4. Report of a Speech by Karl Marx at the Anniversary Celebration of the German Workers’ Educational Society in London
4. Report of a Speech by Karl Marx at the Anniversary Celebration of the German Workers’ Educational Society in London[260]
[...] Of the speeches made at the anniversary celebration I shall only report some remarks by Karl Marx. Concerning the dispute about self-help versus state-help he said that both parties were mistaken. In bourgeois society all the means of subsistence and of labour belong to the capitalists and therefore self-help is nonsense. On the other hand, it is obvious that under a Bismarckian government state assistance is out of the question.—The workers cannot sell themselves to the Bismarck government. State assistance can only proceed from a state in which the proletariat exercises supreme power. To preach the emancipation of labour within the Prussian monarchy would be to raise a storm in a teacup. The emancipation of labour implies the liberation of Germany and this in turn entails the restoration of Poland and the overthrow of the Prussian monarchy. Turning to the Progress Party's[261] criticisms of the behaviour of the workers towards the bourgeoisie, Marx said that at the time when he had written that the workers must unite with the bourgeoisie against absolutism, it had been assumed that the German bourgeoisie would achieve at least as much as the English bourgeoisie had achieved in its time, but this had not happened in fact. In Germany, and particularly in Prussia, a press law was in force which freely permitted people high up in society to abuse and slander those beneath them. He added that the workers' newspapers and the workers' movement itself could only exist with police authorisation and that the government could only be attacked with kid gloves. In such conditions joint action by the workers and the bourgeoisie was impossible, particularly since the bourgeoisie was too cowardly to carry out its own programme.