AN UNUSUAL FRIENDSHIP 192 THE CLASS STRUGGLE 193 Court Councillor. There is no trace of this ultimate human weakness in the friendship of Marx and Engels: the more their thoughts and labors became interwoven, the more each one of them remained a full man, complete in himself.
rather on the relations between Socialism and democracy. The subject, furthermore, was put on an absolutely unacceptable basis: dictatorship or democracy. As if every Socialist who knows the ABC of Socialist philosophy did not know that there is no such thing as bourgeois democracy under capitalism.
For us the choice lies not between dictatorship and democracy but between capitalist dictatorship and Socialist dictatorship, between a dictatorship for and of the people, and a dictatorship against the people.
In France we have, at this moment, a dictatorship of the past. We proclaim to the world that we will put in place of the dictatorship of the deputies of a dead age, the dictatorship of the oppressed masses.
Their exteriors were quite different. Engels, a blond Teuton of tall stature, of English manners, as an observer once said of him, always well dressed, with a bearing that was rigid with the training not only of the barracks, but also of the counting house. With six clerks, he said, he would organize a branch of the administration a thousand times more simple and efficient than with sixty Government Councillors, who cannot even write legibly and get your books all balled up, so that the Devil himself can make nothing of them. member of the Manchester Stock Exchange, perfectly respectable in the business dealings and the amusements of the English bourgeoisie, its fox hunts and its Christmas parties, he was yet a tireless mental worker and fighter, who, in a little house on the outskirts of the city, held his treasure concealed, his little Irish girl, in whose arms he would refresh himself whenever he tired of the human turmoil in the world without.
An Unusual Friendship By FRANZ MEHRING The victory of Marx career was not only due to the man enormous power. According to all human probability, he would have succumbed sooner or later, if he had not found in Engels a friend, of whose self sacrificing fidelity we have had no accurate picture until the publication of the correspondence of the two men.
No other such spectacle is afforded in all recorded history.
Couples of friends, of historical importance, are found throughout history, and German history has its examples also. Frequently their life work is so closely interwoven that it is difficult to decide which accomplishment belongs to each one of them. But always there has been a persistent remnant of individual obstinacy or stubbornness, or perhaps only an instinctive reluctance to surrender one own personality, which, in the words of the poet, is the highest blessing of the children of men. After all, Luther saw in Melanchton only a chickenlivered scholar, while Melanchton regarded Luther as a coarse peasant. And in the correspondence of Goethe and Schiller, any one with sound senses can discern the secret lack of attunement between the great Privy Councillor and the small Marx, on the other hand, short, thick set, with flashing eyes and a lion mane of ebon hue, betraying his Semitic origin; of careless exterior, a father, whose family cares alone would be sufficient to keep him away from the social life of the great city; so intensely devoted to consuming intellectual labor that he has hardly the time to gulp down a hasty dinner and uses up his bodily strength to all hours of the night; a tireless thinker, to whom thought is a supreme pleasure; in this respect a genuine successor of Kant, of Fichte, and particularly, of Hegel, whose sentence he loved to repeat: Even the most criminal thought of a scoundrel is more sublime and more magnificent than the miracles of the celestial sphere, but differing from them in that his thoughts inexorably drive him to action, he was unpractical in small matters, but very practical in large matters; far too helpless to arrange a petty household, but incomparably capable in the business of re