MARX TO FRIEDRICH ADOLPH SORGE” 

[London,] 19 October 1877 

Dear Sorge, 

At the same time as this letter, I am sending you the enclosed 
manuscript for Douai, in case he is doing the translation of 
Capital." The manuscript contains, besides a few alterations to the 
German text, indications as to where the latter is to be replaced by 
the French edition.” In the copy of the French edition intended for 

a See this volume, pp. 276-77. 

Douai, also despatched to your address today, the above- 
mentioned passages in the manuscript are marked. I found the 
work much more time-consuming than I had thought, added to 
which I had a nasty bout of influenza and have not quite got over it 
yet. 

In case of publication,” Douai must say in the foreword that, 
besides the 2nd German edition, he has used the French edition 
which came out later and was revised by me, but sy No means that 
this American edition has been authorised by the writer. Were he to do 
so, English booksellers would at once set about pirating it in 
England, and would be legally entitled to do so. Although I am 
happy to concede translation rights all over Europe, wherever — 
there is a copyright [agreement] with England, this certainly does 
not apply to England, that land of Mammon. London booksellers 
have already made several attempts, frustrated by me, to contrive 
an English edition without my consent and hence also without 
payment. I, however, am quite determined that these gentlemen 
shall not enrich themselves at my expense, be it by a penny. 

Just at the moment Engels’ time is taken up in all kinds of ways, 
first by work for the Vorwdrts,” secondly by a flood of philistine 
visitors from Germany, thirdly by his own ‘influenza’, and fourthly 
by his wife’s illness. This is why we have been unable to tackle the 
Manifesto together to date.'** 

In Germany a corrupt spirit is asserting itself in our party, not 
so much among the masses as among the leaders (upper class and 
‘workers’). The compromise with the Lassalleans has led to further 
compromise with other waverers; in Berlin (via Most) with 
Dihring and his ‘admirers’, not to mention a whole swarm of 
immature undergraduates and over-wise graduates who want to 
give socialism a ‘higher, idealistic’ orientation, i.e. substitute for the 
materialist basis (which calls for serious, objective study if one is to 
operate thereon) a modern mythology with its goddesses of 
Justice, Liberty, Equality and Fraternité. Dr Héchberg, the gentle- 
man who edits the Zukunft, is a representative of this tendency and 
has ‘bought his way’ into the party—no doubt with the ‘noblest’ of 
intentions, but I don’t give a fig for ‘intentions’. Seldom has 
anything more pitiful than his programme for the Zukunft been 
ushered into the world with more ‘modest pretensions’. 

The workers themselves, when like Mr Most and Co. they give 
up working and become literati by profession, invariably wreak 
‘theoretical’ havoc and are always ready to consort with addle- 
heads of the supposedly ‘learned’ caste. In particular, what we had 
been at such pains to eject from the German workers’ heads 

decades ago, thereby ensuring their theoretical (and hence also 
practical) ascendancy over the French and English,—namely 
Utopian socialism, the play of the imagination on the future 
structure of society,—is once again rampant and in a far more 
ineffectual form, not only as compared with the great French and 
English Utopians, but with—Weitling. It stands to reason that 
Utopianism which bore within itself the seeds of critical and 
materialist socialism, before the advent of the latter, can now, post 
festum, only seem silly, stale and thoroughly reactionary. 

Latterly the governing principle of the Vorwdrts would seem to 
have been to accept manuscripts—‘copie’, as the French say— 
regardless of its provenance. To take a few of the recent 
numbers,—first we find a chap unacquainted with the rudiments 
of economics providing grotesque revelations about the ‘laws’ 
governing crises.**’ All he reveals is his own inner ‘collapse’. And 
then we actually get a pert lad from Berlin being allowed to 
publish, at the ‘sovereign people’s’ expense, an endless series of 
articles containing his unedifying thoughts on England and the 
most egregious Pan-Slav poppycock *”*! 

Satis superque!* 

Your 
Karl Marx 

Apropos. Some (a few) years since, a kind of Blue Book (whether 
official or not, I don’t know) came out on the conditions of the 
miners in Pennsylvania**? who are known to be in a state of 
altogether feudal dependence on their monery torps (I believe the 
thing came out after a bloody encounter*™). It is of the utmost 
importance that I should have that publication and, if you can get 
hold of it for me, I will send you what it costs; if not, you might 
be able to let me have the title, in which case I should apply to 
Harney (in Boston).