Works of Marx and Engels 1879
Strategy and Tactics of the Class Struggle
Abstract
Written: September 17-18 1879;
Transcribed: by Zodiac.
A Private Circulation Letter from Marx and Engels, (First drafted by Engels) to Germany's Social-Democratic leadership — Bebel, Liebknecht, Fritzsche, Geiser, Hasenclever, Bracke.
This was in response to an August 1879 article written by Karl Hochberg, Eduard Bernstein, and Carl August Schramm, entitled "Retrospects on the Socialist Movement in Germany". The magazine piece advocated transforming the German Social-Democratic party from a revolutionary to a reformist platform.
It is an unavoidable phenomenon, well established
in the course of development, that people from the ruling class also join
the proletariat and supply it with educated elements. This we have already
clearly stated in the Manifesto. Here, however, two remarks are to be made:
First, such people, in order to be useful to the proletarian movement,
must bring with them really educated elements. This, however, is not the
case with the great majority of German bourgeois converts. Neither the
Zukunft [fortnightly Berlin magazine] nor the Neue Gesellschaft
[monthly Zurich periodical] has provided anything to advance the movement
one step. They are completely deficient in real, factual, or theoretical
material. Instead, there are efforts to bring superficial socialist ideas
into harmony with the various theoretical viewpoints which the gentlemen
from the universities, or from wherever, bring with them, and among whom
one is more confused than the other, thanks to the process of decomposition
in which German philosophy finds itself today. Instead of first studying
the new science [scientific socialism] thoroughly, everyone relies rather
on the viewpoint he brought with him, makes a short cut toward it with
his own private science, and immediately steps forth with pretensions of
wanting to teach it. Hence, there are among those gentlemen as many viewpoints
as there are heads; instead of clarifying anything, they only produce arrant
confusion — fortunately, almost always only among themselves. Such educated
elements, whose guiding principle is to teach what they have not learned,
the party can well dispense with.
Second, when such people from other classes join the proletarian movement,
the first demand upon them must be that they do not bring with them any
remnants of bourgeois, petty-bourgeois, etc., prejudices, but that they
irreversibly assimilate the proletarian viewpoint. But those gentlemen,
as has been shown, adhere overwhelmingly to petty-bourgeois conceptions.
In so petty-bourgeois a country as Germany, such conceptions certainly
have their justification, but only outside the Social-Democratic
Labor party. If the gentlemen want to build a social-democratic petty-bourgeois
party, they have a full right to do so; one could then negotiate with them,
conclude agreements, etc., according to circumstances. But in a labor party,
they are a falsifying element. If there are grounds which necessitates
tolerating them, it is a duty only to tolerate them, to allow them
no influence in party leadership, and to keep in mind that a break with
them is only a matter of time.
In any case, the time seems to have come.
It is inconceivable to us how the party can any longer tolerate in its
midst the authors of that [Hochberg, Bernstein, Schramm] article. If the
party leadership more or less falls into the hands of such people, the
party will simply be emasculated and, with it, an end to the proletarian
order.
So far as we are concerned, after our whole past only one way is open
to us. For nearly 40 years we have raised to prominence the idea of the
class struggle as the immediate driving force of history, and particularly
the class struggle between bourgeois and the proletariat as the great lever
of the modern social revolution; hence, we can hardly go along with people
who want to strike this class struggle from the movement. At the founding
of the International, we expressly formulated the battle cry: The emancipation
of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.
We cannot, therefore, go along with people who openly claim that the
workers are too ignorant to emancipate themselves but must first be emancipated
from the top down, by the philanthropic big and petty bourgeois. Should
the new party organ take a position that corresponds with the ideas of
those gentlemen, become bourgeois and not proletarian, then there is nothing
left for us, sorry as we should be to do so, than to speak out against
it publicly and dissolve the solidarity within which we have hitherto represented
the German party abroad. But we hope it will not come to that.
This letter is to be communicated to all the five members of the Committee
in Germany, as well as Bracke....
On our part, we have no objection to this being communicated to the
gentlemen in Zurich.