Marx & Engels Collected Works Volume 50 Ka by Karl Marx

Author:Karl Marx
Format: epub

Letters- 1894 357 Keir Hardie and acts as though, having despaired of a political Labour organisation, he is now pinning his hopes solely on the Trades Unions. True, his experience with the former has not been altogether happy and he might starve if the Engineers Union did not pay his parliamentary salary. He is vain, having let himself be rather excessively soft-sawdered by the Liberals, i.e. by the ‘social wing’ of the Radicals, and definitely sets too much store by the many individual concessions he has obtained, but is for all that the only really honest man in the whole movement, i.e. among its leaders, and has a thoroughly proletarian instinct by which he will, or so I believe, be guided more surely at the crucial moment than will the others by their cunning and calculated self-interest. On the Continent success has kindled an appetite for more success, and peasant-catching in the literal sense of the term3 is coming to be all the rage. First the French declare at Nantes, through Lafargue, 419 not only that it is no business of ours (I had already written and told them as muchb) to precipitate the ruin of the small peasant by direct intervention, a task that may safely be entrusted to capitalism, but also that it behoves us actually to protect the small peasant against taxation, usury and the big landowner. But we cannot go along with this, firstly because it is stupid and secondly because it is impossible. Next, Vollmar 418 goes to Frankfurt and actually proposes to bribe your peasant as such; nor is the peasant with whom he is concerned in Upper Bavaria, your small, debt-ridden Rhenish chap, but your middhng if not big peasant who exploits his farmhands, male and female, and sells cattle and grain in quantity. And that would not be feasible unless one were to abandon the whole principle of the thing. We can only win over the Alpine peasants and the big peasants of Lower Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein at the cost of betraying their ploughboys and day labourers, and in so doing we should lose politically more than we should gain. The Frankfurt Party Conference failed to come to any decision on this question and that is a good thing, in as much as the matter will now be properly gone into; the people who attended it knew far too little about peasants, or rural conditions, which vary so greatly from province to province, to do anything more than form resolutions out of thin air. But the matter will have to be settled sooner or later. a In German peasant-catching { Bauernfangerei ) also means confidence trick. - b See this volume, p. 348

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