Letter to Victor Adler, October 11, 1893

ENGELS TO VICTOR ADLER

IN VIENNA

London, 11 October 1893

Dear Victor,

We arrived back here on 29 September 189 with mounting recklessness, attacked the pile of work we found waiting for us.

Though I was unable to discover Comrade Höger's 'whole series of boulevards' in Berlin, there can be no doubt that, so far as appearances go, it is a very fine city; even in working-class districts all one sees are palatial façades. But what lies behind those façades is better passed over in silence. The poverty of working-class districts is, of course, universal, but what I found particularly overwhelming was the 'Berlin living-room',^[1] a place unimaginable anywhere else in the world, a refuge of darkness and stale air as also of your Berlin philistine who feels perfectly at home there. Golly! There was nothing of the kind in August's apartment, which was the only one I liked, but in any of the others I'd go off my head.

However in writing this letter it was not my object to send you the above cri de cœur, but rather to congratulate you and the Viennese.

First, your Schwender speech 269 which shows once again how sure is your grasp of the difficult and complex conditions in Austria, and how firm a hold you keep on the clue in the labyrinth. And at this particular juncture that is of the utmost importance.

In the second place I must especially congratulate you and the Austrians generally on the resounding victory won as a result of your agitation for suffrage, namely Taaffe's Electoral Reform Bill. 270 And here I must enlarge somewhat.

Having taken a look at your country, people and government I have come to realise ever more clearly that really outstanding victories are within our grasp there. An industry that is growing rapidly but which, because of years of high protective tariffs, still largely continues to operate

with outmoded productive forces (the equipment I saw in the Bohemian factories proved as much); the industrialists themselves. I mean the bigger ones—the majority of whom are as closely involved in the Stock Exchange as in industry proper; in the towns, philistines who are more or less indif- ferent to politics, have abandoned themselves to sybaritism, 271 and desire above all to be left to pursue their pleasures in peace; in the country, either a rapid slide into debt or the swallowing up of small properties; the real ruling classes are the big landowners who, however, are quite content with their political position whereby they are assured of a rather indirect domination; also the upper middle class and a scattering of haute finance^[2] closely linked with the big industrialists whose political power is much less immediately in evidence but who are also quite content with this state of affairs; among the propertied classes, i.e. the grandees, there is no desire to turn indirect into direct, constitutional rule, while among the small fry no serious effort is made toward true participation in political power; the result is indifference and stagnation, punctuated only by the feuding over nationalities between various members of the aristocracy and the bourgeoisie, and by the events arising out of the union with Hungary.

Above all this there hovers a government whose absolutist proclivities are subject to few formal, and these for the most part only fictive, restraints; nor, in practice, does it encounter many obstacles. For it is by its nature conservative and so, too, is your aristocrat, your bourgeois and your philistine bon vivant. The peasant, however, in his rural isolation, cannot achieve any organised opposition. What is wanted of the government is that it should live and let live, and this is something at which the Austrian government has always been adept. Hence the fabrication—explicable also on other grounds—of laws and regulations that exist only on paper, hence, too, the extremes to which that process is taken, its elevation into a principle and the astonishing administrative slippiness which, I must say, exceeded anything I could have imagined.

Well then, in a stagnant political situation such as this, one in which the government, despite its extraordinarily advantageous position vis-à-vis the individual classes, is nevertheless perpetually getting into hot water: 1. because those classes are split up into umpteen nationalities and hence, contrary to all the rules of strategy, march united (against the workers) but fight divided (i.e., against one another), 2. because of

perpetual money troubles, 3. because of Hungary, 4. because of involvements abroad—in short in a situation like this, I told myself, a worker's party with its own programme and tactics, which knows what it wants and how to get it, has sufficient will-power to do so, and is, moreover, thanks to a happy miscegenation of Celts, Slavs and Germans, in which the latter element predominates, possessed of a gay, mercurial temperament—that party need only develop its capabilities enough to score quite outstanding successes. With none of the other parties knowing what they want and a government which likewise does not know what it wants, but lives from hand to mouth, a party which knows what it wants and wants it with tenacity and singleness of purpose, is bound to win in the end. And all the more so in that everything the Austrian Workers' Party 272 wants and could want is no more than is also demanded by the country's progressive economic development.

Here, therefore, we have a situation more propitious to rapid success than in any other country, even in Germany where, though development has been more rapid and the party is stronger, yet resistance is far more determined. Add to that the fact that Austria, a great power in decline, still feels ill at ease in Europe, a feeling that has always been foreign to Prussia, a small power in the ascendant. And, having joined the ranks of the 'modern' states in 1866, Austria also feels ashamed of internal weaknesses—which it need not have done when still an avowedly reactionary state. Indeed, the less a country wants to be a genuinely modern state, the greater will be its desire to be regarded as such, and the more strongly reaction rears its head in Prussia— where it is under far greater restraint than in Austria—the more liberal will be the attitude adopted by Austria out of malicious glee.

Now, the situation in Europe—I mean the internal situation of the in- dividual states—is approximating ever more closely to that of 1845. The proletariat is increasingly coming to hold the same position as the bour- geoisie did then. At that time it was Switzerland and Italy who set things off; Switzerland with her internal strife between democratic and Catholic cantons which came to a head in the Sonderbund War; 273 Italy with Pio Nono's 274 liberal endeavours and the liberal-nationalist changes in Tuscany, the small duchies, Piedmont, Naples and Sicily. The Sonderbund War and the bombardment of Palermo 275 were, as everyone knows, the immediate precursors of the February revolution of 1848 in Paris.

Today, when the crisis might come to a head only five or six years hence, Belgium would seem to be taking over the role of Switzerland,

Austria that of Italy, and Germany that of France. The struggle for suffrage began in Belgium 276 and is being taken up on an impressive scale in Austria. And there can be no question of a settlement being reached on the basis of some sort of half-baked electoral reform. Once the ball is rolling, the impulsion will communicate itself to all around it, and thus one country will immediately affect its neighbour, So besides the possibility of your scoring great victories there is the opportunity, i.e. hence also the likelihood, of your doing so.

Such, more or less, is the tenor of what I expounded to Louise yesterday afternoon as my view of Austria's immediate mission. And at 8 p.m. the Evening Standard brought the news—still in rather indefinite terms—of Taaffe's capitulation,^[3] while today we are given the Bill, at any rate in very general outline. Well, now the ball really has got rolling, and you people will see to it that it doesn't stop. I don't want to say anything about the Bill until I am rather better informed, but of one thing I feel sure, namely that Taaffe would like, à la Bismarck, to split the now undivided urban Liberal vote and play off the workers against the bourgeoisie. Not that we have any objection; the Liberal and other bourgeois parties will try and restrict enfranchisement still further, and you might thus find yourselves in the pleasant position of supporting the worthy Taaffe against his parliament. At all events, it's a bonus that is not to be sneezed at and, before I come back, you will doubtless be duly installed as a deputy in the Diet. The Daily Chronicle'is already talking of 20 safe seats for Labour. With 20, or even less than 20, the Diet will be a very different kind of body from what it has been hitherto, and the gentlemen will be amazed at the life that this will inject into the ramshackle old place. And if a few Czechs should happen to get in alongside our German chaps, it will put something of a damper on the squabbling over nationalities, and enable Young Czechs and Old Czechs 277 and German Nationals to see each other in an altogether new light. And here one might say that the entry of the first social-Democrats into the Diet, will mark the beginning of a new era in Austria.

And it is you people who have brought this about and, because of the dawning of this new era, we all of us rejoice that we shall have in the Diet a man with so incisive an intellect as yourself.

Warm regards from Louise and

Your

F. Engels

Regards from Louise to yourself and also from me to Popp, Reumann, Adelheid, Ulbing and tutti quanti.