sions and a monopolist position in world markets.
Marx and Engels systematically followed, over some decades, this relation between working class opportunism and the imperialistic peculiarities of English capitalism. Engels, for instance, wrote the following to Marx on 7th October, 1858: "The English working class is actually becoming more and more bourgeois, which would seem to show that this most bourgeois of all the nations apparently wanted to bring matters to such a pass as to have a bourgeois aristocracy and a bourgeois proletariat side by side with the bourgeoisie. Obviously this is, to a certain extent, well calculated on the part of a nation which is exploiting the whole world." Almost a quarter of a century later on, in a letter of August 11th, 1881, Engels speaks of the worst English trade unions which "allow themselves to be led by men bought by the capitalists or at least paid by them." In a letter to Kautsky, of the 12th September, 1882, Engels wrote: "You ask me what the English workers think of colonial policy? The same thing as they think about politics in general. There is no working class party here, there are only Conservative and Liberal Radicals, and the workers very quietly enjoy together with them the fruits of the British colonial monopoly and of the British monopoly of the world market."91 Engels set forth these ideas for the general public in his preface to the second edition of The Condition of the English Working Class which appeared in 1892.
Here he clearly points out causes and effects.
The causes are:
(1) Exploitation of the whole world by this country.
