Letter to Leo Frankel, April 24, 1891

Author(s) Friedrich Engels
Written 24 April 1891


First published, in Hungarian, in Népszava, No. 130, Budapest, 3 June 1906
Translated from the Hungarian
Published in English for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 49


ENGELS TO LEO FRANKEL

IN PARIS

London, 24 April 1891

Dear Frankel,

I owe you a reply to your letters of 27 December and the 16th of this month. As regards the first I am well aware of the disagreeable feeling that comes over one on returning to a country after many years of absence to find what was formerly a group of good friends locked together in violent fratricidal strife. Still — à la guerre comme à la guerre[1] That is a necessary condition of progress and there's nothing one can do about it. The moment will come when you will be able to intervene in the interests of them all, but I don't believe that that time has yet come. Brussels will throw light on many matters, if indeed Brussels ever takes place,[2] since it is threatened by the Belgians' ill-considered general strike.[3]

What has recently been happening among the various factions in connection with the 1st of May has, in my view, demonstrated once and for all that, so far as we are concerned, the first commandment must be self-restraint. Self-restraint is what I too must impose upon myself in regard to your request concerning the May Day number of the Bataille,[4] even if there were no other reasons for my doing so. In the first place I have not seen a single copy of the Bataille since June 1889 and all I know about it, and this purely from hearsay, is that it sided with the Rue Cadet in the anti-Boulangist struggle; secondly, I have for the past two months been so snowed under with requests of a similar nature that I have had to make up my mind once and for all to turn these down — one such letter is going off to Vienna today.

It's high time Volume III of Capital came out. Before I set to work on it I have got to get some new editions ready and this I cannot possibly refuse to do. But so long as Volume III remains unfinished I shall take nothing on and, what's more, shall actually have to cut down on much of my correspondence.

With best wishes from myself and also from Louise Kautsky.

Your

F. Engels

  1. ↑ war is war
  2. ↑ The International Socialist Workers' Congress met in Brussels, 16-22 August 1891. The 337 delegates represented the socialist parties and organisations and numerous trades unions in many European countries and the USA. By a majority vote the congress debarred the anarchists from taking part in its deliberations. Representatives of British trades unions attended. The American delegates included trades unionists, as well as socialists.
    The congress discussed labour legislation, strike action and boycott, militarism and the celebration of May Day.
    The resolution on the first question called on workers the world over to join forces for the fight against capitalist rule and, where workers possessed political rights, to use these to free themselves from wage slavery. The resolution on strikes and boycott recommended the workers to make use of these methods of struggle and stressed that trades unions were absolutely essential to the workers.
    The attitude of the working class to militarism was in the centre of the congress deliberations. Wilhelm Liebknecht's and Edouard Vaillant's reports on this issue and the draft resolution tabled by Liebknecht pointed out that militarism was an inevitable product of the capitalist system, that socialist society alone could put an end to it and bring about international peace and that the socialists were the true party of peace.
    The leader of the Dutch Social-Democrats, Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, who took a semi-anarchist stand, tabled an alternative resolution, under which socialists in all countries should, in the event of war, call on their respective people to proclaim a general strike. The vast majority of the delegates voted for the resolution tabled by Liebknecht.
    Referring to the resolutions of the Brussels Congress, Engels pointed out that 'in matters of principle as of tactics the Marxists have been victorious all along the line' (Engels to F.A. Sorge, 2 September 1891).
  3. ↑ The International Miners' Congress, held in Paris from 31 March to 4 April 1891, was attended by 99 delegates from 5 countries, representing about 900,000 (according to other sources, 600,000) workers. It resolved to set up an international association of miners and elected a commission to draw up its Rules. There was a heated debate over the proposal of the Belgian delegation that a general miners' strike should be called internationally to press the demand for an eight-hour working day. There was strong opposition to this, particularly from the British delegation, which insisted that the vote on this issue should be based on the number of workers represented by each delegation. The congress voted for a general strike in principle, but contrary to the Belgians' proposal refused to call one immediately.
  4. ↑ This refers to the attempt, staged in Sofia on 27 March 1891, on the life of Stephan Stambulov, head of the Bulgarian government, in which Minister of Finance Belchev, who was accompanying him, was killed. Stambulov oriented his foreign policy on Austria-Hungary and opposed Russian interference in Bulgarian affairs. The assassination was widely commented upon in the democratic press, which traced it to Russian diplomatic intrigues and the increased danger of war.