Letter to Eduard Bernstein, July 14, 1892

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 14 July 1892


First published 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 EDUARD BERNSTEIN

IN ZURICH

London, 14 July 1892

Dear Ede,

Your and Gine's[1] postcard of 24 June 1892 (I reproduce the postmark for want of any other date) and letter of 2 July have reached me safely. I feel sure that the prospects for your harvest have in the meantime improved to such an extent that you are now worth, not 50 raps but 1 franc, and, since the value of money — whether paid or not — does after all represent [2] physical labour, I am equally sure that your health can only benefit from your haymaking. But why you sweat physically in the heat of the afternoon and mentally in the cool of the morning is not very clear unless it's a slimming cure you are after and of that, after all, you have no need. However, you are now in Zurich, so that all these comments will arrive after the event and your haymaking will presumably have given way to nutrimentum Spiritus[3] (to stick to old Fritz's[4] Latin) in the museum or the Tonhalle or whatever the places are called there. But you should take spiritus in the form vini aut cerevisiae[5] rather than in that of more abstract spiritous material, otherwise it won't be a real summer holiday. As for what's happening in the English elections,[6] the Vorwärts is in any case far better informed than the two of us put together.

Bax's editorship of Justice would seem to be over. After the one number in which he radically changed the paper's tone,[7] there was a hitch; the tone reverted — at any rate in the negative sense of ignoring the movement in France, Germany, etc.— to what it had been, even though the earlier onslaughts were not resumed. But the last number is again Hyndman ALL OVER; Keir Hardie is attacked, Burns ignored and all the leading articles are supplied by Hyndman. Over here it is said that Bax's attack on Stanley of Africa (who suddenly turned up in North Lambeth to oppose the Gladstonians as UNIONIST candidate) has brought about a breach between him and Hyndman and that Hyndman has led the SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC FEDERATION[8] in a fervent pro-Stanley campaign in the latter's constituency. I am passing this on to you as related to me. No doubt you will be seeing Bax in Zurich in about a fortnight's time but whether, having resigned from the editorship of Justice, he will pay me a call before then, I cannot say.

Typical characteristics of the elections are: 1. A complete lack of enthusiasm for HOME RULE in England.

2. The granting of suffrage to working men has driven vast numbers of petty bourgeois into the Conservative camp, at any rate in the larger cities. Your petty bourgeois is beginning to be afraid of the workers, or at any rate does not want to be mistaken for one of them; CONSERVATIVE IS RESPECTABLE and hence he votes against Gladstone.

3. The strength of the Liberal Party lies in the middle and lower middle classes of the smaller towns and COUNTIES where the pressure exerted by the semi-feudal landowners and the High Church clergy is still a force to be reckoned with. In the larger cities even the DISSENTERS, traditional mainstay of the Liberal Party, are beginning to vacillate — cf. for instance Birmingham.

4. Now that the two bourgeois parties are on an almost exactly equal footing (today of 3,300,000 votes cast, the opposition's majority over the government amounts in all to no more than about 76,000), it is Labour which is beginning to call the tune. And only in the election of Labour candidates — Keir Hardie, Burns, Wilson and others— was there any show of enthusiasm. Even before the elections I had said that these would be the last to be fought out between the two official parties, but that they would give the Liberals a foretaste of things to come. As has happened in full measure. Even at the next elections the Labour Party will put up quite a different show. The current elections must have filled it with confidence in its own strength.

5. The new Parliament is a provisional one. Gladstone will not get a majority without the support of the Irish and Labour members, which means an early dissolution. So much the better.

Apropos. Tussy intends to send the Neue Zeit an article on the elections in which, however, only such internal matters will be discussed as could be known to someone over here, and then not to all and sundry. So don't let it deter you from writing in the Neue Zeit about the general results as you see them. Her information, on the other hand, consists of specific facts relating to the skulduggery of the various parties, something quite different to what you will be writing.

Warm regards from Louise and myself to both of you.

Your

F.E.

  1. ↑ Emma Engels
  2. ↑ more or less
  3. ↑ spiritual nourishment
  4. ↑ Frederick II
  5. ↑ of wine or beer
  6. ↑ The summer 1892 parliamentary election in Britain was won by the Liberals. The campaign brought success to the workers' and socialist organisations, which had put up a considerable number of independent candidates. Three of them—James Keir Hardie, John Burns and John Havelock Wilson — were elected.
  7. ↑ 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).
  8. ↑ The Social Democratic Federation, set up in August 1884, consisted of English socialists of different orientations, mostly intellectuals. For a long time the leadership of the Federation was in the hands of reformists led by Hyndman, an opportunist sectarian. In opposition to them, the revolutionary Marxists within the Federation (Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Edward Aveling, Tom Mann and others) worked for close ties with the revolutionary labour movement. In the autumn of 1884 — following a split and the establishment by the Left wing of an independent organisation, the Socialist League (see Note 49) — the opportunists' influence in the Federation increased. However, revolutionary elements, discontented with the opportunist leadership, continued to form within the Federation, under the impact of the masses.