Letter to Paul Lafargue, June 15, 1889

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 15 June 1889


First published in: F. Engels, P. et L. Lafargue, Correspondance, t. II, Paris, 1956
Translated from the French
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 48


ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE

AT LE PERREUX

London, 15 June 1889

My dear Lafargue,

I have written and told Bebel[1] that your contributions are coming in rather slowly, and that you are hard put to it to obtain adequate funds for the congress, etc. I explained to him the reasons (your numerical weakness in Paris, the necessity for the provincials to scrape up their funds for their delegations, the habitual sluggishness of the French in paying contributions, etc.) and I suggested that here was an opportunity for the German Party to make a grant as a good international invest- ment. You would be well-advised to ginger up Liebknecht with a view to obtaining the said grant since you would be better able than I to put your case to him, at the same time mentioning that you have written to him on the subject at my instance.

I am sending you Justice, containing Hyndman's reply.[2] It is an outburst of impotent rage from a man aware that he has been well and truly trounced. What he says about Parnell and Stepniak is an out-and- out lie. I have before me a letter from Stepniak, sent to Tussy yesterday just after he had seta. Justice, in which he says it is false and that he will be writing to Justice without delay.[3] As for Parnell, his name was given

to us officially by the LABOUR ELECTORAL ASSOCIATION[4]

and, so long as he has not divested himself of his functions as secretary to that Association, he cannot contest the validity of his signature.[5] He had refused to sign as a private person and we had respected his scruples on that score.

No one knows who this Field is—the chap who has evinced such ardour in defending our congress.[6]

The Danish paper run by Trier and Petersen[7] has come out publicly in our favour, but they are right not to have gone further than this. Should they propose sending a delegation to our congress, they would impel the official Danish Party into the arms of the Possibilists. We have the satisfaction of knowing that these cryptic-Possibilists will not dare go to the other congress.

Since the nature of the two congresses is now quite distinct—ours consisting of all the Socialists combined, the other of men who stop short at Trades Unionism (it'll get nothing more, except for the Possibilists and the Social Democratic Federation), it is beginning to seem unlikely that there will be a merger, and if there is none there will be no disgrace. For it is a matter of common knowledge that Socialism has, as yet, failed to unite under its banner the whole of Europe's work- ing class—knowledge which the existence of two parallel congresses would merely go to confirm.

On the other hand, our congress being now more progressive than the other, we now have different responsibilities. If the two congresses were both avowedly Socialist, we could avoid a rumpus by making sundry concessions of a formal nature. But now that the forces have been mustered, without intervention by us, in two different camps and under two different banners, it behoves us to safeguard the honour of the Socialist banner, while the merger—if it happens—will be not so much a merger as an alliance. Hence it is a matter of thoroughly thrash- ing out the terms of that alliance.

Whatever the case, we must wait and see how things go, and not tie ourselves down beforehand by making irrevocable decisions. The real aim must always be to put one's adversary in the wrong and so to arrange things that, in the event of a breach, it is he who will take the blame.

You may be sure that, after what has happened, neither the Possibilists

nor the Social Democrat Federation will be animated by a desperate urge to effect a merger, but rather by an ardent desire to saddle us with the blame for the breach they secretly desire and which alone could give them some semblance of continued existence. To do them the kindness of provoking a breach would mean giving them a new lease of life. Only mistakes on our part would enable them to recover from their defeat, and those mistakes are going to be made by us if we let ourselves be swayed by passion or any kind of sentiment. It is a matter of pure calcu- lation, nothing else.

Give Laura a kiss from me and from Nim. This morning Sam Moore left Liverpool for your African homeland.

Yours ever,
F.E.

  1. ↑ On 16 June 1889, August Bebel notified Engels about the receipt of his letter. The whereabouts of the Engels letter is unknown.
  2. ↑ In his article 'The International Workers' Congress and the Marxist Clique', Henry Hyndman claimed that the signatures of W. Parnell and S.M. Stepniak were appended without their consent.
  3. ↑ The letter of Stepniak (S.M. Kravchinsky) was published in the newspaper Justice, No. 284, on 22 June 1889.
  4. ↑ The National Labour Electoral Association - a trade union organisation that succeeded, in 1887, to the Labour Electoral Committee; its aim was to have workmen being elected to Parliament and municipal councils.
  5. ↑ See this volume, p.331
  6. ↑ A reference to an article by Arthur Field, an English journalist, in the Kent Times and Tribune on the occasion of the International Socialist Congress (see P. Lafargue's letter to F. Engels of 2 June 1889).
  7. ↑ Arbeideren