Letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht, April 4, 1889

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 4 April 1889


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVIII, Moscow, 1940
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 48


ENGELS TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT

IN BORSDORF NEAR LEIPZIG

London, 4 April 1889

Dear Liebknecht,

Besides your letters to myself, I have before me those to Bonnier and Ede.[1]

From them I see that, as usual, we diverge very considerably as soon as it comes to taking action.

Your 'politeness' post festum[2] would now simply make you look ridiculous in the eyes of the English.

Your advice to the French, namely that they might ultimately arriver à un arrangement quelconque avec les Broussistes[3] , i.e. deliberately go and present their backsides to be kicked, has, quite understandably, infuriated them. The above advice, and your annoyance at the fact that we—for the pamphlet was embarked upon at my instigation and almost wholly edited by me[4] —should have presented the Possibilists for what they are—recipients of reptile funds[5] of the Opportunists,[6] i.e. haute finance[7] —thereby opening the eyes of large numbers of Englishmen to things which had been deliberately withheld from them,—your annoyance, I say, is explicable only if you were intent on keeping a foot in the back door so that—even after being spurned by the Possibilists—you might cook up some little deal for the account and at the risk of the German party. If that's how things are, then I am not at all sorry to have taken some of the wind out of your sails.

This, along with your opinion[8] that Ede should have replied to the Justice with an editorial, i.e. in the Sozialdemokrat, i.e. in German and thus in a form neither accessible nor comprehensible to the English, shows that you are totally out of touch with conditions both in France and over here, and that your calculations are based on out-of-date information and imaginary situations. Nor is anything else to be expected since you receive none of the relevant journals there and have no regular correspondence with anyone of note (I mean, of course, in the socialist parties) in England and France. Ede is infinitely better informed than you are about all these matters, and you would do better to turn to him for information rather than haul him over the coals about matters in which he is and must needs be far and away your superior.

That the pamphlet was not only the greatest service we could do you people, but also completely indispensable, is something I trust I shall be able to bring home, if not to you, then at least to Singer, when the two of you come over here.

One thing I do know—you can arrange the next congress yourselves; I shall wash my hands of it.

The Hague resolution was sent to me by Lafargue expressly for publication, as was absolutely essential after the brazen rebuff meted out to you by the Possibilists.[9] So I'll damned well forget about etiquette and just wait and see whether anyone else besides you complains.

As regards the date of the congress, any alteration to what has already been resolved will put fresh difficulties in the way of an understanding, since everybody will propose a different date and it will be the 10th of October before they have agreed upon, let us say, the 10th of August. For us to make proposals to you on this matter will serve no useful purpose and I can only hope that, after all this bother—for the past 4 weeks I haven't been able to do a stroke of work on Volume III[10] because of this damned business—something real will actually come of it.

Cordial regards to your wife and to the others when you see them.

Your

F.E.

I fully understand—and have plainly intimated as much to Lafargue[11] —that you should want to avoid a set-to with the Possibilists which, be it noted, would take place with the consent of the powers that be, and with police protection for the Possibilists; in other words, out of gratitude for the favourable attitude you have adopted towards France since 1870, you would be beaten up as Prussians by the French.

  1. ↑ The reference is to Wilhelm Liebknecht's letter to Charles Bonnier of 26 March 1889, about the need to change the date of an International Socialist Congress or, as an alternative, reaching agreement with the Possibilists. Wilhelm Liebknecht's letter to Eduard Bernstein has not been found.
  2. ↑ after the event
  3. ↑ come to an arrangement of some sort with the Broussists
  4. ↑ A reference to the pamphlet The International Working Men's Congress of 1889. A Reply to 'Justice', London 1889. Its original version was written by Eduard Bernstein at Engels' suggestion in reply to the editorial comment entitled The German 'Official' Social Democrats and the International Congress in Paris and carried by the newspaper Justice on 16 March 1889, No. 270. Having been edited by Engels, the pamphlet appeared in English in London, and then it was published by the German newspaper Der Sozialdemokrat and signed: E. Bernstein.
  5. ↑ 'Reptiles' and 'the reptile press' were designations used by left-wing writers for the venal reactionary pro-government press. The 'reptile fund' referred to Bismarck's special fund for bribing periodicals and individual journalists.
  6. ↑ Opportunists was the name given in France to the party of moderate bourgeois republicans upon its split in 1881 and the formation of a left-wing party of radicals under Georges Clemenceau. The name was first used in 1877 by Henri Rochefort, a journalist, after the leader of the party, L. Gambetta, had said that reforms were to be implemented at 'an opportune time' ('un temps opportun').
  7. ↑ high finance
  8. ↑ A reference to Wilhelm Liebknecht's letters to F. Engels of 20 and 28 March dealing with the forthcoming International Congress, in particular, when it was called, and British representation in it.
  9. ↑ The resolution of the Hague Conference (see note 385) was published in the pamphlet The International Working Men's Congress of 1889. A Reply to 'Justice'.
  10. ↑ of Capital
  11. ↑ See previous letter