Reply to Mr. Paul Ernst

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A friend sends me the Magdeburg Volksstimme of September 16. In an article therein, signed Paul Ernst, I find the following passage:

“And if Engels now describes our opposition as ‘student revolt’, I would ask him to demonstrate where we have championed other views but his own and Marx’s; and if I have depicted our parliamentary Social Democrats as partly very petty-bourgeois in character, Engels need only look at what he himself wrote in 1887 in the Preface to his Housing Question.”

My dealing with German writers over the years have enriched me with many curious experiences. But it seems that there are even greater treats in store. I am supposed to tell Mr. Paul Ernst where “we“ have championed other views, etc. Well, as far as the “we” is concerned, that is, the “opposition“ which entered on to the scene with such high and mighty airs and made such a faint-hearted exit, and which I described as revolts by men of letters and students, we can keep it short: in just about every article which they publish.

But as far as Mr. Ernst himself is concerned, I need not tell him that again. For I have already told him so—four months ago, in fact—and I suppose I must now plague the public, for better or for worse, with my “Ernst” correspondence.

On May 31 this year Mr. Ernst wrote to me from Görbersdorf that Mr. Hermann Bahr was reproaching him in the Freie Bühne for wrongly applying the Marxist method of viewing history with regard to the Scandinavian women’s movement and would I please

“say in a few lines whether my view corresponds with Marx’s or not, and furthermore permit me to use the letter against Bahr”.

I replied to him on June 5 that I could not become involved in his dispute with Mr. Bahr, and that I was quite unfamiliar with the “Scandinavian women’s movement”. I then went on:

“As regards your attempt to handle the matter in a materialist way, I should say first of all that the materialist method turns into its opposite if, in an historical study, it is used not as a guide but rather as a ready-made pattern in accordance with which one tailors the historical facts. And if Mr. Bahr believes he has caught you out in this respect, it seem to me that he may not be altogether unjustified.

“You subsume the whole of Norway and everything that happens there under one category, philistinism, and then unhesitatingly and erroneously apply to that Norwegian philistinism your opinion of German philistinism. But here there are two facts which present an insuperable obstacle.

“Firstly: When, throughout Europe, the victory over Napoleon turned out into the victory of reaction over the Revolution, the fear inspired by the latter sufficing only in its cradle, France, to wrest a bourgeois-liberal constitution from the returning legitimists, Norway took occasion to give itself a constitution that was far more democratic than any of its coevals in Europe.

“And, secondly, Norway has, during the past twenty years, experienced a literary revival unparalleled in any other country during that period save Russia. Philistine or not, this people has been far more creative than all the rest and is, indeed, putting its stamp on other literatures, not least the German.

“These facts, in my view, render it necessary to examine Norwegian ‘philistinism‘ in the light of its particular characteristics.

“And in so doing you will probably find that a very important distinction emerges. In Germany philistinism was born of a failed revolution, a development that was interrupted and repressed. Its idiosyncratic, abnormally pronounced character made up of cowardice, bigotry, ineptitude, and a total lack of initiative, resulted from the Thirty Years‘ War and the period that ensued—the very time in which practically all the great nations were experiencing a rapid rise. That character persisted, even after Germany had again been gripped by the historical movement, and was strong enough to imprint itself, more or less a generalised German type, on all the other social classes in Germany until such time as our working class broke out of these narrow confines. If the German workers are flagrantly ‘unpatriotic’, it is precisely because they have completely shaken off German philistine bigotry.

“Hence German philistinism is not a normal historical phase but a caricature taken to extremes, a form of degeneration, just as your Polish Jew is a caricature of the Jews. The English, French, etc., lower middle class is not at all on the same level as your German lower middle class.

“In Norway, on the other hand, the class of small peasants and the lower middle class with a slight admixtur of middle class elements—as it existed, say, in England and France in the seventeenth century—have, for several centuries, constituted the normal state of society. Here there is no question of an archaic state of affairs having been forcibly imposed upon them by the failure of a great movement or by a Thirty Years‘ War. The country has been retarded by its isolation and by its natural circumstances, but its state was commensurate with the conditions of its production, and hence normal. It is only quite recently that large-scale industry has, sporadically and on a very small scale, begun to come into the country, where, however, there is no place for the most powerful lever for the concentration of capital—the stock exchange; and even the tremendous expansion of maritime trade has proved to be a conservative factor. For whereas everywhere else steam is superseding sail, Norway is enormously increasing the number of its sailing vessels and possesses, if not the largest, then certainly the second largest, fleet of windjammers in the world, most of them owned by small and medium-sized shipping firms, as in England in, say, 1720. But nevertheless this has brought some animation into the old, sluggish existence—animation which finds expression in, among other things, the literary revival.

“The Norwegian peasant was never a serf, so that the whole process takes place against an entirely different background, as in Castile. The lower middle class Norwegian is the son of a free peasant and, such being the case, is a man compared with the degenerate German philistine. And whatever the failings of, for example, Ibsen’s plays, these reflect a world which is, it is true, lower middle and middle class, but utterly different from the German world a world in which people still have character and initiative and act independently if, by the standards of other countries, often eccentrically. Personally, I would prefer to get to know all I could about things of this sort before passing judgment.”

So here I told Mr. Ernst, albeit politely, but nonetheless clearly and firmly, “where”—namely, in the article from the Freie Bühne which he sent to me himself. When I demonstrate to him that he uses the Marxist approach as nothing but a pattern to which he tailors the historical facts that is precisely an example of the “considerable misunderstanding“ of the same approach with which I reproached the gentlemen. And when I prove to him, using his own example of Norway, that his pattern of philistinism on German lines flies in the face of the historical facts when applied to Norway, I thereby catch him in advance and in person displaying the ‘gross ignorance of the decisive historical facts on every occasion’, with which I also reproached those gentlemen.

And now look at the affected primness which Mr. Ernst feigns, like a country maiden treated like “one of those“ by some blueblooded scoundrel in the streets of Berlin! He appears before me four months after the above letter, the picture of outraged virtue, demanding that I should tell him “where?”. Mr. Ernst appears to have but two literary frames of mind. First he lets fly with impudence and self-assurance, as if there really was more to it than hot air; and when people proceed to defend themselves, [he protests that] he has said nothing at all and bemoans the base disregard shown to his pure feelings. Outraged virtue in his letter to me in which he complains that Mr. Bahr has treated him “with quite unbelievable insolence”! Injured innocence in his reply to me, in which he quite naively asks “where?”, while he must have known the answer for a good four months. An unrecognised noble soul in the Magdeburg Volksstimme, in which he also asks old Bremer, who had quite rightly rapped his knuckles, “Where?“

And the sigh asks always: where?

Always, where?

Does Mr. Ernst stil l want to know “where”? Well, let him turn, for example, to the article in the Volks-Tribüne on the “Dangers of Marxism”, in which he appropriates without hesitation the odd assertion of the metaphysicist Dühring—as if, according to Marx, history makes itself quite automatically, without the cooperation of human beings (who after all are making it!), and as if these human beings were simply played like mere chessmen by the economic conditions (which are the work of men themselves!). A man who is capable of confusing the distortion of Marxist theory by an opponent such as Dühring with this theory itself must turn elsewhere for help—I give up.

Perhaps I may now be excused from answering any more “wheres”? Mr. Ernst is so prolific, he turns out articles with such alacrity that one comes across them everywhere. And when you imagine that you have finally seen the last of them, he turns up again as the author of sundry anonymous pieces. Then a mere mortal like myself is unable to keep up and is tempted to wish that instead of prescribing his remedies so freely, Mr. Ernst should have something prescribed for himself.

He says further:

“If I have depicted our parliamentary Social Democrats as partly very petty-bourgeois in character, Engels need only”, etc.

Partly very petty-bourgeois? In the article in the Sächsische Arbeiter-Zeitung which forced me to reply, it says that petty-bourgeois parliamentary socialism has now a majority in Germany. And I said that I knew nothing about this. Now Mr. Ernst merely wishes to defend the assertion that the parliamentary group is “partly” very petty-bourgeois. Again the unrecognised noble soul, to whom the wicked world imputes all kinds of outrages. Who has ever denied that the petty-bourgeois tendency is represented not only in the parliamentary group but also in the party as a whole? Every party has a right wing and a left wing, and that the right wing of the Social Democratic Party is petty-bourgeois is only in the nature of the things. If there is no more to it than that, why all the fuss? We have been well aware of this old story for years, but it is a far cry from that to a petty-bourgeois majority in the parliamentary group or in the party itself. If this danger were to pose a threat, we should not wait for the warnings of these strange loyal Eckarts. For the time being the vigorous and joyful proletarian struggle against the Anti-Socialist Law and the rapid economic development have increasingly deprived this petty-bourgeois element of ground, air and light, whereas the proletarian element has grown more and more powerful.

There is, however, one thing which I can divulge to Mr. Paul Ernst by way of conclusion: there is something that is far more dangerous to the party than a petty-bourgeois group which can be consigned to the lumber-room at the next elections. I am referring to a clique of loud-mouthed men of letters and students, particularly when they are incapable of seeing the simplest things with their own eyes and of impartially weighing up the relative importance of the available facts or the strength of the forces involved when assessing an economic or political situation, and hence seek to force on the party tactics that are utterly insane, as gentlemen such as Bruno Wille and Teistler in particular, and to a lesser extent Mr. Ernst, have amply demonstrated. And this clique becomes even more dangerous if it unites to form a mutual assurance society, setting in motion all the means of organised advertising in order to smuggle its members into the editorial chairs of the party newspapers and control the party by means of the party press. Twelve years ago the Anti-Socialist Law saved us from this danger, which was already overtaking us, even then. Now that this law is going, the danger is back again. And I trust this will make it quite clear to Mr. Paul Ernst exactly why I am willing to fight tooth and nail to prevent myself from being identified with the elements of such a clique.

London, October 1, 1890

Frederick Engels