London, 28 October 1882 

Dear Bebel, 

I have at last got round to writing — Marx has been back here for 
about 3 weeks and leaves the day after tomorrow for the Isle of 
Wight, so I have had no respite in which to do anything. 

As regards Vollmar’s articles, 9°° I was particularly taken with the 
first one on account of its rightful dismissal of the wails emitted by 
those ‘right wing’ gentlemen who are clamouring for the repeal! of the 
Anti-Socialist Law, even upon conditions that would be worse for 
the party than the Anti-Socialist Law itself, provided this would en- 
able them to go back to founding newspapers 4 la Gerichts-Zeitung and 
hence to the old literary fleshpots of Egypt. In my view it would 
be perfectly in order to point out to these people — and it was exclu- 
sively against them that the article was levelled—— that a voluntary 
repeal of the Anti-Socialist Law might very easily be accompanied 
by conditions that aggravated the position of the party; to emphasise 
that the last way we shall rid ourselves of the Anti-Socialist Law is by 
begging and cringing. 

Otherwise the question is an academic one so far as I am con- 
cerned. J believe that the Law will receive its quietus from the events 
which will usher in the revolution and which cannot be long in 
coming. 

I read the second article pretty cursorily as there were 2 or 3 people 
with me who kept chatting all the time. Otherwise I should have 
detected, from the way he visualises revolution, the French influence 
and hence also, no doubt, my Vollmar. Your handling of this aspect 
has been absolutely right. +°’ It is the longed-for, ultimate realisation 
of the phrase ‘single reactionary mass’. *°* Here all the official parties 
combined in a lump, there we socialists in column; a great decisive 
battle, victory at one stroke all along the line. Things aren’t that easy 
in reality. In reality, as you indeed point out, a revolution begins the 
other way round, in that the great majority of the people, as also of 
the official parties, band together against the government thus isolated 

and overthrow it and only after such of the official parties as still 
remain viable have reciprocally, collectively and successively brought 
about their own ruin, only then will Vollmar’s great parting of 
the ways come about and with it our opportunity to rule. If, like 
Vollmar, we were to try and begin the revolution straight off with the 
last act, we should have a pretty rotten time of it. 

I paid little attention at the time to the final passage on the new 
tactics —there’s certainly a great deal of indictable stuff there if 
looked at in conjunction with the Penal Code. However no great 
harm can be done if someone occasionally goes a bit too far in this 
direction; as it is, they err all too often in the other. So if I have made 
too light of this passage you, or so it seems to me, have taken it 
too seriously; you will have seen from Viereck’s jubilations in the 
Siiddeutsche Post how the right wing is seeking to make capital out of 
your reply. *°* I don’t believe our people in Germany would have 
accepted Vollmar’s way of talking simply on the strength of his arti- 
cles, though the proclamation he has called for, ‘We are organising in 
secret, certainly deserves to be rejected. 

I am eagerly awaiting the material on Bismarck,* but as you’re 
both in jug, *°° no doubt I shall now have to wait some time. But if 
by then I have got my teeth into a different, longer work, which has 
also long been pending," I shan’t be able to break off, and Bismarck 
will have to wait. 

In France the long-expected split has occurred. 39+ The original as- 
sociation of Guesde and Lafargue with Malon and Brousse was prob- 
ably inevitable when the party was founded, but Marx and I were 
never under any illusion that it could last. The point at issue is purely 
one of principle: ought the struggle of the proletariat against the 
bourgeoisie to be waged as a class struggle, or ought it to be conceded 
that, in good opportunist (or Possibilist, as the socialist translation 
has it) fashion, the programme and the movement’s class character 
be dropped wherever this would enable more votes or more ‘support- 
ers’ to be won? Malon and Brousse have come out in favour of the 
latter, thereby sacrificing the proletarian class character of the move- 
ment and making a division inevitable. Well and good. The develop- 
ment of the proletariat takes place everywhere to the accompaniment 
of internal struggles, and France, which is presently forming a work- 

 See this volume, p. 324.-> Engels means Dialectics of Nature (see present edition, 
Vol. 25). 

ers’ party for the first time, is no exception. We in Germany have 
passed beyond the first phase of the internal struggle (with the 
Lassalleans) and others still lie ahead of us. Unification is perfectly all 
right provided it works, but there are things which take precedence 
over unification. And when, like Marx and me, one has spent a life- 
time fighting harder against the self-styled socialists than against 
anyone else (for we regarded the bourgeoisie simply as a class and 
hardly ever took issue with individual bourgeois), one cannot feel 
unduly perturbed just because the inevitable struggle has broken out. 

I hope this will reach you before you go to quod. Marx and Tussy 
send their love. Marx is recuperating in fine style and, if there’s no 
recurrence of his pleurisy, he’ll be stronger next autumn than he has 
been for years. When you see Liebknecht in the ‘Kéafigturm’,* as they 
call it in Berne, give him regards from us all. 

Your 

F.E.