#time

"My dear Laura. My congratulations to Paul le candidat du Jardin des Plantes—et des animaux. Being, in his quality as a nigger, a degree nearer to the rest of the animal kingdom than the rest of us, he is undoubtedly the most appropriate representative of that district. Let us hope the animaux will have the best of it in this struggle against the bêtes.—I am rather surprised at Basly's holding back, but if a set of men succeeds in being excluded from the press altogether, what can they expect? From Mesa's letter in the Spanish Socialista I See that the Blanquists too are making volte-face and approaching the Possibilists—another bad sign. A little success—even relative—at the elections would therefore be very welcome when our people are under such a momentary cloud. I know very well that that cloud will pass, that Parisian party life is a continual change of ups and downs, but at the same time I cannot but wish that next time they will cherish their own little weekly paper a little more than those disreputable dailies to which they work hard to give a reputation in order to be kicked out as soon as they have succeeded."

React to this quote

More by Friedrich Engels

See all

“The irony of world history turns everything upside down. We, the "revolutionaries," the "rebels"—we are thriving far better on legal methods than on illegal methods and revolt. The parties of order, as they call themselves, are perishing under the legal conditions created by themselves. They cry despairingly with Odilon Barrot: la légalité notes tue, legality is the death of us; whereas we, under this legality, get firm muscles and rosy cheeks and look like eternal life.”

“The proletariat is that class in society which lives entirely from the sale of its labor and does not draw profit from any kind of capital; whose weal and woe, whose life and death, whose sole existence depends on the demand for labor – hence, on the changing state of business, on the vagaries of unbridled competition.”

“There can be little doubt that, as far as they thought of the matter at all, Marx and Engels were personally homophobic, as shown by an acerbic 1869 exchange of letters on Jean-Baptiste von Schweitzer, a German socialist rival. Schweitzer had been arrested in a park on a morals charge and not only did Marx and Engels refuse to join a committee defending him, they resorted to the cheapest form of bathroom humor in their private comments about the affair.”

“Works of Marx and Engels”

“Libcom.org/library Frederick Engels archive”

“When all capital, all production, all exchange have been brought together in the hands of the nation, private property will disappear of its own accord, money will become superfluous, and production will so expand and man so change that society will be able to slough off whatever of its old economic habits may remain.”