Letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, March 5, 1892

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 5 March 1892


First published abridged in Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Joh. Phil. Becker, Jos. Dietzgen, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx u. A. an F.A. Sorge und Andere, Stuttgart, 1906 and in full in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXIX, Moscow, 1946
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 49


ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH ADOLPH SORGE

IN HOBOKEN

London, 5 March 1892

Dear Sorge,

Have received your letters of 15, 22 and 29 January and postcards of 2, 4 and 13 February. Also the newspapers re Anna.[1] The latter has evidently succumbed to that fashionable complaint, megalomania. It's strange; these sort of people, the Hartmanns et al, are fit for one deed — GOOD, BAD OR INDIFFERENT — and, once that's done, are good for nowt else,[2] as Schorlemmer would say.

Though I haven't alas had time to read your last article in the Neue Zeit[3] I must get round to doing so since it's only with your help that I can follow developments in America without going astray.

I am terribly overburdened with all kinds of tasks and tiresome odds and ends. You ought to see the mass of German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish, Russian, Danish, American, English and, now and again, Romanian newspapers I get and must at any rate glance at if I am to keep au courant with the movement. Not to mention genuine tasks which swallow up the rest of my time. And the correspondence! I've got backlog enough to last me a week. And then I'm supposed to complete Volume III[4] It's appalling. But it will be managed some- how. Only you people must be patient if I sometimes allow my corres- pondence to lapse.

In France things are going very well. Lafargue is using his expense allowance and his free railway pass to travel all over the place, from Lille to Toulouse, agitating and this with brilliant success. All the other socialist factions have been pushed into the background by ours and even in Paris the Possibilists are continuing to beat a retreat, thanks to their internal squabbles and to vigorous action on the part of our own people. They again have in mind a daily journal as party organ, and this would now stand a better chance.[5] It's capital that Constans should have been sacked from the Ministry of the Interior; the chap was determined to provoke fusillades, by violence, and we can do without them. Since our May Day demonstration coincides with the municipal elections throughout France,[6] shooting is a lux- ury no minister could permit himself unless, like Constans, he was banking on a nine days' wonder.

Here the bickering continues as before, but nevertheless the cause is making headway in true Anglo-Saxon fashion, slowly but surely. Everything always subsides into small individual battles which can- not be assessed until actually resolved. At the moment these concern the May Day celebrations. On the one side our people, on the other, in opposition to us, the TRADES COUNCIL (the stuffier TRADES UNIONS) and the SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION; the two enemies of yesteryear have been forced to club together against us, which is in itself a vic- tory. We are in possession of Hyde Park and POSSESSION is NINE POINTS OF THE LAW. How things will turn out remains to be seen. On our side we shall probably have the GASWORKERS, a number of the smaller un- ions and the RADICAL CLUBS (almost wholly working class)—what happens next must remain to be seen.

And now for Germany. Things are going so swimmingly there that we couldn't wish for anything better, although we shall no doubt ex- perience some pretty hard knocks in the near future. From the outset Little Willie[7] has been a prime example of a 'last of the line' with a singular aptitude for ruining the dynasty and monarchy. But now his madness has taken on an acute form and his megalomania is such that he can neither sleep nor hold his tongue. As luck would have it, the regis voluntas which, at the drop of a hat, would become suprema lex,[8] is directed against us one day and the Liberals the next, and now he has actually discovered that it's the Liberals, whose progeny we are, that are the source of all evil — he's been taught as much by his clerical friends. And now he's prosecuting the Kölnische Leitung for lèse-majesté[9] and will not rest content until he has hounded your tame German philistine into the opposition. What more could we ask? A month ago, when Stumm's speech was heard in the Reichs- tag,[10] it was still possible to envisage the re-introduction of the Anti- Socialist Law but that is no longer the case, for William is more in- censed by the opposition of the bourgeoisie to his bill for the clericali- sation of primary schools[11] than by all the Social-Democrats put to- gether, and would sooner leave us alone than make any concessions to the other fellows. In both chambers it is, in fact, from the bourgeois parties that he encounters most opposition, not from our 35 members in the Reichstag; in the Prussian chamber we have no seats at all. Nevertheless, we, too, may run into some heavy weather — yet what could be better than for the Crown to place itself in an impossible po- sition vis-à-vis the middle classes and the workers at one and the same time? The ministers are all second-rate or third-rate men, Caprivi is a staunch lout but unequal to his task, nor does Miquel grow any the wiser for his perpetual cheese-paring. In short, at this rate a crisis may be in the offing. In Prussia and in the Prusso-German Empire people cannot as in Bavaria afford to go on for years putting up with a demented monarch[12] and I shouldn't be surprised if, some time soon, they didn't erect a special madhouse for Little Willie. And then there'd be a Regency, which is exactly what we've been needing.

As regards Russia and la haute politique[13] I have nothing to add to my article[14] in the Neue Zeit.

Warm regards from Aveling, who happens to be here just now — Tussy is off agitating in Plymouth. Louise will enclose a short note. Warm regards to your wife,[15] and look after yourselves.

Your

F.E.

  1. ↑ See next letter.
  2. ↑ In the original: nix mehr z.e wolle (South German dialect)
  3. ↑ F. A. Sorge, 'Das Programm der Geldreformer in den Vereinigten Staaten'.
  4. ↑ of Capital
  5. ↑ This concerns the plan for turning Le Socialiste, the weekly newspaper of the French Workers' Party (see Note 146), into a daily. Engels had asked Laura and Paul Lafargue to keep him informed of the progress of the negotiations. The plan failed to materialise.
  6. ↑ At the municipal elections held in France between 1 and 8 May 1892 the Workers' Party scored a considerable success, polling over 100,000 votes and getting 635 so cialists elected. In 26 towns the socialists obtained more seats than any other party and in Roubaix, Marseille, Narbonne and Toulon they headed the municipal councils.
  7. ↑ William II
  8. ↑ In late March 1890 the Jungen, a group of Berlin Social-Democrats, including Max Schippel, published an appeal under the title 'Was soil am 1. Mai geschehen?', urg ing the workers to hold a strike on the 1st of May. The appeal reflected the specific attitude of the Jungen, crystallised in 1890, as a petty-bourgeois semi-anarchist op position group within the German Social-Democracy. The hard core of the group was made up of students and young literati (hence the group's name) who claimed the role of the party's theoreticians and leaders. Paul Ernst, Paul Kampffmeyer, Hans Müller, Bruno Wille and others were the group's ideologues. The Jungen ig nored the change in the conditions for the party's activity after the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law. They denied the need for using legal forms of struggle, opposed participation in parliamentary elections and the use of the parliamentary platform by the Social-Democrats and demagogically accused the party and its Executive of opportunism, violation of party democracy and promotion of the interests of the petty bourgeoisie. In October 1891 the Erfurt Congress expelled some of the opposi tion leaders from the party. A reply to the above-mentioned appeal of the Jungen was given on the party's behalf by the Social-Democratic parliamentary group in a statement entitled, 'An die Arbeiter und Arbeiterinnen Deutschlands!' (adopted in Halle on 13 April 1890).
  9. ↑ On 2 March 1892, it was announced in Berlin that proceedings had been in stituted against Kölnische Zeitung on charges of lèse-majesté. An article published in the newspaper contained critical remarks in regard of William IPs speech at the annual banquet of the Brandenburg Landtag on 24 February 1892, in which the emperor sharply attacked the 'criticasters' and opponents of the government pol icy. The prosecution of Kölnische Zeitung, followed by charges against and the con fiscation of other newspapers, was seen by the German and European public as marking the imperial authorities' transition to a policy of open police reprisals.
  10. ↑ In a letter to Engels of 19 September 1890 Jules Guesde pointed out an inaccuracy in Engels' letter of 2 September to the leaders of the French Workers' Party (see present edition, Vol. 27, pp. 233-34) concerning the resolution of the 1889 Paris International Socialist Workers' Congress on the procedure for the convocation of the next congress. Engels considered that authorisation to call it had been given to both the Swiss and the Belgian socialists. Formally it was the executive committee, to be set up by the Swiss socialists, that had to decide where to call the congress, in Switzerland or in Belgium. In essence, however, Engels was right since the execu tive could not function without agreeing its steps with the Belgians (see also Note 26).
  11. ↑ This refers to the International Socialist Conference held in The Hague on 28 February 1889. Attended by representatives of the socialist movement in Germany, France, Belgium, Holland and Switzerland, it had been called, on Engels' initiative, by the Social-Democratic group in the German Reichstag with a view to formulating the terms for the convocation of the International Socialist Workers' Congress in Paris. The Possibilists stayed away from the conference and refused to recognise its deci sions. The conference determined the powers, the date and the agenda of the con gress.
  12. ↑ Ludwig II
  13. ↑ high politics
  14. ↑ 'Der Sozialismus in Deutschland'
  15. ↑ Katharina Sorge