IN HOTTINGEN-ZURICH 

London, 26 November 1886 
Dear Mr Schliiter, 

Very many thanks for your communication re J. Ph. Becker.? As 
to his moving to Zurich, that is a matter I would rather leave to you to 
deal with direct. You say that the need for it is perfectly obvious; to 
you in Zurich that may seem entirely right, but to me here in London, 
where I am less able to weigh up the pros and cons, the case looks dif- 
ferent. And for that reason I cannot possibly persuade him to move, 
at the drop ofa hat, to Zurich from Geneva to which, after forty years, 
he has grown accustomed, having become, so to speak, part and par- 
cel of the place. Accordingly I have so far said not a word about the 
matter. 

The English translation is all but done and once I have paid off 
my most pressing debts in the shape of letters owed to correspondents, 
I shall at last be able to attend to the items in suspense reposing in my 
desk. In order of seniority these are as follows: 

1) Italian translation of Wage Labour and Capital,” 10 months old, 

2) French ditto of the /8th Brumaire,? 8 months old, 

3) your Chartist ms., 5’ 

4) and 5) my Housing Question, etc., and the Mordspatrioten.‘ To 
these you have now added 6) and 7). 

* of the first volume of Capital (see Note 56)-? by Marx-° F. Engels, ‘Introduction 

to Sigismund Borkheim’s Pamphlet Jn Memory of the German Blood-and- Thunder Patriots. 
1806-1807’. 

6) Theory of Force. You are welcome to go ahead, but what do 
you mean by ‘correspondingly altered’? The purely positive part 
amounts to no more than a few pages while the anti- Duhring polemic 
is itself positive and indispensable both factually and technically. 
However if you simply mean the deletion of individual passages hav- 
ing no particular relevance to the question of force and merely serv- 
ing to link together the rest of the text, then I agree. This will amount 
to about 25 pages and is rather little. In my view the 2 chapters, Mo- 
rality and Law: Eternal Truths and Equality, could be similarly re- 
vised and added on, since these also revolve round the materi- 
alist-economic view of history, in which case the whole could be enti- 
tled On Law and Force in World History or something of the kind. 

7) On Social Relations in Russia. °°* If you reprint the little pamph- 
let as it stands I have no objection; a preface to it would mean my 
embarking on further Russian studies, for which I have absolutely no 
time; a preface without further studies would provide nothing new 
and would therefore best be omitted. The articles relating to it in the 
Volksstaat would also best be omitted. No. 3 was an attack on Lavrov 
who since then has given us no cause to bring up the old business 
again and, like the beginning of No. 4 (attacking Tkachov), * it con- 
tains nothing, save for one or two perhaps tolerable jokes, that could 
be of any interest today, let alone have any effect as propaganda. 

If Ede is not wholly engrossed in the Eternal Feminine,” kindly tell 
him that in my view the Sociat Democratic Feperation #°° ought now 
to be handled somewhat differently. The stupidity of the government, 
the inaction of the working men’s Radical Clubs °°° vis-a-vis the 
enormous growth in the number of ‘unemployed’ and, finally, the 
wisdom of the Soctauisr Leacug, 34° whose constant preoccupation 
with its own rules and regulations leaves it time for nothing else, have 
provided the Socta, Democratic Feperation with so splendid a pitch 
that not even Hyndman & Co. have yet managed to queer it. The So. 
c1aL Democratic Feperation is beginning to be something of a power, 
since the masses have absolutely no other organisation to which they 
can rally. The facts should therefore be recorded impartially, in parti- 
cular the most important fact of all, namely that a genuinely socialist 
labour movement has come into being over here. But one must be 
very careful to draw a distinction between the masses and their tem- 

* In the original mistakenly articles Nos. | and 2.-? See this volume, p. 501. 

porary leaders and, in particular, make sure you don’t identify your- 
selves with the latter in any way, for it is virtually certain that before 
very long these political adventurers will, with the impatience that is 
born of ambition, again commit the most appalling blunders. As soon 
as the movement has acquired substance, either it will keep these gen- 
tlemen in check or they will destroy themselves. Hitherto the irrita- 
tion felt by the majority has simply taken the form of dull, uncon- 
scious dissatisfaction, but it isin this way that the ground has been 
prepared for sowing. 

“In America, apart from New York, the real movement is running 
ahead of the Germans. The Americans’ real organisation is the 
Knicuts or Lasor 6°° which is as muddle-headed as the masses them- 
selves. But it is from this chaos that the movement will evolve, not 
from the German sections—— the Germans, that is, who, for the past 
20 years, have proved incapable of extracting from their theory what 
America needs. °*° But this is just the moment when the Germans 
might exert a very enlightening influence —if only they had learnt 
English! 

Kindest regards to everyone. 

Yours, 
F. Engels