Letter to Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis, February 22, 1881

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To Ferdinand Domela Nieuwenhuis in The Hague

London, February 22, 1881

41 Maitland Park Road, N.W.

Dear Comrade,

My prolonged silence is due to the fact that I wished to enclose in my reply to your letter of 6 January a conspectus of the amendments that you might care to make in the event of a 2nd edition of Kapitaal en Arbeid. As a result of domestic disturbances, unforeseen labours and other disruptions, I have not yet got this done and shall therefore be sending off this letter without the enclosure for the present, lest my continued silence be misconstrued by you. The amendments I consider necessary relate to details; the main thing, the spirit of the thing, is there already.

I have to thank you for the kind dedication, since you, personally, have thereby thrown down the gauntlet before our bourgeois antagonists.

The author of Mannen van beteekenis, an inspector of schools OR SOMETHING OF THAT SORT, wrote to me requesting material for a biographical memoir and, in addition, got his publisher to approach my brother-in-law, Juta, with a view to his persuading me to accede to a request of the kind I habitually turn down. The gentleman — the author of Mannen— wrote to me saying he did not share my views but recognised their importance, protested his esteem, etc. The selfsame individual subsequently had the effrontery to embody in his pamphlet a libellous fabrication by that notorious Prussian spy, Stieber, and likewise, — on the inspiration, no doubt, of one of the armchair socialists in Bonn, — to accuse me of deliberate misquotation, nor, in so doing, did the estimable fellow even go to the trouble of reading up my polemic against the worthy Brentano in the Volksstaat, where he would have seen that Brentano, who had originally denounced me in the Concordia (manufacturers’ sheet) for ‘formal and substantive falsification’, later extricated himself with the lie that he had misunderstood me, etc. A Dutch journal proposed to open its columns to me for the chastisement of the ‘inspector of schools’, but on principle I do not reply to pin-pricks of this kind. I have never, even in London, taken the slightest notice of such literary yapping. Any other course would mean wasting the better part of my time on making rectifications all over the place, from California to Moscow. In my younger days I sometimes did some hard hitting, but wisdom comes with age, at least in so far as one avoids useless DISSIPATION OF FORCE.

The "question" of the forthcoming Zürich Congress about which you inform me seems to me--a mistake. The thing to be done at any definite given moment of the future, the thing immediately to be done, depends of course entirely on the given historical conditions in which one has to act. But this question is in the clouds and therefore is really the statement of a phantom problem to which the only answer can be--the criticism of the question itself. No equation can be solved unless the elements of its solution are involved in its terms. Moreover the embarrassments of a government which has suddenly come into being through a people's victory have nothing specifically "socialist" about them. On the contrary. The victorious bourgeois politicians at once feel themselves embarrassed by their "victory" while the socialist can at least take action without any embarrassment. One thing you can at any rate be sure of: a socialist government does not come into power in a country unless conditions are so developed that it can above all take the necessary measures for intimidating the mass of the bourgeoisie sufficiently to gain time--the first desideratum [requisite]--for lasting action.

Perhaps you will point to the Paris Commune; but apart from the fact that this was merely the rising of a town under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was in no sense socialist, nor could it be. With a small amount of sound common sense, however, they could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people -- the only thing that could be reached at the time. The appropriation of the Bank of France alone would have been enough to dissolve all the pretensions of the Versailles people in terror, etc., etc.

The general demands of the French bourgeoisie laid down before 1789 were roughly just the same, mutatis mutandis [with corresponding alterations] as the first immediate demands of the proletariat are pretty uniformly to-day in all countries with capitalist production. But had any eighteenth-century Frenchman the faintest idea a priori beforehand of the way in which the demands of the French bourgeoisie would be accomplished? The doctrinaire and necessarily fantastic anticipations of the programme of action for a revolution of the future only divert us from the struggle of the present. The dream that the end of the world was at hand inspired the early Christians in their struggle with the Roman Empire and gave them confidence in victory. Scientific insight into the inevitable disintegration of the dominant order of society continually proceeding before our eyes, and the ever-growing passion into which the masses are scourged by the old ghosts of government--while at the same time the positive development of the means of production advances with gigantic strides--all this is a sufficient guarantee that with the moment of the outbreak of a real proletarian revolution there will also be given the conditions (though these are certain not to be idyllic) of its next immediate modus operandi [form of action].

It is my conviction that the critical juncture for a new International Workingmen's Association has not yet arrived and for this reason I regard all workers' congresses, particularly socialist congresses, in so far as they are not related to the immediate given conditions in this or that particular nation, as not merely useless but harmful. They will always fade away in innumerable stale generalised banalities.

Yours most cordially,

Karl Marx