Letter to August Bebel, after April 27, 1880

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 27 April 1880


First published, in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Vol. I (VI), Moscow, 1932
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 46


ENGELS TO AUGUST BEBEL

IN LEIPZIG

[London, after 27 April 1880]

[...][1] so as to make the whole thing impossible without actually prohibiting it.

Mr Hasselmann will soon become harmless if you people bring to light really compromising facts about him and take the wind out of his sails in the Reichstag, i. e. proceed in a frankly revolutionary way, which can be done by using quite temperate language, as you yourself did in exemplary fashion in your speech on the persecutions.[2] If, however, a person is constantly afraid of being thought by the philistine, as often happens, to be a bit more extreme than he really is, and if in fact the enclosed cutting from the Kölnische Zeitung is correct in reporting that the Social-Democrats have brought a motion intended to restore the guild privilege of trading in home-made goods, then the Hasselmanns and Mosts will have an easy task.

None of this, however, is really of much consequence. What is now keeping the party alive is unobtrusive, spontaneous activity on the part of individuals; like its organisation, it is kept going by their irrepressible journeyings. In Germany we have fortunately reached the stage when every action of our adversaries is advantageous to us; when all historical forces are playing into our hands, when nothing, absolutely nothing, can happen without our deriving advantage from it. For that reason we can quietly allow our adversaries to work for us. Bismarck is working for us like a real Trojan. He has now won Hamburg for us and will shortly also make us a present, first of Altona, and then of Bremen. The National Liberals are working for us, even though all they do is submit to kicks and vote taxes. The Catholics are working for us, even though they voted first against, and then for, the Anti-Socialist Law, in return for which they, too, have simply been delivered by Bismarck over to the tender mercies of the government, i. e. also placed outside the law. Anything we can do is a mere drop in the ocean compared with what events are doing for us at this moment. Bismarck's feverish activity, which is throwing everything into disorder and putting everything out of joint without achieving anything of a remotely positive nature; which is stretching the philistine's tax-paying potential to the utmost limit, and this for nothing and worse than nothing; which wants one thing one day and the opposite the next and is forcibly driving into the arms of the revolution the philistine who would so gladly grovel at his feet — this is our strongest ally, and I'm delighted at your being able to confirm from actual observation that there has in fact been a shift to the left, as was inevitable in the circumstances.

In France, too, things are progressing well. Our communist viewpoint is breaking new ground everywhere and the best of those advocating it are all of them former anarchists who have come over to us without our raising a finger.[3] Unanimity has thus been established among European socialists; any who are still shilly-shallying aren't worth mentioning now that the last remaining sect, the anarchists, has melted away. There, too, we find increasingly a general shift to the left among the bourgeois and peasants, as you have already remarked; but there's one snag here: this shift to the left is primarily tending towards a war of retribution and that must be avoided.

The victory of the Liberals here has at least one good aspect in that it puts a spoke in the wheel of Bismarck's foreign policy.[4] Since he might just as well dismiss the Russian war from his mind now, he will, as usual, doubtless sell his ally — Austria — to the first comer. After all, the bitter experiences of 1864-66 have already shown the Austrians that Bismarck seeks allies only to betray them — but they're too stupid and will again fall into the trap.

In Russia, too, everything is proceeding splendidly, despite judicial murder, banishments and an appearance of calm. You can't banish sheer lack of money. Not one banker will make a loan without a guarantee from the Imperial Assembly. Hence the present desperate recourse to an internal loan. On paper it will be a success, in reality a total failure. And then they will have to convene some assembly or other if only to obtain cash — always supposing something else doesn't happen in the meantime.

Kindest regards to you and Liebknecht from Marx and

Yours

F. E.

  1. ↑ The beginning of the letter is missing.
  2. ↑ An excerpt from this letter was published in English for the first time in: K. Marx, On History and People, McGraw Hill Book Company, New York, 1977. It appeared in English in full in The Letters of Karl Marx, selected and translated with explanatory notes and an introduction by Saul K. Padover, Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey, 1979.
  3. ↑ Engels probably means, above all, Paul Brousse and Benoît Malon.
  4. ↑ A reference to the French edition of the first volume of Capital. An attempt to translate Marx's principal work into French was first made by Charles Keller, a member of the Paris Section of the International. Between October 1869 and April 1870, he translated about 400 pages which he sent to Marx for editing. After the defeat of the Paris Commune, however, Keller was forced to emigrate to Switzerland, where he embraced Bakuninist views, after which Marx terminated co-operation with him. In December 1871, Paul Lafargue assisted Marx in concluding a contract for the publication of Capital with the progressive French journalist and publisher Maurice Lachâtre. The contract was signed on 15 February 1872. Under it, Capital was to appear in 44 instalments, one printer's sheet each. The work appeared between 1872 and 1875 in two instalments at a time, but was sold in series of five instalments each, making nine series in all. The last instalments having come out, the series were stitched together and sold as separate books. The first volume of Capital was translated into French by Joseph Roy. Marx did not think much of the effort and made a vast number of alterations, in fact, revised the book. As he himself said, the authorised French translation had an independent scientific value alongside the German original. In this edition, the first volume of Capital is published in Engels' authorised English translation with the interpolations from the French edition given in the Appendix (see present edition, Vol. 35).