Marx Engels Collected Works Volume 8
Volume Eight of the Collected Works of Marx and Engels contains their writings from November 8, 1848 to March 5, 1849. This is the second of three volumes (Vols. 7-9) covering the period of revolutions in 1848 and 1849.
The bulk of the volume consists of articles written by Marx and Engels for the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, organ of the revolutionary-proletarian wing of German and European democracy. These articles, like the rest of the contents of this volume — the letters written by Engels on behalf of the workers’ organisations of Switzerland, the accounts (published in the Appendices) of Marx’s and Engels’ speeches at the meetings of workers and democrats in Cologne, and so on — demonstrate the part which Marx and Engels played in the revolutionary events of those days. Edited by Marx and Engels, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung was a fearlessly revolutionary journal. It consistently exposed the manoeuvres of the monarchist-aristocratic circles and of the liberal bourgeoisie whose connivance they enjoyed; it was the genuine organiser of the people’s struggle. Through this newspaper, Marx and Engels directed the activity of Communist League members in various parts of Germany, influenced the German working-class and democratic movement as a whole, and promoted the unity and mobilisation of all the country’s revolutionary forces.
These articles by Marx and Engels show the continuous, dialectical change in class forces during the revolution, the real meaning of the events taking place in Germany and other countries and the social background to the acute political conflicts. The conclusions they then drew have made a major contribution to the Marxist teaching on the class struggle, explaining in detail working-class strategy and tactics at each new stage of the bourgeois-democratic revolution.
In the period covered by this volume the counter-revolutionary forces were fighting hard against the people’s gains in the first months of the 1848 revolution. The defeat of the Paris proletariat in June was the signal for a general counter-attack by monarchist-aristocratic and Right-wing bourgeois circles whose aim was the complete or partial restoration of the old order.
The bourgeois-democratic revolutions in France and Germany were, indeed, largely in a stage of decline — yet the masses everywhere continued the struggle to defend their achievements. Police persecution notwithstanding, the democratic and proletarian organisations did not abandon their activity.
In these conditions, Marx and Engels concentrated their efforts on explaining the real situation to the broad masses, the real threat of defeat for the revolution, and on mobilising resistance against the counter-revolution. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung editors did everything in their power to unite the workers and revolutionary democrats, urging them to make use of parliamentary as well as other methods to bring about a turn of the tide in favour of the revolution.
Marx and Engels realised that if the revolutionary struggle was to succeed, it must not be confined within a national framework but become international; the international solidarity of the democratic and proletarian movement in all the major European countries should be counterposed to the bloc that was being formed by the internal and external counter-revolutionary forces. They saw in every revolutionary centre in any part of Europe an integral element of the general European revolutionary movement. They devoted particular attention to Italy and Hungary, where, despite the general downward trend of the European revolution, an upsurge of popular revolutionary energy was evident — a fact justifying their hopes that the reactionaries’ attempts at restoration would yet be finally frustrated and the revolution be renewed with greater depth and scope.
The volume begins with Marx’s article “The Crisis in Berlin”. This, together with his series of articles “Counter-Revolution in Berlin”, came as the immediate response to the counter-revolutionary coup d'état which had taken place in Prussia. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung had already in September 1848 warned that a coup d'état was imminent, and had pointed out that unless the Prussian National Assembly took steps to rally the support of the masses, it would first be turned out of Berlin and then dissolved (see present edition, Vol. 7, p. 429). The prognosis proved correct. Early in November 1848, Frederick William IV charged the reactionary General Brandenburg with forming a government, and the provincial city of Brandenburg was declared to be the new seat of the Assembly. Marx saw this coup as a direct result of the suppression of the uprisings of the Paris proletariat in June and of the masses in Vienna in late October and November 1848.
At the moment of political crisis Marx proposed what should be done. His tactical platform of struggle against the counter-revolutionary forces envisaged not only active defence but also a counter-offensive to carry forward and consolidate the revolution. As an immediate reply to the coup d'état, he put forward on November 12, 1848, the slogan of refusal to pay taxes (see this volume, p. 21). This move would not only weaken the counter-revolution by undermining its financial resources, but — most important of all — would draw the masses of the people into action. At the same time, he adapted his tactical proposals to the actually developing conditions of the struggle. Thus the appeal of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats of November 14, 1848, which was written by Marx, advised, for the time being, against any violent resistance to the collection of unpaid taxes under a writ of execution. While the Prussian National Assembly had as yet not decided to call on the masses to refuse to pay taxes and this slogan w as not supported in the other provinces, such resistance could only have developed into premature and sporadic acts of rebellion. The situation changed when, under the influence of numerous local appeals, the National Assembly adopted on November 15 a decision on the refusal to pay taxes which was to come into force on November 17. Non-payment of taxes had now acquired nation-wide significance and the authority of the National Assembly. Marx immediately called on the masses and the workers’ and democratic organisations to resist the collection of taxes by all means, including violence. On November 17 he wrote in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung: “It is high treason to pay taxes. Refusal to pay taxes is the primary duty of the citizen!” (see this volume, p. 36). From November 19 to December 17 the Neue Rheinische Zeitung carried in large type on its front page the slogan “No More Taxes!!!”
The Rhenish District Committee of Democrats’ appeal of November 18, written by Marx, called for the organisation of a people’s militia everywhere, the re-election of municipal councils that had refused to obey the decision of the National Assembly, the setting up of committees of public safety. Marx saw such committees as embryos of provisional revolutionary organs of power to replace Prussian officialdom. And he was himself a member of the People’s. Committee in Cologne, which played a considerable role in organising the campaign against tax payments in the Rhine Province. The Second District Congress of Democratic Associations of the province, held on November 23 with Marx as one of the delegates, approved Marx’s programme of action (see this volume, p. 46).
Meanwhile, the liberal-democratic majority in the Prussian National Assembly confined itself to passive resistance. Many local democrats also remained irresolute. And Marx warned that their tactics of passive resistance were dooming the movement to failure. Such tactics, he wrote, “resemble the vain struggle of a calf against its slaughterer” (see this volume, p. 38). Profiting by their opponents’ weakness, the Prussian counter-revolutionaries carried the coup d'état to its conclusion: on December 5, 1848, the Prussian National Assembly was dissolved.
Marx analysed the causes of the counter-revolutionary victory in Prussia in a series of articles, “The Bourgeoisie and the Counter-Revolution”, in his articles “Montesquieu LVI”, “The Berlin National-Zeitung to the Primary Electors” and “Camphausen”, and in his speech at the trial of members of the Rhenish District
Committee of Democrats on February 8, 1849. The first of these works was particularly important. It contained a general account of the German revolution and in what respects it differed from the previous battles waged against feudalism by the European bourgeoisie. Contrasting the events of 1848 in Germany with the English revolution of the seventeenth century and the French revolution of the eighteenth, Marx concluded that there were different types of bourgeois revolutions and that the differences between them were determined primarily by historical conditions — the specific features of the different stages in the emergence of bourgeois society, the degree of development of the class contradictions between the bourgeoisie and the oppressed classes, the proletariat above all.
The revolution in Germany, Marx pointed out, was, like the preceding revolutions in England and France, the result of an acute contradiction between the dominance of the feudal ruling class, whose bulwark was the monarchy, and the bourgeois relations which were taking shape. However, as distinct from the English bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century and the French bourgeoisie of the eighteenth, when the proletariat and the other exploited sections of the urban population “did not yet constitute independent classes or class sub-divisions”, the Prussian bourgeoisie was already being challenged by an emerging working class which was beginning to fight for its own interests. And it could see in the example of France what a menacing turn the class struggle of the proletariat could take. That is why “from the first it was inclined to betray the people and to compromise with the crowned representative of the old society.... It stood at the helm of the revolution not because it had the people behind it but because the people drove it before them; it stood at the head not because it represented the initiative of a new social era but only because it represented the rancour of an old one” (see this volume, pp. 161, 162-63).
Whereas in England and France the bourgeois revolutions had led to a radical change in the political system corresponding to the requirements of the capitalist mode of production, the March revolution of 1848 in Prussia left intact “the old bureaucracy, the old army, the old boards of prosecuting magistrates” (see this volume, p. 317). The Prussian bourgeoisie decided to make its way to power, not with the help of revolution but by a deal with the aristocracy and the monarchy. Hence the “theory of agreement with the Crown” which was put forward by the Prussian liberal constitutionalists and which covered up, as Marx and Engels repeatedly stressed, the bourgeoisie’s betrayal of the revolutionary cause. The opposition to the revolution by considerable sections of the Prussian, mainly big, bourgeoisie and their fear of the masses thus dictated their efforts to remain on “a legal basis”, their renunciation of resolute struggle against the forces of feudal-monarchist reaction. Fearing for their own property, they nipped in the bud every encroachment on feudal property and thereby alienated the peasantry, their natural ally in the struggle against feudalism. This cowardly and essentially treacherous stand of the bourgeoisie doomed the bourgeois-democratic revolution to defeat in conditions when the working class was not yet itself ready to lead a revolutionary-democratic movement of the whole nation and had not yet achieved sufficient class consciousness and organisation.
The coup d'état in Prussia, Marx stressed, was the logical result of the policy of the Prussian so-called liberal governments which succeeded one another after March 1848 and surrendered position after position to the counter-revolutionary monarchists and aristocrats. And so, during the November crisis in Prussia, far from energetically supporting the Prussian National Assembly in its conflict with the Crown, the liberal majority of the Frankfurt National Assembly declared the Berlin decision on the refusal to pay taxes to be illegal and thus actually helped the Brandenburg Government to implement its counter-revolutionary designs. In his article “The Frankfurt Assembly” Marx branded this as an act of treachery. Subsequently, too, the Neue Rheinische Zeitung continually exposed the Frankfurt Assembly’s connivance at counter-revolution (see the article “Report of the Frankfurt Committee on Austrian Affairs” and others).
In 1848-49 Marx and Engels became finally convinced that the bourgeoisie was step by step losing its effectiveness as an advanced opponent of feudalism. The counter-revolutionary degeneration of the European bourgeoisie — even though in certain sectors of the struggle and in certain countries (Hungary, Italy) it was still acting in a revolutionary way — made it necessary drastically to reassess the disposition of class forces in the bourgeois-democratic revolution and the conditions for its victory. Since the bourgeoisie was losing the ability to carry through bourgeois-democratic reforms by means of revolution, it fell to the working class to head the people’s struggle for total liquidation of the remnants of feudalism. Thus changes in the position of the various classes by the middle of the nineteenth century led Marx and Engels to the idea of the hegemony of the working class in the bourgeois-democratic revolution — an idea which was elaborated by Lenin in the new historic conditions of the twentieth century. During the 1848-49 revolution, Marx and Engels were already directing their efforts to preparing the working class for this role by accelerating the growth of its class consciousness and the creation of a revolutionary working-class party.
At the trial of the Rhenish District Committee of Democrats, Marx told the bourgeois jury that the bourgeoisie was in duty bound to fight to abolish feudal relations and absolutism. And yet, he said, by their appeals to preserve “a legal basis” the Prussian liberals were merely seeking to perpetuate the old laws and to impose them on the new social system which had arisen during the revolution. Society, he continued, was not founded on the law but, on the contrary, “the law must be founded upon society, it must express the common interests and needs of society... which arise from the material mode of production prevailing at the given time” (see this volume, p. 327). The preservation of old laws in despite of new needs of social development, the striving to impose on society an obsolete political system already doomed by the new conditions, led to social crises only to be resolved by revolution. He accused Prussia’s ruling circles of conspiring against the people, against the law and order established as a result of the popular revolution in March 1848. He emphasised that, having in effect violated all legality, the Crown had no right to accuse the revolutionary movement’s leaders of illegal activity. Refusal to pay taxes was a natural and legitimate means of self-defence for the people. “If the Crown makes a counter-revolution, the people has the right to reply with a revolution” (see this volume, p. 339).
Analysing the events in Prussia and Germany, Marx concluded that there was no middle way between the complete victory of the feudal absolutist forces, with the abolition of freedom of assembly, association and the press, and a new upsurge of the revolution, as a result of which the proletariat, the peasantry and the urban petty bourgeoisie would establish a democratic republic and proceed to carry out social measures to prepare the ground for transition to the proletarian revolution. Marx pointed out that “a purely bourgeois revolution and the establishment of bourgeois rule in the form of a constitutional monarchy is impossible in Germany, and that only a feudal absolutist counter-revolution or a social republican revolution is possible” (see this volume, p. 178).
Marx and Engels saw the German revolution as part of the European revolution, the course and prospects of which they followed closely in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. It was to these problems that Marx devoted his articles “The Revolutionary Movement in Italy” and “The Revolutionary Movement”, in which he noted that the triumphant progress of the European revolution in February and March 1848 had been followed by a reactionary counter-offensive. The prevention of the workers’ demonstration of April 10 in London had weakened the revolutionary impetus of Chartism, and the June defeat of the French proletariat was a heavy blow for the European revolutionary movement as a whole. On August 6, Milan was retaken by Austrian troops; on November 1, revolutionary Vienna fell. This was followed by the counter-revolutionary coup d'état in Berlin.
Soberly assessing the consequences of the defeat of the revolution, Marx emphasised the importance of these lessons for the masses who at the beginning of the revolution had been prey to illusions, fine phrases about universal brotherhood and so on. “The chief result of the revolutionary movement of 1848 is not what the peoples won, but what they lost — the loss of their illusions” (see this volume, p. 197).
As regards the prospects of the revolution in Europe in 1849, Marx placed his hopes on the imminence of a new victorious rising of the French proletariat which would provide the impulse for a revolutionary upsurge in other countries of Europe, including Germany.
Marx saw in bourgeois-aristocratic England, with its enormous industrial and commercial might, a serious threat to the French proletariat and the cause of the revolution. He compared the England of that time to “the rock against which the revolutionary waves break.... A revolution of the economic relations in any country of the European continent,” he stressed, “in the whole European continent without England, is a storm in a teacup” (see this volume, p. 214). That is why, taking account of the actual situation, Marx predicted that a victorious move by the French proletariat would call forth a military clash on a European and even on a world-wide scale — in as much as the involvement of England, as a colonial power, was inevitable. But in the course of this armed struggle between the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary forces, the preconditions could again mature for a Chartist rising in England itself. “England will head the counter-revolutionary armies, just as it did during the Napoleonic period, but through the war itself it will be thrown to the head of the revolutionary movement and it will repay the debt it owes in regard to the revolution of the eighteenth century” (see this volume, p. 215).
This volume contains a large group of articles and reports written by Engels during his forced stay in Switzerland from November 1848 to the middle of January 1849. While living in that country of “classical” bourgeois federalism, Engels used every opportunity — to disabuse of their illusions the South-German petty-bourgeois democrats who rejected the slogan of a centralised German democratic republic and saw the Swiss state system as a model for Germany. Engels’ reports on the sittings of the Federal Assembly and its chambers show up the provincial limitations of political life in Switzerland, the narrow-mindedness, pettiness and prejudices of most of the politicians there. At the same time, Engels did not overlook progressive aspects of the struggle against aristocratic reaction and clericalism, the eradication of patriarchalism, the implementation of certain centralising reforms. His article “The German Central Authority and Switzerland” and his reports on the Swiss conflict with Austria and the so-called Imperial Government formed by the Frankfurt National Assembly defended the right of the Swiss to repulse the attempts of the reactionaries to interfere in their internal affairs, in particular the demands for the extradition or expulsion of revolutionary refugees.
Engels followed closely the development of the working-class movement in the Swiss Republic. In his reports “The Ex-Principality”, “The New Institutions. — Progress in Switzerland”, “Elections. — Sydow” and others he emphasised that “the actual revolutionary forces of the people are among the Swiss and German workers” (see this volume, p. 59). He himself took part in the First Congress of the German Workers’ Associations of Switzerland held from December 9 to 11, and was able to ensure that many of its decisions stressed the need for drawing the workers into the political struggle, and not merely into the struggle for limited economic demands. This point of view was constantly defended by the Neue Rheinische Zeitung against some of the leaders in the German working-class movement who were inclined, like Stephan Born, to see the tasks of the proletarian struggle only in terms of economic reforms. Elected by the Congress to the Central Commission of the newly created Union of German Workers’ Associations in Switzerland, Engels worked hard to promote international links between the Swiss workers and the proletarian and democratic organisations of Germany (see “Address of the Central Commission of the Workers’ Associations of Switzerland to the Executive of the March Association in Frankfurt am Main” and the “Letter of the Central Commission of the Workers’ Associations in Switzerland to the Association in Vivis”).
In the middle of January 1849, when he was no longer in danger of arrest if he appeared ‘ in Germany, Engels, who was eager to engage in active revolutionary work in his own country, returned to cologne and continued, in association with Marx, to work with great energy on the editorial board of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. This was when the newspaper published a number of his articles on the Hungarian revolution, on the national contradictions and conflicts in the Slav regions of the Austrian Empire, and on the national question as one of the most important problems of the revolution in Europe.
The struggle of oppressed nations for freedom and independence had Marx’s and Engels’ firm support. In a number of articles, they stressed the high importance for European democracy of the Polish people’s national liberation movement. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung wrote with keen sympathy about the Italians’ struggle for liberation from Austrian oppression and for national unification. A new wave of revolutionary events in a number of Italian states (the Papal states, Tuscany, Sicily etc.), the fall of the counter-revolutionary and moderate liberal governments there under pressure from the masses, and the prevailing republican influence were all welcomed as portents of possible change in general European revolutionary development in the interests of the working class and democracy. “After six months of almost uninterrupted defeats for democracy after a series of unprecedented triumphs for the counter-revolution, there are at last indications of an approaching victory of the revolutionary party,” wrote Marx about the turn of events in Italy at the end of November 1848 (see this volume, p. 101). The Neue Rheinische Zeitung greeted the proclamation of a republic in Rome on February 7, 1849, as an important revolutionary act (see this volume, p. 414).
In Hungary, too, the liberation struggle was entering upon a new phase which Marx and Engels believed could help rekindle the flame of general European revolution. Led by Kossuth’s revolutionary Government, the Hungarian people were heroically repulsing the Austrian counter-revolutionaries, who, after the suppression of the Vienna uprising, had hurled heavy armed forces against them. Taking advantage of the contradictions between the Hungarian landowner and bourgeois top crust and the national minorities, the Austrian ruling classes dragged into the war against revolutionary Hungary national formations recruited in the Slav lands of the Austrian Empire and Transylvania-Serbs, Croats, Rumanians and others. They were able to direct the national movements of these peoples against the Hungarian revolution largely also because Kossuth’s Government had long refused to grant these peoples autonomy and satisfy other national demands.
Marx and Engels stressed that the Hungarian people’s national liberation war against the Habsburg monarchy was a genuinely revolutionary war, part of the revolutionary-democratic struggle of the people of Europe. They saw the fighters for the independence of Hungary, and also of Poland, as allies of the European proletariat and revolutionary democracy, part of the forces undermining such bulwarks of international counter-revolution as the Austrian Empire, the Prussian monarchy and Tsarist Russia. By shaking the might of the Habsburg Empire, the Hungarian revolution, wrote Marx and Engels, was having a big influence on the course of the European revolution.
As early as November 1848, Marx was devoting close attention to the revolutionary events in Hungary and asked Engels, who was then in Switzerland, to write an article about them. In January 1849, this article appeared in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung under the title “The Magyar Struggle”. It was followed by a series of articles and reports in which the course of military operations in Hungary was analysed.
These articles refuted the reports of the “brilliant successes” of the Austrian army and the hopeless predicament of the Hungarians, spread by the official Austrian news bulletins and seized on by a number of German newspapers, liberal ones included. Engels noted that the German press as a whole adopted an attitude of open hostility and nationalist arrogance towards the Hungarians’ struggle. Sifting and comparing the forced admissions contained in Austrian bulletins and local newspapers, he pieced together the true picture of the successful defensive battles being fought by the Hungarian army, which in fact possessed resources sufficient not only for defence but also for a counterblow. Subsequent events confirmed the accuracy of Engels’ military forecasts (see the articles “European War Inevitable”, “From the Theatre of War” and others). He pointed out that on the Hungarian side it was a genuinely revolutionary and popular war, and showed itself to be such in the very methods of warfare being used — mobilisation of all the forces of the people to repulse the invading enemy and the combination of regular army operations with widespread guerilla warfare. Despite the Austrian advantage in numbers and arms, the Hungarian army was superior in its fighting qualities, its revolutionary enthusiasm, its high morale, and in the support of the people and the unity of the rear and the front. The rear of the Austrian army of occupation was, as Engels constantly noted in his articles, extremely, unreliable and the rebel movement occasionally flared up behind the lines. He gave a high appraisal of the political and military leaders of the Hungarian revolution 1 including the Polish revolutionaries who had joined Hungary’s liberation struggle, and of the Hungarian Government’s energy and resolution and its anti-feudal reforms. He spoke of Lajos Kossuth as a revolutionary leader “who for his nation is Danton and Carnot in one person” (see this volume, p. 227).
Engels saw danger, not only for the Hungarian but also for the European revolution, in the Austrian reactionaries’ appeal for military aid from Tsarist Russia. The appearance of the first Tsarist detachments in Transylvania was interpreted b y ‘him, on the one hand, as testifying to the weakness of the Habsburg monarchy, which had proved incapable of suppressing the Hungarian revolutionary movement with its own forces, and, on the other hand, as the danger signal of an impending union of the counter-revolutionary states, a rebirth of the policy of the Holy Alliance, a policy of brutally imposing monarchist counter-revolutionary governments on the nations.
The use by the counter-revolutionary forces of a number of Slav peoples against Hungary, and also what was known as Austro-Slavism, a programme for uniting the Slavs under the aegis of the Habsburgs, provoked Engels to a violent attack on pan-Slavism. The denunciation of pan-Slavism was, for him, an integral part of the struggle against the bourgeois-landowner nationalist ideology. This ca m at n was vigorously fought by the editors of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, who also condemned other forms of nationalism — pan-Germanism, pan-Scandinavianism and the like.
In their entire approach to the national question, Marx and Engels invariably asked which class forces were playing the leading role in the national movements, to what extent they were helping to weaken the reactionary states, and whether they were reserves of the revolution or were, on the contrary, playing into the hands of counter-revolution. The class criterion was for them decisive in assessing any national movement. For in the course of the revolution, the entire character of a national movement may change depending on the preponderance of the various classes in it. In 1848-49, when the struggle against absolutism and the remnants of feudalism was complicated by violent national conflicts, the ruling classes deliberately sought to fan the flames of national hatred still higher, by deceit or violence to involve individual nations in predatory and counter-revolutionary wars, and to incite them against those peoples who were fighting for the victory of the bourgeois-democratic revolution and for truly national liberation. It was in this sense that Engels spoke in 1848-49 of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary peoples (see his article “The Magyar Struggle”, “Democratic Pan-Slavism” and others).
In those years, owing to a number of historical causes, the development of the national movement of some of the Austrian Slav peoples was complicated and rife with contradictions. When the representatives of revolutionary-democratic trends had been defeated or pushed into the background, the leadership of these movements fell into the hands of monarchistic bourgeois and landowner elements who in effect subordinated them to the interests of the Habsburg monarchy and Russian Tsarism. just before the 1848 revolution, Marx and Engels had sympathised with the independence struggle of the Slav peoples in the Austrian Empire (see Engels’ article “The Beginning of the End in Austria”, Vol. 6 of the present edition); and in June 1848 they expressed complete solidarity with the popular uprising in Prague (see Vol. 7 of the present edition, pp. 92 and 1 1 9). But after the defeat of the uprising, as the character of the national movements of a number of Slav peoples changed and reactionary Austro-Slavism showed its hand, they condemned these movements, describing them as counter-revolutionary and hostile to the cause of democracy and the working class.
Nor did Engels forget that the Austrian Slavs themselves were in many respects victims of the cunning and provocative policy of the Austrian reactionaries, who were only too free with their demagogical promises of autonomy. The Slav peoples, he wrote, would have to pay dearly for this deception: when they had finished with the Hungarians, the Habsburgs would trample on the illusions of a “Slav Austria”, of a “federative state of nations with equal rights”, and in particular of “democratic institutions” for the Austrian Slavs. These peoples “will have to suffer the same military despotism which they helped to impose on the Viennese and Magyars” (see this volume, pp. 375 and 376). In “War. — Discord between the Government and the Southern Slavs”, “The War in Hungary”, “Croats and Slovaks in Hungary” and other articles, Engels cited numerous facts showing how the Slav peoples had become painfully aware that they had been deceived and were being used for purposes contrary to their real interests. He noted with satisfaction the emerging sympathy for revolutionary Hungary among some of the Austrian Slavs, for instance in Slovakia (see this volume, pp. 442 and 469).
However, it must be evident to us today that the articles “The Magyar Struggle” and “Democratic Pan-Slavism” contain some erroneous judgments on the past and future of the small Slav peoples incorporated into Austria. Contrary to the picture of the predatory, oppressive policy of the German states in the east of Europe which Engels gave in his series of articles “The Frankfurt Assembly Debates the Polish Question” (see Vol. 7 of the present edition) and other works, in these articles he represented the subjugation of some of the Slav peoples as having been connected exclusively with the spread of civilisation and culture. History has not confirmed Engels’ opinion that the small Slav peoples of Central Europe were doomed to be absorbed and assimilated by their larger and more highly civilised neighbours. The tendency towards political centralisation which resulted from the development of capitalism and caused the small peoples to lose their national independence, concealed from Engels another tendency which was not sufficiently manifest at the time, namely, the sharpening of the oppressed peoples’ struggle for independence, for setting up their own states.
In these pronouncements, Engels was probably influenced by the gravity of the political situation at the time, and this accounted for the sharp polemical tone of his articles, all the beat of which was directed against the counter-revolutionary forces then going over to the offensive. A certain part was played in this by the idea which Marx and Engels entertained at that time of the nearness of a simultaneous victory of the proletarian revolution in the developed countries, a revolution which would have put an end to both social and national oppression and for which more favourable conditions would have been provided by capitalism drawing into its orbit the backward peoples still in the stage of feudalism. As for the tendencies towards decentralisation, including those which took the form of national demands, Marx and Engels regarded them often enough as a factor slowing down the development of the favourable conditions.
This point of view was not final. Later on, substantial corrections were made which took into account the liberation struggle of the oppressed peoples in Europe and in the colonial countries against national enslavement, a struggle which was developing with ever growing vigour. Thus already at the period when the Crimean war of 1853-56 was looming ahead, Engels supported the demand of national independence for the small Slav and other peoples in the Balkan Peninsula who were oppressed by the reactionary Turkish Empire.
Yet Engels’ opinion in 1848-49 that the small Slav peoples of the Austrian Empire would hardly play a progressive role in the future was not expressed without reservations. “If at any epoch while they were oppressed the Slavs had begun a new revolutionary history, that by itself would have proved their viability,” he wrote (see this volume, p. 371). Subsequent developments have shown that the Slav peoples who were oppressed and enslaved under the Austrian Empire proved entirely viable in the national sense, succeeded in creating their own statehood, and later, as a result of the victorious socialist revolution, set about establishing a highly advanced social system, greatly contributing to human progress.
Much of the material in this volume reflects the struggle waged by Marx and Engels to rally the revolutionary-democratic forces in Germany after the counter-revolutionary coup d'état in Prussia, as well as their efforts to develop the class consciousness of the German proletariat and to prepare the ground for the creation of a mass independent proletarian party. An important place in this struggle was occupied by the defence of the German people’s democratic rights and liberties against the reactionaries, in particular against their encroachments on the revolutionary press, one of their main targets being the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. The article “Three State Trials against the Neue Rheinische Zeitung”, the speeches for the defence by Marx and Engels at the trial of the newspaper’s editors on February 7, 1849, and other writings, administered a body blow against the initiators of these reactionary moves. They bore witness to the effectiveness of the revolutionary press in forming progressive public opinion, exposing the arbitrariness of counter-revolutionary power and organising the struggle against a reactionary political system (see this volume, pp. 316-17).
In the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, Marx and Engels defended members of the democratic movement in general who were victims of police persecution. The articles “The Prussian Counter-Revolution and the Prussian judiciary”, “The Tax-Refusal Trial”, “Lassalle” and others informed the public of the lawlessness of the Prussian police authorities and showed up the whole Prussian police and judicial system.
During preparations for the elections for the Second Chamber of the Prussian Diet, which replaced the dissolved National Assembly, Marx and Engels worked to unite all the democratic forces without, however, glossing over the disagreements existing in the democratic camp. They punctured the parliamentary illusions associated with the Constitution imposed by the King, which not only the liberals but also certain democrats represented as a guarantee that democratic reforms would be carried out by peaceful and constitutional means.
In his articles “The Berlin National-Zeitung to the Primary Electors” and “The Kölnische Zeitung on the Elections”, Marx exposed the vain belief that this Constitution would be a means of solving the social question and also the attempts of the liberals to comfort themselves and the people with hopes of its revision in a progressive spirit. He foretold that it would indeed be revised, but only “insofar as it suits the King and the Second Chamber consisting of country squires, financial magnates, high-ranking officials and clerics” (see this volume, p. 257).
In opposition to the liberals and some of the democrats, Marx considered broad popular participation in the elections not as a means of directly achieving political and social aims by constitutional methods, but primarily as a means of politically activating the masses and preparing them for future revolutionary battles. The successes of the democrats at the electoral meetings and in the Chamber itself, he thought, would provide them with additional opportunities to influence the masses in this direction and resist the reactionaries. But he never ceased to emphasise that the pressing political and social problems could be solved only by a new revolution carried out by the working class, the urban petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry. “Are not precisely these classes the most radical, the most democratic, of society as a whole?” Marx wrote. “Is it not precisely the proletariat that is the specifically red class?” (see this volume, p. 289).
Marx and Engels also defended their tactical line in the revolutionary struggle in heated arguments with sectarians in the working-class movement. In particular, the adherents of Gottschalk in the Cologne Workers’ Association were arguing against taking any part in the parliamentary elections, and trying to convince the workers that it would make no difference to them whether Germany was a monarchy or a republic. The Neue Rheinische Zeitung pointed out that this could lead only to the isolation of the proletariat from the other democratic forces, and that the democratic republic was the form of state which corresponded most closely to the interests of the working class and its allies and was best adapted to the tasks of their future revolutionary struggle. Under the influence of Marx and his supporters it was decided at committee meetings of the Workers’ Association in January 1849 “to take part in the general electoral committees ... and to represent the general democratic principle there” (see this volume, p. 514).
While calling on the workers to take an active part in the democratic movement, Marx and Engels at the same time tried to help them become aware how much their own interests were politically and socially opposed to those of the bourgeoisie. Characteristic in this respect is Marx’s article “A Bourgeois Document” which describes the Prussian bourgeoisie crawling “in the most servile reverence before throne, altar, army, bureaucracy and feudalism” and its “shameless maltreatment of the working class” (see this volume, p. 219).
The section “From the Preparatory Materials” contains the rough drafts of two of Marx’s articles and also the draft of the judiciary part of his speech at the trial of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung on February 7, 1849.
The Appendices include reports on the meetings of the Committee of the Cologne Workers’ Association and on the general meeting of its members. Although these reports are extremely brief and resemble minutes, they give a vivid picture of the ideological, educational and organisational work carried odt by Marx and Engels in a mass workers’ association which they were striving to transform into the foundation on which the future party of the German proletariat was to be built. The Cologne Workers’ Association of which Marx was elected President pro tem in the autumn of 1848 was becoming, due to the influence of Marx and other members of the Communist League, more and more a proletarian class organisation which took an increasingly active part in the political struggle.
Also included in the Appendices are reports on the “democratic banquets”, or people’s meetings, which took place in February 1849. Such banquets became a recognised form of political work among the masses and were held to commemorate the anniversaries of the February and March revolutions. A number of the documents in this section convey the extent of official harassment and police persecution to which the Neue Rheinische Zeitung and its editors were subjected.
In compiling this volume, account has been taken, not only of the contents of Volume 6 of the German and Russian editions of Marx’s and Engels’ Works but also of the results of research carried out in recent years in the Soviet Union and the German Democratic Republic to establish the authorship of articles in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Newly discovered articles by Marx, “Decision of the Berlin National Assembly”, “Tax Refusal and the Countryside”, “Position of the Left in the National Assembly”, together with Engels’ reports from Switzerland and his articles on the revolutionary war in Hungary — in all 52 articles and reports — have been included in this volume. Of the 130 works in the main section, 114 are being published in English for the first time, as is noted on each occasion at the end of the translation. Articles previously translated into English are accompanied by editorial notes giving the date of the first English publication. All the items in “From the Preparatory Materials” and the Appendices are being published in English for the first time.
Account has also been taken of the latest conclusions of German and Soviet research concerning the insufficiently justified inclusion in previous editions of certain articles attributed to Marx.
Wherever it has been impossible, on the basis of the materials available, to ascertain lo which of the two authors — Marx or Engels — an article or item in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung belongs, the author’s name is not included at the end of the translation. If such data are available, the author’s name is given.
The titles of articles published in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung are taken from the table of contents in the newspaper. Titles provided by the editors of the present edition have been printed in square brackets. When newspaper sources quoted by Marx or Engels are not available, references are given to reproductions of the corresponding items in other newspapers.
The volume is provided with Notes, a Name Index, an Index of Quoted and Mentioned Literature, an Index of Periodicals and a Subject Index. For the reader’s convenience, there is a Glossary of Geographical Names occurring in the text in the form customary in the German press of the time, but now archaic or Germanised.
Explanatory footnotes are provided for Swiss geographical names still current in a German, French or Italian form.
The volume was compiled and the Preface and Notes written by Vladimir Sazonov and edited by Lev Colman (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).
Albina Gridchina and Yuri Vasin (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU) prepared the Name Index, the Index of Quoted and Mentioned Literature, the Index of Periodicals and the Glossary of Geographical Names, and Vladimir Sazonov the Subject Index.
The translations were made by Gregor Benton, Clemens Dutt, W. L. Guttsman, Frida Knight, Barbara Ruhemann, Barrie Selman, Christopher Upward, joan and Trevor Walmsley (Lawrence & Wishart), and Richard Dixon and Salo Ryazanskaya (Progress Publishers), and edited by Maurice Cornforth, Clemens Dutt, Frida Knight, Christian Maxweli and Margaret Mynatt (Lawrence & Wishart), Richard Dixon, Lydia Belyakova, Tatyana Grishina and Natalia Karmanova (Progress Publishers), and Larisa Miskievich, scientific editor (Institute of Marxism-Leninism of the CC CPSU).
The volume was prepared for the press by Lyudgarda Zubrilova (editor) and Nadezhda Korneyeva (assistant editor) for Progress Publishers.