Second Article
[Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung No. 80, October 7, 1847]
The Communists — this we established in the first article — are attacking Heinzen not because he is no Communist, but because he is a bad democratic party writer. They are attacking him not in their capacity as Communists but in their capacity as democrats. It is purely coincidental that it is precisely the Communists who have opened the polemic against him; even if there were no Communists at all in the world, the democrats would still have to take the field against Heinzen. In this whole controversy it is only a question of: 1. whether Herr Heinzen as a party writer and agitator is capable of serving German democracy, which we deny; 2. whether Herr Heinzen's manner of agitation is a correct one, whether it is merely tolerable, which we likewise deny. It is therefore a question neither of communism nor of democracy, but just of Herr Heinzen's person and his personal eccentricities.
Far from starting futile quarrels with the democrats, in the present circumstances, the Communists for the time being rather take the field as democrats themselves in all practical party matters. In all civilised countries, democracy has as its necessary consequence the political rule of the proletariat, and the political rule of the proletariat is the first condition for all communist measures. As long as democracy has not been achieved, thus long do Communists and democrats fight side by side, thus long are the interests of the democrats at the same time those of the Communists. Until that time, the differences between the two parties are of a purely theoretical nature and can perfectly well be debated on a theoretical level without common action being thereby in any way prejudiced. Indeed, understandings will be possible concerning many measures which are to be carried out in the interests of the previously oppressed classes immediately after democracy has been achieved, e.g. the running of large-scale industry and the railways by the state, the education of all children at state expense, etc.
Now to Herr Heinzen. Herr Heinzen declares the Communists had begun a quarrel with him, not he with them. The well-known argument of the street-porter, then, which we will readily concede to him. He calls his conflict with the Communists "the absurd split which the Communists have provoked in the camp of the German radicals". He says that as long as three years ago he had been concerned to prevent the approaching split as far as his powers and circumstances might permit. These fruitless exertions were followed, he says, by attacks on him by the Communists.
Herr Heinzen, as everyone perfectly well knows, was not yet in the radical camp three years ago. At that time Herr Heinzen was progressive-within-the-law and liberal. A split with him was therefore by no means a split in the camp of the radicals.
Herr Heinzen met some Communists here in Brussels at the beginning of 1845. Far from attacking Herr Heinzen for his ostensible political radicalism, they rather took the greatest trouble to bring the then liberal Herr Heinzen over to just this radicalism. But in vain. Herr Heinzen only became a democrat in Switzerland.
"I later became more and more convinced (!) of the need for a vigorous struggle against the Communists"—in other words, of the need for an absurd split in the radical camp! We ask the German democrats whether someone who contradicts himself so absurdly is fitted to be a party writer?
But who are the Communists by whom Herr Heinzen claims he was attacked? The above innuendoes and particularly the ensuing reproaches against the Communists show who it was clearly. The Communists, we read,
"were outshouting the whole camp of the literary opposition, confusing the minds of the uneducated, decrying even the most radical men in the most uninhibited manner, ... they were intent on paralysing the political struggle as far as possible, ... indeed, they were finally positively allying themselves ... even with reaction. Furthermore they often descended, obviously as a result of their doctrine, to base and false in-triguesin practical life...."
Out of the fog and vagueness of these criticisms looms an easily recognisable figure: that of the literary hack, Herr Karl Grün. Three years ago Herr Grün had some personal dealings with Herr Heinzen, whereupon Herr Grün attacked Herr Heinzen in the Trier'sche Zeitung, Herr Grün attempted to outshout the whole camp of the literary opposition, Herr Grün strove to paralyse the political struggle as far as possible, etc.
But since when has Herr Grün been a representative of communism? If he thrust himself on the Communists three years ago, he has never been recognised as a Communist, he has never openly declared himself to be a Communist, and more than a year ago he thought it proper to inveigh against the Communists.
Moreover, even at that time, for Herr Heinzen's benefit, Marx repudiated Herr Grün, just as he later publicly showed him up in his true colours at the first opportunity.(1)
Concerning Herr Heinzen's final "base and false" insinuation about the Communists, one incident which occurred between Herr Grün and Herr Heinzen, and nothing more, lies behind this. This incident concerns the two gentlemen in question and not the Communists at all. We are not even so exactly acquainted with this incident as to be able to pass judgment on it. But let us assume Herr
Heinzen is in the right. If he then, after Marx and other Communists have repudiated his adversary, after it has been shown beyond all doubt that his adversary was never a Communist, if Herr Heinzen then still presents the incident as a necessary consequence of communist doctrine, it is monstrously perfidious of him.
And furthermore, if in his above reproaches Herr Heinzen has in mind persons other than Herr Grün, he can only mean those true socialists whose admittedly reactionary theories have long ago been repudiated by the Communists. All members of this now completely dissolved movement who are capable of learning anything have come over to the Communists and are now themselves attacking true socialism wherever it still shows itself. Herr Heinzen is thus again speaking with his customary crass ignorance when he once more disinters these superannuated visions in order to lay them at the Communists' door. Whilst Herr Heinzen here reproaches the true socialists, whom he confuses with the Communists, he subsequently makes the same nonsensical criticisms of the Communists as the true socialists did. He thus has not even the right to attack the true socialists, he belongs, in one respect, to them himself. And whilst the Communists were writing sharp attacks on these socialists, the same Herr Heinzen was sitting in Zurich being initiated by Herr Rüge into those fragments of true socialism which had found a niche for themselves in the latter's confused brain. Herr Rüge had indeed found a pupil worthy of him!
But what of the real Communists then? Herr Heinzen speaks of honourable exceptions and talented men, of whom he foresees that they will reject communist solidarity (!). The Communists have already rejected solidarity with the writings and actions of the true socialists. Of all the above reproaches, not a single one applies to the Communists, unless it be the conclusion of the whole passage, which reads as follows:
"The Communists ... in the arrogance of their imagined superiority laughed to scorn everything which is indispensable for forming the basis of an association of honourable people."
Herr Heinzen appears to be alluding here to the fact that Communists have made fun of his sternly moral demeanour anc[1]
mocked all those sacred and sublime ideas, virtue, justice, morality, etc., which Herr Heinzen imagines form the basis of all society. We accept this reproach. The Communists will not allow the moral indignation of that honourable man Herr Heinzen to prevent them from mocking these eternal verities. The Communists, moreover, maintain that these eternal verities are by no means the basis, but on the contrary the product, of the society in which they feature.
If, incidentally, Herr Heinzen foresaw that the Communists would reject solidarity with those people he takes it into his head to associate with them — what is the point of all his absurd reproaches and lying insinuations? If Herr Heinzen only knows the Communists from hearsay, as almost appears to be the case, if he knows so little who they are that he demands they should designate themselves more closely, and so to speak introduce themselves to him, what brazenness is this he exhibits in polemicising against them?
"A designation of those ... who ... actually represent communism or manifest it in its pure fo'rm would ... probably have to exclude completely the vast majority of those who base themselves upon communism and are used for it, and it would hardly be the people from the Trier'sche Zeitung alone who would protest against the assertion of such a claim."
And a few lines later:
"Those who are really Communists now must be allowed the consistency and honesty" (what a decent philistine speaks here!) "of coming forward and openly professing their doctrine and declaring their dissociation from those who are not Communists.... They are under the moral obligation" (how typical of the philistine these expressions are) "not to maintain unscrupulously (!) the confusion which is created in the minds of a thousand suffering, uneducated minds by the impossibility (!!), dreamt of or falsely advertised as a possibility, of finding a way, based on real conditions, to implement that doctrine (!). It is the duty" (the philistine again) "of the real Communists either completely to clarify things for all their unenlightened adherents and to lead them to a definite goal, or else to detach themselves from them and not to use them."
If Herr Rüge had produced these last three periods, he could have been well pleased. Entirely matching the philistine demands is the philistine confusion of thought, which is concerned only with the matter and not with the form and for that very reason says the exact opposite of what it wants to say. Herr Heinzen demands that the real Communists should detach themselves from the merely seeming ones. They should put an end to the confusion which (that is what he wants to say) arises from the mixing up of two different trends. But as soon as the two words "Communists" and "confusion" collide in his mind, confusion arises there too. Herr Heinzen loses the thread; his constantly reiterated formula, that the Communists in general are confusing the minds of the uneducated, trips him up, he forgets the real Communists and the unreal Communists, he stumbles with farcical clumsiness over a host of impossibilities dreamt of or falsely advertised as possibilities, and finally falls flat on his face on the solid ground of real conditions, where he regains his faculty of reflection. Now he is reminded that he meant to talk about something quite different, that it was not a question of whether this or that was possible. He returns to his theme, but is still so dazed that he does not even cross out that magnificent sentence in which he executed the somersault just described.
So much for the style. Regarding the matter, we repeat that, honest German that he is, Herr Heinzen comes too late with his demands, and that the Communists repudiated those true socialists long ago. But then we see here once again that the application of sly insinuations is by no means irreconcilable with the character of a decent philistine. For Herr Heinzen gives it clearly enough to be understood that the communist writers are only using the communist workers. He says in almost as many words that if these writers were to come forward openly with their intentions, the vast majority of those who are being used for communism would be excluded completely. He regards the communist writers as prophets, priests or preachers who possess a secret wisdom of their own but deny it to the uneducated in order to keep them on leading-strings. All his decent philistine demands that things be clarified for the unenlightened and that these persons must not be used, obviously proceed from the assumption that the literary representatives of communism have an interest in keeping the workers in the dark, as though they were, merely using them, just as the Illuminati[127] wished to use the common people in the last century. This insipid idea also causes Herr Heinzen to burst forth with always inopportune talk about confusion in the minds of the uneducated, and compels him, as a penalty for not speaking his mind plainly, to perform stylistic somersaults.
We merely take note of these insinuations, we do not take issue with them. We leave it to the communist workers to pass judgment on them themselves.
At last, after all these preliminaries, diversions, appeals, insinuations and somersaults by Herr Heinzen, we come to his theoretical attacks on and reflections about the Communists.
Herr Heinzen
"discerns the core of the communist doctrine simply in ... the abolition of private property (including that earned through labour) and in the principle of the communal utilisation of the earth's riches which follows inescapably from that abolition."
Herr Heinzen imagines communism is a certain doctrine which proceeds from a definite theoretical principle as its core and draws further conclusions from that. Herr Heinzen is very much mistaken. Communism is not a doctrine but a movement; it proceeds not from principles but from facts. The Communists do not base themselves on this or that philosophy as their point of departure but on the whole course of previous history and specifically its actual results in the civilised countries at the present time. Communism has followed from large-scale industry and its consequences, from the establishment of the world market, of the concomitant uninhibited competition, from the ever more violent and more universal trade crises, which have already become full-fledged crises of the world market, from the creation of the proletariat and the concentration of capital, from the ensuing class struggle between proletariat and bourgeoisie. Communism, insofar as it is a theory, is the theoretical expression of the position of the proletariat in this struggle and the theoretical summation of the conditions for the liberation.of the proletariat.
Herr Heinzen will now no doubt realise that in assessing communism he has to do rather more than discern its core simply in the abolition of private property; that he would do better to undertake certain studies in political economy than to gabble wildly about the abolition of private property; that he cannot know the first thing about the consequences of the abolition of private property if he does not also know its conditions.
However, in this respect, Herr Heinzen labours under such gross ignorance that he even says "the communal utilisation of the earth's riches" (another fine expression) is the consequence of the abolition of private property. Precisely the contrary is the case. Because large-scale industry, the development of machinery, communications and world trade are assuming such gigantic proportions that their exploitation by individual capitalists is becoming daily more impossible; because the mounting crises of the world market are the most striking proof of this; because the productive forces and the means of exchange which characterise the present mode of production and exchange are daily becoming increasingly more than individual exchange and private property can manage; because, in a word, the moment is approaching when communal management of industry, of agriculture and of exchange will become a material necessity for industry, agriculture and exchange themselves — for this reason private property will be abolished.
So when Herr Heinzen forcibly separates the abolition of private property, which is of course the condition for the liberation of the proletariat, from the conditions that attach to it, when he considers it quite out of all connection with the real world simply as an ivory-tower fantasy, it becomes a pure cliché about which he can only talk platitudinous nonsense. This he does as follows:
"By its above-mentioned casting-off of all private property..., communism necessarily also abolishes individual existence." (So Herr Heinzen is reproaching us for wanting to turn people into Siamese twins.) "The consequence of this is once more ... the incorporation of each individual into a perhaps (!!) communally organised barracks ... economy." (Would the reader kindly note that this is avowedly only the consequence of Herr Heinzen's own absurd remarks about individual existence.) "By these means communism destroys ... individuality ... independence ... freedom." (The same old twaddle as we had from the true socialists and the bourgeoisie. As though there was any individuality to be destroyed in the individuals whom the division of labour has today turned against their will into cobblers, factory workers, bourgeois, lawyers, peasants, in other words, into slaves of a particular form of labour and of the mores, way of life, prejudices and blinkered attitudes, etc., that go with that form of labour!) "It sacrifices the individual person with its necessary attribute or basis" (that "or" is marvellous) "of earned private property to the 'phantom of the community or
society' " (is Stirner here as well?), "whereas the community cannot and should not" (should not!!) "be the aim but only the means for each individual person."
Herr Heinzen attaches particular importance to earned private property and in so doing once again proves his crass unfamiliarity with the matter on which he is speaking. Herr Heinzen's philistine justice, which allows to each man what he has earned, is unfortunately frustrated by large-scale industry. As long as large-scale industry is not so far advanced that it frees itself completely from the fetters of private property, thus long does it permit no other distribution of its products than that at present occurring, thus long will the capitalist pocket his profit and the worker increasingly know by practice just what a minimum wage is. M. Proudhon attempted to develop a system for earned property which would relate it to existing conditions, and, we all know, he failed spectacularly. Herr Heinzen, it is true, will never risk a similar experiment, for in order to do so he would need to study, and he will not do that. But let the example of M. Proudhon teach him to expose his earned property less to public scrutiny.
And if Herr Heinzen reproaches the Communists for chasing fantasies and failing to keep their feet on the ground of reality — to whom does this reproach properly apply?
Herr Heinzen goes on to say a number of other things which we need not enter into. We merely observe that his sentences get worse and worse the further he proceeds. The clumsiness of his language, which can never find the right word, would of itself suffice to discredit any party which acknowledged him as its literary representative. The solidity of his conviction constantly makes him say something quite different from what he intends to say. Thus each of his sentences contains a twofold nonsense: firstly the nonsense he intends to say, and secondly the one he doesn't intend to say but nevertheless says. We gave an example of it above. It only remains for us to observe that Herr Heinzen repeats his old superstition about the power of the princes when he says that the power which must be overthrown and which is none other than the power of the State, is and always has been the progenitor and'preserver of all injustice, and that his aim is to establish a State really based on justice (!) and within this fantasy structure
"to undertake all those social reforms which have emerged in the course of events in general (!), as correct (!) in theory and possible (!) in practice"!!!
His intentions are as good as his style is bad, and that is the fate of the well-meaning in this bad world.
From seduction by the Zeitgeist,
Nature-nurtured sansculotte,
Dancing badly, but yet bearing
Good intentions in a bosom rough;
Void of talent, yet a character.(2)
Our articles will fill Herr Heinzen with all the righteous indignation of an outraged honest philistine, but for all that he is not going to give up either his style of writing or his discreditable and ineffectual manner of agitation. We found his threat to string us up on the nearest lamp-post when the day for action and decision comes most entertaining.
In short: the Communists must co-operate with the German radicals and desire to do so. But they reserve the right to attack any writer who discredits the entire party. This, and no other, was our intention in attacking Heinzen.
Brussels, October 3, 1847 ^ _ l. Engels
N. B. We have just received a pamphlet written by a worker(3): Der Heinzen'sche Staat, eine Kritik von Stephan, Bern, Rätzer. If Herr Heinzen wrote half so well as this worker, he might be well satisfied. From this pamphlet Herr Heinzen can see clearly enough, amongst other things, why the workers want nothing to do with his peasant republic. We also observe that this pamphlet is the first written by a worker which does not adopt a moral attitude but attempts to trace the political struggles of the present back to the struggle of the various classes of society with one another.
•ardl M Oetefcrc IMf .
Endnotes
[1] This article deals with a meeting held in London on September 22. 1845 at which an international society of Fraternal Democrats was formed. The society embraced representatives of Left Chartists, German workers and craftsmen — members of the League of the Just — and revolutionary emigrants of other nationalities. During their stay in England in the summer of 1845, Marx and Engels helped in preparing for the meeting but did not attend it as they had by then left London. Later they kept in constant touch with the Fraternal Democrats trying to influence the proletarian core of the society, which joined the Communist League in 1847, and through it the Chartist movement. The society ceased its activities in 1853. Engels' article, written to show the significance of international unity of the proletarian and revolutionary democratic forces, was directed at the same time against "true socialism"—the petty-bourgeois socialist trend current among German intellectuals and craftsmen from the end of 1844 onwards. This was Engels' second printed article against "true socialism", the first being "A Fragment of Fourier's On Trade" (see present edition, Vol. 4). Engels describes the meeting of September 22, 1845 and cites speeches delivered at it according to the report published in The Northern Star No. 411, September 27, 1845. Excerpts from the article were published in English in The Plebs MagazineNo. 2, March 1922.
[127] The Illuminati (from the Latin illuminatus) — members of a secret society founded in Bavaria in 1776, a variety of Freemasonry. The society consisted of oppositional elements from the bourgeoisie and nobility, who were dissatisfied with princely despotism. At the same time a characteristic feature of this society was the fear of the democratic movement, reflected in the rules, which made rank-and-file members blind tools of their leaders. In 1785 the society was banned by the Bavarian authorities. Similar societies existed also in Spain and France.