London, 24 March 1891 
122 Regent’s Park Road, N.W. 

Dear Mr Oppenheim, 

First of all I must crave your forgiveness for not having answered 
your esteemed letter of 26 November until now — almost four months 
later to the day! But if you knew what an unending mass of work and 
correspondence of all kinds I have had during that time and that, 
moreover, I am not allowed to wield my pen for more than 3 hours 
daily because of my weak eyes—and by daylight at that!—you 
would, I am sure, excuse me. 

My heartfelt thanks then for your kind good wishes which would 
appear to be coming true in as much as I am on the whole very well, 
all things considered, and everyone alleges that I do not look my age. 
Let us hope that I so continue. 

You further touch on a few difficult themes which cannot be dealt 
with anything like exhaustively in a short letter. Certainly, it would 
spell progress if workers’ unions could negotiate wage settlements 

with the entrepreneurs direct and on everyone’s behalf. Indeed, here 
in England this has been the aim for the past 50 years, though the cap- 
italists know too well where their interests lie to swallow the bait 
save under duress. That aim was achieved in the big pock srrikr of 
1889 '°° as it has been sporadically both before and since; but at the 
first opportunity the masters emancipate themselves from this, the 
unions’ ‘intolerable tyranny’, and declare it inadmissible for such 
third parties, interlopers, to meddle in the patriarchal relations be- 
tween them and their working men. It’s the old story — when busi- 
ness is good, demand compels the masters to be accommodating, 
when it is bad, they exploit the excessive supply of labour to contest 
all these concessions again. On the whole, however, the resistance of 
the workers increases as they become better organised,— so much so, 
in fact, that the general situation on average — improves slightly 
and no crisis can lastingly drag the workers down to or below zero, the 
nadir of the previous crisis. But it would be difficult to say what would 
happen if at any time we were to experience a prolonged, chronic, gen- 
eral industrial crisis of 5 or 6 years’ duration. 

The employment of surplus workers by the state or the municipali- 
ties and the nationalisation of the trade in foodstuffs are matters 
which, in my view, need to be seen in a wider context than occurs in 
your letter. It is not the trade alone, but also the production of all food- 
stuffs a country can itself supply, that must be taken into account 
here. For how else do you propose to employ the surplus workers? If 
they are surplus, it is precisely because there is no market for their 
products. This, however, brings us to the expropriation of the land- 
owners, i.e. considerably further than the present German or Aus- 
trian state would be prepared to go. Nor, for that matter, is it the 
kind of task we could entrust to either of them. How it would be done 
and what the result would be if Junkers were ordered to expropriate 
Junkers may be seen here in England where, despite all the medieval 
trappings, the general run of political life is far more modern than on 
either side of the Erzgebirge. Therein precisely lies the rub; for, so 
long as the propertied classes remain at the helm, nationalisation 
never abolishes exploitation but merely changes its form—in the 
French, American or Swiss republics no less than in monarchist Cen- 
tral, and despotic Eastern, Europe. And to dislodge the propertied 
classes from the helm we first need a revolution in the minds of the 
working masses — as, indeed, is now taking place, if relatively slowly; 
and in order to bring this about, we need an even more rapid revolu- 

tion in production methods, more machinery, more displacement of 
labour, the ruin of more peasants and petty bourgeois, more tangible 
evidence on a vaster scale of the inevitable results of modern large- 
scale industry. 

- The more quickly and irrevocably this economic revolution takes 
place, the more imperative will measures impose themselves which, 
apparently intended to cure evils that have suddenly assumed vast 
and intolerable proportions, will eventually result in undermining the 
foundations of the existing mode of production; and the more rapidly, 
too, will the working masses obtain a hearing thanks to universal 
suffrage. What those initial measures will be must depend on local 
conditions at the time, nor can anything of a general nature be said 
about them beforehand. But as I see it, steps of a truly liberating na- 
ture will not be possible until the economic revolution has made the 
great majority of the workers alive to their situation and thus paved 
the way for their political rule. The other classes can only patch up or 
palliate. And this process of clarifying the workers’ minds is daily gain- 
ing momentum and in 5 or 10 years’ time the various parliaments will 
look very different from what they do today. 

Work on Volume III* will begin as soon as the confounded little 
ancillary jobs and the endless correspondence with people here, there 
and everywhere leave time enough. Then, however, I shall rebel, shut 
up shop and refuse to be disturbed. I hope to get it finished this year; 
I am itching to do it and have got to get it over and done with. 

Shall you be visiting England again? Tussy is very well and cheer- 
ful, very happily married and has grown quite plump. 

Yours sincerely, 

F. Engels