| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 9 October 1886 |
ENGELS TO EDUARD BERNSTEIN
IN ZURICH
London, 9 October 1886
Dear Ede,
Having perused with some perplexity your 3 pages of painstaking argument[1] —perplexity as to what you could actually be driving at—I couldn't help laughing out loud when I finally got to the nub of the matter and realised that all this was intended to explain your marriage which, after all, calls for no explanation whatsoever. If all proletarians were to be so hesitant, either the proletariat would become extinct or it would reproduce itself only through illegitimate children, a method we are unlikely to resort to en masse until the proletariat has ceased to be. So please accept my heartiest congratulations on having at last overcome your grave hesitations and given free rein to the promptings of your heart. You will find that living as a couple, even when times are bad, is better than living alone; I myself put it to the test long enough, sometimes under the most wretched conditions, and never had cause to rue it. So give your fiancée[2] my kindest regards and jump into thalamus[3] with a will.
But it is already four o'clock and my letter must go off before 5.30, so now to business.
Old Becker has been here and there was much talk about the necessity of his recording his reminiscences and experiences. It is something I and, he says, others as well, had often proposed to him, but how is he to do it? In order to live, he contributes to Schneeberger's Korrespondenz in Vienna in return for 25 frs a week, and for this he must laboriously collect material. The toll on his strength and eyesight is such that he is able to do nothing else.[4] It is therefore essential that he be put in a position which will enable him to live while devoting all his time to the thing. Now van Kol, if I remember aright, gives him 25 frs a month and another friend the same amount. That makes 600 frs a year. I have undertaken to send him £5 = 125 frs a quarter. Total 1,100 frs. In my view, it is up to the party to supply the remainder, provided it has the means which, according to what Liebknecht told me, it does have. In fact, it ought really to provide wholly for the old veteran out of its pension fund. But I don't suppose there would be much difficulty about raising from well-to-do party comrades the few hundred francs still required, and this would mean that the party would merely act as intermediary for the regular payments.
The memoirs as such would be a highly valuable addition to the Volksbuchhandlung's[5] list, a new source on our party's antecedents (the revolutionary movement from 1827 to 1860) and its history (from the '50s up till the present), a document that no real historiographer could afford to overlook. And, what's more, a magnificently vivid account—genuine popular literature, if the samples published years ago in the Neue Welt are anything to go by.[6] And the sooner he gets down to it the better, for when a chap has already totted up a total of 77 years, his verbosity tends to outstrip his ability to assess what is important and what is not—such is the course of nature.
I wrote to August[7] about this yesterday; I had meant to write to you first and find out what you people at the publishing end thought about it, but since he is shortly due to go into jug, there was no time to waste. I myself consider the thing to be of the utmost importance. An account of what happened by an active participant,—indeed the only survivor from the thirties whose standpoint is the same as our own—is an absolute necessity; it will cast a new light on the whole of the period between 1827 and 1840 and, unless done by Becker, will be lost forever. Or else it will be undertaken by people who are hostile to us—members of the People's Party and other vulgar democrats, and that would serve no good purpose. It is an opportunity such as will never again present itself and to miss it would, I believe, be a crime.
I told August it would be best—once matters have got to that stage—if the details regarding the balance to be paid and the mode of publication were to be arranged personally between yourself and Becker. And in this connection there's another point which I thought it unnecessary to raise with August at this juncture, namely that the balance should be regarded simply as a pension and not as an advance on the fee. This last might be suggested by some of the 'leaders' but would be an exceedingly shabby way to treat the old warrior. Hence my proposal that as much of the balance as possible be raised by private subscription, when any such suggestion would be automatically precluded.
If all this should be settled and you enter into negotiations with Becker re publication, you should take no notice of his ideas about sales, etc., prospectus, and so forth. So far as his ideas about the sale of banned books are concerned, he might still be living in the '40s, and he has no inkling of the way this has now changed into a big industry.
So consider the matter and let me know what you think. So far the Bulgarians have indeed done unexpectedly well and, if they hold out another 8 or 10 days, either they will win through or, should the Russians march against them, it will be only at the risk of a European war. This they owe to the circumstances of having been so long subject to the Turks, who were content to preserve what remained of their gentile institutions, while only preventing—through the depredations of the pashas—the rise of the middle classes. The Serbs, on the other hand, who had been free of the Turks for 80 years, wrecked their old gentile institutions by introducing Austrian legislation and an Austrian-trained bureaucracy, hence their inevitable drubbing at the hands of the Bulgarians. Give the Bulgarians 60 years of bourgeois evolution—when they would certainly accomplish nothing—and of bureaucratic rule, and they would go to wrack and ruin just as the Serbs have done. It would have been infinitely better for the Bulgarians as for us had they remained Turkish until the European revolution; their gentile institutions would have provided a first-rate point of departure for their further evolution along communist lines, just as would the Russian mir,[8] which is now likewise being destroyed under our very noses.
As things are now I take the view that:
1) The southern Slavs should be supported if, and for as long as, they oppose Russia, for then they will go along with the European revolutionary movement.
2) If, however, they oppose the Turks, i.e. demand the annexation à tout prix[9] of the few Turkish Serbs and Bulgarians that still remain, then they will, consciously or unconsciously, be doing Russia's work for it, and we cannot go along with them. This could only be achieved at the risk of a European war, and isn't worth the candle. The chaps will have to wait, just like the Alsatians and the Lorrainers, the Trentini, etc. Moreover, the result of any renewed attack on the Turks could—in present circumstances—only be that the victorious small nationalities—victorious solely thanks to Russia—would come directly under the Russian yoke, or—cf. the linguistic map of the peninsula—become hopelessly embroiled with one another.
3) As soon as revolution breaks out in Russia, however, the chaps can do as they like. But then, too, they will realise that they are no match for the Turks. Time for the post.
Your
F.E.