Letter to Karl Kautsky, September 18, 1883

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 18 September 1883


First published, in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Vol. I (VI), Moscow, 1932
Printed according to the original
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO KARL KAUTSKY

IN STUTTGART

London, 18 September 1883

Dear Mr Kautsky,

As regards the Geiser business, I do not believe the time has yet come for me to intervene.[1] The chaps must first compromise themselves a bit more in the eyes of the public. The paltry little flysheet and the failure of the motion on the right to work are not enough; they must express themselves in yet stronger terms if we are to get a proper hold on them and if they are not to lie their way out by pleading false excuses. Meanwhile it would be most helpful if you would gather together material in this connection, for the moment will come when we shall have to have a go at these gentlemen. There's no immediate hurry.[2] Bebel and the Sozialdemokrat, as you say yourself, have got the masses behind them, and there is, after all, an antidote to hand. That you have a great deal of this sort of thing to put up with in that Swabian hole, I can well believe, considering that Stuttgart and Munich are the worst places in Germany. And then, I definitely have not got the time to become embroiled in a dispute that would demand a great deal of toil and trouble. If it has got to be — well and good. I return the flysheet herewith.

Lack of time precludes my engaging in further detailed discussion of the articles on marriage.[3] In any case, primitive hetaerism is so remote in time and has been so much overlaid by later developments, whether progressive or otherwise, that nowadays we can nowhere expect to find examples in their pristine form. But all subsequent forms lead back to those primitive origins. Of this much I am certain,— until you have completely dropped the element of jealousy as a determining social factor (in primitive times), it will not be possible to give a correct account of the way things have developed.

Generally speaking, in the case of all those scientific researches which embrace so wide a field and such a mass of material, nothing can really be achieved except by dint of many years of study. Individual aspects that are both new and accurate — and these are, of course, to be found in your articles — present themselves more readily; but to survey the whole and to order it anew is something that can only be done after it has been fully explored. Otherwise there would be many more books like Capital. So I am glad to see that you have turned to themes — for immediate literary treatment — such as early biblical history[4] and colonisation,[5] which make it possible to achieve something without so exhaustive and detailed a study, and yet at the same time strike a topical note. I liked the colonisation article very much. Unfortunately almost all the material you've got is German which, as usual, is toned down and fails to present either the lurid hues of tropical colonisation or its most recent mode. The latter is colonisation, directly and wittingly carried out in the interest of stock-market manipulations, as now by France in Tunisia and Tongking.[6] Of this there is a new and striking instance in the South Seas slave trade; that trade was the immediate purpose of the attempted annexation of New Guinea, etc., by Queensland. Almost on the same day as the expedition set out to annex New Guinea, a Queensland vessel, the Fanny, left for the same island and others further east in order to seize LABOUR, returning, however, without LABOUR but with wounded as well as other unpleasant signs of an encounter.[7] The Daily News reports this and, in a leading article,[8] remarks that the British can hardly censure the French for such practices while doing the same thing themselves! (Beginning of September.)

Last week, at the TRADES UNIONS CONGRESS sitting at Nottingham, Adam Weiler's proposal to press for international factory legislation was thrown out by 26 votes to 2 on the motion of the 'Labour' parliamentarian Broadhurst.[9] So much for Liebknecht's much-vaunted TRADES UNIONS!

Why doesn't Fritz Denhardt write for the Neue Zeit any more? He had a very nice cheery style. The journal itself, of course, has to content with appalling difficulties: the censorship it has to impose upon itself is a thousand times worse than the old, official censorship used to be. You still have some pretty odd contributors and you yourself must often enough long for better ones. At all events, this business has for you the advantage of enabling you at the same time to pursue your scientific studies and let them come to gradual fruition.

Incidentally, Java provides proof of the fact that nowhere and at no time does a population increase so rapidly as under a not unduly oppressive system of bondage: 1755—2 mill.; 1826—5½ mill.; 1850—9 mill.; 1878—19 mill.; — an almost tenfold increase in 125 years—the only example of anything like Malthusian growth. Were they to send the Dutch blood-suckers packing the population would become fairly stable.

Adler turned up just as I was off to the seaside and likewise on my return; he is a man of some promise. He saw much here that might be of use to him.[10]

I yesterday received a money order from Stuttgart for £ 6 3/- for the photographs,[11] but there was no accompanying letter. Will you ask Dietz to be so kind as to drop me a note informing me what name (Christian name) and address (in Stuttgart) he gave at the post office on taking out the order? The post office here is very pedantic in such matters, and if the particulars I give differ in the slightest respect I shall not get the money.

The 2nd volume of Capital will provide me with work and to spare. The bulk of the ms. dates back to before 1868 and is in places no more than a brouillon. The second book will greatly disappoint the vulgar socialists, it contains virtually nothing but rigorously scientific, very minute examinations of things that take place within the capitalist class itself, and nothing at all out of which to fabricate catch-words and orations.

Pumps has already got two offspring. Tussy Marx has taken rooms near the British Museum. Lenchen is keeping house for me.

Kindest regards.

Yours,

F. E.

  1. ↑ In his letter of 14 September 1883 Karl Kautsky sent Engels a leaflet apparently put out by Bruno Geiser and other adherents of the opportunist wing of the German Social Democrats. Kautsky wrote to Engels that the leaflet was a clear demonstration of how, against the background of the Anti-Socialist Law, petty bourgeois elements in the party were advancing not socialist, but petty bourgeois, slogans (the right to work and demand for a minimum wage); in order to counteract this, Kautsky suggested to Engels that he should without delay write a piece for Der Sozialdemokrat explaining that it was impossible to implement the demand for a 'right to work' under capitalist conditions.
  2. ↑ See this volume, p. 64.
  3. ↑ The reference is to a series of articles by Karl Kautsky entitled 'Die Entstehung der Ehe und Familie' and carried by the magazine Kosmos, Stuttgart, Vol. XII (October 1882-March 1883). Engels set out his opinion of the initial articles in his letters to Kautsky of 10 February and 2 March 1883 (see present edition, Vol. 46).
  4. ↑ K. Kautsky, 'Die Entstehung der biblischen Urgeschichte', Kosmos..., Vol. XIII, June 1883.
  5. ↑ K. Kautsky, 'Auswanderung und Kolonisation', Die Neue Zeit, Nos. 8 and 9, 1883.
  6. ↑ In the 1870s and 1880s the French government pursued an active colonialist policy: in 1876 Franco-British financial control had been established in Egypt, and interference in the country's internal affairs continued until 1882, in 1881-83 a French protectorate was established in Tunisia. In 1882 came the provocation of an armed conflict in Madagascar and the beginning of a colonial war in North Vietnam (Tongking) which grew to become a war with China and led to the setting up of a French protectorate in Vietnam in June 1884.
  7. ↑ The reference is to the attempt to annex Port Moresby in New Guinea staged by the British colonial authorities in Queensland, Australia, in April 1883; in November 1884 the British government proclaimed a temporary protectorate over the South-Eastern part of New Guinea and the adjacent island.
  8. ↑ The Daily News, 12 September 1883.
  9. ↑ The regular trade union congress was held in Nottingham from 10 to 15 September 1883.
  10. ↑ Intending to become a factory inspector, Victor Adler took a trip around Germany, Switzerland and Britain in 1883 to familiarise himself with the work of the inspectors there. In Stuttgart he visited Kautsky, who gave him a reference for Engels.
  11. ↑ See this volume, pp. 15-16.