Karl Marx: A Biography

9

400 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHY

and Eduard Bernstein, the future exponent of Revisionism and a recent

convert from the ideas of Diihring to those of Marx. The Party obviously

needed a rallying point: Johannes Most had begun to issue the anarchist

Die Freiheit-, and Karl Hirsch, a socialist journalist living in Paris, had

started a new paper called Die Laterne, published in Brussels. Hirsch was

persuaded to take up the editorship of the proposed Jahrbuch, preparation

of which was left to the three in Zurich: the first issue, however, contained

such a quietist and reformist attitude that Marx and Engels felt bound to

protest. What angered them also was the hostile attitude of the Zurich

editors to Hirsch for having attacked in his paper a Social-Democrat

named Kayser, who had voted in favour of protecting the German iron

industry. Kayser had in fact consulted his colleagues beforehand and

secured their permission to vote as he did. Marx, however, dismissed this

manoeuvring as so much 'parliamentary cretinism'.^85

In a long letter sent to Bebel, Liebknecht and other Party leaders,

Marx and Engels summed up their grievances. They rejected the Zurich

group's view that the working class was incapable of emancipating itself,

that reform alone should be the aim of the Party, and that its programme

should be postponed. This sort of attitude, they said, reminded them of

1848 ; and such men were

the representatives of the petty bourgeoisie ... full of anxiety that the

proletariat, under the pressure of its revolutionary position, may 'go

too far'. Instead of determined political opposition, general mediation;

instead of struggle against government and bourgeoisie, an attempt to

win over and persuade them; instead of defiant resistance to ill-treat-

ment from above, humble submission and confession that the punish-

ment was deserved. Historically necessary conflicts are all interpreted

as misunderstandings, and all discussion ends with the assurance that

after all we are all agreed on the main point.^86

It was of course necessary that the proletariat should be reinforced by
bourgeois converts. But these had first of all to be able to make a valuable
contribution to the proletarian cause and had secondly to abandon com-
pletely their petit-bourgeois prejudices. Marx and Engels ended:

As for ourselves, in view of our whole past there is only one road open

to us. For almost forty years we have stressed the class-struggle as the

immediate driving power of history, and in particular the class-struggle

between bourgeoisie and proletariat as the great lever of the modern

social revolution; it is, therefore, impossible for us to co-operate with

people who wish to expunge this class-struggle from the movement.

When the International was formed we expressly formulated the battle-

cry: The emancipation of the working classes must be achieved by the

working classes themselves. We cannot therefore co-operate with people