• Narri N. (they/them)@lemmy.mlEnglish
    85·
    23 days ago

    Reading their correspondence after this, Marx informs Engels of his dire straits:

    when I wrote to you in the evening, I did so under the pressure of circumstances that were desperate in the extreme. The landlord had put a broker in my house

    (emphasis not mine)

    idk i found this exchange kinda funny. their correspondence reads as heartwarmingly sincere, even if Marx lacked tact in this particular exchange. after this letter Engels finds a way to transfer some 100£ to Marx to stop him from moving to a lodging house with his wife.

    also this from Engels kinda moved me:

    I felt as though with her I was burying the last vestige of my youth. When your letter arrived she had not yet been buried. That letter, I tell you, obsessed me for a whole week; I couldn’t get it out of my head. Never mind. Your last letter made up for it and I’m glad that, in losing Mary, I didn’t also lose my oldest and best friend.

      • BattleshipPokemon [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
        30·
        23 days ago

        Engel’s initial response to the letter is this very icy scolding message followed with some financial advice telling him to take another loan out: https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1863/letters/63_01_13.htm

        Dear, Marx,

        You will find it quite in order that, this time, my own misfortune and the frosty view you took of it should have made it positively impossible for me to reply to you any sooner.

        All my friends, including philistine acquaintances, have on this occasion, which in all conscience must needs afflict me deeply, given me proof of greater sympathy and friendship than I could have looked for. You thought it a fit moment to assert the superiority of your ‘dispassionate turn of mind’. Soit!

      • Narri N. (they/them)@lemmy.mlEnglish
        14·
        22 days ago

        Exactly this. I didn’t read their preceding letters, but by what i can tell it went something like this:

        KM: sry your wife died. btw lemme borrow twenty dollars to push me over to next week FE: yo that’s kinda shitty of you bro KM: you’re right, i’m sorry. but THE LANDLORD FE: it’s alright, i forgive you. here’s a hundred bucks.

        then Marx started asking stuff about machinery (and whether machines are complex tools or tools simple machines or something, idk) and blaming his wife or something. their correspondence clearly wasn’t occasional, i think Marx was working on Capital at this time

  • Wertheimer [any]@hexbear.netEnglish
    57·
    23 days ago

    He did say more after this:

    It is dreadfully selfish of me to tell you about these horreurs at this time. But it’s a homeopathic remedy. One calamity is a distraction from the other. And, au bout du compte, what else can I do? In the whole of London there’s not a single person to whom I can so much as speak my mind, and in my own home I play the silent stoic to counterbalance the outbursts from the other side. It’s becoming virtually impossible to work under such circumstances. Instead of Mary, ought it not to have been my mother, who is in any case a prey to physical ailments and has had her fair share of life … ? You can see what strange notions come into the heads of ‘civilised men’ under the pressure of certain circumstances.

    Salut.

    Your K. M.

    What arrangements will you now make about your establishment? It’s terribly hard for you, since with Mary you had a home to which you were at liberty to retreat from the human imbroglio, whenever you chose.

    • Awoo [she/her]@hexbear.netEnglish
      37·
      23 days ago

      Instead of Mary, ought it not to have been my mother, who is in any case a prey to physical ailments and has had her fair share of life … ?

      Lmao. Wish it was my mom instead, that witch is awful and she’s lived long enough anyway. Sorry dude.

    • booty [he/him]@hexbear.netEnglish
      45·
      23 days ago

      I think the format of written letters that could take weeks to get to their destination kind of encouraged putting effort in. You don’t want to be in the bath in three days going “oh god damn it I fucked up that letter, I need to write a new one to correct it” I mean they did do that, but it’s a real inconvenience they’d want to generally avoid. So it became kind of the standard for letters to be your writing at… maybe not its best but certainly at a high standard.

  • Damarcusart [he/him, comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    42·
    23 days ago

    This is how you know anticommunists never actually read anything Marx wrote. Almost every letter to Engels he’s begging for money shamelessly. You’d think they’d focus more on “Marx was a lazy moocher who just wanted a lazy moocher society” but they don’t. They don’t talk about Marx the man at all, except as a vague “evil dictator” sometimes.

  • woodenghost [comrade/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    10·
    22 days ago

    I think it’s fine to expect a rich bourgeois comrade, who’s betraying his class to support the working class, to materially support comrades. Which is what Engels did. He supported not just Marx, but the whole German communist underground in London and still died with more than he got from the factory sale.

    However, what he should have done to avoid these constant awkward letters, is just set up a weekly allowance for Marx and forget about it.