Vladimir Lenin
The Marx-Engels Correspondence



Written: end of 1913 
Source:Collected Works,Volume 19, pp. 452-458 
First Published: November 28, 1920 -- Pravda, No. 268 
Translated: George Hanna, 1963 
Online Version: marx.org 1996; marxists.org 1999 
Transcribed: Zodiac
HTML Markup: Brian Basgen and David Walters 



 
The long-promised edition of the correspondence of the famous founders of 
scientific socialism has at last been published. Engels bequeathed the work of 
publishing it to Bebel and Bernstein, and Bebel managed to complete his part of 
the editorial work shortly before his death. 
The Marx-Engels correspondence, published a few weeks ago by Dietz, Stuttgart, 
consists of four big volumes. They contain in all 1,386 letters by Marx and 
Engels covering an extensive period, from 1844 to l883. 
The editorial work, i.e., the writing of prefaces to the correspondence of 
various periods, was done by Eduard Bernstein. As might have been expected, this 
work is unsatisfactory both from the technical and the ideological standpoint. 
After his notorious "evolution" to extreme opportunist views, Bernstein should 
never have undertaken to edit letters which are impregnated through and through 
with the revolutionary spirit. Bernstein's prefaces are in part meaningless and 
in part simply false -- as, for instance, when, instead of a precise, clear and 
frank characterisation of the opportunist errors of Lassalle and Schweitzer 
which Marx and Engels exposed, one meets with eclectic phrases and thrusts such 
as that "Marx and Engels were not always right in opposing Lassalle" (Vol. III, 
p. xviii), or that in their tactics they were "much nearer" to Schweitzer than 
to Liebknecht (Vol. IV, p. x). These attacks have no purpose except to serve as 
a screen and embellishment for opportunism. Unfortunately, the eclectic attitude 
to Marx's ideological struggle against many of his opponents is becoming 
increasingly widespread among present-day German Social-Democrats. 
From the technical standpoint, the index is unsatisfactory -- only one for all 
four volumes (Kautsky and Stirling are omitted, for instance); the notes to 
individual letters are too scanty and are lost in the editor's prefaces instead 
of being placed in proximity to the letters they refer to, as they were by 
Sorge, and so forth. 
The price of the publication is unduly high -- about 20 rubles for the four 
volumes. There can be no doubt that the complete correspondence could and should 
have been published in a less luxurious edition at a more reasonable price, and 
that, in addition, a selection of passages most important from the standpoint of 
principle could and should have been published for wide distribution among 
workers. 
All these defects of the edition will, of course, hamper a study of the 
correspondence. This is a pity, because its scientific and political value is 
tremendous. Not only do Marx and Engels stand out before the reader in clear 
relief in all their greatness, but the extremely rich theoretical content of 
Marxism is graphically revealed, because in their letters Marx and Engels return 
again and again to the most diverse aspects of their doctrine, emphasising and 
explaining -- at times discussing and debating -- what is newest (in relation to 
earlier views), most important and most difficult. 
There unfolds before the reader a strikingly vivid picture of the history of the 
working-class movement all over the world -- at its most important junctures and 
in its most essential points. Even more valuable is the history of the politics 
of the working class. On the most diverse occasions, in various countries of the 
Old World and the New, and at different historical moments, Marx and Engels 
discuss the most important principles of the presentation of the political tasks 
of the working class. And the period covered by the correspondence was a period 
in which the working class separated from bourgeois democracy, a period in which 
an independent working-class movement arose, a period in which the fundamental 
principles of proletarian tactics and policy were defined. The more we have 
occasion in our day to observe how the working-class movement in various 
countries suffers from opportunism in consequence of the stagnation and decay of 
the bourgeoisie, in consequence of the attention of the labour leaders being 
engrossed in the trivialities of the day, and so on -- the more valuable becomes 
the wealth of material contained in the correspondence displaying as it does a 
most profound comprehension of the basic aims of the proletariat in bringing 
about change and providing an unusually flexible definition of the tasks of the 
tactics of the moment from the standpoint of these revolutionary aims, without 
making the slightest concession to opportunism or revolutionary 
phrase-mongering. 
If one were to attempt to define in a single word the focus, so to speak, of the 
whole correspondence, the central point at which the whole body of ideas 
expressed and discussed converges -- that word would be dialectics. The 
application of materialist dialectics to the reshaping of all political economy 
from its foundations up, its application to history, natural science, philosophy 
and to the policy and tactics of the working class -- that was what interested 
Marx and Engels most of all, that was where they contributed what was most 
essential and new, and that was what constituted the masterly advance they made 
in the history of revolutionary thought. 
* * *
We intend in the following account, after giving a general review of the 
correspondence, to outline the most interesting remarks and arguments of Marx 
and Engels, without pretending to give an exhaustive account of the contents of 
the letters. 
I. GENERAL REVIEW
The correspondence opens with letters written in 1844 by the 24-year-old Engels 
to Marx. The situation in Germany at that time is brought out in striking 
relief. The first letter is dated the end of September 1844 and was sent from 
Barmen, where Engels' family lived, and where he was born. Engels was not quite 
24 years old at the time. He was bored with family life and was anxious to break 
away. His father was a despot, a pious manufacturer, who was outraged at his 
son's continual running about to political meetings, and at his communist 
convictions. Engels wrote that had it not been for his mother, of whom he was 
deeply fond, he would not have spent at home even the remaining few days before 
he was due to leave. "You would never believe," he complained to Marx "what 
petty reasons, what superstitious fears were put forward by the family against 
my departure." 
While he was still in Barmen -- where he was delayed a little longer by a love 
affair -- Engels gave way to his father and worked for about two weeks in the 
factory office (his father was a manufacturer). "Huckstering is too horrible," 
he writes to Marx. "Barmen is too horrible, the way they waste their time is too 
horrible, and above all things it is too horrible to remain, not merely a 
bourgeois, but a manufacturer, a bourgeois who actively opposes the 
proletariat." He consoled himself, Engels goes on to say, by working on his book 
on the condition of the working class (this book appeared, we know, in 1845 and 
is one of the best works of world socialist literature). "And perhaps one can 
while being a Communist remain in one's outward status a bourgeois and a 
huckstering beast as long as one does not write, but to carry on a wide 
communist propaganda and at the same time engage in huckstering and industry 
will not work. Enough. At Easter I quit here. Add to this the drowsy life of a 
thoroughly Christian-Prussian family -- I cannot stand it any longer; I might in 
the end become a German philistine and introduce philistinism into communism." 
Thus wrote the young Engels. After the Revolution of 1848 the exigencies of life 
obliged him to return to his father's office and to become a "huckstering beast" 
for many long years. But he was able to stand firm and to create for himself, 
not Christian-Prussian surroundings, but entirely different, comradely 
surroundings, and to become for the rest of his life a relentless foe of the 
"introduction of philistinism into communism". 
Social life in the German provinces in 1844 resembled Russian social life at the 
beginning of the twentieth century, before the Revolution of 1905. There was a 
general urge for political life, a general seething indignation in opposition to 
the government; the clergy fulminated against the youth for their atheism; 
children in bourgeois families quarrelled with their parents over their 
"aristocratic treatment of servants or workers". 
The general spirit of opposition found expression in the fact that everybody 
declared himself to be a Communist. "The Police Commissary in Barmen is a 
Communist," Engels writes to Marx. He was in Cologne, Dusseldorf, Elberfeld -- 
wherever he turned he stumbled upon Communists! "One ardent Communist, a 
cartoonist ... named Seel, is going to Paris in two months. I shall give him 
your address; you will all like him for his enthusiastic temperament and his 
love of music, and he could very well be useful as a cartoonist." 
"Miracles are happening here in Elberfeld. Yesterday [this was written on 
February 22, 1845], we held our third communist meeting in the largest hall and 
the best restaurant of the city. The first meeting was attended by 40 people, 
the second by 130 and the third by at least 200. The whole of Elberfeld and 
Barmen, from the moneyed aristocracy to the small shopkeepers, was represented, 
all except the proletariat." 
This is literally what Engels wrote. Everybody in Germany at that time was a 
Communist -- except the proletariat. Communism was a form of expression of the 
opposition sentiments of all, and chiefly of the bourgeoisie. "The most stupid, 
the most lazy and most philistine people, who take no interest in anything in 
the world, are almost becoming enthusiastic over communism." The chief preachers 
of communism at that time were people of the type of our Narodniks, 
"Socialist-Revolutionaries", "Popular Socialists", and so forth, that is to say, 
well-meaning bourgeois, some to a greater, others to a lesser degree, furious 
with the government. 
And under such conditions, amidst countless pseudo-socialist trends and 
factions, Engels was able to find his way to proletarian socialism, without 
fearing to break off relations with a mass of well-intentioned people, who were 
ardent revolutionaries but bad Communists. 
In 1846 Engels was in Paris. Paris was then seething with politics and the 
discussion of various socialist theories. Engels eagerly studied socialism, made 
the acquaintance of Cabel, Louis Blanc and other prominent socialists, and ran 
from editorial office to editorial office and from circle to circle. 
His attention was chiefly focussed on the most important and most widespread 
socialist doctrine of the time -- Proudhonism. And even before the publication 
of Proudhon's Philosophy of Poverty (October 1846, Marx's famous reply, The 
Poverty of Philosophy, appeared in 1847), Engels, with ruthless sarcasm and 
remarkable profundity, criticised Proudhon's basic ideas, which were then being 
particularly advocated by the German Socialist Grun. His excellent knowledge of 
English (which Marx mastered much later) and of English literature enabled 
Engels at once (letter of September 16, 1846) to point to the example of the 
bankruptcy of the notorious Proudhonist "labour bazaars" in England. Proudhon 
disgraces socialism, Engels exclaims indignantly -- it follows from Proudhon 
that the workers must buy out capital. 
The 26-year-old Engels simply annihilates "true socialism". We meet this 
expression in his letter of October 23, 1846, long before the Communists 
Manifesto, and Grun is mentioned as its chief exponent. An "anti-proletarian, 
petty-bourgeois, philistine" doctrine, "sheer phrase-mongering", all kinds of 
"humanitarian', aspirations, "superstitious fear of 'crude' communism" 
(Loffel-Kommunismus, literally: "spoon communism" or "belly communism"), 
"peaceful plans to bestow happiness" upon mankind -- these are some of Engels' 
epithets, which apply to all species of pre-Marxist socialism. 
"The Proudhon plan of association," writes Engels, "was discussed for three 
evenings. At first I had nearly the whole clique with Grun at their head against 
me.... The chief point was to prove the necessity for revolution by force." 
(October 23, 1846). In the end he got furious, he writes, and drove his 
opponents so hard that they were obliged to make an open attack on communism. He 
demanded a vote on whether they were Communists or not. This caused great 
indignation among the Grunites, who began to argue that they had come together 
to discuss "the good of mankind" and that they must know what communism really 
was. Engels gave them an extremely simple definition so as to permit no 
opportunity for evasions. "I therefore defined,"' Engels writes, "the objects of 
the Communists in this way: 
(1) to achieve the interests of the proletariat in opposition to those of the 
bourgeoisie; (2) to do this through the abolition of private property and its 
replacement by community of goods; (3) to recognise no means of carrying out 
these objects other than a democratic revolution by force." (Written a year and 
a half before the 1848 Revolution.) 
The discussion ended with the meeting's adopting Engels' definition by thirteen 
votes against the votes of two Grunites. These meetings were attended by some 
twenty journeymen carpenters. Thus the foundations of the Social-Democratic 
Workers' Party of Germany were laid in Paris sixty-seven years ago. 
A year later, in his letter of November 23, 1847, Engels informed Marx that he 
had prepared a draft of the Communist Manifesto, incidentally declaring himself 
opposed to the catechism form originally proposed. "I begin: What is Communism?" 
writes Engels. "And then straight to the proletariat -- history of its origin, 
difference from former workmen, development of the contradiction between 
proletariat and bourgeoisie, crises, results.... In conclusion the Party policy 
of the Communists." 
This historical letter of Engels' on the first draft of a work which has 
travelled all over the world and which to this day is true in all its 
fundamentals and as actual and topical as though it were written yesterday, 
clearly proves that Marx and Engels are justly named side by side as the 
founders of modern socialism. 
N. Lenin 



End Note
This was intended to be the opening of a larger article Lenin hoped to write 
about the just released (September 1913) four-volume Marx-Engels Correspondence. 
Lenin closely studied the work, compiling a 76-page notebook summarizing, and 
extracting from, the letters. Lenin intended this larger article to be published 
in Prosveshcheniye in 1914. There was even an announcement of it Proletarskaya 
Pravda (No. 7, December 14, 1913). However, the article was never completed. 
Instead, this version ran in Pravda on November 28 1920 -- the 100th anniversary 
of Engels' birth. Because of the occasion, Lenin added the subtitle "Engels as 
One of the Founders of Communism", and a little footnote mentioned "The 
beginning of an unfinished article written in 1913 or early 1914." 

 
