London, 4 November 1882 

Dear Mr Bernstein, 

‘I beg to confirm mine of yesterday’s date. I also have pleasure in 
acknowledging receipt of your favour of the Ist inst. and make haste 
to reply to same.’ As you can see, the old counting-house style is not 
yet quite defunct.—In fact I am writing straight away in order to 
save you a great deal of unnecessary trouble. It is most kind of you to 
hunt out and send all those books for us but ‘as of now we have no 
real use for them’. For in the 3rd edition? Marx merely intends to 
bring the state of factory legislation up to date by making emenda- 
tions and additions; to that end he needs the text of the original Acts and 
nothing more. Secondary matters such as the protection of labour, lia- 
bility, etc., are not of importance for thts purpose. And I wrote and 
told you yesterday what I still need for Bismarck *!*: the early or 
mid-1879 stock market prices of the last 6 railways to be nationalised, 
and the first reading of Bismarck’s Accident, etc., Insurance Bills. 
If I need the latest edition of Saling due to come out in the meantime 
(it was kind of you to advise me of this), I can get hold of it within 4-5 
days. 

I was quite glad to have your information about Garcia; after all, 
one never knows when one may not run into the man. What he says 
about agitation on the part of certain Trades UNIon chiefs in regard to 
the channel tunnel is quite true. They are the very ones who were al- 
ways open to purchase by the radical bourgeois (under Morley) and 
on this occasion they have been joined by G. Shipton, the editor of 
The Labour Standard. There is absolutely no doubt that these people 
are in the pay of the Channel Company; they are not running up 
travelling expenses, etc., out of sheer enthusiasm. Admittedly it is 
a pretty innocuous business at present, but Shipton himself has now 
had a taste of bourgeois money, of course, and in view of his utter 
spinelessness and unbounded craving for popularity, this may lead to 

@ 3rd German edition of Vol. I of Capital-” Saliag’s Bérsen-Papiere 

something more. He has lost his virginity and the other ‘REPRESENTA- 
TIVE WORKING MEN’, those who have grown grey in the hurly-burly, will 
doubtless take him completely in tow before long. 

That you are being bombarded from Paris with pro-Malon anti- 
Guesde letters I willingly believe. But after all, the correspondent you 
cite pronounces himself an incompetent judge in as much as he ad- 
mits writing under the impression of the current anti-German cam- 
paign and reproaches you for doing your duty as editor of the party 
organ, namely ‘taking a bird’s eye view’, critical and all-embracing, 
of the affair and, unlike himself, refusing to be swayed by transitory 
and local events. And if, 2 months later, the man is still harping on 
this one unfortunate article 41° and permits his view of a significant 
faction of the workers to be determined by this one incident alone, 
does that mean that the party organ ought to proceed in an equally 
blinkered fashion? If there exists in Paris a whole lot of non-socialist 
and semi-socialist workers who vent their chauvinism on the hated 
Germans, is the Citoyen at fault? Certainly no more at fault than the 
German socialists in Paris if, when things come to a head, a whole lot 
of non-socialist German workers in Paris, London, New York or any 
other big American city accept a lower wage, thereby depressing the 
wages of the natives (in America even those of the Irish!) and bring- 
ing the German workers en masse into not altogether undeserved disre- 
pute? And, finally, if he found the article so hard to stomach, why 
didn’t he object? A disclaimer did appear and admittedly it made 
pretty light of the matter, but Marx tells me that, according to the ten- 
ets of the Paris press, it was as adequate as any that is customarily is- 
sued in respect of an editor who has blundered, always assuming that 
no pressure has been brought to bear on the paper. But such pressure 
could have been brought to bear, and very simply at that. Had a let- 
ter of protest been drawn up and delivered to the office either by 
a single individual or a deputation, the editors would have had to 
take the matter seriously. Had the editor in attendance (it might even 
have been Picard himself) made difficulties, all that would have been 
required was the threat, that, if the letter failed to appear in the Cz- 
toyen on the following day, it would be sent forthwith to the Sozzalde- 
mokrat, in Zurich. If your correspondent did not know enough French, 
Vollmar was there; had the latter been absent, Hirsch* would have 
gladly taken the thing on. If the chaps had acted in this way they 

* Carl Hirsch 

would have earned themselves respect, taught the Crtoyen a useful les- 
son and I should have been heartily glad. But to submit to it all like so 
many sheep and then give vent to cries of woe is typically German 
and has earned the Germans the contempt they deserve. If we had 
put up with that sort of thing from the French and English, if our 
people had behaved so spinelessly in Germany, where should we 
be today? Before the German socialists in Paris demand it is their 
view of the French movement that should prevail in the party 
organ, they must demonstrate, firstly, that they are at all capable 
of free and impartial criticism and, secondly, that they are able to 
stand their ground vis-a-vis the French. Neither of these things has 
happened. 

As to the undesirability of a daily paper in Paris, I am unable to 
share your view. In Paris the influence of a weekly is confined to small 
circles; if one wants to influence the masses one must have a daily. We 
too were opposed to a daily when there was no prospect of getting 
hold of one and the childish emigration to Lyons took place in con- 
nection with the Emancipation. Things are different now. The 
Citoyen and its editors have made a name for themselves in Paris, bour- 
geois papers of all complexions have been compelled to engage in dis- 
putations with it and been triumphantly dismasted and, were we 
now to lose the daily, it would be a signal defeat. The fact that it can- 
not be an ideal, perfect paper, that a spuriously democratic system of 
editing by comité often ends up with there being no editing at all, as in 
the case of Picard’s article, in no way alters the case. Not long ago, 
however, Lafargue sent me the issues, some 20 of them, dealing 
with the split,?°* and it seemed to me that the paper was by no 
means so bad —- apart from those aspects we have long criticised and 
which would be no different in a weekly. But in the view of anyone 
familiar with conditions in the Paris press a paper appearing twice 
weekly would be impracticable from the start; it would come stil- 
born into the world. Either a weekly or a daily. And with the latter the 
former editors of the Cifoyen undoubtedly now have a_ very 
considerable chance of succeeding, as is evident from their rapid 
transition to the daily Egalité which is already selling more than 
5,000 copies in Paris. 

Now for the Clemenceau mertinc. To assess this, like other things in 
Paris, by German standards, is quite impossible. When Gambetta 
was unable to make himself heard in his own constituency,!’° there 
were shouts of triumph from the entire radical and socialist press. The 

same thing has now happened to Clemenceau.*?' Clemenceau is 
a cool, calculating man, quite prepared to go further, when he sees 
the need for it, and even become a communist, provided he can be 
convinced: convainquez-moi donc!* And the workers in his constituency 
are employing a highly effective means of persuasion by demonstrat- 
ing to him that his seat is in danger. That may give a shove to his 
somewhat slothful study of socialism. 

But who were the people who did it? Guesde & Co. on their own 
perhaps? No, the chairman was in fact Joffrin, Malon’s friend and 
Clemenceau’s future rival candidate in Montmartre! So our people 
were decent enough, as always hitherto in the struggle against the 
bourgeoisie, to vote for Malon’s chairman and side with Malon’s 
people. If we are to censure the attitude of the workers, Malon’s 
people are far more deserving of censure than Guesde’s. 

The passage in the Citoyen simply says that these tactics should con- 
tinue to be employed against Clemenceau; if they have been success- 
ful once, why not again? It remains to be seen whether the Prolétaire 
would be able to pay the /galité in the same coin at meetings. Noth- 
ing I have witnessed so far has given me cause to believe that this 
would be so. But even were it momentarily to be the case, it wouldn’t 
matter, and would be unlikely to continue for long. 

And now a quick word or two before the post goes — otherwise this 
letter won’t leave until Monday morning——on the campaign you 
have in mind with regard to the programme.*?? I consider it most 
untimely. The programme is a bad one, but no one discusses it any 
more. An amended programme requires that it should not be open 
to dispute. So long as delegates are not elected in public, therefore, 
so long as every mandate can be disputed, it would be better not 
to interfere with the programme unless absolutely necessary. An 
amended programme would give the right wing an excuse to set 
themselves up as the true faithful who have complete confidence in 
the old well-tried programme, etc. So think twice about it before 
sowing these seeds of discord among a party that is bound hand 
and foot. 

The greatest danger to any political émigrés lies in the urge to be 
up and doing; something has really got to happen; something has 
really got to be done! And so things happen whose import one fails to 
appreciate and which, as one later realises oneself, had far better 

* Go on. Convince me! 

never happened at all. Might you and Vollmar be suffering from the 
urge to be up and doing? If so beware — of yourselves. 
With kindest regards. 
Yours, 

Marx is in Ventnor, Istz or Wight *!'; getting on well.