Letter to Eduard Bernstein, January 1, 1884

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 1 January 1884


First published, in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Book I, Moscow, 1924
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO EDUARD BERNSTEIN

IN ZURICH

London, 1 January 1884

Dear Bernstein,

First a Happy New Year to you, Kautsky and the whole newspaper office.[1]

Then a request to send me last week's Sozialdemokrat. It should have arrived on Saturday, 29 December, but hasn't reached me yet.

A fortnight ago I was at last able to get up again, have improved steadily and hope to be fit for work in a week's time. And a damned good thing too!

I trust you were not too much infuriated by the number of amendments I made to your ms. As I once said to Kautsky, while we cannot imitate Marx's style, our own ought to be such as not to be wholly out of keeping with Marx's. Provided you don't lose sight of this altogether, we may well produce a work that is presentable.

The note on American slavery[2] shall be done, and various others besides. I shall also be able to include a fair amount in the preface.

How true the passage on slavery was is still evident today: capitalist production in the cotton states is not prospering—through not having any coolies, Chinese or Indian, i. e. slaves disguised as free labour; whereas in Cuba, Mauritius, Réunion, etc., it flourishes in so far as, and only in so far as, it has coolies at its disposal.

As regards your earlier inquiry about the passage from The Civil War in France in the preface to the Manifesto, you will, no doubt, concur with the answer that is given in the original (The Civil War, pp. 19 ff.).[3] I am sending you a copy in case you have not got one there. It is simply a question of showing that the victorious proletariat must first reshape the old, bureaucratic, administratively centralised state machine before they can use it for their own purposes; whereas, since 1848, all bourgeois republicans, so long as they were in opposition, have heaped abuse on that machine but, no sooner in office, have taken it over intact and made use of it, partly against reaction but to an even greater extent against the proletariat. That the Commune's unconscious tendencies should, in The Civil War, have been credited to it as more or less deliberate plans was justifiable and perhaps even necessary in the circumstances. The Russians have very properly appended the passage from The Civil War to their translation of the Manifesto. If there hadn't been such a great rush over getting it out, we could have done this and one or two other things.

Apropos. You once spoke of Guesde's disreputable past, or something of the sort. I know absolutely nothing about that. Undoubtedly just a pack of lies on Malon's part, but I should be glad if you would enable me to clear the matter up.

I shall shortly be sending you one pound sterling from Schorlemmer for his subscription, the balance for party purposes. It's too late to take out a money order today.

At last things have got moving again in Russia. The affair of the sledge and the Tsar is most suspect,[4] that of Sudeikin, on the other hand, crystal clear.[5] We should like to send Alexander[6] a telegram wishing him 'a happy holiday'.

Has Tussy Marx sent you To-Day and the last numbers of Progress? If not I shall attend to this. These two are completely divorced from the TRADES UNIONS movement and are in fact run by a very motley society. Bax is very honest but still somewhat green, Aveling is good but has little time in which to familiarise himself with economics, a subject utterly foreign to him. Joynes is an unreliable chap (once a schoolmaster at the big doss house at Eton, travelled to Ireland with Henry George, was arrested with him and lost his post; is therefore looking around to see what's doing) and Hyndman, an ambitious party leader in partibus infidelium,[7] provisionally in search of a party and meanwhile issuing orders into the blue,—come to that a pretty shrewd fellow.[8] One's best course is to do justice to the aspirations without identifying oneself with the persons. At all events, the publication of To-Day and the transformation of Progress into a socialist journal is of great significance at this particular juncture, now that the poor in the East End OF London are beginning to find their voice. On top of that, all over the country we have chronic overproduction which now seems to be hastening on the crisis. Circumstances are favourable, but whether the people who have taken the matter in hand are a match for those circumstances remains to be seen. This time it's hardly likely to remain without a sequel, as have so many previous curtain-raisers.

Now basta. I haven't written a letter as long as this for the past three months. Schorlemmer and I send our cordial regards to all our friends.

Yours,

F.E.

  1. ↑ Der Sozialdemokrat
  2. ↑ See present edition, Vol. 6, pp. 167-68. — F. Engels, 'Marx and Rodbertus'.
  3. ↑ See present edition, Vol. 22, pp. 328-33.
  4. ↑ Following the introduction of a local state of siege in Leipzig in 1881 (see Note 67), Wilhelm Liebknecht, August Bebel and other German socialists had been forced to leave the city. They settled in the village of Borsdorf near Leipzig.
  5. ↑ On 16 December 1883 his chief and secret police inspector Lieutenant-Colonel Georgi Sudeikin was murdered in St Petersburg in the flat of Sergei Degayev (Yablonsky). The terrorist act was carried out on the decision of the Executive Committee of the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) party which, on pain of his own death, had forced the exposed provocateur Degayev organise the murder. The Standard, No. 18561, 11 January 1884, reported that the St Petersburg chief of police supposed the murderers were led from Paris by Lavrov and Tikhomirov.
  6. ↑ In his letter of 17 March 1883, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, on behalf of the Dutch Socialist Workers' Party, asked Engels to 'pass on our homage and grateful acknowledgement, to the Marx family and to all those who join us in mourning at the grave of the master'. Nieuwenhuis also informed Engels that he planned to translate his work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific into Dutch, which he actually did in 1886. Nieuwenhuis further enquired about Engels' plan with regard to Volume II of Marx's Capital, further study of the English labour movement after 1845 and the reissue of Engels' The Condition of the Working-Class in England.
  7. ↑ It means literally in parts inhabited by unbelievers; here: nominally.
  8. ↑ See this volume, p. 54.