London, 5 June 1884 

Dear Ede, 

Have spent a week at the seaside. 73° While there I got a nasty cut on 
my right index finger and hence can only write briefly and badly. So 
Kautsky will have to wait, the Sozialdemokrat being. more important 

* Henri Leclére 

than the Neue Zeit and, in the latter’s case, the circumstances are such 
that it makes no difference anyway whether I stick my oar in or not. 
Besides I consider that all Kautsky’s moves, in so far as he has told me 
about them and in so far as I am able to judge the situation, have 
been absolutely correct. ?+° 

As regards the Sozialdemokrat, it is a rather different matter. Now 
that their worships, the wailers,'?° have formally combined into 
a party and constitute a majority in the parliamentary group, #9 now 
that they have recognised, and are exploiting, the power they have 
acquired thanks to the Anti-Socialist Law, 4” I consider it to be more 
than ever our duty to defend all our own vantage points to the utmost, 
especially our vantage point on the Sozialdemokrat, which is the most 
important of all. 

These people live off the Anti-Socialist Law. Were there to be free 
discussion tomorrow, I should be all for letting fly at once, in which 
case they would soon come to grief. But so long as there is no free dis- 
cussion, so long as they control all the papers printed in Germany and 
their numbers (as the majority of the ‘leaders’) enable them to make 
the very most of gossip, intrigue, whispering campaigns, we, I believe, 
must steer clear of anything that might lead to a breach, or rather 
might lay the blame for that breach at our door. That is the universal 
rule when there is a struggle within one’s own party, and now it 
applies more than ever. The breach must be so contrived that we 
continue to lead the old party while they either resign or are chucked 
out. 

Then the timing. Just now everything is in ther favour. We cannot, 
after the breach, stop them from slandering and reviling us in Ger- 
many, from posing as the representatives of the masses (for the masses 
do elect them after all!). We have only the Soztaldemokrat and the 
foreign press. They can gain a hearing, we can only do so with diffi- 
culty. So if we precipitate a breach at this moment, the great mass of 
the party will claim not without justification that we have sown dis- 
cord, have disorganised the party at the very time when, beset by 
dangers, it is laboriously reorganising itself. If we can avoid it, the 
breach ought to be postponed, and this is still my view, until some 
change in Germany gives us rather more elbow room. 

If a breach becomes inevitable nevertheless, it must not be of the 
personal kind, it must not involve any rows (or what could be repre- 
sented as such) between e. g. you and the Stuttgarters ?!°; rather the 
occasion for it must be a quite specific point of principle, i.e. in this 

case of an infringement of the programme. Rotten though the pro- 
gramme may be, a cursory perusal of it will enable you to find enough 
in it to support your argument. ?7*! The programme, however, is not 
subject to the jurisdiction of the parliamentary group. The breach 
must be prepared in advance to the extent that Bebel, for one, agrees 
to it and at once goes along with you. And, thirdly, you must know 
what you want and are able to do once the breach has been made. 
To allow the Sozialdemokrat to pass into the hands of these people 
would be to make the German party the laughing-stock of the entire 
world. 

The worst thing ofall in such a case is impatience; decisions made on 
the spur of the moment and dictated by passion always seem to one- 
self tremendously noble and heroic, but they regularly lead to blun- 
ders, as I know only too well from a hundred examples from my own 
practical experience. 

So: 1) postpone the breach for as long as possible, 2) if it becomes 
inevitable, make sure that it emanates from them, 3) get everything 
ready in the meantime, 4) do nothing without Bebel, for one, and poss- 
ibly also Liebknecht, who will again be good for something (possibly 
too good) once he sees that the thing is inevitable and, 5) defend your 
vantage point on the Sozialdemokrat envers et contre tous,* down to your 
last cartridge. That is my view. 

You could certainly repay the ‘condescension’ of these gentlemen 
a thousand times over. You’re certainly never at a loss for a ready an- 
swer in other respects and can certainly confront those jackasses with 
enough irony as well as disdain to make them rue this behaviour. 
There can be no serious discussion with ignoramuses like these who 
glory in their own ignorance; rather, they must be derided, hoist with 
their own petard, etc. 

Don’t forget either that, should things come to a head, my hands 
are very much tied by the vast amount of work ahead of me 
and I shan’t be able to join in the fray to the extent I might wish 
to do. 

I should also be grateful if, instead of general complaints about the 
philistines, you could give me a few details of what they object to and 
what they demand. Nota bene, the longer you negotiate with them, the 
greater the amount of self-incriminating material they must inevit- 
ably supply you with! 

Write and tell me how far I ought to go into these matters when 

a 

against all-comers 

corresponding with Bebel; I shall have to write to him shortly and in- 
tend to put off doing so until Monday the 9th inst., by which time 
I may have had a reply from you. 

Regards to Kautsky. 

Your 

PE,