Marx-Engels Correspondence 1863
Written: Manchester, 21 April, 1863;
Published: Gesamtausgabe, International Publishers, 1942;
Transcribed: Sally Ryan;
HTML Markup: Sally Ryan.
What is to be done with Lassalle it is hard to say; after all, I should assume that it would be beneath the dignity of the great Itzig [Lassalle] to bring out the heavy artillery of a formal denial against such petty gossip as that of Meyen. Let the fellow get out of his own dirty mess himself; if he can do anything he will not need any testimonial from you, and why should you compromise yourself after once having told him that he cannot go with us all the same, or we with him. What stupidity, to start with, to mix himself up in the Schulze-Delitzsch Knoten business and to attempt to form a party there, of all places, on the basis of our former work. We can only welcome the fact that Schulze-Delitzsch and other rabble are trying during this bourgeois period to raise the Knoten to the heights of the bourgeois point of view, for otherwise we should have had this business to wade through during the revolution, and in Germany, where everything is so much complicated by the mentality of the petty state, this small beer might have been held up to us as something new and practical. That is finished with now; we have got out opponents in the right position and the Knote has become conscious and so transferred himself to the ranks of the petty-bourgeois democracy. But to regard these chaps as representatives of the proletariat! It takes Itzig to do that.