Preface to Marx-Engels Collected Works Volume (47)

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Volume 47 of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels contains Engels’ letters dated from April 1883 to December 1886.

The letters at the beginning of this volume to the participants of democratic and labour movements in Russia, Germany, Holland, Britain, the United States and Italy on Marx’s death reflect the world-wide concern over this sad development.

After Marx’s death, the volume of Engels’ correspondence increased considerably. The stream of letters from all over the world was evidence of growth of the workers’ and democratic movement in Europe and the United States, of Engels’ influence on this process and his expanding ties with leaders of socialist parties.

New names appeared among his correspondents, such as those of Hermann Schlüter, John Lincoln Mahon, Pasquale Martignetti, and Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky. He wrote not only to friends, comrades and followers, but also to strangers who turned to him for advice or with requests (see this volume, pp. 8, 27, 66, 282-83). For Engels maintaining and expanding his international contacts was a most demanding duty. He wrote to August Bebel on 30 April 1883: ‘For after all, we wish to maintain intact, in so far as it is in my power, the many threads from all over the world which spontaneously converged upon Marx’s study’ (p. 17).

Marx named Engels and Eleanor Marx his ‘literary executors’. Engels concentrated on completing the publication of Marx’s unfinished works, first of all volumes II and III of Capital, which he had left in handwritten variants, and of new editions of Volume I of Capital (p. 39).

Engels also intended to undertake, but unfortunately did not write, a full biography of Marx on the basis of the existing extensive correspondence and other material from Marx’s archive, which would incorporate the history of the German socialist movement from 1843 to 1863 and of the International from 1864 to 1872 (pp. 17, 26). In his letters, Engels referred repeatedly to the history of the International Working Men’s Association, stressing the role Marx had played in it. ‘Mohr’s life without the International,’ he wrote (in English) to Laura Lafargue on 24 June 1883, ‘would be a diamond ring with the diamond broken out’ (p. 40).

Engels completed the preparation for the printer, begun by Marx, of the third German edition of Volume I of Capital before the end of 1883. This involved much painstaking labour (as his letter to Friedrich Adolph Sorge of 29 June 1883, among others, shows). He also went out of his way to assure the appearance of Capital in other languages (p. 87), choosing translators with great care, and often helping to edit their translations. With Samuel Moore, Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx, he organised and edited the first English translation of Volume I of Capital (pp. 436-37) which took him ‘the better part of a year’ (p. 492).

Many of Engels’ letters refer to his preparation for the printer of the second and third volumes of Marx’s Capital. They are imbued with respect for his deceased friend and with the wish to make the works of Marx available to the working class and progressive intellectuals. ‘...Some labour when you’re dealing with a man like Marx, who weighed every word,’ Engels wrote to Johann Philipp Becker on 22 May 1883. ‘But to me it is a labour of love; after all I shall be back again with my old comrade’ (p. 26).

Other letters on this score give a fairly good idea of how Engels laboured over Capital’s economic manuscripts — how he virtually deciphered Marx’s handwriting, how he determined the chronological framework, collated notes, compared separate variants, checked quotations, and finally transcribed the entire volume in order to edit the clean copy (pp. 29, 33, 42-43, 53, 88-89). He could not let anyone else do this because, as he put it, ‘there is not another living soul who can decipher that writing and those abbreviations of words and style’ (p. 93).

Preparation of Volume III dragged out and the volume did not appear in print until 1894. In his letters to Karl Kautsky of 21-22 June 1884 and Johann Philipp Becker of 2 April 1885, and elsewhere, Engels emphasised the scientific significance of the second and third volumes of Capital (pp. 154, 267).

Engels followed carefully the dissemination of Marx’s ideas. Of particular interest are his letters about the popular summary of Capital produced by the French socialist Gabriel Deville. Engels was concerned that the explication of Marxism’s basic economic principles should be comprehensible to working people and not overly abstruse (p. 61), and in his letters to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky he recommended publishing the popularisations by Deville and Paul Lafargue. This would, he argued, introduce Capital and its ideas into the United States (pp. 464-65). Engels also welcomed Kautsky’s book, Karl Marx’s Oekonomische Lehren, which was well received by the public (p. 482).

In the 1880s, economic literature, notably by the so-called ‘armchair socialists’ (Kathedersozialisten), charged that Marx had borrowed his theory of surplus value from Rodbertus (pp. 138-39). This charge of plagiarism had to be refuted once and for all owing to the influence the armchair socialists were gaining among some Social Democrats. Engels produced a critical analysis of the main works of Rodbertus, whom he vividly described as ‘apostle of the careerists of Bismarckian socialism’ (p. 139) in letters to Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky (pp. 72, 125-26, 193-94), whose content accords with ideas Engels originally expressed in his prefaces to the first German edition of Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy (‘Marx and Rodbertus’) and the first edition of Volume II of Capital (see present edition, Vols. 26 and 36).

The correspondence refers extensively to Engels’ work on the translation and republication of a number of other important works by Marx and himself. The letters show that, in choosing these works, Engels was above all guided by the needs of the workers’ movement, with an eye to the continuous entry into it of new people unversed in theory.

In some countries, the workers’ movement of the 1880s was quite strongly influenced by the anarchists. The focal point of their polemics with Social Democrats was the question of the State. On 18 April 1883, answering the American Philipp Van Patten’s question on Marx’s attitude to anarchists, Engels elaborated on the historical future of the State. He described anarchist formulae — that the proletarian revolution should begin by abolishing the State — as ‘anarchist absurdities’, because this would be tantamount to destroying ‘the only organism by means of which the victorious working class can exert its newly conquered power’ (p. 10). Engels dwelt on the matter also in a letter to Bernstein, this time in connection with the latter’s attack in the press on some American socialists who had also failed to understand Marx’s doctrine of the State. Engels referred Bernstein to Marx’s The Civil War in France and cited extracts from The Poverty of Philosophy and the Manifesto of the Communist Party (pp. 73-74, 86). To bring the Marxist doctrine of the State to those who had newly joined the socialist movement, Engels republished these and other works (Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte and Engels’ AntiDiihring and The Housing Question).

Engels examined the nature and class essence of the State in his The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State (see present edition, Vol. 26). He noted that he wrote the book to fulfil Marx’s wishes. Marx had read Ancient Society by the liberal American scholar, Lewis H. Morgan, and had himself planned to write on the subject (pp.103, 115-16).

The correspondence of the 1880s lifts the veil on Engels’ further elaboration of the theory of socialist revolution. He was above all preoccupied by the question of tactics and, in particular, by what he saw as the incorrect evaluation by the German Social Democrats of the character of the expected revolution. Engels examined capitalist world development in the 1880s, and concluded that the socialist revolution in countries with semi-absolutist political survivals and feudal relations in agriculture (for instance, Germany) would necessarily be preceded by a bourgeois-democratic stage. ‘...In our case ...,’ he wrote to Bernstein in 1883, ‘the first, immediate result of the revolution can and must, so far as form is concerned, be nothing other than a bourgeois republic’(p. 51). Then and only then would the struggle between the working class and the bourgeoisie follow classical lines, i. e. pave the way to ‘direct, undisguised class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie’ (ibid.). At the same time, Engels warned against imagining ‘the revolution as something that can be achieved overnight. In fact it is a process of development on the part of the masses which takes several years even under conditions that tend to accelerate it’ (p. 51).

All his life Engels examined the dynamics of capitalist economics. Like Marx, he noticed the modification of the economic cycle and the appearance of intermediate five-year crises. He associated this with the uneven development of the leading states and the gradual decline of Great Britain in the world market (pp. 23, 82). To be sure, not all of Engels’ predictions came true. Among others, this applies to the idea of an economic ‘crisis without end’ (p. 402) which he predicted in a letter to Nikolai Danielson of 8 February 1886 and Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky of 3 February 1886 (pp. 396-97). In the 1890s, Engels would elaborate on his views, noting capitalism’s considerable stability and expanding sphere of influence (see present edition, Vol.

37).

In many of his letters, Engels touched on various international problems of the mid-1880s which arose owing to the rivalry of the European powers in the Balkans, Germany’s aggressive policies, and the views of certain circles in France who wanted back the lands Prussia had seized in 1871 (pp. 353, 483-84, 485-86, 510-11, 513-14). Examining the diplomatic games in Europe, the balance of power and the probable consequences of a military conflict, Engels helped European socialists to work out their tactics in questions of war and peace. In his letters to August Bebel, Johann Philipp Becker and Friedrich Adolph Sorge he stressed that workers of all countries should fight against the militarist system and the war danger. Though Engels admitted that war might create favourable conditions for the victory of the working class, he did not relate revolution and its victory directly to war. On the contrary, he was convinced war would take an incredibly high toll and ‘retard our movement’ (pp. 353-54, 487).

Special mention should be made of letters to members of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany which, as Engels put it, was at that time the leading European workers’ party (p. 36).

The German labour movement in 1883-86 was exposed to the rigours of Bismarck’s Anti-Socialist Law. By combining legal and illegal methods, the party managed to win influence among the mass of the people by the mid-1880s. Engels described its success in Reichstag elections as a trial of strength (p. 198).

He believed that socialist parties should participate in election campaigns and parliamentary activity, but did not regard them as the only or main form of struggle. Looking into the experience of the German Social Democrats, he called their attention to the conditions on which they might come forward with their own bills without prejudicing their principles. In a letter to Bernstein of 11 November 1884, he said such bills could be formulated ‘without regard for pettybourgeois prejudices’ and could avoid being Utopian (p. 217). He elaborated on this in a letter to Bebel of 20-23 January 1886 (pp. 388-89).

Engels helped the left wing of the German Social Democratic movement in its fight against reformist elements who had a majority in the Social Democratic parliamentary group. He traced the spread of reformism to the influence of the petty bourgeoisie. ‘In a philistine country like Germany,’ he observed in a letter to Johann Philipp Becker of 15 June 1885 ‘the party must also have a philistine “educated” right wing’ (p. 300). That most of the parliamentary group were men of petty-bourgeois background was traceable to the absence of deputies’ salaries, which barred the doors to the Reichstag for many promising worker deputies.

Reacting to differences within the Social Democratic parliamentary group over the bill on State subsidies to shipping companies, Engels set forth his views on party unity in letters to Bebel and others (pp. 239, 269-71, 284 et al). Letting matters reach an open break with the right wing, he felt, was undesirable in the context of the Anti-Socialist Law, and would only weaken the party: in the absence of a forum for public discussion, the rank-and-file would hardly be able to understand the reasons for, and substance of, the split. Engels wrote to Bernstein on 5 June 1884: ‘We ... must steer clear of anything that might lead to a breach, or rather might lay the blame for that breach at our door. That is the universal rule when there is a struggle within one’s own party, and now it applies more than ever’ (p. 145).

We see from his correspondence that Engels was a faithful reader of Der Sozialdemokrat, the central organ of the Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, and, indeed, was always ready to help its staffheaded by Bernstein. His letters were often made the core of editorials, and thus came to be known to the German workers (pp. 139-42, 329-31).

Engels’ letters to August Bebel, leader of the party’s left wing, touched on an especially broad spectrum of problems. Engels wrote of Bebel: ‘There is no more lucid mind in the whole of the German party, besides which he is utterly dependable and firm of purpose’ (pp. 201-02).

Engels’ letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht of 2 January 1886, first found in 1983, is being published in English translation here for the first time, filling a gap in their correspondence which has reached us incomplete.

During that period, Engels devoted much of his attention to the independent movement of the English working class, especially in connection with ‘the sudden emergence’ of socialism in Britain (p. 82). He saw the ‘secret’ of its revival (some decades after Owenism andm Chartism had faded away) in the erosion of Britain’s monopoly in the world market by American and German competition, and the impact of the economic depression which had dragged on and on since 1873 (ibid.). More than ten years of slump had increased unemployment, ruined tenant farmers, and speeded up rural migration to the cities, adding to the number of homeless and jobless. The radical-minded intellectuals and politically active workers, disappointed in the Liberals, turned to socialism for relief from economic strains and social contradictions. The word ‘socialism’ was on everybody’s lips. In a letter to Laura Lafargue, who was in Paris, Engels referred to ‘the new Socialist “rage” in London’ (pp. 94-95).

Engels, as his letters show, was critical of the Democratic Federation formed and headed by Henry Mayers Hyndman in 1881 and renamed the Social Democratic Federation in 1884. His guarded attitude was due to its heterogeneous membership, the young people who had ‘emerged from amongst the bourgeoisie’. These elements, he wrote, varied considerably ‘morally and intellectually’, and had no root in the working class (pp. 54, 82). ‘The elements presently active,’ he wrote to Bebel on 30 August 1883, ‘might become important, now that they have accepted our theoretical programme and thus acquired a basis, but only if a spontaneous movement broke out amongst the workers here and they succeeded in gaining control of it’ (p. 54).

After reading the Federation’s manifesto, Engels commented that ‘these people have now at last been compelled publicly to proclaim our theory as their own, a theory which, at the time of the International, seemed to them to have been imposed upon them from outside’ (ibid.). But the incorporation in the programme of a Marxist provision—the socialisation of the means of production — did not mean a mass working-class political party had emerged. Engels, however, had urged English workers to set up such a party as early as 1881, in his contribution to The Labour Standard (see present edition, Vol. 24, pp. 404-06). The trade union movement was far removed from socialist ideas. Yet the Social Democratic Federation’s leadership, notably Hyndman, renounced contacts with the organised workers. Engels wrote to Laura Lafargue in February 1884: ‘...The new “respectable” Socialist stir here does go on very nicely, the thing is becoming fashionable, but the working classes do not respond yet. Upon that everything depends’ (p. 105).

Engels criticised Hyndman for his lack of scruples, his disregard of political principles, and chauvinism in regard to other nations. He called him to account, too, for his excessive ambition, and his tendency towards political intrigue (pp. 118, 123, 155, 165, 236-37, 247, 366-67). The fact that Marx had broken off relations with Hyndman in 1881 had, of course, contributed to Engels’ guarded attitude (see present edition, Vol. 46, pp. 102-04).

Working jointly with Samuel Moore, Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx on the English translation of Volume I of Capital, Engels was sceptical of Hyndman’s translation of some of its chapters (pp. 127, 313, 424) printed in To-Day. He criticised Hyndman’s translation in an article, ‘How Not to Translate Marx’ (present edition, Vol. 26). Nevertheless the appearance in the socialist press of large fragments of Capital before its publication under separate cover in 1887 after Engels’ editing had helped the spread of Marx’s economic theory among workers and intellectuals.

Engels’ letters betray his good knowledge of such socialist periodicals as Justice and To-Day from which he obtained an idea of the people who had attached themselves to the socialist movement in the early half of the 1880s (pp. 85-86, 114, 122, 424). He was also briefed on the activity of the Social Democratic Federation by Eleanor Marx, Edward Aveling, William Morris, Belfort Bax, and other of its leftleaning members. Towards the close of 1884, Hyndman’s sectarian tactics caused profound differences within the Federation, and led to the resignation of those on its left wing who formed a new organisation, the Socialist League. Engels set forth the history ofthat split in letters to Bernstein and Sorge (pp. 236-38, 245). In the years that followed, he informed his correspondents in Germany and in the United States of the activity of those two socialist organisations.

Although critical of the SDF leadership, Engels approved of its actions in defence of the unemployed (holding demonstrations, sending deputations to MPs, and so forth). However, he described its leaders’ attempt at attracting the mass of workers with ultra-left slogans of ‘social revolution’ as reckless ‘revolutionary ranting’ (pp. 407-08, 427). In the autumn of 1886 he admitted, however, that the ‘Social Democratic Federation is beginning to be something of a power, since the masses have absolutely no other organisation to which they can rally’ (p. 529). However, among the active socialists of the SDF, the Radical Clubs in the East End, and the Socialist League, he saw no one who could lead a mass movement of the unemployed (pp. 526, 534). Engels had close contacts with members of the Socialist League and supported their newspaper, The Commonweal, and was doubly upset by the symptoms in its ranks of’teething troubles’, sectarianism, and anarchist influence (pp. 438, 446, 471).

Despite some successful actions, the socialist movement in Britain of the early half of the 1880s was divided and had no public backing to speak of. ‘...The masses,’ Engels wrote to Sorge, ‘are still holding aloof, although here too beginnings of a movement are perceptible. But it will be some time before the masses are in full spate, which is a good thing because it means that there will be time for proper leaders to emerge’ (p. 492).

In a series of letters Engels referred to specific features in the history of France and its labour movement. Ever since 1789, he pointed out, the political struggles in France had followed classical lines, with the governments that succeeded each other ‘moving ever further to the Left’ (pp. 149, 342). In 1885 Engels welcomed the collapse of Jules Ferry’s cabinet which had ruled on behalf of the big bourgeoisie and stock exchange speculators with a big stake in colonial conquest, and had predicted the imminent victory in elections of the Radicals. This, he hoped, would provide favourable conditions for class struggle (pp. 270, 364). What might hamper the growth of the French labour movement, he maintained, was its low theoretical level and the surviving influence of various types of pre-Marxian socialism (pp. 183, 342). In his view, it had not yet fully recovered from the defeat of the Paris Commune (p. 211).

The correspondence is an important source of information about the processes that were underway in the French socialist movement of the early half of the 1880s. In 1882 the movement broke up into separate organisations of reformists (Possibilists) and collectivists, the latter comprising the Workers’ Party, by and large an adherent of scientific socialism. Engels’ letters clarify his outlook and that of the leaders of the Workers’ Party on two crucial issues that had a bearing on the party’s future: the relationship with the Possibilists, and use of the bourgeois parliament in the workers’ interests.

At a complicated time, with the Workers’ Party locked in struggle with the Possibilists, Engels urged its leaders to study theory. Some of his letters to Lafargue were printed as articles in the French socialist press (pp. 235-36, 255-56). He commended Lafargue and Deville for lecturing on Marx’s teaching in France and for coming to grips with the opponents of Marxism in the press (pp. 107, 134-35, 171, 179-83). Engels welcomed the independent labour faction in the Chamber of Deputies. For the first time, the voice of labour resounded publicly in defence of the striking miners of Decazeville. The workers’ deputies edged away from the Radicals, which Engels considered as ‘a great event’ (pp. 409, 414, 418, 441-42). Although the faction was small, the Workers’ Party had now acquired a public political, tribune.

Time and again, in letters to Bebel, Liebknecht, and Paul and Laura Lafargue, Engels offered his view of bourgeois radicalism in France whose influence had risen in the autumn of 1885. Some of his statements were over-emphatic. This applied first of all to his ideas about the historical possibilities of the Radicals, and also to overoptimistic predictions of the imminent emergence of the French socialists onto the political foreground (pp. 300, 314, 343, 470).

A conspicuous place in the volume is taken up by Engels’ correspondence with his old friend, the American socialist Friedrich Adolph Sorge, and with Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky, who translated some of Engels’ works. His letters show how profoundly he understood the specificity of the United States, a country that had had no feudal past and was the ‘ideal of all bourgeois: a country rich, vast, expanding, with purely bourgeois institutions unleavened by feudal remnants or monarchical traditions, and without a permanent and hereditary proletariat’ (p. 452). Still, the emergence of largescale industry there resulted in the appearance of an indigenous working class.

A powerful workers’ action for an eight-hour working day was mounted in 1886, with 11,500 enterprises being engulfed in strikes. This and the success of the French socialists Engels described as ‘the two events of world historic importance’ of the year (p. 470). The strikes demolished the image of a non-antagonistic America to which the European bourgeoisie had resorted in the election campaign. ‘What has completely stunned these people is the fact that the movement is so strongly accentuated as a labour movement, and that it has sprung up so suddenly and with such force’ (p. 533).

The socialist movement in 19th-century America was strongly influenced by German immigrants. Nor was this influence all positive. The Lassalleans, advocates of essentially political struggle, had all too often caused a weakening of local unions which confined themselves to economic demands only. The Socialist Labor Party founded in 1876 consisted almost exclusively of German immigrants. It had its newspapers, New-Yorker Volkszeitung and Der Sozialist, both of which appeared in German. At times, the German socialist move-ment in the United States was perceived by its members as a branch of the German socialist movement in Europe. Engels referred scathingly to the bookwormish dogmatism of the German socialists in the USA (p. 531). In a letter to Florence Kelley-Wischnewetzky in December 1886, he deplored their sectarianism and non-participation in the 1886 movement of the American workers (pp. 541-42). He was troubled by the lack of cohesion and unity in the US labour movement, and referred to the subject at length in his letters, emphasising its importance (pp. 470, 525).

The letters show that Engels saw the Noble Order of the Knights of Labor, an organisation of chiefly unskilled white and black workers, as the point of departure in the drive for a true working-class party in the USA. Not that he was blind to the mistakes of its leaders. He considered it a real force, stating in no uncertain terms that the Order should be revolutionised from within, that it was necessary ‘to work in their midst, to form ... a nucleus of men who know the movement and its aims’ (pp. 532, 541). Neither the Knights of Labor nor the United Labor Party, whose founding Engels welcomed in his letter to Laura Lafargue of 24 November 1886, however, proved viable.

When Kelley-Wischnewetzky asked for Engels’ permission to translate and publish his book, The Condition of the Working-Class in England, he gave his consent and promised to edit the translation. In lieu of a preface, he wrote an article, ‘The Labour Movement in

America’ (see present edition, Vol. 26), where he raised the problems he had discussed in his correspondence with Kelley-Wischnewetzky (pp. 82, 525, 530, 540-41), and made an incisive analysis of the popular US economist Henry George.

Engels’ correspondence reflects his keen interest in the socialeconomic and political history of Russia and the Russian revolutionary movement. His chief Russian correspondents in 1883-86 were Nikolai Danielson, Pyotr Lavrov, and Vera Zasulich. Their letters, along with the periodicals and other literature, were for him a continuous source of information about life in Russia.

Engels saw the specificity of Russia in that there every degree of ‘social development is represented, from the primitive commune to modern big industry and high finance, and ... all these contradictions are forcibly pent up by an unheard-of despotism’ (p. 281 ). He predicted an imminent financial crash and stressed the disaffection among all social groups over the internal situation. He observed that ‘the so-called emancipation of the peasants’ in 1861 had not entirely liberated the peasants, with left-overs of feudal relations surviving in the countryside. As in the 1870s, one of the central subjects in the correspondence between Engels and the Russian revolutionaries was that of the prospects for revolution in Russia. Engels clearly overestimated the revolutionary sentiment in Russia when he wrote that the Tsar’s government was ‘at bay’ and that the country would soon have its own 1789 (pp. 112, 338).

His optimism was partly stimulated by the activity of Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) revolutionary organisation (pp. 256, 338). His letter to Vera Zasulich of 23 April 1885 contains his conception of the character and motive forces of the impending revolution in Russia. He discusses possible revolutionary scenarios, from a palace coup to a people’s revolution, which he compares to the Jacobinic dictatorship of 1793 . When he gave both main dates of the French Revolution, 1789 and 1793, he evidently had in mind the succession of stages in the revolutionary cycle, from the bourgeois to the bourgeois-democratic revolution (pp. 112, 281).

Like Marx, he was certain that the Russian revolution would tear down tsarism, that ‘last stronghold of reaction’ (pp. 488-89), and thereby influence the political situation in the rest of Europe, ending tsarism’s policy of conquests (pp. 338, 515-16).

The letters show that Engels welcomed the growth of revolutionary forces in Russia and that he established close ties with the first Russian Marxists in the Emancipation of Labour group.

Nor did he ever deny support to Russian socialists who had translated into Russian such works as: K. Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (1886), Volume II of Capital (1885), and his Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (1884), and so forth. He commended their professional skill. In a letter to Sorge of 29 June 1883 he wrote, ‘Translating the Manifesto is awfully difficult; by far the best renderings I have seen are the Russian’ (p. 42).

The correspondence of 1883-1886 is a valuable source of information about Engels’ life and offers evidence of his boundless respect for Marx. To perpetuate the memory of his friend, often to the detriment of his then shaky health, he worked from eight to ten hours at his desk, editing Marx’s manuscripts (pp. 197, 202, 456, 492). Conscious of the pressure of his obligations, he wrote to Johann Philipp Becker on 15 October 1884: ‘...My misfortune is that since we lost Marx I have been supposed to represent him. I have spent a lifetime doing what I was fitted for, namely playing second fiddle, and indeed I be- lieve I acquitted myself reasonably well. And I was happy to have so splendid a first fiddle as Marx. But now that I am suddenly expected to take Marx’s place in matters of theory and play first fiddle, there will inevitably be blunders and no one is more aware of that than F (p. 202).

The letters produce a vivid and most attractive portrait of Engels, a revolutionary internationalist, theorist, sensitive and responsive friend, a man brimming with energy and optimism. They testify to his touching affection for Marx’s daughters, and his warm concern for such veterans of the labour movement as Friedrich Fessner, Johann Philipp Becker, George Julian Harney, and others.

* * *

Volume 47 contains 310 letters by Frederick Engels. Of these 180 are published in English for the first time; 130 letters have been published in English before, 65 of these in part only. All previous publications are indicated in the notes.

letter No. 310 of 25 March 1886, the use of which was kindly granted by University College Fibrary, Fondon, shortly before the deadline, was included in the volume at the last moment on p. 543, so that the chronological order had to be disregarded.

Eleanor Marx-Aveling’s letter to Horatio Bryan Donkin of 8 February 1886, the use of which was kindly granted by University College Fibrary, Fondon, is included in the Appendix and is being published in English for the first time.

Obvious errors in the text of the letters have been silently corrected. Abbreviated proper and place names, and individual words are given in full, except when the abbreviations were made for reasons of secrecy or cannot be deciphered. Defects in the originals are indicated in the footnotes, and passages with lost or illegible words are denoted by omission marks. Wherever their hypothetical reconstruction was possible, it is given in square brackets. Any text crossed out by the author is reproduced in footnotes only if it has a substantive bearing on the sense. The special nature of certain letters which were drafts or fragments reproduced in other documents is indicated either in the text itself or in the notes.

Foreign words and expressions in the text of the letters are retained in the form in which they were used by the authors, with a translation where necessary in the footnotes and italicised (if they were underlined by the authors they are italicised and spaced out). English words and expressions used by Engels in texts written in German and French are printed in small caps. Longer passages written in English in the original are placed in asterisks.

The numbers of notes relating to the same facts and events in the texts of different letters, are repeated.

The texts of letters and notes were prepared for publication by Irina Shikanyan (April 1883 to November 1885), Yelena Kofanova -(•November 1885 to January 1886), and Natalia Sayenko (January to December 1886). The Preface was written by Irina Shikanyan. Editors of the volume are Valeria Kunina and Velta Pospelova. The name index and the index of periodicals are by Andrei Pozdnyakov with the assistance of Yelena Kofanova, and the index of quoted and mentioned literature is by Yelena Kofanova (Russian Independent Institute of Social and National Problems).

The translations were done by Peter and Betty Ross, and Rodney Livingstone (Lawrence & Wishart), K. M. Cook and Stephen Smith (Progress Publishing Group Corporation) and edited by K. M. Cook, Stephen Smith, Maria Shcheglova, Anna Vladimirova (Progress Publishing Group Corporation) and Vladimir Mosolov, scientific editor (RIISNP).

The volume was prepared for the press by Svetlana Gerasimenko (Progress Publishing Group Corporation).