[London,] 11 and 15 March 1884 

My dear Lafargue, 

In complete agreement with almost all your alterations, '°’ except 
for the following: 

p. 6, wrong ideas about ... exchange value—you can’t continue 
with an ‘and’; what follows, his utopian interpretation, is caused by 
those wrong ideas; that causation must be shown. 

p. 6, bottom: he deafens us, etc., has been unduly shortened; what 
is lacking is the false or spurious science. You must try to stick closer 
to the original. 

p- 7, same objections; and also: ‘but who, having to forego some of 
his pretensions to originality’—— this corrupts the text. Marx says: 
‘There is in addition the clumsy repugnant show of erudition of the 
self-taught, whose natural pride in his original reasoning has already 
been broken’; he has, in fact, been an original thinker and is proud so 
to have been, but is so no longer, having discovered that what he be- 

* Adolf Sorge jun.-° K. Marx, ‘On Proudhon’, present edition, Vol. 20, pp. 30-31; 
here and below Engels quotes Marx’s article in German. 

lieved to be original and new had already been said by others before 
him; then he goes on to spurious science, etc. Your text denies the 
originality of Proudhon. 

ibid. Cabet. You have no right to make Marx say more than he ac- 
tually said: ‘Cabet—— worthy of respect for his practical attitude to- 
wards the French proletariat’.* Marx says nothing of devotion, 
a word he abhorred, as you must know,—~it might run: worthy of re- 
spect for the rdle he played amongst the French proletariat (or in the 
political movement of the French proletariat), etc., or something of 
the sort. 

ibid. Gan you say: to preach throughout all 3 volumes? 

Ibid. bottom, Thiers: if you abridge in the way you do, you ought 
to add what the original says: “Thiers, by his reply opposing Proud- 
hon’s proposals, which was then issued as a special booklet.” This is, 
I think, the famous book De la propriété, but I am not sure. 

p. 8, credit ... might accelerate—not credit, but the application 
thereof; you should therefore say: might serve to accelerate, or some 
such turn of phrase. 

p. 9, displays the cynicism of a moron to the greater glory of the 
Tsar? ‘For the greater glory of the tsar he expresses moronic cyni- 
cism’. ° The extreme cynicism with which Proudhon addresses himself 
to the misfortunes of Poland pays court to the policy of the Tsar. 1° 
This is what needs to be brought out. 

ibid. bottom. On the one hand, etc.— the two contradicting tendencies 
which govern the interests of the petty bourgeois, should not be omit- 
ted; your text appears to do away with them. 

p. 10, rowdy would be better than scandalous. 

15 March 

Well, now! Try to be more faithful to the original; Marx isn’t a 
man with whom one can afford to take liberties. I hope that Laura 
will insist upon the text’s being well and faithfully rendered. 

Herewith the £ 10. 

We have all the books and soox-cases“ here and, for the past 3 days, 
have been busy amalgamating the two libraries and setting them in 

* Ibid., p. 31.-'Ibid.-° Tbid., p. 32.-9 from Marx’s library 

order. It’s the very devil of a task and Nim and I are both tired, so 
WITH LOVE TO Laura FROM Nim AND MYSELF NO MORE AT PRESENT 

From Yours TRULY, 

Fok.