London, 14 October 1891 

Dear Kautsky, 

On reading your draft as published in the Vorwdirts,3?* I find to my 
great surprise “one reactionary mass’ cropping up all of a sudden. 
I am writing to you about it immediately though I very much fear 
that this will come too late. By striking a shrill, discordant note, this 
propagandist phrase utterly destroys the harmony of the concise, ri- 
gorously formulated scientific propositions. For it is a propagandist 
phrase and an excessively biassed one at that and hence —in its apo- 
dictically absolute form where alone it sounds effective-— utterly 
false. 

False because it presents an in itself correct /istorical tendency as 
a fat accompli. The moment the socialist revolution comes, all the 
other parties will appear as a reactionary mass by comparison with 
ourselves. Maybe that is what thay are already, being no longer capa- 
ble of progressive action of any kind, although this is not necessarily 
the case. But at this moment we cannot say as much, not with the assur- 
ance with which we put forward the other propositions in our pro- 
gramme. Even in Germany circumstances may arise in which the 
parties of the Left, deplorable though they are, will be compelled to 
clear up part of the vast quantity of anti-bourgeois, bureaucratic and 
feudal rubbish that still remains there. In which case they could 
hardly be described as one reactionary mass. 

Until we are strong enough to seize power ourselves and put our 
principles into practice there cannot, strictly speaking, be any ques- 
tion of one reactionary mass by comparison with ourselves. Otherwise the 
entire nation would be divided into a reactionary majority and an 
impotent minority. 

Take the chaps who dismantled the system of small states in Ger- 
many, who provided the bourgeoisie with elbow-room in which to 
carry out its industrial revolution, who introduced a unified transport 
system — both for things and for persons—, thereby inevitably ac- 
cording greater freedom of movement to ourselves—were their ac- 
tions those of a ‘reactionary mass’? 

Take the French bourgeois Republicans who between 1871 and ’78 
put paid once and for all to the monarchy and the rule of the clergy, 
who secured freedom of the press, of association and of assembly to an 
extent hitherto unknown in France in non-revolutionary times, who 
introduced compulsory schooling and standardised education, raising 
it to a level that might well serve as an example to us in Germany — 
were their measures those of a reactionary mass? 

Take the Englishmen of the two official parties who have vastly ex- 
tended the suffrage and brought about a fivefold increase in the num- 
ber of voters, who have evened out the size of constituencies and in- 
troduced compulsory and improved schooling, who at every session 
still vote not only for bourgeois reforms but also for one concession af- 
ter another in favour of the working man—their progress may be 
slow and sluggish but nobody can condemn them out of hand as ‘one 
reactionary mass’, 

In short we have no right to present a tendency in gradual process 
of realisation as an already accomplished fact, the less so in that in 
England, for example, such a tendency will never quite get to the point 
of becoming a fact. Come the revolution over here, the bourgeoisie 
would still be prepared to introduce all sorts of minor reforms, though 
by then it would be quite pointless to insist on minor reforms in a sys- 
tem that was in the process of being overthrown. 

Under certain circumstances the use in propaganda of Lassalle’s phrase 
is justified, though in our case it has in fact been misused to an 
enormous extent, e.g. in the Vorwdrts ever since 1 October 1890. But 
it should not be included in the programme where it would be utterly false 
and misleading. It would look like Bethmann the banker’s wife on the 
balcony someone proposed to build onto his house for him. ‘If you 

build me a balcony,’ he said, ‘my wife will go and sit there and muck 
up me whole facade!’ 

I can’t comment on any other alterations in the Vorwérts version as 
I’ve mislaid the paper and this letter must go off. 

The party congress ?°' began on an illustrious date. The 14th of 
October is the anniversary of the battles of Jena and Auerstedt when 
the old, pre-revolutionary Prussia collapsed. Let’s hope that the 
14th of October 1891 will usher in for Prussianised Germany the ‘do- 
mestic Jena predicted by Marx! 37% 

Your 

F. Engels