Engels–Lafargue Correspondence, Volume Three (1891–1895)

Of the three volumes of Engels's correspondence with Paul and Laura Lafargue, this is the one that ends in a death.

It opens in January 1891, with the Second International barely eighteen months old and the French socialists still splintered into warring chapels. It closes in the summer of 1895, weeks before the cancer of the throat that killed Engels on 5 August. In between it holds the richest strategic thinking of his last years - on the Erfurt Programme, on the electoral breakthrough of the French workers' party, and above all on the single document that has shadowed his reputation ever since.

That document is the 1895 introduction to Marx's The Class Struggles in France, the so-called political testament, which the German party leadership cut to make its author look like a prophet of peaceful, parliamentary, evolutionary progress. This volume is the place to read what Engels himself thought of the operation, because he wrote about it to the Lafargues while it was happening - which makes these letters a primary document in one of the longest-running arguments in the socialist tradition.

The translation is Yvonne Kapp's, from the third volume of the correspondence compiled and annotated by Emile Bottigelli for Editions Sociales, published in Moscow by the Foreign Languages Publishing House as it was being folded into Progress Publishers.

Two things are here at once and both are valuable: Engels in his last years, thinking aloud to the two people he trusted most at the exact moment when the strategy of the modern workers' movement was being decided; and, in the apparatus around him, the record of how a later movement chose to remember and enlist him.

Volume Three of three. New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov.