Your letter fully confirms our view that the unification was precipitate on our part and bears within itself the germ of future disunion. It would be well if this disunion could be postponed until after the next Reichstag elections...  The programme  as it is now, consists of three parts: 1) Of Lassallean propositions and slogans, the adoption of which remains a disgrace to our Party. When two factions want to agree on a joint programme they include the points on which they concur and do not touch upon those they are unable to agree. True, Lassallean state assistance was in the Eisenach programme, but as one of many transitional measures and, according to all I have heard, it would almost certainly have been thrown overboard, on Bracke s  motion, at this year s Congress had it not been for the unification. Now it figures as the sole and infallible panacea for all social ailments. It was an immense moral defeat for our Party to allow the iron law of wages and other Lassallean phrases to be foisted upon it. It became converted to the Lassallean creed. That simply cannot be argued away. This part of the programme is the Caudine yoke  under which our Party crawled to the greater glory of the holy Lassalle. 2) Of democratic demands which have been drawn up wholly in the spirit and style of the People s Party.  3) Of demands made on the present-day state (it is not clear on whom the other demands are made), which are very confused and illogical. 4) Of general principles, mostly borrowed from the Communist Manifesto and the Rules of the International, but which have been so re-edited that they contain either utterly false propositions or pure nonsense, as Marx has shown in detail in the essay known to you.  The whole thing is untidy, confused, disconnected, illogical and discreditable. If the bourgeois press possessed a single person of critical mind, he would have taken this programme apart phrase by phrase, investigated the real content of each phrase, demonstrated its nonsense with the utmost clarity, revealed its contradictions and economic howlers (for instance, that the instruments of labour are today the monopoly of the capitalist class , as if there were no owners of land; the talk about the freeing of labour instead of the freeing of the working class, for labour itself is much too free nowadays!) and made our whole Party look frightfully ridiculous. Instead of that the asinine bourgeois papers took this programme quite seriously, read into it what it does not contain and interpreted it communistically. The workers seem to be doing the same. It is this circumstance alone that made it possible for Marx and me not to dissociate ourselves publicly from such a programme. So long as our opponents and likewise the workers view this programme as embodying our intentions we can afford to keep quiet about it. If you are satisfied with the result achieved in the question of personal composition we must have greatly reduced our demands. Two of ours and three Lassalleans! So here too ours are not allies enjoying equal rights but the vanquished, who are outvoted from the very start. The activities of the Committee,  as far as we know them, are also not edifying: 1) Decision not to include in the list of Party literature two works on Lassalleanism by Bracke and B Becker;  if this decision has been revoked it is not due either to the Committee or to Liebknecht; 2) Instructions to Vahlteich  forbidding him to accept the post of correspondent for the Frankfurter Zeitung offered him by Sonnemann.  Sonnemann himself had told this to Marx, who met him when he passed through Frankfurt. What surprises me even more than the arrogance of the Committee and the readiness with which Vahlteich submitted instead of letting them go whistle is the enormous stupidity of this decision. The Committee should rather have seen to it that a paper like the Frankfurter Zeitung is served everywhere only by our people... You are quite right when you say that the whole thing is an educational experiment which even under those circumstances promises to be very successful. The unification as such will be a great success if it lasts two years. But it undoubtedly was to be had much more cheaply.
Marx-Engels Correspondence 1875