Most of the books in this series are Soviet arguments, and an introduction to them is a reply. This one is different. What sits between these covers is not a Moscow textbook but a run of private letters written between 1887 and 1890 by Frederick Engels in London and Paul and Laura Lafargue in and around Paris — Laura being Marx's second daughter, Paul her husband and one of the founders of French Marxism. The letters are the thing itself: first-rank primary material, the unguarded working correspondence of the man who, in these very years, was steering the international socialist movement by post from a house on Regent's Park Road while correcting the manuscript of the third volume of Capital. You cannot refute a primary source, and this introduction does not try. It does three things instead. It says what the correspondence is and why this particular stretch of it matters. It turns a critical eye on the Moscow packaging — the selection, the note apparatus, the silent editorial hand — rather than on Engels. And it offers an honest assessment of Engels as these letters actually show him, strengths and blind spots together, because the tradition that produced this series is entitled to read its own founders soberly.
Take the period first, because it is the reason this volume is more than a family album. The years 1887 to 1890 are the hinge on which the modern socialist movement turns. When the correspondence opens, the workers' movement is a scatter of national parties, sects and trade-union federations with no common instrument; the First International is fifteen years dead. When it closes, the Second International exists, its founding congress has met in Paris in July 1889, and the first international May Day has been called for 1890. Almost every letter here is, at some level, about building that instrument — and about the squalid, exhausting, indispensable manoeuvre it took to build it.
It should be said at once what these letters are like to read, because their value is partly in their texture. This is not a statesman dictating for the record. The Lafargues call Engels "the General," a household nickname; he signs himself, on occasion, "Kakadou." High international politics arrives interleaved with the price of wine, the health of the dogs, the grandchildren, and a long-running joke about the tapeworm Paul is trying to expel — Engels prescribing "a dose of filix mas or cousso" for the "intimate friend inside" with the same brisk confidence he brings to the congress negotiations. The intimacy is not incidental. It is why the letters are trustworthy in a way a memoir is not: Engels is thinking aloud to the two people he trusts most, and the strategic judgements come out unpolished, with the hesitations and the swearing left in. When he is uncertain he says so; when he is exultant he is undignified about it. A reader gets the man deliberating, not the monument.
The central drama is the fight over the founding congress, and it is a more humiliating and human affair than the commemorative version allows. There were two rival congresses in Paris in July 1889, meeting in the same city at the same time: the Marxist congress that the Lafargues, the Germans and Engels organised, and the congress of the French Possibilists — the reformist wing led by Brousse — allied with Hyndman's people in London. Each claimed to be the International. Engels ran his side of the negotiation from London, and the letters are a masterclass in what organisation actually consists of when there is no authority to enforce anything. He nails down a prior agreement at a preparatory meeting at The Hague; he leans on Bebel and Liebknecht in Germany; and above all he spends letter after letter restraining his own comrades, the Lafargues and the French Guesdists, whose sectarian instinct was to turn every question into a trial of strength. In March 1889 he writes to Paul Lafargue almost pleadingly: "Be reasonable; carry out loyally what has been passed, do not make it impossible for your best friends to support you, 'give and take,' use the position won at The Hague as a starting point scoring the first victory over the enemy and as a base for future triumphs. But do not force down the throat of the other nationalities things which they certainly will not swallow." That sentence is the whole of Engels's internationalism in miniature: the refusal to let any one national party, even the one he agreed with, dictate to the others.
What is striking — and what the celebratory framing tends to bury — is that Engels did not think his own side was obviously right on the tactics. He told Lafargue plainly that, left to his own preference, he would have done the opposite: "Were the matter still open to discussion, I personally would incline to your view that the congress should be held side by side with that of the Poss[ibilists], even at the risk of a fight with them." He submitted his own judgement to a collective decision already taken, because holding the coalition together mattered more than winning the argument. This is Engels the organiser at his best, and it is the opposite of the caricature of the doctrinaire.
The congress met, and it worked. Paul Lafargue's letter of 23 July 1889, written in the wreckage of a fortnight of eighteen-hour days, has the authentic exhaustion of someone who has just pulled off something difficult: "The congress is over at last! I can sleep to my heart's content." A proposal to merge the two congresses had nearly detonated the whole thing — "had the fusion taken place there would have been a pugilistic set-to" — but it was averted, and what Lafargue remembered was not the manoeuvring but the mood: "The most genuine fraternity prevailed at our congress; the French, who are so eager to speak, showed the greatest deference to the foreigners, above all to the Germans." One German delegate told him at the banquet, "I am not pleased, I am gladdened to the depths of my heart." Out of that congress came the call for the demonstration of 1 May 1890 — the birth of international May Day, still the movement's one universal festival — and here again Engels's tactical patience is on display. Rather than keep fighting the Possibilists head-on, the strategy was to let them rot: "Our congresses have come off gloriously," he wrote, "and when we compare them with the Possibilists, they come out in still bolder relief… Il faut qu'ils cuisent dans leur propre jus" — let them stew in their own juice. Do not attack them, he insisted repeatedly; attacking a disintegrating rival only arrests its disintegration.
The second great theme is Germany, and it culminates in one of the most quoted lines Engels ever wrote to Laura. Through 1887–89 the German Social-Democrats are still living under Bismarck's Anti-Socialist Law, campaigning half-illegally, their press driven abroad and their meetings broken up; the correspondence tracks the two-yearly ritual by which the law was renewed and, in January 1890, the collapse of the parliamentary cartel that had sustained it. The law, un-renewed, "ceased to be in force from October 1st, 1890," and with it went Bismarck himself, resigned that March. By the February 1890 elections the party has won a million and a half votes in the teeth of a decade of persecution. Engels's letter of 26 February 1890, written as the election telegrams "came raining in here thick and fast," is drunk on it: the party had taken 1,341,500 votes, and he pronounces the verdict that would echo through the whole subsequent history of the movement — "The 20th February 1890 is the opening day of the German revolution." "The old stability," he adds, "is gone for ever." A week later he signs off to Lafargue: "vive la révolution allemande!"
This is Engels at his most exhilarated and, one has to say, at his most fallible — and it is worth being exact about why, because it is the single point in this volume where the sober assessment the series owes its founders has real work to do. The optimism was not naïve gradualism. In the same February letter Engels sees, with cold clarity, the danger that the state will not wait to be voted out: the ruling powers may "provoke riot and fighting and crush us before we are too strong, and then alter the Constitution. That is evidently what we are drifting to, and the chief danger to be avoided… we may be forced to fight before we are fully prepared, and there is the danger." He was not the fatalist that some of his epigones became. And yet the metric has quietly shifted under his feet. The "opening day of the German revolution" is an election day, and its evidence is a vote count. The steady climb of the German ballot had become, for Engels as for the party he loved, the visible proof that history was moving their way on a rising line. That habit of mind — history as an escalator, the revolution as the terminus of an electoral curve — is exactly what the Second International would harden, after Engels's death, into the fatalist gradualism of Kautskyan orthodoxy, the conviction that the movement had only to grow and wait. Engels's own famous 1895 introduction to Marx's The Class Struggles in France, written five years after these letters and edited down by nervous party leaders into a testament to legality, sits at the head of that road. It would take the collapse of August 1914 — the same German party voting the war credits — to show what the escalator had carried the movement into. None of that is Engels's fault in any simple sense; he warned against the coup and never surrendered the expectation of a "decisive crisis." But the correspondence lets you watch the reflex forming, and an honest reader should watch it rather than cheer.
There are other tensions worth naming, in the same spirit. Engels's factional heat in these letters is real and not always attractive. The Possibilists are, across hundreds of pages, "opportunists," "carpet-baggers" — Paul Lafargue's phrase, that they "use socialism to obtain political positions and municipal grants" — and "those perfect lackeys." Some of that is deserved; Brousse's people really did trade socialist votes for municipal advantage. But the ferocity of the split ran ahead of the issues that formally divided the two congresses, which were procedural — the validation of delegates' credentials, whether the congress should be open or closed. Engels, who elsewhere was sharply critical of the narrowness of the French Guesdists (it was of their brand of doctrine that he made his celebrated remark that if that was Marxism, then he himself was no Marxist), here largely indulged that narrowness because the Guesdists were on his side of the barricade. His readings of the French scene are shrewd — his running analysis of Boulangism is a small masterpiece of contempt, dismissing the general with the observation that "he takes Paris and leaves to the Monarchists all the provinces," and tracing his war-chest to Russian money — but he backed a French faction that was itself a sect, and the correspondence does not pretend otherwise.
Set against these, the strengths are overwhelming and should be stated as plainly. The organisational genius is the obvious one: a man past sixty, running an international coalition by letter across four languages, holding Germans, French, Belgians, Danes and Americans in a single frame by sheer tactical intelligence and the moral authority of Marx's oldest friend. The internationalism is genuine and not merely rhetorical — the insistence, against his own closest allies, that no national party impose on the rest. There is his feel for the workers' own movement as against the manoeuvres of leaders: the letters of autumn 1889 follow the great London dock strike almost hour by hour, Engels reading the strikers' tactics like a general and worrying, correctly, that a bluffed general-strike threat was "a declaration of despair" that could hand the companies victory. And there is the quiet fact that runs under everything — that all this was being done by the man who was simultaneously the executor of Marx's unfinished life's work. In the middle of the congress fight he reports, almost in passing, "Of Capital III Vol. I finished Section IV yesterday." He is the movement's living memory as well as its organiser, and the register drops, once, into something unbearably human when he describes Eleanor planting the family grave at Highgate: "If Mohr had lived to see this!" That is the private cost of being the last man standing from the founding generation, and it is why this correspondence is worth reading even by people with no interest in the politics.
Which brings us to the Moscow packaging, and to the one respect in which this volume genuinely differs from most in the series: the apparatus is largely good. This English edition of 1960, published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House — the house that three years later became Progress — is a translation of the French Correspondance edited by Émile Bottigelli for Éditions Sociales in Paris, and Bottigelli was a serious scholar. His footnotes are overwhelmingly what footnotes should be: dates, identifications, the tracing of newspaper references. The translation is by Yvonne Kapp, later the biographer of Eleanor Marx, and it is superb — idiomatic, alert to Engels's jokes and his macaronic slides between English, German and French. Point three of this series' standing brief is to credit real scholarship where it exists, and here it plainly does. A reader is far better served by this volume than by the average Progress polemic.
The criticism is therefore of a subtler kind, and it is about ownership, omission and framing rather than falsification. Begin with ownership. Again and again a footnote records that a given letter is printed "transcribed from the original in French, by the Moscow Institute of Marxism-Leninism, which owns the original." That formula — repeated for letter after letter — is the whole Soviet relationship to the Marx-Engels heritage compressed into a phrase. The manuscripts of the founders of the movement sat in a state institute in Moscow; access to them was a grant, not a right; and the definitive editions of the world's socialist inheritance were, in consequence, a monopoly of the party that claimed to be that inheritance's sole legitimate heir. The scholarship is real; the proprietorship behind it is the point.
Then omission. The Publisher's Note states that "Editorial notes follow the French edition, except for certain notes found unnecessary for the English reader." That is a small sentence carrying a large licence. The English reader is not told which of Bottigelli's notes were dropped, or on what principle "unnecessary" was judged, and so cannot know whether the pruning was innocent housekeeping or something more directed. In a series built on the study of what Soviet editors chose to include and leave out, an admitted, unspecified excision is exactly the kind of thing to register rather than wave through.
The framing is the most interesting point, because it works almost entirely by silence. The 1889 congress is presented throughout — in the running heads, in the very "our congress"/"their congress" grammar that the apparatus leaves unglossed — as a clean Marxist victory over opportunism. On the letters' own terms it largely was. But an edition issued from Moscow in 1960 is celebrating the foundation of the Second International without a syllable of acknowledgement that the same International would, within a quarter-century, become in Moscow's own account the very type of opportunist betrayal — the parties that voted for the war in 1914, the tradition that Lenin spent the rest of his life denouncing and against which the Communist International was founded as a deliberate repudiation. A 1960 volume can honour Engels for building the Second International and can honour Lenin for burying it, but it cannot do both on the same shelf without a word about the trajectory that connects them, and this one does not try. The silence is congenial to its moment. 1960 was the year the Soviet line on the "parliamentary road" and peaceful coexistence was being consolidated, and a volume that foregrounds Engels the electoral triumphalist — the million and a half votes, the "opening day of the German revolution" reached through the ballot box, the May Day demonstration — while letting his warnings about the coming resort to force pass without emphasis, leans, however gently, in a serviceable direction. Nothing is falsified. The letters are all here, the alarming ones with the hopeful ones. But the apparatus supplies no counter-weight, and in the choosing of what to underline and what to leave mute, a 1960 reader was quietly encouraged to find in Engels the ancestor the moment wanted.
That is a light charge compared with the wholesale rewriting this series has had to document elsewhere, and it should be stated as the light charge it is. The honest summary is that the Foreign Languages Publishing House did something valuable here — it put Engels's own words, well translated and largely well annotated, into English — and that the Soviet fingerprints are on the frame rather than the picture: in the monopoly the recurring credit line advertises, in the unspecified cuts the Publisher's Note concedes, and in a curatorial silence about where the road that opens in these letters was going to lead. Read the correspondence for what it is: the finest close-up we have of how the international workers' movement was actually assembled, by a very great organiser who was also, by 1890, beginning to mistake the rising line of the German vote for the road to power. Both halves of that sentence are in the letters. This edition prints them faithfully and lets you draw the second for yourself, which is more than can be said for most of what Moscow published, and a good deal less than a candid apparatus would have done.