London, 11 July 1884 

Dear Kautsky, 

I trust Ede will get over his feverish attack; give him my regards 
and tell him that I, too, shall be drinking to his health. 

To have let Auer have the Hamburg stuff is perfectly all right so far 
as I’m concerned. I suggested Bebel and Dietz merely because I had 

to tell the man to whom I intended to mention his name; needless to 
say this does not in any way restrict your freedom of action. 

The matter of Dietz is becoming a bore. If he won’t say either yes 
or no, then we can’t go on waiting for him. My chief concern is that 
the thing* should come out and, secondly, that it should not be in- 
stantly confiscated en masse. I. e. two things that are to be had simulta- 
neously only in Switzerland. Printing in Austria should be considered 
only in case of need; 1) it would mean fresh delays and negotiations 
and 2) the thing would be banned all the same, you need be under 
no illusions as to that’; and 3) not only could it be banned in Aus- 
tria, but also seized (remember the Viennese affair you told me 
about last autumn). So do get something positive done at last. 

There must still be something peculiar going on in the Neue Zeit, 
otherwise that wise man Schippel would certainly not have been 
allowed to talk of a ‘Rodbertusian-Marxian theory’, or of things that 
‘one has come to recognise since Rodbertus’; and without editorial com- 
ment at that.© The Germans must have fallen low indeed if they have 
still not discovered that what Marx has in common with Rodbertus is 
nothing more than the application égalitaire de la théorie ricardienne* 
mentioned by Marx on p. 49 of the Poverty and which has been 
a commonplace among English socialists since 1827! But that is very 
far from being surplus value as defined by Marx and applied by him 
to every aspect of the science of economics. Which is why the good 
English, and likewise Rodbertus, for all their borrowings from 
Ricardo, have made no headway at all in the matter of economics; 
the first advance in this field was made by Marx, who demolished all 
previous political economy. 

Incidentally, if I am to tackle Rodbertus properly, I must have his 
piece of 1842," Zur Erkenntniss unsrer Zustéinde, or whatever it is called. 
You quoted from it. Could you let me have it for a day or two or, 
better still, buy it for me? To judge by some of the quotations, it 

* F, Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State.-» Cf. this volume, 
pp. 131-32.-° M. Schippel, ‘H.M. Hyndman. The Historical Basis of Socialism in 
England, London, 1883’, Die Neue Zeit, No. 7, 1884.-4 equalitarian application of 
Ricardian theory-° See K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy, present edition, 
Vol. 6, p. 138.-' 1841 in the original.-* K. Kautsky, ‘Das Kapital von Rodber- 
tus’, Die Neue Zeit, Nos. 8-9, 1884, pp. 343, 389. 

would seem to be the best, because the first thing that he wrote, his la- 
ter stuff being a mere rehash, hence increasingly flimsy. 

Your 
F.E.