12. K. Marx and F. Engels. To the Editor of the Social-Demokrat
The undersigned promised to contribute to the Social-Demokrat and permitted their being named as contributors on the express condition that the paper would be edited in the spirit of the brief programme submitted to them. They did not for a moment fail to appreciate the difficult position of the Social-Demokrat and therefore made no demands that were inappropriate to the meridian of Berlin. But they repeatedly demanded that the language directed at the ministry and the feudal-absolutist party should be at least as bold as that aimed at the men of Progress. [8] The tactics pursued by the Social-Demokrat preclude their further participation in it. The opinion of the undersigned as to the royal Prussian governmental socialism and the correct attitude of the workers' party to such deception has already been set out in detail in No. 73 of the Deutsche-Brüsseler-Zeitung of September 12, 1847, in reply to No. 206 of the Rheinischer Beobachter(1) (then appearing in Cologne), in which the alliance of the "proletariat" with the "government" against the "liberal bourgeoisie" was proposed. We still subscribe today to every word of the statement we made then.
London and Manchester, February 23, 1865
Endnotes
[8] Marx has in mind the polemical articles by the Chartist leader Ernest Jones, published in the weekly Notes to the People in 1851 and 1852 and aimed at Christian socialists and bourgeois advocates of the co-operative principle who asserted that social evils could be eliminated under the existing bourgeois system by setting up workers' co-operative societies. In contrast to them, Jones proved that co-operatives could be a powerful means of social transformation if introduced on a national scale by a working class which had won political power. Jones wrote some of the articles jointly with Marx (see present edition, Vol. 11, pp. 573-89).