Letter to Carlo Terzaghi, after January 6, 1872 (First Version)

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 6 January 1872


First version of the letter, drafted after 6 January 1872
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 44

ENGELS TO CARLO TERZAGHI[1]

IN TURIN

[First Version]

[Draft]

London [after 6 January 1872]
122 Regent's Park Road

My dear Terzaghi,

I received your letter of 4 December last year, and if I have not replied sooner, it was because I wanted to give you a precise answer about the matter which interests you most of all, namely the fund for the Proletario. I am now in a position to provide it.

We have very little money, and the millions of the International exist solely in the terrified imagination of the bourgeoisie and of the police, who cannot understand how an association like ours has been able to achieve such an important position without having money amounting to millions at its disposal. If they had only seen the accounts submitted at the last Conference[2] ! But never mind; let them go on believing it, it will do us no harm. It had already been decided, on receipt of your letter, to take out a number of shares in the Proletario, in the name of the General Council represented by me, but then the news reached us of the split which you had caused[3] and it was considered doubtful that the newspaper could go on being produced after it. Then there were the holidays, which meant that the meeting of the 26th did not take place, etc., etc. At last I can tell you that if you wish to continue the newspaper, and if there are solid grounds for hoping that this can be done, I am authorised to send you five pounds, i.e. roughly a hundred and sixty Italian lire, in return for which you can send me the corresponding amount of shares in my name. Write to me, then, by return of courier so that if, as I hope, the newspaper is to reappear, I can send you the money without delay.

Tell me at the same time whether the addresses given in your last letter (C. C[eretti] Mirandola, E. P[escatori] Bologna) will be enough to write to them, with no other indication of street or number, because I would not like my letters to be written for any Mordecaian[4] to read.

You will probably have been sent a circular by the congress of the Jura Federation in Switzerland attacking the General Council and demanding the immediate convocation of a Congress.[5] The General Council will reply to these attacks, but in the meantime a reply has appeared in the Egalité in Geneva,[6] which I sent you three days ago together with two English newspapers containing summaries of the meetings of the General Council.[7] These citizens, who first looked for an argument with us using the pretext of the Conference, now attack us because we are carrying out the resolutions of the Basle Congress, resolutions which have the force of law for us and which we are obliged to carry out.[8] They do not want the authority of the General Council, not even if it were to be voluntarily consented to by all I would really like to know how without this authority (as they call it) the Tolains, the Durands and the Nechayevs could have been dealt with according to their deserts and how, with that fine-sounding phrase about the autonomy of the sections, they expect to prevent the formation of sections of Mordecaians and traitors. Besides, what did these same men do at the Basle Congress? With Bakunin they were the most ardent advocates of these resolutions proposed not by the General Council, but by the delegates from Belgium!

If, however, you want to have an idea of what they have done and can do for the International, read the official report of the Federal Committee to the congress of the Jura Federation in the Revolution sociale, Geneva, No. 5, 23 November 1871, and you will see to what a state of dissolution and impotence they have reduced in one year a federation which was well established before.[9]

It seems to me that the term authority is much abused. I know of nothing more authoritarian than a revolution, and when one fights with bombs and rifle bullets against one's enemies, this is an authoritarian act. If there had been a little more authority and centralisation in the Paris Commune, it would have triumphed over the bourgeois. After the victory we can organise ourselves as we like, but for the struggle it seems to me necessary to collect all our forces into a single band and direct them on the same point of attack. And when people tell me that this cannot be done without authority and centralisation, and that these are two things to be condemned outright, it seems to me that those who talk like this either do not know what a revolution is, or are revolutionaries in name only.[10]

Write to me, therefore, about the matter without delay. Greetings and fraternity.

Yours,

F. Engels

🔍 See also : Letter to Carlo Terzaghi, January 14-15, 1872 (Second Version).
  1. ↑ In a letter to Engels dated 4 December 1871 Carlo Terzaghi applied for financial assistance for II Proletario Italiano newspaper, of which he was publisher. Engels drafted a reply after 6 January 1872. However, before the letter was despatched Engels read in the Gazzettino Rosa of Terzaghi's support for the demand of the Bakuninist Jura Federation that a General Congress be convened without delay. Thus, on 14[-15] January Engels wrote another letter with only the first two paragraphs of the old draft left more or less intact. The remainder was written partly between the deleted lines of the first draft and partly on a clean sheet. Engels wrote in German across Terzaghi's letter: 'Answered on 6 January 1872-14 January.'
    The second version of the letter was published in English for the first time in: Marx and Engels, Selected Correspondence, Foreign Languages Publishing House, Moscow, 1955.
  2. ↑ the London Conference of 1871
  3. ↑ In December 1871 in the Turin Workers' Federation (Federazione operaia), set up in late September of that year, a split occurred between the supporters of the International (including the Bakuninists) and the Mazzinians. The Mazzinians' opponents left the Federation to form a society called the Emancipation of the Proletarian (La Emancipazione del Proletario), which declared itself a section of the International. It consisted of workers from the railway workshops, the machine-building works and the arsenal. The Bakuninist Carlo Terzaghi was elected secretary. Later he was dismissed from the position and exposed as a police agent.
  4. ↑ The Mordecaians— see this volume, p. 246.-292, 305, 357
  5. ↑ The Congress of the Bakuninist Jura Federation held in Sonvillier on 12 November 1871 adopted the Sonvillier circular, 'Circulaire à toutes les fédérations de l'Association Internationale des Travailleurs'. It was directed against the General Council and the 1871 London Conference, and countered the Conference decisions with anarchist phrases about the sections' political indifferentism and complete autonomy. The Bakuninists proposed that all the federations demand the immediate convocation of a congress to revise the General Rules and to condemn the General Council's actions.
    The International's sections in Germany, Britain, France, Belgium, Holland, the USA, and also the Section in Milan, came out against the circular. Engels gave the Bakuninists a vigorous rebuff in his article 'The Congress of Sonvillier and the International' (present edition, Vol. 23).
  6. ↑ A reference to the 'Réponse du Comité fédéral romand à la Circulaire des 16 signataires, membres du Congrès de Sonvilliers', resolutions of Thirty Sections in Geneva (see Note 398), and the 'Déclaration de la rédaction' directed against the Sonvillier circular. They appeared in L'Égalité, No. 24, 24 December 1871.
  7. ↑ The Eastern Post, Nos. 168 and 169, 16 and 23 December 1871, carried reports on the General Council meetings of 12 and 19 December.
  8. ↑ On 23 December 1871 the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 300, and on 28 December, the Norddeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, No. 302, printed a report on the 1871 London Conference, including the texts of its resolutions. At Marx's request Eleanor Marx informed Liebknecht on 29 December (see this volume, p. 571) that the report was a falsification. On 30 December Der Volksstaat, No. 104, printed a statement in its 'Politische Uebersicht' column pointing out that the above-mentioned resolutions were falsified.
    Engels referred to it as the 'Stieberian escapade' after Wilhelm. Stieber, the organiser of the trumped-up Communist trial in Cologne (1852). On the trial, see Note 138.
  9. ↑ A reference to the report of the Bakuninist committee to the Sonvillier congress of 5 October 1871. The committee, after the split in the Romance Federation in April 1870, continued illegitimately to call itself the Romance Federal Committee. The report cited facts about the anarchist sections supporting the Bakuninists (mostly in highland Jura).
  10. ↑ Marginal note by Engels (in German): 'This is not quite right.'