London, 5 August 1890 

Dear Schmidt, 

Your letter travelled with me in my pocket up to North Cape and 
in and out of half a dozen Norwegian fjords; I had intended to answer 
it during the journey, but the writing facilities aboard the ship in 
which Schorlemmer and I made the whole trip were too frightful. So 
I am making up for it now. 

Many thanks for the news about your doings which are always of 
great interest to me. You should really try and do the article on 
Knapp,’ the subject being one of such importance. What we are con- 
cerned with is the destruction of Prussian tradition in one of its strong- 
holds and with showing up the old braggadocio for the humbug it 
really is.’ 

Summarising the English Blue Books for the ‘archives’? could 
hardly be done by anyone not resident in London and therefore not 
himself in a position to assess the theoretical or practical importance 
of the various publications. The number of parliamentary publica- 
tions is so great as to require a separate monthly catalogue— and 
thus you might find yourself in the position of having to search for 
a needle in a haystack, only to lay your hands on an occasional pin. 
If, however, you would nevertheless care to do some work in this field 
from time to time —as a rule it’s a terrible sweat if one wants to pro- 
duce anything worthwhile — I shall be glad to let you have any infor- 
mation you may require. If, incidentally, Braun wants a regular man 
for it, he could do no better than to ask E. Bernstein, 4 Corinne 
Road, Tufnell Park, N. For it so happens that Ede Bernstein wishes to 
study conditions in England as soon as he can get away from the So- 
zialdemokrat and so this would suit him very well. But he leaves for 
a few weeks at the seaside either today or tomorrow, so I shall not be 
able to put the matter to him, it having only just occurred to me. 

I saw a notice of Paul Barth’s book* in the Vienna Deutsche Worte 
written by that bird of ill-omen Moritz Wirth? and this review made 
an unfavourable impression on me which also extended to the 
book itself. I shall take a look at it, but if little Moritz is right when he 
quotes Barth as saying that, in all Marx’s writings, he can find only 
one example of the dependence of philosophy, etc., upon the material 
conditions of existence and that Descartes declares animals to be 
machines, I can only say I feel sorry for a man capable of writing such 
things. And if that man has not yet found out that, if the material 
mode of existence is the primum agens,° this does not preclude the ideal 
fields from in turn exerting a reciprocal but secondary influence upon 
it, then he cannot possibly have understood the subject he is writing 
about. But as I have said, this is all at second hand and little Moritz is 
a friend one can well do without. Nor, today, has the materialist view 
of history any lack of such friends to whom it serves as a pretext for not 
studying history. As Marx said of the French Marxists in the late sev- 
enties: ‘Tout ce que je sais, c’est que je ne suis pas Marxiste.’ °° 

There has also been a discussion in the Volks-Tribüne° about the dis- 
tribution of products in the society of the future— whether this 
should be made in accordance with the amount of work performed or 
in some other way. A very ‘materialist’ view was taken of the mat- 
ter, In opposition to certain idealist jargon about justice. But oddly 
enough it occurred to no one that the method of distribution depends 
almost entirely upon how much there is to distribute and that, since this 
is likely to change as advances are made in production and social or- 
ganisation, similar changes might also take place in the method of 
distribution. But in every case the participants in the debate saw ‘so- 
cialist society’, not as something that is constantly changing and 
progressing, but as something stable and fixed for all time and which 
must therefore also have a method of distribution that is fixed for all 
time. Yet surely, if one is to be rational, all one can do is 1. discover 
what method of distribution should be used to start off with, 2. find 
what the general trend of future developments is likely to be. But not 
a word of that have I found in the whole of the debate. 

In general the word ‘materialist’ is used by many of the younger 
writers in Germany as a mere cliché with which to label anything and 
everything without bothering to study it any further; in other words, 
having once attached the label, they imagine they have sorted things 
out. Our view of history, however, is first and foremost a guide to 
study, not a tool for constructing objects after the Hegelian model. 
The whole of history must be studied anew, and the existential condi- 
tions of the various social formations individually investigated before 
an attempt is made to deduce therefrom the political, legal, aesthetic, 
philosophical, religious, etc., standpoints that correspond to them. 
Little has been done along these lines hitherto because very few peo- 
ple have seriously set their minds to it. Here we could do with any 
amount of help; it is a truly immense field and anyone who is pre- 
pared to apply himself to it seriously could achieve much and make 
a name for himself. Instead, the only use to which the cliché (anything 
can be turned into a cliché) of historical materialism has been put by 
all too many younger Germans is hastily to run up a jerry-built sys- 
tem out of their own relatively inadequate historical knowledge — for 
economic history is as yet in its infancy -— thus becoming great prodi- 
gies in their own eyes. And then a Barth can come along and attack 
the thing itself which has, of course, been debased to a mere cliché in 
his own milieu. 

However, all this will presumably sort itself out. We are now strong 
enough in Germany to withstand a great deal. One of the great ser- 
vices the Anti-Socialist Law '' has done us is to rid us of the importuni- 
ties of German academics of vaguely socialist complexion. We are 
now strong enough to be able to digest even your German academic 
who has once again started to give himself great airs. You, who have 

really achieved something, must yourself have noticed how few of the 
young men of letters who attach themselves to the party take the 
trouble to go in for political economy, the history of political econ- 
omy, the history of trade, of industry, of agriculture, of social 
formations. How many know anything about Maurer except 
his name? A journalist’s competence must suffice for everything, and 
the result is what you might expect. Sometimes it seems these gentry 
think anything is good enough for the worker. If only these gentry 
knew how Marx used to regard even his best stuff as not nearly good 
enough for the workers, how he thought it a crime to offer the workers 
anything less than the very best! 

After the way they have so brilliantly stood the test since 1878, 
I have implicit faith in our workers and in them alone. They, like 
every big party, will make mistakes over particular aspects of their 
development, perhaps big mistakes. For it is only from the conse- 
quences of their own mistakes and by experiments on their own per- 
sons that the masses will learn. But all that will be overcome, and far 
more easily in Germany than anywhere else because the soundness of 
our lads is proof against anything, and again because Berlin, which is 
unlikely at an early date to shake off its specifically Berlin-like charac- 
ter is, for us, a centre only in the formal sense, like London is, not as 
Paris is for France. The French and English workers — despite my 
being able to see the reasons for their blunders — have often given me 
cause for vexation, but never, since 1870, the Germans, save perhaps 
for certain individuals who spoke in their name—but never 
the masses who have always brought things back onto the 
right lines again. And I wouldn’t mind betting that they never will 
give me cause for vexation. 

Yours, 
F. Engels 

I am addressing this to the Volks-Tribüne, not knowing whether 
‘Pankow’? still holds good.