Engels to Sorge, June 3, 1885.... In connection with the shipping subsidy (after the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law), “the split will probably come and can then only be useful. A petty-bourgeois-socialist group is inevitable in a country like Germany, where the petty bourgeoisie, much more than historical law, ‘goes down to an unknown date’”....
April 29, 1886: “In Germany in quiet times everything takes on a philistine character; here the sting of French competition is absolutely necessary. And it will not be lacking”....
February 22, 1888: ...“It only requires a start to be made somewhere and the bourgeois will be amazed at the latent socialism, which will then break out and become apparent” (291)....
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December 7, 1889: ...“The most repulsive thing here [in Britain] is the bourgeois ‘respectability’ which has grown deep into the bones of the work- ers.... Even Tom Mann, whom I regard as the best of the lot, is fond of mentioning that he will be lunching with the Lord Mayor. If one compares this with the French, one realises what a revolution is good for, after all”....[1] |
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February 8, 1890.... “The Fabians, a well-meaning band of educated bourgeois, who sought to refute Marx.... Their main aim is ... to draw the bourgeois to socialism and so introduce it peacefully and constitutionally” (331)....
((on the Fabians 393 (March 18, 1893)—p. 401 (November 11, 1893)...—they want to permeate liberalism with socialism; they themselves need to be permeated with the spirit of the workers)).
April 19, 1890.... In Britain there is a vast amount of friction, etc., of the traditional squabbles, prejudices of the skilled workers, etc., etc.
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...“But under the surface the movement is going on, is embracing ever wider sections and mostly just among the hitherto stagnant lowest [Engels’s italics] strata. The day is no longer far off when this mass will suddenly find itself [Engels’s italics], when it will dawn upon it that it itself is this colossal mass in motion”....[2] (336). March 4, 1891 ... the dockers and gasworkers and their trade union have had a setback, their “new trade union has been shattered and the old con- servative trade unions, rich [Engels’s italics], and therefore cowardly, remain lone on the field” (359). September 14, 1891. The Newcastle Trades Union Congress is also a victory (as is, too, the international congress).... “The old [Engels’s italics] trade unions, with the textile workers at the head and the entire party of reaction among the workers, exerted every effort to rescind the 1890 resolution on the eight-hour day. They failed ... and the bourgeois papers recognise the defeat of the bour- geois labour party [Engels’s italics] completely and with horror, howling and gnashing of teeth” (368). |
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October 24, 1891 ... on a possible war ... we Germans should (perhaps) “enact 1793” ... it will be a bad luck if there is a war and it “prematurely brings us into power, so we must be prepared for this eventuality” (371)....
Idem, 376: in such a war “we must play va-banque” (376).
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...“the masses [in Germany] are excellent and mostly better than the leaders”... (399) (October 7, 1893). |
December 2, 1893.... Difficulties of the development of the workers’ movement in America: 1) the system of “party government” (two parties; loss of votes for a third); 2) immigration divides the workers into two groups, the immigrants into subgroups; and, in addition, the Negroes; 3) the protective tariffs expose the workers “to the influence of a prosperity”, which does not exist in Europe (403)....
412 (May 12, 1894), the sectarianism of the Social-Democratic Federation and of the German-American Socialists in America reduces theory to “rigid orthodoxy” ... ((they want undeveloped workers to swallow the theory all at once)).
[1] Marx, Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, p. 408.
[2] Marx, Engels, Selected Correspondence, Moscow, 1965, p. 412.
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