Letter to Wilhelm Liebknecht, November 24, 1894

ENGELS TO WILHELM LIEBKNECHT

IN BERLIN

[London,] 24 November 1894
41 Regent's Park Road, N. W.

Dear Liebknecht,

I have written to Bebel, 25 suggesting that, in political debate, one should always consider things calmly and do nothing in haste or in the heat of the moment. I myself having often come a cropper in consequence. On the other hand, however, I also have a small bone to pick with yourself.

Whether Bebel's conduct in the assembly was inept is open to question. 425

But in point of fact he was absolutely right. As to editor of the central organ you are, of course, bound to cast oil on troubled waters, to argue away even what are very real differences, TO MAKE THINGS PLEASANT ALL ROUND, and to promote unity in the party until the day the breach comes. Thus as editor you may have deplored Bebel's conduct. But what was displeasing to the editor should have been welcome to the party leader, namely the fact that there should be men who do not always have to sport an obligatory pair of editor's spectacles upon their noses, and who also remind the editor that, in his capacity as party leader, he would do well now and again to view the world with the naked eye rather than through rose-tinted spectacles.

On the very eve of the Frankfurt Party Conference the Bavarians formed what was tantamount to a Sonderbund at Nuremberg. 431 They arrived in Frankfurt with what was manifestly an ultimatum. To add insult to injury, Vollmar spoke of marching separately, while Grillo^[1] declared: 'Resolve any thing you like; we shall not conform.' They claimed special rights for the Bavarians and dubbed their opponents in the party 'Prussians' and 'Berliners'. They demanded that the grant of supplies be approved, as also an agrarian policy which is actually further to the right than that of the petty bourgeoisie. Instead of promptly putting a spoke in their wheels, as had always been done before, the Party Conference did not venture to pass a resolution. So if that wasn't the time for Bebel to speak of the penetration of the party by petty-bourgeois elements then I'm at a loss to know when he should have done.

And what did the Vorwärts do? Fasten upon the form of Bebel's attack, say things weren't so bad after all and place itself in such 'diametrical opposition' to him that only the—in the event inevitable—'misunder- standing' of Bebel's opponents forced you to declare that your diametrical opposition referred simply to the form taken by Bebel's attack, but that, so far as its substance was concerned—the matter of supplies and the agrarian question—he had been right and you were on his side. 432 I should have thought that the mere fact of your having been forced to make this statement after the event would have proved to you that you had strayed much further to the right than Bebel could have strayed to the left.

And after all, the whole debate hinged solely upon the two points in which the action of the Bavarians culminated, namely, the opportunism

of granting supplies in order to catch the petty bourgeoisie, and the op- portunism of Vollmar's agrarian propaganda intended to catch the middle and big peasants. These, and the sectarian attitude of the Bavarians were the only practical questions under consideration, and if Bebel took them up at the point at which the Party Conference had left the Party in the lurch, you ought to be grateful to him. If he described the impossible position created by the Party Conference as attributable to the growing influence of philistinism in the party, he was merely placing a particular question in the general context in which it belongs, and that is also worthy of recognition. And if he forced a debate on all this, he was only doing what absolutely had to be done and ensuring that, when confronted by urgent questions, the next Party Conference should act in full knowledge of the facts instead of being left gaping, as at Frankfurt.

The danger of a split cannot be laid at the door of Bebel who called a spade a spade. It must be laid at the door of the Bavarians who presumed to act in a way hitherto unprecedented in the party, much to the glee of the vulgar democrats on the Frankfurter Zeitung who recognise in Vollmar and the Bavarians men of their own stamp, while the latter rejoice and become ever more audacious,

You say Vollmar is not a traitor. Maybe. Nor do I think he regards himself as such. But what would you call a man who asks of a proletarian party that it should oblige the Upper Bavarian big and middle peasants, owners of anything between ten and thirty hectares, by perpetuating a state of affairs based on the exploitation of farm servants and day labourers? A proletarian party, expressly founded for the perpetuation of wage slavery! The man may be an anti-Semite, a bourgeois democrat, a Bavarian particularist and anything else you care to name, but a Social Democrat? Come to that, in a growing workers' party, the accretion of petty-bourgeois elements is inevitable, nor does it do any harm. Any more than the accretion of 'academics',^[2] failed students, etc. A few years ago they still constituted a danger. Now we are able to digest them. But the process of digestion must be allowed to run its course. And for this, hydrochloric acid is needed; if there is not enough of it (as Frankfurt went to show), we ought to be thankful to Bebel for giving us an extra dose, thereby enabling us properly to digest the non-proletarian elements.

For it is in this that the restoration of true harmony in the party con-

sists, not in seeking to do away with every question involving genuine internal controversy by ignoring or denying its existence.

According to you, what is at stake is 'the bringing about of effective action'. Very nice, too, but when exactly is the action going to start?^[3]