ENGELS TO CONRAD SCHMIDT” 

London, 6 April 1895 
41 Regent’s Park Road, N. W. 

Dear Schmidt, 

I am most indebted to you for your tenacity over the ‘fiction’.* (There is in 
fact a difficulty here which I only mastered as a result of your insistence 
upon the ‘fiction’. The solution may be found in III, 1, pp. 154-157° though 
it has not been elaborated or emphasised with sufficient exactitude, a cir- 
cumstance that has persuaded me to enlarge briefly on the above point in the 
Neue Zeit with reference to Sombart’s° and your objections. In any case there 
is a further point regarding which I should like to make an addition to 
Volume II I and bring it into line with the situation today by taking account 
of certain changes in economic conditions since 1865. °* 

But if I am to develop that point concerning the effectiveness and validity 
of the law of value, it would make thing easier for me if you would permit 
me to make mention, not only of the ‘hypothesis’ of your Centralblatt 
article,’ but also of the ‘fiction’ you discuss in your two letters and to quote 
one or two passages from them for the purpose of defining more precisely 
what you mean by the hypothesis of the article. So would you kindly reread 
the passage alluded to above and then tell me whether I may say that the 
aforesaid quotations were extracted from letters by Dr C. Schmidt to myself. 
Should you be convinced by Marx’ passage that, where the production of 
commodities is concerned, the law of value is, after all, rather more than a 
necessary fiction, we should then see eye to eye, and in that case I should of 
course be glad to dispense with this. 

Mrs Freyberger, formerly Louise Kautsky I, along with her little girl, 
sends you her best compliments in the same way as I would ask you to 
remember me very kindly to your wife. 

* See this volume, pp. 462-66 - ° See present edition, Vol. 37 — ° Sombart, ‘Zur Kritik des 
Ukonomischen Systems von Karl Marx’. In: Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik, 
Bd.7, H. 4 - ‘ C. Schmidt, ‘Der dritte Band des Kapital’. In: Sozialpolitisches Centralblatt, 25 
Februar 1895 

Yours, 
F. Engels