Letter to Heinrich Nonne, about February 26, 1884

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 26 February 1884


First published in: Marx and Engels, Works, First Russian Edition, Vol. XXVII, Moscow, 1935
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO HEINRICH NONNE

IN PARIS

[Draft]

[London, about 26 February 1884]

What I wrote and told you about Malon[1] are the simple facts of which I have been given proof and which are in no way altered by Paris gossip. Malon did indeed quit the Peace Congress[2] in company with Bakunin and 15 others, and he was a co-founder of the secret Alliance.[3] The document of March 1870 has actually been in my possession[4] ; what the lies are that Malon has recently been concocting about the International are of no interest to me; I am unlikely so much as to look at them. In my view the fact that he is self-taught does not give him the right to falsify history. If he is fit to play a leading role among the French, I am sorry for the French proletariat.

As regards your propagation of international relations,3

1) the aims are so vague that I really cannot give up any time on the strength of your general prospects;

2) virtually all the people you mention are unknown to me (the only one I know at all well is precisely the one you fail to name). But one cannot be active in the international movement for 40 years without having everywhere old friends and allies to whom one is politically and morally committed. I should therefore first have to obtain information from them about many of your people and about the attitude of one side to the other. I cannot very well do that, however, without giving some inkling of your scheme;

3) but I cannot possibly embark on an alliance without having the least idea of where and into what further associations it will lead me. Some kind of central committee would presumably be set up in Paris, which would decide on the admission of new members and on possible action, and it might so happen that I found myself in the same association as people whom I should be compelled to oppose outright or that I became responsible for an action I disapproved of. That is an eventuality I cannot expose myself to at all.

Do not, however, let this deter you. If you are able to achieve something worthwhile, it will please me nonetheless. I am grateful to you for your confidence and remain, etc.

  1. ↑ Benoît Malon
  2. ↑ The reference is to the Congress of the League of Peace and Freedom held in Berne in late September and early October 1868.
  3. ↑ The reference is to the disruptive activities in the International of Mikhail Bakunin and his supporters. In the autumn of 1868 in Geneva they founded the International Alliance of Socialist Democracy, an organisation with its own programme and rules that contradicted those of the International (see present edition, Vol. 21, pp. 207-11). Following the refusal by the General Council of the International Working Men's Association to admit the Alliance to the International, in 1869 Bakunin, in violation of the promise he had given to disband his organisation, secretly introduced the Alliance into the International with the aim of seizing its leadership. Posing as sections of the International, sections of the Alliance publicised their anarchist programme, claiming it was the programme of the International. In November 1871, the Bakuninists' congress in Sonvillier, Switzerland, called for a revision of the International's Rules, notably the articles on the importance of the political struggle by the working class and its party.
  4. ↑ See this volume, p. 97.