London, 8 September 1879 

Dear Old Man, 

I am sorry to hear that you are still in the clutches of 
misfortune and it’s not within my power to extricate you from 
them altogether. In the meantime I have been able to place two 
pounds at your disposal, and have also received a third from a 
friend,” who is both a chemist and a communist of the first water; 
I have just taken out a money order for you in respect of these 
three pounds, vulgo 75 fr. 60, and hope it will be paid you 
without delay. It goes without saying, of course, that you need feel 
absolutely no embarrassment where I am concerned; anything I 
can do for you will always be done without fail, and always with 
pleasure, and it’s disgraceful we shouldn’t have reached the stage 
of ensuring our veterans a carefree existence. 

The Freiheit is unlikely to survive until the new year, unless it 
derives a new importance from the stupidities of its opponents. It 
is intended to set up an official party organ in Zurich*”° and to 
entrust its management—under the ultimate control of the 
Leipzigers—to Germans in Zurich of whom it cannot be said that 
they inspire me with confidence. At any rate, in the Jahrbuch for 
social science edited by Héchberg, one of their number, there are 
some rather extraordinary things: the party was wrong in makin 
itself out to be a workers’ party, brought the Anti-Socialist Law 
upon itself by otiose attacks on the bourgeoisie, what was wanted 
wasn’t revolution, but slow, peaceful development, etc.°!3 This 
cowardly twaddle, needless to say, is all of it grist to Most’s mill, 
and he is all agog to exploit it, as you will see from recent 
numbers of the Freiheit'* We had been invited by Leipzig to 
contribute to the new organ” and had, indeed, consented; but 
since learning who is to be immediately responsible,“ we have 
again cried off, nor, after this Jahrbuch, can there be any 
intercourse whatever with men who are trying surreptitiously to 
introduce such twaddle and such toadyism into the party—with 
Hochberg and Co. The Leipzigers will discover soon enough what 

a Carl Schorlemmer - > Der Sozialdemokrat - © See this volume, pp. 367-68. 

kind of allies they have landed themselves with. All in all, it’s just 
about time we took a stand against the philanthropic big and petty 
bourgeois, the students and professors who are forcing their way 
into the German party and seeking to water down the proletariat’s 
class struggle against its oppressors till it becomes an institution for 
universal fraternisation, and this at a moment when the bourgeois, 
with whom we are supposed to fraternise, have outlawed us, 
destroyed our presses, disrupted our meetings and delivered us up 
sans phrase* to the caprices of the police. The German workers are 
hardly likely to join in such a campaign. 

Our people in Russia have scored a signal victory—they have 
disrupted the Russo-Prussian alliance.” If they hadn’t, by their 
ruthless action, put the fear of God into the Russian government, it 
would probably have succeeded in overcoming _ the 
internal discontent felt by the aristocracy and middle classes over 
the English ban on the entry of troops into the open city of 
Constantinople*!” and the ensuing diplomatic defeat in Berlin.*° 
But as it was, blame for those defeats had to be shifted onto 
another country, onto Prussia. Though uncle and nephew may 
have temporarily patched things up at Alexandrovo, the breach 
is now beyond repair. And, unless there’s a catastrophe in Russia 
very soon, there will be war between Russia and Prussia, a war 
predicted by the General Council as the inevitable consequence of 
the French war while this last was still in progress, and which was 
avoided only with the utmost difficulty in 1873.°'7 

Well, keep your pecker up, and drop us a line again soon—a 
proper letter, since in a mere postcard you can’t really get things 
off your chest. 

Warmest regards from Marx and 

Your old friend, 

F..E.