in Leipzig

2, Adelaide Gardens, Ramsgate,
31 July 77

Dear Liebknecht,

Your two letters of the 21st and 28th received. I can only hope that the fiasco of the Dühring affair is final and that the matter is not patched up again. The party organs that have allowed themselves to be seduced into attributing scientific importance to him, because—the Prussians persecuted him?!!—remain disgraced forever. And that is all I have seen.

Vahlteich did indeed make the remark about the Marxians and Dühringians; it appeared in all the papers immediately after the congress that published his speech in the public meeting (where he committed it). I do not believe he will deny it. That he is now grumbling is no reason for me to make him out to be better than he is.

Élisée Reclus is a mere compiler, nothing more. Since he and his brother were co-founders of the secret Alliance, he will, if he likes, be able to give you more of the unvarnished truth about it than you can give him. Whether he is with those fellows or not is all one; politically he is muddle-headed and impotent.

I never said that the mass of your people want no real science. I spoke of the party, and that means the party as it presents itself before the public, in the press and at congresses. And here semi-education and the ex-worker who puffs himself up into a literary man now predominate. Even if these people constitute only a tiny minority, as you say, you must obviously only take them into consideration because each of them has his following. The moral and intellectual decay of the party dates from the unification and could have been avoided if at that time a little more reserve and sense had been shown. A healthy party sweats out a good many things in the long run, but it is a long and difficult process, and the health of the masses is certainly no reason for gratuitously inoculating them with a disease.

For the *Zukunft* it is a piece of luck that your letter arrived in time to prevent my already decided answer to the invitation to collaborate. An invitation from an entirely anonymous editorial board, which has no other guarantees to offer for its scientific character than the congress resolution, as if a congress could confer the character of scientific character! The impertinence of entrusting our manuscripts to wholly anonymous people, people who might possibly be the worst sort of Dühringians!

You say Wiede is a co-editor. But he himself, on the 20th inst., invites me to collaborate on a review to be founded by him in Zurich!

In short, I am sick of this confusion, this continual launching of ill-considered and precipitate things. If only because of the necessity of finally getting my own larger works finished, I cannot enter into any commitments. I shall finish off the *Dühring*, after that I shall only write articles when I myself think it urgently necessary, and if there were a journal that was no party organ, I should give it preference so as to be no longer exposed to congress debates. For scientific work there is, after all, no democratic forum, and one experience of it is enough for me.

You ought to go to Ghent and then come from there to London! We shall certainly not go to Ghent, why else would we have withdrawn from practical activity in The Hague? Via Antwerp you are immediately and very cheaply in London, a room is always ready for you at my place.

I must close, the table is being laid.
Yours,
F. E.