Letter to Wilhelm Bracke, June 25, 1877

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 25 June 1877


First published in Braunschweiger Volksfreund, Nr. 148, 1877
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


ENGELS TO WILHELM BRACKE

IN BRUNSWICK

London, 25 June 1877

Dear Bracke,

Many thanks for your remittance of £15.1.2. in payment of interest which has been credited to you with thanks.

You should simply transfer the fee of 30 marks[1] to your election fund, if only by way of a sop to the man's conscience.

As for the next Kalender,[2] let us wait a bit before deciding what to do. After all, there's almost a year to go.

The beginning of Dühring, 'Political Economy',[3] goes off to Leipzig today. Liebknecht maintains that the congress resolution in no way affects my articles. I can only assume the same since the congress is not, after all, empowered to make arbitrary use of my articles or, without my consent, to relieve Liebknecht of the commitment he entered into vis-à-vis myself on the strength of a resolution adopted by last year's congress.[4]

You really are a martyr to ill-health. One might almost think that Brunswick had a dreadfully unwholesome climate. Gout, rheumatism, measles and an unknown complaint into the bargain—it's truly horrifying! I hope that all will end well.

What a wretched, petty-minded creature that Helmholtz must be so much as to let himself be irritated by the remarks of a Dühring, let alone be irritated to the extent of confronting the Berlin faculty with the alternative: either Dühring goes or I go![5] As though all that Dühring has written, rabidly envious as it is, was of any more consequence to science than a fart! But admittedly Helmholtz, though a quite outstanding experimentalist, is no whit superior to Dühring as a thinker. And then again, a German professorship—particularly in Berlin—is the top of German petty-bourgeois philistinism and provincialism. Where else could a man of, for example, Virchow's scientific repute set his highest sights on—becoming a town councillor!

You will yet be surprised at the kind of stuff the Turks are made of. If only we had in Germany a parliament such as that in Constantinople! So long as the mass of the people—in this case the Turkish peasant and even the Turkish middle landowner—remains sound, and sound he is, an oriental polity such as this is capable of withstanding a quite incredible amount of buffeting. Any other nation would have been destroyed by four hundred years of metropolitan corruption, a legacy from the Byzantines; all the Turks need do to be a complete match for Russia is slough off the topmost layer. Treachery, venality on the part of army leaders and commandants of fortresses, the squandering of money destined for the army, defalcation of all kinds, everything that would ruin any other state, is to be found in abundance in Turkey, but not in such abundance as to effect its ruin. The only danger for the Turks lies in the meddling of European diplomats, notably the English who are restraining the Turks from making uninhibited use of their military resources and expect them to put up with the most unheard-of provocation. Thus when, for instance, the Romanians let the Russians into their country,[6] the Turks were supposed to regard this as an act of neutrality and neither to occupy nor to consolidate the bridgeheads of their fortresses on Wallachian territory[7] —not on your life! That would infringe Romania's neutrality! And the Turks were good-natured enough to comply with this English and Austrian claptrap and thus reduce the defensive qualities of their Danubian fortifications by more than half!

The crossing of the Danube by the Russians at Matshin, which I foretold in conversation with Marx as much as three weeks ago, is an admission of their inability to force a crossing where it would have been of some use, namely above the Dobrudja.[8] The Russians will have to send at least two or three army corps through the Dobrudja if they want to carry the Chernavoda-Küstend[9] positions—how they propose to supply them and how many will reach their destination, I should dearly like to know. This action has been forced upon the Russians by the defeat of the Montenegrins which they could not allow to happen without doing something about it. No doubt the campaign will now get under way, and the Russians are faced with the choice of sending as many troops across the Danube as military necessity demands but they will be unable to feed them, or of sending fewer—no more than they can feed,—whereupon the campaign will soon come to a halt. Nevertheless, the immediate future will probably see a rash of Russian victories on the Danube—none of which will be of the least significance.

Kindest regards from your

F. E.

  1. ↑ Engels was entitled to a fee for his article 'Karl Marx' written for Bracke's nes was Volks-Kalender for 1878 (see Note 275).
  2. ↑ Volks Kalender
  3. ↑ The publication of Eugen Dühring's Cursus der Philosophie als streng wissenschlicher Weltanschauung und Lebensgestaltung and the second edition of his Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Sozialismus (1875) made his views very popular in Germany. Among the German Social-Democrats, he acquired such followers as Johann Most, Friedrich Wilhelm Fritzsche, and Eduard Bernstein. Even August Bebel came under his influence for a short time. In view of this, in his letters to Engels of 1 February and 21 April 1875, Liebknecht proposed that the latter use Der Volksstaat to criticise Dühring's views.
    Engels did so for the first time in the essay 'Prussian Schnapps in the German Reichstag' carried by Der Volksstaat in February 1876 (see present edition, Vol. 24).
    Marx agreed with Engels that Dühring's views had to be exposed to serious criticism. Engels interrupted the work on Dialectics of Nature which he had begun in May 1873 and made a start on Anti-Dühring (see present edition, Vol. 25). It took him over two years, from May 1876 to July 1878, to complete it. Part I of the book was mainly written between September 1876 and January 1877 and was printed in the Vorwärts as a series of articles under the heading Herrn Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung der Philosophie in January-May 1877.
    Part II was written in July-August 1877. Marx contributed Chapter X. This part was published under the heading Herrn Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung der politischen Oekonomie in the Wissenschaftliche Beilage and the supplement to the Vorwärts in July-December 1877.
    Part III was written mostly between August 1877 and April 1878 and appeared in the Vorwärts in May-July 1878 under the title Herrn Eugen Dühring's Umwälzung des Sozialismus.
    The book aroused strong resistance on the part of Dühring's followers. At a regular party congress held in Gotha from 27 to 29 May 1877, they tried to prevent the publication of Engels' work in the party's central organ. Anti-Dühring appeared in the newspaper with lengthy intervals.
    In July 1877, Part I of the book was published in Leipzig as a separate pamphlet. In July 1878, Parts II and III were also published there as a separate pamphlet. The first complete edition of Anti-Dühring, with Engels' preface, appeared at the same time.
    In late October 1878, following the introduction of the Anti-Socialist Law in Germany, Anti-Dühring was banned along with Engels' other works.
  4. ↑ At the 29 May sitting of the Gotha Congress of the German Socialist Workers' Party (27-29 May 1877), Dühring's followers demanded that the publication of Engels' Anti-Dühring be stopped in the party's central organ. The proposal was made by Johann Most and Julius Vahlteich. August Bebel proposed that Engels' work appear as a separate edition rather than in the Vorwärts. Referring to the resolution of the 1876 congress concerning the publication of Engels' articles, Wilhelm Liebknecht suggested that they should be carried either by the scientific supplement to the Vorwärts or in the Zukunft magazine, or as separate pamphlets. Parts II and III of Anti-Dühring appeared in the supplement to the Vorwärts.
  5. ↑ From 1872, Dühring, a lecturer at the University of Berlin, fiercely attacked university professors including Prof. Helmholtz, and also some aspects of university life. For this, he suffered reprisals at the hands of the reactionary professors and, in July 1877, on the insistence of the faculty of philosophy was deprived of the right to lecture. His followers launched a vigorous protest campaign, and the democratic quarters at large denounced his expulsion.
  6. ↑ In March 1877, the Romanian government agreed to let Russian troops pass through its territory. On 24 April Russia declared war on Turkey.
  7. ↑ See this volume, p. 228.
  8. ↑ On 22 (10) June 1877, Russian troops crossed the Lower Danube. On the Russian army's crossing of the Middle Danube, see Note 294.
  9. ↑ Romanian name: Constanja.