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Special pages :
To the International Congress of Socialist Students, 1893
| Author(s) | Frederick Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 19 December 1893 |
Printed according to the newspaper, checked with the rough manuscript
Translated from the French
Published in English in full for the first time in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Volume 27
The International Congress of Socialist Students was held in Geneva on December 22-25, 1893. Present at it were 26 delegates from Armenian, Belgian, Bulgarian, French, German, Italian, Polish, Romanian, Russian and Swiss student organisations. The congress resolutions were drawn up in the spirit of the decisions of the Brussels and Zurich congresses of the Second International. The congress recommended that more vigorous socialist propaganda be conducted among students and decided to set up an International Secretariat in Geneva for the purpose of establishing and strengthening contacts among the socialist students in different countries.
Apart from the newspaper L’Etudiant socialiste, Engels’ greeting was printed by the Bulgarian Social-Democratic magazine Aenh (Day), book s 4-5, 1894.
It was first published in English in an abridged form in: K. Marx, F. Engels, V. I. Lenin, On Scientific Communism, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1967, pp. 82-83.
London, December 19, 1893
Dear Citizens,
While thanking you for your kind invitation to the Congress of Socialist Students, I greatly regret that I am unable to accept, being detained by some urgent and important work. I must therefore limit myself to wishing your Congress all the success which it deserves. May your efforts succeed in developing among students the awareness that it is from their ranks that there must emerge intellectual proletariat which will be called on to play a considerable part in the approaching revolution alongside and among their brothers, the manual workers.
The bourgeois revolutions of the past asked nothing of the universities but lawyers, as the best raw material for their politicians; the emancipation of the working class needs, in addition, doctors, engineers, chemists, agronomists and other experts; for we are faced with taking over the running not only of the political machine but of all social production, and in that case what will be needed is not fine words but well-grounded knowledge.
Fraternal greetings,
F. Engels