Letter to Victor Adler, January 11, 1894

ENGELS TO VICTOR ADLER

IN VIENNA

London, 11 January 1894

Dear Victor,

First, my thanks to you all, and especially to yourself, your wife and family, for your good wishes^[1] which I heartily reciprocate, and thanks also for the League tie-pin which I shall sport as soon as I have a suitable necktie to wear it with—I intend to buy one specially for the purpose.

That there is a great deal to be done over there I can readily believe and none of us can imagine how you are able to manage it all, and under the most difficult circumstances at that. We admire and envy you your tenacity. What particularly pleased me, however, was your assurance that an end has been put to the foolishness you had been fearing over there. I have since received reports on the two Congresses and have been able to discover at least some of the particulars therefrom. Things couldn't in fact have gone off better in regard to this crucial matter.

So far as the healthy development of the movement is concerned, it was a real blessing that the perspicacious Höger should have declared suffrage to be a bourgeois racket and not something to go on strike for, and that the miners should, after their own fashion, have declared themselves opposed to any strike that did not also support the eight-hour day. And at Budweis the Czechs have also helped us by making admission conditional on recognition of the programme and tactics (à la Zurich) and by shelving the general strike, which seemed more pervasive there than anywhere else, until the Party Conference, when it will probably be shelved again.

K. Kautsky's article which you reprinted will be of great help to your people. But it's indicative of the extent to which its author has lost touch with the living party movement. A few months ago he showed an inconceivable want of tact in proposing to sling a purely academic discussion of the general strike in abstracto, and of its pros and cons generally, into the midst of a movement engaged in a life and death struggle against slogans advocating such a strike. And now comes this article which, at any rate in the passages you cite, hits the nail on the head quite admirably.

Anyhow, come next month and the Electoral Reform Bill, and you people will (be able to) start agitating again with a will. It was quite a good thing that the first high fever should have had a chance to run its course, for now the chaps will take a rather calmer view of things. Whichever way it goes, the government and the Diet are bound to place new weapons in your hands and next year there will be several score if not a whole crowd of you in parliament. Proletarians in that anachronistic assembly with its class hierarchies! Those chaps will show the French that the proletariat is not le quatrième état^[2] as, by false analogy, they are so fond of describing it, but an utterly modern, youthful class incompatible with all that old nonsense of estates which it must disrupt before getting to the stage at which it can embark on its own particular task, the disruption of the bourgeoisie. I am already looking forward to the day when the first of our chaps sets foot in the Diet.

All the same, I still take the view that the coalition government will collapse the moment it tries to act in real earnest. I should say that in Austria the time has not yet come for the one reactionary mass—not, at any rate, for its formation on a lasting basis. And even if the leaders in the Cabinet were to unite, the small fry in parliament would not succeed in doing so; and if, behind all this, you have a Franz Joseph yearning to get his Taaffe back, it seems to me that the days of Windischgrätz are numbered. And in practice Taaffe now stands for universal suffrage.

I am curious to see how the sixty so-called Socialists in the French Assembly will make out.^[3] They are a mixed bunch, even some of the socialistes de la veille^[4] being of a very indeterminate nature and also, despite their desire for fusion, encumbered with all manner of old and ugly memories; on top of that, however, all of these put together are in a minority as compared with the Millerand-Jaurès majority consisting of socialistes du lendemain^[5] Indeed, the French preserve an obstinate silence in the face of any inquiry as to the nature of their group. On Sunday Bonnier will be passing through London on his way back from Paris; I shall question him and, no doubt, succeed in finding something out.

Volume III^[6] is at last being printed. The first twenty chapters (664 pp. out of approx. 1870 ms. pp.) have already gone to press, I am working on the next third which only requires a final editing, and then it will soon be the turn of the last third which will probably call for rather more work. We shall be appearing in September, I think.

But now I must return to my beloved Chapter 23. Unfortunately a frightful lot of time was lost over the festive season.

Warm regards to your wife and children, Popp, Ulbing, Pernerstorfer, Reumann, Schrammel, Adelheid, little Ryba and tutti quanti,^[7] but in particular to you yourself from

Yours,

F. Engels