ENGELS TO PAUL LAFARGUE
AT LE PERREUX
London, 16 May 1889
My dear Lafargue,
Herewith my notes on your draft appeal,[1] which I have discussed with Bernstein. If, by the bye, you say that the Troyes[2] congress represented the whole of the French working class you are putting yourselves in flagrant contradiction to the facts and laying yourselves open to protests and refusals from abroad—and quite needlessly at that. Your dicta will not cause the Possibilists and their Paris majority to vanish into thin air.
I have sent out the English circular to the weekly papers, tomorrow it will go to the daily press, to the London radical clubs,[3] to Socialist organisations and to such influential people as may be interested.
This will account for perhaps 1,000 copies, Tussy will dispose of 500 others and Keir Hardie of another 500 in Scotland. The addresses and wrappers are ready, and everything will go off tomorrow so that by Saturday evening, when the clubs, Trade Unions, etc., meet, all will have been distributed.
Bonnier's letter is in the Star.[4]
Clara Zetkin[5] has written an excellent article in the Berlin Tribune—had we had so exact an account of things three months ago, it would have helped us a great deal. Bernstein will make good use of it when he goes to see Massingham tomorrow, as also of the affair of the 13th[6] whose significance was not apparent from the Egalité article, but all the details of which she has given to Bernstein.
You are quite right not to locate the National Council in Paris—since your strength lies in the provinces, it is there rather than in Paris that the official leadership belongs. That the provinces should be better than Paris is, moreover, a very good sign.
Tomorrow will see the first performance of another of Aveling's plays.[7] Although he has not taken the public by storm, he is attracting the notice of some critics, even those who have hitherto adhered to the conspiracy of silence.
The miners' strike in my part of Germany (Barmen lies some five or six miles from the edge of the coal-field) is an event of the very greatest significance.[8] Whatever the outcome, it will open up territory hitherto closed to us and, as of now, will earn us 40,000-50,000 more votes in the elections. The government is scared stiff, for any attempt at resolute action or, as they say in Prussia (although the term is an Austrian one), 'schneidiges Handeln'[9] might precipitate a week of bloodshed, as happened in Paris in 1872. Henceforward the miners will be ours throughout the length and breadth of Germany—and they are a force to be reckoned with.
As for Boulanger, I hope you are right and that that mountebank has lost the game.[10] But...
POST-TIME!
Yours ever,
F. E.
I shall write to Danielson[11]
International Socialist Working Men's Congress.
14th to 21st July, 1889.
Workers and Socialists of Europe and America,—
The Bordeaux[12] Working Men's Congress, held by the delegates of upwards of 200 trades unions from all the industrial centres of France,[13]
and the Troyes[14] Congress, constituted by the delegates of 300 workmen's and[15] Socialist groups representing the French working class and revolutionary Socialism at large, have resolved to convene an International Congress in Paris, during the Exhibition, that shall be open to the workers of the whole world.
This resolution has been joyfully welcomed by the Socialists of Europe and America, happy to be able to meet and to clearly formulate the demands of the working-class on the subject of international labour legislation, which question will be treated at the Berne Conference, to be held by the representatives of the Governments of Europe in September.
The capitalists invite the rich and mighty to the Universal Exhibition, to contemplate and admire the achievements of the workers doomed to misery in the midst of the most colossal wealth ever possessed by any human society. We, Socialists, whose aim is the emancipation of labour, the abolition of wage-slavery, and the creation of an order of things in which all workers—without distinction of sex or nationality—shall have a right to the riches produced by their common toil; it is the producers whom we invite to meet us on the 14th July in Paris.
We call on them to seal the bond[16] of fellowship that, by consolidating the efforts of the proletariat of all countries, will hasten the advent of the new world.
'Working men of all countries, unite!'
—to seal the bond may give rise to difficulties. The Germans are forbidden to have any kind of organisation whatever and such as they have in defiance of the law is regarded as a secret society. Hence one must avoid any expression which suggests the idea of formal organisation. Bid them to a fête of solidarity, to a public demonstration of fraternity—anything you please, so long as you do not invite them to form an official organisation or words to that effect, as the English jurists say.
It also seems to me that one or two good sentences are needed to make an effective ending.
And you might tell the international Socialists who are going to sign this that the details of place of meeting, etc., will be communicated later by the Paris commission. A little prose after so much rhetoric would not come amiss. It would be more businesslike.
- ↑ The circular about the convocation of an International Working Men's Congress, written by P. Lafargue and J. Guesde, was sent by the authors to Engels on 14 May, 1889. In June 1889 it was printed in the form of a leaflet in French in Paris and in English in London, and also published in German by the newspapers Der Sozialdemokrat on 1 June and Berliner Volksblatt on 2 June. The newspaper The Star had also printed it on 14 May 1889 in the Feature The People's Post Box (in English); the circular likewise appeared in the weekly Commonweal on 8 June and also as an appendix to the pamphlet The International Working Men's Congress of 1889, II, A Reply to the 'Manifesto of the Social Democratic Federation' (see note 444).
- ↑ The convention of the French Workers' Party held in Troyes in December 1888 (see note 322) passed a decision on nominating a socialist as an independent candidacy for the by-election of 27 January 1889. The candidature of Boule, a labourer and stonemason, was nominated accordingly. This convention also decided to hold an International Socialist Working Men's Congress in Paris in 1889, thus confirming the decision of the National Congress of the French trade unions (see note 331).
- ↑ Radical Clubs began to emerge in London and other cities in the 1870s. They consisted of bourgeois radicals and workers. In the Clubs of London's poorer areas, such as the East End, the workers predominated. The Clubs criticised the Irish policy of Gladstone's Liberal government and urged an extension of the suffrage and other democratic reforms. From the early 1880s they engaged in socialist propaganda. In 1885 London's Radical Clubs united in the Metropolitan Radical Federation.
- ↑ The reference is to Bonnier's letter published by The Star on 15 May 1889, under the heading The Paris Congress; it exposed the collusion of the Possibilists with the reactionary wing in the Paris Municipal Council.
- ↑ [C. Zetkin,] 'Der internationale Arbeiterkongres und die Streitigkeiten unter den französischen Arbeitern', Berliner Volks-Tribüne, No. 19, 11 May 1889.
- ↑ Several Possibilist organisations, dissatisfied with the behaviour of their leaders during the election to the chamber of Deputies on 27 January 1889, and in the course of the preparation for the International Working Men's Congress, levelled strong criticism at them. In its turn, the leadership of the Possibilist Party on 16 April expelled the group of the 14th arrondissement of Paris from its ranks; late in April 1889 the key organisations of the 13th arrondissement left the Federation of the Possibilists. For more detail, see the pamphlet The International Working Men's Congress of 1889, II, A Reply to the 'Manifesto of the Social Democratic Federation' (see note 444).
- ↑ Engels is referring to E. Aveling's play Dregs, staged by the Vaudeville Theatre on 16 May 1889.
- ↑ The German coal miners' strike in the Ruhr was a major event in the German working-class movement of the late 19th century. It began on 3 May 1889 in the Essen and on 4 May in the Helsenkirch coal mining districts; then it spread to the entire Dortmund area. At its height the strike action involved as many as eighty thousand miners. The main demands were: higher wages, an eight-hour working day and recognition of the worker committees. Frightened by the scope of the strike action, government bodies had the entrepreneurs make a promise to fulfil some of the miners' demands. As a result, some of the miners resumed their work in mid May. However, the mine-owners broke their promises, and a meeting of coal miners' delegates on 24 May decided to continue the strike action. The threat of reprisals and the new promises made by mine-owners resulted in the termination of the strike in the beginning of June.
- ↑ brisk action
- ↑ The French government, alarmed at General Boulanger's popularity, decided to put him on trial on the pretext of his conspiring in a plot threatening the security of the republic. On 1 April 1889, Boulanger and some of his supporters fled abroad. On 8 April Boulanger was deprived of his parliamentary immunity; and on 14 August 1889, the Supreme Court sentenced him, together with Dillon and Rochefort, who had fled in company with Boulanger, in absentia, to banishment.
- ↑ See this volume, p. 346.
- ↑ The National Congress of the French Trade Unions took place on 23 October-4 November 1888. It represented 272 labour unions—the workers' syndical chambers and industrial groups. Most of the delegates belonged to the revolutionary wing of the French workers' movement. The congress had been opened in Bordeaux, but its sessions had to be transferred to Le Bouscat after the police declared the congress disbanded because of a red banner over its rostrum. The congress passed a decision to convene an International Socialist Working Men's Congress in Paris in 1889 to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution. Also discussed was a general strike, considered to be the only revolutionary way.
- ↑ The word 'France' was inserted by Engels with a question mark.
- ↑ The convention of the French Workers' Party held in Troyes in December 1888 (see note 322) passed a decision on nominating a socialist as an independent candidacy for the by-election of 27 January 1889. The candidature of Boule, a labourer and stonemason, was nominated accordingly. This convention also decided to hold an International Socialist Working Men's Congress in Paris in 1889, thus confirming the decision of the National Congress of the French trade unions (see note 331).
- ↑ Engels underlined this word and put a question mark.
- ↑ Underlined by Engels.