XVII
Volume 49 of the Collected Works of Karl Marx and Frederick Engels contains Engels' letters from August 1890 to September 1892.
As is clear from a number of events, including the May Day demonstrations that swept over nearly the whole of Europe, the successes of the German Social-Democrats in the elections to the Reichstag and the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law, and the foundation of new trades unions in England, the working-class and socialist movement gained considerable ground in these years. The letters in this volume give a vivid picture of the still unflagging scholarly and political activity of Engels, seventy years of age on 28 November 1890, during this period. They reflect the many problems facing the working-class movement in the early 1890s after the foundation and con-solidation of the socialist parties and the formation of a new international association, the Second International. They also reflect the complications facing the spread and confirmation of Marxist ideas.
Of particular importance during the 1890s were the propagation of Marxism, the explanation of its fundamental theoretical propositions, and the safeguarding of those propositions from oversimplification and contemporary misinterpretation.
Engels gave much of his time to preparing new editions for the press and editing translations of Marx's works and of his own writings, including those that had become virtually unobtainable by that time. Engels bore in mind the theoretical significance and poten-
XVIII Preface
tial import of the work being republished and, in editing the translations, the peculiarities of the respective country. All these publications were brought out with his direct participation: he worked on the texts, wrote notes when necessary and read the proofs. As a rule, Engels wrote special introductions for them which were, in effect small-scale studies in their own right. The editions prepared by Engels in-fluenced the views and practical activities of the Marxists and the development of the working-class parties.
During these years, Engels still regarded it as his 'urgent duty' (see this volume, p. 396) to prepare for publication Marx's economic manuscripts, above all those comprising Volume III of Capital (see pp. 329, 331, 334, 379, 385, 390, 440, 450, etc.). Because of the many tasks in hand and his state of health, however, Engels was not able to begin this work until November 1891. He wrote to Karl Kautsky on 3 December 1891: 'I have just got to the most difficult part, i. e. the last chapters (six to eight or thereabouts) on money capital, banks, credit, etc., and, once having started, I shall have to keep at it without a break and work through the relevant literature again, in short make myself completely au fait, if only so that I may — as is probable — eventually leave most of it as it stands, yet at the same time feel quite sure that I have committed no blunders either in the positive or the negative sense' (pp. 314-15). At the beginning of 1892, he was again compelled to break off work on Volume III and was not able to resume it until September.
Of considerable interest are Engels' letters dealing with theoretical problems and the development and deepening of certain propositions of Marxist theory that had become particularly important in the early 1890s. As the ideas of Marx and Engels spread further, they were taken up by representatives of the most diverse ideological trends. Many propositions of the theory were being digested by the members of the working-class movement in a one-sided and oversimplified manner as various slogans, and were sometimes grossly distorted. Certain members of the socialist movement, as Engels noted in his letter to Conrad Schmidt of 12 April 1890, tended to impose their own personal conjectures on the works of Marx and Engels instead of reading what they actually contained (see present edition, Vol. 48).
Particularly widespread in the early 1890s was a perverse interpretation of the materialist understanding of history in the spirit of 'eco-
XIX
nomic materialism', according to which economics was the sole active factor in the historical process. These views were especially typical of a number of young socialists in Germany. Some of them asked Engels directly to explain certain points about the materialist interpretation of history.
In this respect, Engels' famous letters to Conrad Schmidt of 5 August and 27 October and to Joseph Bloch of 21-22 September 1890 deserve attention. They give not only a compressed exposition of the Marxist analysis of the historical process, but take an important step forward in elaborating certain vital problems of the materialist interpretation of history (see also Engels' letters to Paul Ernst of 5 June 1890, to Franz Mehring of 14 July 1893, and to W. Borgius of 25 January 1894 — present edition, vols 48 and 50).
In his letters to Schmidt and Bloch, Engels examines the interaction of basis and superstructure, economics and politics, the dialectics of the objective and the subjective factors of social development, and the role of the conscious activity of the masses. In his letter to Schmidt of 5 August 1890, Engels used the term 'historical materialism' for the first time (p. 8). In doing so, he wanted to indicate that the economic factor, definitive in the final analysis, is itself subject to feedback from the superstructure (pp. 34-35 and 59-63).
Worried about the prospects for revolution and the nature of the future society, many socialists turned to Engels for clarification. Engels considered that the level of socio-economic development in the main European capitalist countries was creating the conditions for revolutionary transformations in the relatively near future. Consciously avoiding detailed predictions about the future society, he confined himself to the most general terms.
In his letters to Conrad Schmidt of 5 August and 1 July 1890, Otto Boenigk of 21 August 1890, and Max Oppenheim of 24 March 1891, Engels expressed himself decisively against the idea of the communist society as something 'fixed for all time' (p. 8) and emphasised that, like any other social structure, the new society would not arise straightaway, but only by a process of gradual formation; it would develop uninterruptedly by 'constant change and transformation' (p. 18). He described the decisive feature of the new society as 'the organisation of production on the basis of common ownership, initially by the nation, of all means of production' (ibid.). In his letter to Otto Boenigk, he expressed the idea of the definite sequence of transformation of private property into public, and marked out ways for the X X Preface
transformation of agriculture on collective principles (pp. 18-19). An important condition for the organisation of life in the new society was the attraction of specialists in engineering, agriculture, medicine and also lawyers, teachers, etc. (pp. 19, 272).
In his letter to Schmidt of 5 August 1890, Engels gave his view on distribution in communist society. The 'method of distribution depends almost entirely upon how much there is to distribute ... since this is likely to change as advances are made in production and social organisation' (p. 8).
At the same time, Engels repeatedly stressed the impossibility of determining in full detail how precisely the communist transformation of society was going to develop. This 'must depend on local conditions at the time, nor can anything of a general nature be said about them beforehand,' he wrote to Max Oppenheim on 24 March 1891 (p. 153). The problem of stages in the development of the communist society and the specific measures which the workers must take when they have taken over state power is 'the most difficult subject on earth' (p. 212).
The letters in this volume show the many-sidedness of Engels' activity in co-ordinating the international working-class and socialist movement. Correspondence was an important source of information for him about the state of the working-class movement in various countries, and it was also his principal means of passing on revolutionary experience and of exerting an ideological influence on the activities of the members of the socialist parties and organisations.
The organisation of the working-class movement, the efforts of the socialist parties to consolidate their ranks and opposition to dogmatism and sectarian trends have an important place in Engels' letters. Since they were not intended for publication, his assessments of reformist and 'left-wing' sectarian elements in the working-class movement were often very harsh. He emphasised that the 'class-conscious continental proletariat has no intention of placing itself under the leadership of people who regard the wage system as an eternal and immutable universal institution' (p. 524). On the other hand, those who, 'more or less, have the correct theory as to the dogmatic side of it, become a mere sect because they cannot conceive that living theory of action, of working with the working class at every possible stage of its development, otherwise than as a collection of dogmas to be learnt by XXI
heart and recited' like a conjurer's formula or a Catholic prayer' (p. 186). Advocating independence from the bourgeois influences of the class policy of the workers' parties and considering that unity of views and party discipline should be based on the high awareness and activity of its members and on the participation of each one in working out party policy and tactics, Engels nevertheless admitted: 'That ...doesn't preclude our failure to agree on many points. But these again are points where in course of time agreement is automatically reached as a result of discussion or of new events' (p. 158). Engels considered the development of broad party democracy and the free exchange of opinions as an indispensable condition, with the reminder that 'discipline in a big party cannot be anything like as strict as it is in a small sect' (p. 182), but that the criticism must be made within the framework of the programme and with the strict observance of party ethics. Engels drew attention to the inalienable right of the rank-and-file members to influence the activity of their leaders and prevent them from breaking away from the grass roots of the party. In his letter to Karl Kautsky on 11 February 1891 Engels wrote: 'It is also imperative that the chaps should at long last throw off the habit of handling the party officials — their servants — with kid gloves and kow-towing to them as infallible bureaucrats, instead of confronting them critically' (p. 131).
It can be seen from the letters how much Engels did to widen and strengthen international ties, including personal contacts between socialists of various countries, to arrange for the exchange of information between the socialist parties about their activities and to encour-age co-operation in the press. Engels considered it highly important for the information to be comprehensive and fully objective.
From Engels' letters, and also from those of Eleanor Marx-Aveling printed in the Appendices to this volume, it is clear that he himself initiated a number of international meetings between the socialists. He used his seventieth birthday celebrations for the organisation of a meeting of socialists from the leading European countries and for the discussion of problems in common (see pp. 76-77). It was also at Engels' suggestion that an international conference of socialists was held during the Congress of German Social-Democrats at Halle in the autumn of 1890 to prepare the Congress of the Second International in Brussels in 1891 (see pp. 24, 29 and 42).
Engels devoted much attention to the recently formed new international socialist association — the Second International. The letters XXII Preface
published in the present volume make it possible to reconstruct the entire course of preparations for the Second and Third congresses of the Second International and Engels' own part in their convocation. He endeavoured to widen as much as possible the number of the congresses' participants, especially such mass working-class organisations as the British trades unions (pp. 24, 28, 29, 42-43, 46, 74, 229, 238, 520-21, 523-24, 533-34, 545-46, 548).
A number of letters contain fundamental ideas on the stand the socialists took because of the threat, intensified in the early 1890s, of an all-European war. Engels continued developing the idea, expressed many times in the preceding years, of the profound interest of the working class in the preservation of peace, stressing this as one of the most important conditions for the future success of the workers' movement. From his letters to Sorge, Bebel and others, it is clear that the rapidly growing influence of Social-Democracy, especially in Germany, had given him hope that the proletariat might gain political power in that country in a relatively short historical period. Engels wrote to Bebel on 24-26 October 1891: 'I ... hope and pray that this splendid, unerring progress of ours, evolving with the impassivity and inexorability of a natural process, will continue along its appointed course' (p. 272).
Should war break out (at that time, this meant the possibility of France, in alliance with Tsarist Russia, waging war on Germany), the socialist parties should proceed from the interests of the workers' struggle for emancipation. But since a victory by Russian Tsarism in such a war would mean not only a threat to Germany's national unity, but the total destruction of German Social-Democracy, at that time the vanguard of the European working-class movement, Engels considered that the German socialists must endeavour to fight the war by 'revolutionary means' (p. 271). These ideas of Engels were stated in great detail in his letters to Bebel and Sorge (pp. 242-46, 258, 266-67, 270-72, 327) and were finally formulated in his article 'Socialism in Germany' (present edition, Vol. 27).
Of particular importance in Engels' correspondence during these, as in the preceding years, are the letters to the leaders of German Social-Democrats— August Bebel, Wilhelm Liebknecht, Karl Kautsky, Franz Mehring and others. Many problems associated with the German working-class movement were also reflected in Engels' letters to XXIII
other active members of the international working-class movement, particularly to Friedrich Adolph Sorge and to Paul and Laura Lafargue.
The early 1890s in the German working-class movement were conspicuous for many important events associated above all with the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law. The party, which at that time was 'the paramount party in Europe' (p. 47), now had considerably wider scope for all its activities. It was now essential for its tactics and organisation to be changed and for a new programme to be drawn up. Engels followed very closely the sharp struggle that developed in the party in the summer of 1890 during preparations for the Halle Congress. Much of his correspondence is concerned with the opposition group of the Jungen (Young Ones), which attacked legal forms of struggle, deplored the parliamentary activities of the party and, exploiting the opportunist blunders of some leaders, demagogically accused the entire leadership of renouncing its revolutionary goals, violating party democracy, and of corruption. The Jungen harshly criticised the draft of the new Party Rules, published at the beginning of August 1890.
Engels supported the Marxist section of the party leadership, although this did not prevent him, in a number of letters, from talking about the validity of certain criticisms directed at it.
He considered, not without justification, that the pseudo-revolutionary jargon of the Jungen could easily influence those party members who did not yet have sufficient theoretical training and experience of practical struggle, and find in them definite support. 'He-rein lies a danger which should not be underestimated,' he warned Wilhelm Liebknecht (p. 14). At the same time, in his letters to the leaders of German Social-Democracy, Engels cautioned them against hasty organisational measures against the Jungen, advising flexibility in the controversy with them and tolerance about the different opinions within the party. He wrote to Liebknecht on 10 August 1890: 'Do not make martyrs unnecessarily, show that there is freedom of criticism, and if you have to throw anyone out, do so in cases where thefacts — overt acts of turpitude and betrayal — are quite blatant and completely demonstrable!' (pp. 14-17).
Particularly interesting and valuable for an understanding of Engels' attitude to the Jungen are his letters to Friedrich Adolph Sorge, in which he gave a frank assessment of the party leadership, noting in particular the excessive harshness and irritation which Bebel and Liebknecht permitted themselves in the struggle with the opposition. 'The biggest party in the empire,' Engels wrote to Sorge on 9 August 1890, 'cannot remain in existence unless every shade of opinion is allowed complete freedom of expression, while even the semblance of dictatorship ... must be avoided...' (p. 11).
Engels did a great deal to help the leaders of the German Social-Democrats in their restructuring of the organisation after the repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law. He analysed the completely new conditions that had come into being and under which the party must act in future. In his letter to Liebknecht of 10 August 1890, he critically exam-ined the draft Party Rules, which had to be discussed at the next congress, and noted the points violating, in his opinion, democratic principles. He considered it most unacceptable that, according to the draft, the Social-Democratic group of the Reichstag was virtually being placed over the Party Executive elected by the Congress. Engels also criticised the points on the election to the Congress of an equal number of representatives from all the electoral districts irrespective of the number of party members in them, and also the allocation to the Executive of more responsible functions than those carried out by the Congress (p. 14). In the Rules' final version, as accepted by the Halle Congress, these points were removed.
Many of Engels' letters are concerned with preparations for the party congress in Erfurt, which accepted a new programme of the German Social-Democratic Party. Much attention is given in them to the publication, early in 1891, of Marx's Critique of the Gotha Programme written back in 1875 (see present edition, Vol. 24). With this publication, Engels endeavoured not to allow a repetition in the new programme of the erroneous propositions of the Gotha Programme and to inflict a blow on the Lassalle cult, widespread amongst the German Social-Democrats. '...It was my duty to publish the thing the moment the programme came up for discussion,' he wrote to Kautsky (p. 134). His letters to Kautsky of 7 and 15 January, 3, 11 and 23 February 1891, to Bebel of 1-2 May 1,891, to Paul and Laura Lafargue of 1-2 May 1891, and to Sorge of 24 October 1891, show what a prin-cipled significance Engels attributed to the publication of this document, and with what patience and tact Engels prevailed over the opposition of certain party leaders to the publication of Marx's critical comments.
Engels had faith in the ideological strength and maturity of the party itself. 'And I knew that the party was amply strong enough to XXV
stand it and I reckoned that today it would even tolerate the forth-right language used 15 years ago,' wrote Engels to Kautsky on 23 February 1891 (p. 133). In the same letter, he gave a general apprecia-tion of the personality and activities of Ferdinand Lassalle, stressing the duality of his role in the German working-class movement (pp. 134-35).
That the publication of Critique of the Gotha Programme had been well timed was confirmed when, in the summer of 1891, the Opportunists, represented by Vollmar, leader of the Bavarian party organisation, spoke out on pragmatic grounds for co-operation with the Junker-bourgeois monarchist state. Observing with satisfaction Vollmar's defeat at the Erfurt Congress (pp. 266, 273, 282), Engels gave Bebel practical advice on the tactics in the struggle with opportunism (p. 480).
In Engels' letters, mainly those to Paul and Laura Lafargue, much space is given to the problems of the working-class movement in France. Analysing France's internal situation, he noted the increasing political reaction, the existence of revanchist moods and the deepening of a political crisis.
Observing the growth of political activity among the French workers, the struggle for the right to strike and the development of the trade union movement, Engels repeatedly spoke of the need for unity of action in the Workers' Party and other socialist groups and the winning of the broad working masses over to its own side. He considered that the main task of the French socialists was to overcome the split in the country's working-class movement. Unity, however, must be achieved by meticulous daily work. Observing, on the one hand, the strengthening of the Workers' Party and, on the other, the crisis of the Possibilists, who had split into two factions in the autumn of 1890, Engels warned against the forcing of events, drawing an analo-gy with the unification of the two trends in the German working-class movement in 1875 (p. 97). He thought that the tactics of the French Workers' Party should be the conclusion of an agreement on practical co-operation with other socialist groups and the rejection of any attempt at unification at that time (p. 117).
Engels attributed great importance to the parliamentary activities of the French socialists. He paid special attention to the election campaign in the autumn of 1891. Informing Bebel that Lafargue had XXVI
been elected at the second ballot to the Chamber of Deputies, he wrote that it would have a considerable influence on France, since 'on this occasion literally all the socialist parliamentary groups, including the Possibilists ... pulled together' (p. 291). He looked with great hope on the prospects for the development of the socialist movement in France and stated with satisfaction that the Workers' Party was not 'a riotous force liable to act on the spur of the moment, but ... a regular, organised, political force' (p. 424).
The letters in this volume show how Engels, as a witness of the development of the working-class and socialist movement in Great Britain, noted entirely new factors in this process. He took a keen interest in the spectacular rise of the working-class movement during those years — the appearance of new trades unions, the impressive May Day demonstrations in 1890 and 1891, and the successful strikes testify-ing to the entry into the struggle of new and, until recently, oppres-sed and disorganised strata of the proletariat.
With great sympathy, Engels followed the struggle of the new trades unions, with many of whose leaders — William Thorne, Benjamin Tillet, John Burns, Tom Mann and others — he kept in personal contact. He welcomed the results of the Liverpool Trades Union Congress of 1890, at which, for the first time, the representatives of the new trades unions achieved the passing of a resolution on the struggle for the legal eight-hour working day. He considered that 'with its acceptance came the collapse of the empire of the old, conservative labour movement...' (p. 26), which had previously been opposing any kind of state regulation of relations between workers and capitalists.
Engels' letters also contain a description of the British socialist organisations. He thought that, in spite of definite progress, they were still 'far removed from the genuine English movement' (p. 167). The sectarianism of the Social Democratic Federation was revealed, he thought, by the fact that, although its platform was in the main theoretically right, it did not take the real demands of the people into consideration (ibid.). 'It has ossified Marxism into a hard and fast dogma and, by repudiating any labour movement that isn't orthodox Marxist (and, what's more, Marxist in a very wrong-headed way) ... has put itself in such a position that it can never become anything other than a sect' (pp. 493-94).
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At the same time, Engels noted that the participants of the new trades union movement, members of the Social Democratic Federation among them, showed interest in socialism (p. 167).
Engels wrote with satisfaction that Edward Aveling and Eleanor Marx-Aveling had authority in the left wing of the Social Democratic Federation and among the members of the new trades unions (ibid.). Particularly creditable, he thought, was their organisation of the May Day demonstrations carried out under the leadership of the Legal Eight Hours and Internationl Labour League, which was formed in the summer of 1890 out of the Central Committee for the preparations for the May Day demonstration of 1890 and played a considerable part in the socialist propaganda and formation of the Independent Labour Party in 1893. Describing, in a letter to Laura Lafargue, the May Day demonstration of 1891, Engels stressed that 'it has been almost exclusively Edward's and Tussy's work and they had to fight it through from beginning to end' (p. 185).
Some of Engels' letters contain his evaluation of another socialist organisation, the Fabian Society, which represented the democratic intellectuals and part of the workers. He disapproved of the Fabian thesis on the transition from capitalism to socialism through the education of the working class (p. 75). He criticised the Fabian Society because 'it preached and practised the affiliation of the workers to the Liberals' (p. 515). The grounds for this criticism were, in part, a letter from George Bernard Shaw to Bebel of 29 May 1892, which the latter forwarded to Engels. Outlining the pre-election tactics of the Fabians, Shaw wrote: '...Our only chance where the workers are not completely organized is to force the Liberals to accept our men as their party candidates' (see p. 563). Engels wrote about this to Kautsky: 'As regards our tactics we have one firm rule for all modern countries and for all times and that is to prevail upon the workers to form their own independent party in opposition to all bourgeois parties' (p. 515).
In a number of letters, Engels reacted to the problems of the working-class movement in the USA. His chief correspondents during those years were Sorge and Schlüter. The latter, having emigrated to the USA in 1889, ran the New Yorker Volkszeiting, a German-language newspaper of the Socialist Labor Party. It was from their XXVIII
letters that Engels drew much of his information about the condition of the working-class movement.
Engels could see the complexity and contradictoriness of the working-class and socialist movement in the USA. On the one hand, a fairly powerful trade union movement represented by the American Federation of Labor, an organisation of the skilled workers, mainly native-born Americans; on the other hand, contingents of immigrant workers, some of whom were outside the ranks of the organised working-class movement. The largest of these contingents consisted of emigrants from Germany who had brought their own traditions to the American working-class movement and were the core of the Socialist Labor Party. Its isolation in the working-class movement and its consequent failure to become a mass party resulted from its under-estimation of work in the mass organisations, especially those representing the trades, and from its lack of contact with the native-born American and the Black working men who were beginning to join in the struggle.
Engels did not approve of the standpoint taken by the Socialist Labor Party at the end of 1890 and the beginning of 1891, when its leaders refused to work in the biggest American workers' organisation, the American Federation of Labor, rejecting the terms, as proposed by Gompers, for entry to the organisation in individual order. In his letter to Schlüter of 29 January 1891, Engels put the question directly: 'Where do you propose to find a recruiting-ground if not amongst the trades unions?' (p. 114).
In answer to Sorge on 24 October 1891, Engels agreed with him that an 'ebb-tide had begun' in the working-class movement in the USA, considering this to be a characteristic sign of the movement, which was developing spasmodically. He thought that one of the causes of such ebbs was that 'the standard of living of the native American working-man is notably higher even than that of his English counterpart and this alone is enough to put him out of the running for some time to come' (p. 265).
At the same time, Engels hoped that 'when the time comes over there, things will move with tremendous speed and dynamism, but that may not be for some while yet. Miracles never happen' (ibid.).
In the early 1890s, Engels continued to take a lively interest in the state of affairs in Russia. He kept in personal contact with young Rus-
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sian Marxists, revolutionary Narodniks (Populists) and progressive scholars. His main Russian correspondent during those years was the economist Nikolai Danielson, the translator of Marx's Capital into Russian. Danielson's letters, devoted chiefly to economic problems and the position of the Russian peasantry, like the Russian books which he sent regularly, were an important source of information for Engels about the situation in the country and about the views of the Narodnik-oriented section of the Russian intelligentsia, who still had hopes of the non-capitalist way of development for Russia. Engels disputed these views in his replies, stating and substantiating his own viewpoint on Russia's present and on its immediate future.
As is very clear from these letters, Engels was definitively convinced that Russia had decisively taken the road of capitalist development, and that the peasant commune, despite of isolated indications of its relative vitality, was unable 'to resist the incessant blows dealt to it ... by rampant capitalism' (p. 443). This idea was expressed with preci-sion in his letter of 15 March 1892. Recalling what Marx had said at the end of the 1870s to the effect that the development of capitalism in Russia would inevitably lead the peasant commune to its destruction, Engels wrote: 'That seems to me to be in course of fulfilment just now.... I am afraid we shall have to treat the ooupiHa [commune] as a dream of the past, and reckon, in future, with a capitalist Russia' (p. 384). Objecting to Danielson, who affirmed that capitalism in Russia was developing artificially, and solely because of the government's protectionist policy, Engels proved the historical inevitability of capitalist production in Russia with all its consequences. He wrote on 22 September 1892: '...If Russia required after the Crimean war a. grande industrie of her own, she could have it in one form only: the capitalistic form' (p. 536). Engels also convinced his correspondent that whatever might or might not be the forms of this process, its essence and the contradictions inherent in it were, on the whole, the same as those in other countries.
In connection with the terrible famine that swept Russia in 1891 and which, Engels supposed, could lead to an acute internal political crisis, he analysed, in a letter to Bebel of 29 September-1 October 1891, the correlation of the class forces in the country that were capable of taking charge of a coup. 'In Russia three classes suffer — the landowning aristocracy, the peasantry, the emergent proletariat. The latter is still, and the first is already, too weak for revolution, while all the peasantry could achieve would be local insurrections which X X X
would be fruitless unless given the necessary cohesion and moral support by a successful insurrection in urban centres,' i. e. unless the workers were strong enough to play the leading role in overthrowing the autocracy. The bourgeoisie, which owed its position exclusively to the state, would hardly be able to head the struggle against Tsarism, although objectively it was the bourgeoisie alone that could assume power in the event of a coup (p. 243).
* * *
Volume 49 contains 276 letters by Engels, of which 173 are published in English for the first time, and 103 were published in this language earlier, 40 of them in part only. The details of the earlier English publications are given in the notes.
Obvious slips of the pen have been silently corrected. Proper and place names, and separate words abbreviated by the author are given in full. Defects in the manuscript are indicated in the footnotes, while passages of lost or illegible texts are indicated by omission points. Where restoration seems possible, it is given in square brackets. Passages deleted by the author are reproduced in footnotes only where they substantially affect the meaning.
Foreign words and expressions are retained in the form in which they were used by the author with a translation where necessary in the footnotes, and are italicised (if underlined by the author, they are given in spaced italics). English words and expressions used by Engels in text written in German and French are printed in small caps. Longer passages written in English in the original are placed in asterisks.
The number of notes relating to the same facts and events given in the texts of different letters, are duplicated.
The texts of the letters and notes were prepared by Alexander Va-tutin (letters from August 1890 to October 1891) and by Yuri Vasin (letters from November 1891 to September 1892). The preface was written by Alexander Vatutin and Yuri Vasin. The volume was edited by Boris Tartakovsky. The name index and the indexes of quoted and mentioned literature and periodicals were prepared by Alexander Panfilov (Russian Independent Institute of Social and National Problems).
The translations were made by Peter and Betty Ross, Barry Selman (Lawrence & Wishart), K. M. Cook, Victor Schnittke (Progress Publishing Group Corporation) and edited by Nicholas Jacobs (Lawrence & Wishart), Yelena Kalinina and Natalia Karmanova (Progress Publishing Group Corporation) and Norire Ter-Akopyan (Russian Academy of Sciences).
The volume was prepared for the press by the editors Yelena Kali-nina and Margarita Lopukhina (Progress Publishing Group Corporation).
LETTERS
August 1890-September 1892
1890
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