In an article in La Tribuna of February 2 this year, the 
honourable Giovanni Bovio reproaches the Italian Republican 
parliamentary deputies, who have latterly gone over to the royalist 
camp, for treating too scornfully the question of the form of 
government. This does not affect me directly. What does affect me 
is that he deals with my article on German socialism (Critica 
Sociale, January 16, 1892)* making the same reproach against the 
German socialists in general and against me in particular. This is 
what he says on the matter”: 

“Thus we can see the error of those socialists who, with Frederick Engels, speak 
of the imminent coming to power of socialism and do not specify what kind of 
power. Engels even established with mathematical arguments (and numbers have 
for some time seemed to me a good argument in history) the not too distant year 
in which the socialist party will become the majority in the German parliament. So 
far so good. And then? 

“It will take power. 

“Even better. But what power? Will it be monarchic, or republican, or will it 
go back to Weitling’s utopia, superseded by the Communist Manifesto of January 
1848? 

“The forms make no difference to us. 

“—Really?... But you cannot speak of power except where the form is made 
concrete. You can say that the new substance, the new idea, will of itself create the 
form, produce it from deep within itself, but you cannot, you must not, dispense 
with the problem.” 

To this I reply that I do not accept in the slightest the 
honourable Mr. Bovio’s interpretation. 

a See this volume, pp. 237-41.— Ed. 
b The following quotations are given in Italian in the original.— Ed. 

Reply to the Honourable Giovanni Bovio 271 

For a start, I have never said the socialist party will become the 
majority and then proceed to take power. On the contrary, I have 
expressly said that the odds are ten to one that our rulers, well 
before that point arrives, will use violence against us, and this 
would shift us from the terrain of majority to the terrain of 
revolution. But let us pass over this. 

“It will take power. But what power? Will it be monarchic, or republican, or will 
it go back to Weitling’s utopia, superseded by the Communist Manifesto of January 
1848?” 

Here I must permit myself the use of one of the honourable 
Mr. Bovio’s own expressions. He must really be a ‘“‘man of the 
cloister” if he has the slightest doubt about the nature of this 
power. 

All of governmental, aristocratic and bourgeois Germany 
reproaches our friends in the Reichstag for being republicans and 
revolutionaries. 

Marx and I, for forty years, repeated ad nauseam that for us 
the democratic republic is the only political form in which the 
struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first 
be universalised and then culminate in the decisive victory of the 
proletariat. 

The honourable Mr. Bovio is surely not so naive as to believe 
that an emperor of Germany would draw his ministers from the 
socialist party and that, if he so desired, he would accept the 
conditions—implying abdication—without which those ministers 
could not count on the support of their party? But it is true that 
his fear of seeing us “go back to Weitling’s utopia” gives me a 
fairly exalted estimate of my interlocutor’s naivety. 

Or does the honourable Mr. Bovio, in referring to Weitling, 
mean to imply that the German socialists attribute no more 
importance to the social form than to the political form? Again he 
would be mistaken. He should be well enough acquainted with 
German socialism to know that it demands the socialisation of all 
the means of production. How can this economic revolution be 
accomplished? That will depend on the circumstances in which 
our party seizes power, on the moment at which and the manner. 
in which that occurs. As Bovio says: 

“the new substance, the new idea, will of itself create the form, produce it from 
deep within itself”. 

Meanwhile, if tomorrow, by some accident, our party were 
called to power, I know perfectly well what I would propose as a 
programme of action. 

“The forms make no difference to us.’? 

I should like to point out that it was neither I nor any other 
German socialist who said that, or anything of the kind, but the 
honourable Mr. Bovio and he alone. I should certainly like to 
know by what right he attributes such “‘sciocchezza”* to us. 

For the rest, if the honourable Mr. Bovio had waited for and 
read the second half of my article (Critica Sociale, February 1),” 
perhaps he would not have taken the trouble of confusing the 
German revolutionary socialists with the Italian royalist Republi- 
cans. 

February 6, 1892 
Frederick Engels 

February 16, 1892 script, checked with the journal 

Translated from the French and 
Italian