KARL MARX

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-treatment
from above, humble submission and confession that the punishment
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 completely
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 battlecry:
The emancipation of the working classes must be achieved by the
working classes themselves. We cannot therefore co-operate with people