Engels' (non)reply to Wicksteed

[Tom Walker <timework@xxxxxxxxx>]

"'To-Day' has become a mere 'symposium', i.e. a review in which everyone
can write for and against socialism. Next No. a critique of 'Capital'! I
was supposed to reply to this anonymous writer, but declined with
thanks."
 -- Engels to Kautsky, Sept. 20, 1884.

The critique in question was titled "Das Kapital. A Criticism by Philip
H. Wicksteed". Does anyone happen to have an electronic copy of that
article on hand that they could send me or know of the location of one
on the web? I've already searched to no avail. Wicksteed's 1910
textbook, "The Common Sense of Political Economy", contains the most
extraordinarily ornate and long-winded discussion of what he eventually
admits to being reluctant to call the market for labour. This discussion
concludes with a bizarre five-paragraph tirade against the
"lump-of-labour" mentality of the working classes, the point of which
would seem to be that, "When we understand that local distress is
incidental to general progress, we shall not indeed try to stay general
progress in order to escape the local distress, but we shall try to
mitigate the local distress by diverting to its relief some portion of
the general access of wealth to which it is incidental."

I can't help but get the feeling, reading Chapter 8 of Wicksteed's
textbook, that the poor sot "meant well". Wicksteed seems to be engaging
a characteristically Fabian "rhetoric of courtship" -- conceding the
"economic" ground to the most reactionary and rapacious representatives
of capital in order that he may, at the last instance, append a plea for
enlighted compassion as the best way of combatting such "misdirected
sympathies" and "anti-social ways". Seen in this light, the third way
politics of Blair, Giddens et.al., is classic Fabianism reduced to its
absurd (and Orwellian!) conclusion -- a rhetoric that absolutely
identifies reactionary means with "progressive" ends.

In other words, I regret that Engels didn't reply. I suspect that
Wicksteed missed the point about the labour theory of value and
demolished a straw man of his own construction.