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Title: Marx to John Malcolm Ludlow, London, 10 April 1869
Description: Marx corrects John Malcolm Ludlow, who in an article on Lassalle had made him a propagator of Lassallean principles, and points to Buchez as the source of Lassalle's cooperative scheme.
Author: Karl Marx
Date: 1869-04-10
URL: https://marxismo.school/archivo/marx-engels/cartas/originales/1869-04-10%20Marx%20to%20John%20Malcolm%20Ludlow
---


*Letter from Karl Marx to John Malcolm Ludlow in London, London, 10 April 1869. Written in English. Text after a photocopy of the manuscript, [MEGAdigital](https://megadigital.bbaw.de/briefe/detail.xql?id=M0000996) (MEGA² III/16, letter no. 101), Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften, CC BY-SA 4.0, without the editors' apparatus. [Traducción al español](https://marxismo.school/archivo/marx-engels/cartas/1869-04-10%20Marx%20a%20John%20Malcolm%20Ludlow)*

10 April. 1869  
1, Modena Villas, Maitland Park,  
Haverstock Hill, N.W.

Dear Sir,

Being aware of your services to the working class, I should before this have given myself the pleasure of sending you my last work: „Das Kapital“ (2nd and 3d vls not yet published), if I had known you to be a German reader.

In your article on Lassalle in the Fortnightly you say first that Lassalle propagated my principles in Germany and say then that I am propagating “Lassallian principles” in England. This would indeed be what the French call “un échange de bons procédés”.

In the volume I send you, you will find Preface, p. VIII, nt *1* the plain facts stated viz. that “Lassalle has taken from my writings almost literally *all his general theoretical developments*”, but that I “have nothing whatever to do with *his practical applications*”. His practical nostrum, government aid to cooperative societies, I call by courtesy *his*. It belongs in fact to, and was zealously preached, at the time of Louis Philippe, by Monsieur *Buchez*, Ex-St. Simonien, author of the “Histoire Parlèmentaire de la Rèvol. Franç.”, glorifying Robespierre *and* the Holy Inquisition. M. Buchez put forward his views, f. i. in the journal “*L’atèlier*”, in *opposition* to the radical views of the French communism of that time.

Since you quote my reply to Proudhon: “*Misère de la Philosophy*”, you cannot but be aware from its last chapter that in 1847, when all the political economists and all the socialists concurred on one single point—the condemnation of *Trades' Unions*, I demonstrated their historical necessity.

Yours truly  
Karl Marx.

J. M. Ludlow, Esq.