Text coloring decodes as follows:
Black: | Ken Ellis |
Red: | Marx, Engels, and Lenin. |
Green: | Press report, etc. |
Blue: | Correspondent, adversary, SLP-related |
Purple: | Unreliable Info |
Brown: | Inaccurate quote, but true to intent |
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 131-2) London,
June 20, 1882
... "The presumption of the Lassalleans after their
arrival in America was inevitable. People who carried the only
true gospel with them in their bag could not speak unpretentiously
to the Americans, still languishing in spiritual darkness. What
was at stake, moreover, was finding a new footing in America to
take the place of the one that was disappearing more and more
under their feet in Germany. To make up for it we are happily
rid of them in Germany; in America, where everything proceeds
ten times as fast, they will soon be disposed of." . . .
That prediction was one of many examples of Engels' over-optimism.
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 139) London,
April 24, 1883
... "The Volkszeitung has made enough blunders,
but still not as many as I expected. And all of them have done
their part - Schewitsch, Cuno, Douai, Hepner. They were a know-better
quartet of people who know damned little, jointly and severally.
Still I felt obliged to write a few lines to the editors; they had printed my cable to you as
one addressed to them, and merely falsified the second
one, to them, to the effect that Marx died in Argenteuil.
We wrote that we here refused to put up with that; in doing this
they would make it impossible for me to send them any more communications,
and if they again permitted themselves to misuse my name in such
a manner they would compel me to ask you at once to state publicly
that the whole thing was a forgery on their part. The gentlemen
should practice their Yankee humbug among themselves. Moreover,
the Americans are much more decent: according to the Volkszeitung
a telegram had been sent to me, which I never received, and almost
believed the gentlemen of the Volkszeitung had pocketed
the money themselves. Now Van Patten writes that no money at all
had been available. Now I am compelled to publish this here, otherwise
it would be said that I had kept the telegram from the Paris press
and the Sozialdemokrat. The answer regarding Most that
I sent Van Patten in reply to his inquiry will no doubt have been
published before this letter arrives.
"At the Copenhagen Congress
it was decided that Liebknecht and Bebel visit America next spring.
It is a question of money for the election campaigns of 1884-85
(all this between the two of us). Liebknecht has suggested
that Tussy [Eleanor
Marx] go
along as his secretary, and she would very much like to do so;
thus you are very likely to see her there soon. We haven't made
any plans at all as yet."
...
Van Patten, referred to in the previous letter, was a member of the New York Central Labor Union, and was also SLP National Secretary. He wrote to Engels on April 2, 1883, inquiring (LTA, p. 137):
"When all parties were
united in connection with the recent memorial celebration in honor
of Karl Marx, many loud declarations were made on the part of
Johann Most and his friends that Most had stood in close relation
to Marx and had popularized his work, Capital, in Germany
and that Marx had been in agreement with the propaganda which
Most had conducted. We have a very high opinion of the capacities
and the activity of Karl Marx, but we cannot believe that he was
in sympathy with the anarchistic and disorganizing methods
of Most, and I should like to hear your opinion as to the attitude
of Karl Marx on the question of anarchism versus socialism. Most's ill-advised, stupid chatter
has already done us too much harm here, and it is very unpleasant
for us to hear that such a great authority as Marx approved of
such tactics."
Some 64+ years later, A.P. quoted Engels' letter
to Van Patten without credit (see Part C) in his 1947 preface
to Engels' "Socialism:
From Utopia to Science".
A.P.'s claims that he,
De Leon, and the SLP also stood on Marxist principles were consistent with the declarations
of Johann Most, but were all false.
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 141) London,
June 29, 1883
... "Schewitsch has replied to me "dignifiedly,"
regretting my "pettiness." Dignity sits well on him.
He'll get no answer.
"Nor will Most, who must
confirm everything I assert, and for that reason is so furious.
I believe he will find support in that sectarian land, America,
and cause trouble for some time. But that is just the character
of the American movement: that all mistakes must be experienced
in practice. If American energy and vitality were backed by European
theoretical clarity, the thing would be finished over there in
ten years. But that is impossible historically."
Engels to Eduard Bernstein in
Zürich
(MEW 36, pp. 97-8) London, February 5, 1884
... "I quite agree with you on von der Mark and the
"Volkszeitung"*.
At Marx's death, Schewitsch falsified my telegram to Sorge and
printed it as if it had been sent to the "V.Z.". I protested.
He covered the falsification with the lie that the first word
was indecipherable - but he printed it correctly! and the other
thing he deemed "necessary
in the interest of the paper"! Furthermore, he said, my propaganda was
"petty". However it was
not "petty" [kleinlich] but rather gross
[grosslich] how the gentlemen exploited Marx's death for propaganda
for themselves and to proclaim their half alliance with {Johann} Most. But Schewitsch is the last socialist
Russian aristocrat, and they must always "go farthest"
and are accustomed to use the whole world as a means to their
ends. The tolerance article was simply silly. The Russians quarreled
among themselves amiably
[con amore], and the Irish too."
__________
* "In the Sunday edition of the "New
Yorker Volkszeitung" of Dec. 2, 1883, under the pseudonym
"von der Mark", an article by the editor Wilhelm Ludwig
Rosenberg had been published which declared the state to be an
abstract concept, an alliance of individuals. Under his pseudonym
"Leo", Eduard Bernstein published in the "Sozialdemokrat"
on December 20, 1883, a reply: "Socialism and the State".
Bernstein quoted verbatim Engels' ideas expressed in the third
part of "Entwicklung
des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft"
{Development
of Socialism from Utopia to Science}
about the
historic function of the state and Lasalles's "free people's
state" cliché, and then discussed polemically Lassalle's,
as well as the anarchist concept of the state.
Speaking to the anarchists, Bernstein emphasized
that it was necessary to conquer the state "not to do away
with it as the anarchists pretend to want."
The article ended with the call: "Therefore no delusion about
our final goal, but also no mistake about the way to this goal!
It is: Win the power in the state."
"On January 3, 1884, Rosenberg
published in the "New Yorker Volkszeitung" under the
heading "Herr Leo" a second article in which he tried
to show that Engels and August Bebel, since they stood for the
dying off of the state and for the idea of no rulers, had made
a concession to the anarchists' ideal of statelessness." {From a footnote by the Publisher.}
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 142) London,
March 7, 1884
.
. . "I shall hardly have the time to enter
into a debate with Stiebeling. Such little gods can safely be
left to themselves. Besides, sectarianism cannot be prevented
in America for years to come. And so the great {Johann} Most will also end up as Karl Heinz the Second,
no doubt. I am getting the Wochen [Weekly] -Volkszeitung,
but there isn't much in it.
"I do not know how matters
stand with the trip of Bebel, Liebknecht, or someone else to America.
In reply to their inquiry I told them that, in my opinion, it
would not do to tap America [financially] every three years for the elections. The situation
in Germany, moreover, is very good. Our boys are standing up to
it famously. The {Anti-}
Socialist
Law is involving them in a local struggle with the police everywhere,
which entails lots of cleverness and trickery and usually ends
victoriously for us, providing the best propaganda in the world.
All the bourgeois papers utter sighs from time to time over the
enormous progress of our people, and they are all afraid of the
coming elections." ...
In the next letter, Engels speculated on the effects if that year's electoral victories for the German Workers' Party could be duplicated by workers' parties in America and elsewhere.
Engels to August Bebel in Plauen
bei Dresden
(MEW 36, pp. 214-5) London, October 11, 1884
... "The election excitement has been going around in
my head all day long. Our three-year-old great test is an event
of European importance, in contrast to which the panic journeys
of all the emperors mean nothing. I remember too well how in 1875
the election victories of our side took off in Europe and chased
the Bakunist
Anarchism
from the stage in Italy, France, Switzerland and Spain. And just
now such an effect is very much needed again. The caricature anarchists à la {Johann} Most who have already come down from
Rinaldo Rinaldini to Schinderhannes and below would, at least
for Europe, receive a similar blow and save us a lot of effort.
In America, where sects live forever, they could then slowly die
off - after all, Karl Heinz kept himself going there for 25 years
after he was dead and buried in Europe. The provincial French,
who are developing very well, would be much encouraged and the
Paris masses would receive a new impulse to emancipate themselves
from their position as the tail of the extreme Left. Here in England
where the reform bill gives the workers new power, this impulse
would come just in time for the next election in 1885 and would
offer an opportunity to the Social Democratic Federation - which
consists only of the old literati on the one hand, old sectarian
remains on the other hand and a sentimental public in the third
place - to really become a party. In America, only such an event
is still needed to make the English speaking workers finally realize
what power they have if they would only use it. And in Italy and
Spain it would be a new blow for continuing anarchistic doctrinaire clap-trap. In one word, the victories
you achieve have an effect from Siberia to California and from
Sicily to Sweden." ...
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
(ELC I, p. 248) London, November 23, 1884
... "Bernstein's letter to Paul about Lassalle finds
its explanation in this, that in Paris, as in London and
New York, the old Lassalle set is still strongly represented among
the Germans. They have mostly emigrated, Germany is too hot for
them and won't listen to them. But as they are comparatively harmless
abroad, and form a useful international cement, besides finding
funds for the Germans at home, on les ménage un peu [one fosters them a little]."
...
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(pp. 144-5) London, February 10, 1885
"I herewith return Mr. Putnam's letter - of course
it would be a splendid success if we could secure publication
by that firm - but I am afraid Mr. P. will stick to his objections,
the great strength of which, from a publisher's standpoint, I
fully recognize. Perhaps the fact that a new German edition of
my work is in actual preparation may shake him a little. My friends
in Germany say that the book
{"The
Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844"} is important to them just now because
it describes a state of things which is almost exactly reproduced
at the present moment in Germany; and as the development of manufacturing
industry, steam and machinery, and their social outcrop in the
creation of a proletariat, in America corresponds at the present
moment as nearly as possible to the English status of 1844 (though
your go-ahead people are sure to outstrip the old world in the
next 15-20 years altogether), the comparison of industrial England
of 1844 with industrial America of 1885 might have its interest
too.
"Of course in the new
preface to the English translation I shall refer as fully as space
will permit to the change in the condition of the British working
class which has taken place in the interval; to the improved position
of a more or less privileged minority, to the certainly not alleviated
misery of the great body, and especially to the impending change
for the worse which must necessarily follow the breakdown of the
industrial monopoly of England in consequence of the increasing
competition, in the markets of the world, of Continental Europe
and especially of America."
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 146-7) London,
June 3, 1885
.
. . "Thanks for the Grönlund and Ely {American Socialist
writers},
as well as for the newspapers. Ely is a well-meaning philistine
and at least takes more pains than his German companions in adversity
and stupidity, which is always to be appreciated. Grönlund,
on the other hand, makes a strongly speculative impression on
me; his pushing of our views, to the extent that he understands
them or not, obviously serves to push his own utopianisms as real
live German socialism. In any event, a symptom. . . .
"You had the same correct
forebodings about the Reichstag fellows that I did - they let
tremendous petty-bourgeois desires come to light in connection
with the steamship subsidy. It almost resulted in a split, which
is not desirable at the present time, as long as the {Anti-}Socialist Law is in force. But as soon
as we have some more elbow-room in Germany, the split will doubtless
occur and then it cannot but be helpful. A petty-bourgeois Socialist
fraction {of the party} is unavoidable in a country
like Germany, where philistinism, even more than historical law,
"ain't got no beginning." It is also useful as soon
as it has constituted itself apart from the proletarian party.
But this separation now would be merely harmful, if it were provoked
by us. If they themselves disavow the program in practice,
however, so much the better, and we can seize upon it.
"You in America also suffer
from all sorts of great scholars such as Germany's petty-bourgeois socialists possess in Geiser, Frohme,
Blos, etc. The historical digressions of the Stiebelings, Douais,
etc., on migrations in the Sozialist amused me very much, since these people have studied
all that much better and much more thoroughly than I have. Douai,
in particular, gives himself extraordinary airs. Thus, in No.
13 of the Sozialist he says: In the German conquests in Italy, etc., the king
received one-third of the land, two-thirds going to the soldiers
and officers, of which in turn two-thirds went to the former slaves, etc. "As can be read in Jornandes
and Cassiodorus." I was dumbfounded
when I read all that. "The same is reported regarding the Visigoths." "Nor was it otherwise in France." Now all that is
invented from A to Z, and neither in Jornandes nor in Cassiodorus
nor in any other contemporary source is there a word of it.
It is both colossal ignorance and impudence to throw such nonsense
up to me and to tell me I am "demonstrably wrong." The sources, practically all of
which I know, state exactly the contrary. I have let it pass this
time because it happened in America, where one can hardly fight
such a matter out; let Monsieur Douai take care in the future
- I might lose patience sometime."
. . .
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(p. 148) London, January 7, 1886
"I have received your Ms. {Manuscript} but have not as yet been able to look at it, so
cannot say how long it will take me. Anyhow I shall lose no time,
you may be sure. As to those wise Americans who think their country
exempt from the consequences of fully expanded capitalist production,
they seem to live in blissful ignorance of the fact that sundry
states, Massachusetts, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, etc., have
such an institution as a Labor Bureau, from the reports of which
they might learn something to the contrary."
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 148) London,
January 29, 1886
.
. . "An American woman [Florence
Kelley Wischnewetzky] has translated my book
on the working class in England and has also sent me the manuscript
for revision - some passages of which will take some time. Publication
in America is assured, but I can't understand what this person
now finds in the old thing.
. . . Give Dietzgen my regards. He has a hard row to
hoe, but it will come out all right. After all, the movement in
America is making fine progress. It was not to be expected that
the Anglo-Americans go at the thing other than in their
way, contemptuous of reason and science, but they are coming closer
none the less. And, finally, they will come over altogether. Capitalist
centralization is proceeding there with seven-league boots, quite
otherwise than over here."
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(p. 149) London, February 3, 1886
"If I am not too often interrupted in the evenings,
I hope to be able to send you the remainder of the Ms. {Manuscript} and possibly also the introduction in
a fortnight. This latter may be printed either as a preface or
as an appendix. As to the length of it I am utterly incapable
of giving you any idea. I shall try to make it as short as possible,
especially as it will be useless for me to try to combat arguments
of the American press with which I am not even superficially acquainted.
Of course, if American workingmen will not read their own states'
Labor Reports, but trust to politicians' extracts, nobody can
help them. But it strikes me that the present chronic depression,
which seems endless so far, will tell its tale in America as well
as in England. America will smash up England's industrial monopoly
- whatever there is left of it - but America cannot herself succeed
to that monopoly. And unless one country has the monopoly
of the markets of the world, at least in the decisive branches
of the trade, the conditions - relatively favorable - which existed
here in England from 1848 to 1870 cannot anywhere be reproduced,
and even in America the condition of the working class must gradually
sink lower and lower. For if there are three countries (say England,
America, and Germany) competing on comparatively equal terms for
the possession of the Weltmarkt
[world market],
there is no chance but chronic overproduction, one of the three
being capable of supplying the whole quantity required. That is
the reason why I am watching the development of the present crisis
with greater interest than ever and why I believe it will mark
an epoch in the mental and political history of the American and
English working classes - the very two whose assistance is as
absolutely necessary as it is desirable."
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
(ELC I, p. 335) London, February 9, 1886
... "At last I have got nearly the whole of the Ms.
of the English translation of Vol. I (of Capital) in my hands;
the small remnant Edward has promised for Sunday. I shall go at
it this week - the only thing that keeps me from it is the revision
of a translation (English) of my old book on the English working
class by an American lady who has also found a publisher for it
in America-strange to say! This I do in the evenings and shall
- unless much interrupted - finish this week." ...
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(p. 151) London, February 25, 1886
... "I am glad that all obstacles to publication have
been successfully overcome. Only I am sorry that Miss Foster has
applied to the Executive of the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei {SLP} in New York, as appears
from their report of meeting in Der Sozialist, New York, February 13. Neither Marx
nor myself has ever committed the least act which might be interpreted
into asking any workingmen's organization to do us any personal
favor - and this was necessary not only for the sake of our own
independence but also on account of the constant bourgeois denunciations
of "demagogues
who coax the workingmen out of their hard-earned pennies in order
to spend them for their own purposes." I shall therefore be compelled
to inform that Executive that this application
was made entirely without my knowledge or authority. Miss F. no
doubt acted in what she thought the best way, and this step of
hers is in itself no doubt perfectly admissible; still, if I could
have foreseen it, I would have been compelled to do everything
in my power to prevent it.
"The revision of your
translation has delayed that of the English translation of Das
Kapital by three weeks - and at a most critical period of
the year too. I shall set about it tonight and it may take me
several months. After that, the German third volume must be taken
in hand; you see, therefore, that for some time it will be impossible
for me to undertake the revision of other translations, unless
few and far between and of small volume." ...
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(p. 152) London, March 12, 1886
"Deeply buried as I am in the English Capital,
I have only the time to write a few lines in haste. It did not
require all your exposition of the circumstances to convince me
that you were perfectly innocent of what had been done in America
with your translation. The thing is done and can't be helped,
though we both are convinced that it was a mistake. ...
"And now I cannot conclude without expressing to
you my most sincere thanks to you for the very great trouble you
have taken to revive, in English, a book of mine which is half-forgotten
in the original German."
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 153) London,
April 29, 1886
... "To be sure, I had not suspected that Douai was
so terribly underrated as a great man. May he take with him into
the grave the consciousness of his greatness, together with all
of its underrating, without seeing it lessened by sugar-coating.
But he was the right man for America, and if he had remained an
ordinary democrat, I would have wished him the best of luck. But
as it is, he got into the wrong pew.
...
"I think I have already written you that an American
lady, married to a Russian, has gotten it into her head to translate
my old book. I looked over the translation, which required considerable
work. But she wrote that publication was assured and that it had
to be done at once, and so I had to go at it. Now it turns out
that she turned the negotiations over to a Miss Foster, the secretary
of a women's rights society, and the latter committed the blunder
of giving it to the Socialist
Labor Party.
I told the translator what I thought of this, but it was too late.
Moreover, I am glad that the gentlemen over there do not translate
anything of mine; it would turn out beautifully. Their German
is enough, and then their English!
"The gentlemen of the
Volkszeitung must be satisfied. They have gained control
of the whole movement among the Germans, and their business must
be flourishing. It is a matter of course that a man like Dietzgen
is pushed to the rear there. Playing with the boycott and with little strikes is, of course, much more
important than theoretical education. But with all that the cause
is moving ahead mightily in America. A real mass movement {the Henry George boom} exists among the English-speaking
workers for the first time. That it proceeds gropingly at first,
clumsy, unclear, unknowing, is unavoidable. All that will be cleared
up; the movement will and must develop through its own mistakes.
Theoretical ignorance is a characteristic of all young peoples,
but so is rapidity of practical development. As in England, all
the preaching is of no use in America until the actual necessity
exists. And this is present in America now, and they are becoming
conscious of it. The entrance of masses of native-born workers
into the movement in America is for me one of the greatest events
of 1886. As for the Germans over there, let the sort now flourishing
join the Americans gradually; they will still be somewhat ahead
of them. And, lastly, there still is a core among the Germans
over there which retains theoretical insight into the nature and
the course of the whole movement, keeps the process of fermentation
going, and finally rises to the top again. ...
... "Another thing. A Mr. J. T. McEnnis interviewed
me a few days ago under the pretext of getting advice on labor
legislation for the State of Missouri. I soon discovered that
newspaper business was behind it, and he confessed that he was
working for the leading democratic paper of St. Louis, but gave
me his word of honor that he would submit every word to me in
advance for revision. The man was sent to me by the Russian Stepniak.
Nearly two weeks have passed, and I am afraid he did not keep
his promise. I have forgotten the name of the St. Louis paper.
Therefore, if anything is printed regarding the interview, please
have the enclosed statement printed in Der Sozialist, the Volkszeitung, and anywhere else you
think necessary. If the man does come and keep his promise, I
shall, of course, let you know at once, and you can then tear
up the statement." ...
For the lack of an opportunity to edit the final version of the interview, Engels disclaimed whatever would have been printed without his approval. His disclaimer stated in part:
... "I had an opportunity to convince myself that Mr. McEnnis, for lack of the necessary rudimentary knowledge, would hardly be able, even with the best of intentions, to understand my remarks correctly."
FREDERICK ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
(ELC I, p. 353) May 7, 1886
... "On the other hand, in Paris our movement has reached
that stage when even a mistake made would not do it too much harm.
Of course the speed of future progress depends a great deal upon
the leadership given by the heads of groups; but once the masses
are on the move, they are like a healthy body which has the strength
to eliminate the elements of disease and even a little poison."
Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht
in Leipzig
(MEW 36, p. 483) London, May 12, 1886
... "The Chicago-affair probably means the end of the
anarchist
comedy in
America. People are allowed to yell as much as they want, but
with regard to pointless brawls the Americans have no tolerance
since they have become an industrial nation." ...
Engels to Eduard Bernstein in
Zürich
(MEW 36, pp. 486-7) London, May 22, 1886
... "Our Frenchmen are doing fine. Here, on the other
hand, everything remains amateurish play. The anarchist stupidities in America can become useful; it is
not desirable that the American workers achieve too rapid successes
while they are at their present still quite bourgeois stage of
thinking - high wages and short working time. That could strengthen
the one-sided trades-union spirit more than necessary." ...
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
(ELC I, p. 355) London, May 23, 1886
... "The victory at Dec[azeville]
would have
been exceedingly nice, but after all the defeat may be more useful
to the movement in the long run. So I do believe, too, that the
anarchist
follies of
Chicago will do much good. If the present American movement -
which so far as it is not exclusively German, is still in the Trades Union stage - had got
a great victory on the 8 hours question, Trades Unionism would
have become a fixed and final dogma. While a mixed result
will help to show them that it is necessary to go beyond "high
wages and short hours.""
LAURA LAFARGUE TO FREDERICK ENGELS
IN LONDON
(ELC I, pp. 356-7) Paris, May 25, 1886
... "I cannot help thinking that they are rather overdoing
it in the American Sozialist with Deutschland
{Germany}. It may be all right in the States but
it is all wrong for France. It has been hard enough to get the
glib and skipping Frenchies to take kindly to the ponderous "têtes
carrées" [square-heads (i.e.,
Germans)] and, even were it true, it is impolitic
to boast that the whole of the French movement is kept alive by
German money. It is taking away all value from the subscriptions
received from Germany, the moral effect of which has been so great." ...
ENGELS TO FLORENCE KELLEY-WISCHNEWETZKY
IN ZURICH
(MESC, pp. 371-2) London, June 3, 1886
"Whatever the mistakes and the Borniertheit
[Narrow-mindedness] of the leaders of the movement, and partly of the
newly awakening masses too, one thing is certain: the American
working class is moving, and no mistake. And after a few false
starts, they will get into the right track soon enough. This appearance
of the Americans upon the scene I consider one of the greatest
events of the year. What the breakdown of Russian Czarism would
be for the great military monarchies of Europe - the snapping
of their mainstay - that is for the bourgeois of the whole world
the breaking out of class war in America. For America after all
was the ideal of all bourgeois; a country rich, vast, expanding,
with purely bourgeois institutions unleavened by feudal remnants
or monarchical traditions and without a permanent and hereditary
proletariat. Here everyone could become, if not a capitalist,
at all events an independent man, producing or trading, with his
own means, for his own account. And because there were not, as
yet, classes with opposing interests, our - and your - bourgeois
thought that America stood above class antagonisms and
struggles. That delusion has now broken down, the last Bourgeois
Paradise on earth is fast changing into a Purgatorio, and can
only be prevented from becoming, like Europe, an Inferno by the
go-ahead pace at which the development of the newly fledged proletariat
of America will take place. The way in which they have made their
appearance on the scene is quite extraordinary: six months ago
nobody suspected anything, and now they appear all of a sudden
in such organised masses as to strike terror into the whole capitalist
class. I only wish Marx could have lived to see it!" ...
About American conditions, Marx wrote in Capital in 1867 (NW 17, p. 773):
... "[T]he American Civil War brought in its train a colossal national debt, and, with it, pressure of taxes, the rise of the vilest financial aristocracy, the squandering of a huge part of the public land on speculative companies for the exploitation of railways, mines, &c., in brief, the most rapid centralisation of capital. The great republic has, therefore, ceased to be the promised land for emigrant labourers. Capitalistic production advances there with giant strides, even though the lowering of wages and the dependence of the wage-worker are yet far from being brought down to the normal European level." ...
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(pp. 158-60) Eastbourne, August 13, 1886
... "If the thing
{"The
Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State"} is to come out in English at all, it
ought to be published in such a way that the public can get hold
of it through the regular book trade. That will not be
the case, as far as I can see, with Die Lage {"The Condition of the Working Class in
England in 1844"}. Unless the trade arrangements
are very different in America from those in Europe, the booksellers
will not deal in works published by outside establishments belonging
to a workingmen's party. This is why Chartist and Owenite publications
are nowhere preserved and nowhere to be had, not even
in the British Museum, and why all
our German party publications are - and were, long before the
Socialist Law - not to be had through the trade, and remained
unknown to the public outside the party. That is a state of things
which sometimes cannot be avoided but ought to be avoided wherever
possible. And you will not blame me if I wish to avoid it for
the English translations of my writings, having suffered from
it in Germany for more than forty years. The state of things in
England is such that publishers can be got - either now or in
the near future - for socialist works, and I have no doubt that
in the course of next year I can have an English translation published
here and the translator paid; and as I have moreover long since
promised Dr. Aveling the translation of the Entwicklung
[Socialism:
Utopian and Scientific]
and the Ursprung {"Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State"}, if he can make it pay
for himself, you see that an American edition, brought
out outside the regular book trade, would only spoil the chance
of a London edition to be brought out in the way of the regular
trade and therefore accessible to the public generally and everywhere.
"Moreover, I do not think
that this book is exactly what is wanted at the present moment
by the American workingman. Das Kapital will be at their
service before the year is out; that will serve them for a pièce
de résistance
[main dish]. For lighter, more popular
literature, for real propaganda, my booklet will scarcely serve.
In the present undeveloped state of the movement, I think perhaps
some of the French popularizations would answer best. ...
"August 14. To return to the Ursprung. I
do not mean to say that I have absolutely promised Aveling to
let him have it, but I consider myself bound to him in case a
translation is to come out in London. The final decision
then would depend very much upon the nature of the publishing
arrangements you can make in America. To a repetition of what
Miss Foster has done with Die Lage I decidedly object.
When I see my way to an English edition, brought out by a firm
known in the bourgeois trade, and not only of this book, but probably
of a collection of various other writings, with the advantage
of having the translation done here (which saves me a deal of
time), you will admit that I ought to look twice before sanctioning
the bringing out, in America, of this little book alone and thereby
spoiling the whole arrangement. And with the present anti-socialist
scare in America, I doubt whether you will find regular publishers
very willing to associate their name with socialist works.
"A very good bit of work
would be a series of pamphlets stating in popular language the
contents of Das Kapital. The theory of surplus value,
No. 1; the history of the various forms of surplus value (cooperation,
manufacture, modern industry), No. 2; accumulation and the history
of primitive accumulation, No. 3; the development of surplus value
making in colonies (last chapter), No. 4 - this would be specially
instructive in America, as it would give the economic history
of that country, from a land of independent peasants to a centre
of modern industry and might be completed by specially American
facts.
"In the meantime you may
be sure that it will take some time yet before the mass
of the American working people will begin to read socialist
literature. And for those that do read and will read, there
is matter enough being provided, and least of all will Der
Ursprung be missed by them. With the Anglo-Saxon mind, and
especially with the eminently practical development it has taken
in America, theory counts for nothing until imposed by dire necessity,
and I count above all things upon the teaching our friends will
receive by the consequences of their own blunders to prepare them
for theoretical schooling."
Engels to August Bebel in Plauen
bei Dresden
(MEW 36, p. 509) London, August 18, 1886
... "This entrance of the Americans into the movement,
and the revival of the French movement by the three Labor deputies
and Decazeville - those are the two world historic events of this
year. In America various stupidities are happening - the Anarchists here, the Knights of
Labor there - but that doesn't matter, the thing is going and
will develop quickly. There will be many disappointments - the
wirepullers of the old political parties are already getting ready
to get the sprouting Labor Party under their secret direction
- and quite colossal blunders will be made, but nevertheless things
will proceed more rapidly there than elsewhere.
"In France the 108,000
votes for Roche have proven that the radical workers are beginning
to dissociate themselves from the Radicals, and that in masses.
To secure this success, this newly-won position, our people have
managed to have the temporary organization for Roche's election
changed into a permanent one, and so they have become the theoretical
teachers of the workers who are turning away from the Radicals.
All these people call themselves Socialists, but are learning
now through bitter experience that their faded trash by Proudhon
and L. Blanc is pure bourgeois and petty-bourgeois muck, and therefore
are sufficiently open to Marx's theory. That is the result of
the Radicals being half in power; should they get complete
power, all the workers will secede, and I assert: victory for
Radicalism, i.e. the faded old French Socialism in the Chamber
means victory for Marxism, first in the Paris City Council.
Oh, if only Marx could have seen this, how his maxim holds good
in France and America, that the democratic republic today is nothing
but the battle-ground on which the decisive battle between bourgeoisie
and proletariat is being fought."
...
Let us digress here into a portion of a story about Joseph Dietzgen, as reported in Sorge's book entitled "The Labor Movement in the United States" (pp. 242-3):
... "Since the majority of
the organized German workers are socialists, one could assume
that by the description of the activities of German workers in
the United States the discussion concerns only socialists. However
- there are socialists and Socialists. There are socialists as
such, to which most of the organized German workers belong, and
there are Socialists
in particular,
official
Socialists,
members of the Socialist
Labor Party,
socialists
par excellence.
There remains something to be said about the latter, especially
about their national
executive committee,
their executive, as it is called here
for short.
"The executive of the Socialist Labor Party resided during this whole period in
the two neighboring towns of New York City and Brooklyn and made
continuous, if largely unsuccessful, efforts to expand this socialist
organization. During the first three years (1886-1889) especially,
the executive strictly adhered to
the letter of socialist
dogma and
thus often lost the spirit of it. They obstinately insisted on
adhering to the statute of the organization without considering
the peculiar development of the situation which cannot be forced
into a straitjacket; they always wanted to be first and often
ended up last because of their clumsiness. They lacked understanding
of the important events in 1886 and 1887 and the initiative to
exploit these events for the socialist cause, as well as the courage
and virility to maintain a secure position.
"During the great New Yorkers' election
campaign
in 1886, the executive acted rather listlessly,
and it approved the 1887 campaign (Progressive Labor Party) only
a few days before the election. The executive observed the struggle almost indifferently
because the little word socialist did not appear at the
head of the ballot and proclamations. These people missed the
point that movement, vigorous agitation, is the first requisite
for existence and any progress. They embraced words instead and finally collapsed pitifully.
"When the bomb exploded
in the Haymarket and the white terror reigned in Chicago, when
the workers' press was censored there, the right of assembly suspended,
the personal security of the habeas corpus abolished, and the
sanctity of the home disrespected, when the official bourgeoisie
started to destroy the leaders of the proletariat in the giant
city on Lake Michigan, then the executive of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP)
could think of nothing better to do than to whine into the world
and into the ears of the bourgeoisie: We are no anarchists, we have nothing to
do with them.
"Josef Dietzgen, the philosopher
of the proletariat as Marx called him, moved to Chicago in March
1886 where the executive ordered him to remain
as a co-worker of the Socialist, the central organ of the SLP, and to write reports of the situation in and
around Chicago. Almost every number of the journal in March and
April of 1886 contained writings by Dietzgen. When his report
on the Haymarket bomb affair reached the editorial staff of the
Socialist, they showed it to the
executive, which rejected it.
The latter asked its secretary to inform Dietzgen that his report,
the report of an eyewitness, did not agree with the point of view
of the executive sitting 1,000 miles
away and therefore could not be published. Fear, it seemed, lay
in the bones of this peculiar labor party executive, and it is almost surprising that they
did not fare as Lingenau, who became famous through his last will
and who died as a result of the fears that the poor fellow suffered
during the railroad unrest.
"The executive thirsted quite madly for a testimonial
of good behavior, and the police finally relented and gave it
a certificate of good conduct for the person who replaced Dietzgen.
This man wrote his reports for the Socialist to the liking of his bosses in New York.
As it happened, the police arrested him, as they did many people
in Chicago at that time. He was brought before a police captain
who questioned him about his work and status. The party comrade and correspondent of the Socialist explained to the policeman
that he tried to write about the mistakes and sins of the anarchists with whom neither he
nor his party comrades had anything
in common. The supervisor of the law and nightstick heroes was
happy to make the acquaintance of such a solid, honorable man
and released him with the following words, recorded by the correspondent.
"You are a right fellow; go home and write that, it's all
right!"
"One should compare that with the deeds and presence
of Dietzgen" ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 161) London,
September 16, 1886
... "A fine gang seems to be at the head of the party in New York; the Sozialist is a model of what a paper should not
be. But neither can I support Dietzgen in his article on the anarchists* -
he has a peculiar way of dealing with things. If a person has
a perhaps somewhat narrow opinion on a certain point, Dietzgen
cannot emphasize enough (and often too much) that the matter has
two sides. But now, because the New Yorkers are behaving contemptibly,
he suddenly takes the other side and wants to picture us all as
anarchists. The moment may excuse
this, but he shouldn't forget all his dialectics at the decisive
moment. However, he has gotten over it by now, no doubt, and is
certainly back on the right track; I have no worries on that score.
"In a country as untouched
as America, which has developed in a purely bourgeois fashion
without any feudal past, but has unwittingly taken over from England
a whole store of ideology from feudal times, such as the English
common law, religion, and sectarianism, and where the exigencies
of practical labor and the concentrating of capital have produced
a contempt for all theory, which is only now disappearing in the
educated circles of scholars - in such a country the people must
become conscious of their own social interests by making
blunder after blunder. Nor will that be spared the workers; the
confusion of the trade unions, socialists, Knights of Labor, etc.,
will persist for some time to come, and they will learn only by
their own mistakes. But the main thing is that they have started
moving, that things are going ahead generally, that the spell
is broken; and they will go fast, too, faster than anywhere else,
even though on a singular road, which seems, from the theoretical
standpoint, to be an almost insane road." ...
__________
* "In an article in the Chicago Vorbote, Dietzgen
had proposed that no distinction should be made, for the time
being, between anarchists, socialists, and communists." {Note by International Publishers.}
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
(ELC I, p. 373) London, September 24, 1886
... "I had a letter from Tussy {Eleanor} on her arrival in N[ew]
Y[ork], she had a very pleasant voyage, but
was rather disappointed at the live American bourgeois she met
on board; it rather damped her enthusiasm for America, but prepared
her for the realities of American life." ...
PAUL LAFARGUE TO FREDERICK ENGELS
IN LONDON
(ELC I, p. 376) Paris, September 30, 1886
... "Our acquittal has been an immense victory; it is
the first time that the bourgeois have acquitted Socialists because
they are Socialists: that is a big step. It shows, to some extent,
that the bourgeoisie is ready for some part of our theories. Unfortunately
the anarchistic form is too beloved
in France, otherwise we could do more propaganda amongst the bourgeois,
who are frightened off by the large phrases of the anarchists which the revolutionaries
are compelled to use up to a point.
"What a success the three travelers in socialism
have had in New York! The telegraph reports their triumphal progress.
This trip will have big repercussions in America and in England:
it will greatly help the development of the American socialist
movement and give Tussy and Aveling standing in England. They
may on their return exercise greater influence on the Socialist
League and guide it in the right direction." ...
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
(ELC I, pp. 377-8) London, October 2, 1886
... "I am afraid Paul exaggerates the significance of
the Paris verdict in so far as it is a symptom of the accessibility
of the industrial bourgeoisie for socialist ideas. The struggle
between usurer and industrial capitalist is one within the bourgeoisie
itself, and though no doubt a certain number of petty bourgeois
will be driven over to us by the certainty of their impending
expropriation de la part des boursiers [by the moneybags], yet we can never hope to get the mass
of them over to our side. Moreover, this is not desirable, as
they bring their narrow class prejudices along with them. In Germany
we have too many of them, and it is they who form the dead weight
which trammels the march of the party. It will ever be the lot
of the petty bourgeois - as a mass - to float undecidedly between
the two great classes, one part to be crushed by the centralization
of capital, the other by the victory of the proletariat. On the
decisive day, they will as usual be tottering, wavering and helpless,
se laisseront faire [will offer no resistance], and that is all we
want. Even if they come round to our views they will say: of course
communism is the ultimate solution, but it is far off, maybe 100
years before it can be realised - in other words: we do not mean
to work for its realisation neither in our, nor in our children's
lifetime. Such is our experience in Germany.
"Otherwise the verdict
is a grand victory and marks a decided step in advance. The bourgeoisie,
from the moment it is faced by a conscious and organised proletariat,
becomes entangled in hopeless contradictions between its liberal
and democratic general tendencies here, and the repressive
necessities of its defensive struggle against the proletariat
there. A cowardly bourgeoisie, like the German and Russian,
sacrifices its general class tendencies to the momentary advantages
of brutal repression. But a bourgeoisie with a revolutionary history
of its own, such as the English and particularly the French, cannot
do that so easily. Hence that struggle within the bourgeoisie
itself, which in spite of occasional fits of violence and oppression,
on the whole drives it forward - see the various electoral reforms
of Gladstone in England, and the advance of radicalism in France.
This verdict is a new étape
[stage]. And so the bourgeoisie,
in doing its own work, is doing ours."
...
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
(ELC I, pp. 395-6) London, November 24, 1886
"I hope you have recd the American letters I sent
you yesterday; today I can keep my word and write. Our people {Liebknecht and the Avelings} have indeed hit upon
a lucky moment for their journey, it coincides with the first
formation of a real American working men's party and what was
practically an immense success, the Henry George "boom"
in N[ew] York. Master George is rather a confused sort of
a body and being a Yankee, has a nostrum of his own, and not a
very excellent one, but his confusion is a very fair expression
of the present stage of development of the Anglo-American working-class
mind, and we cannot expect even American masses to arrive at theoretical
perfection in six or eight months - the age of this movement.
And considering that the Germans in America are anything but a
fair and adequate sample of the workmen of Germany, but rather
of the elements the movement at home has eliminated - Lassalleans,
disappointed ambitions, sectarians of all sorts - I for one am
not sorry that the Americans start independently of them, or at
least of their leadership. As a ferment, the Germans can and will
act, and at the same time undergo, themselves, a good deal of
useful and necessary fermentation. The unavoidable starting point,
in America, are the Knights of Labour, who are a real power, and
are sure to form the first embodiment of the movement. Their absurd
organisation and very slippery leaders - used to the methods of
corrupt American partisanship - will very soon provoke a crisis
within that body itself, and then a more adequate and more effective
organisation can be developed from it. All this, I think, will
not take very long in Yankeeland; the great point gained is that
the political action of the working class as an independent party
is henceforth established there."
...
ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH ADOLPH SORGE
IN HOBOKEN
(MESC, pp. 373-5) London, November 29,1886
"The Henry George boom has of course brought to
light a colossal mass of fraud, and I am glad I was not there.
But in spite of it all it was an epoch-making day. The Germans {SLP} do not know how to use
their theory to set the American masses in motion; most of them
do not understand the theory themselves and treat it in a doctrinaire
and dogmatic way as something that has got to be learned by heart
and which will then satisfy all requirements without more ado.
To them it is a credo and not a guide to action. What is more,
they learn no English on principle. Hence the American masses
had to seek out their own path and seem to have found it for the
time being in the Knights of Labor, whose confused principles
and ludicrous organisation seem to correspond to their own confusion.
But from all I hear, the Knights of Labor are a real power, especially
in New England and the West, and are becoming more so every day
owing to the brutal opposition of the capitalists. I think it
is necessary to work inside this organisation, to form within
this still quite plastic mass a core of people who understand
the movement and its aims and will therefore take over the leadership,
at least of a section, when the inevitable, now impending break-up
of the present "order" takes place. The worst side of
the Knights of Labor was their political neutrality, which has
resulted in sheer trickery on the part of the Powderlys, etc.;
but the edge of this has been taken off by the behaviour of the
masses in the November elections, especially in New York. The
first great step of importance for every country newly entering
into the movement is always the constitution of the workers as
an independent political party, no matter how, so long as it is
a distinct workers' party. And this step has been taken, much
more rapidly than we had a right to expect, and that is the main
thing. That the first programme of this party is still confused
and extremely deficient and that it has raised the banner of Henry
George are unavoidable evils but also merely transitory ones.
The masses must have time and opportunity to develop, and they
have the opportunity only when they have a movement of their own
- no matter in what form so long as it is their own movement
- in which they are driven further by their own mistakes and learn
from their experience. The movement in America is at the same
stage as it was in our country before 1848; the really intelligent
people there will first have to play the part played by the Communist
League among the workers' associations before 1848. Except that
in America things will now proceed infinitely faster. For the
movement to have gained such election successes after scarcely
eight months of existence is wholly unprecedented. And what is
still lacking will be set going by the bourgeoisie; nowhere in
the whole world do they come out so shamelessly and tyrannically
as over there, and your judges brilliantly outshine Bismarck's
imperial pettifoggers. Where the bourgeoisie wages the struggle
by such methods, a crucial stage is rapidly reached, and if we
in Europe do not hurry up the Americans will soon outdistance
us. But just now it is doubly necessary that there should be a
few people on our side who have a firm grasp of theory and well-tried
tactics and can also speak and write English; because for good
historical reasons the Americans are worlds behind in all theoretical
questions; and although they did not bring over any mediaeval
institutions from Europe, the did bring over masses of mediaeval
traditions, religion, English common (feudal) law, superstition,
spiritualism - in short, every kind of imbecility which was not
directly harmful to business and which is now very serviceable
for stupefying the masses. If there are some theoretically lucid
minds there, who can tell them the consequences of their own mistakes
beforehand and make them understand that every movement which
does not keep the destruction of the wage system constantly in
view as the final goal is bound to go astray and fail - then much
nonsense can be avoided and the process considerably shortened.
But it must be done in the English way, the specific German character
must be laid aside, and the gentlemen of the Sozialist will hardly be capable of doing this,
while those of the Volkszeitung are cleverer only where
business is involved.
"In Europe the effect
of the American elections in November was tremendous. That England
and America in particular had no labour movement up to now was
the big trump card of the radical republicans everywhere, especially
in France. Now these gentlemen are dumbfounded; Mr. Clemenceau
in particular saw the whole foundation of his policy collapse
on November 2nd. "Look at America", was his eternal motto; "where there is a real
republic, there is no poverty and no labour movement!" And the same
thing is happening to the Progressives and "democrats"
in Germany and here - where they are also witnessing the beginnings
of their own movement. The very fact that the movement is so sharply
accentuated as a labour movement and has sprung up so suddenly
and forcefully has stunned these people completely." ...
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(pp. 165-7) London, December 28, 1886
... "Of course the appendix
{to "The
Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844"} is now a little out of date, and as I
anticipated something of the kind, I proposed that it should be
written when the book was ready through the press. Now a preface
will be much wanted, and I will write you one; but before, I must
await the return of the Avelings to have a full report of the
state of things in America; and it seems to me that my preface
will not be exactly what you desire.
"First, you seem to me
to treat New York a little as the Paris of America, and to overrate
the importance, for the country at large, of the local New York
movement with its local features. No doubt it has a great importance,
but then the Northwest, with its background of a numerous farming
population and its independent movement, will hardly accept blindly
the George theory.
"Secondly, the preface
of this book is hardly the place for a thoroughgoing criticism
of that theory, and does not even offer the necessary space for
it.
"Thirdly, I should have
to study thoroughly Henry George's various writings and speeches
(most of which I have not got) so as to render impossible all
replies based on subterfuges and side-issues.
"My preface will of course
turn entirely on the immense stride made by the American workingman
in the last ten months, and naturally also touch Henry George
and his land scheme. But it cannot pretend to deal extensively
with it. Nor do I think the time for that has come. It is far
more important that the movement should spread, proceed harmoniously,
take root, and embrace as much as possible the whole American
proletariat, than that it should start and proceed from the beginning
on theoretically perfectly correct lines. There is no better road
to theoretical clearness of comprehension than to learn by one's
own mistakes, "durch Schaden klug werden." {To learn by bitter experience} And for a whole large
class, there is no other road, especially for a nation so eminently
practical and so contemptuous of theory as the Americans. The
great thing is to get the working class to move as a class;
that once obtained, they will soon find the right direction, and
all who resist, H{enry} G{eorge} or Powderly, will be left out in the cold with
small sects of their own. Therefore I think also the Knights of
Labor a most important factor in the movement which ought not
to be pooh-poohed from without but to be revolutionised from within,
and I consider that many of the Germans
there made a grievous mistake when they tried, in the face of
a mighty and glorious movement not of their own creation, to make
of their imported and not always understood theory a kind of alleinseligmachendes [it alone bringing salvation] Dogma, and to keep aloof from
any movement which did not accept that dogma. Our theory is not
a dogma but the exposition of a process of evolution, and that
process involves successive phases. To expect that the Americans
will start with the full consciousness of the theory worked out
in older industrial countries is to expect the impossible. What
the Germans ought to do is to act up to their own theory - if
they understand it, as we did in 1845 and 1848 - to go in for
any real general working-class movement, accept its faktische
[actual] starting point as such, and work it gradually up
to the theoretical level by pointing out how every mistake made,
every reverse suffered, was a necessary consequence of mistaken
theoretical orders in the original programme; they ought, in the
words of the Communist Manifesto: in der Gegenwart der
Bewegung die Zukunft der Bewegung zu repräsentieren [To represent in the
movement of the present the future of that movement]. But above all give
the movement time to consolidate; do not make the inevitable confusion
of the first start worse confounded by forcing down people's throats
things which, at present, they cannot properly understand but
which they soon will learn. A million or two of working men's
votes next November for a bona fide working men's party
is worth infinitely more at present than a hundred thousand votes
for a doctrinally perfect platform. The very first attempt - soon
to be made if the movement progresses - to consolidate the moving
masses on a national basis will bring them all face to face, Georgeites,
Knights of Labor, trade unionists, and all; and if our German
friends by that time have learnt enough of the language of the
country to go in for a discussion, then will be the time for them
to criticise the views of the others and thus, by showing up the
inconsistencies of the various standpoints, to bring them gradually
to understand their own actual position, the position made for
them by the correlation of capital and wage labor. But anything
that might delay or prevent that national consolidation of the
working men's party - on no matter what platform - I should consider
a great mistake, and therefore I do not think the time has arrived
to speak out fully and exhaustively either with regard to Henry
George or the Knights of Labor."
...
Engels' insightful analyses of the American political terrain of that time period are still valuable for understanding the situation we find ourselves in today. The following extract from Engels' January 1887 Preface to the American edition of "The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844" is another fine example of his powers of observation (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973, p. 16):
"In February 1885, American
public opinion was almost unanimous on this one point; that there
was no working class, in the European sense of the word, in America*;
that consequently no class struggle between workmen and capitalists,
such as tore European society to pieces, was possible in the American
Republic; and that, therefore, Socialism was a thing of foreign
importation which could never take root on American soil." {Engels then went on to enumerate
fresh signs of activity in the American workers' movement in the
subsequent years of 1886-7.}
_______
* "An English edition of my book, which was written
in 1844, was justified precisely because the industrial conditions
in present-day America correspond almost exactly to those which
obtained in England in the 1840s, i.e., those which I described.
How much this is the case is evident from the articles on "The
Labour Movement in America." by Edward and Eleanor Marx-Aveling
published in the March, April, May and June Issues of Time,
the London monthly. I am referring to these excellent articles
with all the greater pleasure because it offers me an opportunity
at the same time to reject the miserable slanderous accusations
against Aveling which the Executive of the American Socialist Labor Party was unscrupulous enough to circulate." {Footnote by Engels.}
In his footnote,
Engels referred to an experience in which Eleanor (Tussy) Marx-Aveling
accompanied her husband - Dr. Edward Aveling - and Wilhelm Liebknecht
on a propaganda tour of America. They had been hired by the SLP to agitate for the Party,
after which the SLP
Executive Committee accused
Aveling of "fabricating
accounts". In his correspondence,
Engels "helped
Aveling to prove the absurdity and falsity of those charges"*.
_________
* From publisher's note #6
to "The
Condition of the Working Class in England", Frederick Engels, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1973, p. 336.
In his same Preface, Engels described "three more or less definite forms under which the American labor movement thus presents itself" - Henry George's United Labor Party, the Knights of Labor, and the SLP (Ibid., p. 22):
"The third section consists of the Socialist Labor Party. This section is a party but in name, for nowhere in America has it, up to now, been able actually to take its stand as a political party. It is, moreover, to a certain extent foreign to America, having until lately been made up almost exclusively by German immigrants, using their own language and for the most part, little conversant with the common language of the country. But if it came from a foreign stock, it came, at the same time, armed with the experience earned during long years of class struggle in Europe, and with an insight into the general conditions of working-class emancipation, far superior to that hitherto gained by American working-men. This is a fortunate circumstance for the American proletarians who thus are enabled to appropriate, and to take advantage of, the intellectual and moral fruits of the forty years' struggle of their European class-mates, and thus to hasten on the time of their own victory. For, as I said before, there cannot be any doubt that the ultimate platform of the American working class must and will be essentially the same as that now adopted by the whole militant working class of Europe, the same as that of the German-American Socialist Labor Party. In so far this party is called upon to play a very important part in the movement. But in order to do so they will have to doff every remnant of their foreign garb. They will have to become out and out American. They cannot expect the Americans to come to them; they, the minority and the immigrants, must go to the Americans, who are the vast majority and the natives. And to do that, they must above all things learn English."
Remarkably enough, Engels wrote that "the ultimate platform of the American working class must and will be essentially the same as that now adopted by the whole militant working class of Europe, the same as that of the German-American Socialist Labor Party." That old pre-SIU platform is reproduced in Appendix 2, and calls for a less bureaucratic democracy than what the republic enjoys today.
ENGELS TO FLORENCE KELLEY-WISCHNEWETZKY
IN NEW YORK
(MESC, p. 378) London, January 27, 1887
... "The movement in America, just at this moment, is
I believe best seen from across the Ocean. On the spot, personal
bickering and local disputes must obscure much of the grandeur
of it. And the only thing that could really delay its march, would
be the consolidation of these differences into established sects.
To some extent, that will be unavoidable, but the less of it the
better. And the Germans have most to guard against
this. Our theory is a theory of evolution, not a dogma to be learnt
by heart and to be repeated mechanically. The less it is crammed
into the Americans from without and the more they test it through
their own experience - with the help of the Germans - the more it will become second nature with them.
When we returned to Germany in spring 1848, we joined the Democratic
Party as the only possible means of gaining the ear of the working
class; we were the most advanced wing of that party, but still
a wing of it. When Marx founded the International, he drew up
the General Rules in such a way that all working-class
Socialists of that period could join it - Proudhonists, Pierre-Lerouxists,
and even the more advanced section of the English Trades Unions;
and it was only through this latitude that the International became
what it was, the means of gradually dissolving and absorbing all
these minor sects, with the exception of the Anarchists, whose sudden appearance in various
countries was but the effect of the violent bourgeois reaction
after the Commune and could therefore safely be left by us to
die out of itself, as it did. Had we from 1864-73 insisted on
working together only with those who openly adopted our platform
- where should we be today? I think all our practice has shown
that it is possible to work along with the general movement of
the working class at every one of its stages without giving up
or hiding our own distinct position and even organisation, and
I am afraid that if the German Americans choose a different line
they will commit a great mistake."
...
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(pp. 169-174) London, February 9, 1887
... "As to the distorted passage from my letter which
the irrepressible Eaton could not refrain from publishing, it
is no use for Rosenberg and Co. to saddle Aveling with it. The
passage about the hundred thousands and millions occurred in my
letter {dated December 28}
to you and
in no other letter. So you will know who is responsible
for this indiscretion and for putting this nonsense into my mouth.
As far as I am concerned I have no objection to your publishing
the whole passage and indeed the whole letter.
"Your fear as to my being unduly influenced by Aveling
in my view of the American movement is groundless. As soon as
there was a national American working-class movement, independent
of the Germans, my standpoint was clearly indicated by the facts
of the case. That great national movement, no matter what its
first form, is the real starting point of American working-class
development. If the Germans join it, in order to help it or to
hasten its development in the right direction, they may do a great
deal of good and play a decisive part in it. If they stand aloof,
they will dwindle down into a dogmatic sect and be brushed aside
as people who do not understand their own principles. Mrs. Aveling,
who has seen her father {Marx}
at work,
understood this quite as well from the beginning, and if Aveling
saw it too, all the better. And all my letters to America, to
Sorge, to yourself, to the Avelings, from the very beginning,
have repeated this view over and over again. Still I was glad
to see the Avelings before writing my preface, because they gave
me some new facts about the inner mysteries of the German party in New York.
"You appear to take it
for granted that Aveling has behaved in America as a swindler,
and not only that: you call upon me, upon the strength of assertions
and allusions contained in your letter, to treat him as such and
to do all in my power to have him excluded from the literary organs
of the party. Now for all these assertions
you cannot have any proof because you have not been able
to hear any defense. Still you are better off then we here; you
have at least heard one side, while we do not even know
what the distinct charge is!
"In the early hole-and-corner
stages of the working-class movement, when the workingmen are
still under the influence of traditional prejudices, woe be to
the man who, being of bourgeois origin or superior education,
goes into the movement and is rash enough to enter into money
relations with the working-class element. There is sure to be
a dispute upon the cash account, and this is at once enlarged
into an attempt at exploitation. Especially so if the "bourgeois"
happens to have views on theoretical or tactical points that disagree
with those of the majority or even of a minority. This I have
constantly seen for more than forty years. The worst of all were
the Germans; in Germany the growth of the movement has long since
swept that failing away, but it has not died out with the Germans
outside Germany. For that reason Marx and I have always tried
to avoid having any money dealings with the party, no matter in
what country.
"And when the Avelings
went to America I had very strong misgivings on that point. Only
when it was arranged that the tour should be made together with
Liebknecht, I felt more at rest, because Liebknecht, as an old
hand, would know how to deal with such complaints, and because
any charges brought against him on that score would merely make
the complainants ridiculous in Germany and in Europe generally.
Well, the tour was arranged differently afterwards, and here is
the result.
"From this you will see
that I look upon this matter a great deal cooler than what people
seem to do in New York. But moreover, I have known Aveling for
four years; I know that he has twice sacrificed his social and
economic position to his convictions, and might be, had he refrained
from doing so, a professor in an English university and a distinguished
physiologist instead of an overworked journalist with a very uncertain
income. I have had occasion to observe his capacities by working
with him, and his character by seeing him pass through rather
trying circumstances more than once, and it will take a good deal
(more than mere assertions and innuendoes) before I believe what
some people tell about him now in New York.
"But then, had he tried
to swindle the party, how could he do that
during all his tour without his wife being cognizant of it? And
in that case the charge includes her too. And then it becomes
utterly absurd, in my eyes at least. Her I have known from a child,
and for the last seventeen years she has been constantly about
me. And more than that, I have inherited from Marx the obligation
to stand by his children as he would have done himself, and to
see, as far as lies in my power, that they are not wronged. And
that I shall do, in spite of fifty Executives. The daughter of Marx swindling the
working class - too rich indeed!
"Then you say: "No one here imagines
that Dr. Aveling put the money in his pocket, or spent
it as the bills indicate. They believe
that he merely tried to cover his wife's expenses." That is a distinct
charge of forgery, and this you give as an extenuating charitable
supposition. What then, if this be the attenuated charge, what
is the full charge? And on what ground is this charge made? "The ridiculous bills
which Dr. Aveling sent in." I should like to see a few of these "ridiculous" bills. For fifteen
weeks they were sent every Sunday to the Executive who gave no sign of disapproval. Nor
did they budge when the Avelings, Dec. 19, returned to New York.
It was only on the 23rd, when they were on the point of leaving,
when they could no longer defend themselves against charges, real
or trumped-up, that the Executive discovered these bills, to which, singly,
they had never objected, were ridiculous when added up!
That is to say they object, not to the bills, but to the rules
of addition. Why, then, did the Executive, instead of shortening the tour, try to extend
it, and just at the close of it plan a second visit of the Avelings
to Chicago, which fortunately did not come off? It strikes me
that in all this it is not the bills which are ridiculous but
the Executive.
"Well, at the meeting
of December 23d, the Avelings hear for the first time that these
bills are ridiculous, and the Executive lays before them a statement of account drawn
up by themselves. As soon as his statement is objected to Dr.
Aveling at once accepts that of the Executive, according to which - as I have seen
myself in Rosenberg's handwriting - a balance is due to him of
$176.00. Then, being again bullied by Walther, he refuses that
balance, returns $76.00 at once, and sends the rest from London.
And then you say that "Dr. Aveling's returning the $100.00 has not helped
matters at all."
Why, what in the name of goodness do these people want then? Is
Aveling to be treated as a swindler because the Executive appropriate $176.00 which, on their
own showing, belong to him?
"Then the mystery with
which the Executive envelop this matter
becomes darker and darker. When the article in the New York
Herald appeared and was cabled across, the Avelings sent the
enclosed circular to the sections, and at the same time, to the Executive. That circular - unless
I take Aveling to be a liar and a swindler, which I decline doing
until further conclusive evidence - is in my eyes conclusive against
the Executive, at least until I see
their reply. But what do the Executive do? They get infamous attacks into the Volkszeitung, they spread rumors
and reports behind Aveling's back, they call meetings of the sections
and lay their version before them, and get them to vote
resolutions in a matter which cannot be judged without an impartial
audit of the whole accounts and a full defense of the absent accused.
And having, as it appears, succeeded in their New York circle to slander Aveling, not as a man who
has spent their money extravagantly (for such, rightly or wrongly,
might be their honest conviction), but as a swindler and forger
of accounts, they rise to the level of the occasion created by
their own inventive genius, and promise a circular proclaiming
Aveling a swindler and forger to the working class of the whole
world! And all this, mind you, behind the back of, and unknown
to the man whom they charge, and who can, not only not defend
himself, but not even make out the precise facts on which the
charge is based! If this is the way people are to be judged in
our party, then give me the Leipzig Reichsgericht [Supreme Court of Germany] and the Chicago jury.
[The hand-picked
jury that convicted eight militant workers of murder after the
Haymarket massacre of May 4, 1886]
"Fortunately we have passed
that stage in the older parties in Europe. We have seen Executives
rise and fall by the dozen; we know they are as fallible as any
pope, and have even known more than one that lived sumptuously
on the pence of the workingmen, and had swindlers and forgers
of accounts in their midst. In their circular, the Executive will not only have to define their charge - which perhaps will thus at last become
known to us - but also to prove
it. People on this side do not take the work of their own Executives
for gospel, much less that of Mr. Walther and Mr. Rosenberg, be
it ever so "official".
"In my opinion, the Executive have placed themselves
in a very uncomfortable position. Had they grumbled at the accounts
as merely extravagant, they might have secured a hearing outside
their own circle, for that is more or less a matter of opinion.
But having never objected to the accounts sent in, they felt they
had cut the ground from under their own feet, and, as weak people
do under the circumstances, exaggerated the charge in order to
cover themselves. Thus they came to the fresh charge of swindling
and forgery which they can never prove and must be content to
insinuate. But an infamy insinuated to cover mere weakness remains
neither more nor less an infamy. And having swelled what was originally
a mere trifling matter of disputed accounts into a criminal offense,
they actually feel bound to go before the various working-class
parties with it. And naturally, they do it in a sneaking underhand
way, preventing the accused from even hearing the charge. One
mistaken step leads to another, and at last they arrive in a complete
mess and are caught in their own net. And all that not out of
inborn malice, but sheer weakness.
"You will now see that
I must distinctly decline following your advice as to "giving Kautsky a hint, not to let the letters appear
which are advertised in the name of Aveling," because the Executive are going to launch "an official circular" against Aveling,
and "his
name as one of the staff can only injure any organ." Neither Kautsky
nor myself has, I believe, ever given any ground for anyone to
suppose that we would treat thus the friends we have worked with
for years, upon the strength of mere assertions and innuendoes.
And if I were to say anything of the kind to Kautsky, I should
simply drive him to the conclusion that I was either falling rapidly
into dotage or that I was no longer to be trusted across the road.
Indeed I feel certain you regretted having written this passage
as soon as the letter had gone.
"I see very well that
you wrote your letter in what you considered the interests of the party, and thus were led to
represent to me the case of Aveling as hopeless and judged without
appeal. But so far he is judged by nobody but the Executive who are themselves parties,
accusers, judges, and jury all in one, for the resolution of the New York sections, whatever it may be,
counts for nothing. What the other sections may say remains to be seen, but even
they, if impartial, can only declare themselves incompetent until
they have the full facts and until the accused has been heard.
And I for one consider it utterly ruinous to the party to introduce into it, and even to outdo,
the kind of justice practiced by Bismarck and the American bourgeois,
who do at least respect forms and give the prisoner at the bar
a hearing - and for us to act thus at the very moment we protest
against these infamous proceedings.
"No doubt it may suit
the Executive, under the pretense
of avoiding public scandal, to shirk publicity. But that will
not do. Either they must retract the dishonoring charge, reduce
the case to its simple dimensions of a dispute about accounts,
and settle that honorably and straightforwardly, or they must
come out publicly with the charge and have it fought out. There
has already too much of it been allowed to leak out, and it cannot
remain where it is, nor is Aveling the man to leave it there.
And as I cannot allow the Avelings to be accused of infamies behind
their back, it was my duty to communicate your letter to Mrs.
Aveling (he being too ill at present) and to read her my reply.
And if at any time circumstances should require the publication
of this my letter, you are at liberty to publish it in full,
while I reserve to myself the same right, of course without dragging
in your name, unless the people should have done so previously."
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 175) London,
Feb. 12, 1887
... "The gentlemen of the Executive of the Socialist Labor Party are behaving quite abominably towards
the Avelings. After the Herald article was published through
their indiscretion, if not inspiration, a quite infamous article
appeared in the Volkszeitung, for which I can only hold
Mr. Douai responsible for the present. The Avelings answered the
Herald scandal with the enclosed circular, which was sent
out from here around January 18th to all the sections as well as to the Executive. Well, on January 28th the latter had
a person whom I may not name for the present, but whom you must
therefore guess, write me an embarrassed letter in which it is
asserted as a fact, an undisputed fact, that Aveling tried to
cheat them. He sent in false accounts - so it is assumed out of
Christian charity - in order to cover his wife's hotel expenses
(the party paid only the railroad
fare for Tussy), and returning the $176.00 does not change matters,
for that isn't the point at issue at all, etc. Nothing but insinuations,
not a single fact, not even a definite charge. And then
it is said: they have already had the New York sections pass a resolution on the matter in order to issue a circular to all the European
parties to brand Aveling. And I am called
upon to warn Kautsky not
to print anything more by such a blackguard as Aveling, who is
to be expelled from all party organs!
"You can imagine how I
replied to these dirty tricks. If I can find anyone to make a
copy of the letter I shall send you it - with my inflamed eye
I cannot copy it for the third time. The gentlemen haven't the
slightest pretext. For when Aveling first heard on December 23rd,
through a letter from Rosenberg, that the Executive would object to some items in his statement
of account, he answered Rosenberg at once, sending the letter
by special messenger: "I cannot discuss money matters with the party, and am ready to accept anything without
discussion that the National
Executive
of the S.L.P. thinks right!" And that was before
he knew what they would say and offer him! And now these fellows
go ahead, pocket $176.00, which belong to the Avelings according
to their own reckoning, and declare for that very
reason that Aveling, and not they themselves, is a swindler!
"Now we shall have to
go through with the affair. Unfortunately, however, we here know
no one in New York except yourself who can be relied on, ever
since the Volkszeitung, too, has behaved so vulgarly. I
should be pleased if you could let us know how Schewitsch and
others stand, whether or not they have already let themselves
be duped by the Executive's lies. We should at
least know whom to turn to in New York without bothering you.
But one must marvel at the fact that the very people in New York
who are indignant about the Chicago jury outdo the disgracefulness
of that jury in this case and damn people without even giving
them a hearing, without even telling them what the charges against
them are."
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
(ELC II, p. 26) London, February 24, 1887
... "In a day or two you will get a printed circular
with Aveling's reply to the charges of the N[ew] York Executive. If this Circular has not been sent
to the German club in Paris then it has not been sent to Paris
at all. It is nothing but the usual complaint of Knoten against Gelehrte [louts vs. men of learning] that
they lived extravagantly on the pence of the working men. Fortunately
we have a good reply."
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 177-8) London,
March 10, 1887
"Postcard and letter of February 21 received. You
guessed right. It would be useless to send a copy of the long
letter, as the formulation of the complaints in the Executive's circular is considerably different
and milder, and up to now all the rest is only private gossip.
How the people in Europe see the thing is shown by Singer's reply
to the circular sent him: "It is the old story;
it's only a pity that the Avelings have to suffer for it." No doubt you have
received this circular, which I sent you in four English and four
German copies, as well as my letter of about a week ago.
"W[ischnewetsky] is
not able to translate the Manifesto. Only one man can do
that, Sam Moore, and he is working on it now; I already have the
first section in ms. But it should be remembered that the Manifesto,
like almost all the shorter works of Marx and myself, is far too
difficult for America at the present time. The workers over there
are only beginning to enter the movement . . . they are still
quite crude, tremendously backward theoretically, in particular,
as a result of their general Anglo-Saxon and special American
nature and previous training - the lever must be applied directly
in practice, and for that a whole new literature is necessary.
I suggested to W[ischnewetsky] some time ago that she embody the main points of
Capital in popularly written independent little pamphlets.
Once the people are somewhat on the right road, the Manifesto
will not fail to make its impression, whereas now it would be
effective only among a few.
...
"The Socialist
Labor Party
may be what it likes*, and claim for itself
the results of its predecessors' work as much as it likes, but
it is the sole workers' organization in America wholly standing
on our platform. It has more than 70 sections throughout the North and West, and as
such, and only as such, have I recognized it. I have expressly
said that it is a
party only in name.
And I am convinced that the gentlemen of the Executive were very much disappointed with my
preface and would have preferred not to have it. For they themselves
belong to the wing which I say will ruin
the party if it gains the upper
hand. And it seems to be aiming at that. In the local Justice
Rosenberg attacks the K. of L.
{Knights
of Labor} because of the longshoremen's strike {involving 30,000 workers}; he may not be entirely
wrong about the individual facts, but he displays a lack of insight
into the course of the movement that will soon destroy the party if these people continue to rule. The
very blunders of the careerist leaders of the K. of L. and their
inevitable conflicts with the Central Labor Unions in the big
Eastern cities must lead to a crisis within the K. of L. and bring
it to a head, but the blockhead doesn't realize that." ...
__________
* "Engels had received complaints
regarding the comments on the Socialist Labor Party made in his preface to the American
edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England in
1844. " {Note by
International
Publishers.}
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 178-80)
London, March 16, 1887
"Many thanks for your letters of February 28th and
March 2nd. with the enclosures, and for your many efforts. I am
returning the Exec[utive]'s
circular
herewith, as we have it. We sent the enclosed letter to J[onas] at
once in reply to the Volkszeitung article (so the pretty
Jonas kept Aveling's reply for a whole month before deciding to
print it). If he should not print it and you can exert any pressure
upon him, it would be excellent. But his article seems to indicate
a certain retreat already.
"The great point in dispute
regarding the objectionable items in A[veling]'s account will doubtless have been solved
by our circular of February 26th. It is extraordinary that people
who make a fuss about such details, which cannot be understood
at all out of their context, do not say to themselves that the
other side of this context must be heard before one takes it upon
oneself to sit in judgment. But these expenses would also have
been found in Liebk[necht]'s account if the latter
had handed in his accounts at all. He said, however, that the party must bear all my expenses,
and so I'll not write anything down.
And they
were satisfied with that. The Ex[ecutive]
then says
nothing about the fact that Aveling, in Boston, for instance,
paid almost all the expenses, not only for L[iebknecht], but for his daughter as well, although
it is set forth in the accounts and we were decent enough not
to mention it in the circular. L[iebknecht]
let all the
wine, etc., be brought to A[veling]'s room and thus charged to A[veling]'s account during their trip. The Executive knows all that and suppresses
it. But the meanest of all is that it sent out its circular over
there on January 7th, but sent it to us only on February
3rd, so that it gained a whole month's unhampered headstart
in its calumnies before we even learned what A[veling]
was really
accused of.
"
I do not
believe without further proof that the resol[ution] has
been adopted by most of the sections. The way in which the Knights of Labor are being
treated is, if I am to base myself upon A[veling]'s and Tussy's reports, diametrically
opposed to the views of all the sec[tions]
in the West.
But if that is the case, the whole "party" can bury itself alive.
"It is really fortunate
that you sent me the Soz[ialist]. Up to now I was able to give Kautsky
or the Avelings the second
copy received
from the Executive, so that it had its
uses. This week the fine
gang no longer
sent me the paper. I take that to mean
that the next numbers will again contain contemptible slanders of A[veling]. We wrote to Müller in St. Paul,
asking him also to print the second circular of February 26. While
the Ex[ecutive] exploits secret journalism in its own way as it
pleases, it apparently wants to place the onus upon A[veling] if he is the first to publish.
"It seemed to us here
to be a matter of course that A[veling] did not answer the New
York Herald. The art[icle] was so weirdly absurd
and, what is more, both of them said it wasn't customary in America
to answer such farces seriously. From what I know of the Herald
they would hardly have printed it either. Only after the art[icle] was
reprinted here did A[veling] reply at once. But even if A[veling]
had answered
the Herald art[icle], how would that have
helped him against the Ex[ecutive]?
Thus this seems to me to be a lame excuse of Schewitsch's. In
general, I am astounded at the enormous flabbiness of most of the New Yorkers that has come to light
in this connection. The Ex[ecutive]
disseminates
lies as big
as your fist and every one believes it - from Jonas to Schewitsch
and to the Wischnewetzkys! The Ex[ecutive]
does seem
to be a great
authority
in New York after all."
...
On Aveling's behalf, and in his name, Engels wrote the following note, dated March 16, 1887, to the editors of the New York Volkszeitung (MECW 26, pp. 617-8):
"In your article concerning me in the Volkszeitung of March 2 you maintain
"that Aveling is said to have submitted a bill which contained items that a labour agitator, who must know that the donations raised to finance agitation come almost entirely out of the pockets of hard-working labourers, really should not present."
"Passing over all the
minor points and restricting my reply to the one main point, I
wish to state:
"The weekly bills submitted
by me to the Executive contained all my expenses,
that is to say both those chargeable to the Party and others to be met by me personally. I had made
it clear to the Executive in advance and in the
most unambiguous way - first in a verbal agreement with the treasurer,
R. Meyer, and then in several letters - that all the purely personal
expenses were to be defrayed by me in return for the $366.00 ($3.00
per day) guaranteed to me by the Executive, and that I left it entirely up to the
Executive to decide which items
of expenditure should be passed on to the party, and which items should be charged to me personally.
"I never expected - even
less demanded - that any of these personal items of expenditure
should be paid for "out of the pockets of hard-working labourers",
and indeed none of them have been. For further information about
this I refer you to my enclosed circular of February 26 to the
sections, to the publication
of which I can no longer object after what has occurred." ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 180-1) London,
April 6, 1887
"Postcard with Dietzgen clipping of March 24th and
letter of the 25th received. Hepner will hardly be in a position
to judge from a few isolated facts whether Aveling should have
been "franker." I myself do not dare to decide it, but
I merely know that in money matters Aveling is just as much of
an unlucky fellow as Hepner himself. Both of them have an enviable
talent for getting themselves innocently involved in differences
regarding money. ...
"Wilhelm [Wilhelm Liebknecht], who cloaked himself
in silence at first, is suddenly all afire. Here is what he writes
me on March 28th (between the two of us - please do not transmit
to others the literal text, but only whatever part of the content
you consider fitting):
""The New Yorkers will probably come around.
I wrote them in a very sharp tone weeks ago - that under no circumstances
will I allow myself to be played off against Aveling and Tussy.
I categorically demanded an apology, and as I have said,
I think they will submit. It is a great pity that Aveling did
not write me at once when he returned" (this is an empty excuse, as I
informed him of the principal charges, as far as we knew them
then, as early as January 20th). "I learnt of the whole affair only through
you, and the election campaign, which naturally took all of my
time, was in progress then. And so much time has been lost. But
everything will be straightened out. If the New Yorkers are stubborn,
I shall proceed against them publicly. Tell that to Aveling
and Tussy."
"In general the paper
takes a strong stand against the gentlemen of the Executive. Aveling has received
sympathetic letters from many private sources in New York. The
Am[erican] Section in Rochester declares that it continues
to have confidence in him, while the German Sect[ion] in
Cleveland (or Buffalo, I forget) takes his side
completely. And a month ago the Ex[ecutive]
- without
waiting for the Sections'
vote - sent
all the documentary material to the auditing commission for a decision, thus again appealing to a new tribunal! Of course
we wrote the commission at once, sent them documents,
and demanded access to certain letters, etc.
"You will have received
a copy of A[veling]'s reply to the second
Volkszeitung article, which is indeed even more scurrilous." ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 181-2) London,
April 9, 1887
"I wrote you on the 6th and received your letter
on March 29th. Thanks for your efforts with regard to Jonas. I
think they will bear fruit.
"So the Ex[ecutive] wants
to reply. That will mean a new concealment of facts. But this
resolve to reply itself proves how absurd and shabby it was to
try to cheat the sect[ions] into rendering judgment
upon its initial allegations. First the sect[ions] are to decide. Then, even before the
period agreed on has expired, the Ex[ecutive] begs the auditing commission for a verdict.
And now it itself confesses that further light is required before
a decision can be rendered!
"In any event the gentlemen
have ruined themselves. And if the Wischnewetzkys, who have behaved
rather like Washragskys in the whole affair, have been constrained
to call them liars, things must have reached a pretty pass. The
very fact that Mrs. W[ischnewetzky] decided to show you my letter proves the dilemma
the two of them are in. I was "humane" enough to judge the Ex[ecutive] to
be real German
louts as
much as a year ago.
"This pleases me in so
far as I now hope to be relieved of Mrs. W[ischnewetzky]'s harassing about translations. First
of all, she translates like a factory, leaving the real work to
me; second, she neglected its publishing miserably, letting these
louts get hold of it. We are no longer so badly off that we have
to go begging with our manuscripts. And now, after I wrote an
additional preface for her, things are at a standstill, evidently
just because this preface is not to the taste of the Ex[ecutive]!
"The A[veling]s have also received sympathetic letters
and section
resolutions
from Springfield, Mass.; others will probably arrive in the next
few days from the West."
...
FREDERICK ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
(ELC II, p. 33) London, April 13, 1887
... "The N[ew] York affair is going very well. The gentlemen of
the Executive
Committee
have made so many blunders since then that they are as good as
routed. It's a very long business and very involved, but we have
nothing further to hear from that quarter." ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 183-4) London,
April 23, 1887
"I wrote you on the 9th. Thanks for the postcard
and the things you sent. The publication of my preface in the
Volkszeitung in a translation made over there is effrontery
twice over. First, because I want to have nothing to do with the
paper so long as it behaves so scurrilously towards Aveling. And,
second, because I cannot put up with any outsider's translation
of my English writings into German, and especially such a translation,
which is full of mistakes and misunderstands the most important
points. This woman has had my preface ever since the beginning
of February (sent on January 27th), and in the only letter I have
received from her since then, dated March 19th (postmarked April
8th), she merely mentions the plan of a German edition, for
which she asked my consent - she knew that I had no copy of it
here. I wrote her at once to return the original to me so that
I might translate it. There are things in it where each word must
be weighed. And then she connives behind my back with Jonas and
Co!
"I protested at once.
Let her show you my letters. This is the last straw. It is impossible
for me to work with a person who continually commits such silliness.
"But she'll hear from
me. Her last long letter on the Aveling affair can be characterized
by one word alone: filth. The endeavor of a weak person, influenced
by every gust of wind, to justify herself in a wrong cause, which
she herself must consider wrong. I shall answer her next week
con amore [with love]. This kind of person
must not think that she can bamboozle me like a baby.
"Hyndman's correspondence
in the Standard is pitiable and cowardly. He wants to maintain
contact with {Henry} George, while the latter
grows more and more set on his land fad, and therefore must suppress
all that is socialist. Things are going badly with him here, too.
The sensational effects have vanished and new ones can't be had
every day. But without them Hyndman cannot maintain himself in
his role. The Avelings, on the other hand, have begun very effective
agitation in the Radical clubs of the East End, laying special
emphasis on the American example of an independent labor party.
And the American example is the only thing that has an effect
here - besides the German elections. The cause is making good
progress and - if things continue in America as they have been
going - can cost the Liberals the whole East End of London in
a year." ...
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
(ELC II, p. 38) London, April 26, 1887
... "The N[ew] Y[ork] Executive have launched in their despair another circular
against Aveling saying that his statements are lies, yet making
very important admissions in our favour. We shall of course reply.
But the affair is practically ended, the Ex[ecutive] are
themselves accused in N[ew] Y[ork]
as swindlers
and liars in another affair and on their trial before the N[ew] Y[ork]
sections; so that whatever they
have said, say or may say, loses all importance. In the meantime
the Aufsichtsbehörde {Board of Supervision}
of the American party appeals to them (to
Edward and Tussy) to let the matter drop, and from very many places
they receive very nice letters both from Americans and Germans.
So that matter is virtually settled.
"Edward and Tussy's agitation
in the East End clubs is going on very favourably. The American
example has its effects; it at last offers a handle to stir up
the English working people."
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 184-6) London,
May 4, 1887
"What you write on April 28th regarding the New
York louts is certainly quite true, but you must not forget that
I can answer only the points that you emphasize yourself, and
not those about which you say nothing.
"The Manifesto
has been translated, and only my accursed eyes prevent me from
looking over the work. In addition, a French, an Italian, and
a Danish manuscript are in my desk, waiting to be looked through!
What is more, forty years ago you were Germans, with a German
aptitude for theory, and that is why the Manifesto had
an effect at the time, whereas, though translated into French,
English, Flemish, Danish, etc., it had absolutely no effect upon
the other peoples. And for the untheoretical, matter-of-fact Americans
I believe simpler fare is all the more digestible since we
experienced the story told in the Manifesto, while they
did not.
"The affair with my book
has been simply bungled by Mrs. Wischn[ewetzky], who gave Miss Foster plein pouvoir [full powers], which Miss Foster then turned over to the Ex[ecutive]. I protested immediately,
but it had been done already. Up to the present Mrs. Wischnewetzky
has bungled everything she has handled; I shall never give her
anything again. She can do what she wants, and I shall be glad
if she accomplishes something; but I have enough, and let her
leave me in peace in the future. I answered her last letter a
week ago.
"Aveling is carrying on
splendid agitation in the East End of London. The American example
is having an effect; the Radical clubs - to whom the Liberals
owe their 12 seats out of the 69 in London - have approached [Aveling]
for lectures
on the American movement, and Tussy and he are actively at work.
It is an immediate question of founding an English workers' party
with an independent class program. If this turns out well, it
will force both the Social Democratic Federation and the Socialist
League into the background, which would be the best solution of
the current squabbles. Hyndman sees that his existence is menaced,
especially as he has fallen out with almost all his followers.
He has therefore reprinted the Executive's charges against Aveling in Justice. This
is very good, for it puts an end to the gossip behind one's back
and gives Aveling a chance to discuss the matter everywhere. Let
us hope that the position of the Socialist League is also cleared
up at Whitsuntide; the anarchists must be expelled or we'll drop the whole mess.
"The Avelings have sent
you Time with their articles on America; I take it you
have received it? (March, April, May numbers.) Even the Tory Standard
praises them! At the present moment the Avelings are doing more
than all the others here and are much more useful - and then I'm
supposed to answer Mother Wischnewetzky's childish misgivings
regarding the grave charge under which Dr. A[veling]
will stand
until he has disproved the circ[ular] of
the Ex[ecutive]! The madam seems to have quite forgotten, among
her gossipy German sisters, that it is not A[veling]
who has to
disprove, but the Ex[ecutive] that has to prove!" ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 186-7) London,
May 7, 1887
"I wrote you on the 4th and received yours of April
26th. Many thanks for the reports, which were doubtless written
under severe physical tribulations. I can only take the passage
regarding Mrs. Wischnewetzky and her regretting having written
her denunciatory letter to mean that it was written with her consent
to spare her a direct pater peccavi [Father,
I have sinned].
I had to write her today and I told her "if that, as I must
suppose, was written with her consent, I was perfectly satisfied
and had no longer any reason to revert to that subject in a spirit
of controversy." You see, I want to make it as easy for her
as possible. But she is awkward and, besides, a luckless person
of the first water. She writes me that she wants to publish my
preface* in German. I have no objections, naturally. But
she knows that I kept no copy, and yet she does not send me the
Ms. {manuscript} so that I can translate
it. Nor do I receive the book itself or even a single galley proof
of the preface. Instead, the preface is turned over to the Volkszeitung
for a thoroughly dull translation, containing errors, to boot,
which almost lead me to conclude that she even copied my English
Ms. incorrectly. Well, now she writes me that she has sent the
Ms. off to me at last (not a word about the V[olks]
z[eitung] trans[lation]) - but what doesn't
arrive is the Ms.!
"I am especially pleased
to hear that Mr. Jonas has had to climb down a peg. In view of
his business jealousy of the Ex[ecutive]
he was the
last one to have any reason for zeal in this affair on the Ex[ecutive]'s behalf; throughout
this whole period he has behaved as scurrilously as possible,
just because he realized that he had burned his fingers.
"Our friend Liebkn[echt], too, suddenly does not want "to break with the Executive." I have put a
pistol to the head of the good-hearted L[iebknecht], who doesn't want to spoil his relations
with either side, and he'll come around all right. If he hadn't
made fools of us in that manner, our reply to Circular II would
have been finished already. But it is hardly so pressing, and
it should be a crushing answer. We have won, thanks to your support
and activity, without which we should be far from where we are
now. It is good that we old fellows can still rely upon one another."
__________
* "Engels had written the
preface to the American edition of The Condition of the Working
Class in England in 1844 in English." {Note by International Publishers.}
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(pp. 187-8) London, May 7, 1887
"I have received your note of April 25th with thanks,
but no preface; if I receive it per next steamer on Monday
I shall send you word at once. In the meantime as I received no
copy of the book as yet, will you please see that I get at least
something to work upon, a proofsheet or whatever it is,
as the V[olks]z [eitung] translation cannot pass under any circumstances.
I shall work at the translation as fast as my inflamed eye will
allow; I am only sorry you did not send me the Ms. or a proof
as soon as the idea of a German edition occurred to you.
"Sorge writes to me: "The Wischnewetzkys greatly
regret that the dissimulations and suppressions of the Executive led them to send you
that letter, and they have made all conceivable efforts to obtain
justice for Aveling in the New York section."
If this, as I must suppose, was written with your consent, then
I am perfectly satisfied, and have no desire whatever to return
to that subject in a spirit of controversy.
"Nobody was more rejoiced
than I when I learnt that the book was finally out of the hands
of that despicable Executive and of the S.L.P. generally. Forty years'
experience has shown me how useless and literally thrown away
are all those publications by small cliques, that by their very
mode of publication are excluded from the general book market,
and thereby from literary cognizance. It was the same thing even
with the party publications in Germany up to 1878; and only since
the Sozialistengesetz
[Anti-Socialist
Law] which forced our people to organize a
book trade of their own, in opposition both to the government
and to the officially organized Leipzig book trade, has this been
overcome. And I do not see why in America, where the movement
begins with such gigantic and imposing force, the same mistakes,
with the same drawbacks in their wake, should be quite unnecessarily
gone through over again. The whole socialist and, in England,
Chartist literature has thereby been made so extinct that even
the British Museum cannot now procure copies at any price!"
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
(ELC II, pp. 42-3) London, May 21, 1887
... "You will have seen in Justice how Hyndman
has tried to bring out Edward's American bother, but has apparently
got more than he expected - his retreat in this week No. is undignified
enough. A 3d circular on this affair is in the printer's hands.
I have had some droll correspondence with Liebk[necht]
about the
letter from him it will publish. In N[ew]
York we are
completely victorious and that is the chief point; and our final
circular I hope will settle the business." ...
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 36, p. 665) London, June 4, 1887
"No movement makes so much fruitless work as one
that is still in the stage of a sect. You know that as well as
I. And so this letter about English affairs." ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 188-9) London,
June 30, 1887
... "I am writing to the Wischnewetzkys to phrase the
footnote as follows: "to repudiate the absurd slanders which
Aveling has been exposed to in consequence of his agitational
tour of America." If they don't want that either, they can
turn to you, and then you can, if necessary, authorize them to
delete the whole footnote. For I cannot quote Aveling without
saying a word about the stuff as well.
"The story of Scribner's
announcement of Capital looks like deliberate piracy. Thanks
for the information; I shall turn it over to Sonnenschein. As
far as I know, Scribner is not Sonnenschein's agent in
New York.
"That the men of the Ex[ecutive] believed they had purchased Liebk[necht]'s silence with the election funds was to be expected
and was not unjustified. Fortunately, I had L[iebknecht]
completely
under my thumb as a result of his first bragging letter and made
very resolute use of it when he tried to withdraw.
"Hyndman continues to
gossip about A[veling] here too, and has been greatly aided by A[veling]'s bashfulness in speaking
about the affair. If we could only get hold of the fellow once,
he would have cause to remember it, but in the meantime he himself
is ruining his position more and more. He is so miserably envious
that he cannot tolerate any competitor, and is living in open
or concealed warfare with everyone. And A[veling]
has become
zealous for battle at last, and Tussy will see to it that he remains
so. . . .
"I am fed up with Father
McGlynn, and George has turned into a real founder of a sect.
Nor did I expect anything else, but this experience was hard to
avoid in view of the newness of the movement. Such people must
have the length of their tether, but the masses learn only from
the consequences of their own mistakes." .
. .
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
IN PARIS
(ELC II, p. 50) London, July 15, 1887
... "I was obliged to give a card of introduction (to
Paul) to a young Dr. Conrad Schmidt of Königsberg, who dabbles
in question sociale. He is about the greenest youth I ever
saw, he was here about 3 months, seems a decent fellow, as decent
fellows go nowadays, frisst keine Schuhnägel and säuft
keine Tinte [Eats no shoe nails,
and drinks no ink].
If Paul deposits him rue Richelieu, Bibliothèque nationale,
he will not trouble him much. He admires Zola in whom he has discovered
the "Materialistische Geschichtsanschauung." [The materialist conception of history]"
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 188-9) London,
Aug. 8, 1887
.
. . "The story about the Wischnewetzkys is
becoming more and more entertaining.*
Such an Executive would have been deposed
long ago in Germany. These people must think everything is permitted
them, and that the party will follow them through
thick and thin as a reward for their expecting the Americans to
place themselves under the command of a German group, in which the purest louts seem to be getting more and more of
an upper hand. If Messrs.
Germans make
that the condition for their participation over there, the movement
will soon stride over them. History is on the move over there
at last, and I must know my Americans badly if they do not astonish
us all by the vastness of their movement, but also by the gigantic
nature of the mistakes they make, through which they will finally
work out their way to clarity. Ahead of everyone else in practice
and still in swaddling clothes in theory - that's how they are,
nor can it be otherwise. But it is a land without tradition (except
for the religious), which has begun with the democratic republic,
and a people full of energy as no other. The course of the movement
will by no means follow the classic straight line, but travel
in tremendous zigzags and seem to be moving backwards at times,
but that is of much less importance there than with us. Henry
George was an unavoidable evil, but he will soon be obliterated,
like Powderly or even McGlynn, whose popularity at the moment
is quite understandable in that God-fearing country. In autumn
much will be - I won't say cleared up, but more and more complicated,
and the crisis will come closer. The annual elections, which force
the masses to unite over and over again, are really most fortunate." . . .
___________
* "In meetings of the New York Section the Wischnewetzkys had bitterly attacked
the Executive for its stand in the
Aveling affair, and had been expelled for so doing." {Note by International Publishers.}
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(pp. 190-2) London, September 15, 1887
"I am glad the pamphlet*
sells so
well. The copies I received I shall hand over to Aveling, who
has just returned from the country, to be distributed partly among
the socialist periodicals, partly at his East End meetings at
his lectures on the American movements. I shall also try through
him to get an agent for its sale and let you know the result. ...
"The repudiation of the socialists by
{Henry} George
is in my opinion an unmerited piece of good luck which will redeem
to a great extent the - unavoidable - blunder of placing George
at the head of a movement he did not even understand. George as
the standard-bearer of the whole working-class movement was a
dupe; George as the chief of the Georgeites will soon be a thing
of the past, the leader of a sect, like the thousands of other
sects in America. ...
"The reply of the Executive to my footnote is in
itself so deprecatory and meaningless that to reply to it would
be a work of supererogation. I cannot reply in time for the congress**, and the fact remains that I have openly
taken sides against the Executive in this matter. A fresh controversy across the
Atlantic can lead to nothing. As to the Socialist and the Volkszeitung boycotting me, I am sorry for it on
account of the book and pamphlet, otherwise it is a matter of
perfect indifference to me; I have got over such chicanery too
often by simply waiting and looking on.
"Your expulsion I read in the Volkszeitung at the
time; it was what I expected. I hope your pamphlet will come in
time for the congress; it would have been well if it had been
out a month ago so as to come into the hands of the sections before they sent delegates. I am curious what the
congress will do, but do not hope for too much. ...
"Fortunately the movement in America has now got
such a start that neither George, nor Powderly, nor the German
intriguers can spoil or stop it. Only it will take unexpected
forms. The real movement always looks different to what it ought
to have done in the eyes of those who were tools in preparing
it."
__________
* "The preface to the American
edition of The Condition of the Working Class in England in
1844." {Note by
International
Publishers.}
** "The national convention of the Socialist Labor Party, which met in Buffalo in September 1887." {Note by International Publishers.}
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 192-3) London,
September 16, 1887
.
. . "I shall be able to look for and find
Marx's letter on {Henry}
George only
when I begin putting things in order, that is, as soon as some
new bookcases I have ordered to give me more space arrive. Then
you'll get a translation at once. There's no hurry - George must
still compromise himself some more. His repudiation of the socialists is the greatest good
fortune that could happen to us. Making him the standard-bearer
last November was an unavoidable mistake for which we had to pay.
For the masses are to be set in motion only along the road that
fits each country and the prevailing circumstances, which is usually
a roundabout road. Everything else is of subordinate importance,
if only the actual arousing takes place. But the mistakes unavoidably
made in doing this are paid for every time. And in this case it
was to be feared that making the founder of a sect the standard-bearer
would burden the movement with the follies of the sect for years
to come. By expelling the founders of the movement, establishing
his sect as the special, orthodox, George sect, and proclaiming
his narrow-mindedness as the borne [boundary] of the whole movement, George saves the latter
and ruins himself.
"The movement itself will of course, still go through
many and disagreeable phases, disagreeable particularly for those
who live in the country and have to suffer them. But I am firmly
convinced that things are now going ahead over there, and perhaps
more rapidly than with us, notwithstanding the fact that the Americans,
for the time being, will learn almost exclusively from practice
and not so much from theory.
"The reply of the New York Executive to my footnote is pitiful. Nor do I
hope for much from their convention. The people in the East - the sections - do not seem to be worth much, while
a shift in the center of gravity of the Social-Democratic Party
to the West is rather unlikely."
. . .
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 36, p. 705) London, September 16, 1887
... "The trades-union congress here has proven again
that the revolution in the old trades-unions is progressing. Against
the leaders, especially against Broadhurst and the rest of the
labor-parliamentarians, they have decided on the founding of a
special Labor Party. An armchair-socialist Austrian delegate
of the Reich Council was quite amazed at the change since 1883,
when he was here last."
...
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(pp. 196-7) London, Feb. 22, 1888
... "I am not astonished at Grönlund's proceedings.
I was rather glad he did not call on me here. From all I hear
he is full of vanity and self-conceit. . . . Es muss auch solche Käuze geben [it takes all sorts to make a world]. In America not less
than in England all these self-announced grands hommes [great men]
will find
their own level as soon as the masses begin to stir - and will
then find themselves shifted to that level of their own with a
velocity that will astonish them. We have had all that in Germany,
and in France, and in the International, too. ...
"Your remarks about my books being boycotted by the official German Socialists of New York are quite
correct, but I am used to that sort of thing, and so the efforts
of these gents amuse me. Better so than to have to undergo their
patronage. With them the movement is a business, and "business
is business." This kind of thing won't last very long; their
efforts to boss the American movement as they have done with the
German-American one must fail miserably. The masses will set all
that right when once they move.
... "Home Rule for Ireland and for London is
now the cry here, the latter a thing which the Liberals fear even
more than the Tories do. The working-class element is getting
more and more exasperated, through the stupid Tory provocations,
is getting daily more conscious of its strength at the ballot-box,
and more penetrated by the Socialist leaven. The American example
has opened their eyes, and if next autumn there were to be a repetition,
in any large American town, of the New York election campaign
of 1886, the effect here would be instantaneous. The two great
Anglo-Saxon nations are sure to set up competition in Socialism,
as well as in other matters, and then it will be a race with ever-accelerated
velocity."
Engels to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis
in the Hague
(MEW 37, p. 31) London, February 23, 1888
... "The best proof of how much things are progressing
among the workers here comes through the workers' East End radical
clubs. The example of the New York election campaign in November
1886 worked among them first; for, what America does makes more
of an impression here than what the whole European continent does.
The New York example makes it clear to people that, in the end,
it would be best if the workers formed their own party. When the
Avelings came back, they took advantage of this mood and since
then have been very active in these clubs - the only political
workers' organizations of importance existing here." ...
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(p. 199) London, April 11, 1888
... "The free trade question will not disappear from
the American horizon until settled. I am sure that protection
has done its duty for the United States and is now an obstacle,
and whatever may be the fate of the Mills bill*, the struggle will not end until either free trade
enables the United States manufacturers to take the leading part
in the world market to which they are entitled in many branches
of trade, or until both protectionists and free traders are shoved
aside by those behind them. Economic facts are stronger than politics,
especially if the politics are so much mixed up with corruption
as in America. I should not wonder if during the next few years
one set of American manufacturers after the other passed over
to the free traders - if they understand their interests they
must . ...
"I am glad of your success against the Executive as far as it goes** -
from Volkszeitung Weekly March 31st I see they won't give
in yet - there you see what an advantage it is to be on the spot.
The non-resisting weakness which went straight against the Avelings
because they were absent - that weakness you could work around
to your favor because you were not absent; and thus the hostility
to you is reduced to mere local klatsch [gossip], which with perseverance
you are sure to overcome and live down." .
. .
__________
* "A tariff bill before
Congress at the time."
** "Mrs. Wischnewetzky had attacked the Executive Committee of the S.L.P. for its careless publication of Engels'
The Condition
of the Working Class in England in 1844. For this she was expelled from the party, but reinstated in August, 1888." {2 notes by International Publishers.}
ENGELS TO MRS. [FLORENCE KELLEY]
WISCHNEWETZKY
(p. 200) London, May 2, 1888
... "I am boycotted here almost as much
as you are in New York - the various socialist cliques here are
dissatisfied at my absolute neutrality with regard to them, and
being all of them agreed as to that point, try to pay me out by
not mentioning any of my writings. Neither Our Corner (Mrs.
Besant) nor To-day nor the Christian Socialist (of
this latter monthly, however, I am not quite certain) has mentioned
the Condition of the Working Class though I sent them copies
myself. I fully expected this but did not like to say so to you
until the proof was there. I don't blame them, because I have
seriously offended them by saying that so far there is no real
working-class movement here, and that, as soon as that comes,
all the great men and women who now make themselves busy as officers
of an army without soldiers will soon find their level, and a
rather lower one than they expect. But if they think their needle-pricks
can pierce my old well-tanned and pachydermatous skin, they are
mistaken."
In 1888, Engels visited America, and traveled a bit in New England, New York, and Canada, mostly for the benefit of his health. He scrupulously tried to avoid the New York Socialist scene until the very end.
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 200-1) London,
July 11, 1888
"In all haste, information which you must, however,
keep absolutely secret. You must not be surprised if you
see me over there around the middle of August or a few days later
- I shall perhaps make a short pleasure trip across the ocean.
Be so good as to tell me at once where you live so that
I can look you up, and in case you shouldn't be there at that
time, where I can find you. Also whether the Wischnewetzkys
will be in New York around that time. I shall see nobody else
upon my arrival, for I do not want to fall into the hands of the
Messrs. German
Socialists
- that is why the thing must be kept secret. If I come, I shall
not come alone - with the Avelings who have business to transact
over there. More soon."
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 201) London,
July 11, 1888
... "I expect that little Cuno will be lying in wait
for me, but I think I have a magic spell to make him tractable.
When I return, shortly before we sail, I shall have to see various
people at the Volkszeitung. That can't be avoided, nor
does it do any harm, but at the beginning I want a rest." ...
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC II, p. 151) London, August 6, 1888
"When you receive this letter I shall be floating
away on the "City of Berlin", with Tussy, Edward,
and Schorlemmer towards the shores of the New World. The plan
has been of pretty long standing, only it was constantly being
crossed by all sorts of obstacles . . . . The affair had to be
kept secret, first because indeed of the series of obstacles which
threatened to wreck it, and secondly in order to save me as much
as possible from the interviewers of the N[ew] Y[ork] Volkszeitung and others (among whom, as Sorge writes, little
Cuno is now one of the most formidable) and from the delicate
attention of the German
Socialist Executive,
etc. of N[ew] York, on arrival, as that would spoil all the pleasure
of the trip and rend all its purpose. I want to see and not to
preach, and principally to have a complete change of air, etc.,
in order to get finally over the weakness of the eyes" ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 202) London,
August 28, 1888
"Arrived here yesterday morning ... This
Boston is badly scattered, but more human than New York City.
Cambridge, in fact, is very pretty, quite Continental European
in appearance." ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 202-3) Boston,
Aug. 31, 1888
... "Yesterday we were in Concord, visiting the reformatory
and the town. We liked both of them very much. A prison in which
the prisoners read novels and scientific books, establish clubs,
assemble and discuss without warders present, eat meat and fish
twice daily with bread ad libitum [at
will], with
ice water in every workroom and fresh running water in every cell,
the cells decorated with pictures, etc., where the inmates, dressed
like ordinary workers, look one straight in the eye without the
hangdog look of the usual criminal prisoner - that isn't to be
seen in all Europe; for that the Europeans, as I told the superintendent,
are not bold enough. And he answered in true American fashion,
"Well,
we try to make it pay, and it does pay." I gained great respect for the
Americans there.
"Concord is exceedingly beautiful, graceful, as
one wouldn't have expected after New York and even after Boston,
but it's a splendid hamlet to be buried in, but not alive! Four
weeks there, and I should perish or go crazy.
"My nephew Willie Burns is a splendid fellow, clever,
energetic, in the movement body and soul. He is getting along
well; he works on the Boston and Providence R.R. (now the Old
Colony), earns $12.00 a week, and has a nice wife (brought along
from Manchester), and three children. He wouldn't go back to England
for any money; he is exactly the youngster for a country like
America.
"Rosenberg's resignation and the strange debate
on the Sozialist in the Volkszeitung
seem to be symptoms of collapse."*
______________
* "The collapse (of the Socialist Labor Party) came one year later."... {Note by International Publishers.}
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 37, p. 90) Niagara Falls, N.Y. September
4, 1888
"The fact that Jonas has found me out is one more
reason to postpone the return to New York as long as possible.
However, even if now he sends me his Cuno I don't mind, I am finished
with the trip and he can bother me at most for half an hour."
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 203-4) Montreal,
September 10, 1888
... "The St. Lawrence and the rapids are very pretty.
Canada is richer in ruined houses than any other country but Ireland.
We are trying to understand the Canadian French here - that language
beats Yankee English holler.
...
"It is a strange transition from the States to Canada.
First one imagines that one is in Europe again, and then one thinks
one is in a positively retrogressing and decaying country. Here
one sees how necessary the feverish speculative spirit of the
Americans is for the rapid development of a new country (presupposing
capitalist production as a basis); and in ten years this sleepy
Canada will be ripe for annexation - the farmers in Manitoba,
etc., will demand it themselves. Besides, the country is half-annexed
already socially - hotels, newspapers, advertising, etc., all
on the American pattern. And they may tug and resist as much as
they like; the economic necessity of an infusion of Yankee blood
will have its way and abolish this ridiculous boundary line -
and when the time comes, John Bull will say "Yea and Amen" to it."
Engels to Conrad Schmidt in Berlin
(MEW 37, p. 103) London, October 8, 1888
... "America has interested me very much; one really
has to have seen this country with one's own eyes, a country whose
history goes back no further than commodity production and is
the promised land of capitalist production. Our ordinary conceptions
of it are as wrong as those of a German schoolboy of France." ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 207) London,
October 10, 1888
... "So Jonas has extricated himself from the trap very
cleverly and fabricated an interview in a way that I cannot easily
repudiate.*
"Mother Wischnewetzky is furious because I "was in New York for ten
days and did not find the time to undertake the two hours' easy
railway journey to her; she had so much to talk over with me." Well if I hadn't
caught cold and weren't plagued with indigestion, and if I had
been in New York for ten days on end at all!"
______________
* "This refers to an article
in the New York Volkszeitung on Engels' visit to the United
States." {Note by International Publishers. The article was very short and contained
nothing pertinent to America.}
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC II, p. 165) London, November 28, 1888
... "Let us hope that the unconscious logic of French
history will overcome the conscious breaches of logic committed
by all parties - but then one must not forget that the form of
all unconscious developments is the Negation der [of
the] Negation, the movement by contrasts,
and that this in France means republicanism (or respectively socialism)
and Bonapartism (or Boulangism), and Boulanger's avènement [Accession]
would be
a European war - the very thing most to be feared."
Engels to Conrad Schmidt in Zurich
(MEW 37, p. 133) London, January 11, 1889
..."You won't have any other choice now but to become
a writer, and for that Berlin is, of course, the best place in
the Reich. I am glad that you don't talk any more (in your 2nd
letter) of your American plans. You would have experienced a great
disappointment over there. That, under the rule of the Emergency
Law, one finds the German-American
Socialist press
to be a good one, I understand, especially from the point of view
of a journalist. In reality it doesn't amount to much, either
from the theoretical, or from the local American point of view.
The best is the "Philadelphia Tageblatt"; Well-meaning
but weak the "St. Louis Tageblatt"; managed well as
a business but precisely mainly as a business, the "New Yorker
Volkszeitung". Very bad the "Sozialist", (N.Y.), official organ of the
German party. For theoretical brains
there is for the time being little room in America. The Germans
insist - at least in their official organization - on remaining a branch of the German party, and look down with Lassallean arrogance on the "ignorant"
Americans, demand that the latter join their German party, that is, put themselves under German leadership; in short, they behave
with sectarian narrowness and pettiness. In the interior it is
better, but the New
Yorkers still
remain on top. The "Chicagoer Arbeiter-Zeitung" (now
edited by Christensen), I see only rarely. In short, in America
one can be effective only in the daily press, and one has to have
been there for at least a year in order to acquire the necessary
knowledge of people and the necessary self-assurance; furthermore,
one has to submit to the public opinion there, which often is
the more narrow-minded because the boorishness eliminated in Germany
by big industry still finds representatives among the Germans
there. (That is the strange thing about America; that, beside
the newest and the most revolutionary, the most ancient and outmoded
drags on). In a few years it probably can and will be better,
but, whoever wants to help with the development of the scientific
side finds here in Europe a much better prepared public." ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 209) London,
January 12, 1889
... "Mother Wischnewetzky is very much hurt because
I did not visit her in Long Branch instead of getting well in
your home and putting myself in shape for the trip. She seems
to be hurt by a breach of etiquette and lack of gallantry towards
ladies. But I do not allow the little women's rights ladies to
demand gallantry from us; if they want men's rights, they should
also let themselves be treated as men. She will doubtless calm
down." ...
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
At LE PERREUX
(ELC II, pp. 194-5) London, February 4, 1889
... "Well, I hope the new paper will come out; we must
take the situation as it is and make the best of it. When Paul
gets to work at a paper again, he will brace himself up for the
fight and no longer say despondently: il n'y a pas à aller
contre le courant [There's no going against
the current].
Nobody asks of him to stop the current, but if we are not
to go against the popular current of momentary tomfoolery,
what in the name of the devil is our business? The inhabitants
of the Ville Lumière have proved to evidence that they
are 2 millions, "mostly
fools,"
as Carlyle says, but that is no reason why we should be fools
too. Let the Parisians turn reactionists if they cannot be happy
otherwise - the social revolution will go on in spite of them,
and when it's done they can cry out: Ah tiens! c'est fait - et
sans nous - qui l'aurait imaginé! [Bless
my soul, it's happened-and without us - who would have thought
it!]"
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 210-11)
London, February 23, 1889
"Postcard of January 19th and letter of February
10th received. I get the Labor Standard [published by J. P. McDonnell in Paterson,
N.J.] and am giving Wischnewetzky's articles
to Tussy, who will use them if a new edition of the Labor Movement
is issued. They contain material that is characteristic of America.
Such neglect of safety measures against fire and the like would
simply not pay in Europe. But over there it is like the railways
and everything else: if they only exist, no matter how,
it suffices.
... "I shall write Kautsky what you say about Rappap[ort]: lack of material and the desire for
comprehensiveness brings many a person in who doesn't belong there. [in the columns of Die Neue Zeit]" ...
Many of Engels' letters to Sorge during the spring and summer of 1889 focused on a European labor congress in which many of the same forces that had clashed during the last days of the First International clashed again with renewed vigor. The March 30 and April 6 editions of "Der Sozialdemokrat" of 1889 published Engels' "An Answer to Justice", dealing with controversial information about German Social-Democrats in Great Britain and America that appeared in Hyndman's journal of the Social-Democratic party in England. A portion of Engels' article dealt with the record of the Germans in America and the rest of the world (MEW 21, pp. 513-4):
... "the Socialist Labor Party of America, although originally only,
and still even today consisting mostly of Germans, has numerous
non-German sections: Anglo-American, Slavic,
Scandinavian, etc., besides many German newspapers which are either
completely, or partly, identical, the party publishes an English periodical, the "Workmen's Advocate" and covers its
still considerable deficit (see the New Yorker "Sozialist" of March 2, 1889, Report of the National-Executive), provides out of their own funds the
cost for an agitator for the Anglo-American workers - Professor
Garside - and in America has to let itself be reproached for being
only a bunch of foreign intruders who are interfering in American
affairs which are none of their business and which they do not
understand. And that is said of them quite regardless of the fact
that the German-Americans are either American citizens or are
planning to become citizens and to remain in America. If the Germans
in England, almost all of whom are here only temporarily, would
follow the instructions given to them by "Justice", i.e. publish English papers for English
readers, participate in public agitation among Englishmen, interfere
in English politics, fulfill all duties of Englishmen and demand
all rights of Englishmen, the same reproach would be hurled at
them and, among others, possibly also by "Justice".
"With regard to the assertion that the German-Americans
"are
forced to learn English", I can only say I wish it were so. Unfortunately,
however, this is not so at all.
"But wherever there have been German Socialists,
they can claim to have collaborated as far as they were able,
actively and successfully, with socialist agitation. Neither in
America nor in Switzerland nor in Eastern and Northern Europe
would Social Democracy occupy its present position had it not
benefited from the activities of the Germans living in these countries.
They were everywhere and always the first to establish communication
between the Socialists of the various nations, and the German
Arbeiterbildungsverein [Workers' Education Society] was,
if we go back to 1840, the first international socialist society.
If these facts are unknown to "Justice", the international police and international
capital know them very well. Wherever foreign socialists are being
molested, persecuted and expelled by continental police, in three
of four cases they were Germans, and the law to prevent immigration
of foreign socialists pending now before the American Congress
is directed mainly against Germans."
Engels to Wilhelm Liebknecht
in Borsdorf bei Leipzig
(MEW 37, p. 258) Eastbourne, August 17, 1889
... "You should have realized by now that it happens
to you very frequently that you are not at home when one wants
to take you by your word, or one wants something from you which
should be a matter of course. How was it with the Aveling affair
in America? At the beginning, under the immediate impression of
the mean trick played by the New York Executive, you wrote; "The New Yorkers owe Aveling an apology,
I will demand it from them, and if they dig their heels in, I
will stand up publicly against them." But later, when the time came
to make good on your promise, things looked quite different: You
wrote a statement which was neither fish nor flesh, didn't do
Aveling any good nor the New Yorkers any harm - unforeseen circumstances!
And only gentle pressure from me brought forth from you a statement
which contained at least part of what you promised." ...
Engels to Hermann Engels in Engelskirchen
(MEW 37, pp. 262-3) Eastbourne, August 22, 1889
... "in England, big industry has ruined the crafts,
but has not known what to replace them with. The Germans have
not had the sole privilege of furnishing bad merchandise for good
money; the Londoners can do that brilliantly. That's really different
in America. I think for ordinary, everyday business, where speculation
doesn't play any role, America is the most solid country in the
world, the only one where one still gets "good work"." ...
Engels to Karl Kautsky in Stuttgart
(MEW 37, p. 275) London, September 15, 1889
... "In Denmark, the old party leadership badly disgraced
themselves in the Congress affair, and the opposition, Trier,
Petersen, etc. are winning ground strongly. You should engage
Trier as a correspondent for the "Arbeiterzeitung"" ...
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 37, p. 276) London, September 26, 1889
"Thanks for the "Volkszeitung", etc. The
revolution in the glass of water that happened over there is very
funny. Possibly the start of something better to come. The nemesis
marches slowly but surely; it is part of the irony of history
that the same people who always relied on the New Yorkers to be
against the mass of the party,
especially the Westerners, are being toppled precisely by the
New Yorkers."
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 219) London,
Oct. 12, 1889
... "The New Yorker revolution is growing funnier and
funnier - the efforts of Rosenberg and Co. to stay at the top
à tout prix
[at any price] are amusing but, fortunately, useless too. Your
correspondence with the Nationalists*
in the W.A. [Workmen's
Advocate] pleased me, first because one recognized old Sorge
ten miles away, and second because it is a public sign
of life again from you."
. . .
__________
* "Sorge was then engaged
in a controversy with Daniel De Leon in the columns of the Nationalist
organ." {From a note
by International
Publishers. But, the W.A. was really an SLP organ.
The debate is reproduced in Appendix 2. - K.E.}
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 220) London,
Dec. 7, 1889
.
. . "Things won't turn out that well: to have
the "Socialist
Labor Party"
liquidated. Rosenberg has a lot of other heirs beside Schewitsch,
and the conceited doctrinaire Germans over there certainly have
no desire to give up their usurped position of teachers to the
"immature" Americans. Otherwise
they would be nothing at all.
"Over here it is being proved that a great nation
simply cannot be tutored in a doctrinaire and dogmatic fashion,
even if one has the best of theories, evolved out of their own
conditions of life, and even if the tutors are relatively better
than the S.L.P."
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 37, p. 321) London, Dec. 7, 1889
... "Rappaport has been sent to Kautsky. If one has
such an atrocious name, one has to be capable of any idiocy.
"Little Hepner is such a clever little man, so impartial
in his own eyes and at the same time so impractical (what the
Jews call Schlemiel - a born loser) that I wonder how he has not
come to grief over there long ago. It's a pity about the little
guy, but that can't be helped."
...
ENGELS TO HERMANN SCHLÜTER
IN NEW YORK
(MESC, p. 389) London, Jan. 11, 1890
... "The fact that you have got rid of Rosenberg and
Co. is the main point about the revolution in your American socialist tea-pot. The German party over there must be smashed up as
such, it is the worst
obstacle.
The American workers are coming along already, but just like the
English they go their own way. One cannot at the outset cram theory
into them, but their own experience and their own blunders and
the evil consequences of them will soon bump their noses up against
theory - and then it will be all right. Independent nations go
their own way, and of them all the English and their offspring
are surely the most independent. Their insular stiff-necked obstinacy
is often enough annoying, but it also guarantees that what is
begun will be carried out once a thing has been set going."
Engels to August Bebel in Berlin
London, January 23, 1890
(MEW 37, p. 351)
"From America you will hardly get much money. That
is au fond {basically} good. A real American
party is for you and the world much more useful than the few pennies
you would get, precisely because that so-called party is not a party but a sect and, moreover, a purely German sect, a branch,
on foreign soil, of the German party, specifically of its out-dated Lassalle elements. But now the Rosenberg clique has been defeated and
thereby the greatest obstacle for the development of and absorption
into a real American party has been eliminated."
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 224-6) London,
Feb. 8, 1890
... "In my opinion, we hardly lose anything worth mentioning
by the defection of the official Socialists over there to the Nationalists. If the
whole German Socialist Labor Party went to pieces as a
result, it would be a gain, but we can hardly expect anything
as good as that. The really useful elements will finally come
together again all the same, and the sooner the dross has separated
itself, the sooner this will happen; when the moment comes at
which events themselves drive the American proletariat farther
on, there will be enough of them fitted by their superior theoretical
insight and experience to take over the role of leaders, and then
you will find that your years of work have not been for nothing. ...
..."The Schleswig-Holsteiners and their descendants
in England and America are not to be converted by lecturing; this
pigheaded and conceited lot must experience it in their own persons.
And this they are doing more and more from year to year, but they
are most conservative - just because America is so purely
bourgeois, has no feudal past at all, and is therefore proud of
its purely bourgeois organization - and so they will get rid of
the old traditional mental rubbish only through practical experience.
Hence it must begin with the trade unions, etc., if it is to be
a mass movement, and every further step must be forced upon them
by a setback. But once the first step beyond the bourgeois point
of view has been taken, things will move quickly, like everything
in America, where the velocity of the movement, growing with natural
necessity, is setting some requisite fire underneath the Schleswig-Holstein
Anglo-Saxons, ordinarily so slow; and then, too, the foreign elements
in the nation will assert themselves by greater mobility. I consider
the decay of the specifically
German party,
with its ridiculous theoretical
confusion,
its corresponding arrogance, and its Lassalleanism, a real piece of good
fortune. Only when these separatists are out of the way, will the fruits of your work
come to light again. The
{Anti-}Socialist
Law was a misfortune, not for Germany, but for America, to which
it consigned the last of the louts. When I was over there, I often
marveled at the many loutish faces one encountered, faces which
died out in Germany, but are flourishing over there.
... "We have our
Nationalists here too: the Fabians, a well-meaning lot of "eddicated"
bourgeois, who have refuted Marx with the rotten vulgarized economics
of Jevons, which is so vulgarized that one can make anything out
of it, even socialism. As over there, their chief aim is to convert
the bourgeois to socialism and thus introduce the thing
peacefully and constitutionally. They have published a bulky book* about
it, written by seven authors."
__________
* "Fabian Essays in Socialism, edited by George Bernard
Shaw, London, 1889."
{Note by International
Publishers.}
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 227-8) London,
April 12, 1890
"The matter of Miquel's letters*
involves
great difficulties. "Wilhelm" [Wilhelm
Liebknecht] also would have liked
to have them, in order to blurt them out at an inopportune time,
thus permanently spoiling our means of exerting pressure on Miquel.
For once the scandal is over, Miquel will snap his fingers at
us. But it is of much greater value to me to have the fellow somewhat
under the thumb through this means of pressure than to make a
useless clamor, as a result of which he would be released and
would be glad, to boot, that he had weathered it. What is more,
the whole world knows that he was a member of the {Communist} League.
"I have had altogether too brilliant experiences
with American journalism to bite at this chance. If it became
known at the Volkszeitung that these letters were in America,
those sensationalists would not rest until they had them - and
I don't want to expose anyone to this temptation and torture.
Moreover, what guarantee have I how long Schlüter remains
with the Volkszeitung and whether they don't make the release
of these letters the condition for his staying?
"In short, it is impossible for me to enter this
deal. ...
__________
* "Engels had been requested
to send Johannes Miquel's letters to Marx to America for publication
when the opportunity should present itself." {Note by International Publishers.}
The publication of Bellamy's book Looking Backward gave birth to the Nationalist movement. The next letter assessed both the movement and its journal - The Nationalist - with which De Leon was associated before moving on to the SLP:
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 229-31)
London, April 19,1890
"I get the
Nationalist regularly; unfortunately there is not much in it.
They are a feeble imitation of the Fabians here. Superficial and
shallow as the Dismal Swamp, but full of conceit regarding the
lofty generosity with which they, the "eddicated"
bourgeois, condescend to emancipate the workers, in return for
which the latter must politely keep quiet and must submissively
obey the orders of the "eddicated" cranks and their
isms. Let them have their brief pleasures; one fine day the movement
will wipe all that out. An advantage we continentals have, who
have felt the influence of the French Revolution in an altogether
different fashion, is that such a thing isn't possible here. ...
"The foregoing details concerning persons and momentary
dissensions are solely for your information, of course, and must
not get into the Volkszeitung at any cost. This once
for all - for I have already had instances here of the fact
that Schlüter sometimes takes things a bit too lightly in
this respect." ...
Engels to Hermann Schlüter
in New York
(MEW 37, p. 416) London, June 14, 1890
... "So far, everything is all right here in Germany,
too. Wilhelmchen {the German
Kaiser} threatens
with elimination of universal
suffrage - nothing better could happen to us!
We are drifting fast enough anyway either into world war or world
revolution - or both."
Engels to Karl Kautsky in Stuttgart
(MEW 37, p. 433) London, August 5, 1890
... "Sorge ...
is the best
man for you. I want to write to him about it, too. Of course,
you have to pay him exceptionally well - or else he prefers to
give music lessons. Also, it will be difficult to make him report
regularly, and it is better that way. Sometimes months can pass
when nothing decisive is happening, and sometimes he might have
to report on something critical every week." ...
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 37, p. 449) London, August 27, 1890
"Who is now the editor-in-chief of the "Volkszeitung"?
Tussy met Schewitsch in London at a meeting, he told her that
he heard in New York that I talked very maliciously about him.
But this is definitely a lie. Should that come from A. Jonas?"
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 37, p. 476) London, September 27, 1890
... "Concerning Schewitsch your news is probably correct.* When
he passed through here he fell into Tussy's hands at a meeting
and told her that he had heard that I had expressed myself in
a malicious way against him; therefore he preferred not to visit
me. I attributed this to Jonas - it may also have been the subterfuge
of a bad conscience. It's the old story of so many Russians: une
jeunesse orageuse et une vieillesse blasée [a tumultuous youth and a blasé old age], as one of them called
it."...
* (MEW 37, Note #469, p. 603): "In two letters to Engels, both dated Sept. 10, 1890, F. A. Sorge wrote about the fact that Sergei Schewitsch had begged the tsar for clemency and had been given a position in Riga. This news was supposedly confirmed through a letter from Schewitsch in which he asked that his possessions be sent to him at an inn in Riga where he wanted to stay."
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 37, p. 506) London, November 26, 1890
... "Your debut in the "Neue Zeit" is very
good, do continue in this manner. You will soon get back into
writing. (The remuneration is approximately double of what contributors
get here (5 Marks per page); when you get into it again and work
faster you won't find that so low. What Schlüter told you
I would like to have better verified. That I and others get 5
Marks per page in the "Neue Zeit", and that that is
the usual fee, is certain. I myself have written to Kautsky that
you should be offered more. Schlüter sometimes blabbers out
things without thinking. Of course, in American terms, $2 per
page is very little, and if you find that you must ask American
prices, you are quite right to do it. But Kautsky, who surely
does everything for you, must also take into account Dietz, who
is the treasurer, and I do not wish that the door to the "Neue
Zeit" should be opened, because of such considerations, to
someone of the "Volkszeitung" or the "Sozialist". Think again about
this matter, and if you insist on additional payment write me,
and I will appeal to Kautsky on this; that will then leave all
doors open.
"The boycott against me* had
already been declared by Rosenberg and Co., and if now the Nationalists fall in with them, it
serves me right. Why don't I desist then from the class struggle!
Marx and I had the same experience here with the Fabians who also
want to bring about the liberation of the workers through the
"Jebildeten"."
{educated}
* (MEW 37, Note #493, p. 606): "Friedrich Adolph Sorge on Oct. 14, 1890, had written the following to Engels: "The Messrs. Nationalists have proclaimed a boycott against you. I heard about it already last summer and found, however, upon closer inspection that, in their announcements and book reviews, your writings were never mentioned, your name was never said. Professor De Leon, whose name is probably known to you (the same with whom last year I had a correspondence which I published) is said to have stated that your writings are harmful to the movement (the Nationalist movement, of course). The man speaks frequently now from the tribunes of the New York Socialists and is considered a great figure. But the best thing was that the conceited Kantist L. Daniel, editor of the 'Workmen's Advocate' (a Frenchman by birth) extended this boycott to the 'Workmen's Advocate' and co-workers had to force him, through threats, to give up the boycott.""
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 233) London,
Jan. 29, 1891
... "I see clearly enough that things are going downhill
with the S.L.P.
from its
fraternization with the Nationalists*, compared to whom the
Fabians here - likewise bourgeois - are radicals. I should have
thought that the Sozialist would scarcely be able to beget extra boredom by
cohabiting with the Nationalist. Sorge sends me the Nationalist, but despite all my efforts I cannot find anyone
who is willing to read it.
"Nor do I understand the quarrel with Gompers**. His Federation is, as far as I know,
an association of trade unions and nothing but trade unions. Hence
they have the formal right to reject anyone coming as the
representative of a labor organization that is not a trade
union, or to reject delegates of an association to which such
organizations are admitted. I cannot judge from here, of course,
whether it was propagandistically advisable to expose oneself
to such a rejection. But it was beyond question that it had to
come, and I, for one, cannot blame Gompers for it.
"But when I think of next year's international congress*** in
Brussels, I should have thought it would have been well to keep
on good terms with Gompers, who has more workers behind him, at
any rate, than the S.L.P., and to ensure as big a delegation from
America as possible there, including his people. They would
see many things there that would disconcert them in their narrow-minded
trade-union standpoint - and besides, where do you want to find
a recruiting ground if not in the trade unions?"
___________
* "The National Citizens
Alliance, a short-lived middle-class political group, collaborating
with the Knights of Labor for the formation of a third political
party.
** "The A.F. of L. had refused a charter
to the New York Central Labor Federation on the ground that a
section of the SLP was affiliated to it.
*** "The second congress of the Second International
was held in Brussels, August 16-22, 1891." {3 Notes by International Publishers.}
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 38, p. 30) London, February 11, 1891
... "I am very glad that you want to do away with the
"Nationalist". Here I can find
no one, but absolutely no one, who wants to read it, and I myself
have no time to scrutinize the pieces of wisdom of the various
respectable upstarts. I would have proposed this to you a long
time ago, but I thought: since Sorge sends me this, at last
there must be something to it, for once." ...
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 38, p. 46) London, March 4, 1891
... "Hyndman is once again bubbling over against me,
that happens every 6 months, but he can stand on his head and
march all around London on his head, I won't answer him. He is
also pitching in again against Aveling, and mentions also the
American affair. Do you think that, now that Rosenberg has been
thrown out, a satisfactory declaration can be obtained from the American party? I am only asking your opinion, I am
not authorized to demand that any steps be taken." ...
Engels to Karl Kautsky in Stuttgart
(MEW 38, p. 88) London, April 30, 1891
... "The American militia system is practically nothing
but a kind of voluntary national guard of bourgeois, and Hyndman
wrote 10 years ago from America already to Marx that there the
bourgeois are drilling extensively in order to protect themselves
from the workers. How absolutely useless it is against exterior
enemies is shown in all wars conducted by the United States with
newly formed regiments of volunteers (recruited) and especially
in the Civil War. There the militia disappeared completely. Already
in America I have heard of the armories of the militia regiments
in the interior of New York as being real fortresses. As long
as every worker does not have his repeater-rifle and 100 rounds
of ammunition in his house, everything is nonsense."
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC III, p. 58) London, May 4, 1891
... "They {Hyndman's
SDF in England} have been made to feel their real position,
and that is: the same position which the Germans in the Socialistic Labour Party in
America hold there, that of a sect. And that is their position, though
they are real live Englishmen. It is very characteristic of the
Anglo-Saxon race and their peculiar mode of development, that
both here and in America the people who, more or less, have the
correct theory as to the dogmatic side of it, become a
mere sect because they cannot conceive that living theory of action,
of working with the working class at every possible stage of its
development, otherwise than as a collection of dogmas to be learnt
by heart and recited like a conjurer's formula or a Catholic prayer.
Thus the real movement is going on outside the sect, and leaving
it more and more." ...
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 38, p. 112) London, June 10, 1891
..."Thanks for the American pirate edition {of "Capital"}. Schlüter wrote
me strange things about it. Please thank him for his detailed
letter, I am sorry I can't answer it now."
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 234) London,
June 10, 1891
..."The movement here is getting along very well. The Gas Workers and General Laborers Union is taking first place here more and more, thanks
to Tussy especially. The movement is proceeding in an English
fashion - systematically, step by step, but surely - and the comical
phenomenon that here, as in America, the people who claim to be
the orthodox Marxists, who have transformed our concept of
movement into a rigid dogma to be learned by heart, appear as a pure sect, is very significant. What is more, that over
there these people are foreigners, Germans, while over here they
are true-blue Englishmen, Hyndman and his set." .
. .
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 234) Ryde,
Isle of Wight, Aug. 9-11, 1891
.
. . "I am very grateful for the information
regarding the Journal of the Knights
of Labor - I have to look through
such a pile of papers that it is often very hard for me to get
my bearings without such reports. Likewise, regarding Gompers
and Sanial*; very important, should
I see them in London?"
...
___________
* "Sorge had informed Engels
in a letter dated July 14, 1891, of the enmity between Sanial
(delegate of the Socialist Labor Party to the Brussels Congress of the Second International)
and Gompers (delegate of the American Federation of Labor). Sorge
had expressed the fear that Gompers would exploit this feud at
the congress for his own political ends." {Note by International Publishers.}
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 38, p. 155) Helensburgh, Scotland, Sept.
14, 1891
... "Among the American delegates I saw Mac-Vey and
Abraham Cahan, the Jewish apostle; I liked them both.
"The Congress is, after all, a splendid victory
for us - the Broussists stayed away completely, and the Hyndman people
have put away their opposition. And the best thing is that they
have thrown out the Anarchists, just like at the Hague
Congress {of 1872}. Where the old International broke off, just
there the new, much bigger and declared Marxist one is beginning
again."
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 38, p. 166) London, September 30, 1891
... ""The
"People"
is unreadable. Such a silly collection of junk in a newspaper
I haven't seen for a long time. Who is the translator of my "Entwicklung"*? Jonas?
* (MEW 38, Note #238, p. 610): "The Socialist Labor Party of North America had, in 1891, without Engels' knowledge, published his paper "Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissensschaft" {"The Development of Socialism from Utopia to Science"} in the weekly "The People". As can be seen from Friedrich Adolph Sorge's letters to Engels of October 9 and 12, 1891, Engels' paper was translated by De Leon and H. Vogt, (obviously from the German edition of 1883); it was also to be published as a pamphlet."
ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH ADOLPH SORGE
IN HOBOKEN
(MESC, p. 411) London, Oct. 24, 1891
... "Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus [Socialism: Utopian and Scientific]
will be published
here in a translation prepared by Aveling and edited by me (in
Sonnenshein's Social Series). In face of this authorised translation
the American pirate edition*
with its
miserable English will be rather innocuous. It is moreover not
even complete, whatever they found too difficult they have left
out." . . .
__________
* "Engels refers to a translation
by De Leon and Vogt which was published by the Socialist Workers' Party of America." {Note by Progress Publishers.
It should have read: "Socialist Labor Party". The SWP
was organized decades later.-K.E.}
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 236-7) London,
October 24, 1891
.
. . "For heaven's sake do me the favor of
not sending me any American monthly regularly. I
long for the opportunity of reading a book once again;
though I am able to look through properly only one-third of the
papers sent me, they take all my time - but the movement is gigantic
by now and one must remain au courant [well-informed]! ...
"I can very well believe that the movement over
there is ebbing again. Over there everything proceeds with great
ups and downs. But every up wins ground conclusively, and so one
advances after all. Thus the tremendous strike wave of the Knights of Labor
and the 1886-1888
strike movement has put us ahead despite all the recoils. For
there is an altogether different life in the masses than before.
The next time even more ground will be won. But with all that
the native American workingman's standard of living is considerably
higher than even that of the British, and that alone suffices
to place him in the rear for still some time to come. Then there
is the competition of immigration and other things. When
the time comes, things will go ahead over there tremendously fast
and energetically, but it may take some time until then. Miracles
happen nowhere. And then there is the misfortune of the arrogant Germans, who want to play the
schoolmaster and commander in one, and make the natives dislike learning even
the best things from them"
. . .
Engels to Nikolai Franzewitsch
Danielson in Petersburg
(MEW 38, p. 195) London, October 29, 1891
... "The "breeding of millionaires", as Bismarck says, seems to really
advance in your country with giant steps. Such profits as shown
in your official statistics are unknown today in English, French
or German textile factories. 10, 15, at most 20% average profit
and 25-30% in exceptional years of especial prosperity are considered
good. Only in the infancy of modern industry could enterprises
with the newest and best machinery which produced their goods
with considerably less labor than socially necessary at that time
secure for themselves such profit rates. At this time, such profits
are made only by successful speculative enterprises with new inventions,
that is, by one out of 100 enterprises; the rest are usually complete
failures.
"The only country today, where similar or almost
similar profits in some main industries are possible, is the United
States of America. There the protective tariffs after the Civil
War, and now the MacKinley-Tariff, have led to similar consequences,
and the profits must be enormous, which they are. The fact that
this depends completely on tariff legislation which can be changed
from one day to the next, is sufficient to prevent any great investment
of foreign capital (great in relation to the mass of invested
domestic capital) in these industries, and thus to stop up the
main source of the competition and the lowering of profits."
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 239-40)
London, Jan. 6, 1892
... "There is no place yet in America for a third
party, I believe. The divergence of interests even in the same
class group is so great in that tremendous area that wholly different
groups and interests are represented in each of the two big parties,
depending on the locality, and almost each particular section
of the possessing class has its representatives in each of the
two parties to a very large degree, though today big industry
forms the core of the Republicans on the whole, just as the big
landowners of the South form that of the Democrats. The apparent
haphazardness of this jumbling together is what provides the splendid
soil for the corruption and the plundering of the government that
flourish there so beautifully. Only when the land - the public
lands - is completely in the hands of the speculators, and settlement
on the land thus becomes more and more difficult or falls victim
to gouging - only then, I think, will the time come, with peaceful
development, for a third party. Land is the basis of speculation,
and the American speculative mania and speculative opportunity
are the chief levers that hold the native-born worker in bondage
to the bourgeoisie. Only when there is a generation of native-born
workers that cannot expect anything from speculation any
more, will we have a solid foothold in America! But, of course,
who can count on peaceful development in America! There are economic
jumps over there, like the political ones in France - to be sure,
they produce the same momentary retrogressions.
"The small farmer and the petty bourgeois will hardly
ever succeed in forming a strong party; they consist of elements
that change too rapidly - the farmer is often a migratory farmer,
farming two, three, and four farms in succession in different
states and territories, immigration and bankruptcy promote the
change in personnel in each group, and economic dependence upon
the creditor also hampers independence - but to make up for it
they are a splendid element for politicians, who speculate on
their discontent in order to sell them out to one of the big parties
afterward.
"The tenacity of the Yankees, who are even rehashing
the Greenback humbug, is a result of their theoretical backwardness
and their Anglo-Saxon contempt for all theory. They are punished
for this by a superstitious belief in every philosophical and
economic absurdity, by religious sectarianism, and idiotic economic
experiments, out of which, however, certain bourgeois cliques
profit.
"Louise {Kautsky}
asks you
to send her only the Woman's Journal (Boston) and
even this only until March 31st, unless we
do not write otherwise before then. She needed it for the Vienna
Arbeiterinnen-Zeitung (she, Laura [Marx's second daughter],
and Tussy are the chief contributors) and she says it could never
occur to her to force the drivel of the American swell-mob-ladies
upon working women. What you have so kindly sent her has enabled
her to become well-posted again and has convinced her that these
ladies are still as supercilious and narrow-minded as ever; she
merely wants to give this one magazine a couple of months' trial.
In the interim she thanks you most sincerely for your kindness. ...
"The story about Gompers is as follows: He
wrote me and sent me detailed papers of his organization. I was
out of town a great deal at the time - in summer - and tremendously
busy in-between. Nor was I at all clear about the matter; I thought
Iliacos extra peccatur muros et intra [They
sin inside and outside the Trojan walls]. Then it was said that Gompers would
come to Brussels or over here, and so I thought I would settle
the matter orally. Afterward, when he didn't come, I forgot
about the matter. But I shall look up the documents and write
him that I decline the role*
with thanks.
"I wrote K. Kautsky a few days ago and instructed
him to inquire of Dietz regarding the reprinting of your articles
in a separate book; I am still waiting for a reply. Haste makes
waste is the motto in Germany, especially in [Stuttgart]" . . .
__________
* "Of arbitrator between
the American Federation of Labor and the Socialist
Labor Party." {Note by International Publishers.}
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC III, p. 164) London, March 14, 1892
... "Secondly, Paul says we must reap where Boulanger
has sown. Exactly so, but reap the masses, and discard
the leaders, as the plan was with the Possibilists; but these
leaders have no masses behind them, and are themselves highly
undesirable bedfellows."
...
Engels to Nikolai Franzewitsch
Danielson in Petersburg
(MEW 38, p. 305) London, March 15, 1892
... "But once the Russian peasant is condemned to having
to become an industrial or agrarian proletarian, the decline of
the land-owner seems to be certain also. From everything, I conclude
that this class is indebted even more than the peasants and must
gradually sell all their properties. And between the two, it seems,
steps a new class of property owners, village kulaks or urban
bourgeois - maybe the fathers of a future Russian real-estate
aristocracy?
"The crop failure of last year has made all that
crystal clear. I fully share your opinion that the causes are
of an entirely social nature. With regard to deforestation, this
is, like the ruin of the peasants, an essential condition of vital
importance for bourgeois society. There is no "civilised"
country of Europe which has not felt this, and America*, and Russia
doubtlessly also, are experiencing it at this moment. So deforestation
is in my eyes essentially a social factor as well as a social
result. But at the same time it provides the interested parties
with the favorite pretext of blaming economic failures on a cause
for which obviously nobody can be made responsible."
__________
* "In America I saw this
four years ago with my own eyes. There great efforts are being
made to work against the consequences and to make good the mistakes." - F.E.
ENGELS TO SCHLUETER (p. 242)
London, March 30, 1892
"Your great obstacle in America, it seems to me,
lies in the exceptional position of the native-born workers. Up
to 1848 one could speak of a permanent native-born working class
only as an exception. The small beginnings of one in the cities
in the East still could always hope to become farmers or bourgeois.
Now such a class has developed and has also organized itself on
trade-union lines to a great extent. But it still occupies an
aristocratic position and wherever possible leaves the ordinary
badly paid occupations to the immigrants, only a small portion
of whom enter the aristocratic trade unions. But these immigrants
are divided into different nationalities, which understand neither
one another nor, for the most part, the language of the country.
And your bourgeoisie knows much better even than the Austrian
government how to play off one nationality against the other:
Jews, Italians, Bohemians, etc., against Germans and Irish, and
each one against the other, so that differences in workers' standards
of living exist, I believe, in New York to an extent unheard of
elsewhere. And added to this is the complete indifference of a
society that has grown up on a purely capitalist basis, without
any easygoing feudal background, toward the human lives that perish
in the competitive struggle.
. . .
"In such a country continually renewed waves of
advance, followed by equally certain setbacks, are inevitable.
Only the advances always become more powerful, the setbacks less
paralyzing, and on the whole the cause does move forward. But
this I consider certain: the purely bourgeois foundation, with
no prebourgeois swindle back of it, the corresponding colossal
energy of development, which is displayed even in the mad exaggeration
of the present protective tariff system, will one day bring about
a change that will astound the whole world. Once the Americans
get started, it will be with an energy and impetuousness compared
with which we in Europe shall be mere children."
FREDERICK ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC III, p. 173) London, May 19, 1892
"How poorly organised your statistical service is!
In Germany, we should have had all the results within 3-4 days
after the 2nd ballot, and Le Socialiste of the 15th gives
only very haphazard and incomplete information. But it will come,
you will see that nothing strikes the imagination of the masses
so forcibly as a good array of figures of electoral
victories,
well set out. It is of capital importance above all when it's
a matter of making the workers realise the strength of action
that universal suffrage gives
them. Don't forget to complete your statistical results of May
1st, 1892 - for comparison with the figures which the '93 parliamentary
elections will show; should there be an advance, of which I am
sure, you will see the effect this will have when friends and
enemies can ascertain the progress, the ground won in a year,
by incontestable figures."
...
Engels to Nikolai Franzewitsch
Danielson in Petersburg
(MEW 38, p. 364) London, June 18, 1892
... "There can be no doubt that the present stormy growth
of modern "big industry" in Russia has only been caused
by artificial means, protective tariffs, state subsidies, etc.
The same happened in France where protectionism has existed since
Colbert without interruption, and in Spain, Italy, and since 1878,
even in Germany. And that, even though Germany had already almost
completed its industrialization when in 1878 protective tariffs
were introduced to help the capitalists impose on their domestic
customers such high prices that in foreign countries they could
sell below cost. And America has done exactly the same in order
to shorten the period in which American manufacture would not
have been able to compete with England under the same conditions.
I do not doubt that America, France, Germany and even Austria
will reach the point where they can successfully confront the
English competition on the free world market with at least a number
of important articles. France, America and Germany have broken
England's industrial monopoly already to a certain degree, which
is very noticeable here. Will Russia get just as far? I doubt
it, because Russia, like Italy, suffers from a lack of coal at
the places favorable for industry"
...
Engels to Karl Kautsky in Stuttgart
(MEW 38, p. 377) London, June 25, 1892
... "Many thanks for your information regarding the
Sorge-Dietz affair. Since Sorge has not written me as to how far
your negotiations have progressed, and since I needed to know
that before I could do anything myself, this was important to
me. Dietz is too exclusively after a mass market. If he wants
to be the publisher of the scientific socialists, he must
establish a department where books which are being sold more slowly
can also find a place. If not, someone else must be found. Really
scientific literature cannot be marketed by the tens of thousands,
and the publisher must provide for that." ...
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 38, p. 439) Ryde, Isle of Wight, August
23, 1892
... "But to Stuttgart I will come on no account, and
therefore I will negotiate with Dietz shortly in writing, as soon
as I know that he hasn't gone with Bebel on a trip. The matter
itself is, after all, already settled, it is only a question of
the details, so you can work on the additions, and the more complete
they are, the better. Especially if you wanted to treat the time
since 1870 a little more fully, it would be good to include also
the fortunes of the avowedly socialist German party and the blunders they committed. You must consider that
you write for a public that doesn't know anything at all about
things there and have to be told the plain truth. And even if
the Messrs. leaders in New York and Cincinnati grumble, you don't
have to give a fig, you are used to it. ...
"Last week all of Lancashire voted in all
districts, with mostly very large majorities, for 8 hours instead
of 10. In short, the thing is marching splendidly here too, and
next year not only Austria and France, but England also will march
behind Germany, and that will surely finally also have the proper
effect on your Anglo-Americans, especially if your militia is
doing some more shooting to drive out some of their republican
and great-country arrogance."
...
Engels to Victor Adler in Lunz
(MEW 38, pp. 444-5) Ryde, August 30, 1892
... "What you say about tactics is only too true. But
there are only too many people, who, for the sake of not having
to exercise their brains, want to apply for all eternity the tactics
meant for the moment. Tactics are not made from nothing, but according
to changing circumstances. In our present situation, we must only
too often let ourselves be dictated to by our opponents.
"You are also correct with regard to the independents.
I still remember the years when I - at that time still officially
corresponding with Liebknecht - constantly had to fight against
the German Spiessburgerei
[philistinism] which was seeping in everywhere. All in all, we
have that behind us in Germany, but what Spiessers are sitting
in the party-faction and are continuing to come into it! A labor
party in such a situation can choose only between workers who
are immediately being disciplined and then go to the dogs as party
pensioners, and Spiessburgers who maintain themselves but disgrace
the party. And compared with these people, the independents are
priceless.
"What you say about the rapid industrial progress
of Austria and Hungary has pleased me enormously. That is the
only solid basis for progress in our movement. And that is also
the only good side of protectionism - at least for most continental
countries and America. Big industry, big capitalists and large
masses of proletarians are being bred artificially, the centralization
of capital is being accelerated, the middle sectors are being
destroyed. In Germany, protective tariffs were actually superfluous,
since they were introduced just at the moment when Germany established
itself on the world market, and this process they have
disturbed; but on the other hand they have filled many voids in
German industry which otherwise would have remained voids for
a long time. And if Germany is forced to sacrifice its protective
tariffs to its position on the world market it will be more competitive
than ever before. In Germany, as in America, protective tariffs
are now a pure obstacle because they prevent these countries from
occupying the proper position on the world market. In America
they must therefore soon go down, and Germany must follow.
"But, as you elevate your industry, you do a good
thing for England; the sooner its rule over the world market is
totally destroyed the sooner the workers here come into power.
The continental and American competition (also the Indian) has
finally caused a crisis in Lancashire, and the first consequence
was the worker's sudden conversion to the 8-hour day."
Engels to Nikolai Franzewitsch
Danielson in Petersburg
(MEW 38, pp. 468, 470) London, September 22,
1892
... "I can't see how the results of the industrial revolution
which is going on before our eyes in Russia is in any way different
from those we saw in England, Germany, and America. In America,
the conditions for management and property in agriculture are
different. And that is indeed a difference. ...
"Take England! The last new market, which, if opened
could bring a temporary revival to English trade, is China. Therefore,
English capital insists on building Chinese railroads. But Chinese
railroads mean the destruction of the entire basis of Chinese
small agriculture and cottage industry, and since there isn't
even a Chinese grande industrie as a counterweight, it will be
made impossible for millions of people to make a living. The consequence
will be mass emigration as the world has not seen before, a flooding
of America, Asia and Europe by the hated Chinese who will compete
with the American, Australian and European worker, because the
Chinese standard of living is the lowest in the world. And if
the mode of production in Europe by that time has not yet been
revolutionized, that will then become necessary.
"Capitalist production creates its own demise, and
you can be sure it will do this also in Russia. It can, and if
it lasts long enough, certainly will cause a fundamental agrarian
revolution - I mean a revolution in land ownership which will
ruin landowners as well as kulaks, and replace them with a new
class of big land-owners recruited from village-kulaks and bourgeois
speculators from the cities. At any rate, the conservative elements
who have introduced capitalism into Russia will one day be awfully
astounded by the consequences of their actions."
FREDERICK ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC III, p. 211) London, November 12, 1892
... "The fruits of your peregrinations through France
begin to ripen, and all of us are pleased to see the progress
made in France. Do you realise now what a splendid weapon you
in France have had in your hands for forty years in universal suffrage; if only people had known how to use
it! It's slower and more boring than the call to revolution, but
it's ten times more sure, and what is even better, it indicates
with the most perfect accuracy the day when a call to armed revolution
has to be made; it's even ten to one that universal
suffrage,
intelligently used by the workers, will drive the rulers to overthrow legality, that is, to put us in the most favourable position
to make the revolution."
Engels to August Bebel in Berlin
(MEW 38, pp. 518-9) London, November 19, 1892
... "I must congratulate you on your resolutions. They
are excellent. I only know one person who could do it better,
and that was Marx. The one about state socialism as well as the
one about anti-semitism hits the nail on the head. And exactly
such resolutions were until now the weakness of the German movement;
they are feeble, uncertain, imprecise, verbose; in short, mostly
shameful. Luckily they are so untranslatable that the translator
in a foreign language is forced to put the sense into them which
they didn't have by themselves."
...
FREDERICK ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC III, pp. 220-2) London, December 5, 1892
... "Ah le Panama! I can tell you I am 45 years younger
again, and living through a second 47. Then La Presse (Girardin's)
brought every day a fresh revelation about some scandal, or some
other paper brought a reply to some charge of his; and this went
on till it killed Louis Philippe. But those scandals and even
those of the Second Empire dwindle into nothingness compared with
this grand national Steeplechase of Scandals. Louis Bonaparte
took jolly good care, when he coaxed the peasants' money out of
their buried hoards, to do so for the benefit of his State loans
which were safe; but here the savings of the small tradesman,
the peasant, the domestic servant and above all of the petite
rentier, the loudest howler of all, have gone into irretrievable
ruin, and the miracle has been performed of transforming a canal
which has not been dug out, into an unfathomable abyss.
1,500 million francs, 60 million pound sterling, all gone, gone
for ever, except what has found its way into the pockets of swindlers,
politicians, and journalists; and the money got together by swindles
and corrupt dodges unequaled even in America. What a base of operations
for a socialistic campaign!
"The thing has evidently been based upon its own
immensity. Everybody considered himself safe because everybody
else was as deeply in it. But that is just what now makes hushing
up impossible; partial disclosures having set in, the innumerable
receivers of "boodle" (for here American is the only
possible language) are by their very numbers debarred from common
and concerted action, everybody fights on his own hook and as
best he can, and no talking and preaching can prevent a general
sauve-qui-peut {rout}. That the police
have placed themselves at the disposal of the Committee after
the strike of the courts of law, show that confidence in the stability
of swindle is broken, and that it is considered safe to keep well
with the "financial purity" side.
"To my mind c'est le commencement de la fin {it's the beginning of the end}. The bourgeois republic
and its politicians can hardly outlive this unparalleled exposure.
There are but three possibilities: an attempt at monarchy, another
Boulanger, or socialism. The first and the second, if attempted,
could only lead to the third, and thus we may be called upon,
long before we in consequence of our own action had a right to
expect it, to enter upon a career of immense responsibility. I
should be glad of it, if it does not come too soon and too suddenly.
It will do our Germans good to see that the French have not lost
their historical initiative. A country cannot pass through 200
years like what 1648-1848 were for Germany without leaving a small
impression of the philistine even on the working class. Our revolution
of 48/49 was too short and too incomplete to wipe that out altogether.
Of course, the next revolution which is preparing in Germany with
a consistency and steadiness unequaled anywhere else, would come
of itself in time, say 1898-1904; but revolutionary times, preparing
a thoroughgoing crisis, in France, would hasten that process,
and moreover, if the thing breaks out in France first, say 1894,
then Germany follows suit at once and them the Franco-German Proletarian
Alliance forces the hand of England and smashes up in one blow
both the triple and the Franco-Russian conspiracies; them we have
a revolutionary war against Russia - if not even a revolutionary
echo from Russia - vogue la galère! [And
let it rip!]" ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 243-5) London,
December 31, 1892
.
. . "Here in old Europe things are a little
livelier than in your "youthful" country, which still
doesn't quite want to get out of its hobbledehoy stage. It is
remarkable, but quite natural, how firmly rooted are bourgeois
prejudices even in the working class in such a young country,
which has never known feudalism and has grown up on a bourgeois
basis from the beginning. Out of this very opposition to the mother
country - which is still clothed in its feudal disguise - the
American worker also imagines that the traditionally inherited
bourgeois regime is something progressive and superior by nature
and for all time, a non plus ultra [not to be surpassed]. Just as in New England, Puritanism,
the reason for the whole colony's existence, has become for this
very reason a traditional heirloom and almost inseparable from
local patriotism. The Americans may strain and struggle as much
as they like, but they cannot discount their future - colossally
great as it is - all at once like a bill of exchange; they must
wait for the date on which it falls due; and just because
their future is so great, their present must occupy itself mainly
with preparatory work for the future, and this work, as in every
young country, is of a predominantly material nature and involves
a certain backwardness of thought, a clinging to the traditions
connected with the foundation of the new nationality. The Anglo-Saxon
race - these damned Schleswig-Holsteiners, as Marx always called
them - is slow-witted anyhow, and its history, both in Europe
and America (economic success and predominantly peaceful political
development), has encouraged this still more. Only great events
can be of assistance here, and if, added to the more or less completed
transfer of the public lands to private ownership, there now comes
the expansion of industry under a less insane tariff policy and
the conquest of foreign markets, it may go well with you, too.
The class struggles here in England, too, were more turbulent
during the period of development of large-scale industry
and died down just in the period of England's undisputed industrial
domination of the world. In Germany, too, the development of large-scale
industry since 1850 coincides with the rise of the Socialist movement,
and it will be no different, probably, in America. It is the revolutionising
of all established conditions by industry as it develops
that also revolutionizes people's minds.
"Moreover, the Americans have for a long time been
providing the European world with the proof that the bourgeois
republic is the republic of capitalist businessmen, in which politics
are a business deal like any other; and the French, whose ruling
bourgeois politicians have long known this and practiced it in
secret, are now at last, through the Panama scandal, also learning
this truth on a national scale. But to keep the constitutional
monarchies form putting on virtuous airs, every one of them has
its little Panama: England, the building societies' scandals,
one of which, the Liberator, has thoroughly "liberated"
a mass of small depositors from some £8,000, 000; Germany,
the Baare scandals and Löwe's guns (which prove that the
Prussian officer steals as he always did, but very, very little
- the one thing in which he is modest); Italy, the Banca Romana,
which is already nearly a Panama, having bought up about 150 deputies
and senators; I am informed that documents about this are to be
published in Switzerland shortly - Schlüter should watch
for everything that appears in the papers about the Banca Romana.
And in Holy Russia the Old-Russian Prince Meshchersky is outraged
by the indifference with which the Panama disclosures are received
in Russia and can explain it to himself only by the fact that
Russian virtue has been corrupted by French examples, and "we
ourselves have more than one Panama at home."
"But, all the same, the Panama affair is the beginning
of the end of the bourgeois republic and may soon put us in a
very responsible position. The whole of the opportunist
gang and the majority of the Radicals are disgracefully compromised;
the government is trying to hush it up, but that is no longer
possible; the documentary evidence is in the hands of people who
want to overthrow the present rulers: (1) the Orleanists;
(2) the fallen minister Constans, whose career has been ended
by revelations about his scandalous past; (3) Rochefort and the
Boulangists; (4) Cornelius Herz, who, himself deeply involved
in all sorts of fraud, has evidently fled to London only to buy
himself out by putting the others into a hole. All these have
more than enough evidence against the gang of thieves, but are
holding back, first, in order not to use up all their ammunition
at once, and second, in order to give both the government and
the courts time to compromise themselves beyond
hope of rescue. This can only suit us; enough stuff is coming
to light by degrees to keep up the excitement and to compromise
the dirigeants [leaders] more and more, while it also gives time for the
scandal and the revelations to make their effect felt in the most
remote corner of the country before the inevitable dissolution
of the Chamber and new elections, which however ought not
to come too soon.
"It is clear that this affair brings the moment
considerably nearer when our people will become the only possible
leaders of the state in France. Only things should not move too
quickly; our people in France are not ripe for power by a long
shot. But as things stand at present it is absolutely impossible
to say what intermediate stages will fill out this interval. The
old Republican parties are compromised to the last man, and the
Royalists and Clericals sold Panama lottery tickets on a large
scale and identified themselves with them - if the ass Boulanger
had not shot himself, he would now be master of the situation.
I'm curious to know whether the old unconscious logic of French
history will again hold good this time. There will be plenty of
surprises. If only some general or other does not swing himself
to the top during the intervals of clarification and start war
- that is the one danger."
...
Paul Lafargue was not quite as sanguine as Engels over the prospects of immediate revolution in Europe all because of the Panama scandal, as indicated by his January 2, 1893 reply to Engels (ELC III, pp. 226-7):
. . . "One would have to be
an imbecile to believe that Paris is in an uproar and on the eve
of revolution. I have already told you that the population is
unconcerned; there has not yet been a single popular demonstration;
six years ago, during the Wilson affair, 100,000 people surrounded
the Chambers demanding Grévy's resignation. The police
have had to bring out their anarchists to simulate some sort of agitation; that didn't
come off; the police had to arrest their Pemjean sentenced to
8 month's imprisonment, but let him off this time. The population
in other industrial centres is equally unconcerned; the Panama
swindles don't interest them, they have not been robbed of anything.
It is only the small bourgeois who have lost, and all they care
about is getting their money back; the financiers are busy starting
another Panama. Thiébaud, Boulanger's adviser and bear-leader,
made a speech explaining that it only requires a few millions
to buy a canal and that it would be "a national crime"
if the Americans were allowed to take possession. All the Paris
newspapers published the speech.
"This all goes to show that the population is anything
but revolutionary."
LAURA LAFARGUE TO FREDERICK ENGELS
IN LONDON
(ELC III, p. 225) [January 2, 1893]
... "As for myself, my dear General, you know that it's
enough to be a Marxist and Engelsist to stay young forever!" ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 246-7) Sunday,
January 18, 1893
... "The Fabians here in London are a band of careerists
who have understanding enough to realize the inevitability of
the social revolution, but who could not possibly entrust this
tremendous job to the crude proletariat alone and are therefore
kind enough to set themselves at the head. Fear of the revolution
is their fundamental principle. They are the "eddicated"
par excellence. Their socialism is municipal socialism;
the community, not the nation, should become the owner
of the means of production, at least temporarily. This socialism
of theirs is then represented as an extreme but inevitable consequence
of bourgeois liberalism, and from this follow their tactics, not
to fight the Liberals decisively as opponents, but to push them
on to socialist conclusions: therefore to intrigue with them,
to permeate liberalism with socialism - not to put up Socialist
candidates against Liberals, but to palm them off and force them
upon the Liberals, or to deceive the latter into taking them.
They naturally do not realize that in doing this they are either
betrayed and deceived themselves or else are betraying socialism.
"With great industry they have produced, among all
sorts of rubbish, some good propaganda writing as well, in fact
the best that the English have turned out in this respect. But
as soon as they come to their specific tactic: hushing up the
class struggle, it gets rotten. Hence, too, their fanatical hatred
of Marx and of all of us - because of the class struggle."
"These people have, of course, a considerable bourgeois
following and hence money, and have many able workers in the provinces
who would have nothing to so with the S.D.F." {Hyndman's Social Democratic Federation} ...
Engels to Louis Héritier
(MEW 39, p.12) London, January 20,1893
... "Our working class has to take the few hours it
can dedicate to reading out of rest and sleep; it therefore has
the right to demand that everything we offer it be the result
of conscientious work, and not give occasion to controversies
that it cannot possibly follow."
FREDERICK ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC III, p. 211) London, February 25, 1893
... "As for the Millerand & Co. Rad[ical] Soc[ialists], it is absolutely essential
that the alliance with them should be based on the fact that our
Party is a separate party, and that they recognise that. Which
in no way rules out joint action in the forthcoming elections,
provided that the distribution of seats to be jointly contested
is made in accordance with the actual state of the respective
forces; those gentlemen are in the habit of claiming the lion's
share.
"Do not let the fact that your speeches do not create
as much stir as formerly discourage you. Look at our people in
Germany: they were booed for years on end, and now the 36 dominate
the Reichstag. Bebel writes saying: if we were eighty or a hundred
(out of 400 members), the Reichstag would become an impossibility.
There is not a debate, no matter what the subject, in which we
do not intervene and we are listened to by all the parties. The
debate on the socialist organisation of the future lasted five
days, and Bebel's speech was wanted in three and a half million
copies. Now they are having the whole debate published in
pamphlets at five sous, and the effect, already tremendous, will
be doubled!" ...
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 248-9) London,
March 18, 1893
... "The silver business in America does not seem to
be able to settle down otherwise than through a crash. Nor does {President} Cleveland seem to have the power and
courage to break the necks of this bribery ring. And it would
be really good if things came to a head. A nation - a young
nation - so conceited about its "practice" and so frightfully
dense theoretically as the Americans are gets thoroughly rid of
so deep-rooted a fixed idea only through its own sufferings. The
plausible idea of imagining that there isn't enough money in the
world because one hasn't any when one needs it - this childish
idea common to the paper-currency swindle à la Kellogg
and to the silver swindle is most surely cured by experiment and
bankruptcy, which may also take a course that is very favorable
for us. If only some sort of tariff reform is effected this fall,
you may be quite satisfied. The rest will follow; the main thing
is that American industry is enabled to compete in the world market.
"Here things are going very well. The masses
are unmistakably in motion; you are getting the details from Aveling's
somewhat long-winded reports in the Volkszeitung. The best
evidence is that the old sects are losing ground and must
fall into line. The Social-Democratic Federation has actually
deposed Mr. Hyndman; he is allowed to grumble and complain a bit
about international politics here and there in Justice,
but he is finished - his own people have found him out. The man
provoked me personally and politically wherever he could for ten
years; I never did him the honor of answering him, in the conviction
that he was man enough to ruin himself, and in the end I have
been justified." ...
ENGELS TO MR. F. WIESEN (p. 250)
London, March 14, 1893
"I do not see what violation of the social-democratic
principle is necessarily involved in putting up candidates for
any elective political office or in voting for these candidates,
even if we are aiming at the abolition of this office itself.
"One may be of the opinion that the best way to
abolish the Presidency and the Senate in America is to elect men
to these offices who are pledged to effect their abolition, and
then one will consistently act accordingly. Others may think that
this method is inappropriate; that's a matter of opinion. There
may be circumstances under which the former mode of action would
also involve a violation of revolutionary principle; I fail to
see why that should always and everywhere be the case.
"For the immediate goal of the labor movement is
the conquest of political power for and by the working class.
If we agree on that, the difference of opinion regarding the ways
and means of struggle to be employed therein can scarcely lead
to differences of principle among sincere people who have their
wits about them. In my opinion those tactics are the best in each
country that leads to the goal most certainly and in the shortest
time. But we are yet very far from this goal precisely in America,
and I believe I am not making a mistake in explaining the importance
still attributed to such academic questions over there by this
very circumstance."
...
Engels to Friedrich Adolph Sorge
in Hoboken
(MEW 39, p. 54) London, March 18, 1893
... "A young man from Texas, F. Wiesen in Baird, asked
me to declare something against the nomination of candidates "for
president", that this was a denial of revolutionary principle,
since the position of president was to be done away with. I answered
him the enclosed; should it get to the public in a garbled
form, do me the favor to have it printed in the "Volkszeitung"."
The following is a portion of an interview with Engels by a reporter from Le Figaro about German Socialism. The interview was also reprinted in Le Socialiste of May 20, 1893 (ELC III, pp. 392-3):
"Will the Socialist Party
put up candidates in all the constituencies?"
"Yes, we shall stand candidates in 400 constituencies.
It is important for us to test our strength."
"And the final aim of you German Socialists?"
"But we have no final aim.. We are evolutionists,
we have no intention of dictating definitive laws to mankind.
Preconceptions regarding the detailed organisation of the society
of the future? You will find no trace of any such thing among
us. We shall be quite satisfied when we have put the means of
production into the hands of the community, and we know well enough
that that is impossible with the monarchic and federal government
of to-day."
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 253) London,
May 17, 1893
... "The May First demonstration here was very nice;
but it is already becoming somewhat of an everyday or rather annual
matter; the first fresh bloom is gone. The narrow-mindedness of
the Trades Council and of the socialist sects - Fabians and the
S.D.F. - again compelled us to hold two demonstrations, but everything
went off as desired and we - the Eight-Hour Committee - had many
more people than the united opposition. In particular, our international
platform had a very good audience. I figure that there was a total
of 240,000 in the park, of which we had 140,000, and the opposition
at most 100,000." . . .
ENGELS TO HOURWICH (pp. 253-4)
London, May 27, 1893
... "As to the burning questions of the Russian revolutionary
movement, the part which the peasantry may be expected to take
in it, these are subjects on which I could not conscientiously
state an opinion for publication without previously studying over
again the whole subject and completing my very imperfect knowledge
of the facts of the case by bringing it up to date. But for that,
I am sorry to say, I have not at present the time. And then, I
have every reason to doubt whether such a public statement by
me would have the effect you expect of it. I know from my own
experience (1849-1852) how unavoidably a political emigration
splits itself up into a number of divergent factions so long as
the mother-country remains quiet. The burning desire to act, face
to face with the impossibility of doing anything effective, causes
in many intelligent and energetic heads an overactive mental speculation,
an attempt at discovering or inventing new and almost miraculous
means of action. The word of an outsider would have but a trifling,
and at best a passing, effect. If you have followed the Russian
emigration literature of the last decade, you will yourself know
how, for instance, passages from Marx's writings and correspondence
have been interpreted in the most contradictory ways, exactly
as if they had been texts from the classics or from the New Testament,
by various tions of Russian emigrants. Whatever I might say on
the subject you mention would probably share the same fate, if
any attention was paid to it. And so for all these various reasons,
I think it best for all whom it may concern, including myself,
to abstain."
FREDERICK ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC III, pp. 271-3) London, June 27, 1893
... "Then you say: the French Workers' Party is at one
with German S[ocial] - D[emocracy] against the German Empire, with the Belgian Workers'
Party against the Cob[ourg] monarchy, with the Italians against the Savoy monarchy,
etc., etc.
"There would be nothing against all that if you
had added: and all these parties are at one with us against
the bourgeois Republic which oppresses us, Panamises us and ties
us to the Russian tsar. After all, your Republic was made
by old Wilhelm and Bismarck; it is quite as bourgeois as any of
our monarchist governments, and you mustn't suppose that with
the cry of "Long
live the Republic"
on the day after Panama, you will find a single supporter in the
whole of Europe. The republican form is no more than the simple
negation of monarchy - and the overthrow of the monarchy will
be accomplished simply as a corollary to revolution; in Germany
the bourgeois parties are so bankrupt that we shall pass at once
from monarchy to the social republic. Hence you cannot
go on opposing your bourgeois republic to the monarchies as something
to which other nations should aspire. Your republic and our monarchies
are all one in relation to the proletariat; if you help us against
our monarchist bourgeois, we shall help you against your republican
bourgeois. It's a case of reciprocity and by no means the deliverance
of the downtrodden Monarchists by the great-hearted French Republicans,
this doesn't tally with the international outlook and even less
with the historical situation which has brought your republic
to the feet of the tsar. Don't forget that, if France makes war
on Germany in the interests and with the help of the tsar, it
is Germany which will be the revolutionary centre.
"But there is another very regrettable affair. You
are "at
one with German S[ocial]-D[emocracy] against the German Empire". This has been
translated in the bourgeois press as "gegen das deutsche Reich". And that is what everybody
will see in it. For Empire means "Reich" as well as
"Kaisertum" (imperial regime); but in "Reich"
the emphasis is laid on the central power as representing national
unity, and for this, the political condition of their existence,
the German Socialists would fight to the end. Never would
we wish to reduce Germany to the pre-1866 state of division and
impotence. Had you said against the emperor, or against the imperial
regime, not one could have said much, although poor Wilhelm is
hardly of a stature to deserve being honoured in this way; it
is the owning class, landlords and capitalists, which is the enemy;
and that is so clearly understood in Germany that our workmen
will not understand the meaning of your offer to help them to
defeat the crackpot of Berlin.
"So I have asked Liebk[necht]
not to mention
your declaration insofar as the bourgeois papers do not do so;
but if, based upon this unfortunate expression, there were attacks
on our people as traitors, it would give rise to a rather painful
argument.
"To sum up: a little more reciprocity could do no
harm - equality between nations is as necessary as that between
individuals.
"On the other hand, your manner of speaking of the
republic as a desirable thing in itself for the proletariat, and
of France as the chosen people, prevents you mentioning the -
unpleasant but undeniable - fact of the Russian alliance, or rather
the Russian vassalage."
...
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 256) London,
Oct. 7, 1893
... "I saw De Leon and Sanial in Zurich. They did not
impress me."
Engels to Nikolai Franzewitsch
Danielson in Petersburg
(MEW 39, pp. 148-9) London, October 17, 1893
... "In the Berlin "Sozialpolitisches Centralblatt", a Mr. P. v. Struve
has published a long article about your book. In one respect I
must agree with him: I also think that the present capitalist
phase in the development of Russia is an unavoidable consequence
of the historical conditions which were created by the Crimean
War, of the way in which, in 1861, the revolution in the agrarian
system came about, and of the political stagnation in Europe in
general. He is definitely wrong in comparing Russia's present
situation with that of the United States in order to refute what
he calls your pessimistic view of the future. He says that the
bad consequences of modern capitalism in Russia will be overcome
just as easily as in the United States. Here he is completely
forgetting that the USA from the very beginning were modern, bourgeois;
that they were founded by petit bourgeois and peasants who fled
from European feudalism in order to establish a purely bourgeois
society. In contrast to this, in Russia we have a base of a primitive
communist character, a gentil society stemming from the time before
civilization which, although falling apart, still serves as the
base, the material on which and with which the capitalist revolution
(for it is a real social revolution) operates. America has had
for more than a century a money economy; in Russia the rule was
almost exclusively an economy of exchange of natural products.
Therefore it is a matter of course that the revolution in Russia
has to be much more violent, much more incisive and accompanied
with much more suffering than in America."
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 257-8) London,
Dec. 2, 1893
... "The repeal of the silver-purchase law has saved
America from a severe money crisis and will promote industrial
prosperity. But I don't know whether it wouldn't have been better
for this crash to have actually occurred. The phrase "cheap
money" seems to be bred deep in the bone of your Western
farmers. First, they imagine that if there are lots of means of
circulation in the country, the interest rate must drop, whereby
they confuse means of circulation and available money capital,
concerning which very enlightening things will be brought out
in Volume III {of "Capital"}.
ond, it suits all debtors to contract debts in good currency and
to pay them off later in depreciated currency. That is why the
debt-ridden Prussian Junkers also clamor for a double currency,
which would provide them with a veiled Solonic riddance of their
debts. Now if they had been able to wait with the silver reform
in the United States until the consequences of the nonsense had
also reacted upon the farmers, that would have opened many of
their dense heads.
"The tariff reform, slow as it is in getting started,
does seem to have caused a sort of panic among the manufacturers
in New England already. I hear - privately and from the papers
- of the layoff of numerous workers. But that will calm down as
soon as the law is passed and the uncertainty is over; I am convinced
that America can boldly enter into competition with England in
all the great branches if industry.
"The German socialists in
America are
an annoying business. The people you get over there from Germany
are usually not the best - they stay here - and in any event they
are not at all a fair sample of the German party. And as is the
case everywhere, each new arrival feels himself called upon to
turn everything he finds upside down, turning it into something
new, so that a new epoch may date from himself. Moreover,
most of these greenhorns remain stuck in New York for a long time
or for life, continually reinforced by new additions and relieved
of the necessity of learning the language of the country or of
getting to know American conditions properly. All of that certainly
causes much harm, but, on the other hand, it is not to be denied
that American conditions involve very great and peculiar difficulties
for a steady development of a workers' party.
"First, the Constitution, based as in England upon
party government, which causes every vote for any candidate not
put up by one of the two governing parties to appear to be lost.
And the American, like the Englishman, wants to influence his
state; he does not throw his vote away.
"Then, and more especially, immigration, which divides
the workers into two groups: the native-born and the foreigners,
and the latter in turn into (1) the Irish, (2) the Germans, (3)
the many small groups, each of which understands only itself:
Czechs, Poles, Italians, Scandinavians, etc. And then the Negroes.
To form a single party out of these requires quite unusually powerful
incentives. Often there is a sudden violent élan,
but the bourgeois need only wait passively, and the dissimilar
elements of the working class fall apart again.
"Third, through the protective tariff system and
the steadily growing domestic market the workers must have been
exposed to a prosperity no trace of which has been seen here in
Europe for years now (except in Russia, where, however, the bourgeois
profit by it and not the workers).
"A country like America, when it is really ripe
for a socialist workers' party, certainly cannot be hindered from
having one by the couple of
German socialist
doctrinaires." ...
ENGELS TO SCHLUETER (p. 259)
[London] Dec. 2, 1893
.
. . "Now you are at last on the road to getting
rid of bimetallism and of the McKinley tariff; that will do much
to promote developments over there, though a good silver crash
would have been very good to enlighten the marvelously stupid
American farmer and his cheap money."
. . .
FREDERICK ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC III, p. 325) London, March 6, 1894
... "Then your Mr. Juarès, this doctrinaire professor,
who is nevertheless ignorant, above all, of political economy,
and of essentially superficial talents, misuses his gift of the
gab to push himself to the fore and pose as the mouthpiece of
socialism, which he does not so much as understand. Otherwise
he would never have dared to put forward State socialism
which represents one of the infantile diseases of proletarian
socialism, a disease which they went through in Germany, for example,
more than a dozen years ago, under the regime of the Anti-Socialist
Laws, when that was the only form tolerated by the government
(and even protected by it). And even then only a negligible minority
of the Party was caught in that snare for a short while; after
the Wyden Congress [1880] the
whole thing petered out completely.
"Ah, yes, but we have a republic in France, the
ex-Radicals will say; it's quite another matter in our case, we
can use the government to introduce socialist measures!"
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 261) London,
March 21, 1894
... "After the tariff business is put in order somewhat
over there and the import duty on raw materials is abolished,
the crisis will probably subside and the superiority of American
over European industry will have a telling effect. Only then will
things grow serious here in England; but then they'll do so rapidly." . . .
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 263) London,
May 12, 1894
... "The Social-Democratic Federation here shares with
your German-American Socialists the distinction of being the only parties who have
contrived to reduce the Marxist theory of development to a rigid
orthodoxy, which the workers are not to reach themselves by their
own class feeling, but which they have to gulp down as an article
of faith at once and without development. That is why both of
them remain mere ts and come, as Hegel says, from
nothing through nothing to nothing. I haven't had time as yet to read Schlüter's
polemic with your Germans, but shall look through it tomorrow.
From former articles in the Volkszeitung the right tone
seems to have been struck."
. . .
FREDERICK ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC III, p. 332) London, June 2, 1894
... "It is always on the cards that the whole thing
will not turn out too badly, and even well; but, in the meantime,
you will go through some curious experiences, and I am glad for
us all that there is a solid body of troops in Germany whose actions
will decide the battle. This socialist mania which is emerging
in your country may lead to a decisive struggle in which you win
the first victories; the revolutionary traditions of the country
and of the capital, the character of your army, reorganised since
1870 on a far more popular basis - all this makes such an eventuality
possible. But to ensure victory, to destroy the foundations of
capitalist society, you will need the active support of a much
stronger, more numerous, more tried and more conscious socialist
party than you have at your command. It would mean the achievement
of what we have foreseen and predicted for many years. The French
give the signal, open fire, and the Germans decide the battle.
"In the meantime, we are nowhere near that and I
am very curious to see how the confused enthusiasm surrounding
you will resolve itself."
...
Engels to Karl Kautsky in Stuttgart
(MEW 39, p. 277) London, July 28, 1894
"In all of America not a single intelligent correspondent
can be found, with the exception of Sorge and Schlüter, because
the Germans there stubbornly adhere to the same tarian attitude
towards the working masses which is maintained here by the Social
Democratic Federation. Instead of viewing the movements of the
Americans as the progressive element which, even through wrong
ways and detours, must finally lead to the same result as that
which they brought with them from Europe, they see in them (in
the American movements) only the wrong ways and pompously look
down on the stupid
blind Americans,
brag about their orthodox superiority, repulse the Americans instead of attracting them, and
they therefore themselves remain a powerless little sect. For that reason their writers fall into pure ideology and see all conditions wrongly and narrowly." ...
FREDERICK ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC III, p. 341) [August 23 or 24, 1894]
... "The last two
{Congresses} will
deal with the question of peasants and rural workers. In general
the views of the two national groups are the same, save that you {in France}, the uncompromising revolutionaries
of yesterday, now lean rather further towards opportunism than
the Germans, who will probably not support any measure serving
to maintain and store up the smallholding against the disintegrating
action of capitalism. On the other hand, they will agree with
you that it is not our task to accelerate or force this
disintegrating action, and the important thing is for small landowners
to combine in agricultural associations to farm jointly on a large
scale."
ENGELS TO SORGE (p. 263-6) London,
Nov. 10, 1894
... "The movement over here still resembles the American
movement, save that it is somewhat ahead of you. The mass
instinct that the workers must form a party of their own against
the two official parties is getting stronger and stronger; it
again showed itself more than ever in the municipal elections
on November 1st. But the various old traditional memories, and
the lack of people able to turn this instinct into conscious action
and to organize it all over the country, encourage the persistence,
in this early stage, of haziness of thought and local isolation
of action. Anglo-Saxon sectarianism prevails in the labor movement,
too. The Social-Democratic Federation, just like your German Socialist Labor Party, has managed to transform our theory into the rigid dogma
of an orthodox sect.
It is narrow-mindedly exclusive and, thanks to Hyndman, it has
a thoroughly rotten tradition in international politics, which
is shaken from time to time, to be sure, but which hasn't been
broken with as yet. ...
"The war in China has given the old China a deathblow.
Isolation has become impossible; the introduction of railways,
steam engines, electricity, and large-scale industry has become
a necessity if only for reasons of military defense. But with
it the old economic system of small peasant agriculture, where
the family also made its industrial products itself, falls to
pieces too, and with it the whole old social system which made
relatively dense population possible. Millions will be turned
out and forced to emigrate; and the millions will find their way
to Europe, en masse. But as soon as Chinese competition sets in
on a mass scale, it will rapidly bring things to a head in your
country and over here, and thus the conquest of China by capitalism
will at the same time furnish the impulse for the overthrow of
capitalism in Europe and America."
...
FREDERICK ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
(ELC III, p. 366) London, January 22, 1895
... "So that, with the complete revolution in weapons
since 1870 and, in consequence, of tactics, there is a total uncertainty
about the outcome of a war where so many imponderables are involved
and regarding which all the calculations made in advance are based
on fictitious quantities."
...
ENGELS TO SORGE (pp. 269-70)
London, Jan. 16, 1895
. . . "The temporary decline of the movement in America
has attracted my attention for some time now, and the German socialists
won't stop
it. America is the youngest, but also the oldest
country in the world. Over there you have old-fashioned furniture
styles alongside those you have invented all yourselves, cabs
in Boston such I last saw in 1838 in London, and in the mountains
stagecoaches dating from the seventeenth century alongside the
Pullman cars, and in the same way you keep all the intellectual
old clothes discarded in Europe. Anything that is out of date
over here can survive in America for one or two generations. Karl
Heinzen, for instance, not to mention religious and spiritualist
superstition. Thus the old Lassalleans still survive among you, and men like Sanial, who
would be superannuated in France today, can still play a role
over there. That is due, on the one hand, to the fact that America
is only now beginning to have time, beyond concern for material
production and enrichment, for free intellectual labor and the
preparatory education that this requires; and, on the other hand,
to the duality of American development, which is still engaged
in the primary task - clearing the tremendous virgin area
- but is already compelled to enter the competition for first
place in industrial production. Hence the ups and downs of the
movement, depending on whether the mind of the industrial worker
or that of the pioneering farmer gains predominance in the average
man's head. Things will be different in a couple of years, and
then great progress will be observed. For the development of the
Anglo-Saxon race with its old Germanic freedom is quite peculiar,
slow, zigzag in form (here in England in small zigzags, in your
country colossal ones), a tacking against the wind, but it advances
none the less." ...
Engels to Karl Kautsky in Stuttgart
(MEW 39, p. 484) London, May 21, 1895
... "One more thing. I have suggested to Sorge that
he should publish his articles about the American movement separately
when they are finished. He agreed, but says that there will be
much to be worked over, to be improved and filled out, and that
before the next summer vacation he would hardly find time. He
accepted my proposal to bring up the matter with Dietz. Will you
be so kind as to ask Dietz whether he would like to take it on,
and if yes, under what terms. The articles are the best and only
authentic writings we have about the American movement, and
I consider it very desirable that they should be preserved for
the public as a separate entity."
As far as I know, the series of articles by Sorge that were serialized in the Neue Zeit were not collected, translated and made available to the public, aside from the batch that went into his "The Labor Movement in the United States". If Engels thought that they were so valuable, it may be past time to make them available.