Letter to Eduard Bernstein, December 7, 1885

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 7 December 1885


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, 7 December 1885

Dear Ede,

Here too we've had a storm in our socialist tea-cup. Kautsky will already have written and told you something about it; Echoes (Liberal) enclosed herewith. Also some other stuff, and a document (letter from Bland, based on the minutes of the Executive of the SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION, sent you by Aveling), which will give you the substance.

This time Hyndman has given himself the coup de grâce. He took money from the Tories for socialist candidatures in order to filch votes from the Liberals. He has admitted to taking £340, but since the official expenses of the 3 candidatures amounted to about £600, it must have been something in the region of £1,000, if not more.

Taking money from another party may, in certain circumstances and by way of an exception, be admissible if, 1) the money is given unconditionally and 2) the transaction does not do more harm than good. In this instance the very opposite was the case. 1) The condition was that socialist candidates be put up in districts where they could only be made to look ridiculous — as, indeed, happened: Williams, 27 votes out of 4,722, Fielding, 32 out of 6,374; only Burns got 598 votes out of 11,055 in Nottingham. 2) Hyndman, however, knew that to take money from the Tories would spell nothing less than irreparable moral ruin for the socialists in the eyes of the one and only class from which they could draw recruits, namely the great, radical working masses. It's almost a replica of the Stoecker alliance against the Party of Progress once proposed in Berlin.[1]

Well, not content with this heroic deed, Hyndman already saw himself as a second Parnell holding the scales between the two parties, though forgetting that, unlike Parnell, he does not command 80 votes in Parliament and 200,000 Irish votes in the elections in England and Scotland.[2] He got the Executive of the Federation to empower him to go to Birmingham with Champion and call on Chamberlain, the leader of the Radicals.4 ' 5 With Tory money in his pocket, he offered the latter his support if he, Chamberlain, would cede him a seat in Birmingham, assure him of Liberal votes and agree to introduce an Eight Hours' Bill. Not being such a mug as the Tories, Chamberlain showed him the door.

In the meantime the affair, arranged on the qt by the Federation's Executive, became known in the branches and caused a great furore. Of which more in Bland's letter; it was written for publication, but you should not mention the fact that it is based on the minutes. A general meeting is to be called and whether the Federation will survive it seems doubtful; not, at any rate, as a viable organisation.

Herewith Hunter Watts' statement in The Pall Mall Gazette.[3]

It was written with Hyndman's connivance, yet he had to let the expression 'ILL-ADVISED', used of himself, stand. By contrast, Williams' statement in The Echo is nothing less than a slap in the face, its attitude being, and not without reason, one of outright hostility to all socialist MIDDLE-CLASS MEN. SO that's what Mr Hyndman has brought about with his pushfulness. The man is nothing but a caricature of Lassalle, totally indifferent to the nature of the means even when not conducive to the end, provided Hyndman himself gets something out of it; add to that his perpetual craving for instantaneous success, so that he kills the goose that lays the golden egg; and finally, the way he considers himself the centre of the universe, being utterly incapable of seeing the facts in any light other than that which is gratifying to him.

And, for good measure, a political adventurer comme il faut.a All Lassalle's bad points magnified, and not a single one of his good ones.

What do things look like in your parliamentary tea-cup?

Your

F.E.

  1. ↑ The reference is to the attempt made by the leaders of the German Conservative Party (see Note 230) and the Christian-Social Party, Adolph Wagner and Adolf Stoecker, to conclude an electoral alliance with the Social Democrats against the candidates of the Party of Progress (see Note 93) during the Berlin elections of November 1881. They agreed to support Social-Democratic candidates (August Bebel and Wilhelm Hasenclever) in two Berlin constituencies on condition that the Socialist Workers' Party acknowledged the 'social reforms' being carried out by Bismarck's government and backed the implementation of these 'reforms' with a view to warding off a revolution. On behalf of the party, Bebel and Liebknecht sharply rebuffed these manoeuvres on the part of the reactionaries. Their statement was published in the Volks-Zeitung, 19 November 1881.
  2. ↑ The British general election took place from 23 November to 19 December 1885. The Liberals obtained 335 seats of which 4 belonged to the 'independents', the Conservatives 249 and the supporters of Irish Home Rule, 86 seats. These were the first elections held after the parliamentary reform of 1884 (see Note 299).
  3. ↑ In a statement headed 'The Socialists and the General Election' and carried by The Pall Mall Gazette, 4 December 1885, John Hunter Watts, the treasurer of the Social Democratic Federation (see Note 300), tried to justify the actions of 'an ill-advised few London Socialists' by claiming that they intended 'to take ammunition from the enemy in order to blaze it in their faces'.