in Geneva

Dear Old Friend, London, 1 April 1880

I hereby inform you that I have taken out a money order for you at the post office for four pounds sterling, which should be 100 francs 80 centimes, and wish you good receipt of it. I hope your health and that of your wife will now improve, the biting winter having happily passed. Here things are so-so, Frau Marx is still not as she should be, and Marx too could be better, after the winter he always has his worst time, a spasmodic cough prevents him from sleeping.

For the rest, things here are just like anno 1850. Der Arbeiterverein!! is splitting into all sorts of parties – Most on one side, Rackow on the other – and we have trouble enough to avoid being dragged into this turmoil. Nothing but storms in a glass of water, which may have a partly very good effect on those involved, in that they contribute to their further development, but for the course of the world it is fairly indifferent whether 100 German workers here declare themselves for one side or another. If only they could exert some influence on the English – but there is absolutely no question of that. Most, in his confused thirst for action, cannot keep still, but is also utterly incapable of getting anything done; the people in Germany simply refuse to see that the moment for revolution has now arrived because Most has been disciplined and expelled from Germany. *Die Freiheit* wants to become the most revolutionary paper in the world, by hook or by crook, but that is not achieved by merely repeating the word revolution in every line. Fortunately, it’s pretty much all the same what is in the paper and what is not. The same holds for the Zurich organ! which preaches revolution today, tomorrow declares violent overthrow to be the greatest misfortune, on the one hand is afraid of being surpassed by Most’s big words, and on the other fears that the workers might take its own big words seriously. Now choose between the hollow ranting of *Die Freiheit* and the narrow-minded philistinism of *Der Sozialdemokrat*¹!

¹ Der Sozialdemokrat

I fear our friends in Germany are deceiving themselves as to the kind of organisation that can be maintained under the present circumstances. That the elected members of parliament should place themselves at the head, because there is no other leadership, I have nothing against. But the strict obedience which the old party leadership, elected for that purpose, could demand, they can neither demand nor enforce. Least of all under the present circumstances, without a press, without mass meetings. The looser the organisation appears to be now, the firmer it is in reality. Instead of this, the old system is supposed to be retained: the party leadership decides definitively (although there is no congress to correct or, if necessary, depose them), and whoever attacks one of them is a heretic. At the same time, the best of them themselves know that there are all manner of incapable people and others not quite kosher among them, and they must be very narrow-minded indeed if they do not see that in their organ it is not they who are in command, but Höchberg by virtue of his money-bag, and next to him his fellow philistines Schramm and Bernstein. In my view, the old party along with its earlier organisation is finished. Once the European movement, as is to be expected, gets going again soon, then the great mass of the German proletariat will enter it, then the 500,000 men of anno 1878! will be the educated, trained core of this mass, but then the old “strict organisation” inherited from Lassallean traditions will also be a drag-shoe, which could certainly hold back a wagon, but which cannot be clamped onto an avalanche.

At the same time, the people do nothing but things that are quite suited to blow the party apart. Firstly, the party is supposed to go on supporting the old agitators and editors by having a whole lot of newspapers foisted upon it, in which there is nothing but what can be read in any bourgeois rag. And the workers are supposed to put up with this in the long run! Secondly, in the Reichstag and in the Saxon Landtag they usually behave so tamely that they disgrace themselves and the party before the whole world, making “positive” proposals to the existing government as to how it can do things better in petty details, etc. And the workers, who have been declared outside the law, who are delivered hand and foot to the arbitrary power of the police, are supposed to regard that as proper representation! Thirdly, the philistine petty-bourgeois spirit of *Der Sozialdemokrat*, which they approve of. In every letter they write to us that we should on no account believe any reports that splits or differences of opinion have broken out in the party, but everyone coming from Germany assures us that the people have been utterly bewildered by this conduct of the leaders and are by no means in agreement with it. Given the character of our workers, which is proving itself so splendidly, this is also impossible otherwise. The German movement has the peculiarity that all the mistakes of the leadership are always made good again by the masses, and this will probably be the case this time as well.

Well, keep your courage up and let me hear from you. Borkheim is still pretty much in his old helpless condition.?

Yours,
F.E.