Letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, December 7, 1872

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 7 December 1872


First published in Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Joh. Phil. Becker, Jos. Dietzgen, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx u. A. an F. A. Sorge und Andere, Stuttgart, 1906
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 44


ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH ADOLPH SORGE

IN HOBOKEN

London, 7 December[1] 1872

Dear Sorge,

Today I am sending you the Emancipation 76, The International Herald 36 and the Blanquist pamphlet,[2] which is quite unobtainable here and which I was only able to acquire this morning in a roundabout way. Serraillier has written off in answer to the Liberie in Brussels and the Egalité in Geneva, but those jackasses from the Égalité say it is too personal and refuse to print it!

On 3.12. I sent you the Emancipation 74/75, the Plebe 117 and The International Herald 33-35.

MacDonnel sailed for New York on Wednesday, I gave him a few lines for you.[3] If the Fenians there[4] should still mistrust him, you would be doing a service if you could reassure them; he helped us here very ably and quite selflessly.

1. Holland. Van der Hout arrived here the day before yesterday; the Dutch bourgeois will give him no more work, so he wants to look for some here. He says that the Jurassians had invited the Dutch Federation to a new separatist congress.[5] Whereupon they held a Dutch congress[6] at which they resolved: 1. to stand by the General Council, 2. to send a delegate to the separatist congress, but only to report, not to vote, 3. not to recognise any congress but the legitimate one of September 1873 and only to put their complaints, etc., to it. So this amounts to the divorce of the Dutch and the separatists.

2. Spain. You will have seen from the Emancipation that all is going well there. Apart from those known to you, Lérida, the new federation of Cadiz, a large proportion of the Valencians and Pont de Vilumara have come out against the Federal Council. After the Spanish Federal Council directly contravened both the General and the special Spanish Rules by convening a congress in Cordoba on 25 December" to choose between the resolutions of The Hague and Saint-Imier, the New Madrid Federation announced that the Federal Council had forfeited its mandate, and is calling for the election of a new provisional Federal Council.[7] This decisive step will soon clarify the position. In the meantime, a section of our people in Spain, above all the Catalan factory workers, think that the issue should be fought out at the congress in Cordoba, and so will not join in for the present. The Alliance people are hurrying matters along so as to have a majority in Cordoba and they will most probably succeed in their aim, after which the Catalans will formally come over to us.

3. France. Despite the intrigues of the Jurassians and the Blanquists things are going well in the South, where there will be a congress in the next few days which will endorse the Hague resolutions and will probably issue an address to the General Council.[8] However, they demand that there should be someone here with plenary powers who can also delegate temporary powers for France. There is a whole pile of money to be raised which can only be collected by a fully authorised agent on the spot. Larroque, our best man in Bordeaux, is now asking Serraillier and myself to grant him such authority to collect monies there, and I think I am justified in doing so by virtue of the money-raising powers conferred on me, until such a time as this is confirmed or cancelled by the General Council. Since it is vital that there should be somebody at the congress I have just referred to who does have some sort of authority emanating from the General Council, I am taking it upon myself to issue it to him,[9] and if you disapprove you should inform me at once so that it can be withdrawn without delay.—Lyons is the only place where the Jurassians have some support, thanks to the indolence of the Genevans, but otherwise they have only individuals on their side. You will have seen that the Bulletin jurassien has taken the side of that policeman, Bousquet, and has declared him to be a man of honour.[10]

4. England. The opposition to Hales is growing. Murray, Milner and Dupont have come onto the FEDERAL COUNCIL and will be joined by others. Riley has declared that he no longer wishes to have The International Herald as the official organ of this FEDERAL COUNCIL and, as you will see, the relevant part of the title has disappeared. However, it will probably be a while before the swindle finally collapses. The Hague resolutions[11] will appear in the next International Herald, as will also some reports by us on the course of events in the International.[12]

We do not even have a complete set of the minutes[13] Hales still has some. It would be a very good thing therefore if you could authorise Marx to take possession of all the papers belonging to the International and/or the old General Council, and particularly the minutes.[14]

A letter of authority for Serraillier for France is absolutely indispensable,6 ' unless you want everything to fall apart once more. Serraillier is continuing to conduct his correspondence energetically and we are finding the money for him to do so, but he is nothing but a private individual as long as he has not received proper authorisation; and for all their autonomy, the French do want to be directed by someone who has been duly authorised by the General Council. We have nobody else but Serraillier for the job here; Dupont is much too unreliable for such an extensive correspondence and is too busy with his patent.

Greetings from Marx together with his family and from my wife.[15] Lafargue and Longuet are both here now so that père Marx is surrounded by his entire family.

Your

F. E.

Greetings to Cuno. Why does the scamp not write?

  1. ↑ In the original: 'September'.
  2. ↑ Internationale et révolution
  3. ↑ This letter by Engels has not been found.
  4. ↑ A reference to the Irish sections of the International Working Men's Association in the USA. Their members were mostly former Fenians (see Note 6).
  5. ↑ Engels ironically applied the name Sonderbund (a separate union) to the emerging bloc of anarchists and their supporters who opposed the decisions of the Hague Congress. The original Sonderbund was a separatist association of reactionary Swiss Catholic cantons that existed in the 1840s.
  6. ↑ A reference to the congress of a number of the Dutch sections of the International held in Amsterdam on 24 November 1872. It was convened by the Dutch Federal Council as a response to the anarchist campaign against the resolutions of the Hague Congress.
  7. ↑ Marx wrote this letter to Jung after he had received resolutions from the Central Committee of the German-speaking sections in Switzerland which endorsed the General Council's proposal to defer the regular congress of the International due on 5 September 1870.
    A copy, handwritten by Marx, of the resolution of the Committee of the Social-Democratic Workers' Party was enclosed with the letter.
  8. ↑ On 25 December 1872 a private conference of the International Working Men's Association's branches in Southern France was held in Toulouse and attended by delegates from Toulouse, Montpellier, Bordeaux, Béziers, Sète, Agen, Narbonne, Bayonne, Avignon, Castelnaudary, Lavardac, Perpignan, etc. The conference was to endorse the resolutions of the Hague Congress and put up a fight against the Bakuninists. These plans, however, were foiled by arrests of the International's members, which began at that time in Southern France.
  9. ↑ F. Engels. 'Mandate to E. Larroque'.
  10. ↑ Engels is referring to Jules Montels' letter protesting at the expulsion from the International's Béziers section of anarchist Abel Bousquet, a police officer. The letter was published in Bulletin de la Fédération jurassienne, No. 20-21, 10 November 1872.
  11. ↑ K. Marx and F. Engels, 'Resolutions of the General Congress Held at The Hague from the 2nd to the 7th September, 1872'.
  12. ↑ In conformity with the agreement signed by the publisher and proprietor of n The International Herald William Riley and the British Federal Council, from 11 May 1872 (No. 6) the paper functioned as the Council's official organ. It was at Marx's suggestion that Riley broke the agreement on 30 November 1872 and refused to give the reformist majority of the British Council an opportunity to use the newspaper against the General Council. After the revolutionary wing of the British Federal Council formed a new Council in late December 1872 (see Note 643), the paper resumed its functions as the Council's mouthpiece.
    The Hague Congress resolutions were published in The International Herald, No. 37, 14 December 1872. Reports on the International's activities on the Continent written by Engels were published between mid-January and mid-February 1873 (see present edition, Vol. 23, pp. 409-13).
  13. ↑ of the London General Council
  14. ↑ The Manchester Foreign Section of the International Working Men's Association was formed in August 1872, mostly of emigrant workers. It resolutely opposed the reformist wing of the British Federal Council and supported Marx's and Engels' efforts to strengthen the British Federation and purge it of the elements that were disorganising its work. The circular mentioned by Engels was written by him at the request of the Manchester section in reply to the circular of 10 December 1872 drawn up by the reformist wing which had seceded from the British Federal Council. After the section had approved it, Engels' circular was published as a leaflet and sent to all members of the International in Great Britain (see present edition, Vol. 23, pp. 304-08).
  15. ↑ Lydia Burns