London, 6 January 1882 

Dear Mr Bernstein, 

I am writing to you in haste today in order to shed some light on 
the peculiar expressions that occur in the last number of the Egalité 

a 

under the leadership of 

on the subject of the Sozialdemokrat. The point is that, out of the 
goodness of his heart, Guesde engaged for the German section of the 
paper a person known to be the mortal enemy of everything apper- 
taining to ‘Zurich’,* and the said person was unable to refrain from 
thus expressing his displeasure that the Sozialdemokrat should survive 
and not the Laterne. You would oblige us and serve the cause by tak- 
ing no notice of this. Ifit happens again, we shall at once put a stop to 
it. By contrast, we were delighted that the Sozialdemokrat should not 
have hesitated to accuse the deputies of downright cowardice, thus 
bringing matters to a head, something which many of them, had Be- 
bel not been there, would doubtless have sooner avoided.?*° 

The Egalité people, by the way, have been luckier than, au fond,” 
they deserved. Malon and Brousse made horrible fools of themselves 
in connection with Joffrin’s candidature by putting forward a 
watered-down programme—in defiance of the congressional 
resolution passed at Rheims,??* and quite simply suppressed one of 
the points discussed there, just because it happened not to suit their 
book (Egalité, No. 4, p. 7, Paris). In this way they put the Egalité 
in the right which, in the circumstances and on tactical grounds, 
was absolutely imperative— not Guesde and Co., but Malon and 
Co., were the real ‘autoritaires’,’ the strivers after dictatorship.* And, 
now that the struggle has come out into the open, I need hardly say 
that our sympathies lie wholly with Guesde and his friends. More- 
over, the Egalité is, and always has been, infinitely superior to the 
Prolétaire as far as content is concerned. Malon and Brousse are again 
behaving like true Bakuninists: they accuse others of hankering 
for dictatorship and, under pretence of maintaining their ‘auto- 
nomy’, want to rule the roost themselves without regard for party 
resolutions. 

Marx is at Veninor in the Isle of Wight, but writes to say that the 
weather is atrocious,’ worse than here. Well, it will soon change, no 
doubt; at all events, there would now seem to be no real danger of 
a relapse. The haste the bourgeois press was in to disseminate 
the news of his confidently anticipated demise did him no end of 
good: ‘Now I must live to a ripe old age, if only to spite the damned 
rascals.’ 

@ Carl Hirsch -° really -° ‘Allemagne’, L’Egalité, 3rd series, No. 4, 1 January 1882.- 
4 authoritarians-“Paris’, L’Egalité, 3rd series, No. 4, 1 January 1882.-' See this 
volume, p. 171. 

Kautsky will have to be patient for a few more days. Schorlemmer 
is still here, which means that the most that I can do is dabble in 
natural science; on top of that, there’s all the coming and going 
which won’t be over until next week. Then, when time’s no object, as 
Schorlemmer says Darmstadt-fashion, I'll write to him about the 
Poles.* 

Kindest regards to him and you, 

from yours 
F. Engels