UN GENEVA 

London, | April 1880 

Dear Old Man, 

This is to notify you that I have taken out a money order for you at 
the post office for four pounds sterling-—should amount to 100 frs 
80 cts—and hope it will reach you safely. I trust that your health 
and that of your wife has improved now that the bitter winter is 
happily behind us. Here things are so-so. Mrs Marx is still not quite 
up to the mark and Marx, too, could be better. When winter’s over, 
he always has his worst time; his coughing fits prevent him from 
sleeping. 

For the rest, things have reverted to what they were in 1850. The 
Workers’ Society has split up into a multitude of parties 8-—— Most 
here, Rackow there — and it is as much as we can do not to get drawn 
into this maelstrom.* So many storms in a teacup, which may have an 
altogether salutary effect on some of the participants in that they con- 
tribute to their development but, so far as the march of events is con- 
cerned, whether 100 German working men here declare themselves for 
this side or for that is pretty immaterial. If they could exert any influ- 
ence on the English— but there’s no question of that. In his thirst for 
action Most cannot keep still but nor, for that matter, can he get any- 
thing done; people in Germany just won’t see that, because Most has 
been statutorily slung out of the country, the moment of revolution is 
at hand. The Frezheit is to become, by hook or by crook, the most rev- 
olutionary paper in the world, but this cannot be achieved simply 
by repeating the word ‘revolution’ in every line. Luckily it matters 
very little what’s in the paper and what isn’t. The same thing applies 
to the Zurich organ,” which advocates revolution one day, only to de- 
clare on the next that a violent upheaval is the greatest of misfor- 
tunes, which is afraid on the one hand of being outdone by Most’s 
rhetoric and fears on the other that the workers may take its own rheto- 
ric to heart. Well, take your pick between the empty rantings of the 
Fretheit and the narrow philistinism of the Sozéaldemokrat. 

@ See this volume, p. 9.-> Der Sozialdemokrat 

I fear that our friends in Germany are deluding themselves as to 
the kind of organisation that ought to be maintained under present 
circumstances. That elected members of parliament should wish to 
place themselves in the van because there would otherwise be no lead- 
ership — to that I have no objection. But they can neither demand 
nor impose the implicit obedience that could be demanded by the 
former party leadership, specifically elected for the purpose. Least of 
all under present circumstances, without a press, without mass meet- 
ings. The more loose-knit the organisation now seems to be, the more 
tightly-knit it is in reality. Instead of this, the old system is to be re- 
tained, the party leadership is to have the final say (although there is 
no congress to discipline or, if necessary, dismiss it), and anyone who 
attacks one of its members is branded a heretic. At the same time, the 
best of them are themselves aware that they have in their midst all 
sorts of incapable and otherwise not very savoury persons, and they 
must be obtuse indeed if they fail to see that it is not they who are in 
control of their organ, but Hochberg, thanks to his money-bags, and 
with him his fellow philistines Schramm and Bernstein. In my view, 
the old party, together with its former organisation, is finished. When, 
as may be expected, the European movement shortly gets going 
again, then it will be joined by the vast mass of the German prole- 
tariat, of which the 500,000 men of 1878 ° will form the trained and 
educated nucleus, and then, too, the old ‘rigorous organisation’ de- 
riving from the Lassallean tradition will become a brake which, 
though it might hold back a waggon, no one could hope to apply to 
an avalanche. 

At the same time, these men are doing a number of things which 
may wholly disrupt the party. First, the party is to go on maintaining 
its former agitators and editors by saddling itself with a mass of pa- 
pers which contain nothing more than may be found in any middle- 
class local rag. And the workers are supposed to tag along with that 
indefinitely! Secondly, their bearing in the Reichstag and in the Sax- 
on Diet is for the most part so meek as to discredit both them and the 
party in the eyes of the whole world; they make ‘positive’ suggestions 
to the existing government as to how it might do better in minor 
questions of detail, etc. And the workers, who have been declared 
outside the law and delivered up, bound hand and foot, to the tender 
mercies of the police, are expected to regard this as adequate repre- 
sentation! Thirdly, there is their tolerance of the philistine petty bour- 
geoiserie of the Sozialdemokrat. In every letter we are told that we must 

on no account believe any reports of splits or differences of opinion 
within the party, but everyone who comes here from Germany assures 
us that our people are completely bewildered by this conduct on the part 
of their leaders and that they by no means agree with it. Nor could it 
be otherwise, given the character of our workers which has so splen- 
didly stood the test. It is a peculiarity of the German movement that 
all the mistakes committed by the leadership are invariably put right 
by the masses, and no doubt such will again be the case this time.!° 
Well, keep your pecker up and drop us a line occasionally. Bork- 
heim is still in pretty well the same helpless condition as before.’ 

Your 
F.E.