Letter to Laura Lafargue, October 2, 1886

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To Laura Lafargue in Paris

London, 2 October 1886

My dear Laura,

To begin with the beginning, I enclose cheque for .£42,13.4, being one-third part of Meissner’s remittance of £128.- which I hope you will receive and get cashed all right.

I am sorry you cannot come just now while the weather is fine, but if you feel such a decided home-sickness after London fogs and our beautiful winter, you can be suited too. Nim undertakes to accommodate you at any time, Christmas or otherwise, and if we have other visitors at the same time, she undertakes to accommodate them too. So that is settled, and we shall this time not be disappointed. I also forward 2 Volkszeitungen which please return, as they belong to Edward and he will expect to find them here on his return (his papers, etc., are forwarded to me in his absence). From these you see that la république cosaque—Mohr’s solution of Napoleon’s alternative: ou république ou cosaque — flourishes in New York as luxuriantly as in Paris. It is lucky for them that the first attempt at intimidation came so soon and was so clumsily executed.

I am afraid Paul exaggerates the significance of the Paris verdict in so far as it is a symptom of the accessibility of the industrial bourgeoisie for socialist ideas. The struggle between usurer and industrial capitalist is one within the bourgeoisie itself, and though no doubt a certain number of petty bourgeois will be driven over to us by the certainty of their impending expropriation de la part des boursiers, yet we can never hope to get the mass of them over to our side. Moreover, this is not desirable, as they bring their narrow class prejudices along with them. In Germany we have too many of them, and it is they who form the dead weight which trammels the march of the party. It will ever be the lot of the petty bourgeois – as a mass – to float undecidedly between the two great classes, one part to be crushed by the centralisation of capital, the other by the victory of the proletariat. On the decisive day, they will as usual be tottering, wavering and helpless, se laisseront faire, and that is all we want. Even if they come round to our views they will say: of course communism is the ultimate solution, but it is far off, maybe 100 years before it can be realised – in other words: we do not mean to work for its realisation neither in our, nor in our children’s lifetime. Such is our experience in Germany.

Otherwise the verdict is a grand victory and marks a decided step in advance. The bourgeoisie, from the moment it is faced by a conscious and organised proletariat, becomes entangled in hopeless contradictions between its liberal and democratic general tendencies here, and the repressive necessities of its defensive struggle against the proletariat there. A cowardly bourgeoisie, like the German and Russian, sacrifices its general class tendencies to the momentary advantages of brutal repression. But a bourgeoisie with a revolutionary history of its own, such as the English and particularly the French, cannot do that so easily. Hence that struggle, within the bourgeoisie itself, which in spite of occasional fits of violence and oppression, on the whole drives it forward – see the various electoral reforms of Gladstone in England, and the advance of radicalism in France. This verdict is a new étape. And so the bourgeoisie, in doing its own work, is doing ours.

But now I must conclude. I want this letter to be registered and have still to write to Tussy by first post.

Yours affectionately,

F. Engels