I am afraid our friends in Germany are mistaken about the kind of organisation which should be maintained under present conditions. I have nothing against the fact that the chief members of Parliament are taking the lead in the absence of any other leadership. But they can neither demand nor enforce the strict obedience which the old Party leadership--elected for this purpose--could insist upon. Least of all in the present circumstances, without a press, without mass meetings. The looser the organisation is now in appearance the stronger it will be in reality. But instead of this the old system is to be maintained, final decisions are in the hands of the party leadership (although there is no congress to correct it or if necessary to dismiss it), and anybody who attacks one of them is a heretic. And with it all the best of them know themselves that there are all sorts of incapable and in other ways not quite sound people among them, and they must surely be very limited if they do not realise that it is not they who have the command of their organ but Hochberg, thanks to his money-bags, and with him his fellow-philistines Schramm and Bernstein. In my opinion the old Party, together with its former organisation, has come to an end. If, as is to be expected, the European movement soon gets going again, the great mass of the German proletariat will enter it and then the 500,000 men of the year 1878 will join the trained and educated kernel of this mass; but then too the old "strict organisation" handed down by Lassallean tradition will become a brake which might hold back a cart but cannot be applied to an avalanche. Moreover these people are doing nothing but things well-calculated to break up the Party. First the Party is supposed constantly to provide for the old agitators and editors, thanks to which it gets saddled with a whole crowd of papers with nothing whatever in them beyond what can be read in every bourgeois gossip rag. And the workers are expected to cooperate with this indefinitely! Secondly, they come out in the Reichstag and the Saxon Landtag in such a tame way, for the most part, that they discredit themselves and the Party before the whole world, making "positive proposals" to the existing government as to how to do things better in small questions of detail, etc. And the workers, who have been declared outside the law, who are delivered over bound hand and foot to the caprices of the police, are expected to regard this as proper representation! Thirdly, the philistine petty-bourgeois tone of the Sozial Demokrat, which they sanction. In every letter they tell us not on any account to believe reports of any division or differences of opinion having broken out in the Party, but everybody who comes from Germany assures one that the people are completely bewildered by this behaviour on the part of their leaders and by no means in agreement with it. Indeed, considering the character of our workers, which has so splendidly maintained itself, anything else would be impossible. It is the peculiar characteristic of the German movement that all the mistakes of the leadership are invariably made good again by the masses, and so it will no doubt be this time too.
Letters: Marx-Engels Correspondence 1880