London, | February 1881 
122 Regent’s Park Road, N. W. 

Dear Mr Kautsky, 

Having been long prevented, I am at last able to reply to your let- 
ter. 8° 

Now, in view of the fact that you intend to come here shortly, it 
would be a somewhat unnecessary labour to let you have a detailed 
critique in writing of the book you have been good enough to send me; 
since I shall, in all probability, have the pleasure of discussing it with 
you in person, I shall confine myself to just a few points. 

1. What you say on p. 66 ete. is invalidated by the fact that other, 
real differences exist between surplus value and profit on capital be- 
sides the percentage estimate based on the variable or total capital. 
The main passages from Capital relating to this are summarised in 
Anti-Dühring, p. 182. °! 

2. Even if the armchair socialists? persist in demanding that we 
proletarian socialists should help them solve the problem of how to 
avoid what looks like imminent over-population and the threat of col- 
lapse this poses to the new social order, that is very far from being 
a reason why I should do them such a favour. To resolve all the 

* Presumably A. Redgrave, The Factory and Workshop Act, 1878, London, 1879. 

doubts and scruples of these chaps which they owe to the excess of 
their own muddle-headed wisdom, or even to refute, for example, all 
the monstrous twaddle which Schaffle alone has assembled in his 
many fat tomes, is, in my opinion, a sheer waste of time. It would 
fill a fair-sized book were one merely to attempt to put right all the 
misquotations from Capital inserted by these gentlemen between invert- 
ed commas. They should first learn to read and copy before demand- 
ing to have their questions answered. 

Moreover, I do not regard the question as in any way a burning 
one at a moment when American mass production, as yet only in its 
infancy, and really large-scale agriculture are threatening to all but 
suffocate us by the sheer volume of the means of subsistence pro- 
duced; on the eve of an upheaval of which one of the first conse- 
quences must be to populate the globe— what you say on the subject 
on pp. 169-70, skates too lightly over this point—— and which, more- 
over, will of necessity call for considerable demographic growth in 
Europe. 

Euler’s calculation ** has about as much merit as the one concern- 
ing the kreutzer which, invested at compound interest in the year dot, 
doubles every 13 years and therefore now amounts to some 
Lee 

60 

say on p. 169 that social conditions in America are not very different 
from those in Europe, this holds good only so long as you consider 
nothing but the large coastal cities, or even the outward legal forms 
those conditions assume. There can be no doubt that the vast mass of 
the American people live in conditions that are exceedingly favour- 
able to demographic growth. The stream of immigrants is proof of 
this. And yet it has taken more than 30 years to double itself. Alarm- 
ism doesn’t come into it. 

The abstract possibility that mankind will increase numerically to 
such an extent that its propagation will have to be kept within 
bounds does, of course, exist. But should communist society ever find 
itself compelled to regulate the production of humans in the same 
way as it has already regulated the production of things, then it, and 
it alone, will be able to effect this without difficulty. In such a society 
it would not, or so it seems to me, be particularly difficult to obtain 
deliberately a result which has already come about naturally and 
haphazardly in France and Lower Austria. At all events, it’s for those 
chaps to decide whether, when and how it’s to be done and what 

gulden, a silver nugget larger than the earth. When you 

means they wish to use. I don’t consider myself qualified to supply 
them with suggestions and advice about this. Indeed, these chaps 
will, presumably, be every bit as clever as we are. 

Incidentally, as early as 1844 I wrote (Deutsch-Franzésische Fahr- 
bicher, p. 109): ‘For even if Malthus were completely right, this’ (so- 
cialist) ‘transformation would have to be undertaken straight away; 
for only this transformation, only the education of the masses which it 
provides, makes possible that moral restraint of the propagative in- 
stinct which Malthus himself presents as the most effective and easiest 
remedy for over-population.’? 

That must suffice until I am able to discuss the other points with 
you in person. You are quite right to come over here. You are one of 
the few among the younger generation who really tries to learn some- 
thing, and hence it will do you a lot of good to get out of the atmo- 
sphere of non-criticism in which all the historical and economic lite- 
rature currently being produced in Germany is going to wrack and 
ruin. 

With sincere regards, 

Yours, 
F. Engels