Most of the books in this series are Soviet productions, and the introductions to them are quarrels — with a falsified history, a doctored quotation, a silence where a name should be. This volume is different, and the difference should be stated at the outset. What the Foreign Languages Publishing House issued in Moscow in 1959, in Yvonne Kapp's translation, is not a Soviet argument at all. It is a primary source: the letters that passed between Frederick Engels and Paul and Laura Lafargue between 1868 and 1886, the first of three volumes, translated from the French edition compiled and annotated by Émile Bottigelli for Éditions Sociales in Paris. One cannot refute Engels's correspondence, and there is no reason to want to. What can be examined is the packaging Moscow put around it, and what the letters themselves show of the man who wrote most of them — a man this tradition claims as a founder, and can therefore afford to read without flattery.
Taken simply as documents, these letters are first-rank material, and the pleasure of them survives everything. They begin with a courtship. In March 1868, Paul Lafargue — a Creole medical student from Bordeaux, twenty-six, recently expelled from English medical registers for his part in the International — wrote to Engels in Manchester to ask him to be a witness at his wedding. The letter is a small comic masterpiece. It opens by hailing Engels, in French, as "the great beheader of champagne bottles, fathomless swallower of ale and other adulterated trash, secretary to the Spaniards," and wishing him the protection of "the god of good carousals." It then announces that "Mr. Lafargue, medical student, bachelor, is about to marry Miss J. Laura Marx, spinster" — a stringer, Paul adds, "of metaphysical pearls" — apologises for the bother, and explains that although Engels is "far from having all the moral qualities requisite to the fulfilling of this respectable bourgeois function in a respectable way," still, "there is no man whom I should like better than yourself to stand by me during so formidable a ceremony." The tone — mock-heroic, affectionate, faintly drunk on its own high spirits — is the tone of a young man writing to an older one he half-worships and wholly trusts. It sets the key for the twenty-seven years the correspondence would run. Engels was the couple's witness, their banker, their editor, their strategist, and finally, after Marx's death in 1883, the nearest thing they had to a father. Laura had grown up with him; Paul had married into him. The letters are unguarded precisely because the relationship was familial, and they let us watch the transmission of a politics across a generation, in the domestic register where such things are actually handed on.
The volume's years are the years of aftermath and refounding. It opens with the First International still alive and closes with organised French socialism just clearing the ground. The largest political drama of the early letters is the war inside the International against Bakunin and his followers — the fight that would break the Association apart at the Hague in 1872 and effectively end it. Lafargue is Engels's man on the Spanish front of that war, and his reports from the peninsula are among the sharpest things in the book. "Spain is where you can appraise Bakunin's influence," he writes in 1871; "it is he who has inoculated the people of this country not to concern themselves with politics, which does them the greatest harm." Engels answers as a field commander reading a map. "The victory gained in Spain," he writes that December, "greatly reduces the field of struggle." He tracks the defections and adherences country by country, works Italy through the press, times his blows. And when the moment comes to finish the anti-authoritarian wing he does not hesitate: "We must now make an end of this sect."
It is worth pausing on that word, because the modern reader, especially one reading in the shadow of the twentieth century, will hear in the Bakunin fight an early rehearsal of later and darker things — the centralist against the federalist, the General Council against the autonomous section, the charge of "conspiracy" against a dissenting current. The letters do not sustain the darker reading, and it would be anachronistic to press it. What they show is a genuine political argument fought with the weapons of the time: pamphlets, resolutions, congress votes, the capture of newspapers. And they show, alongside the ruthlessness, a striking tactical generosity. Of the Spanish comrades who mixed sound organisation with insurrectionary rhetoric, Engels writes: "We must make a full allowance for their position. The Bakunist rubbish cannot be cleared away in one day." This is not the voice of a man who thinks the line settles everything. It is the voice of someone who distinguishes between an opponent's doctrine and an opponent's usefulness, and who knows that a movement is built out of imperfect materials.
The second great arc of the volume is the birth of a French party. Out of the wreckage of the Commune and the International, Jules Guesde, Lafargue and Marx himself assembled the Parti Ouvrier — the French Workers' Party — around the programme adopted at Le Havre in 1880, whose principles, as Lafargue notes with pride, were "drafted in Regent's Park Road," which is to say at Engels's own house, from a preamble Marx dictated. This is the famous "minimum programme," the first attempt to give French socialism a Marxist rather than a Proudhonist or Blanquist spine. And almost at once it split. In September 1882, at the Saint-Étienne congress, the party broke in two: the Marxist "Guesdists" walking out to hold their own counter-congress at Roanne, the reformist majority — Paul Brousse, Benoît Malon and their followers — keeping the machinery. Lafargue's long letter of 10 October 1882 is the best contemporary account of that rupture we have from the inside, complete with the lecture fees that paid the delegates' fares and the war council held in a shared hotel. His verdict on the reformists is blunt: "we shall beat the Possibilists, who are nothing but Lassalleans." The Possibilists took their name from their willingness to make the movement's demands "possible" — winnable, immediate, municipal — and to Lafargue this was simple capitulation.
The finest single letter in the volume, and the one that shows Engels at the height of his powers, comes from the far end of these years, in March 1886. A workers' group had appeared in the Chamber of Deputies, and the Decazeville miners' strike had thrown it into sudden prominence. Engels writes to Laura with an exhilaration he rarely let himself show: "To me, this appearance of a parti ouvrier in the Palais-Bourbon is the great event of the year. The ice is now broken with which the Radicals had so far succeeded to cover the working masses of France." He grasps at once that the event is international — that "the reappearance of France on the scene of the proletarian movement ... will have a tremendous effect everywhere especially in Germany and America" — and he tells us he has already forwarded the speeches to Bebel in Berlin. But the analytical heart of the letter is a lesson in patience. He praises the French Marxists precisely for their restraint, for "their forbearance towards the Possibilists," for limiting their attacks to the points that exposed Brousse as an obstacle to unity rather than making war on the whole reformist wing. "Savoir attendre" — knowing how to wait — "that is what our friends have learnt at last, and that will carry them through." It is a remarkable thing to find under the pen of the man who, four years earlier, had blessed the Roanne split: the strategist correcting the sectarian, and correcting him in the direction of unity.
So much for the correspondence, which needs no defending. The question this series is bound to ask is a different one: what did Moscow do with it, and what does the doing tell us? Here the honest answer is that the Foreign Languages Publishing House did remarkably little, and that the little it did is still worth naming. The scholarly spine of the edition is not Soviet at all. The annotation is Bottigelli's, carried over from the French Communist Party's Éditions Sociales; the translation is by Yvonne Kapp, who would go on to write the standard life of Eleanor Marx and who renders the letters — their French tags, their private jokes, their code-names for the hunted Communards — with a fidelity and an ear that no state house could manufacture on command. As a piece of book-making this is a genuine service to English readers, and it should be credited plainly. For most of its length it is simply a good edition of an important text.
The Soviet hand shows in three quieter places. The first is a single sentence in the Publisher's Note. The editorial notes, it says, "follow the French edition except for certain notes found unnecessary for the English reader." The reader is not told which notes were dropped, or on what principle, or how many. It is a small thing and probably an innocent one — a house trimming what it judged redundant — but it is exactly the small thing the study of these editions teaches one to mark. An apparatus that silently removes what it finds "unnecessary," and supplies no list, has reserved to itself a power the reader cannot audit. In a volume of documents whose whole value is completeness, the unannounced cut is a habit worth noticing wherever it appears, and it appears here at the very threshold.
The second is the vocabulary of the notes, and it is subtler than falsification. Consider how Bottigelli's note — printed here without demur — glosses the Saint-Étienne split. The Possibilists, it explains, sought to present the workers' demands "in such a way as to render them 'possible'" which "amounted to the abandonment of a theoretical standpoint," and it records that "Guesde, in L'Égalité, called this attitude opportunism." The note does not merely report the quarrel; it adopts one side's verdict as its own summary, and it plants the word opportunism — the master-term of a century of orthodox anathema — as the natural name for the reformist position. Nothing in the note allows that the Possibilists were the pioneers of French municipal socialism, that they carried real working-class districts, or that the Guesdists' doctrinaire abstentionism was itself a sectarian vice that Marx and Engels repeatedly had to restrain. For a Moscow house in 1959, this framing required no effort at all; it was simply the ambient grammar. The reformist is the opportunist, the Marxist is orthodoxy, and the label does the analysis. That the letters themselves — Engels's 1886 praise of "forbearance," his impatience with sectarian narrowness — cut against the note's confidence is precisely the sort of tension the apparatus is built not to notice.
The third is the treatment of Bakunin, and here the point is one of omission rather than distortion. The note that introduces the anti-authoritarian current describes the Alliance of Socialist Democracy flatly as "a secret society which Bakunin had started and fostered within the International," whose members were duly expelled "at the Hague Congress of 1872," and stops. The expulsion is presented as a matter of hygiene: a conspiracy exposed, a verdict delivered, an end made of a sect. What no note anywhere in the volume concedes is that the split turned on a real and unresolved question — the question of centralisation and autonomy, of how much authority the workers' movement should concentrate in a single directing body. That was the substance of the anti-authoritarian objection, and it was not a frivolous one. A reader opening this book in Moscow in 1959, three years after Soviet tanks had answered the workers' councils of Budapest, might have found that buried question uncomfortably alive. The apparatus keeps it buried, not by lying about it but by declining to raise it. The silence is the editorial act.
It should be said, against the temptation to make more of this than the evidence bears, that the 1959 volume does not strain to enlist Engels for any contemporary Soviet line. The great set-piece of that kind — Engels's 1895 introduction to Marx's Class Struggles in France, the "testament" that the German party bowdlerised into an endorsement of the purely parliamentary road, and that a state preaching "peaceful coexistence" would have every motive to enlist — lies outside this volume's dates entirely; it belongs to the third. Here the letters run only to 1886, and the apparatus mostly lets them run. What one finds is not a heavy Stalinist frame but a light one: a scholarly French edition, competently Englished, gently pruned, and glossed in the reflexive vocabulary of its publisher. That is a more accurate and more interesting finding than a manufactured scandal would be, and the credibility of the harder judgements this series makes elsewhere depends on saying so.
Which leaves the third and last task, the one the letters make both possible and obligatory: to read Engels himself, plainly, as this tradition's own founder rather than as its icon. The strengths are the ones the correspondence puts on almost every page. First among them is strategic acuity — not cleverness in the abstract, but the capacity to read a concrete conjuncture and act on it. The 1886 letter on the Decazeville strike is a model of the thing: Engels sees in a single parliamentary group the breaking of the ice over the French masses, dates the turn, weighs the forbearance that produced it, and forwards the evidence to Berlin the same night. Bound up with this is an internationalism that was not a slogan but a working method. Engels does not follow the French movement, the German, the Spanish and the English as separate stories; he holds them in one field, relays each to the others, and measures a local event by its continental echo. He is, in these decades, the movement's living memory and its clearing-house, the point through which Marseilles reaches Berlin and Madrid reaches London.
Two further virtues deserve naming because the caricature of Engels misses them. One is his insistence on the workers' own movement as the real thing — his delight, in 1886, is at the independent appearance of the class in the Chamber, not at a doctrine's triumph. The other is a generosity, moral and literal, that runs quietly under the whole correspondence. Engels bankrolled the Lafargues for years; the requests — "Would you please advance me 300 francs" — are constant, and constantly met, and this material fact underwrites the intellectual one. He could afford to be the movement's treasurer, and he chose to be. The mentorship the letters record is patient, unstinting and, at its best, self-correcting: it was Engels, not the younger militants, who kept insisting that a movement is built by waiting as well as by fighting.
The death of Marx in 1883 falls squarely inside this volume, and it changes the correspondence from within. Until then Engels had written as the junior partner of a partnership, the practical man beside the theorist. After it he is the sole surviving authority of the founding generation, the last man who could say what he and Marx had actually meant, and the letters register the new weight without ever announcing it. He becomes the executor of the manuscripts, the finisher of Capital, the arbiter of a hundred disputes about what the doctrine required; and Laura, who had grown up translating for her father, becomes his indispensable collaborator in French, correcting the "rickety French" of the very letters he was sending into the movement. The relationship that began as a young man's joke about witnesses to a wedding had become, by the mid-1880s, one of the load-bearing joints of European socialism — and the reader watches it bear the load in real time, in the ordinary currency of requests for money, corrected proofs and forwarded newspapers.
The weaknesses are real too, and this tradition does itself no service by pretending otherwise. The plainest is sectarianism — or rather a divided mind about it. Engels blessed the Guesdist rupture of 1882 and shared, in the letters, the contempt in which the Lafargues held the Possibilists; the correspondence is thick with the confident dismissal of persons — Brousse, Malon, Hyndman, at moments even his own kinsman Longuet — and the "great man" verdict too often stands in for the analysis it should follow. The party he helped Guesde and Lafargue to build was, for all Marx's programme, a narrow and doctrinaire formation, and Marx's own weary mot about the French disciples — that if their system was Marxism, then he for one was no Marxist — was aimed at exactly the rigidity these letters document. The 1886 sermon on savoir attendre is so striking precisely because it is Engels arguing against a tendency he had elsewhere indulged. He was the corrective to the Lafargues' factionalism; he was also, when it suited the fight, its sponsor.
The deeper tension is one the reader can only see by standing at the end of the road. The confidence that runs through the letters — "whatever is done, must turn out to our benefit," the sense that events themselves were driving the masses toward the Marxist party — was earned, in 1886, by a movement genuinely on the rise. But that same confidence in the objective logic of history, projected forward and inherited by lesser men, would harden in the Second International into a fatalism of gradual and inevitable advance, the faith that the ballot and the census would deliver socialism on their own. It was that faith, not Engels's letters, that August 1914 shattered. Nothing in this volume commits him to it; the parliamentary optimism that his 1895 "testament" would be twisted to license is a later chapter. But the seed is here, in the temperament as much as the theory — in a mind so sure that the future belonged to it that it could underrate what waiting might one day be made to mean. To say this is not to convict Engels of his epigones' errors. It is to read him as he would have wanted to be read: as a strategist to be argued with, not a scripture to be recited. On that footing the letters are inexhaustible, and this edition, whatever the small marks its makers left on it, is the door to them.