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Special pages :
Letter to Henry Mayers Hyndman, December 8, 1880
Source: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence (Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1975).
Published in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 46
To Henry Mayers Hyndman in London
8 December 1880[edit source]
My dear Sir,
Mrs Marx, like most sickly people whose illness has assumed a chronic character, becomes sometimes suddenly unable to leave her bedroom and then fit again for social intercourse. Believing she could within a few days pay a visit to Mrs Hyndman, she did not write to her at once, but as we are this week inundated with visitors from the Continent, she begs me to write you that she will give herself the pleasure to call upon Mrs Hyndman next week.
I welcome the prospect of the journal you speak of. If you say that you do not share the views of my party for England I can only reply that that party considers an English revolution not necessary, but – according to historic precedents – possible. If the unavoidable evolution turn into a revolution, it would not only be the fault of the ruling classes, but also of the working class. Every pacific concession of the former has been wrung from them by ‘pressure from without’. Their action kept pace with that pressure and if the latter has more and more weakened, it is only because the English working class know not how to wield their power and use their liberties, both of which they possess legally.
In Germany the working class were fully aware from the beginning of their movement that you cannot get rid of a military despotism but by a Revolution. At the same time they understood that such a Revolution, even if at first successful, would finally turn against them without previous organisation, acquirement of knowledge, propaganda, and ... [word illegible]. Hence they moved within strictly legal bounds. The illegality was all on the side of the government, which declared them en dehors la loi. [1] Their crimes were not deeds, but opinions unpleasant to their rulers. Fortunately, the same government – the working class having been pushed to the background with the help of the bourgeoisie – becomes now more and more unbearable to the latter, whom it hits on their most tender point – the pocket. This state of things cannot last long.
Please to present my compliments to Mrs Hyndman.
Yours very truly,
Karl Marx