ernest Jones and enclosed you will find a 
letter from him addressed to you, intended for publication.” Since 
Jones writes very illegibly and with abbreviations, and since I 
assume that you are not yet an ovut-and-ouT Englishman, I am 
sending you, along with the original, a copy made by my wife, 
together with the German translation; you should print them both, 
the original and the translation, side by side. Below Jones’ letter 
you might add the following comment: As to George Julian Harney, 
likewise one of Mr Heinzen’s authorities, he published our 
Communist Manifesto in English in his Red Republican with a 
marginal note describing it as ‘THE MOST REVOLUTIONARY DOCUMENT EVER 
GIVEN TO THE world’,” and in his Democratic Review he translated the 

a Jenny Marx’s letter to Joseph Weydemeyer of 27 February 1852. See this volume, 
pp. 572-73. - > The Communist Manifesto was published in English in The Red 
Republican, Nos. 21, 22, 23, 24 of 9, 16, 23 and 30 November 1850. It was on this 
occasion that Marx and Engels were first named as its authors. In this letter Marx 
gives the quotations in English followed by the German translation. 

words of ‘wisdom brushed aside’ by Heinzen, namely my articles on 
the French Revolution from the Revue der N. Rh. Z,? and in a 
paper on Louis Blanc he refers his readers to these articles as 
being the ‘true critical examination’ of the French affair.’ By the 
way, in England there is no need to have recourse only to 
‘extremists’. If, in England, a Member of Parliament becomes a 
minister, he must have himself re-elected. Thus Disraeli, the new 
Chancellor, Lorp or THE Exchequer, writes to his constituents on 
1 March: 

* ‘We shall endeavour to terminate that strife of classes which, of late years, has 
exercised so pernicious :in influence over the welfare of this kingdom.** 

Whereupon The Times of 2 March comments: 

* ‘If anything would ever divide classes in this country beyond reconciliation, 
and leave no chance of a just and honourable peace, it would be a tax on foreign 
corn.’ * 

And lest some ignorant ‘man of character’‘ like Heinzen should 
suppose that the «aristocrats are for and the bourgeois against the 
Corn Laws” because the former want ‘monopoly’ and the latter 
‘freedom’ —your worthy citizen sees opposites only in this ideologi- 
cal form—we shall content ourselves with saying that, in England, 
in the eighteenth century, the aristocrats were for ‘freedom’ (of 
trade) and the bourgeois for ‘monopoly’,—precisely the same 
attitude as is adopted by the two classes in present-day ‘Prussia’ 
towards the ‘Corn Laws’.”° There is no more rabid Free TRADER than 
the Neue Pr. Z. 

Finally, if I were you, I should tell the democratic gents en 
général that :ney would do better to acquaint themselves with 
bourgeois literature before they venture to yap at its opponents. 
For instance they should study the historical works of Thierry, 
Guizot, John Wade and so forth, in order to enlighten themselves 
as to the past ‘history of the classes’. They should acquaint 

aK. Marx, The Class Struggles in France, 1848 to 1850. Published in the Neue 
Rheinische Zeitung. Politisch-dkonomische Revue. By the English translation of this 
work Marx means Engels’ review of the first chapter published under the title ‘Two 
Years of a Revolution; 1848 and 1849’ in The Democratic Review, April-June 
1850. - > [G. J. Harney,] Review of Louis Blanc’s Historic Pages from the French 
Revolution of February 1848 in The Democratic Review, May 1850, pp. 465- 
66. - © Here and below Marx quotes from Disraeli’s ‘Address to His Constituents’ 
published under the date-line: ‘London, Tuesday, 2 March 1852’, The Times, 
No. 21052, 2 March 1852. -¢ Presumably an allusion to Heine’s satirical poem 
Atta Troll, Chap. XXIV—kein Talent, doch ein Charakter’ (Talent none, but 
character). 

4— 2736 

themselves with the fundamentals of political economy before 
attempting to criticise the critique of political economy. For 
example, one need only open Ricardo’s magnum opus to find, on 
the first page, the words with which he begins his preface: 

* ‘The produce of the earth—all that is derived from its surface by the united 
application of labour, machinery, and capital, is divided among three classes of the 

community; namely the proprietor of the land, the owner of the stock or capital 
necessary for its cultivation, and the labourers by whose industry it is cultivated.’ *4 

Now, in the United States bourgeois society is still far too 
immature for the class struggle to be made perceptible and 
comprehensible; striking proof of this is provided by C. H. Carey 
(of Philadelphia),” the only North American economist of any 
note. He attacks Ricardo, the most classic representative“ of the 
bourgeoisie and the most stoical opponent of the proletariat, as a 
man whose works are an arsenal for anarchists and socialists, for 
all enemies of the bourgeois order.* He accuses not only him, but 
also Malthus, Mill, Say, Torrens, Wakefield, MacCulloch, Senior, 
Whately, R. Jones, etc.—those who lead the economic dance in 
Europe—of tearing society apart, and of paving the way for civil 
war by showing that the economic bases of the various classes are 
such that they will inevitably give rise to a necessary and 
ever-growing antagonism between the latter. He tries to refute 
them, not, it is true, like the fatuous Heinzen, by relating the 
existence of classes to the existence of political privileges and 
monopolies, but by seeking to demonstrate that economic conditions: 
rent (landed property), profit (capital) and wages (wage labour),“ 
rather than being conditions of struggle and antagonism, are 
conditions of association and harmony.” All he proves, of course, 
is that the ‘undeveloped’ relations in the United States are, to him, 
‘normal relations’. 

Now as for myself, I do not claim to have discovered either the 
existence of classes in modern society or the struggle between 
them. Long before me, bourgeois historians had described the 
historical development of this struggle between the classes, as had 
bourgeois economists their economic anatomy. My own contribu- 
tion was 1. to show that the existence of classes is merely bound up 
with certain historical phases in the development of production; 2. that 
the class struggle necessarily leads to the dictatorship of the 

4D. Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy, and Taxation, Third Edition, 
London, 1821, p. V. - > See H. Ch. Carey, Essay on the Rate of Wages... - © Above 
‘representative’ Marx wrote ‘interpreter’.- 4 See also this volume, pp. 345- 
46. - © ibid., pp. 378-84 and 392. 

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Third page of Marx’s letter to Weydemeyer of 5 March 1852 

proletariat; 3. that this dictatorship itself constitutes no more than a 
transition to the abolition of all classes and to a classless society. 
Ignorant louts such as Heinzen, who deny not only the struggle 
but the very existence of classes, only demonstrate that, for all 
their bloodthirsty, mock-humanist yelping, they regard the social 
conditions in which the bourgeoisie is dominant as the final 
product, the non plus ultra* of history, and that they themselves are 
simply the servants of the bourgeoisie, a servitude which is the 
more revolting, the less capable are the louts of grasping the very 
greatness and transient necessity of the bourgeois regime itself. 

Select from the above notes whatever you think fit." By the way, 
Heinzen has adopted our ‘centralisation’ in place of his ‘federative 
republic’, etc.*? When the views on classes we are now disseminat- 
ing have become familiar objects of ‘sound common sense’,” then 
the scoundrel will proclaim them aloud as the latest product of his 
‘own sagacity’ and yap his opposition to our onward progress. Thus, 
in the light of his ‘own sagacity’, he yapped at Hegelian philosophy ‘ 
so long as it was progressive. Now he feeds on its stale scraps, spat out 
undigested by Ruge. 

Herewith also the end of the Hungarian article. It is all the 
more essential that you should try to make some use of 
this—assuming your paper exists—because Szemere, the erstwhile 
prime minister of Hungary, now in Paris, has promised me to 
write a long article for you, signed with his own name. 

If your paper has come into being, send more copies so that it 
can be distributed more widely. 

Your 
K. Marx 

Kind regards to you and your wife from all your friends here, 
especially my wife. 

Apropos. I am sending you the Notes“ and a few copies of my 
Assizes speech‘ (this last for Cluss, to whom I promised it) by the 

a the uttermost point - > An allusion to Heinzen’s expression ‘sound common 
sense’ (der gesunde Menschenverstand). See K. Marx, ‘Moralising Criticism and 
Critical Morality’, present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 317, 330 and 337. - © An allusion to 
Heinzen’s comedy Doktor Nebel, oder: Gelehrsamkeit und Leben, Cologne, 1841. See 
K. Marx and F. Engels, The Great Men of the Exile, present edition, Vol. 11, 
p- 277.-4 See this volume, p. 32. - © Notes to the People - K. Marx, “The First 
Trial of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung’ and ‘The Trial of the Rhenish District 
Committee of Democrats’ in Zwei politische Prozesse, Cologne, 1849.