Letter to August Bebel, January 23, 1890

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To Bebel in Berlin

London, January 23, 1890

Dear Bebel,

Congratulations on the Elberfeld acquittal and no less on your brilliant handling of the case, which emerged quite clearly despite the bad reporting. It was no small thing to steer your way through it as you did, with a train of 90 accused, including a Röllinghof and, no doubt, a number of other worthless elements: but I don’t suppose that Mr Pinoff will ever want to see you confronting him from the dock again. So that chap is the ultimate of which the Prusso-German Public Prosecutor’s Office is capable. He interprets the law just as Bismarck does the Constitution, i.e. as an undergraduate in a pub interprets the students’ beer drinking ritual—the greater the uproar the better. It’s enough to make a French—not to mention English—lawyer’s hair stand on end.

Today, no doubt, the Anti-Socialist Law will again be debated in Berlin. I think you are right when you say (in the Arbeiter-Zeitung) that, if Bismarck doesn’t cop it from this Reichstag, he’ll cop it from the next one; the ever-mounting tide of our votes will break the back of any and every bourgeois opposition. In this I do not see eye to eye with Ede. He and Kautsky—they both have something of a bent for ‘higher politics’— believe that what we should aim for in the next elections is a majority hostile to the government. As though anything of the sort still existed among the bourgeois parties in Germany! The men of Progress will disappear with the suspension of the Anti-Socialist Law; the bourgeois elements among them will go over to the National Liberals, and the petty bourgeois and working men to us. That is why they will cry off every time it looks as though the Anti-Socialist Law might be thrown out. And in other respects also Bismarck will always obtain a majority; even though they may still show some tendency to bridle and jib in the first year, he’ll talk them round in the second and they are, after all, safe from their constituents for the next 5 years! But if Bismarck goes off the rails or otherwise disqualifies himself, it doesn’t really matter what sort of people (bourgeois, I mean, not Junkers) there are in the Reichstag; let the wind but shift and they are all equally capable of reviling their idols of yesterday. On this occasion, therefore, I see no reason why we should not repay the Progressists for their infamous behaviour of 1887 and bring it home to them that they exist by our grace only. Parnell’s decision of 1886 that the Irish in England should all vote against the Liberals, for the Tories, that is, for the first time since 1800 stop being a herd voting for the Liberals, transformed Gladstone and the Liberal chiefs into Home Rulers in a matter of six weeks. If anything can still be made out of the Progressists, then only by showing them in the by-elections ad oculos that they are dependent on us.

I am looking forward enormously to the actual elections. For then our German working men will again show the world what finely tempered steel they are made of. It’s possible that you’ll have a new element in the Reichstag—labour representatives who are not as yet socialists. The movement amongst the miners will have given you an idea of the way in which the movement is progressing over here—a hitherto indifferent stratum of the working class, largely proof against agitation, is being galvanised out of its lethargy by having to fight for its immediate interests and is virtually impelled into the movement by the bourgeoisie and the government, which, in present circumstances and provided we don’t insist on precipitating matters, means that they are impelled into our arms. It is much the same here, save that they have behind them, not a powerful socialist party, but only small cliques, at variance amongst themselves and for the most part led by ambitious men of letters or poetic dreamers. But here, too, things are proceeding inexorably and it is precisely these people, now coming over to us en masse, who will soon make short work of the cliques and create the unity that is needed.—In our case this new element lends added interest to the elections.

I have just received your Hamburg speech but shall not be able to read it till after luncheon.

The French are making a collection for your election fund, though I doubt that very much will come of it; the point is that it’s an international gesture.

Unless something unforeseen happens, peace would seem assured so far as this year is concerned—thanks to the tremendous advances in technology whereby every new gun, every new type of gunpowder, etc., is already obsolete even before it can be introduced into so much as one army, and thanks to the universal fear of unleashing these vast masses of men and powers of destruction, of which no one can say what their effect would be in practice. Thanks also to the French and the way they have dropped Boulanger, who was in the pay of Russia (they’d put 15 million francs at his disposal), thereby eliminating all prospects of a restoration of the monarchy (that being the only purpose Boulanger was supposed to serve). But neither the Tsar nor Russia’s diplomats care to embark on anything they are not sure of attaining; an alliance with the Republic is to them too dubious—the Orléans would better suit their book. Nor does the anti-Turkish campaign launched by Gladstone for the benefit of his Russian friends cut any ice here and, since Gladstone is not yet in office and the Tory government is decidedly pro-German, pro-Austrian and anti-Russian, the Little Father will have to bide his time. But we are indeed sitting upon a live mine and a spark would be enough to set it off.

Our people’s Paris daily, already advertised by Liebknecht in German newspapers, has not yet been born—the birth pangs still continue. The matter will probably be decided within the next 2 or 3 weeks. At all events, now that we have a group in the Chamber, the outlook is far more promising and in due course the Possibilists and Boulangists will again be vanquished in Paris. In the provinces, we alone of all the socialists reign supreme.

You people will be unlikely to get much money from America too.

Au fond, not a bad thing. A genuinely American party is of far greater use to you and the world generally than the few pence you used to get, precisely because the so-called party over there was not a party but a sect, and a purely German sect at that, a branch on foreign soil of the German party and of its specifically Lassallean and outmoded elements in particular. But now the Rosenberg clique has been thrown out and, with it, the greatest obstacle to the development and rise of a genuinely American party.

Cordial regards to yourself and your wife,

Your

FE.