| Author(s) | Friedrich Engels |
|---|---|
| Written | 4 November 1882 |
ENGELS TO EDUARD BERNSTEIN
IN ZURICH
London, 4 November 1882
Dear Mr Bernstein,
I beg to confirm mine of yesterday's date. I also have pleasure in acknowledging receipt of your favour of the 1st inst. and make haste to reply to same. As you can see, the old counting-house style is not yet quite defunct.— In fact I am writing straight away in order to save you a great deal of unnecessary trouble. It is most kind of you to hunt out and send all those books for us but as of now we have no real use for them. For in the 3rd edition[1] Marx merely intends to bring the state of factory legislation up to date by making emendations and additions; to that end he needs the text of the original Acts and nothing more. Secondary matters such as the protection of labour, liability, etc., are not of importance for this purpose. And I wrote and told you yesterday what I still need for Bismarck[2] : the early or mid-1879 stock market prices of the last 6 railways to be nationalised, and the first reading of Bismarck's Accident, etc., Insurance Bills. If I need the latest edition of Saling[3] due to come out in the meantime (it was kind of you to advise me of this), I can get hold of it within 4-5 days.
I was quite glad to have your information about Garcia; after all, one never knows when one may not run into the man. What he says about agitation on the part of certain TRADES UNION chiefs in regard to the channel tunnel is quite true. They are the very ones who were always open to purchase by the radical bourgeois (under Morley) and on this occasion they have been joined by G. Shipton, the editor of The Labour Standard. There is absolutely no doubt that these people are in the pay of the Channel Company; they are not running up travelling expenses, etc., out of sheer enthusiasm. Admittedly it is a pretty innocuous business at present, but Shipton himself has now had a taste of bourgeois money, of course, and in view of his utter spinelessness and unbounded craving for popularity, this may lead to something more. He has lost his virginity and the other 'REPRESENTATIVE WORKING MEN', those who have grown grey in the hurly-burly, will doubtless take him completely in tow before long.
That you are being bombarded from Paris with pro-Malon anti-Guesde letters I willingly believe. But after all, the correspondent you cite pronounces himself an incompetent judge in as much as he admits writing under the impression of the current anti-German campaign and reproaches you for doing your duty as editor of the party organ, namely taking a bird's eye view, critical and all-embracing, of the affair and, unlike himself, refusing to be swayed by transitory and local events. And if, 2 months later, the man is still harping on this one unfortunate article4 ' ° and permits his view of a significant faction of the workers to be determined by this one incident alone, does that mean that the party organ ought to proceed in an equally blinkered fashion? If there exists in Paris a whole lot of non-socialist and semi-socialist workers who vent their chauvinism on the hated Germans, is the Citoyen at fault? Certainly no more at fault than the German socialists in Paris if, when things come to a head, a whole lot of non-socialist German workers in Paris, London, New York or any other big American city accept a lower wage, thereby depressing the wages of the natives (in America even those of the Irish!) and bringing the German workers en masse into not altogether undeserved disrepute? And, finally, if he found the article so hard to stomach, why didn't he object? A disclaimer did appear and admittedly it made pretty light of the matter, but Marx tells me that, according to the tenets of the Paris press, it was as adequate as any that is customarily issued in respect of an editor who has blundered, always assuming that no pressure has been brought to bear on the paper. But such pressure could have been brought to bear, and very simply at that. Had a letter of protest been drawn up and delivered to the office either by a single individual or a deputation, the editors would have had to take the matter seriously. Had the editor in attendance (it might even have been Picard himself) made difficulties, all that would have been required was the threat, that, if the letter failed to appear in the Citoyen on the following day, it would be sent forthwith to the Sozialdemokrat, in Zurich. If your correspondent did not know enough French, Vollmar was there; had the latter been absent, Hirsch[4] would have gladly taken the thing on. If the chaps had acted in this way they would have earned themselves respect, taught the Citoyen a useful lesson and I should have been heartily glad. But to submit to it all like so many sheep and then give vent to cries of woe is typically German and has earned the Germans the contempt they deserve. If we had put up with that sort of thing from the French and English, if our people had behaved so spinelessly in Germany, where should we be today? Before the German socialists in Paris demand it is their view of the French movement that should prevail in the party organ, they must demonstrate, firstly, that they are at all capable of free and impartial criticism and, secondly, that they are able to stand their ground vis-à-vis the French. Neither of these things has happened.
As to the undesirability of a daily paper in Paris, I am unable to share your view. In Paris the influence of a weekly is confined to small circles; if one wants to influence the masses one must have a daily. We too were opposed to a daily when there was no prospect of getting hold of one and the childish emigration to Lyons took place in connection with the Emancipation.[5] Things are different now. The Citoyen and its editors have made a name for themselves in Paris, bourgeois papers of all complexions have been compelled to engage in disputations with it and been triumphantly dismasted and, were we now to lose the daily, it would be a signal defeat. The fact that it cannot be an ideal, perfect paper, that a spuriously democratic system of editing by comité often ends up with there being no editing at all, as in the case of Picard's article, in no way alters the case. Not long ago, however, Lafargue sent me the issues, some 20 of them, dealing with the split,[6] and it seemed to me that the paper was by no means so bad — apart from those aspects we have long criticised and which would be no different in a weekly. But in the view of anyone familiar with conditions in the Paris press a paper appearing twice weekly would be impracticable from the start; it would come stillborn into the world. Either a weekly or a daily. And with the latter the former editors of the Citoyen undoubtedly now have a very considerable chance of succeeding, as is evident from their rapid transition to the daily Egalité which is already selling more than 5,000 copies in Paris.
Now for the Clemenceau MEETING. To assess this, like other things in Paris, by German standards, is quite impossible. When Gambetta was unable to make himself heard in his own constituency,[7] there were shouts of triumph from the entire radical and socialist press. The same thing has now happened to Clemenceau.[8] Clemenceau is a cool, calculating man, quite prepared to go further, when he sees the need for it, and even become a communist, provided he can be convinced: convainquez-moi donc![9] And the workers in his constituency are employing a highly effective means of persuasion by demonstrating to him that his seat is in danger. That may give a shove to his somewhat slothful study of socialism.
But who were the people who did it? Guesde & Co. on their own perhaps? No, the chairman was in fact Joffrin, Malon's friend and Clemenceau's future rival candidate in Montmartre! So our people were decent enough, as always hitherto in the struggle against the bourgeoisie, to vote for Malon's chairman and side with Malon's people. If we are to censure the attitude of the workers, Malon's people are far more deserving of censure than Guesde's.
The passage in the Citoyen simply says that these tactics should continue to be employed against Clemenceau; if they have been successful once, why not again? It remains to be seen whether the Prolétaire would be able to pay the Egalité in the same coin at meetings. Nothing I have witnessed so far has given me cause to believe that this would be so. But even were it momentarily to be the case, it wouldn't matter, and would be unlikely to continue for long.
And now a quick word or two before the post goes — otherwise this letter won't leave until Monday morning — on the campaign you have in mind with regard to the programme.[10] I consider it most untimely. The programme is a bad one, but no one discusses it any more. An amended programme requires that it should not be open to dispute. So long as delegates are not elected in public, therefore, so long as every mandate can be disputed, it would be better not to interfere with the programme unless absolutely necessary. An amended programme would give the right wing an excuse to set themselves up as the true faithful who have complete confidence in the old well-tried programme, etc. So think twice about it before sowing these seeds of discord among a party that is bound hand and foot.
The greatest danger to any political émigrés lies in the urge to be up and doing; something has really got to happen; something has really got to be done! And so things happen whose import one fails to appreciate and which, as one later realises oneself, had far better never happened at all. Might you and Vollmar be suffering from the urge to be up and doing? If so beware — of yourselves. With kindest regards.
Yours,
F. E.
Marx is in Ventnor, ISLE OF Wight4 ' '; getting on well.