London, 6 June 1884 

Dear Bebel, 

Have received your letter of the 4th inst. and shall attend to the en- 
closure. You do not say whether you got my registered letter of 21 
April, °° in which I returned the envelope, its seal broken, of your letter 
of the 18th of that month. Ifit has been intercepted, then the Stiebe- 
rising of letters has been doubly proven. ?*? 

If everything were to go according to the wishes of the Conserva- 
tives 7°° and Liberals, ?** and likewise accord to the secret yearnings of 
the progressist philistines,°? there can be no doubt that the Anti- 
Socialist Law 37 would long since have been perpetuated as an insti- 
tution in Germany and that it would so remain. But that can only 
happen if nothing happens elsewhere in the world, and everything re- 
mains as it is now. Despite all these philistine desires, the Law was on 
the very brink of disaster when friend Bismarck applied his two last 
and most powerful levers —Lehmann’s direct intervention ?'° and 
the threat of dissolution. ?** Hence it would not even require a par- 
ticularly violent convulsion of the present status quo, peaceful as it is, 
to put an end to the whole caboodle. And in my opinion this will 
surely happen before two years are out. 

True, Bismarck has, for the first time, played a really nasty trick 
on us by procuring 300 million marks for the Russians. 18? That will 
give the Tsar“ a couple of years’ respite from an acute financial emer- 
gency and thus temporarily eliminate the danger that looms larg- 
est — the necessity of having to convene the Estates for the voting of 
subsidies, as in France in 1789 and Prussia in 1846. If the revolution 
in Russia is not to be put back by several years, there must either 
be some unforeseen complications or else a couple of nihilistic thun- 
derbolts.” Neither of these can be counted on to happen. All we 
may be sure of is that the recent borrowing operation cannot be 
repeated. 

At home, on the other hand—as you yourself say —a change of 
monarch is imminent and is bound to make everything totter. Here 
again it is as it was in 1840, before the death of old Frederick Wil- 
liam IIT. So many interests are bound up with the old familiar state of 
political stagnation that there is nothing the heart of Philistia as 
a whole desires more fervently than its perpetuation. But with the old 
monarch * the keystone disappears and the whole artificial structure 
collapses. The afore-mentioned interests, faced with an entirely new 
situation, suddenly discover that the world of today looks completely 
different from that of yesterday, and that they will have to look round 
for new mainstays. The new monarch and his new entourage have 
plans that have long been suppressed; the whole body of those who 
govern or are capable of governing expands and changes; officials are 
perplexed by the new conditions, and the insecurity of the future, the 
uncertainty about who will be at the helm tomorrow or the day after, 
causes the action of the entire government machine to falter. That, 
however, is all we require. But we shall get more. For in the first place 
we may be sure that while, at the start, the new government may 
have liberalising aspirations, it will soon become frightened at its own 
daring, will vacillate hither and thither and eventually grope its way 
hither and thither, living from hand to mouth, from instance to in- 
stance, each decision conflicting with the next. Aside from the general 
effect of this vacillation, what will become of the Anti-Socialist Law if 
it is administered under these conditions? The slightest attempt to ad- 
minister it ‘fairly’ would be enough to render it ineffective. Either it 
has to be operated as at present, purely at the whim of the police, or it 

* Alexander III-> Cf. this volume, pp. 256, 275.-° William I-4 Crown Prince 
Frederick William 

will everywhere be broken.— That is one aspect. But there is another, 
namely that then, at last, some animation will return to the bourgeois 
political scene, the official parties will cease to be the one reactionary 
mass they now are (which is no gain to us, but rather a dead loss), 
and again begin seriously combatting one another and likewise strug- 
gling for political supremacy. It will make a tremendous difference to 
us whether, on the one hand, both National Liberals and Crown 
Prince Free Thinkers ?*! have a chance of coming to the helm, or 
whether, as now, the ability to govern is confined to the liberal Con- 
servatives. We shall never be able to lure the masses away from the lib- 
eral parties so long as the latter are not given an opportunity of dis- 
crediting themselves in practice, of taking the helm and demonstrat- 
ing their ineptitude. As in 1848, we are still the opposition of the fu- 
ture and must, therefore, have the most extreme among the existing 
parties at the helm before being able to confront it as the opposition 
of the present. Political stagnation, i.e. aimless and purposeless strug- 
gle between the official parties, as at present, can be of no service to us 
in the long run. What could, however, is a progressive struggle be- 
tween those parties, with the centre of gravity gradually shifting to 
the Left. That’s what is currently happening in France where, as al- 
ways, the course of the political struggle has assumed a classical] form. 
The successive governments are moving ever further to the Left, and 
a Clemenceau government is already in sight; it will not be the most 
extreme bourgeois government. With every shift to the Left, conces- 
sions accrue to the workers (cf. the recent strike at Denain in which, 
for the first time, the military did not intervene 24°) and, more impor- 
tant still, the field is being increasingly cleared for the decisive battle, 
while the position of the parties becomes more distinct and well- 
defined. This slow but inexorable progress of the French Republic to- 
wards its logical conclusion—the confrontation between radical 
would-be socialist bourgeois and genuinely revolutionary workers — 
I consider to be a manifestation of the utmost importance, and 
I hope that nothing will happen to stop it. And J am glad that our 
people are not yet strong enough in Paris (but all the stronger for that 
in the provinces) to be misled by the force of revolutionary phrases 
into attempting a putsch.— In muddle-headed Germany, needless to 
say, progress is not being made along the same purely classical lines as 
in France; we have lagged much too far behind for that, and every- 
thing we experience has already had its day elsewhere. But despite the 

rottenness of our official parties, political life of some description 
would be of far greater advantage to us than the present political death 
in which action is confined to the secret intrigues of foreign policy. 

Sooner than I expected, friend Bismarck has lowered his trousers 
and shown the assembled people the posterior of his right to 
work ?33-— an amalgam of the Poor Act of the 43rd year of the reign 
of Elizabeth and the Bastille amendment of 1834.? What bliss for 
Blos, Geiser and Co. who have, after all, been riding the hobby-horse 
of the right to work for some time now * and who already seem to imag- 
ine that it was they who had roped in Bismarck! And, having once 
embarked on this topic, I feel impelled to tell you that the perfor- 
mance of these gentry, both in the Reichstag-—in so far as one can 
judge from the inadequate newspaper reports— and in their own 
press, has increasingly convinced me that J, at least, do not even re- 
motely share their standpoint or have anything at all in common with 
them. These allegedly ‘educated’ but in fact utterly ignorant and ob- 
stinately ineducable philanthropists, who were not only admitted in 
the face of Marx’s and my long and oft reiterated warnings, but were 
actually shepherded into the Reichstag, would seem to me to be be- 
coming increasingly aware that they are in a majority in the parlia- 
mentary group and that it is precisely they who, with their time- 
serving attitude towards every crumb of state socialism tossed to them 
by Bismarck, more than any one else, are concerned that the Anti- 
Socialist Law should remain in force and that it should be applied le- 
niently, if at all, to well-meaning persons like themselves — again 
something which only people like you and I prevent the government 
from doing, for if these, the afore-mentioned philanthropists, were rid 
of us it would be easy for them to prove that there was no call for an 
Anti-Socialist Law where they were concerned. Their abstention as 
well as their general performance in connection with the Dynamite 
Bill was likewise typical.?*” But what’s going to happen at the next 
election '°* if, as seems probable, the safest constituencies fall to these 
chaps? 

It is a great pity that, during the next few critical months, you will 
be so far away; now, with the elections upon us, we should certainly 
have had occasion to tell each other a great deal. Could you not let 
me have an address from which my letters could be forwarded to you? 
I also hope you may sometimes be able to send me some interesting 
information about your trip. 

* See this volume, pp. 55-56. 

Apart from what seems to me steady progress and increasing cohe- 
sion on the part of the educated bourgeois elements of the party, 
I am not at al] anxious about the course things are taking. I would, if 
possible, rather see a split avoided so long as we have no freedom 
of action. But if it has to be—and it is for you people to decide, 
then so be it! 

A work of mine on the origin of the family, property and the state is 
about to appear. As soon as it comes out I shall send it to you. 

Your old friend 
F. Engels