Letter to Karl Marx, June 27, 1851

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 27 June 1851


First published in Der Briefwechsel zwischen F. Engels und K. Marx, Bd. 1, Stuttgart, 1913
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 38


[Manchester,] 27 June 1851

Dear Marx,

It is very bonasse[1] of the good Saxon police actually to inform us themselves of what we did not previously know or could not have discovered. Burgers' didactically dignified circular letter with the familiar clair-obscur[2] of its reasoning must have cost them much fruitless brain-racking[3] ; they even picked out all the wrong passages for printing in bold. A pretty figure the great Windmillers[4] cut now, thrown out of their own party before the eyes of the whole world, the great Willich bracketed with Haude, Gebert and other such unknown rabble, with a certain 'Schopper' (derived from 'Schoppen')[5] whose rare services are so little known that even in Cologne they can't print his name correctly! So FAR ALL RIGHT. But Article I of the Rules bodes ill for the arrested men: 'all methods of revolutionary activity', or however it goes.[6] It removes the business from the sphere of mere prohibited association to that of high treason. To judge, by the way, from an allusion in the Kölnische Zeitung, I would seem to be right in supposing that the intention is to arraign the whole company in Berlin before the State tribunal which is to be brought into being specifically for this grandiose occasion.

The utter failure of the government's attempt to make a bogy out of the great Dresden disclosure augurs well for the mood of the bourgeoisie. So little terror does the red spectre now hold for the bourgeois that he refuses to listen to talk of a big communist plot and is already beginning to fear that the system of house searches will ere long be extended to himself.

Not a single paper has taken the bait and the government's frantic endeavour to discover further machinations in gymnastic societies, 'free communities'[7] and among democratically-minded master tailors proves, on the one hand, how much it is vexed by the indifference of the bourgeoisie whose curiosity it is seeking to whet, and, on the other, how little the Rules and the circular letter have led to further disclosures. It would seem that Miquel's house also was searched in vain.

Qu'y a-t-il de nouveau a Londres?[8]

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ kindly
  2. ↑ half-light
  3. ↑ The reference is to the Address of the Cologne Central Authority of the Communist League of 1 December 1850, which was discovered by the police during the arrests of Communist League members in Dresden and published in the Kölnische Zeitung and other bourgeois papers in June 1851. On the whole, the authors of the Address, especially Bürgers, supported Marx and Engels in their condemnation of the splitting activities of the Willich-Schapper group. They stated in the Address that the Cologne Central Authority was expelling from the League all the members of the separatist union set up by Willich and Schapper. However, instead of disclosing the real causes of the split in the League, the Address put the blame partially on Marx and his followers. Some propositions set forth in the Address were vague and obscure.
  4. ↑ members of the London German Workers' Educational Society
  5. ↑ 'Der communistische Bund', Kölnische Zeitung, No. 150, 24 June 1851. Instead of 'Schapper' the paper had 'Schopper', on which Engels made a pun by deriving it from 'Schoppen'—'a pint pot'.
  6. ↑ On the new Rules of the Communist League see Note 342. The first paragraph of the Rules said: 'The aim of the Communist League is to bring about the destruction of the old society—and the overthrow of the bourgeoisie—the spiritual, political and economic emancipation of the proletariat, the communist revolution, using all the resources of propaganda and political struggle towards this goal...' (see present edition, Vol. 10, p. 634).
  7. ↑ Friends of Light—a religious trend which arose in 1841. It was directed against pietism which, supported by Junker circles and predominant in the official Protestant Church, was distinguished by extreme mysticism and bigotry. The 'Friends of Light' movement was an expression of bourgeois discontent with the reactionary order in Germany in the 1840s, which led in 1846-47 to the formation of so-called free communities, which broke away from the official Protestant Church.
  8. ↑ What's new in London?