In 1891, Engels remarks (in “To the Critique of the 1891 Draft Social-Democratic Program,” Neue Zeit, XX, 1, 1901–1902, pp. 5 and following): “The political demands contained in the draft suffer from a grave shortcoming. In it… ”
NB
there is nothing—(Engels’ emphasis)—that ought properly to have been said” (p. 9). ||
Engels goes on to explain that the German Constitution is but a “mold” of the 1850 Constitution, and that the Reichstag is—just as Liebknecht had put it—a “fig leaf covering up absolutism” (p. 10).
“… To attempt, on the basis of this constitution—and of the petty-state structure it enshrined—to ‘transform all instruments of labor into common property,’ while at the same time maintaining the union between Prussia and Reuss-Greiz-Schleiz-Lobenstein—where one ally possesses as many square miles as the other has square inches—is sheer nonsense.
It is risky to broach this topic. Yet, in any case, the matter must be advanced one way or another. How urgently this is needed becomes strikingly clear precisely now, with the opportunism—so rapidly spreading (einreißende)—that has taken root in much of the social-democratic press. Out of fear…
* See this volume, p. 68. Ed.
“The renewal of the Socialist Law, prompted by memories of all manner of hasty pronouncements made under the sway of that very law, is now suddenly supposed to enable the Party to rely entirely on the existing legal order in Germany to carry out all its demands by peaceful means.”
NB:
the argument and “the will of the people…”
Engels further observes that one may still speak of a “peaceful” “integration” (“man kann sich vorstellen”—a more tentative and cautious formulation: merely to imagine) in countries like democratic republics—France, America—or in monarchies such as England, “where the impending buyout of the dynasty is discussed daily in the press, and where that very dynasty is powerless in the face of the popular will…” “But in Germany, where the government is almost omnipotent and the Reichstag, along with all other representative bodies, lacks real power—in Germany, to proclaim such a thing—and to do so without necessity—amounts to stripping absolutism of its fig leaf while binding oneself hand and foot.”
((Abstractly speaking, such a policy can only, in the long run, mislead one’s own Party. One shifts general, abstract political questions to the forefront, thereby obscuring the more immediate, concrete questions—those questions which, when the first major events occur, when the first political crises arise, will themselves force their way onto the agenda.
Nota bene! What else could possibly come of it but for the Party to find itself suddenly at a loss in the decisive moment, with uncertainty hanging over the most critical issues—and, above all, with everything left unresolved?!
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