Letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, June 3, 1885

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 3 June 1885


First published in Briefe und Auszüge aus Briefen von Joh. Phil. Becker, Jos. Dietzgen, Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx u. A. an F.A. Sorge und Andere, Stuttgart, 1906
Printed according to the original
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 47


ENGELS TO FRIEDRICH ADOLPH SORGE

IN HOBOKEN

London, 3 June 1885

Dear Sorge,

I was sorry to hear that you have been incapable of writing and trust that the thing has subsided. The Gronlunds and Elys,[1] as also the newspapers, gratefully received. Ely is a well-meaning philistine and does at least take more trouble than his German fellow-sufferers and fellow-blockheads which, after all, deserves recognition. Gronlund, on the other hand, strikes me as being speculative: his boosting of our stuff, in so far as he does or does not understand it, is clearly aimed at palming off his own Utopian fiddle-faddle as REAL LIVE GERMAN SOCIALISM. A symptom at any rate.

As regards To-Days and Commonweals, I am sending you the former from March onwards and the latter from the beginning.[2]

However their administrative side is not particularly efficient; should the paper [The Commonweal] fail to reach the Sozialist regularly, I should be very grateful if you would advise me so that I can provide proof of inefficiency, this being invariably denied by the secretary, though it undoubtedly exists.

You would do best to ignore Fabian completely; the man feels a need to get himself talked about and there is no necessity to encourage that.[3] His chief grievance against me is that I maliciously defamed V — 1 in the Anti-Dühring, a point on which he complained to Marx by letter. 209

You have had the same correct presentiment about the Reichstag laddies as I have — the case of the Steamship Subsidies[4] has revealed the immensity of their philistine aspirations. It almost came to a split, which would not be desirable at present, so long as the Anti-Socialist Law 37 remains in force. As soon as we get a bit more ELBOW-ROOM in Germany, the split will doubtless come and can then only do good. A petty-bourgeois-socialist parliamentary group is inevitable in a country like Germany where philistinism, even more than historical right, 'doesn't have no date'. 4 0 8 It will also be useful once it has constituted itself a body separate from the proletarian party. However such a split could only do harm just now if it were provoked by us. But if they do in fact renounce the programme, so much the better; we shall then be able to let fly.

You in America also suffer from various great savants of the kind possessed by Germany's philistine socialists in the persons of Geiser, Frohme, Bios, etc. The historical digressions in the Sozialist by your Stiebelings, Douais, etc., on the subject of Völkerwanderung[5] amused me greatly, for these people have studied the whole thing far better and far more thoroughly than I have. Douai, in particular, gives himself colossal airs. For instance in No. 13 of the Sozialist, apropos the German conquests in Italy, etc., he tells us that the King acquired ⅓ of the land and the officers and soldiers ⅔, of which ⅔ passed in turn to the former slaves, etc. This we learn from Jornandes and Cassiodorus.' 40Q When I read that I was completely bowled over. Precisely similar accounts, he goes on, are provided about the Visigoths. Nor was it otherwise in France.' Well, the whole thing is an invention from start to finish and you won't find a word of it either in Jornandes or in Cassiodorus or in any other contemporary source. It reveals at once colossal ignorance and impudence to confront me with such utter rubbish and to say that I am 'demonstrably in the wrong'. The sources, and I know practically all of them, state precisely the opposite. I have let it pass this time, as it was written in America where one can hardly make an issue of that kind of thing. But Monsieur Douai had better watch out in future; I might well lose patience some day.

The 2nd volume of Capital will be out shortly; all I am awaiting is the last half proof-sheet of the preface where Rodbertus receives a further broadside. The 3rd book is going ahead merrily, but will take a long time. Not that that matters, as the 2nd volume must be digested first. The 2nd volume will cause great disappointment, being a purely scientific work with little in the way of agitation. By contrast the third volume will again have the effect of a thunderbolt, since the whole of capitalist production is dealt with in context for the first time and all official bourgeois economics rejected out of hand. But it will be quite a task. Since the New Year I have dictated more than half of the final version and expect to finish this preliminary work in about 4 months. But after that there will be the actual job of editing, which won't be easy as the most important chapters are in some disorder — so far as form is concerned. However everything will work out all right, though it will take time. As you can imagine, I shall have to leave everything else on one side until I have finished, and hence neglect my correspondence; nor can there be any question of writing articles. But you would oblige me if you would see to it that nothing of what I have said about the 3rd volume gets into the Sozialist. That would inevitably give rise to unpleasantnesses in Zurich and elsewhere. Whatever the readers need to know will appear in my preface to the 2nd volume.

All is well with Tussy so far. The two of them[6] are very happy together, though unfortunately they are not always in good health. Lafargue must now do another 4 months on account of the same old fine and costs.[7] The police were intent on fomenting a riot in Paris on 24 May, but nothing came of it and the ministers took fright.[8] So the Victor Hugo business went off quietly after all, and that is just as well. As there is no Garde Nationale, no weapons are to be had and any attempted coup would inevitably be crushed. One just has to adapt one's tactics to the circumstances. Regards to Dietzgen and Adolf.[9]

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ L. Gronlund, The Cooperative Commonwealth in Its Outlines; R. T. Ely, French and German Socialism in Modern Times (see also this volume, p. 192).
  2. ↑ See this volume, pp. 298, 312.
  3. ↑ Ibid., p. 124.
  4. ↑ In late 1884, Bismarck, seeking to step up German colonial policy (see Note 292) demanded that the Reichstag approve annual subsidies for steamship companies to organise regular services to Eastern Asia, Australia and Africa. This demand led to disagreements within the Social-Democratic group in the Reichstag. The Left wing headed by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht came out against supporting the government's policy. The Right-wing majority in the group (Dietz, Frohme, Grillenberger, etc.) intended to vote for the subsidies under the pretext that they promoted international links. Under pressure from the majority, the parliamentary group decided to declare the subsidies issue to be of no major importance and give each member the right to vote as they thought fit (see Der Sozialdemokrat, No. 50, 11 December 1884). The sharp criticism expressed in Der Sozialdemokrat and the resolutions adopted by the party leadership led the majority of the parliamentary group to somewhat modify their attitude to the government's project when it was discussed in the Reichstag in March 1885 and to make their support conditional on the Reichstag accepting a number of the group's proposals. It was not until after the Reichstag declined to endorse the proposals made by the Social-Democratic group that they voted against the subsidies.
  5. ↑ II G. C. Stiebeling, 'Reform oder Revolution', Der Sozialist, No. 7, 14 February 1885; A. Douai, 'Eine Entgegnung auf Dr. Stiebeling's Artikel', Der Sozialist, No. 13, 28 March 1885.
  6. ↑ Eleanor Marx Aveling and Edward Aveling
  7. ↑ On 21 May 1885 Paul Lafargue was sent to Ste Pélagie prison, Paris, for two months for failing to pay a fine of 100 francs imposed on him in April 1883 by a jury in Moulins as punishment for his public speeches (see Note 9). To begin with, Lafargue was kept in the cell reserved for criminals, but later transferred to the part of the prison where the political detainees were kept.
  8. ↑ On 24 May 1885 a demonstration was organised in Paris in memory of the members of the Paris Commune. Carrying red flags, the demonstrators made their way to the Mur des Fédérés in Père-Lachaise cemetery where 200 members of the Commune had been shot on 27 May 1871. The police attacked the demonstrators on the pretext that it was forbidden to carry red flags on demonstrations in Paris. A clash ensued in which a number of people were killed and injured. Engels expected that the police would try to organise a similar act of provocation on 1 June during the funeral of Victor Hugo who had died on 22 May 1885.
  9. ↑ Adolf Sorge jun.