Letter to Eduard Bernstein, February 8, 1883

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 8 February 1883


First published, in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Book I, Moscow, 1924
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 46, p. 432

To Bernstein in Zurich


London, 8 February 1883

Dear Mr Bernstein,

1. I trust you have received the final ms. (The Mark) which was sent off from here registered on 20 December. But the printing delays are now getting really too outrageous. If it goes on like this you had better reset the title and put 1884 on it. When, exactly, will there be another sheet?

2. I have received — neither the first Accident Bill, nor Bebel's speech on the subject. Meanwhile it has struck me that a specific attack on Bismarckian socialism has become outdated.[1] Viereck's little paper[2] has lost all inclination for it. Singer, who had been suffering badly from nationalisation mania on the last occasion but one, was, on the last occasion, completely free of it and genuinely revolutionary, [3] while as for those weaklings in the Reichstag, Bios, Geiser & Co., their courage, if not their enthusiasm, would appear to have evaporated. So why crack a nut with a sledgehammer? I think we should let Bismarckian socialism dig its own grave. After which all that remains is a criticism of the rotten Lassallean remnants. But if the pamphlet[4] is printed so slowly, this attack, too, may have ceased to be topical by the time the thing comes out.

3. You are mistaken about Malon. The man is not as stupid, or rather as naive, as he makes himself out to be. C'est un faux bonhomme'[5] who has learnt from the Bakuninists how to manipulate people on the sly while making out that it is he himself who is being manipulated. One of these days you will see that I am right.

4. Stock exchange tax. Has long existed here in England in the form of a simple, everyday stamp on the transfer document — ½% of the amount paid and 5/- transfer fee (securities au porteur[6] are rare over here; they are free). The only consequence is that the real speculation on the stock exchange is in margin dealings where no actual transfer takes place. Hence only affects the so-called 'solid capital investment'. Nor has anything ever been devised that the stock market speculators cannot circumvent.

I am against it, 1. because we, after all, demand only direct taxation, rejecting any that is indirect, so that the people may know and sense what they are paying, and also so that capital can be got at in this way, 2. because we certainly cannot vote one penny to this government.

You are right in describing the outcry against the stock exchange as petty-bourgeois. The stock exchange simply adjusts the distribution of the surplus value already stolen from the workers, and how that is done may at first be a matter of indifference to the workers as such. However the stock exchange adjusts this distribution in the direction of centralisation, vastly accelerates the concentration of capitals and is therefore as revolutionary as the steam engine.

Equally petty-bourgeois, though perhaps just excusable, are taxes with a moral purpose — beer, spirits. In this context they are quite ludicrous and altogether reactionary. Had the stock exchange in America not created colossal fortunes, how would large-scale industry and a social movement have been possible in that land of farmers?

It would be quite a good idea if you were to lash out here. But with circumspection. There must be no gap in one's defences where your Stoeckers are concerned.

5. 3rd edition of Capital.[7] Will doubtless take some time yet as Marx is still ailing. His stay in Ventnor, where it rained continuously, did him no good. On top of that there has been the loss of his daughter.[8] He has been back here for the past 3 weeks and is so hoarse that he can barely speak, so not much could be discussed (only don't mention this in the paper[9] , of course).

6. We should be grateful for the Rodbertus-Meyer book.[10] At one time the man was almost on the point of discovering surplus value, but his estate in Pomerania prevented him from doing so.

Very many thanks for the photograph.

Kautsky has sent me his pamphlet on American grain. Choice irony: 3 years ago the population was to be reduced because it would otherwise have nothing to eat; now the population does not even suffice to eat what America produces![11] That's what happens when you study so-called 'questions' one by one without linking them together. In so doing you naturally fall victim to that dialectic which 'is objectively present', Diihring notwithstanding, 'in things themselves'. [12]

I am delighted to hear that the Hohenzollern family again boasts a professing pederast. It would not bè complete without one. Admittedly Prince Karl, like Frederick William II, also 'operated' in that line, but he also included women. That reminds me, did Adolf Beust give you Mirabeau's Secret History of the Court of Berlin[13] which I gave him to pass on to you? If not, get hold of it. The book is inimitable on the subject of Frederick William II; the best bits have been dog's-eared.

Kindest regards.

Yours,

F. E.

  1. ↑ Cf. Engels'letter to Eduard Bernstein. 13 September 1883
  2. ↑ Süddeutsche Post
  3. ↑ During his stay in London in May 1882, Paul Singer discussed with Engels the attitude the Social-Democratic Party should take to Bismarck's policies, which probably compelled Singer to modify his stand.
  4. ↑ A reference to the preparation of the German edition of Engels' work Socialism: Utopian and Scientific. As he had promised, Engels prepared the German text by making additions to and changes in it, and wrote a preface. He also supplemented it by his essay 'The Mark' on the emergence and development of landed property in Germany. The work was finished in September 1882, and the pamphlet was printed in Hottingen-Zurich at the end of the year and was on sale in early 1883 under the title Die Entwicklung des Sozialismus von der Utopie zur Wissenschaft.
  5. ↑ Shifty customer
  6. ↑ to bearer
  7. ↑ The third German edition of Volume One of Capital, which appeared in print after Marx's death (in 1883), was edited by Engels. By the 2nd volume Marx means here the part of his work that later made up the second and the third volumes of Capital.
  8. ↑ Jenny Longuet died on 11 January 1883.
  9. ↑ Der Sozialdemokrat
  10. ↑ [J. K.] Rodbertus-Jagetzow, Briefe und Socialpolitische Aufsätze, Berlin [1882], edited and with a preface by R. Meyer.
  11. ↑ Engels compares Kautsky's book Der Einfluss der Volksvermehrung auf den Fortschritt der Gesellschaft (1880), which defended the 'sound core' of Malthus' theory, with his own pamphlet Die überseeische Lebensmittel-Konkurrenz, which was an off-print from Staatswirthschaftliche Abhandlungen (Serie II, Heft IV und V, 1881).
  12. ↑ Engels is referring to Hegel's idea of the objectively existing dialectical contradiction in things and processes, which Dühring attacked in his book Kritische Geschichte der Nationalökonomie und des Socialismus.
  13. ↑ H. G. Mirabeau, Histoire secrète de la cour de Berlin...