... Actually I am rather glad that the Anti-Socialist Law  was left in force and not repealed. The liberal philistine would have won a great victory for the conservatives at the elections for he is prepared to go not only through fire and water but even through the deepest muck-pit to keep the Anti-Socialist Law in operation. And then a new and stricter law would have been the result. As it looks now it has been extended most likely for the last time, and if old Wilhelm should kick the bucket from his renal colic it will soon cease to exist in practice. That the German liberals  and the Centre  thoroughly disgraced themselves when the vote  was taken is also worth something, but still more Bismarck s right to work. Ever since that muddlehead took hold of this there are prospects of our getting rid of wailers like Geiser.  Incidentally it takes a Bismarck to do such a stupid thing in face of a labour movement that cannot be held in check even with exceptional laws. In the meantime our people are quite justified in getting him more and more involved in this matter by pressing him for fulfilment. As soon as that fellow has committed himself a little more (which he is sure not to do so soon) the whole flimflam will resolve itself into Prussian police rule. Empty phrases will help him damned little as an election programme The right to work was first advanced by Fourier,  but with him it is realised only in the phalanstery and therefore presupposes the adoption of the latter. The Fourierists peace-loving philistines of the D mocratie pacifique, as their paper was called, disseminated that phrase precisely because it sounded innocuous. The Paris workers of 1848 with their utter confusion in theoretical matters allowed this phrase to be palmed off on them because it looked so practical, so non-utopian, so readily realisable. The government put it into practice in the only way capitalist society could put it into practice by building nonsensical national workshops. In the same way the right to work was realised here in Lancashire during the cotton crisis of 1861-64 by building municipal workshops. And in Germany it is also put into operation by establishing starvation and flogging colonies for the workers, which are now arousing the enthusiasm of the philistines. Put forward as a separate demand the right to work cannot be realised in any other way. One demands that capitalist society should make that right effective but this society can do that only within the framework of its conditions of existence and if one demands the right to work in this society one demands it subject to these definite conditions; hence one demands national workshops, workhouses and colonies. But if the demand of the right to work is supposed to include indirectly the demand for the transformation of the capitalist mode of production, it is a cowardly regression in comparison with the present state of the movement, a concession to the Anti-Socialist Law, a phrase that can serve no other purpose than to confuse and muddle up the workers with regard to the aims they have to pursue and the sole conditions under which they can achieve their aims...
Letters: Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, Selected Correspondence 1884