| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 7 October 1892 |
ENGELS TO AUGUST BEBEL
IN BERLIN
London, 7 October 1892 Dear August,
First to business. Lafargue sent me a France with the enclosed notice of an interpellation by Millevoye, 5 a Boulangist. 6 He intends to make use of this opportunity to remind the Chamber of everything done by the German Socialists in 1871 and thereafter to maintain or restore good relations between France and Germany, and of what they have had to endure as a result. He would like to have:
les dates des protestations des socialistes allemands, les paroles prononcées au Reichstag et ailleurs, et les condamnations subies[1] .
Now since the things I have here are incomplete or only to be extracted with untold labour from collections of periodicals buried in numerous packing-cases, during which process I might easily overlook what is most important, you would greatly oblige me and the French if you would take out the most cogent items and send them to me together with dates and references (from the official stenographic report). That is,
1. The statements which led to the incarceration of the Brunswick Executive in 1870 in Lötzen, along with date and period of detention. 7
2. Your protest in the Reichstag against the annexation 8 and perhaps also one or two cogent passages from the Volksstaat attacking the war and the annexation;
3. A few trenchant excerpts from later Reichstag speeches by you and Liebknecht, along with dates and particulars of the subject of the debate in which they were made;
4. Anything else that seems to you important. Not a great deal is needed. You will know roughly how much is needed for a speech and if you then add 1 or 2 spare quotations, that will do. I should be glad if you would also quote some of your own statements, lest the French should imagine that Liebknecht did it all himself or even say that Liebknecht was an exception and that the others thought differently.
Yesterday we sent you in the Workman's Times 2 French newspapers with reports on Liebknecht's speeches and also a piece by Guesde which will have pleased you.[2]
Lafargue will be drumming up support in Carmaux and other towns in the South until his return on the 16th or 17th of this month, That is when the Chamber reassembles, and he must have the material by then. 9
He writes to say that the patriotic press, all of which, and particularly La France, is in the pay of Russia, has launched furious attacks on Liebknecht. The Russian embassy now pays the newspapers by the job—so much for each individual article accepted. Which is also a sign that the Russians are short of funds. There is no doubt that Liebknecht has raised a furore. I don't begrudge the old man his popularity and, in two respects, can only hope, 1. that it won't make him even more obstinate with regard to the editorship of the Vorwärts and, 2. that in the Reichstag the malicious sniping of the German patriots and accusations of high treason, etc., don't suddenly provoke him into maintaining the opposite, thereby landing not just himself in the cart but us as well. A reporter on the Gaulois quotes him as saying: 'Were Germany to declare a war of aggression on France, the German Socialists would declare war on their own government, et moi-même je prendrais un fusil pour défendre l'intégrité du territoire française'[3] When he corrects this obviously exaggerated report, it is not impossible that he will go to the opposite extreme, should the Junkers and bourgeois in the Reichstag work him up into a real passion.
Lafargue says that Loubet and the Minister for Public Works, Viette, would go to considerable lengths to bring about an acceptable settlement of the strike at Carmaux 10 and compel the company to climb down, but that Freycinet is against it. The latter has designs on the presidency of the Republic and therefore wants to keep in with the voters of the Right and the Centre.
Otherwise, Lafargue is very satisfied with the Congress. 11 The 12 copies of the Neue Zeit 12 arrived here and were passed on to Tussy. The chaps ought to have sent them to her instead of to me, but as it was a day was lost. Unfortunately there has recently been a change of ownership at the Pall Mall Gazette and we don't yet know what prospects the paper will now hold out for us.
Your account of the movement among the miners tallies with our experience in this country; here, too, the chaps keep themselves very much apart from the other branches of labour and are progressing more slowly than the rest. But in our case, the fact that there is already a strong workers' party behind them will eventually see us through; the chaps are bound to join us, once the movement has taken a hold on them. On the other hand there are, both here and in Germany, bad and unreliable leaders who cannot be induced to trust the workers in other branches. In this country, moreover, the petty jealousies existing between the men of one coal-field and another have so far not even permitted the creation of a united guild comprising all mine workers.
I shall do my utmost to stop the French from dispensing with your con- tributions. It is vitally important that occasionally, at any rate, accurate reports on the German movement should appear in Paris and particularly that the public should be made aware of the general political situation in which you people have to carry on the fight. You alone can do that, nor is there any need at all for you to come into conflict with Liebknecht as a result, provided he doesn't regard contributions to the French paper[4] as his monopoly. That wouldn't do at all.
You need have no fear that Burns is keeping too much in the background. The man's vanity is on a par with Lassalle's. But compared with the precipitate way in which K. Hardie thrusted himself to the fore to secure pride of place by resorting to little dodges, he was unquestionably right in adopting a non-committal attitude.
At the moment I am reading Hans Müller[5] and have not yet finished. It is all stale stuff and long familiar to us. The few bad speeches he quotes are not even skilfully chosen. Had I wanted to make out a case against the petty- bourgeois goings-on in the party or parliamentary group, I should have provided quite different material. The Steamship Subvention alone provides eight times as much as he does and of better quality. 13 He takes a speech made by Liebknecht in 1881 14 during the period of general confusion that followed the promulgation of the Anti-Socialist Law 15 instead of later ones when the political situation makes the pacific, philistine overtones seem far less excusable, and then goes so far as to assert that power is in all circumstances revolutionary and never reactionary. The jackass fails to notice that where there is no reactionary power to be overthrown there can be no question whatever of revolutionary power. After all, you cannot start a revolution against something that can be removed without the least effort.
If there is one thing that sends the self-opinionated students, the men of letters and the would-be literati of the working class into a state of impotent rage, it is the sight of our party calmly continuing along its victorious course without needing the help from these petty panjandrums. If mistakes are made, the party is strong enough to deal with them itself. Witness the undeniably tame philistinism of the majority of the parliamentary group at the time of the Steamship Subvention, wit-ness the traditional tendency of the Party Executive, a tendency which continued to manifest itself for a short while after the Anti-Socialist Law had been repealed, to intervene in a dictatorial manner (and which, moreover, had its counterpart in an identical tendency among the executives of the previous Berlin organisation), etc., etc. Our Party is now so strong that it could, without risk of degeneration, digest not only a goodly number of petty bourgeois but also the "heddicated" and even the worthy Independents, 16 had not the latter given themselves their marching orders.
Time for the post. Regards to your wife[6] and yourself from Louise[7] and
Your
F.E.