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      From a letter to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer (in Berlin) 
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                                              London, February 13, 1865 
 
[ ... ] 
 
Coalitions of the growing trade unions, as a means of the organized 
working-class struggle against the bourgeoisie, are not only of the 
highest importance -- as is seen, among other things, in the United 
States, where the worker, despite the suffrage and republicanism, could 
not dispense with them -- but also in Prussia and in Germany in general, 
where the right of coalition ruptures police rule and bureaucracy, tears 
up the regulation of servants [i.e., the semi-serfs on the Junker 
estates] and the agricultural Junker economy; in short, it is a measure 
of maturation of the "subjects", which the Progressive party [founded 
June 1861; demanded German unification under Prussian hegemony] -- that 
is, every bourgeois opposition party in Prussia -- if not crazy, would a 
hundred times rather allow than the Prussian government, even the 
government of a Bismarck! In contrast, on the other side there is the 
royal Prussian government support of the cooperative societies -- and 
anybody who knows Prussian conditions also knows beforehand their pygmy 
dimensions; as an economic measure they are nil, but at the same time 
they widen the guardianship system, bribe a portion of the working 
class, and emasculate its movement.  
 
Just as the bourgeois party in Prussia disgraced itself and brought on 
its present misery when it seriously believed that with the "New Era" 
[of King William I] the government would fall into its lap by the grace 
of the Prince Regent, so the labor party will disgrace itself even more 
if it imagines that through the Bismarck era, or some other Prussian 
era, golden apples will fall into its mouth by the grace of the king.  
That disappointment over Lassalle's unfortunate illusion of a socialist 
effort on the part of a Prussian government is bound to come, there can 
be no doubt.  The logic of things will speak.  But the _honor_ of the 
labor party requires that it reject such phantom illusions even before 
their hollowness is exposed by experience.  
 
The working class is revolutionary or it is nothing.  
 
 
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