Marx to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis
in The Hague

22 February 1881
41, Maitland Park Road
London, N.W.

Dear Comrade,

My long silence was occasioned by the fact that with my reply to your letter of 6 January I wanted to enclose a survey of the amendments that might perhaps be made on your part in the event of a second edition of “Kapitaal en Arbeid”. Owing to domestic disturbances, unforeseeable tasks and other interruptions I have not yet finished, so I am sending these lines for the time being without the enclosure, since continued silence on my part might be misinterpreted on yours. The amendments that seem to me necessary concern details; the main thing, the spirit of the thing, is there.

I thank you for the kind dedication, since by it you have personally thrown the gauntlet in the face of the bourgeois antagonists.

The author of “Mannen van beteekenis”, school inspector or something of that sort, had written to me asking for materials for my biography, and had also had his bookseller approach my brother-in-law Juta so that the latter might persuade me to entertain the request, since I usually decline such things. The gentleman wrote to me—the author of “Mannen”—that he did not share my views but recognised their importance, declarations of respect, etc. This same individual later had the shamelessness to incorporate in his pamphlet a fabrication of slander by the notorious Prussian spy Stieber, and likewise—probably at the inspiration of a Bonn Kathedersozialist—charged me with deliberately falsifying citations, without the honourable gentleman taking the trouble to read my polemic against the worthy Brentano in the “Volksstaat”, where he would have seen that: Brentano, who originally denounced me in the “Concordia” (a manufacturers’ paper) for “formal and material falsification”, later wriggled out of it by lying that he had meant it differently, etc. A Dutch journal offered to open its columns to castigate the “school inspector”, but as a matter of principle I do not answer such bedbug bites. Even in London I have never taken the slightest notice of such literary yelping. If I had done the opposite, I would have had to fritter away the best part of my time with corrections from California to Moscow. When I was younger, I often struck out sharply, but age brings wisdom enough to avoid useless dissipation of force.

The “question” of the forthcoming Zurich Congress which you report to me seems to me—a blunder. What is to be done at a specific, given moment of the future, directly to be done, depends of course entirely on the given historical circumstances in which one has to act. But that question is posed in cloud-cuckoo-land, is thus in fact a phantom problem, to which the only answer must be—the critique of the question itself. We cannot solve an equation that does not include the elements of its solution in its data. Incidentally, the embarrassments of a government suddenly brought into being by a popular victory are by no means something specifically “socialist”. On the contrary. The victorious bourgeois politicians immediately feel embarrassed by their “victory”, whereas the socialist at least can intervene without embarrassment. You may rely on one thing: a socialist government will not take the helm of a country unless conditions are so developed that it can above all take the necessary measures to frighten the mass of the bourgeoisie so thoroughly that the first desideratum—time for sustained action—is gained.

You will perhaps refer me to the Paris Commune; but apart from the fact that this was merely the rising of a city under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was by no means socialist, nor could it have been. With a small quantum of common sense, however, they could have achieved a compromise with Versailles useful to the entire mass of the people—the only thing attainable at that time. The appropriation of the Banque de France alone would have put a terrifying end to the Versailles swagger, etc., etc.

The general demands of the French bourgeoisie before 1789 were roughly as fixed, mutatis mutandis, as the first immediate demands of the proletariat are fairly uniform today in all countries of capitalist production. But did any Frenchman of the 18th century have the slightest a priori inkling of the manner in which the demands of the French bourgeoisie would be carried through ? The doctrinaire and necessarily fantastic anticipation of the programme of action of a revolution of the future only distracts from the present struggle. The dream of the imminent destruction of the world fired the primitive Christians in their struggle against the Roman world empire and gave them certainty of victory. The scientific insight into the inevitable and steadily continuing disintegration of the ruling social order under our very eyes, and the masses being lashed more and more into a state of passion by the old governmental spectres themselves, while simultaneously there is the positive development of the means of production on a gigantic scale—this suffices as a guarantee that at the moment of the outbreak of a truly proletarian revolution the conditions of its immediate, next modus operandi (if certainly not idyllic) will also be at hand.

In my conviction the critical juncture for a new international workers’ association has not yet arrived; I therefore regard all workers’ congresses, or rather socialist congresses, insofar as they do not relate to immediate, given conditions in this or that particular nation, as not merely useless but harmful. They will always fizzle out in countless rechewed general platitudes.

Your most sincerely,
Karl Marx