Marx-Engels Correspondence 1865
Source: MECW Volume 42, p. 144;
First published: in Russian, in Bolshevik, 1934.
Dear Citizen,
At its last sitting (see enclosure) the Central Council appointed me pro interim to be secretary for Belgium in place of Citizen Le Lubez, whose resignation as Council Member was unanimously accepted. Citizen Dupont has taken his place as secretary for France.
I will, if you wish, later give you a brief account of the disagreeable incidents which occurred within the Central Council. In my opinion, they were really instigated by a person alien to our Council, well known as an Italian patriot [Giuseppe Mazzini] but an inveterate enemy of the interests of the proletariat, without which republicanism could be no more than a new form of bourgeois despotism. Did he not, as one of his most blindly faithful followers confessed to me, go so far as to demand that all the passages hostile to the bourgeoisie should be deleted from the Italian translation of our ‘Address’.
Despite these regrettable incidents and the more or less voluntary resignation of several individuals, our Association is making glorious headway. Founded only a few months ago, today it already numbers almost 12,000 members in England alone.
The Central Council will be much obliged to you if you send me an official report on the present state of our society in Belgium.
In your correspondence please be so kind as to keep the official letters, which are destined for the Central Council’s archives, separate from such private communications as you may be good enough to send me.
My address is: A. Williams, Esq., 1 Modena Villas, Maitland Park, Haverstock Hill, N. W. London.
Greetings and fraternity.
Karl Marx