Letter to Johann Philipp Becker, January 11, 1878

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 11 January 1878


First published in: F. Engels, Vergessene Briefe (Briefe Friedrich Engels' an Johann Philipp Becker), Berlin, 1920
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 45


ENGELS TO JOHANN PHILIPP BECKER

IN GENEVA

London, 11 January 1878

Dear Old Man,

Avant tout,[1] a Happy New Year to you, and may it bring you less in the way of troubles and burdens than the previous one!

The package eventually arrived a few days ago.[2] My best thanks. I have not quite finished looking through the Bulletin jurassien; I find it interesting to follow the decline of that gang and its ultimate relegation to the back of the stage as a result of our electoral victories of 10 January 1877.[3] Let them now scheme and snarl to their heart's content; they've gone to pot and there they will remain.[4]

You will be receiving from the post office a money order for 50 frs which you should regard as our contribution to the Précurseur. In accordance with the new regulations, I have to retain over here the receipt they gave me; the money order, or so they tell me, will be sent to you from Basle.

We are pretty well. Marx is notably better as compared with former years; his wife is not quite up to the mark, but the doctor[5] promises a complete cure; I myself cannot complain.

Things seem to be going very well indeed for you people in Switzerland; the formation of a workers' party is a great step forward and, even if the programme isn't nearly radical enough for the taste of Messieurs les Bakounistes, it doesn't matter a damn. A party that has the political means to take a direct part in the struggle, and the prospect of soon being able to throw a not inconsiderable weight into the scales, as is the case in Switzerland, has better things to do than to force each individual collaborator to accept its ultimate aims as dogma. There is, of course, much room for improvement in the programme, but it was modelled on the garrulous programme concocted in Germany at the time of the unification.[6]

In Germany, too, big mistakes were made, in particular as regards the attitude adopted—in a spirit altogether Bakuninist—towards the French crisis.[7] And yet on this occasion we again saw how far ahead of us France has come in matters of practice. Lousy though the solution may have so far proved to be, it is nevertheless the first time that anything has been achieved there without a violent upheaval[8] —and violence there, so soon after the bloodbath of 1871, could only lead to the revival of repression and of Bonapartism. But as it is, there is every prospect that the workers will very shortly gain freedom of the press, the right of association and assembly and whatever else is requisite for organisation and struggle, and that is all they need to begin with. They are in a position to discover where they stand theoretically, as is most necessary, and at last, when the opportunity presents itself, to enter the revolution as a tightly knit party and with a definite programme. And then again, the debonapartisation and republicanisation of the peasants, which is now in full swing, is another tremendous gain. And, lastly, the decisive point was reached because the common soldier declared he would not fight—the collapse of militarism has begun from within and may soon find a sequel in Germany, especially if present policy should make it necessary to lead the army into the field in support of the Russians.

Another big mistake in Germany is to have allowed students and other ignorant 'scholars', in the guise of scientific representatives of the party, to flood the world at large with vast quantities of the most arrant nonsense. However, this is a childish ailment which has to be got over, and it is precisely in order to hasten it on that I made such a thorough example of Dühring.[9]

That apart, things are going quite splendidly there as well and, if they now really get cracking with their anti-Russian agitation, it might prove very effective.

Apropos, Buffenoir, whom the Vorwärts is presently making such a fuss of,[10] is a somewhat ambiguous individual; in the first place, he's a clericalist, in the second he has recently eulogised Gambetta in effusive poetical verse and has no standing whatever amongst the workers of Paris. Another instance of Liebknecht's getting himself into a mess.

I hope the peace terms proposed by the Russians will be such that the war will go on. Not having any bridges over the Danube, their army is cut off and might starve miserably if the weather stays bad. And an undecided war, or fresh defeats, would undoubtedly give rise to revolution in Petersburg. Initially started by the court and constitutional, in other words 1789 preceding 1793.[11] Just let a national assembly convene in Petersburg, and the whole of Europe will assume a different aspect.

Your old friend

F. E.

  1. ↑ First of all
  2. ↑ See this volume, p. 214.
  3. ↑ Regular elections to the German Reichstag were held on 10 January 1877. About half a million votes were cast for the socialist candidates of whom 12 were actually elected (see also Note 248).
  4. ↑ Engels is referring to the anarchists. Inability to agree about the final goals of the campaign, failures in practical work (the abortive anarchist putsches in Italy in 1874 and 1877) gave rise to substantial theoretical differences among them. At the congress of the so-called anarchist International in Verviers in 1877, the Bakuninists' statement that all political parties, including the socialists, were essentially reactionary, aroused vigorous protests from the Belgian, the French and some of the Italian delegates.
  5. ↑ George Allen
  6. ↑ The reference is to the programme of the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany adopted by the unity congress in Gotha (see Note 71) in May 1875. Marx described it and gave a critical analysis of it in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (see present edition, Vol. 24), as well as in his letter to Wilhelm Bracke of 5 May 1875 (see this volume, pp. 69-73). Engels dealt with it in his letter to August Bebel of 18-28 March 1875 (ibid., pp. 60-66). The programme adopted at the congress ignored Marx's and Engels' comments on some of fundamental points. The point on proletarian internationalism was included at Liebknecht's suggestion.
  7. ↑ From 10 June 1877 the Vorwärts carried a series of articles covering the conflict between the monarchists and the republican majority in the French Chamber of Deputies and Mac-Mahon's attempt to effect a coup d'état (see Note 283). The first of them was an editorial 'Zum jüngsten Staatsstreich des Herrn Mac-Mahon'. The editorial board took a nihilist stand on these events, implying that it was immaterial to the proletariat whether it was campaigning under a bourgeois republic or a monarchy. These views were stated most directly in the editorial 'Nieder mit der Republik!' (Down with the Republic!) featured by the Vorwärts on 1 July 1877 and written, most probably, by Wilhelm Hasenclever.
  8. ↑ Following the republicans' overwhelming victory at the elections to the Chamber of Deputies on 14 October 1877 (see Note 283) the Broglie ministry was forced to resign on November 19. The attempt by Mac-Mahon and his followers to effect a coup d'état on 13 December fell through due to the resistance of the junior officer corps and especially the body of privates, who shared the republican leanings of the French peasantry. On 14 December, Jules Dufaure's government was formed. In January 1879, Mac-Mahon was obliged to resign before his term of office had expired. Jules Grévy, a moderate republican, was elected president of the Republic. The bourgeois-republican system was definitively established in France.
  9. ↑ F. Engels, Anti-Dühring.
  10. ↑ A reference to Hippolyte Buffenoir's articles printed under the heading 'Aus Frankreich' in the Vorwärts, Nos 124, 128, 129, 132, 133, 140 and 145, on 21 and 31 October, 2, 9, 11 and 30 November and 12 December 1877. In connection with the elections to the French Chamber of Deputies on 14 October 1877, Buffenoir acted as co-author of the manifesto issued by a group of the so-called autonomous socialists of Paris on 9 October 1877.
  11. ↑ Comparing the different stages of the French Revolution, Engels believed that a Russian revolution would end in the establishment of a revolutionary-democratic dictatorship, as had happened in France in 1793 when the Jacobins came to power.