| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 16 December 1882 |
ENGELS TO JOHANN PHILIPP BECKER
IN GENEVA
London, 16 December 1882
Dear Old Man,
I have been waiting for some time for some money to come in so that I could send you another fiver. It eventually came in yesterday, followed that very evening by your postcard.[1] I therefore immediately took out a money order for the said fiver = 126 frs, and hope the money will reach you without delay.
I was very glad to hear that you have extricated yourself from the cantonal and communal mire; it's a sheer waste of time and productive of nothing but tittle-tattle and pointless vexation. Incidentally, that jackass Solari is still sending me 2 copies of the Précurseur. It must be a fine despatch department!
Every year the anarchists commit suicide and every year rise anew from their ashes, and so it will go on until such time as anarchism is subjected to serious persecution. It is the only socialist sect that really can be destroyed by means of persecution. For its perpetual rebirth depends on a steady supply of would-be bigwigs who wish to play a role on the cheap. Anarchism is as if tailor-made for that. But run a risk? Not on your life! Hence the present harassment of anarchists in France will damage that gang only if it isn't sheer make-believe or hanky-panky on the part of the police. But either way its victims will be those poor devils, the miners of Montceau. Incidentally, I have grown so used to the anarchist buffoons that it seems to me quite natural to have that clownish caricature tagging along like this beside the movement proper. They are dangerous only in such countries as Austria and Spain, and then only for the time being. Again the Jura, where watch-making is carried on in houses scattered all over the place, would seem a foreordained hotbed of this ballyhoo, and here your blows could prove quite beneficial.
Marx has been given permission by the doctors to spend the winter on the south coast of England and has been in the Isle of Wight for 6 weeks or so. Hitherto, all has been well as regards the two main counts: no sign of any recurrence of pleurisy or bronchitis. The rotten weather we have been having here (for a week the fog has scarcely lifted at all) means that convalescents are inevitably subject to colds of all sorts and, for one in Marx's condition, these are lingering and troublesome. But if it remains at that, no matter. However, he might well be sent out to Switzerland again next summer, in which case you will certainly see one another.
Madame Lafargue's address is 66 Boulevard de Port-Royal, Paris. Not long ago her husband was arrested, but has already been set free. The point at issue was certain speeches he had made in the provinces and, upon their being summoned by the examining magistrate of Montluçon, he and Guesde, instead of obeying, poured vile scorn upon him in the Egalité. Whereupon he naturally issued a warrant for their arrest but, although Lafargue went daily to the newspaper office and was at so little pains to conceal his whereabouts that he actually announced he was going to speak, and did speak, at meetings, it took the clever Parisian police three weeks to seek him out. Like Guesde before him, he was immediately released after the first hearing at Montluçon. They might still get a couple of months apiece.
As you know, the workers' party in France has split. Malon and Brousse can hardly wait for the day when they become deputies, which means that a herd of voters has to be quickly rounded up. In other words a party created without a programme (literally — for a long series of 'considérants* (preambles) is followed by the conclusion that every locality must draw up its own programme), in which every Tom, Dick and Harry is welcome and, to carry this through, people are being admitted into the party before the congress who accept the old programme with the reservation that, come the congress, they will subvert it. Guesde, Lafargue, etc., were outvoted and those who stood by the programme went to Roanne. Our people are no tacticians and have committed hopeless blunders, but nevertheless they will win through and the 'Possibilists' won't have it all their own way for long. Our chaps have a very considerable lever in the shape of the daily Egalité and, moreover, are all of them devoted to the cause, something which cannot be said of those intriguers, Malon and Brousse.
Well, good-bye, old man, and keep your pecker up. You're unlikely to decline as fast as all that and, as you know, we're all heading the same way!
Your
F. E.