First published in International Socialist Review, Vol.16 No.5, November 1915, pp.273-274.
Translated by W. E. B.
Transcribed and marked up by Zdravko Saveski for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.
DEAR Comrade Bohn: It was a great pleasure to me to greet you here at Berlin and through you to hear of the American comrades who stand firm in the Socialist faith during a time of unprecedented confusion.
We are only "a very small minority," a handful of intractable fanatics - as the superwise statesmen proclaim, the same statesmen who have found a new source of inspiration for the modern labor movement in the mass-murder of a world war. After one has been denounced in this way during nine long months, and by the highest authority, one may be excused for beginning to lose faith in himself. You will understand, therefore, dear comrade, that it gives us deep satisfaction to be assured by comrades in other countries that we are still in possession of our five senses and that our sole crime consists in not having been able to forget in one great chauvinistic spasm all that we have taught and learned during a generation devoted to Socialism.
I do not mean to say by this that we ever seriously questioned the fact that we are on the right road. We owe it to the German working class also, to say that it has never forgotten its great task as utterly as some of its leaders. So long as Germany is still in a state of siege an appearance of truth may be given to the tale about "the great majority" and "the small minority." But even if we were "a very small minority," our victory would not be less certain. The logic of events will finally open the eyes of those who are today wandering in strange ways and will gather them at last under the red flag of proletarian emancipation.
It is true that we had not counted on such a terrible crisis as this one which international Socialism has to endure. Had anyone prophesied nine months ago what we have lived through during the past nine months, he would have been consigned to a madhouse. But anyone who is turned from his revolutionary convictions even by the most terrible catastrophe never really deserved to bear the honorable name of Socialist. If the way to peace proves to be longer and more difficult than we believed and hoped, only a fool will lose his reckoning because of it; a sensible person will only increase the zeal with which he seeks his goal.
Even if the old International is broken down, its spirit is not buried under the ruins. But this spirit would be smothered by a policy of deception and secrecy. The only thing that can restore it is a policy of ruthless self-criticism - of which Marx once said that it is the necessary condition to revolutionary progress.
In the spirit of our great leaders of former days we labor at the rebuilding of the International, and in the consciousness of our mission we can disregard the slanders launched against us and set them down as what they really are, proofs of weakness in those who fabricate them.
Berlin, 1915.
FRANZ MEHRING.
Last updated on 31.7.2021