Letter to Eduard Bernstein, May 5, 1887

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 5 May 1887


First published, in Russian, in Marx-Engels Archives, Vol. I, Moscow, 1924
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 48


ENGELS TO EDUARD BERNSTEIN

IN ZURICH

London, 5 May 1887

Dear Ede,

You're the most incorrigible Hamlet I have ever come across. You are aware that Kautsky and I keep completely aloof from the local German goings-on here[1] and have to do so if all our time is not to be wasted on piffling tittle-tattle. You are aware that we haven't got a single spokesman in the local association because all these people are involved in embittered feuds of the pettiest kind.[2] So if we do anything at all in this matter, it will cause a stir, the chaps will want to know the whys and wherefores, and the next day it will be the gossip of all the anarchist clubs. If you were to come over here, a visit to the club and a chat there would at once put you in a position to find out all you want within the space of two or three days, and without causing any stir at all. So in addition to depriving us of a pleasure if you stay away, you would fulfil only half the purpose of your journey. The only person we could bring into play would be old Lessner, and he has grown so rusty that he'd make a pauvre[3] diplomat.

There's nothing about the Babeuf affair in Avenel's Lundis[4] or Anarchasis Cloots.—Yes, there is—pp. 42 and 94.[5] —So I shall send you the Lundis by registered post. Please let me have it back soon, i.e. in about a fortnight, since I need the book for reference and can't very well dispense with it. I used to have the main source, namely Buonarroti's Conspiration de Babeuf, in an English translation[6] brought out by the Chartists but, like so much else, it has been pinched; I have had another good look for it, but without result.

As regards the Russians, there is a point that ought now to be stressed but of which I have nowhere seen any mention.[7] All over Europe reactionaries are fuming about Nihilist regicide[8] and the use of dynamite in particular, special objects of odium being Russian revolutionaries, whose extradition to Russia they are demanding not without success, even in America. But what is the Russian government up to? In Sofia it gets Alexander Battenberg deposed and, if he wasn't shot in the process, this was thanks solely to his own ineptitude.[9] In Bucharest it instigates assassination attempts on Bulgarian civil governors.[10] And, lastly—some four weeks ago in Sofia—it gets a dynamite bomb thrown at the house of Major Popoff,[11] the commandant or whatever he is.[12] So everything the Russian government reproaches the Nihilists with and for which it demands their extradition as common criminals, it is itself doing through the medium of its notorious agents in Bulgaria. We must demand that, in respect of these specifically Russian modes of procedure, the same standards should be applied to revolutionaries and government alike. This is already felt fairly generally, but it is important that it be said—and pretty loudly at that.

The Schnaebelé affair was obviously a put-up job to get Boulanger into difficulties. The only person to have got the story right, and this as much as a fortnight ago, was Mother Crawford, the Paris correspondent of the Daily News and the Weekly Dispatch, as is confirmed by Bismarck's dispatch.

Whether or not you people in Switzerland are harassed depends solely on how much warlike hubbub there is. If it grows less, the Federal Council will take heart, but if it increases, then woe betide its trousers.

In confidence. Should la Schack return to Switzerland, it might be better not to confide in her too much. She is endowed with an excess of energy which is not always channeled in the right direction. On the one hand she seeks out the liberals from amongst her former acquaintances, on the other her chosen companions are the anarchists among the English workers over here. I personally have no objection to her moving in any circle she pleases, and she herself is a very nice, intelligent and amusing person, but the very fact of her choosing just now, on the eve of a clash with the anarchists in the League (at the Whitsun delegates' conference[13] ), to consort with the latter—so much so that the others already call her the Anarchist Countess—is something that must be taken into account. Strictly between ourselves, however, I think she is, all in all, pretty innocuous.

Aveling and Tussy are conducting a splendid propaganda campaign in the East End Radical Clubs,[14] which have been galvanised into life by the example of America and are now seriously thinking of forming an independent labour party. The chaps came to Aveling of their own accord and that's an excellent sign. Should we succeed in gaining a firm foothold there, the Social Democratic Federation[15] and the Socialist League[16] will both be pushed into the background, and a start will have been made on the conquest of London. What is immediately at stake in this instance is a dozen parliamentary seats—these clubs have hitherto been a source of strength to the Liberals here. And even Hyndman has seen the red light, which is why he is repeating in Justice the calumnies levelled against Aveling by the New York Executive.[17] This is just what we want for the furtherance of our campaign. But you can see how difficult our work over here is being made by the lubberly calumnies of the wretched New York Executive.

Mumma,[18] who is here at the moment, sends her regards.

Your

F. E.

  1. ↑ In his letter of 29 April 1887 Eduard Bernstein asked Engels and Kautsky to find out, confidentially, whether the Austrian anarchist Joseph Peukert, resident in London, was not, as he, Bernstein, assumed, a police agent. In late 1887 Peukert was exposed.
  2. ↑ This refers to the London German Workers' Educational Society. It was founded by members of the League of the Just Karl Schapper, Joseph Moll and Heinrich Bauer in London in 1840. In 1847 and in 1849-50 Marx and Engels took part in its activities. The Society changed its name in subsequent years. From the 1870s it was called the Communist Workers' Educational society. Soon after the introduction of the Anti-Socialist Law in Germany (see note 52), the Society was overruled by the faction that rejected the tactics adopted by German Social Democracy for the period of operation of the Law. It opposed combining legal and illegal methods of struggle, objected to the Social Democrats' use of the Reichstag platform and favoured individual terrorism. In March 1880 a considerable part of the Society's members formed an independent organisation of their own, retaining the Society's name. This new Society declared that it would be guided by the principles and tactics of German Social Democracy. The remainder of the members, in particular the followers of Johann Most, stuck to their extreme Left views. They operated under the same name.
  3. ↑ poor
  4. ↑ G. Avenel, Lundis révolutionnaires, 1871-1874
  5. ↑ This refers to data on the state of affairs in the French republic at the time of the conspiracy of the Equals, which Bernstein needed for his Afterword to Gabriel Deville's book Gracchus Babeuf and die Verschworung der Gleichen. Translated by Bernstein into German, the book was published, with his Afterword, in the series Sozialdemokratische Bibliothek, in Hottingen-Zurich in 1887. The Conspiracy of the Equals, organised by Babeuf and his followers, aimed at provoking an armed uprising of the plebeian masses against the bourgeois regime of the Directory and establishing a revolutionary dictatorship as a transitional stage on the way to 'pure democracy' and 'egalitarian communism'. The conspiracy was exposed in May 1796. At the end of May 1797 its leaders were executed. Buonarroti's Conspiration de Babeuf, which Engels mentions later in his letter, was translated into English and published by William O'Brien, a prominent Chartist.
  6. ↑ Buonarroti, History of Babeufs Conspiracy for Equality, London, 1836
  7. ↑ Engels's remarks contained in this paragraph were used in the column 'Sozialpolitische Rundschau' of Der Sozialdemocrat, No. 20, 13 May 1887.
  8. ↑ Nihilists were the extreme wing of the radical movement in Russia in the 1860s, intellectuals who believed in the destruction of existing society and culture. The Nihilists rejected the dominant ideology and morality and fought against religious prejudices. They demanded freedom of the individual and equality for women, and favoured the study of the natural and exact sciences. Towards the end of the 1860s the term practically ceased to be used in polemic literature, but in later years reactionary journalists occasionally applied it to revolutionaries. In West European literature the term was used to denote Russian revolutionaries, including the members of the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will), in the 1870s and 1880s.
  9. ↑ Engels means the political crisis in Bulgaria in the summer of 1886 created by the overthrow of Prince Alexander Battenberg by a group of military conspirators linked with agents of the Russian Government. The provisional government formed on 9 August was replaced, a few days later, by a proAustrian regency. An attempt to re-enthrone Alexander Battenberg failed in the face of open opposition from Russia. In September, the Russian Government dispatched Major General N. V. Kaulbars to Sofia with the task to prepare the ground for the election of a Russian candidate to the Bulgarian throne. However, his mission failed, owing in particular to the stance taken by the West European powers, notably Britain. On 5 November Russia recalled Kaulbars and broke off diplomatic relations with Bulgaria.
  10. ↑ This refers to an attempt on Mantoff
  11. ↑ Panoff in the ms
  12. ↑ On 31 March 1887 two Bulgarian emigres staged an attempt on the life of Mantoff, prefect of the Bulgarian city of Ruschtschuk, in Bucharest for negotiations with the Russian ambassador. Mantoff was seriously injured. On the night of 23 April a bomb was set off in the house of Major Popoff, chief of the Sofia garrison. The attack had been organised by members ohe pro-Russian Liberal Party. The Russophile officer Olimpi Panoff was shot in Bulgaria in February 1887.
  13. ↑ On 29 May 1887 the third annual conference of the Socialist league (see note 21) was held in London. Delegates from 24 sections attended. The anarchists gained the upper hand; a resolution was adopted saying: 'This conference endorses the policy of abstention from parliamentary action, hitherto pursued by the League, and sees no sufficient reason for altering it.
  14. ↑ After their return from the USA (see note 3) Eleanor Marx-Aveling and Edward Aveling launched a large-scale socialist propaganda campaign in London's Radical Clubs (see note 22). Their purpose was, among other things, to familiarise the British workers with the experience of the US labour movement.
  15. ↑ The Social Democratic Federation was a British socialist organisation, the successor of the Democratic Federation, reformed in August 1884. It consisted of heterogeneous socialist elements, mostly intellectuals, but also politically active workers. The programme of the Federation provided for the collectivisation of the means of production, distribution and exchange. Its leader, Henry Hyndman, was dictatorial and arbitrary, and his supporters among the Federation's leaders denied the need to work among the trade unions. In contrast to Hyndman, the Federation members grouped round Eleanor Marx-Aveling, Edward Aveling, William Morris and Tom Mann sought close ties with the mass working-class movement. In December 1884, differences on questions of tactics and international co-operation led to a split in the Federation and the establishment of the independent socialist league (see note 21). In 1885-86 the Federation's branches were active in the movement of the unemployed, in strike struggles and in the campaign for the eight-hour day.
  16. ↑ The Socialist League was founded in December 1884 by a group of English socialists who had withdrawn from the Social Democratic Federation (see note 62). The League's organisers included Eleanor Marx Aveling, Ernest Belfort Bax and William Morris. 'The Manifesto of the Socialist League' (see The Commonweal No.1, February 1885) stated that its members advocated 'the principles of Revolutionary International Socialism' and sought 'a change in the basis of Society ... which would destroy the distinctions of classes and nationalities'. The tasks of the League included the formation of a national socialist party, the conquest of political power through the election of socialists to local government bodies, and the promotion of the trade union and co-operative movement. In the League's early years its leaderook an active part in the working-class movement. However, in 1887 the League split into three factions (Anarchist elements, 'parliamentarists and 'anti-parliamentarists'). With sectarian tendencies growing stronger, the League gradually distanced itself from the day-to-day struggle of the British workers and finally disintegrated in 1889-90.
  17. ↑ An item headlined 'A Costly Apostle', published in Justice No. 172, 30 April 1887, reproduced the contents of the circulars of the Executive of the Socialist Labor Party of North America attacking Edward Aveling (see notes 32 and 98). Aveling answered in a Letter to the Editor, published in Justice, No. 174. 14 May 1887.
  18. ↑ Louise Kautsky