Speech at a Social-Democratic Meeting in Berlin on September 22, 1893

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[NEWSPAPER REPORT]

Party Comrades!

I thank you from my heart for the splendid and undeserved reception which you have given me. I can only repeat here what I already said in Zurich and Vienna: I regard this reception not as a tribute to me personall but to me as collaborator and ally of a greater man, as the comrade-in-arms of Karl Marx, and in this sense I accept it gratefully. You know that I am not an orator or a parliamentarian; I work in a different field, chiefly in the study and with the pen. And yet I would like to address a few words to you. It is now almost fifty-one years to the day since I last saw Berlin. Since then Berlin has been totally transformed. At that time it was a small, so-called “royal seat“ of hardly 350,000 inhabitants, living off the court, the nobility, the garrison and the civil service. Today it is a great capital city with almost two million inhabitants and lives off industry; today the court, nobility, garrison and civil service could seek another home, and Berlin would still remain Berlin. And the industrial development of Berlin has brought about another revolution. In those days there was not one single Social Democrat in Berlin; people did not even know what Social Democracy was; a few months ago, the Social Democrats of Berlin were passed in review, and mustered almost 160,000 votes, and Berlin has five Social-Democratic deputies out of a total of six representatives. In this respect Berlin is at the head of all the major European cities and has even outstripped Paris by far.

Yet not only Berlin but the whole of the rest of Germany has also undergone this industrial revolution. I have not been in Germany for sixteen years. As you know—for you have personal experience o f it—the Anti-Socialist Law has been in force here since 1878, though happily you have now got rid of it. As long as this law was in force I avoided coming to Germany; I wished to spare the authorities the trouble of deporting me, which they certainly would have done. (Amusement; cries of “They certainly would have done!”) And now, on my present journey, I have been able to see with my own eyes how splendid is the turnabout that has taken place in Germany’s economic situation. One generation ago Germany was an agricultural country whose rural population comprised two-thirds of the total; today it is an industrial country of the first order, and along the entire length of the Rhine, from the Dutch border to the Swiss, I did not find a single little spot where you can look around you without seeing chimneys. Certainly, this seems at first sight to concern nobody but the capitalists. But by expanding industry the capitalists are not only creating surplus value, they are also creating proletarians; they are destroying the petty-bourgeois and small peasant middle classes; they are pushing the class antagonism between bourgeoisie and proletariat to the limit; and those who create proletarians also create Social Democrats. At every fresh election to the Reichstag, the bourgeoisie is dismayed at the irresistible growth of the Social-Democratic vote. They ask, “How does it come about? “ Well, if they had any sense they would surely see that it is their own work! So it has come about that the German Social Democrats are the most united, the most cohesive, the strongest in the whole world, marching from victory to victory thanks to the calm, the discipline and the good humour with which they conduct their struggles. Party comrades, I am convinced that you will continue to do your duty, and so I conclude with the cry: “Long live international Social Democracy!’’