Letter to Laura Lafargue, October 19, 1890

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 19 October 1890


Printed according to the original
Published in English for the first time
First published, in German, in Einheit, Nr. 11, Berlin, 1955
Reproduced from the original
Published in English in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 49


ENGELS TO LAURA LAFARGUE

AT LE PERREUX

London, 19 October 1890

My dear Löhr,

At last! This week I have been, if not busy, at all events 'occupied' and 'engaged' over head and ears. I have sorted about 4 cubic feet of old letters of Mohr's (that is to say addressed mostly to him) of the period 1836-64. All higgledy-piggledy in a big basket, which perhaps you may remember. Dusting, straightening, sorting — it took more than a week to put them into rough order. During all that time my room upset, covered with paperasses[1] in various degrees of order and disorder, so that I could neither go out nor do any other kind of work. That was No. 1. Then came the congresses[2] with — not work, but loss of time for me by callers, etc. And finally, Nim has been quite out of sorts all this week, went to bed on her own accord on Thursday morning and actually sent for the Doctor,— who however told her there was no reason for her to stick in bed, she might sit up at least a few hours which she does. He cannot as yet exactly make out what it is, there are symptoms (jaundice) of liver complaint, she has no appe- tite and is weak. However since last night she is better and in better spirits, and I hope will be well in a few days.

I hope Paul has got rid of his intimate friend inside. If he has not, it's his own fault, a dose of felix mas or cousso will soon put an end to that nuisance. It will poison the brute and do him no harm.

Our congresses have come off gloriously and when we compare them with the Possibilists,[3] they come out in still bolder relief. That nui- sance now will soon put a stop to itself. Only I hope that our friends will give them every inch of rope they may require and not interfere in the least by approaches or otherwise. Il faut qu'ils cuisent dans leur propre jus}[4] Any attempt on our side to meddle with them would only arrest for a time the process of disintegration and pourriture.[5] The masses are sure to come round to us by and by. And the longer we al- low the leaders to kill each other, the less of them shall we have to take over on the day of reunion. If Liebknecht had not been in such a hurry with regard to the Lassalleans coming over to us, he would not have had to take over Hasselmann and others who had to be kicked out six months afterwards.[6] And now in France, as then in Germany, the whole lot of the leaders are rotten to the core.

To my great surprise and relief in last Justice Hyndman declares for Brousse! What a piece of good luck. I was beginning to be afraid I might get into a position where Hyndman would have to be taken on again as at least passively a friend, whereas I like him 10,000 times better as an enemy.

Paul now may be right: the Possibilists may abstain again from their own Congress.[7] The date and place appear to have been fixed at Halle: Brussels, 16 August 1891. This is all I know. To-morrow I shall hear it all from Tussy who left Halle yesterday, her return ticket to Cologne expiring on that day.[8]

I am glad Fischer has been put on the Parteivorstand.[9] You have seen him here. He is very intelligent, very active, revolutionary, absolute- ly anti-philistine, and more international in his ways and manners than most Germans. Tussy writes that after the Lille Congress,[10] the German Reichstag men, a great portion of them, at least, made a rather philistine impression upon her. I fully expected that. As our M. P. s are not paid, we cannot get always the best men, but must ac- cept from those in a relatively bourgeois position the least bad. There- fore our masses are far better than the fraction. The latter may congrat- ulate themselves that they had such asses and shady fellows (many of them probably mouchards[11] ) for an opposition.[12] If they should rebel against Bebel, Singer and Fischer, they will have to be acted against — but I am sure Bebel will always be strong enough to cow them.

Paul est bien naïf avec ses questions sur Bebel et le 'Gil Blas'. Il con- naît Bebel et il connaît le 'Gil Blas'; est-ce qu'il ne se connaîtrait plus soi-même?[13] At any rate I shall send the Gil Bias fortement souligné[14] to Bebel and tell him to disown. Such impudent lying exceeds all measure, even for Gil Bias.[15]

Tussy is quite in love with the Lille delegates, and indeed they seem to have been a regular élite, and shown the very qualities which it has been the fashion of late in France to cry down because the Germans showed them to a higher degree, though up to 1870 it had been the regular thing to claim discipline, esprit d'organisation et action combinée as des qualités tout ce qu'il y a de plus françaises.[16] I was very much inter- ested in Paul's account of these delegates[17] and shall take care that it gets into the English and German Press. The great advantage of the French is that they are bred and born in a revolutionary medium. Both English and Germans lack that advantage and are moreover brought up in the religion of the bourgeoisie — protestantism. That gives to their habits, manners and customs a spiessbiirgerlichen An- strich[18] which they have to shake off by going abroad, especially to France. Look at the redaction of the Lille and the Halle resolutions!

That is the great progress: we cannot now do without any one of the three. Only the Belgians and the Swiss we could very well spare.

Love from Nim and yours affectionately

F.E.

As Paul has said so much in the Neue Zeit[19] about the fleets construct- ed by Mohr for you girls when you were children, I enclose him the, probably, last specimen extant of Mohr's naval architecture.

  1. ↑ wretched scraps of paper
  2. ↑ Engels means the congresses in Lille, Calais and Halle (see notes 12, 38 and 56).
  3. ↑ Engels means the signs of a forthcoming dissociation within the Possibilist Workers' Party (see Note 3). At their congress in Châtellerault, 9 to 15 October 1890, the Possibilists split into two groups — the Broussists and the Allemanists. The latter formed an organisation of their own, the Socialist Revolutionary Workers' Party. The Allemanists retained the Possibilists' ideological and tactical principles but, in con trast to them, attached great importance to propaganda within the trades unions, which they regarded as the workers' principal form of organisation. The Alleman ists' ultimate weapon was the call for a general strike. Like the Possibilists, they de nied the need for a united, centralised party and advocated autonomy and the struggle to win seats on the municipal councils.
  4. ↑ Let them stew in their own juice.
  5. ↑ decay
  6. ↑ This refers to the merger of two trends in the German working-class movement — the Social-Democratic Workers' Party (the Eisenach group), led by August Bebel and Wilhelm Liebknecht, and the Lassallean General Association of German Workers, led by Wilhelm Hasselmann, Wilhelm Hasenclever and others — which took place at a congress in Gotha, 22-27 May 1875. The party thus formed adopted the name of Socialist Workers' Party of Germany. Thus the split within the German working class was overcome. However, the draft programme of the united party (formulated basically by Wilhelm Liebknecht, whose main concern was reconcilia tion) contained serious mistakes and fundamental concessions to the Lassalleans. Marx, in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (see present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 75-99) and in his letter to Wilhelm Bracke of 5 May 1875 (ibid., Vol. 45, pp. 69-73) and Engels, in his letter to Bebel of 18-28 March 1875 (ibid., Vol. 45, pp. 60-66), ap proved the establishment of a united socialist party in Germany, but warned the Ei senach leaders against precipitate action and ideological compromises with the Las salleans. They criticised the erroneous propositions in the draft programme, but the congress adopted it, with only minor amendments.
  7. ↑ This refers to the refusal of the Possibilists (see Note 3) to participate in the socialist congress in Troyes (23-30 December 1888), which originally had been called as a congress of the Possibilist party. The refusal was due to the fact that the convoca tion of the congress had been entrusted to the Troyes socialist organisations, consist ing mostly of supporters of the Workers' Party (Guesdists), so that both parties had been invited.
  8. ↑ Eleanor Marx-Aveling had attended the congresses of the French Workers' Party in Lille (see Note 38) and of the German Social-Democrats in Halle (see Note 12).
  9. ↑ Party Executive
  10. ↑ The Eighth Congress of the French Workers' Party met in Lille on 11 and 12 October 1890. It was attended by about 70 delegates, representing more than 200 party groups and trades unions from 97 towns and localities. The congress revised the party Rules and finally determined the composition and functions of the National Council. The following persons were elected to the Council for the period 1890-91: Jules Guesde, Louis Simon Dereure, Leon Camescasse, Quesnel, Georges Edouard Crépin, Paul Lafargue and Joseph Ferroul. Le Socialiste was made the party's official organ. The congress called for a peaceful demonstration to be held on 1 May 1891. It rejected the proposal for a general strike put forward by the 1888 Bordeaux trade union congress and pronounced for an international strike of miners as the vanguard of the working class capable of representing the interests of all workers. On the Workers' Party see Note 146.
  11. ↑ police spies
  12. ↑ This refers to the opposition group of the Jungen (see Note 13).
  13. ↑ Paul is very naive with his questions about Bebel and Gil Blas. He knows Bebel and also Gil Blas; is it that he does not know himself better?
  14. ↑ specially underlined
  15. ↑ On 17 October 1890 the newspaper Gil Bias carried an interview allegedly grant ed to its correspondent by August Bebel. Engels sent a copy of the text and a letter (which has not been found) to Bebel. The latter replied that he had granted no such interview and the Gil Bias text was a hoax from beginning to end. Seeing that this was the case, Paul Lafargue disavowed the interview in a note headlined 'Le Gil Bias interviewer' (Le Socialiste, No. 6, 26 October 1890).
  16. ↑ this spirit of organisation and collective action as the qualities which are French to the extreme
  17. ↑ In a letter to Engels of 16 October 1890 Lafargue said that almost all the delegates to the Lille Congress (see Note 38) had been victimised by the bourgeoisie: they had lost their living and were forced to engage in petty trade and the like. He also stressed that many of them held elective positions on municipal councils and similar bo dies, which was proof of the growing influence of the French Workers' Party.
  18. ↑ philistine tinge
  19. ↑ P. Lafargue, 'Karl Marx. Persönliche Erinnerungen', Die Neue Zeit, 9. Jg. 1890/91, 1. Bd., Nr. 1