ENGELS TO EDUARD BERNSTEIN !'% 

London, 12 March 1881 

Dear Mr Bernstein, 

Herewith some material on the anti-adultery commandment. ''* 
Whether you'll be able to use it, I confess I don’t know. It’s a ticklish 
subject and you must know whether more harm than good will be 
done by touching on it. At all events I wanted to show you one way of 
dealing with this commandment without relapsing into moral philis- 
tinism, and it may be useful to you anyway to have the historical ma- 
terial on the case, in so far as it was available to me. 

For the rest, the paper? is doing very well on the whole and some of 
the nos. are very good; rather less doctrinaire articles, like the one on 
state socialism, * would do no harm. How can one lump together Tur- 
got, one of the leading economists of the 18th century, with Necker, 
that highly practical man of haute finance,* precursor of your Laffittes 
and Péreires and, worse still, the wretched Calonne, the man of 
hand-to-mouth expedients, who was a genuine aprés moi le déluge’!1° 
aristocrat? How can one place these — Turgot in particular and even 
Necker— cheek by jowl with Bismarck who, at the most, wants 
money regardless, @ Ja Calonne, and the said Bismarck in his turn 
quite summarily cheek by jow! with Stoecker on the one hand and 
Schaffle and Co. on the other, every one of whom in his turn 
pursues quite different lines? If the bourgeois lump them all together, 

@ Der Sozialdemokrat-° {K. Kautsky,] ‘Der Staatssozialismus und die Sozialdemo- 
kratie’, signed: Symmachos, Der Sozialdemokrat, No. 10, 6 March 1881.-° high 
finance-* after me the deluge 

that is no reason why we should proceed as uncritically. Here, pre- 
cisely, are the roots of doctrinairism, in that one believes the self- 
interested and narrow assertions of one’s opponent and proceeds to 
construct on those assertions a system which naturally stands or falls 
with them. With Bismarck it is a case of money, money and again 
money, and the pretexts he gives change in accordance with purely 
external considerations. Give him a differently composed majority 
in the Reichstag and he’ll jettison all his present plans and prepare 
conflicting ones. That’s why one can never ever infer a declaration of 
modern society’s bankruptcy from anything that is done by an ani- 
mal as irrational in theory and inconsistent in practice as Bismarck. 
Still less from the intellectual St Vitus dance of a fool like Stoecker. 
Nor yet from the twaddle of ‘thinking men’ 4 /a Schaffle. Their ‘think- 
ing’ (and this is pretty well all they do ‘think’) is not directed 
towards declaring modern society bankrupt. On the contrary, they 
are, of course, simply living in the hope of patching it up again. But 
what kind of a thinking man is e.g. Schaffle? In his Quintessenz* the 
silly Swabian admits that he pondered one of the (simplest) points in 
Capital for ten years before getting to the bottom of it; in fact the bot- 
tom he got to was pure nonsense. !! 

It is nothing but self-interested misrepresentation on the part of the 
Manchester bourgeois to describe as ‘socialism’ all interference by the 
state with free competition: protective tariffs, guilds, tobacco monop- 
oly, nationalisation of branches of industry, the Overseas Trading 
Company, ''’ royal porcelain factory. That is something we should 
criticise, but not believe. If we do the latter and base a theoretical ar- 
gument thereon, this will collapse together with its premisses,— 
simply upon it’s being proved, that is, that this alleged socialism is 
nothing but feudal reaction on the one hand and, on the other, a pre- 
text for extortion, its secondary object being to turn as many proleta- 
rians as possible into officials and pensioners dependent on the state, 
and to organise, alongside the disciplined army of officials and mili- 
tary, a similar army of workers. Compulsory suffrage imposed by se- 
nior functionaries instead of by factory overseers—fine socialism 
that! This is where you get if you believe what the bourgeois himself 
doesn’t believe but only pretends to, namely that the state = so- 
cialism. 

Otherwise I find that your views on the attitude to be adopted by 

* [A. Schaffle,] Die Quintessenz des Socialismus, Gotha, 1875. 

the paper coincide entirely with my own, and I’m also glad that of 
late there has no longer been such liberal use of the word revolution as 
there was at the outset. That was quite all right earlier on, after the 
sorry opiate-mongering of 1880, '! but it would be preferable, and 
this, too, with an eye to Most, to be wary of high-flown rhetoric. One 
may express revolutionary thoughts without forever harping on the 
word revolution. The pitiful Most is, by the way, quite beside himself; 
he’s at a loss where to pull in and now, on top of that, the success of 
Fritzsche and Viereck in America' has taken the last bit of wind 
out of his sails. 

The paper can now really serve to encourage and cheer up our 
people in Germany, something a number of them, or at least their so- 
called leaders, are much in need of. I’ve received a few more jere- 
miads and answered them in accordance with their deserts. Viereck 
was very down in the mouth at the start, but a few days in the fresh 
air of London were enough to restore his resilience. The paper must 
import that fresh air into Germany and by far the best way of doing 
so is to mock our adversaries, treat them with contempt. Once the 
people learn to laugh at Bismarck & Co. again, much will have been 
gained. But it mustn’t be forgotten that this is the first time such 
a thing has happened to the people, at any rate the vast majority, or, 
more especially, that a large number of agitators and editors will 
have the discomfort of being jolted out of their very comfortable 
berths. Such being the case, it is just as necessary to cheer people up 
as it is constantly to remind them that Bismarck & Co. are still the 
same jackasses, the same scoundrels and the same poor wretches, im- 
potent in face of the historical movement, as they were before the at- 
tempted assassinations. '?° So any joke at the expense of this rabble is 
of value. 

As regards Ireland, only this much: The people are far too canny 
not to know that an uprising would spell their ruin; it would stand no 
chance save in the case of war between England and America. !?! 
Meanwhile the Irish have forced Gladstone to introduce continental 
standing orders in Parliament, '?? thus undermining the whole of the 
English parliamentary system. They have further forced Gladstone to 
forswear all his cant and to become more Tory than even the worst of 
Tories. The Coercion Bills '?3 have gone through, the Land Bill '?* 
will either be thrown out by the Upper House, or else it will be castrat- 
ed, and then the fun will begin, in other words, the covert disintegra- 
tion of the parties will become overt. Since Gladstone’s nomination, 

76 47, Engels to Becker. 28 March 1881 

the Wuics and moderate Torizs, i. e. the big landowners generally, have 
been secretly combining to form a big landed property party. As soon 
as this comes to fruition, and family and personal interests have been 
adjusted, or as soon as the new party is driven out into the open in 
consequence of, say, the Land Bill, the administration and the present 
majority will disintegrate. Then the new bourgeois-radical party will 
come out in opposition to the new conservative party, but with noth- 
ing to fall back on save the workers and the Irish peasants. And so 
that there may be no recurrence of bilking and trickery here, a prole- 
tarian-radical party is in process of formation under the leadership of 
Joseph Cowen (M. P. for Newcastle), an old Chartist who is half, if not 
wholly, communist and a very worthy chap. Ireland is responsible for 
all this, Ireland is the driving force in the realm. This for your private 
information. More on the subject anon. 
Regards, 
Yours 
F.E. 

Since Kautsky — will you give him my regards? —- will be coming 
over here soon, there’s no point in answering him at length. My re- 
gards to Beust should you see him.