Letter to Eduard Bernstein, February 2, 1881

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 2 February 1881


First published, in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Book I, Moscow, 1924
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 46


ENGELS TO EDUARD BERNSTEIN

IN ZURICH

London, 2 February 1881

Dear Mr Bernstein,

Enclosed a letter to Kautsky,[1] which kindly forward; I don't know whether the Vienna address I was given is still the right one.

The 5 nos. of the Sozialdemokrat since the year began testify to a significant step forward. Gone are the melancholy, despairing tones of a 'beaten man', the complementary grandiloquence of stuffy respectability, the incessant revolutionary rhetoric à la Most alternating with philistine tameness, finally the constant preoccupation with Most. The tone has become lively and purposeful. The paper will no longer act as an opiate if it stays like this; rather it will put new heart into our people in Germany. As you have the Neue Rheinische Zeitung you would do well to take a look at it occasionally. The mockery and contempt with which we treated our opponents were precisely what brought us in almost 6,000 subscribers in the 6 months prior to the state of siege[2] and, although we started again from scratch in November, we again had the full tally and more by May '49. The Kölnische Zeitung has now admitted that in those days it only had 9,000.

As it seems that you are short of material for your feuilleton, you might, sometime, reprint the poem from No. 44 of 1848: 'This morning I went to Düsseldorf; possibly with the title 'A Socialist-Eater of 1848' (feuilleton to the Neue Rheinische Zeitung of 14 July 1848) and, under it, the author: Georg Weerth (died Havana, 1856).[3] So just keep it up!

Yours,

F. E.

'Thou shalt not steal' and the apology for the execution of Louis XVI are very good.

  1. ↑ See previous letter.
  2. ↑ The original of this letter is kept at the Engels family archive in Engelskirchen.
  3. ↑ This is a covering letter to Marx's Marginal Notes on the Programme of the German Workers' Party, which went down in history as Critique of the Gotha Programme (see present edition, Vol. 24). Marx's letter to Bracke was first published by Engels, together with the Critique of the Gotha Programme, in 1891 in Die Neue Zeit, Vol. 1, No. 18. An excerpt from this letter was published in English for the first time in The Socialist Series, number one, under the title 'The Socialist Programme. By Karl Marx', The Socialist Labour Press, Glasgow [1918]. It appeared in English in full in: K. Marx and F. Engels, Selected Works. In two volumes, Moscow-Leningrad, 1936.