Letter to Friedrich Lessner, April 4, 1869

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 4 April 1869


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVI, Moscow, 1935
Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 43


ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH LESSNER

IN LONDON

Manchester, 4 April 1869
86 Mornington Street

Dear Lessner,

I was very pleased to have word from you, and enclose the photograph requested. The Becker story[1] together with other material I expressly placed ready a week ago, in order to send it to Marx, but the womenfolk put the stuff somewhere else each morning, so I forgot it day after day. Tomorrow I shall take the package into town, and send Becker directly to you.

The compliments you have so undeservedly paid me shame me all the more since, unfortunately, in the last 18 years, I have been able to do as good as nothing directly for our cause, and have had to devote all my time to bourgeois activities. I hope this will soon change, I expect in a few months once again to be master of my time, and I shall then surely do my part to earn your compliments; it will always be a pleasure for me to bash the same enemy on the same battlefield together with an old comrade like you. You are right; the cause goes better than ever before; years ago, at a time when the stupid democratic mob complained about reaction and the people's indifference to them, we, Moor and I, were right in foreseeing in the period of this reaction the enormous industrial development of the last 18 years and declared this would result in a sharpening of the contradictions between labour and capital, and more acute class struggle. It would make a donkey laugh to see how these stupid democrats have now really been duped, so that there is not even a decent little place for them in any other corner of the world. The Party of Progress in Germany,[2] republicans in France, radicals in England, all of them equally rotten. There is nothing funnier than the sweet-sour compliments they have to make to the social movement, though they know full well that, one fine day, this social movement will have its foot on their necks.

In old friendship

Your

F. Engels

  1. ↑ B. Becker, Enthüllungen über das tragische Lebensende Ferdinand Lassalle's.
  2. ↑ A reference to the members of the German Party of Progress founded in 1861. Among its most prominent members were Waldeck, Virchow, Schulze- Delitzsch, Forckenbeck and Hoverbeck. The Party advocated German unifica tion under Prussia, the convocation of an all-German parliament, and the establishment of a liberal ministry accountable to the Chamber of Deputies. Frightened by the possibility of a popular revolution, it did not support the basic democratic rights, i.e., universal suffrage and freedom of the press, association and assembly. In 1866, its Right wing broke away to form a National-Liberal Partv which capitulated before the Bismarck Government.