London, 4 February 1892 

Dear Schmidt, 

On the strength of your letter of 12 December we drank a toast on 
the 19th of the same month to you and your young wife and on the 
following day, Sunday, after we had had a meal with the Avelings, 
this was solemnly affirmed by us all in a fine 1868 port. I trust you are 
now comfortably settled in Zurich and have found that living with 
another is preferable to living alone. 

Very many thanks for your anti-Wolf article. However it also 
compelled me to read Wolf's opus* which I had quietly laid aside in 
my bookcase against a rainy day. Since the chap takes the view that 
the sole purpose of the German language is to conceal the emptiness 
of his mind, the perusal of this rubbish has been something of a job, 
though one soon discovers the void that lies behind it. You have stat- 
ed the main points quite correctly and lucidly and were perfectly 
right to ignore the unessentials, all of which were put in, of course, 
simply for the purpose of getting the reader so snarled up that he 
overlooks the chief flaw. That the man has an aptitude for economic 
folly amounting to genius I already knew, having read an article of 
his in the Neue Freie Presse in which he seeks to put the Viennese bour- 
geois into an even worse state of confusion that they are in already.’ 
But this time he has exceeded even my expectations. 

Let us reduce his argument to mathematical terms: C,, C,, two 
aggregate capitals whose respective variable components = v,, Vo, 
and whose respective quantities of surplus value = s, and s,. Given an 
equal rate of profit for both (profit and surplus value being provi- 
sionally taken to be equal), it may therefore be said that 
Ci GC, 

C,:C, =s8,:8,, therefore aoe 
1 2 

On this assumption we must now establish the necessary rate of 

* J. Wolf, Das Rétsel der Durchschnittsprofitrate bet Marx. 

surplus value, i.e. we multiply one side of the equation 

by “1_y and the other by ie 1; thus 
vy Yo 

Civ, C,v2 Sig Ma C, v2 

Sivi Sov. Vi Sy V8 

If we bring the respective factors over to the other side of the equa- 
tion, thereby inverting the fraction, we have 
Cr, 82 Cr, C, Cy 81 82 

x = x or a) 
Vv, V2 V2 VY Vi V2 Vi V2 

or, in order to produce Wolf's equal rate of profit, the rates of surplus 
value must be in proportion to the respective aggregate capitals di- 
vided by their respective variable components. If they are not, Wolf's 
equal rate of profit falls to the ground. But that they 1. can be and 2. 
always must be—this was the economic fact that it was up to 
Mr Wolf to prove. Instead he gives us a deduction in which the point 
to be proved appears as an assumption. For the equation of the rate of 
surplus value as set forth is simply another form of the equation of 
the equal rate of profit. 

Example: C, = 100, v, = 40, s, = 10 
C, = 100, v,=10, s.* = 10 

plea 2m which is correct. 
40 10 40 10 

Now it really seems to me that you go a bit too far when you claim 
absolute uniformity of rates of surplus value for large-scale produc- 

tion ‘as a whole. The economic levers which impose uniformity upon 
the rate of profit are, I think, much stronger and more rapid in their 

a 

s, in the ms. 

effect than those whose pressure equalises the rates of surplus value. 
However the tendency is there and the differences are negligible in 
practice. All economic laws are, in the end, merely the expression of 
mutually incompatible tendencies which gradually assert themselves. 

Mr. J. Wolf is in for a pleasant surprise when the turn of the pre- 
face to Volume III* comes round. 

I’m extraordinarily glad that you have made such an encouraging 
start as a lecturer and trust it will so continue. It will give particular 
pleasure to Mr Wolf— serve him right. 

It’s certainly a very good thing that some of those student gentle- 
men of yours who have looked askance at the transactions of the 
party should now be resuming their studies. The more they learn, the 
more tolerant they will be towards people who hold really responsible 
positions and try to fill them conscientiously, and in time they will 
also probably realise that, if an important goal is to be attained and 
the immense army necessary to its attainment kept together, they 
must concentrate on the main issue and not allow themselves to be 
led astray by irrelevant squabbles. They may also discover that the 
‘education’, by which they set so much store vis-a-vis the working 
man, still leaves a great deal to be desired and that the working man 
already possesses instinctively, ‘immediately’ @ /a Hegel, what they 
could only din into themselves at the cost of much toil. But the 
shameful business of ‘Jungen’ at Erfurt was truly deplorable °°! and 
their newspaper,” from what I have seen of it, is no more than a feeble 
imitation of the anarchist autonomy over here. 

If you become ‘bogged down’ in Hegel, do not be discouraged; six 
months later you will discover firm stepping-stones in that self-same 
bog and be able to get across it without trouble. In Hegel the coher- 
ent sequence of stages in the development of a notion is part of the 
system, of what is transient, and I consider that this is where he is at his 
weakest — if also at his wittiest for at every difficult point he has re- 
course to a witticism: positive and negative fall to the ground and 
hence lead on to the category ‘ground’ ‘ (Encyklopddie*). Obviously 
this would require a different rendering for each language. Try trans- 

@ of Capital- Der Sozialist-° A pun in the original: zu Grunde gehen—to perish; 
Grund—ground.-* G.W.F. Hegel, Encyclopadie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im 
Grundrisse, Theil 1: Die Logik, § 120. 

lating the sequence in the Lehre vom Wesen into another language and 
you'll find the transitions for the most part impossible. 
Many regards from 

Yours, 
F. Engels