London, 12-13 June 1883 

Dear Bernstein, 

It is half past eleven at night and having just read the proof of the 
second sheet of the third edition of Capital* (no small task), and sent 
it off, I shall try and utilise what is left of the evening at least to begin 
a letter to you. 

As regards internal matters, I had more or less read between the 
lines of the official report? and, soon after, also received a short exposé 
from Bebel. Some while previously I had written and told Bebel that 
there must ultimately be a break with the ninnies of the right wing,‘ 
but that in my view it was not in our interests to force it before we 
were again in a position to consort directly with the masses; i.e. not so 
long as the Anti-Socialist Law remained operative. 37 Should they 
force our hand, then we should see to it that it was they, not us, who 
rebelled against party discipline, in which case the game would already 
be ours. And they should be brought to do this if they refused to keep 
quiet. So far as Liebknecht is concerned, he will do everything in his 

@ the third German edition of Volume I of Capital-” Protokoll tiber den Kongreß der 
deutschen Sozialdemokratie in Kopenhagen. See also this volume, p. 21.-° See Engels’ 
letter to August Bebel of 21 June 1882 (present edition, Vol. 46). 

power to put off the crisis, but when it does come and he realises that 
it can no longer be postponed, he will be in the right place. 

Let me briefly sum up what I have to do: 

1) Put the papers in order ?; here almost everything has to be done 
by myself since no one except me knows about the old stuff, and 
there’s an enormous pile of it in a fine state of disarray. Much is still 
missing and a lot of packages and boxes haven’t even been opened 
yet. 

2) See to the third edition, with sundry alterations and a few ad- 
denda from the French edition. 5° On top of that, read the proofs. 

3) Take advantage of an opportunity that has presented itself to 
bring out an English translation —in connection with which I today 
called on one of the big publishers here *—— and then revise the trans- 
lation myself>* (Moore, who will be doing it, is first-rate, a friend of 
ours for twenty-six years, but slow). 

4) Collate the 3 or 4 versions of the beginning of Volume II and 
prepare them for the press, besides making a fair copy of the whole of 
the second volume. '’ 

5) Spend a week every now and again tippling with Schorlemmer 
who returned to Manchester yesterday—he always brings some 
work with him, but 0, jerum/> 

Voila la viel“ 

The jackass in the Vossische (I’ve been sent the thing“ four times) 
would certainly seem to have disseminated a lot of despondency in 
good old Germany respecting the despondent Marx. I might, some 
time when in really jolly mood, take a kick at him. Were these oafs to 
get the chance of reading the correspondence between Moor and my- 
self, they’d be speechless with rage. Heine’s poetry is trifling by com- 
parison with our impudent, mocking prose. Moor was capable of be- 
coming furiously angry, but down-in-the-mouth—jamazs/° I was 
convulsed when I reread the old stuff. This correspondence is, by the 
way, also historically memorable and, in so far as it is in my power, it 
will end up in the right hands. Unfortunately I only have the letters 
Marx wrote after 1849, but those are complete. 

* Kegan Paul-° O, jerum, jerum, jerum! O, quae mutatio rerum! (Oh, dear me, dear me, 
dear me. A crazy world. Lord, hear me!) — part of the refrain from a student song at- 
tributed to Eugen Hofling. -* That’s life!-¢ ‘Zur Beurteilung von Karl Marx’, Kéniglich 
privilegirte Berlinische Zeitung von Staats- und gelehrten Sachen, No. 235, Ist sup- 
plement, 24 May 1883.-° never! 

Herewith part of the original draft from the last part of the Commu- 
nist Manifesto which you want to keep as a memento. The first two 
lines were dictated, and were taken down by Mrs Marx. °? 

I would have sent you the enclosed poem by Weerth in time for the 
feuilleton, had you not so contrived matters that your letter arrived 
twelve hours too late-—as it was, I had to wait and see whether you 
printed the feuilleton tel quel.* Anyhow, you can put it in some- 
where else. If only by contrast with the solemn Freiligrath, all of 
Weerth’s stuff is ironical and humorous. Never any question of ‘she- 
rioushness’ here. 

As regards the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law, the chaps in Ger- 
many can never see beyond their own noses. By disappointing Russia 
(and things are far more acute there) with his proclamation in Mos- 
cow just as Frederick William IV disappointed the Prussians in 
1841,°* Alexander III has done more towards that end than all your 
Geisers, Bloses and Co. could ever do with their lamentations. If, one 
fine morning, he is riddled with bullets—as he surely will be— 
Bismarck’s internal régime won’t be worth a brass farthing. Then 
they’ll change their tune. Even if old William> merely (I don’t 
mean Wilhelm Blos‘) kicks the bucket, there will of necessity be 
changes. The men of today have never experienced, nor can they 
possibly imagine, what a crown prince,’ grown up in what has in the 
meantime become a revolutionary situation, is capable of. And a fool, 
what’s more, as vacillating and weak-willed as ‘our Fritz’. Nor, for 
that matter, can the possibility be excluded that the crazy French 
government may fall foul of all the world in such a way as to incite 
violent action in Paris. Tunis, Egypt, Madagascar, Tonkin — and 
now they are actually seeking to contest England’s possession of a few 
rocky islands, with barely 50 inhabitants, off the coast of Normandy. 
I only hope that nothing happens in Paris, for the stupidity that pre- 
vails among the masses there is exceeded only here, in London. 

And on top of that the ingenuous Bismarck works for us like the 
very devil. His latest theory — that the imperial constitution is noth- 
ing but a contract made by governments for which they can substi- 
tute another one any old day, without consulting the Reichstag — is 
a real godsend to us. Just let him try. Add to which the manifest 
intention to bring about a conflict, his stupid, impertinent Boédi- 
kers & Co. in the Reichstag — all this is grist to our mill. True, this 

* as it stood-> William I-° In Engels’ text the parenthesis was a footnote. In 
German ‘merely’ = d/oss.-¢ Frederick William 

means the end of the catch-phrase about ‘one reactionary mass’, °° 
a phrase generally appropriate only for declamation (or, again, for a 
truly revolutionary situation). For it is precisely in this that the quirk 
of history — one operating in our favour— consists, namely that the dif- 
Jerent elements of that feudal and bourgeois mass erode, fight with and 
devour one another, to our advantage and are, therefore, the very op- 
posite of that uniform mass which your lout imagines he can dismiss 
by dubbing the whole lot ‘reactionary’. On the contrary. All these di- 
verse scoundrels must first mutually destroy, utterly ruin and discred- 
it each other, and pave the way for us by proving their ineptitude, each 
lot in turn. It was one of Lassalle’s greatest mistakes, when engaged in 
agitation, wholly to lose sight of what little dialectics he had learned 
from Hegel. Thus, just like Liebknecht, he never saw more than 
one side and, since the former, for certain reasons, happened to 
see the right side, he ultimately proved superior to the great Lassalle 
after all. 

The one regrettable thing about the present German bourgeois 
movement is precisely that the chaps constitute no more than ‘one re- 
actionary mass’, and this has got to stop. We can make no progress 
until at least part of the bourgeoisie has been forced over onto the side 
of a genuine movement, whether by internal or external events. That is 
why we have now had enough of Bismarck’s régime in tts present_form, 
why he can only benefit us by provoking a conflict or resigning and 
also why the time will come for the Anti-Socialist Law to be done 
away with by semi-revolutionary or wholly revolutionary means. All 
those arguments as to whether the ‘Lesser’? alone should go, or the 
Law as a whole, or whether the ordinary penal law should be tight- 
ened up, seem to me like arguments about the virginity of Mary i 
partu and post partum.? What is crucial is the wider political situation 
both at home and abroad; and this changes, does not remain as it is to- 
day. In Germany, by contrast, the case is discussed solely on the as- 
sumption that present conditions in Germany will persist eternally. 
And running parallel with this is an idea, related to that of one reac- 
tionary mass, namely that, with the subversion of the present state of 
affairs, we shall come to the helm. That is nonsense. A revolution is 
a lengthy process, cf. 1642-46 and 1789-93°*; and in order that cir- 
cumstances should be ready for us and we for them, all the intermedi- 
ate parties must come to power in turn and destroy themselves. And 

* during and after parturition 
g Pp 

then we shall come — and may, perhaps, once more be momentarily 
routed. Not that I think this very probable in the normal course of 
events. 

I have today despatched to ‘Volksbuchhandlung, Hottingen-Zurich ,* 
freight forward per Continentat Parcets Express (correspondent of the 
German and Swiss parcel post), a parcel containing the photographs 
ordered,” invoice enclosed. Of the money you should retain the 
£17/-credited to my account over there, against 4 frs for snifters trans- 
mitted by proxy, subscriptions, etc. (If, when remitting the balance, 
it would be more convenient to-include a little more or a little less, 
that would, of course, be aLLRicHT.) Over here 500 cartes and 280 cast- 
nets are still available—first come, first served. Not that you have 
any competitors as yet, save for Dietz. Just how much is pushed on to 
me you will realise when I tell you that I have today had to attend, 
single-handed, to all the details of checking and repacking the photo- 
graphs for you and Dietz, and have likewise had to take them to the 
office (2'/, English miles from here). And then I’m expected to 
work! 

Borde is a jackass whom we have known for years; at Marx’s house 
there are a hundred or more of the notebooks he sent him, lying 
about unopened. Envoyez-le au diable.* 

I shall not come to Switzerland until the continental routes are safer. 
After all, there was no certainty of Marx’s being able to travel to, or 
through, France unscathed this summer. Once one has been expelled, 
that is that, unless one is prepared to take steps such as I should find 
impossible. Don’t I know it! 

You do not, by the way, bore me in the least with internal matters. 
Anyone who’s abroad can never hear enough about the details of this 
sort of internal struggle in a workers’ party which, despite everything, 
is the leading one in Europe. And that kind of thing is withheld from 
me on principle by friend Liebknecht, all of whose reports are 
rosy red, dawn pink, sky-blue and green as the tender leaves of 
hope. 

For the anniversary of the June battle of 1848, I am sending you 
a Neue Rheinische Zeitung article by Marx,° who was the only man in 

* a Social Democratic publishing house- > See this volume, pp. 15-16.-° Cartes de vi- 
site, small photographic portraits mounted on a card.-4 Consign him to the devil.- 
* “The June Revolution’ 

the whole of the European press to back up the insurgents after they 
had fallen. 

Kindest regards, 

Yours, 
F.E. 

13 June 1883 

Do you think the time is ripe for the Sozialdemokrat’s feuilleton to 
print an excessively impudent piece Marx and I wrote in 1847,°° in 
which the ‘true socialists’, who are now also members of the Reichs- 
tag, are pulled to pieces? The most impudent thing ever to have been 
written in the German language.