ENGELS TO PANAYOTTIS ARGYRIADES
IN PARIS
[Draft]
[London, beginning of July 1892]
Dear Citizen,
I have received the Almanack de la Question Sociale for 1891 and '92, for which I send you my thanks.
You hope to be able to number me amongst your contributors for 1893. However I see that, without my knowledge, you have already named me as a contributor for 1892.[1] If there is to be a contribution from me to the 1893 Almanack, it will, I fear, be an involuntary contribution as before. A month ago, when our friends in Austria asked me for an article for their yearbook,[2] I had to tell them
1. that I was unable to undertake any further work, whether large or small, until I had seen to the publication of Vol. III of Marx's Capital, which is now ten years overdue;
2. that a contribution to this or that Socialist yearbook would, in the interests of impartiality, necessitate my contributing to most of the remainder and that accordingly my time would no longer be my own.
True, I made an exception last year in the case of the French Almanack du Parti Ouvrier.[3] But on that occasion it would have been dangerous to hold back. That was the time when at Kronstadt[4] the official French republic kow-towed to the Tsar,[5] the hereditary leader of European reaction. War was imminent and in my view was prevented only by the famine in Russia. At that critical juncture it was up to me to do all in my power to remove any possibility of a misunderstanding between French and German working men.[6] I took advantage of the occasion and spoke up; that is all.
- ↑ In its issue for 1892 Almanack de la Question Sociale, published by Panayottis Argyriades, listed Engels on the title page as one of its principal contributors. Printed in French in that issue, without Engels' knowledge and considerably abridged, was his 'Introduction to Karl Marx's Wage Labour and Capital (1891 Edition)' (see present edition, Vol. 27, pp. 194-201).
- ↑ Österreichischer Arbeiter-Kalender
- ↑ The Anti-Socialist Law, initiated by the Bismarck government and passed by the Reichstag on 21 October 1878, was directed against the socialist and working-class movement. The Social-Democratic Party of Germany was virtually driven into the underground. All party and mass working-class organisations and their press were banned, socialist literature was subject to confiscation, Social-Democrats made the object of reprisals. However, with the active help of Marx and Engels, the Social-Democratic Party succeeded in overcoming both the opportunist (Eduard Bernstein et al.) and 'ultra-Left' (J. Most et al.) tendencies within its ranks and was able, by combining underground activities with an efficient utilisation of legal means, to use the period of the operation of the law for considerably strengthening and expanding its influence among the masses. Prolonged in 1881, 1884, 1886 and 1888, the Anti-Socialist Law was repealed on 1 October 1890. For Engels' assessment of it see his article 'Bismarck and the German Working Men's Party' (present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 407-09).
- ↑ A French naval squadron visiting Kronstadt in July and early August 1891 was accorded an elaborately solemn welcome — a demonstration of a rapprochement between Tsarist Russia and France. At the same time, diplomatic negotiations were in progress which culminated in the signing, in August 1892, of a treaty under which France and Russia undertook to consult each other on international matters and co-operate in the event of a threat of an attack on either of them. This agreement was a landmark on the way to the final formalisation, in 1893, of the Franco-Russian alliance, set up in opposition to the Triple Alliance (see Note 303).
- ↑ Alexander III
- ↑ In the original there follows a phrase 'I spoke to the French proletariat', which is crossed out.