Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - Dialectics

Frederick Engels

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

II

[Dialectics]

In the meantime, along with and after the French philosophy of the 18th century, had arisen the new German philosophy, culminating in Hegel.

Its greatest merit was the taking up again of dialectics as the highest form of reasoning. The old Greek philosophers were all born natural dialecticians, and Aristotle, the most encyclopaedic of them, had already analyzed the most essential forms of dialectic thought. The newer philosophy, on the other hand, although in it also dialectics had brilliant exponents (e.g. Descartes and Spinoza), had, especially through English influence, become more and more rigidly fixed in the so-called metaphysical mode of reasoning, by which also the French of the 18th century were almost wholly dominated, at all events in their special philosophical work. Outside philosophy in the restricted sense, the French nevertheless produced masterpieces of dialectic. We need only call to mind Diderot's Le Neveu de Rameau, and Rousseau's Discours sur l'origine et les fondements de l'inegalite parmi less hommes. We give here, in brief, the essential character of these two modes of thought.

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Socialism: Utopian and Scientific -The Development of Utopian Socialism

Frederick Engels

Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

I

[The Development of Utopian Socialism]

Modern Socialism is, in its essence, the direct product of the recognition, on the one hand, of the class antagonisms existing in the society of today between proprietors and non-proprietors, between capitalists and wage-workers; on the other hand, of the anarchy existing in production. But, in its theoretical form, modern Socialism originally appears ostensibly as a more logical extension of the principles laid down by the great French philosophers of the 18th century. Like every new theory, modern Socialism had, at first, to connect itself with the intellectual stock-in-trade ready to its hand, however deeply its roots lay in material economic facts.

The great men, who in France prepared men’s minds for the coming revolution, were themselves extreme revolutionists. They recognized no external authority of any kind whatever. Religion, natural science, society, political institutions – everything was subjected to the most unsparing criticism: everything must justify its existence before the judgment-seat of reason or give up existence. Reason became the sole measure of everything. It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head [1]; first in the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by its thought, claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but by and by, also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these principles had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form of society and government then existing, every old traditional notion, was flung into the lumber-room as irrational; the world had hitherto allowed itself to be led solely by prejudices; everything in the past deserved only pity and contempt. Now, for the first time, appeared the light of day, the kingdom of reason; henceforth superstition, injustice, privilege, oppression, were to be superseded by eternal truth, eternal Right, equality based on Nature and the inalienable rights of man.

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Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - Introduction - History

History (the role of Religion) in the English middle-class

When Europe emerged from the Middle Ages, the rising middle-class of the towns constituted its revolutionary element. It had conquered a recognized position within mediaeval feudal organization, but this position, also, had become too narrow for its expansive power. The development of the middle-class, the bourgeoisie, became incompatible with the maintenance of the feudal system; the feudal system, therefore, had to fall.

But the great international centre of feudalism was the Roman Catholic Church. It united the whole of feudalized Western Europe, in spite of all internal wars, into one grand political system, opposed as much to the schismatic Greeks as to the Mohammedan countries. It had organized its own hierarchy on the feudal model, and, lastly, it was itself by far the most powerful feudal lord, holding, as it did, fully 1/3rd of the soil of the Catholic world. Before profane feudalism could be successfully attacked in each country and in detail, this, its sacred central organization, had to be destroyed.

Moreover, parallel with the rise of the middle-class went on the great revival of science; astronomy, mechanics, physics, anatomy, physiology were again cultivated. And the bourgeoisie, for the development of its industrial production, required a science which ascertained the physical properties of natural objects and the modes of action of the forces of Nature. Now up to then science had but been the humble handmaid of the Church, had not been allowed to overlap the limits set by faith, and for that reason had been no science at all. Science rebelled against the Church; the bourgeoisie could not do without science, and, therefore, had to join in the rebellion.

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Socialism: Utopian and Scientific - Inroduction 1892

Frederick Engels 

January and March of 1880;

Marx/Engels Selected Works, Volume 3, p. 95-151;

1892 English Edition Introduction

[General Introduction and the History of Materialism]

The present little book is, originally, part of a larger whole. About 1875, Dr. E. Dühring, privatdocent [university lecturer who formerly received fees from his students rather than a wage] at Berlin University, suddenly and rather clamorously announced his conversion to Socialism, and presented the German public not only with an elaborate Socialist theory, but also with a complete practical plan for the reorganization of society. As a matter of course, he fell foul of his predecessors; above all, he honored Marx by pouring out upon him the full vials of his wrath.

This took place about the same time when the two sections of the Socialist party in Germany — Eisenachers and Lasselleans — had just effected their fusion [at the Gotha Unification Congress], and thus obtained not only an immense increase of strength, but, was what more, the faculty of employing the whole of this strength against the common enemy. The Socialist party in Germany was fast becoming a power. But, to make it a power, the first condition was that the newly-conquered unity should not be imperilled. And Dr. Dühring openly proceeded to form around himself a sect, the nucleus of a future separate party. It, thus, became necessary to take up the gauntlet thrown down to us, and to fight out the struggle, whether we liked it or not.

This, however, though it might not be an over-difficult, was evidently a long-winded business. As is well-known, we Germans are of a terribly ponderous Grundlichkeit, radical profundity or profound radicality, whatever you may like to call it. Whenever anyone of us expounds what he considers a new doctrine, he has first to elaborate it into an all-comprising system. He has to prove that both the first principles of logic and the fundamental laws of the universe had existed from all eternity for no other purpose than to ultimately lead to this newly-discovered, crowning theory. And Dr. Dühring, in this respect, was quite up to the national mark. Nothing less than a complete "System of Philosophy", mental, moral, natural, and historical; a complete "System of Political Economy and Socialism"; and, finally, a "Critical History of Political Economy" — three big volumes in octavo, heavy extrinsically and intrinsically, three army-corps of arguments mobilized against all previous philosophers and economists in general, and against Marx in particular — in fact, an attempt at a complete "revolution in science" — these were what I should have to tackle. I had to treat of all and every possible subject, from concepts of time and space to Bimetallism; from the eternity of matter and motion, to the perishable nature of moral ideas; from Darwin's natural selection to the education of youth in a future society. Anyhow, the systematic comprehensiveness of my opponent gave me the opportunity of developing, in opposition to him, and in a more connected form than had previously been done, the views held by Marx and myself on this great variety of subjects. And that was the principal reason which made me undertake this otherwise ungrateful task.

My reply was first published in a series of articles in the Leipzig Vorwarts, the chief organ of the Socialist party [1], and later on as a book: "Herr Eugen Dührings Umwalzung der Wissenchaft" (Mr. E. Dühring's "Revolution in Science"), a second edition of which appeared in Zurich, 1886.

At the request of my friend, Paul Lafargue, now representative of Lille in the French Chamber of Deputies, I arranged three chapters of this book as a pamphlet, which he translated and published in 1880, under the title: "Socialisme utopique et Socialisme scientifique". From this French text, a Polish and a Spanish edition were prepared. In 1883, our German friends brought out the pamphlet in the original language. Italian, Russian, Danish, Dutch, and Roumanian translations, based upon the German text, have since been published. Thus, the present English edition, this little book circulates in 10 languages. I am not aware that any other Socialist work, not even our Communist Manifesto of 1848, or Marx's Capital, has been so often translated. In Germany, it has had four editions of about 20,000 copies in all.

The Appendix, "The Mark", was written with the intention of spreading among the German Socialist party some elementary knowledge of the history and development of landed property in Germany. This seemed all the more necessary at a time when the assimilation by that party of the working-people of the towns was in a fair way of completion, and when the agricultural laborers and peasant had to be taken in hand. This appendix has been included in the translation, as the original forms of tenure of land common to all Teutonic tribes, and the history of their decay, are even less known in England and in Germany. I have left the text as it stands in the original, without alluding to the hypothesis recently started by Maxim Kovalevsky, according to which the partition of the arable and meadow lands among the members of the Mark was preceded by their being cultivated for joint-account by a large patriarchal family community, embracing several generations (as exemplified by the still existing South Slavonian Zadruga), and that the partition, later on, took place when the community had increased, so as to become too unwieldy for joint-account management. Kovalevsky is probably quite right, but the matter is still sub judice [under consideration].

The economic terms used in this work, as afar as they are new, agree with those used in the English edition of Marx's Capital. We call "production of commodities" that economic phase where articles are produced not only for the use of the producers, but also for the purpose of exchange; that is, as commodities, not as use values. This phase extends from the first beginnings of production for exchange down to our present time; it attains its full development under capitalist production only, that is, under conditions where the capitalist, the owner of the means of production, employs, for wages, laborers, people deprived of all means of production except their own labor-power, and pockets the excess of the selling price of the products over his outlay. We divide the history of industrial production since the Middle Ages into three periods:

handicraft, small master craftsman with a few journeymen and apprentices, where each laborer produces a complete article;

manufacture, where greater numbers of workmen, grouped in one large establishment, produce the complete article on the principle of division of labor, each workman performing only one partial operation, so that the product is complete only after having passed successively through the hands of all;

modern industry, where the product is produced by machinery driven by power, and where the work of the laborer is limited to superintending and correcting the performance of the mechanical agent.

I am perfectly aware that the contents of this work will meet with objection from a considerable portion of the British public. But, if we Continentals had taken the slightest notice of the prejudices of British "respectability", we should be even worse off than we are. This book defends what we call "historical materialism", and the word materialism grates upon the ears of the immense majority of British readers. "Agnosticism" might be tolerated, but materialism is utterly inadmissible.

And, yet, the original home of all modern materialism, from the 17th century onwards, is England.

"Materialism is the natural-born son of Great Britain. Already the British schoolman, Duns Scotus, asked, 'whether it was impossible for the matter to think?'

"In order to effect this miracle, he took refuge in God's omnipotence — i.e., he made theology preach materialism. Moreover, he was a nominalist. Nominalism, the first form of materialism, is chiefly found among the English schoolmen.

"The real progenitor of English materialism is Bacon. To him, natural philosophy is the only true philosophy, and physics based upon the experience of the senses is the chiefest part of natural philosophy. Anaxagoras and his homoiomeriae, Democritus and his atoms, he often quotes as his authorities. According to him, the senses are infallible and the source of all knowledge. All science is based on experience, and consists in subjecting the data furnished by the senses to a rational method of investigation. Induction, analysis, comparison, observation, experiment, are the principal forms of such a rational method. Among the qualities inherent in matter, motion is the first and foremost, not only in the form of mechanical and mathematical motion, but chiefly in the form of an impulse, a vital spirit, a tension — or a 'qual', to use a term of Jakob Bohme's [2] — of matter.

"In Bacon, its first creator, materialism still occludes within itself the germs of a many-sided development. On the one hand, matter, surrounded by a sensuous, poetic glamor, seems to attract man's whole entity by winning smiles. On the other, the aphoristically formulated doctrine pullulates with inconsistencies imported from theology.

"In its further evolution, materialism becomes one-sided. Hobbes is the man who systematizes Baconian materialism. Knowledge based upon the senses loses its poetic blossom, it passes into the abstract experience of the mathematician; geometry is proclaimed as the queen of sciences. Materialism takes to misanthropy. If it is to overcome its opponent, misanthropic, flashless spiritualism, and that on the latter's own ground, materialism has to chastise its own flesh and turn ascetic. Thus, from a sensual, it passes into an intellectual, entity; but thus, too, it evolves all the consistency, regardless of consequences, characteristic of the intellect.

"Hobbes, as Bacon's continuator, argues thus: if all human knowledge is furnished by the senses, then our concepts and ideas are but the phantoms, divested of their sensual forms, of the real world. Philosophy can but give names to these phantoms. One name may be applied to more than one of them. There may even be names of names. It would imply a contradiction if, on the one hand, we maintained that all ideas had their origin in the world of sensation, and, on the other, that a word was more than a word; that, besides the beings known to us by our senses, beings which are one and all individuals, there existed also beings of a general, not individual, nature. An unbodily substance is the same absurdity as an unbodily body. Body, being, substance, are but different terms for the same reality. It is impossible to separate thought from matter that thinks. This matter is the substratum of all changes going on in the world. The word infinite is meaningless, unless it states that our mind is capable of performing an endless process of addition. Only material things being perceptible to us, we cannot know anything about the existence of God. My own existence alone is certain. Every human passion is a mechanical movement, which has a beginning and an end. The objects of impulse are what we call good. Man is subject to the same laws as nature. Power and freedom are identical.

"Hobbes had systematized Bacon, without, however, furnishing a proof for Bacon's fundamental principle, the origin of all human knowledge from the world of sensation. It was Locke who, in his Essay on the Human Understanding, supplied this proof.

"Hobbes had shattered the theistic prejudices of Baconian materialism; Collins, Dodwell, Coward, Hartley, Priestley, similarly shattered the last theological bars that still hemmed in Locke's sensationalism. At all events, for practical materialists, Deism is but an easy-going way of getting rid of religion."

Karl Marx

The Holy Family

p. 201 - 204

Thus Karl Marx wrote about the British origin of modern materialism. If Englishmen nowadays do not exactly relish the compliment he paid their ancestors, more's the pity. It is none the less undeniable that Bacon, Hobbes, and Locke are the fathers of that brilliant school of French materialism which made the 18th century, in spite of all battles on land and sea won over Frenchmen by Germans and Englishmen, a pre-eminently French century, even before that crowning French Revolution, the results of which we outsiders, in England as well as Germany, are still trying to acclimatize.

There is no denying it. About the middle of this century, what struck every cultivated foreigner who set up his residence in England, was what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English respectable middle-class. We, at that time, were all materialists, or, at least, very advanced free-thinkers, and to us it appeared inconceivable that almost all educated people in England should believe in all sorts of impossible miracles, and that even geologists like Buckland and Mantell should contort the facts of their science so as not to clash too much with the myths of the book of Genesis; while, in order to find people who dared to use their own intellectual faculties with regard to religious matters, you had to go amongst the uneducated, the "great unwashed", as they were then called, the working people, especially the Owenite Socialists.

But England has been "civilized" since then. The exhibition of 1851 sounded the knell of English insular exclusiveness. England became gradually internationalized, in diet, in manners, in ideas; so much so that I begin to wish that some English manners and customs had made as much headway on the Continent as other Continental habits have made here. Anyhow, the introduction and spread of salad-oil (before 1851 known only to the aristocracy) has been accompanied by a fatal spread of Continental scepticism in matters religious, and it has come to this, that agnosticism, though not yet considered "the thing" quite as much as the Church of England, is yet very nearly on a par, as far as respectability goes, with Baptism, and decidedly ranks above the Salvation Army. And I cannot help believing that under those circumstances it will be consoling to many who sincerely regret and condemn this progress of infidelity to learn that these "new-fangled notions" are not of foreign origin, are not "made in Germany", like so many other articles of daily use, but are undoubtedly Old English, and that their British originators 200 years ago went a good deal further than their descendants now dare to venture.

What, indeed, is agnosticism but, to use an expressive Lancashire term, "shamefaced" materialism? The agnostic's conception of Nature is materialistic throughout. The entire natural world is governed by law, and absolutely excludes the intervention of action from without. But, he adds, we have no means either of ascertaining or of disproving the existence of some Supreme Being beyond the known universe. Now, this might hold good at the time when Laplace, to Napoleon's question, why, in the great astronomer's Treatise on Celestial Mechanics, the Creator was not even mentioned, proudly replied" "I had no need of this hypothesis." But, nowadays, in our evolutionary conception of the universe, there is absolutely no room for either a Creator or a Ruler; and to talk of a Supreme Being shut out from the whole existing world, implies a contradiction in terms, and, as it seems to me, a gratuitous insult to the feelings of religious people.

Again, our agnostic admits that all our knowledge is based upon the information imparted to us by our senses. But, he adds, how do we know that our senses give us correct representations of the objects we perceive through them? And he proceeds to inform us that, whenever we speak of objects, or their qualities, of which he cannot know anything for certain, but merely the impressions which they have produced on his senses. Now, this line of reasoning seems undoubtedly hard to beat by mere argumentation. But before there was argumentation, there was action. Im Anfang war die That. [from Goethe's Faust: "In the beginning was the deed."] And human action had solved the difficulty long before human ingenuity invented it. The proof of the pudding is in the eating. From the moment we turn to our own use these objects, according to the qualities we perceive in them, we put to an infallible test the correctness or otherwise of our sense-perception. If these perceptions have been wrong, then our estimate of the use to which an object can be turned must also be wrong, and our attempt must fail. But, if we succeed in accomplishing our aim, if we find that the object does agree with our idea of it, and does answer the purpose we intended it for, then that is proof positive that our perceptions of it and of its qualities, so far, agree with reality outside ourselves. And, whenever we find ourselves face-to-face with a failure, then we generally are not long in making out the cause that made us fail; we find that the perception upon which we acted was either incomplete and superficial, or combined with the results of other perceptions in a way not warranted by them — what we call defective reasoning. So long as we take care to train our senses properly, and to keep our action within the limits prescribed by perceptions properly made and properly used, so long as we shall find that the result of our action proves the conformity of our perceptions with the objective nature of the things perceived. Not in one single instance, so far, have we been led to the conclusion that our sense-perception, scientifically controlled, induce in our minds ideas respecting the outer world that are, by their very nature, at variance with reality, or that there is an inherent incompatibility between the outer world and our sense-perceptions of it.

But then come the Neo-Kantian agnostics and say: We may correctly perceive the qualities of a thing, but we cannot by any sensible or mental process grasp the thing-in-itself. This "thing-in-itself" is beyond our ken. To this Hegel, long since, has replied: If you know all the qualities of a thing, you know the thing itself; nothing remains but the fact that the said thing exists without us; and, when your senses have taught you that fact, you have grasped the last remnant of the thing-in-itself, Kant's celebrated unknowable Ding an sich. To which it may be added that in Kant's time our knowledge of natural objects was indeed so fragmentary that he might well suspect, behind the little we knew about each of them, a mysterious "thing-in-itself". But one after another these ungraspable things have been grasped, analyzed, and, what is more, reproduced by the giant progress of science; and what we can produce we certainly cannot consider as unknowable. To the chemistry of the first half of this century, organic substances were such mysterious object; now we learn to build them up one after another from their chemical elements without the aid of organic processes. Modern chemists declare that as soon as the chemical constitution of no-matter-what body is known, it can be built up from its elements. We are still far from knowing the constitution of the highest organic substances, the albuminous bodies; but there is no reason why we should not, if only after centuries, arrive at the knowledge and, armed with it, produce artificial albumen. But, if we arrive at that, we shall at the same time have produced organic life, for life, from its lowest to its highest forms, is but the normal mode of existence of albuminous bodies.

As soon, however, as our agnostic has made these formal mental reservations, he talks and acts as the rank materialist he at bottom is. He may say that, as far as we know, matter and motion, or as it is now called, energy, can neither be created nor destroyed, but that we have no proof of their not having been created at some time or other. But if you try to use this admission against him in any particular case, he will quickly put you out of court. If he admits the possibility of spiritualism in abstracto, he will have none of it in concreto. As far as we know and can know, he will tell you there is no creator and no Ruler of the universe; as far as we are concerned, matter and energy can neither be created nor annihilated; for us, mind is a mode of energy, a function of the brain; all we know is that the material world is governed by immutable laws, and so forth. Thus, as far as he is a scientific man, as far as he knows anything, he is a materialist; outside his science, in spheres about which he knows nothing, he translates his ignorance into Greek and calls it agnosticism.

At all events, one thing seems clear: even if I was an agnostic, it is evident that I could not describe the conception of history sketched out in this little book as "historical agnosticism". Religious people would laugh at me, agnostics would indignantly ask, was I making fun of them? And, thus, I hope even British respectability will not be overshocked if I use, in English as well as in so many other languages, the term "historical materialism", to designate that view of the course of history which seeks the ultimate cause and the great moving power of all important historic events in the economic development of society, in the changes in the modes of production and exchange, in the consequent division of society into distinct classes, and in the struggles of these classes against one another.

This indulgence will, perhaps, be accorded to me all the sooner if I show that historical materialism may be of advantage even to British respectability. I have mentioned the fact that, about 40 or 50 years ago, any cultivated foreigner settling in England was struck by what he was then bound to consider the religious bigotry and stupidity of the English respectable middle-class. I am now going to prove that the respectable English middle-class of that time was not quite as stupid as it looked to the intelligent foreigner. Its religious leanings can be explained.

Notes

1. Vorwarts existed in Leipzig from 1876-78, after the Gotha Unification Congress.

2. "Qual" is a philosophical play upon words. Qual literally means torture, a pain which drives to action of some kind; at the same time, the mystic Bohme puts into the German word something of the meaning of the Latin qualitas; his "qual" was the activating principle arising from, and promoting in its turn, the spontaneous development of the thing, relation, or person subject to it, in contradistinction to a pain inflicted from without. [Note by Engels to the English Edition]

History of the English middle-class

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III The Question of Building Socialism in the U.S.S.R.

The Seventh Enlarged Plenum of the E.C.C.I
Permit me, comrades, to pass now to the question of building socialism in our country, in the U.S.S.R.

1. The "Manoeuvres" of the Opposition and the "National-Reformism" of Lenin's Party

Trotsky declared in his speech that Stalin's biggest error is the theory of the possibility of building socialism in one country, in our country. It appears, then, that what is in question is not Lenin's theory of the possibility of completely building socialism in our country, but of some unknown "theory" of Stalin's. The way I understand it is that Trotsky set out to give battle to Lenin's theory, but since giving open battle to Lenin is a risky business, he decided to fight this battle under the guise of combating a "theory" of Stalin's. Trotsky in this way wants to make it easier for himself to fight Leninism, by disguising that fight by his criticism of Stalin's "theory." That this is precisely so, that Stalin has nothing to do with the case, that there can be no question of any "theory" of Stalin's, that Stalin never had any pretensions to making any new contributions to theory, but only strove to facilitate the complete triumph of Leninism in our Party, in spite of Trotsky's revisionist efforts—this I shall endeavour to show later. Meanwhile, let it be noted that Trotsky's statement about Stalin's "theory" is a manoeuvre, a trick, a cowardly and unsuccessful trick, designed to cover up his fight against Lenin's theory of the victory of socialism in individual countries, a fight which began in 1915 and is continuing to the present day. Whether this stratagem of Trotsky's is a sign of honest polemics, I leave the comrades to judge.

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Three years of Proletarian Dictatorship

Stalin
Report Delivered at a Celebration Meeting of the Baku Soviet November 6, 1920

Works, Vol. 4, November, 1917 - 1920

Comrades, before beginning my report, I want to convey the greetings of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Russia to you, the Soviet of Workers' Deputies of Baku, the greetings of the Council of People's Commissars to the Revolutionary Committee of Azerbaijan and its head, Comrade Narimanov, and the ardent greetings of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic to the Eleventh Red Army, which liberated Azerbaijan and is staunchly upholding its liberty. (Applause.)

The basic question in the affairs of Russia during the three years of Soviet power has undoubtedly been the question of her international position. There was a time when Soviet Russia was ignored, disregarded, unrecognized. That was the first period—from the establishment of Soviet power in Russia to the defeat of German imperialism. That was the period when the Western imperialists—the two coalitions, the British and the German, being at each other's throats—disregarded Soviet Russia, had no time for her, so to speak.

The second period was that from the defeat of German imperialism and the beginning of the German revolution down to Denikin's broad offensive against Russia, when he was at the gates of Tula. The distinguishing feature of Russia's international position in that period was that the Entente—the Anglo-French-American coalition—having defeated Germany, directed all its available forces against Soviet Russia. That was the period when we were threatened with an alliance of fourteen states, which afterwards proved to be a myth.

The third period is the one we are in now, when we are not only noticed as a socialist power, not only recognized in fact, but also feared.

THE FIRST PERIOD

Three years ago, on October 25 (or November 7, New Style), 1917, a handful of Bolshevik members of the Petrograd Soviet met and decided to surround Ke-rensky's palace, take prisoner his already demoralized troops, and transfer power to the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies, which was then assembled.

At that time many looked upon us as cranks at the best, and as "agents of German imperialism" at the worst.

Internationally, this period could be called the period of the complete isolation of Soviet Russia.

Not only were the surrounding bourgeois states hostile to Russia; even our socialist "comrades" in the West looked upon us with distrust.

If Soviet Russia nevertheless survived as a state, it was only because the Western imperialists were then absorbed in a fierce struggle among themselves. Furthermore, they looked upon the Bolshevik experiment in Russia with scorn: they believed that the Bolsheviks would die a natural death.

Internally, this period may be described as the period of the destruction of the old order in Russia, of the destruction of the entire apparatus of the old bourgeois power.

We knew from theory that the proletariat cannot simply take over the old state machine and set it going. That theoretical precept, taught us by Marx, was fully confirmed in practice when we found ourselves in a regular phase of sabotage on the part of the tsarist officials, office employees and a certain section of the upper proletariat—a phase of complete disorganization of state power.

The first and most important apparatus of the bourgeois state, the old army and its generals, was thrown on to the scrap heap. That cost us very dear. It left us for a time without any army at all, and we had to sign the Brest peace. But there was no alternative; history offered us no other way of emancipating the proletariat.

Another and equally important apparatus of the bourgeoisie which was destroyed, thrown on to the scrap heap, was the bureaucracy, the apparatus of bourgeois administration.

In the sphere of economic administration of the country, the most notable thing was that the banks, the main nerve of the bourgeois economic organism, were taken out of the hands of the bourgeoisie. The banks were taken out of the hands of the bourgeoisie, and the latter was, so to speak, deprived of its soul. Then came the work of breaking up the old economic machinery and expropriating the bourgeoisie—depriving it of the mills and factories and turning them over to the working class. Lastly came the break-up of the old machinery of food supply and the attempt to build a new one capable of procuring food and distributing it among the population. Finally, there was the abolition of the Constituent Assembly. These, roughly, were the measures Soviet Russia had to take in this period in order to destroy the bourgeois state apparatus.

THE SECOND PERIOD

The second period began when the Anglo-French-American coalition, having defeated German imperialism, set to work to destroy Soviet Russia.

Internationally, this period can be described as a period of open war between the forces of the Entente and the forces of Soviet Russia. If in the first period we were disregarded, were sneered at and scoffed at, in this period, on the contrary, all the dark forces stirred into action in order to put an end to the so-called "anarchy" in Russia, which was threatening the decomposition of the entire capitalist world.

Internally, this period must be described as a period of construction, when the destruction of the old apparatus of the bourgeois state was in the main completed and a new phase, a phase of construction had begun; when the mills and factories which had been taken away from the owners were set going; when real workers' control was instituted and the proletariat then passed from control to direct management, and when a new machinery of food supply was being built in place of the one which had been destroyed, a new machinery of railway administration in the centre and in the provinces in place of the destroyed one, and a new army in place of the old army.

It must be confessed that in general the work of construction proceeded very haltingly in this period, because the greater part—nine-tenths—of our creative energy was devoted to the building of the Red Army, since in the mortal struggle against the forces of the Entente the very existence of Soviet Russia was at stake, and in that period its existence could be preserved only by a powerful Red Army. And it must be said that our efforts were not in vain, because already in that period the Red Army demonstrated the full scope of its might by vanquishing Yudenich and Kolchak.

As regards the international position of Russia, this second period may be said to have been one of the gradual elimination of Russia's isolation. Her first allies began to appear. The German revolution produced closely-welded cadres of workers, communist cadres and laid the foundation of a new Communist Party in the shape of the Liebknecht group

In France, a small group which nobody had paid any attention to before, the Loriot group, became an important group of the communist movement. In Italy, the communist trend, which had been weak at first, came to embrace practically the whole Italian Socialist Party, its majority.

In the East, the Red Army's successes started a ferment which, for instance in Turkey, developed into an outright war against the Entente and its allies.

The bourgeois states themselves in this period were no longer the solid body of hostility to Russia which they had been in the first period, to say nothing of the disagreements within the Entente itself over the question of recognizing Soviet Russia, which grew more acute as time went on. Voices began to be raised advocating negotiation and agreement with Russia. Estonia, Latvia and Finland were examples.

Lastly, "Hands off Russia!" had become a popular slogan among the British and French workers and made it impossible for the Entente to intervene directly in Russia's affairs by force of arms. The Entente had to stop sending British and French soldiers against Russia. It had to confine itself to using the armies of others against Russia, armies which it could not order about at its own discretion.

THE THIRD PERIOD

The third period is the one we are in now. It may be called a transition period. The distinguishing feature of the first part of this period was that, having defeated the main enemy, Denikin, and foreseeing the end of the war, Russia set about converting the state apparatus, which had been adapted to the purposes of war, to new tasks, the tasks of economic construction. Whereas, formerly, the cry had been: "Everything for the war!" "Everything for the Red Army!" "Everything for victory over the foreign enemy!"—now it became: "Everything for the strengthening of the economy!" However, this phase of the third period, which began after the defeat of Denikin and his ejection from the Ukraine, was interrupted by Poland's attack on Russia. The Entente's purpose in this was to prevent Soviet Russia from getting on its feet economically and becoming a great world power. The Entente feared this, and incited Poland against Russia.

The state apparatus, already adapted for economic construction, had to be reconstructed again; the Labour Armies which had been formed in the Ukraine, the Urals and the Don area had again to be put on a war footing in order to rally the fighting units around them and dispatch them against Poland. This period is ending with Poland already neutralized and no new external enemies are so far in sight. The only direct enemy is the remnants of Denikin's army, represented by Wrangel, who is now being smashed by our Comrade Budyonny.

Now there are grounds for assuming that, for a short period at least, Soviet Russia will receive a valuable respite in which to direct all the energies of its indefatigable forces, who brought the Red Army into being almost in one day, to the work of economic construction, and to put our factories, our agriculture and our food agencies on their feet.

Externally, internationally, the distinguishing feature of the third period is not only that our enemies have ceased to ignore Russia, nor only that they have begun to fight her—even brandishing the bogey of the mythical fourteen states with which Churchill threatened Rus-sia—but that, having received a series of drubbings, they have even begun to fear Russia, realizing that she is growing into a great socialist people's power, which will not allow itself to be ill-used.

Internally, the distinguishing feature of this period is that, with the defeat of Wrangel, Russia is getting her hands free and is devoting all her energies to internal affairs. Indeed, it is already observable that our economic bodies are working much better, much more thoroughly, than they did in the second period. In the summer of 1918 the workers of Moscow received one-eighth of a pound of bread mixed with oilcake once in two days. That difficult and distressful period is now a thing of the past. The workers of Moscow, as well as of Petrograd, now receive a pound and a half of bread a day. That means that our food agencies have got properly going, have improved, have learned how to procure grain.

As to our policy towards internal enemies, it remains, and must remain, what it was in all the three periods, that is, a policy of crushing all the enemies of the proletariat. This policy cannot of course be called a policy of "universal freedom"—in the era of the dictatorship of the proletariat there can be no universal freedom, that is, no freedom of speech, freedom of the press, etc., for our bourgeoisie. The sum and substance of our home policy is to grant maximum freedom to the proletarian sections of town and country, and to deny even minimum freedom to the remnants of the bourgeois class.

That is the essence of our policy, which rests upon the dictatorship of the proletariat.

PROSPECTS

Of course, our constructive work in these three years has not been as effective as we would have liked. But allowances must be made for the difficult, the impossible conditions in which the work had to be done, conditions which could not be evaded and could not be gainsaid, but which had to be overcome.

Firstly, we had to build under fire. Imagine a mason who has to lay bricks with one hand and defend what he is building with the other.

Secondly, what we were building was not a bourgeois economy in which each pursues his own private interest and has no concern for the country as a whole and does not set himself the problem of the planned organization of the economy on a country-wide scale. No, it was a socialist society we were building. That means that we must take into account the requirements of society as a whole, that the economy of the whole of Russia must be organized in a planned and conscious way. That is undoubtedly a task of incomparably greater complexity and difficulty.

That is why our constructive efforts could not yield the maximum results.

That being the state of affairs, our prospects are clear: we are on the threshold of the liquidation of our external enemies, on the threshold of the conversion of our entire state machinery from war purposes to economic purposes. Our foreign policy is one of peace; we are no believers in war. But if war is forced upon us—and there are signs that the Entente is trying to transfer the theatre of hostilities to the South, to Transcaucasia—if the Entente, which we have given a beating several times, forces war upon us again, then it goes without saying that we shall not allow the sword to slip from our hand, we shall not disband our armies. We shall continue as before to bend every effort to ensure that the Red Army flourishes and is ready for action, so that it may be able to defend Soviet Russia against its enemies as boldly and bravely as it has done until now.

Reviewing the past of the Soviet power, I cannot help recalling that evening three years ago, on October 25, 1917, when we, a small group of Bolsheviks headed by Comrade Lenin, who had at our disposal the Pet-rograd Soviet (it was then already Bolshevik), a small Red Guard, and a quite small and still not fully cemented Communist Party of 200,000-250,000 members—when we, this small group, deposed the representatives of the bourgeoisie and transferred power to the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers', Peasants' and Soldiers' Deputies.

Since then three years have elapsed.

And now we see that in this period Russia has steeled herself in the crucible of fire and storm and has become a great socialist world power.

Whereas at that time we had only the Petrograd Soviet, now, three years later, all the Soviets of Russia are rallied around us.

Instead of the Constituent Assembly, for which our adversaries were then preparing, we now have the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of Soviets, which sprang from the Petrograd Soviet.

Whereas at that time we had a small guard composed of Petrograd workers, who were able to cope with the military cadets who had raised revolt in Petrograd, but were unable to fight an external enemy because they were too weak, now we have a glorious Red Army many million strong, which is smashing the enemies of Soviet Russia, which has vanquished Kolchak and Denikin, and which is now, by the hand of the tried and tested leader of our cavalry, Comrade Budyonny, destroying the last remnants of Wrangel's army.

Whereas at that time, three years ago, we had a small and still not fully cemented Communist Party of some 200,000-250,000 members in all, now, three years later, after the fire and storms through which Soviet Russia has passed, we have a party of 700,000, a party forged out of steel; a party whose members can be re-marshalled at any moment and concentrated by hundreds of thousands on any party task; a party which, without fear of confusion in its ranks, is able at a wave of the hand of the Central Committee to re-form its ranks and march against the enemy.

Whereas at that time, three years ago, we had only small groups of sympathizers in the West—the groups of Loriot in France, of MacLean in Britain, of Liebknecht, who was murdered by the capitalist scoundrels, in Ger-many—now, three years later, a grand organization of the international revolutionary movement has sprung up—the Third, Communist International, which has won the adherence of the major European parties: the German, the French, the Italian. In the Communist International, which has shattered the Second International, we now have the main core of the international socialist movement.

And it is not by chance that the leader of the Second International, Herr Kautsky, has been thrown out of Germany by the revolution, and that he has been forced to seek asylum in backward Tiflis, with the Georgian social-innkeepers. 

Lastly, whereas three years ago we observed in the countries of the oppressed East nothing but indifference to the revolution, now the East has begun to stir, and we are witnessing a whole number of liberation movements there directed against the Entente, against imperialism. We have a revolutionary nucleus, a rallying centre for all the other colonies and semi-colonies, in the shape of the Kemal Government, a bourgeois revolutionary government but one which is waging an armed struggle against the Entente.

Whereas three years ago we did not even dare to dream that the East might stir into action, now we not only have a revolutionary nucleus in the East, in the shape of bourgeois revolutionary Turkey; we also possess a socialist organ of the East—the Committee of Action and Propaganda.

All these facts indicating how poor we were in the revolutionary sense three years ago and how rich we have become now; all these facts furnish us with grounds for affirming that Soviet Russia will live, that it will develop and defeat its enemies.

Undoubtedly, our path is not of the easiest; but, just as undoubtedly, we are not to be frightened by difficulties. Paraphrasing the well-known words of Luther, 2 Russia might say:

"Here I stand on the border line between the old, capitalist world and the new, socialist world. Here, on this border line, I unite the efforts of the proletarians of the West and of the peasants of the East in order to shatter the old world. May the god of history be my aid!"

Kommunist (Baku), Nos. 157 and 160, November 7 and 11, 1920

Continue to Read more »

LETTERS OF ENGELS RELATING TO "SOCIALISM IN ONE COUNTRY";

Serves as an appendix To Alliance Number 41: Dated July 1 2001.

Item One: From Collected Works Marx and Engels; Volume 46; pp 191-194. 

Page 191 NB: Footnotes are at end of the letter. 

112. Letter Of Engels to Kautsky. 7 February 1882 

ENGELS TO KARL KAUTSKY IN ZURICH 

London, 7 February 1882 

Dear Mr Kautsky, 

I have at last got round to answering your letter of 8 November.1

One of the real tasks of the revolution of ‘48 (and the real as distinct from illusory tasks of a revolution are always carried out on the strength of that revolution) was the restoration of the oppressed and disunited nationalities of Central Europe in so far as these were at all viable and, in particular, ripe for independence. In the case of Italy, Hungary and Germany, this task was carried out by the executors of the revolution, Bonaparte, Cavour and Bismarck, in accordance with the circumstances obtaining at the time. There remained Ireland and Poland. Ireland need not be considered here; it is only very indirectly concerned with conditions on the Continent. But Poland lies in the middle of the Continent and keeping it partitioned is precisely the bond that continually re-cements the Holy Alliance 2 and hence Poland is of great interest to us.

Now it is historically impossible for a great people to discuss this or that internal question in any way seriously so long as national independence is lacking. Prior to 1859 there was no question of socialism in Italy; even the republicans were few in number, although they constituted the most vigorous element. Not until 1861 did the republicans begin to expand, 3 subsequently yielding their best elements to the socialists. Similarly in Germany. Lassalle was on the point of giving up the cause for lost when he was lucky enough to be shot. It was not until 1866, the year that actually decided Little Germany's Greater Prussian unity, 4 that both the Lassallean and the so-called Eisenach parties 5 acquired any significance, and it was not until 1870, when the Bonapartist urge to interfere had been eliminated for good, that the cause gathered momentum. If we still had the old Federal Diet 6, where would our party be now? Similarly in Hungary. It wasn't until 1860 that it was drawn into the modern movement - sharp practice above, socialism below 7.

Generally speaking an international movement of the proletariat is

p.192. 112. Engels to Kautsky. 7 February 1882

possible only as between independent nations. What little republican internationalism there was in the years 1830-48 was grouped round the France that was to liberate Europe, and French chauvinism was thus raised to such a pitch that we are still hampered at every turn by France's mission as universal liberator and hence by its natural right to take the lead (seen as a caricature in the case of the Blanquists but also much in evidence in that of e. g. Malon & Co.8). In the International, too, the French not unnaturally took this view. They, and many others, had first to learn from events, and must still do so daily, that international co-operation is possible only among equals, and even a primus inter pares - at most for immediate action. So long as Poland remains partitioned and subjugated, therefore, there can be no development either of a powerful socialist party within the country itself or of genuine international intercourse between Poles other than the emigres and the rest of the proletarian parties in Germany, etc. Every Polish peasant and workman who rouses himself out of his stupor to participate in the common interest is confronted first of all with the fact of national subjugation; that is the first obstacle he encounters everywhere. Its removal is the prime requirement for any free and healthy development. Polish socialists who fail to put the liberation of the country at the forefront of their programme remind me of those German socialists who were reluctant to demand the immediate repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law 9 and freedom of association, assembly and the press. To be able to fight, you must first have a terrain, light, air and elbow-room. Otherwise you never get further than chit-chat. 

Whether, in this connection, a restoration of Poland is possible before the next revolution is of no significance. It is in no way our business to restrain the efforts of the Poles to attain living conditions essential to their further development, or to persuade them that, from the international standpoint, national independence is a very secondary matter when it is in fact the basis of all international cooperation. Besides, in 1873, Germany and Russia were on the brink of war 10 and the restoration of some kind of Poland, the embryo of a later, real Poland, was therefore a strong possibility. And if these Russian gents don't soon put a stop to their pan-Slav intrigues and rabble-rousing in Herzegovina, 11 they may well find themselves with a war on their hands, a war neither they, nor Austria nor Bismarck will be able to control. The only people who are concerned that the

p.193. 112. Engels to Kautsky. 7 February 1882

Herzegovina affair should take a serious turn are the Russian Pan Slav Party and the Tsar; no one can really concern himself with the rapacious Bosnian riff-raff any more than with the idiotic Austrian ministers and officials who are presently pursuing their activities there. So even without an uprising, as a result, rather, of purely European conflicts, the establishment of an independent Little Poland would be by no means impossible, just as the Prussian Little Germany invented by the bourgeois owed its establishment not to the revolutionary or parliamentary methods they had dreamed of, but to war.

Hence I am of the opinion that two nations in Europe are not only entitled but duty-bound to be national before they are international- Ireland and Poland. For the best way they can be international is by being well and truly national. That's what the Poles have understood in every crisis and proved on every revolutionary battleground. Deprive them of the prospect of restoring Poland, or persuade them that before long a new Poland will automatically fall into their laps, and their interest in the European revolution will be at an end.

We, in particular, have absolutely no reason to impede the Poles in their necessary efforts to attain independence. In the first place they invented and put into practice in 1863 the methods of struggle which the Russians are now so successfully imitating (cf. Berlin und [St] Petersburg, Appendix 2) 12 and, in the second, they were the only reliable and capable military leaders in the Paris Commune.

13. 

Come to that, who are the people who oppose the Poles' national aspirations? First, the European bourgeoisie in whose eyes the Poles have been utterly discredited since the 1846 insurrection with its socialist tendencies 14 and, secondly, the Russian pan-Slavs and those they have influenced, such as Proudhon, who saw this through Herzen's spectacles. But up till today few Russians, even the best of them, are free of pan-Slav tendencies and recollections; they take Russia's pan-Slav vocation for granted, just as the French do France's natural revolutionary initiative. In reality, however, pan-Slavism is an imposture, a bid for world hegemony under the cloak of a non-existent Slav nationality, and it is our and the Russians' worst enemy. That imposture will in due course disintegrate into the void, but in the meantime it could make things very awkward for us. A pan-Slav war, as the last sheet-anchor for Russian Tsardom and Russian reaction, is presently in preparation; whether it will actually materialise is a moot

p.194. 112. Engels to Kautsky. 7 February 1882

point, but if it does there is one thing of which we may be certain, namely that the splendid progress in the direction of revolution now being made in Germany, Austria and Russia itself will be totally disrupted and forced into different and quite unpredictable channels. At best, this would set us back by 3-10 years; in all likelihood it would mean one last respite for a constitutional 'new era' 15 in Germany and also, perhaps, Russia; a Little Poland under German hegemony, a war of retribution with France, renewed racial incitement and, finally, another Holy Alliance. Hence pan-Slavism is now more than ever our mortal enemy, despite - or perhaps just because of - its having one foot in the grave. For the Katkovs, Aksakovs, Ignatievs and Co. know that their empire will be gone for ever the moment Tsardom is overthrown and the stage taken by the Russian people. And hence this ardent desire for war at a moment when the treasury contains less than nothing and not a banker is willing to advance the Russian government so much as a penny.

That is precisely why the pan-Slavs have a mortal hatred of the Poles. Being the only anti-pan-Slav Slavs, they are consequently traitors to the sacred cause of Slavdom and must be forcibly incorporated into the Great Slav Tsardom of which the future capital is Tsarigrad, i.e. Constantinople.

Now you may perhaps ask me whether I have no feeling of sympathy for the small Slav peoples and fragments thereof which have been split apart by those three wedges –the German, the Magyar and the Turkish –driven into the Slav domain? To tell the truth, damned little. The Czecho-Slovak cry of distress: 

"Boze! ... Ach nikdo neni na zemi 

Kdoby Slavum (sic) spravedlivost cinil? " (a)[Original Foot-note: (a) '0 God ... there's no one on earth who would see that justice be done to the Slavs'. From Jan Kollar's Slawy dcera, Part 111, 'Dunag', p.287].

has been answered by Petersburg, and the entire Czech national movement cherishes the aspiration that the Tsar should spravedlivost ciniti (b) [Original Foot-note: .-b see that justice was done] them. The same applies to the others -Serbs, Bulgarians, Slovenes, Galician Ruthenians (at least some of them). But these are aims of a kind we cannot support. Only when the collapse of Tsardom frees the national aspirations of these diminutive peoples from their entanglement in pan-Slav hegemonic tendencies, only then can we let them do as they please and, in the case of most of the Austro-Hungarian Slavs, I am sure that six months of independence will suffice to bring them begging for re-admittance. But in no circumstances will these little nationalities be granted the right they are presently arrogating to themselves in Serbia, Bulgaria and East Rumelia - of preventing, that is, the extension of the European railway network to Constantinople. p.195. 112. Engels to Kautsky. 7 February 1882

Now as for the differences that have arisen between the Poles in Switzerland, these are emigre squabbles 16 such as are seldom of any consequence, least of all in the case of an emigration which will be celebrating its centenary in 3 years' time and which, owing to the urge felt by all emigres to do, or at any rate plan, something, has given birth to plan after plan, one new so-called theory after another. But, as you will see from the foregoing, we are not of the same opinion as the Rownosc people and, indeed, we told them as much in a message sent on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of 29 November 1830, which was read out at the meeting in Geneva. (See Vol. 24, pp. 343-45). (You will find a Polish version of it in the report (Sprawozdanie, etc.- Biblijoteka Rownosci: No. 1, Geneva, 188 1), pp. 30 ff. The Rownosc people have apparently allowed themselves to be impressed by the radical-sounding slogans of the Genevan Russians and are now anxious to prove that they are not open to the reproach of national chauvinism. This aberration, of which the causes are purely local and transitory, will blow over without having any appreciable effect on Poland as such, and refuting it in detail would be more trouble than it was worth. 

How the Poles, by the way, will sort things out with the White and Little Russians and Lithuanians of the old Poland, or with the Germans as regards the frontier is, for the time being, no concern of ours. 

Proof, by the way, of how little the workers, even in allegedly 'oppressed' countries, are tainted by the pan-Slav yearnings of the academics and bourgeois is provided by the splendid accord between German and Czech workers in Bohemia.

But enough for now. Kindest regards from 

Yours, 

F. E.Marx and Engels; Collected Works; Volume 46; Moscow; 1992; pp. 191-195.

Original Notes From Volume 46: page 507

1) At the International Socialist Congress was held in Chur, serious differences surfaced between the polish socialist groups. Kautsky, who wrote to Engels about the mater on 8 November 1881, asked for his opinion concerning the stand Der Sozialdemokrat ought to take in this affair. Engels set forth his views in a letter to Kautsky of 7 February 1882.

2) The Holy Alliance-an association of European monarchs founded in September 1815 on the initiative of the Russian Tsar Alexander I and the Austrian Chancellor Metternich to suppress the revolutionary movement.

3) The national liberation movement for the unification of Italy ended in 1861 with the establishment of a single Italian state (only Rome, which was incorporated into the Italian state after the abolition of the Pope's secular authority in 1870, remained outside it at the time). The event paved the way for the expansion of the independent workers' movement.

4) Little Germany-a plan for the unification of Germany under the Prussian aegis minus Austria. Engels is referring here to the Austro-Prussian War of 1866, which gave birth to the North German Confederation (Norddeutscher Bund), a federative state formed in 1867 to replace the disintegrated German Confederation. The establishment of the North German Confederation was a major step towards the national unification of Germany. The Confederation ceased to exist in January 187 1, when the German Empire was founded.

5) By the Lassallean party Engels implies the General Association of German Workers, the first national German workers' organisation founded on 23 May 1863 at the congress of workers' associations in Leipzig. The main organisational documents and the programme were drawn up by Ferdinand Lassalle, who became the organisation's first president. The errors in Lassalle's propaganda strategy and in his tactics, as well as the anti-democratic structure of the Association gave rise to a strong opposition, the bulk of which joined the Eisenachers. The Eisenach Party -the Social-Democratic Workers' Party of Germany set up at the General Congress of German, Swiss and Austrian Social-Democrats held in Eisenach on 7-9 August 1869. The party programme declared support for the principles of the First International, although Lassallean ideas still wielded a considerable influence in it. At the Congress in Gotha in 1875, the Eisenachers and the Lassalleans formed a single party of the working class, which called itself the Socialist Workers' Party of Germany up to 1890.

6) The Federal Diet (Bundestag) -the central organ of the German Confederation set up by the Vienna Congress in 1815. It comprised representatives of the German states and sat in Frankfurt-am-Main under the chairmanship of the Austrian representative. The Federal Diet ceased to exist together with the German Confederation at the time of the Austro-Prussian War of 1866.

7) A reference to the constitution of 1860 (the so-called October diploma- Oktoberdiplom). It gave Hungary, which formed part of the Austrian monarchy, certain rights (the convocation of a Hungarian parliament, the use of the Hungarian language in administration, etc.) The crisis of the Austrian Empire and mounting popular discontent led to its transformation in 1867 into the dual Austro-Hungarian monarchy. Hungary was recognised as a sovereign part of the state. Political consolidation promoted the development of capitalism there. In 1868, the first workers' organisations emerged in the country, the Budapest Workers' Union and the General Workers' Union (subsequently the latter became the leading organisation of the socialist workers' movement).

8) The Federative Union (full name, Union federative du Centre, the Federative Union of the Centre), one of the six associations constituting the French Workers' Party, had been formed by April 1880. An association of the party's organisations in Paris, it consisted of 80 groups. The Union's leadership was in the hands of the party's Right opportunist wing, the Possibilists - Brousse, Malon and Joffrin (editors of the Proletaire). At the meetings of the Federative Union of the Cqntre on 17 and 24 January 1882, the Egalite editorial board and all party groups siding with the Guesdists were expelled from the Federative Union. Only 28 groups voted in favour, that is, slightly more than one-third of the groups making up the Federative Union (48 groups out of the 80 were present at the meetings mentioned above). After their expulsion from the Federative Union of the Centre, the Guesdists founded a revolutionary federation and called it the Federation of the Centre (Federation du Centre). 

9) Anti-Socialist Law

10) A reference to the events of 1873-75, when the Bismarck government tried to provoke a war with France. The Russian government resolutely sided with France. Thanks to the pressure being put on the German government by Russia, Austria and Britain, Bismarck's attempt failed.

11) In January 1882, Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been occupied by Austria in 1878 under the terms of the Berlin Congress, witnessed an uprising provoked by the Austro-Hungarian government's law of 1881 on military conscription to be introduced in the occupied territories. The uprising reached its peak in the first half of February 1882. The Tsarist government tried to use it to promote its own ends.

12) This refers to the national liberation insurrection of 1863-64 in the Polish territories belonging to Tsarist Russia. The insurrection was suppressed by the Russian government. The anonymous book, Berlin und St. Petersburg. Preussische Beitrage zur Geschichte der Russisch-deutschen Beziehungen, Leipzig, 1880, was the work of the German political writer Julius Eckardt. Appendix 2, to which Engels refers here, deals with the Polish insurrection of 1863-64.

13) This refers above all, to Walery Wroblewski and Jaroslaw Dombrowski. Wroblewski, appointed general, commanded one of the Commune's three armies. General Dombrowski, who first headed the defence operations at one of the key sectors of the front, later commanded the Ist Army of the Commune and in early May 1871 was appointed commander-in-chief of its armed forces.

14) The reference is to the programme advanced in the days of the Cracow uprising (February 1846) by Dembowski, who voiced the interests of the peasantry and the urban poor (to give land to those who had none, radically to improve the workers' condition by setting up national, or 'social', workshops). The National Government formed in Cracow on 22 February issued a manifesto announcing the abolition of feudal duties and taxes. The Cracow uprising was suppressed early in March 1846. In November, Austria, Prussia and Russia signed a treaty on the annexation of the city to the Austrian empire.

15) Engels is referring to the 'liberal course' proclaimed by William, Prince (King from 1861) of Prussia, in October 1858, when he assumed the regency. In actual fact, not one of the reforms expected by the bourgeoisie was carried out. William's policy aimed at consolidating the Prussian monarchy and Junkerdom. 

16) As for footnote number (1).

Item Two From Collected Works Marx and Engels; Volume 46; Moscow 1992; pp 320-323LETTER ENGELS TO KARL KAUTSKY In Vienna 

London, 12 September 1882 

p. 320. 179. Engels to Kautsky. 12 September 1882;

Dear Mr Kautsky,

You really must forgive me for having kept you waiting so long for an answer. I have had so many interruptions of every kind that finally, in order to get any work done at all, I had to give short shrift to everything of lesser importance and put aside all such correspondence as was not absolutely necessary. And since, with your colonial question 1 you had set me a task that was by no means easy to tackle, your letters met with the same fate, and in the process the good Walter got overlooked.

Should Walter and Dr Braun come over here, I shall be glad to see them and whatever can be done for them I will gladly do. As for the rest, it will no doubt turn out all right. But what is Walter actually expected to study over here? That's what needs clearing up first of all. Socialism as such? No need for him to come over here for that, since it's to be had everywhere save in Austria and Germany; moreover, he will quickly exhaust that field, i. e. such literature as is worth reading. Economics? History? Of these he will find an embarras de richesses a at the British Museum -so much so, indeed, that a newcomer runs the risk of instantly losing his bearings. Natural science? That would mean lectures which are wildly expensive here. It seems to me that, before the chap is sent over here, a definite curriculum should be laid down for his studies-at least in outline-and if this were sent to me, it would be easier to judge whether it could best be carried out in this country or somewhere else. Without at least some knowledge of English, he would be completely at a loss here. It would, I think, be a good idea to get him to study French and English for 6 months beforehand, so that he could at least read a modicum of both before he went abroad. He should, besides, have some previous knowledge of history, geography and, if possible, also mathematics and natural science if he wants to study profitably. What the situation is in this respect I cannot know; but if it's at all unsatisfactory, it would certainly be better if you first got him to come to Vienna, so that he might acquire these things under the guidance of his friends and generally learn exactly how one sets about learning something thoroughly off one's own bat. Otherwise, here in London, it would, for the most part, be money down the drain. These are simply thoughts that have passed through my mind when pondering on the case and which may be completely irrelevant, but after all I know little or nothing about the young man's level of education, and that is why I considered it necessary to raise these points. If you let me know more about this, you will not be kept waiting for an answer. All things being equal I am, as you know, always in favour of getting ambitious young people to come abroad so that they may extend their horizons and rid themselves of the parochial prejudices which they must needs acquire at home. 179. Engels to Kautsky. 12 September 1882

You should not, by the way, count too much on Marx so far as Walter is concerned. He is unlikely to come home before next May, and even then he will probably have to take great care of himself if he is to get his work completed. In particular he is now strictly forbidden to talk overmuch, on top of which he has to spend his evenings quietly if he is not to have bad nights. In the daytime, however, he will, of course, be working. If one is trying to get rid of chronic bronchitis of many years' standing and ensure, after three serious bouts of pleurisy, not only that it disappears without trace, but also that it doesn't recur, and to do all this in one's sixty-fifth year, one has enough to contend with on that account alone.

You ask me what the English workers think of colonial policy. Well, exactly what they think of any policy -the same as what the middle classes think. There is, after all, no labour party here, only conservatives and liberal radicals, and the workers cheerfully go snacks in England's monopoly of the world market and colonies. As I see it, the actual colonies, i.e. the countries occupied by European settlers, such as Canada, the Cape, Australia, will all become independent; on the other hand, countries that are merely ruled and are inhabited by natives, such as India, Algeria and the Dutch, Portuguese and Spanish possessions, will have to be temporarily taken over by the proletariat and guided as rapidly as possible towards independence. How this process will develop is difficult to say. India may, indeed very probably will, start a revolution and, since a proletariat that is effecting its own emancipation cannot wage a colonial war, it would have to be given its head, which would obviously entail a great deal of destruction, but after all that sort of thing is inseparable from any revolution. The same thing could also happen elsewhere, say in Algeria or Egypt, and would certainly suit us best. We shall have enough on our hands at home. Once Europe has been reorganised, and North America, the resulting power will be so colossal and the example set will be such that the semi-civilised countries will follow suit quite of their own accord; their economic needs alone will see to that. What social and political phases those countries will then have to traverse before they likewise acquire a socialist organisation is something about which I do not believe we can profitably speculate at present. Only one thing is certain, namely that a victorious proletariat cannot forcibly confer

Engels to Bernstein. 13 September 1882 any boon whatever on another country without undermining its own victory in the process. Which does not, of course, in any way preclude defensive wars of various kinds. 

This business in Egypt 2 has been contrived by Russian diplomacy. Gladstone is to take Egypt (which he is far from having or from holding, even if he had it), so that Russia may take Armenia; which would, according to Gladstone, be the liberation of another Christian country from the Mohammedan yoke. Everything else to do with the affair is pretence, humbug, prevarication. Whether the little scheme will succeed will soon become apparent.

With kindest regards. 

Yours, 

F. E. 

Dr Sax has just sent me his book on Thuringia. [Original Note: E.Sax Die Hausindustrie in Thuringen] Would you thank him for it on my behalf and tell him I shall reply as soon as I have read it. My forwarding address is: Mrs. P. W. Rosher, 122 Regent's Park Road; no inner envelope. It's Pumps who, incidentally, has already got a baby girl [Lilian Rosher]. She doesn't actually live with me any more, but that doesn't matter.

From Marx and Engels Collected Works: Volume 46; Moscow 1992; pp. 320-323

Original Footnotes from Moscow Edition.

Notes from page. 519

1) In a letter of 11 May 1882, Kautsky asked Engels to give his opinion of the colonies in Asia after the victory of the European proletariat. As for Kautsky himself, he asserted that the British proletariat and India would both benefit if India remained under Britain.Notes page 517

2) In 1879-82 Egypt witnessed an upsurge of the national liberation movement against British and French capital179. Engels to Kautsky. 12 September 1882; page 320

which had established direct financial control over the country (in 1878, representatives of Britain and France were made ministers of the Egyptian government and given the right of veto). The insurrection of the Cairo garrison forced the Khedive of Egypt to issue a constitution in September 188 1. In December, Egypt acquired a parliament led by the National Party which had been founded that same year and represented a bloc of liberal landowners and merchants with the patriotically minded officers and intellectuals supported by the peasantry and petty bourgeoisie. The National Party set the country's independence as its target ('Egypt for Egyptians'). However, in the summer of 1882, having provoked a conflict with Egypt, Britain opened hostilities, which, despite the resistance of the Egyptian troops headed by Colonel Arabi, ended in a British victory. In September, they captured Cairo, and Egypt became their colony to all intents and purposes.

The public meetings of protest against the British aggression and the bombardment of Alexandria mentioned by Marx were organised in Paris by the Federation of the Centre (see Note 230) in late July 1882 with the participation of the Citoyen editors Henri Brissac, Jules Guesde and Paul Lafargue. The Guesdists' resolution on Egypt hailed Arabi Pasha and the National Party as worthy of the great mission they had assumed.

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Reply to Kushtysev - socialism

J. V. Stalin

Reply to Kushtysev

December 28, 1928

Works, Vol. 11, January, 1928 to March, 1929

Comrade Kushtysev,

I have received your letter of December 11, 1928.

Your question might at first sight appear to be correct. Actually, it will not stand the slightest criticism. It should be easy to understand that when Lenin says that "Soviet power plus electrification is communism," he does not mean by this that there will be any kind of political power under communism, nor does he mean that if we have seriously set about electrifying the country we have thereby already achieved communism.

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Socialism: Utopian and Scientific

Introduction:

General Introduction and the History of Materialism

History of the English middle-class

Introduction to the French Edition, Karl Marx 1880

Contents:

Part I: Utopian Socialism

Part II: Dialectics

Part III: Historical Materialism

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